Critical Close-up: Metal Gear Solid 4

[Music] crap makes the world go round simply boil the bear overnight do you value home protection and personal security but do you want to keep your tools out of the wrong hands thankfully there's an easy solution we're building a cleaner safer America with GOP's it's like a social network for your guns hello hello I'm George I'm also sorry I'm gonna be your assistant ta for medical ology today cuz Bronson had a foot CIPA I see that cellphones off okay so we're at the fourth seminar for Metal Gear Solid right which means we're at the fourth game of Metal Gear Solid which means this is the game where Metal Gear Solid begins to get stupid yeah question thanks for that yeah you're right it already was stupid but Metal Gear Solid 4 is the game where the stupid takes over this is the game where the series starts to get way up its ass about its own lore and it feels like after all these years of trying to get out of the Metal Gear game we finally get to see what it looks like when Kojima makes a Metal Gear he doesn't wanna make or at least one he didn't expect to make this is a turning point in the series where you started to see people talk about Metal Gear Solid in general as being dumb where as before there was a lot more talk about Metal Gear Solid being this edgy alts cinema forward-thinking thing that was growing videogames as an art form it seems like it this one it starts to stop growing but believe me there was not a game like this before and there's probably not going to be a game like this after [Music] so where were we right so he uploads of iris - iris no gear which was made by the Navy but controlled by the Patriots cuz they want to crank out a bunch of fake news because they're the Illuminati controlling everything as demonstrated by how they full ridin into thinking he's a cool guy action hero saving the day at shadow Moses when he's really a homicidal maniac with a with an identity crisis and he's also still being strung along by the Patriots because he's unknowingly protecting Olga's daughter and they don't let you forget any of that for mgs4 you got to remember a lot of little stuff from mgs2 for this one all those crumbs in the carpet got to get picked out and glued together into something Metal Gear Solid 4 is the greatest monument to fanservice in history so okay just under a decade earlier Kojima said mgs2 was gonna be his last time directing Metal Gear that turned out to not be true Kojima then said mgs3 would be his last but more games continued to come out past Metal Gear 1 came out in 1987 and by the time it was 2005 both corporate pressure and fan death threats were urging him back at it again mgs 1 was a do-over of Mg to that Kojima was excited to remake inglorious 3d with cinematic cutscenes and talented voice acting and then we have mgs - this deeply personal postmodern Interactive think piece about sequels an internet isolationism and then we get mgs3 which feels like this attempt to test himself wipe the slate clean of sequel baggage and just see if he could make a classic hollywood 3 act dumb exciting popcorn action movie just as good as the ones that inspired him and short up to this point the mgs games generally felt like they wanted to be made they had energy enthusiasm and inspiration behind them the soundtracks were full of cute instrumental motifs that reflected the themes instead of just generic action movie music cute girls would tell you good luck when you saved the game codec calls were full of little esoteric fun facts and amusing side stories this reminds me of when we first met I was the one inside the locker that time we're equal now huh not unless I wet my pants that's a low blow okay great use it to get them out of the way in previous games characters had senses of humor they weren't all serious all the time the games had a sense of humor that was actually funny in short mgs4 is the first mgs game that feels like it was made with the sigh instead of a smile it was made to answer questions that weren't meant to be answered it feels like instead of being planted by a personal seed of personal inspiration that had been bubbling up for years this game comes out as a tired fulfillment of fan requests that were so persistent they ended up making the stuff up as they went along yes question the TV programs okay I feel like those show the most obvious example that Kojima is missing the the trees for the forest in this one they show the single most damning example of this misinterpretation of the game's own inspirations they're great they're great they're one of the best parts the Metal Gear Solid 4 don't get me wrong and they begin right when you hit that new game button the television and Metal Gear Solid 4 is a television from Robocop it's a Nerdist honest and simple attempt to show how crazy the world has gotten but you as an enthusiastic fan might have thought this was some kind of postmodern avant-garde piece of art house genius guesswork when it's a very awkward attempt to just do Robocop there a peek at the civilian life in this universe their atmospheric they're creepy they're quippy they have this intensely uncomfortable atmosphere about them that I adore and after the revelations of this Game Informer article I'm more ready to credit all of that to the American studio they outsource these to these sections were written by the LA studio and they were written in English first and that's the whole topic I'll be getting into later until then we see that the military-industrial complex has grown so far out of control that television is becoming military themed somehow he got military themed cooking shows game shows workout programs and they eventually all cut to a PMC commercial before fading to black when the power of the ps3 brings us to a loading screen after fading to black again we're now in an entirely digital alternate universe away from the real actors of TV without that critical establishing shot or a smooth edit to visualize that those were TV programs within the metal gear world not that the metal gear world is just another TV program the jarring difference between real actors and videogame characters is what muddies the execution behind this transition although Metal Gear Solid 4 is a fanservice game for Metal Gear Solid fans and Metal Gear Solid is a series that loves to weird out its fans do know that I enjoyed getting weirded out it's just after all these years of retrospect and interviews and peeks at the sausage factory I'm suddenly not so sure that getting so weirded out to the point where I didn't even know what I was looking at was actually the intended effect anyway snake muses on how commercialized war has become as he's on his way to assassinate liquid in the Middle East a question I totally forgive you for not knowing that because I assume that most of you hit the new game button when wanting to start the video game but you should actually it the briefing button the colonel hires snake on behalf of but not through the channels of the UN he goes undercover posing as a rebel soldier to get close and if confronted his cover story is that he's a UN inspector that's it pretty simple explanation really just too bad if you click a new game no one's gonna say what you're doing there and all you get to see her the moments were snake lies about what he's doing there though I could empathize with any longtime fans disregard for context because mgs4 is a fanservice game it's an amalgamation of previous series tropes that have been stitched together into a Frankenstein zombie of misplaced and for what feels like another first time in the series misused fanservice as a result and is a longtime fan it's easy enough to read between the lines here without needing actually good writing the typical character roles are there and they have been immortalized why else would solid and liquid be in the Middle East together if not to try and kill each other right I mean I get it it's it's a dramatic dependence on routine but I've never liked how this games referential overload overtakes the need for elegant dialogue elegant dialogue dies in the briefing sections before each level even begins enact one's case the colonel more or less spills cleaned the beans of the entire game's plot stake back in the 70s some evil rich people invented a way to hack the planet in the digital age now liquid wants to hijack it all for himself snake we must not allow liquid to hack the planet yeah that's uh that's basically it the soldiers nanomachine Network their ID tag guns the war economy boom and liquids plans to hijack it all get revealed in the same pregame briefing that explains why snakes on that truck in the first place this briefing segment is 15 minutes long and effectively spoiled the events to unfold later but it's not a big spoiler the screen time in word count of this game story actually prioritizes what happens in previous games higher than what happens in this game but at least the act 1 briefing is optional now I play this game four times and what strikes me every single time is that the material of the story is not really that complicated it's not that hard to follow it's just written horrendously stupendously inefficiently characters talk their way around a plot that is really not as complicated as they make it sound yeah question oh we were halfway through the first line before the game even starts or has changed ID tag soldiers carry ID tag weapon okay this is another thing ID tag guns see Meryl explains to us that in the decades since the last game the world has seen almost every military weapon in the world including vehicles get logged into this SOP system that locks soldiers out on a per-user basis PMC's are plugged into the SOP and earlier the colonel said that just about every group out there right now that's wanted to preach their politics through violence is using PMC's to do it so the contradiction here is that both sides of these conflicts fighting each other are supposed to be plugged into the same system but whether or not that's actually the case it depends on who's talked and where and win especially since as far as the gameplay is concerned it's only the PMC weapons that have been locked Kojima got the idea for the Patriots in Metal Gear Solid 2 from the lawyers fighting Napster during the turn of the millennium and is easy to imagine Kojima watching news of companies profiting from the Iraq war in the early 2000s to come up with the idea of the war economy for Metal Gear Solid 4 as late 2000s release where the science-fiction of this game has us suspending our disbelief over a military-industrial dystopian haywire which is quite familiar ground for the series and not that far-fetched of a premise to make for some good science fiction military thriller it's not even that far off in the fiction of Metal Gear Solid 4 and totally not real life poorer countries have become convenient battlefields for companies making money through unnecessary Wars so instead of world war 3 being this big flashy production it's more like a heartless but rational strategy to stimulate the global economy and there's meat to that angle someone could tell a compelling an insightful story about the situation of the world in this game but the nanomachines the Patriots the SOP system and basically the entire screen time of mgs4 story is spent with characters so divorced from the real world that they no longer seem relatable enough for me to care here's an example listen to how these different games introduce their side characters I've requested the assistance of a military analyst named Nastasha Romanenko she'll be providing you back up by codec a female analyst she's built up an impressive record as an advisor for the nuclear emergency search team contact her if you have any questions she's also an expert on high-tech weapons where is she working from at her home in Los Angeles California seems like a million miles away I am the foremost weapon scientist in the Soviet Union and the head of the glorious granion design Bureau this is the Order of Lenin it is an honor of the greatest magnitude given along with the title of hero of socialism the only the finest workers Emma was a brilliant programmer she wrote the worm that destroyed the Arsenal gear AI then vamp killed her I used to be an anime otaku here's another comparison mgs3 saves any mention of the Philosopher's the fictional MacGuffin concept that ties its story together for the end during the climax we get a 3-minute exposition dump from volgen during the final boss another three minutes peel and then a final one-minute reminder before credits compare that to how often and how lengthily mgs4 describes the shadowy fictional magic that ties its story together before the game properly begins we get a four-minute spiel about it from the kernel then a six-minute spiel from Drebin then six minutes from Meryl then six minutes with liquid all explaining what the SOP system is and why it's bad and all those peels are contained inside of syriza's of cutscenes that are so lengthy that players can spend upwards of 45 minutes barely touching their controller while stuff like this happens an SOP is just like one of the three topics that gets the slideshow treatment whenever concept art starts sliding across the screen I like to picture the story boarders panicking is there reading a script they have no idea how to fill with video I mean with cutscenes this long how could they meanwhile back in mgs one those very same nano machines ID locked weapons memes genes and themes were all present but back then they were sparingly mentioned because they were far fetched science fiction concepts and that's totally fine if not the proper way to maintain the tone of having to also be a political thriller grounded in real life's problems the first hour of Metal Gear Solid doesn't explain how nano machines work it explains what you and the DARPA chief were doing there before he mysteriously dies just as he tries to say something important what was the DARPA chief trying to say did snake really die an hour after the sequel starts why did the boss defect these are all dramatic hooks and I can't really pinpoint an equivalent moment in mgs for so where were we right snake sneaking through the Middle East to assassinate liquid so he won't hack the planet and on the way we're getting spiels from Drebin and merrill that go on for way too damn long about stuff we already know and the whole while I can't help but think of Alfred Hitchcock talking about boring movies as just photographs of people talking a lesson from one of the Great's made painful by how much better kojima was at that one game ago the movies in Metal Gear Solid 3 were long but they were eventful they had movement they had music they always tried to find the interesting angles and they often had important little bits of interactivity that were fun and funny and profoundly dramatic they gave you reasons to keep your eyes on the screen cutscenes and mgs4 occasionally featured some very impressive fight choreography but as far as basic dialogue goes so much of them just fit this droning quiet monotone that leaves me half-asleep they're just moving photographs of conversations so snakes apparently no longer afraid of needles we see Naomi's working with the bad guy to help liquid hack the planet and he's already so good at hacking that he Jack's into the battlespace gives everyone heartburn and escapes in act 2 we're chasing after Naomi instead sneaking through a forest like in Metal Gear Solid 3 but with all these nods to Metal Gear Solid 2 happening vamps the big bad guy this time we also see the first sparks of inspiration behind Metal Gear Solid 5 zombie enemies begin I feel it's worth mentioning that usually there would be some comic relief codec conversation or or Easter eggs here but now it's just a guy taking a piss ridin reap Rises the role of a cyborg ninja he helps us out but gets rekt and just like last time the bad guy presses the hack button and escapes next up act 3 does a balancing act between having some of my favorite and least favorite moments of the game a lot of fans in fact I bet the vast majority really disliked this first half were snake puts on his snatcher trenchcoat and has to trail the resistance through a big city map and for this game that's real jarring among all the mainline mgs games 4 is probably the least stealth dependent and easiest of them all the integral podcast actually reminds you to try and play it like a stealth game I hope everyone enjoying it and I hope everyone finds a better way to play it because there's various ways my recommendation is try try to just sneak everything is pretty it's gonna be it's gonna be really fun yeah definitely play it as a sneaking game yeah not as a straight-up actioning engineer enjoy it yeah it is but the first half of act 3 reverses all of that not only is it incredibly punishing if you have an itchy trigger finger it's incredibly punishing if you just screw up once but remember that I'm the kind of Metal Gear fan that loves to crank the old games up to European extreme and s-rank 100% the new games that kind of perfection or Nothing challenge is right up my alley so I ended up interpreting the trial-and-error stealth escort quest as act 3 as more of a stab to turn stealth into the action puzzles of the older games rather than the slow tactical crawl of 3 and up and I think that theming here also showcases the game's best stab at making a new setting all that foggy detective noir stuff is your Grandpa's idea of a stealth adventure it's a classy way to evoke the old age of our hero and it also shows some depth to the worldwide proxy wars happening this is yet another conflict between international PMC's and local rebels where you can muck around with the AI on both sides but it's not fought with open combat in a loud war zone but instead with the tactical espionage action then the second half happens and we are reminded that this is an earnest fanservice game meant to answer questions that were never meant to be answered Eva shows up and reveals that the Patriots were the radio support team from mgs3 and that is the turning point where I immediately felt my reverence II for this series my affection for it begin to dampen this doesn't make the old games retro actively bad but going forward from here it definitely left a sour taste that had the next two games fighting much more of an uphill battle in short the wacky likable friendly side characters of mgs3 are revealed to have been the big bad guys from two games ago all along and the biggest anachronism in the patriot pile that twists this knife in me so hard is paramedic she's a complete goofball she's actually kind of amateur she's still in her 20s and just reads out of her textbook she's adorably unprofessional you think I'd drink alcohol in the middle of a mission wouldn't you hello well I'm knocking a shot back now what just teasing you but apparently a decade later she changes careers to become the world's top leading genetic expert who figures out human cloning and conspires to create the Illuminati all this is because boss's final speech apparently swelled everyone up into so many tears that they decide to use a stolen savings fund to take over the world and make poorly interpreted readings of her speech real this is a video game it's pure fiction they could have come up with any explanation they wanted to but since mgs 4 sticks so hard to this self-flagellating an honestly kind of arbitrary rule of always taking something from a previous game and always grafting it onto something else from a previous game you have this terrifically conflicted anachronistic mess of a backstory to the Patriots because they're combining what is a legitimately creepy conspiracy from mgs2 with complete goofballs from mgs3 the rocky topography of this whole story is spoiler alert for v or V or whatever you want to call it a topic they don't attempt to smooth out until after the final boss and after the credits of a game coming two sequels in seven years later there's so much going on in this story that is just told and not shown the Patriots always exist off screen and we barely get an idea of what the war economy looks like from the outside it's all so abstract I mean what does a JD proxy AI satellite look like what does a patriot look like how how does liquids P and C work do they have a corporate headquarters office building do they have to do their taxes every year like like normal companies do how does drive-ins ammo get to the soldiers he sells them to on the battlefield does everyone have a magical pause video or is his monkey a time-traveling ghost question okay so in the Metal Gear reverse if your name is an animal you're basically a superhero that lives off the grid I can't confidently claim that this is all self-sabotage it's a popular fan theory to think that all these dumb developments are kojima lashing out against fans but that kind of rebellion seems much more neutered here than it did an mgs2 however if you do want to prescribe to that theory these lines from eva can be good support they're probably the meanest the game gets about its own fan base nowadays anyone with a computer can get combat tree of course it's all just virtual training it's so easy for them to get absorbed by these more games and before they know it they're in the PMC's holding real guns these kids end up fighting in proxy wars that have nothing to do with [Music] it's cool to fight like this anyways the second half of act 3 Graf's the motorcycle escape scene of mgs3 onto a boss that grasps the fury under Vulcan Raven that graphs on to the mechanics of a helicopter or Harrier battle but thanks to the new control scheme all you got to do is shoot at it until it dies which I guess means it's a good time to talk about the gameplay so a lot of fans also think that mgs4 is mechanically superior to mgs3 and and oh my god I can't believe I'm such a three fanboy that I can't even agree with that one metal gears controls now make sense they have been revamped to meet the standards set by the rest of the 7th gen action game over the shoulder shooters your basic stealth rules are still pretty much Metal Gear Solid 3 where camo and movement speed matter more than line-of-sight and you don't get to flip through a bunch of menus to change camo most importantly halleluyah sweet mother of mary hark hear the bells the sweet silver bells of our konami overlords have finally allowed this guy to crouch and walk at the same time combine all of the above and a weapon shop that can teleport you guns and ammo even as you're being exploded to death during a boss fight and mgs4 becomes a whole lot less strict about the stealth in the last games which I feel like ironically and partly can be blamed on our new camera system because they got rid of a bunch of the old ones what we've lost from the soliton radars top-down omnipresence to the more modest behind-the-back angle is overhead visibility and while mgs threes original overhead camera angles were some hot garbage to put up with over the whole game they turned out to work wonderfully as an extra optional mode once subsistence gave you a behind-the-back angle that would soon become your default they complement each other extremely well if you're stuck in tall grass or in the middle of a bunch of walls you can pull the camera up and peek over you can also are one for a first-person view with pressure-sensitive peeking controls that even let you stand on your tippy-toes mgs threes controls may be a maximalist mess but after weeks of diligent practice they eventually can be mastered and appreciated if you spend a week in a dojo in the mountains playing nothing else you'll come out wishing every third person game gave you those cameras and mgs4 is no exception Batman vision and x-ray tag guards of modern stealth games are a product of this lack of overhead visibility and those features had yet to make it to mgs4 instead we have the threat ring which mostly does the job well enough but the early areas before you get the solid eye for some kind of overhead visibility had me running into tons of guards that I just had no way of easily previewing ahead of time even on subsequent playthroughs where I was supposed to know where everyone was the camera is either too close or the rooms are too cramped to gracefully see around corners before walking into somebody furthermore camera tends to zoom in way too damn tight if I want to use a cardboard box or something which will also turn off that overhead entry wall visibility of the solid eye I mean the gameplay is not a fiasco it may be a mediocre shooter but it has a really good stealth core to it I just consider it a wonky middle ground between mgs3 subsistence and mgs 5 perfecting their respective eras of stealth basically whenever I asked myself did the gameplay really get better from 3 to 4 I use a very simple question to help gauge my answer can you shoot a poisonous snake with a tranquilizer pick it up off the ground keep it in your bags and throw it at a guard hours later to poison and kill them without negatively impacting your score can you put a guard to sleep shoot out his microphone break his legs so that he'll wake up a harmless [ __ ] while still maintaining your non-lethal self-imposed strategy of being a pacifist angel is mgs4 is toolset and level design versatile and deep enough to allow for strategies that wacky I don't think so if you want to watch a crazy obsessive fan crank the difficulty all the way up into a speedrun of mgs for a lot of that run is going to be a straight line sprint relying on a lot of tranq head shots whereas mgs3 speedruns are weird to look at this is not how you play the game normally to get this good you got to learn tricks a shop in the pause menu and a very situational and lightly used faction system that always favors the rebels are no replacement for the living breathing ecosystem of interactable Zin mgs3 all those animals were usable stealth gadgets guards had an incredible amount of interactions you could do to them and I don't know why they took the interrogations out also without threes abundance of distraction items the tranquilizer gun feels like a more necessary part of mgs for his arsenal and pointing and clicking on bad guys heads is always gonna be a far less interesting option than the distraction and stun gadgets that admittedly are there you got two different kinds of cardboard box for two different kinds of enemies sleeping gas mines are now a thing and the mark two is an incredibly powerful stealth tool for short-range drone warfare and the first three acts even the escort missions are fairly open-ended stealth sand boxes that more or less feel like a good but faster and lighter session of mgs3 but the halfway mark the reactor II doesn't just discombobulated the plot but it also narrows the level design into something much more strict as well with the second half compromising a rail shooter' and then a boss fight you know I do have two very important tips for any of you guys if you do want to go back and replay it and I don't blame you if you do because I know I've been trashing this game and I do consider a train wreck but it is a miraculously well produced train wreck it's still worth going back and just like gawking it the fact that this even happened and and when you do here is one cool way to make it way better play one act per day so at the beginning of an act you got 15 to 20 minutes of briefing then 10 to 15 minutes of intro before a nice long solid half hour to an hour stretch of gameplay a boss shows up there's a little bit of cutscenes before and after a little bit more of some sneaking before things get less playable with a vehicle rail shooter' segments before a 10 to 15 minute outro unless it's acts 3 now what people hate so much is the transition from this outro all the way back to another intro for the next act when you have that many cutscenes piling on top of each other it can sometimes add up to like a whole goddamn hour of cutscenes but playing one act per day means you're not gonna sit through an hour of downtime until the actual very very end of the game and it also showcases how these acts have a kind of episodic pacing to them which i think is a little neat during the briefing you got 20 minutes where you know you're pretty much gonna be safe if you just run around the apartment and take care of chores I mean you're really not gonna miss much but during the act things ramp up you got a boss fight you got an explosive vehicle escape sequence and these things also end on cliffhanger ending then you get a save prompt you know it's safe to leave for now before tomorrow's next episode of Metal Gear Solid 4 also ramp up the difficulty so this is more self-explanatory I've already explained why I think the game is too easy on normal you basically can play it like a shooter and get away with that but it's hard mode that I encourage I recommend it for prodding you into getting that stealthiness in there's no european extreme mode and that makes me sad but on the extreme mode they also limit your non-lethal ammo so much to the point where non-lethal strategies just become a pain in the ass by the end of the game hard mode is the fine one that's the one that slows you down just enough to latch on to the scant few bits of gameplay that are there and then make them last longer which makes the whole experience have better pacing which is also helped if you play one act per day and it's worth imposing those self challenges I think after all half the reason mgs4 is still a train wreck worth seeing is act 4 so liquids adopted the same strategy is what I guess every guerilla criminal and other underdog in mgs4 is doing and that is scouring the world for pre SOP weapons because he's turned off everyone's guns wait guns are falling time to fall to earth when he turned up hauled up it's the first total ceasefire in human history Oh White House responding the public the president has yet to make an official announcement but the media is starting to pick up on it the informations gonna be controlled anyway not this time it's not the war economy is ground to a complete halt oh my god he did it it's the first total ceasefire in Zeeland history war economy related stocks are already going into a freefall good good I thought this is what we wanted stuff like this has been genuinely worried about these characters as moral compasses I mean I get that like as of right now for for the next I don't know day no one can fight back against ocelots its world peace just happened but how do they not see the bright side of this situation how are they not talking more about the incredible implications of this very plot development wait a minute wait what about all those rebel weapons that were on lot from the start does the colonel just not know that only the PMC's lock their weapons anyway is in both this game and mgs2 we're told that preserving the Patriots will ensure the stability of the world's economies and governments and frankly I never bought that they're an evil all-controlling conspiracy they're the Illuminati we are told that the American economy is suffering and generations are failing to prosper under their control so why do we want to preserve them if you are watching this and got confused and thought that liquid Ocelot may actually be on the right side of history here then congratulations you just spoiled the end of the game [Music] mgs4 is a train wreck that's still worth watching because of this [ __ ] right here this is cute I don't know if any fans cared about what happened to dr. Madden our Petrovitch or what happened to fortunes railgun but this is cute the simple pleasure of enjoying some classic music a good old golden oldie as you watch the origins of your world slowly decay and crumble around you that's real nostalgia right there that's the emotional experience of growing old that this chapter starts off doing a damn good job of conveying and [ __ ] like that is why I will always contend that mgs4 is at least a remarkably well produced trainwreck damn this train crashes beautifully but when vamp shows up and dies we get another dose of that childish melodrama sad music plays and strange last words are whispered and I have to wonder how many fans actually cared about fab in fact wasn't he kind of dissed in the last game listen there are no such things as vampires they're just a stupid made-up legend if they do see or yell sometimes Naomi shows up and dies too because she has cancer and she's tired of suppressing the cancer with nano machines so she kills herself okay how did you fix that problem why did you do this isn't this like the exact opposite of what you preached before snake was carrying around some kind of deadly contagious disease he didn't know how long he had left and Naomi was like God live have fun and stuff while you got the chance wait I know why she did this naomi kills herself to make Otakon cry so that that sniper wolf music will play here like the last time Otacon cried here she dies at the very same spot Frank Yeager died at here she dies for purely fanservice reasons such important big deal ass character defining things happen shallow the Lading fanservice reasons Ryden shows up to help but gets rekt Ocelot hacks some stuff physically this time but he still escapes as usual gave me Anders its way through fanservice scene after fanservice scene making as many fan favorite cameos as possible for as little justification as possible on its way to dredge up old questions in awkward places hey remember that time we asked do you think love can bloom even on a battlefield and then you ever wonder why this scene is so goddamn long and awful it's because yeah I do I think at any time any place people can fall in love with each other [Music] this precedes the microwave hallway this games version of the torture scene and I know I've talked to many fans who have cried during this scene and consider it the emotional peak of the entire series yeah this scene where snakes butt cheeks are popping out and writings chopping up bad guys with his mouth but he still gets rekt I think this managed to resonate with so many people not because the content of the story was what was emotional and heavy but rather the context of the game in real life and once again some remarkable production techniques a split-screen effect simultaneously shows all our cast struggling in their most desperate moment sad music amplifies and wails its way into the characters suffering meanwhile in real life Konami had everyone convinced of their lie that this was going to be more of a mainline series finale and we mashed triangle oh we mashed that triangle so hard that the sinew of our muscles was spasming stretching and popping right in tune with snake's own punishment this trainwreck was so well polished that he can see your own wreckage in the reflection then a post mortem video message reveals Naomi was apparently a genius programmer as well as a genius geneticist she along with a seven-year-old child made a computer virus that deletes the digital Illuminati and more or less accomplishes ocelots goal right there for him but there's still one bad guy left for us to fight liquid because even though the two of you are kind of after the same goal these character roles have been immortalized as permanent enemies why else would solid and liquid be seemingly anywhere if not to try and kill each other right we still have a score to settle the beating a dead horse metaphor is rendered in splendid detail as these two whack each other senseless throughout the ages and then Ocelot finally cracks out of his disguise and reveals that he was merely pretending to be liquid this whole time oh god this is hinted after the fight scene and this confirmed an hour later by Big Boss who shows up after the crest to talk about wait what's he doing there how can you still be alive right solid snake kills big boss with a flamethrower in the 90s and the dude explodes but the Patriots apparently creep in behind the scenes put him back together with nanomachines and then eva steals his body again and starts putting him back together with parts grafted from liquid and solidus meanwhile Ocelot convinces himself that he's possessed by liquids ghosts so that he can fool the Patriots into thinking he's big boss by fooling himself into thinking he's a clone of big boss question okay that's just that's that's just big boss wanting to kill the founding members of the Patriots but he's using a computer binary metaphor cuz they're a eyes now why I don't know but I'm sure that Kojima doesn't actually know how dumb this stuff sounds in English when looking at what must have happened behind the scenes it's easy to point fingers at Konami for milking the series but I don't know if I fully prescribed two more of the George Lucas theory either I think Kojima just got tired of Metal Gear long long before this he rewrote a more extreme ending to a sappy happily ever after one after much of the staff complained but creative disputes still happened in veteran series leaves also gradually left long time series co-writer tomokazu Fukushima who was there for all the highest-rated games left in 2006 he was replaced by the newer face of Shu yo Mirada who got his start on NGS - but inherited Fukushima is much bigger while halfway through MGS force development creative disputes had original translators like Jeremy Blas Dean who personally coined terms like OS P and the codec to get passed over for the second game for mgs 2 & 3 they outsource translation to a third party that was given much more strict rules and the woman who did - had very harsh things to say about the experience for mgs4 they still use that same translation firm while also consulting with translators within the fan community James Clinton Howell wrote some of the first great fan essays about Metal Gear Solid 2 also fun factoid within the staff of in tech at the time was one Marc Laidlaw not to be confused with the half-life Marc Laidlaw but rather the police Knotts fan translation Marc Laidlaw and I think there's something to be said of this process of moving from a translator who would try to work with Kojima or fight with Kojima to a translator who just plain didn't even like two translators who were fans of Kojima now comparing the Japanese and English versions of this game is something I would love to go to school for two years to be able to do but alas I have only been told by a friend in Japan that the games domestic dub does not exactly make a revolutionary difference but it is just about one notch more entertaining than the English version and here is my friend Oh his favorite example [ __ ] sky John I it rhymes it flow is the the Japan friend who informed me about this that it was a funny joke that that defuse the tension of a ridiculous scene and in English this thing becomes foxdie think again ain't again it's not like making a better English translation would have totally fixed the game but if that means that the characters had a better sense of humor then that is something real something substantial that got lost for that matter I'm also keeping in mind that there's real less powerful themes in this game and I can't stop visualizing an alternate story with a different goal where mgs4 was less about canon and tropes and more about telling a new story more focused on these themes that just got lost in the chaos like this whole mental health angle that the game isn't committed to you have a stress meter that's easier to fill and less punishing to deplete than the last game stamina meter once the bosses are themed after powerful emotions and they have traumatic backstories that have kept them in a constant state of war flashbacks that is [ __ ] yo and then you think it would be a bigger deal man if those boss has got more treatment they actually could have been genuinely terrifying villains and lastly Rosa's codec conversations never cease to remind us of some very common sense that doesn't seem to particularly deeply researched about how to keep your head space clean I don't know after trying to follow the events of this game mine's really not I need some noodles and then you have the war economy represented in game with an actual interactive system hooray but the reason I'm slapping this one on this list is that the dystopic war economy here is a grand concept only explored on a very very small scale in which Drebin fun bucks are another element abstracted as hell there's very little depth to it very few decisions to make you just do or don't walk forwards to increase your savings account which will only go up in one direction and the second reason I feel the need to slap this one down is that we've seen the next two games pull this theme off better with big bosses offshore rogue nations being controllable with spreadsheet management screens that had me feeling less like a one-man action hero and more like a real state-level war monger were thoughtlessly deploying mercenaries off to die in the middle of nowhere for power and profit was a routine gameplay mechanic that describes the very first line of Mg for but it's a much more fleshed out concept in peace Walker in five although again I have to wonder how strong this guy's convictions really are when he keeps saying he wants to create a society where soldiers aren't manipulated and disposable it takes him a while but eventually he comes to confront this hypocrisy oh and this one this is easily my favorite it's it's a recurring theme that feels very close to the series's heart the final bullet of mgs3 establishes the series ecology as a turning point between some kind of perceived old world versus a much more sinister new one even in mgs1 meryl mentions that modern soldiers are from some different kind of era than those she refers to as real heroes the state of the timeline in 2005 is one where nationalism has turned into stateless neoliberalism and individualism is suppressed by overpowered intelligence agencies and overpowered companies that's creepy that's fascinating and unfortunately it's relatable in this mythos the moral decay of wealthy influencers happens during the 70s and it's represented by their creation of the Patriots and whatever mysteries behind how and why America became so evil in the 70s are probably more fun to solve in your own head than watching the actual really stupid backstory that is the explanation and here is the big one the killer this is the thing that's gonna damn this game's legacy this has already made it age faster than its predecessors just like the snake clones aged faster than their predecessors if you want to make a game theory I hate to put it this way I hate to say it but I do consider this game a failure for several reasons it certainly failed to in this series it failed to wrap it up elegantly without asking a whole lot of questions and on a more personal level I feel like it does fail as a fanservice game I I became a fan of these games I fell in love with the first three solid games because of the elegance of their plot the tightness of their plot how much there was to read into the plot and and a lot of that isn't there with this one and that's why I feel like I'm a fan who is not being serviced here yourself why do these wolves know this strange lady why did snake decide to spend the past decade getting really good at CQC why does he salute big boss's grave it's all fanservice and the worst kind is the easy patronizing kind where you just strip off some fan favorite female characters clothes and shove a camera angle up her skirt it's the kind where the game goes wink-wink nudge-nudge fan graphics sure used to be bad in my right fellow gamers it's an exhausting effort to combine reference and clothes off all mgs tropes for some reason and I don't get the appeal of that goal it makes a lot of confused judgments about what does and doesn't constitute the quintessence of Metal Gear like framing the conflict between solid and liquid is some kind of eternal permanent aspect of the series when looking both before and after this game like what's really not that big of a deal he's only like villain number 3 and mgs2 and and then he doesn't show up at all in Metal Gear Solid 3 he got cut out of Metal Gear Solid 5 and he sure as hell doesn't have anything to do with the MSX games that are still getting referenced here liquid doesn't need a doppelganger his role is not one that always needs to be filled and sticking so hard to the mythology of the third Metal Gear game the first solid game out of a whole series of diverse villains looks really awkward when you actually when you actually go back and have have a grand ol adventure play in the series in chronological order which I just did what would have been a more challenging setup and what I feel like would have satisfied the fans better with less controversy is a story that attempts to wrap up the motifs of Metal Gear Solid rather than the my new Shea of its lore the same story without all this extra [ __ ] could have been told so much more elegantly and we know Koji Pro is capable of that but some fans out there just had to know the identity of the Patriots and this time Kojima just sighs and complies this is how a series about making cute anime action movie sci-fi political thriller video games with fun fourth-wall breaking gags turned into a series about a man who pretends to be a cat falling in love with a man who pretends to be a snake mgs4 is the logical conclusion of sequels its media Perpetua t taken to the extreme and i don't get the appeal of its marketed goal to bring closure to every little aspect of the entire series hear me out here if you're that fanatical of a fan if you really love whatever fan franchise you are such a huge obsessive fan over then wouldn't you want to see it end on a higher note than this nothing lasts forever and we might as well let the creators we love move on and try to make new and better things after they've peaked at their last stuff it's not that far-fetched of a concept I mean why do you think so many people are hyped for death stranding it's a new IP and I may be more skeptical of a new Kojima game than I was in 2008 but there's something nice about seeing fans get service to this hard without the need for big Mama's nipple to pop out in front of Dennis Rodman's naked soda monkey just before he pulls a knife out of the old butt cheek man so oh gosh what I also wanted to briefly mention was build a replication of Mount Rushmore on the side of his battleship with videogame characters it's something that is completely insignificant to the plot but worth mentioning because of how ridiculous it is like like the entire boss unit of the game the beauty and the beast' unit the bosses aren't worth mentioning they're absolutely so ridiculous how can you not mention them

Channel: Super Bunnyhop

Views: 835,523

Rating: 4.7355328 out of 5

Keywords: Metal Gear Solid, MGS4, Bunnyhop, Super, Review, In-Depth, Tanooki, Testicles, Nipple

Id: 2QGpsvlrdPA

Length: 47min 37sec (2857 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 31 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Bangersss]

Oh wow. Four years since the last one. I didn't think it was ever coming.

Anyone who hasn't seen it yet btw, The Critical Closeup for MGS2 is probably the best video ever about the game, there is a whole lot about the game that needs a bit of analysis and he'd done that for you. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-2YuPGYabw

[u/Crashednburning]

MGS4 was my first metal gear game because it had came with my ps3. I went into it completely blind to the series and it out right blew my mind. Over the top movie quality action packed cutscenes, a bad ass protagonist that was trying to save the world while dealing with all the emotions of facing his aging and inevitable death, and even though I wasn't familiar with any of it I could tell it was filled to the brim with returning characters and references that was special for long time fans of the series. Of course after playing the rest of the series and familiarizing myself with the lore and Kojima himself I can now see all the flaws 4 has, but I will never forget my experience playing through that game for the first time and oddly enough I'm glad it was my entry to the series.

[u/TLO_Is_Overrated]

Metal Gear Solid 4 is very weird.

It's a direct sequel to the most financially successful but at the time least liked entry in the series. While 2 was my favourite, it was the least popular of the first three for a long time before these kind of reviews were made about the series.

I do think if MGS 4 (or whatever it would be called) came out in 2013 or later, it would make for a much better (or different) game.

Of all MGS games, MGS 4 felt like the one Kojima didn't want to make. 1 and 2 obviously he wanted to make. Three while he didn't want to make, he also wanted to save his series and he wanted to make something that referenced the old bond era. Peace Walker he talked about making something for his son, and he liked the idea of Big Boss still. Even 5 felt like he wanted to remake parts of peace walker on a console system after he enjoyed Peace Walker.

[u/rm09m]

If you enjoy this kind of look into MGS I highly recommend you check out the excellent Deltahead Translation analysis essays here...

Link: http://www.deltaheadtranslation.com/index/

[u/tiger66261]

If anyone gets the chance to replay MGS4 again, absolutely do it on one of the harder difficulties, namely Big Boss Hard/Extreme.

On easier difficulties you glide through the gameplay sections, leading to serious pacing problems (where most of your time is spent watching cutscene after cutscene). On the harder modes, the gameplay sections are almost double in length, making the split between game and story more even. Stealth becomes a necessity like the old games, as does managing resources and using gadgets. Bosses actually feel like tense fights and you're much more aware of Snake's stress levels and keeping his fragile old body in check.

MGS4 on the Big Boss difficulty feels much closer to Hideo's original vision, while anything under is just a shooting gallery with a whole load of gimmicks. I really do appreciate MGS4's gameplay, bosses, and level design so much more after playing on hardest modes. Beforehand I played on normal and downright hated the game.

[u/[deleted]]

There are a fair bit of inconsistencies in this video.

For example, you definitely DO get to see what Snake's mission is if you don't do the Mission Briefing first. You don't see it in the intro but there's a cutscene later in the game where Colonel visits Snake and tells him to get Liquid.

[u/Flukie]

What a great video, and certainly a interesting perspective on the game even if I do not completely agree.

I remember going into MGS4 with that first act and hoping the whole game would be based around the conflict and expanding on the gameplay of "stealth" in a urban environment that it sets up.

But pretty much after Act 1 the game just as George mentions focuses on plot points that detract from the original world that the game tries to build upon in favour of talking about the old games and the Patriots which removes the games own identity.

I still want to see a PC re-release even if they'd have to change that Blu-Ray line.

[u/Lairdom]

I absolutely love MGS4, but I cannot defend it from any criticism. I think it works for me because of how big the first and second game became in the years before MGS4. People wanted answers and MGS3 did not give them those answers, so it all piled up until MGS4 finally had to give them. And by this point nothing less than "larger than life" would suffice. At least thats what it felt at the time. People had unreasonable expectations but they were by and large met, although not all of it could hold to scrutiny.

[u/PupperDogoDogoPupper]

When MGS4 first shipped, you couldn't play every act back to back. The game literally had to install that Act to your PS3 from the disc because the game was so big (unoptimized). In a sense it felt like seeing a more traditional five-act play - you ended, as he noted, with a dramatic cliffhanger at the end of each act, and the game FORCED you to get up, step away from the game, really let things sink in, maybe grab a snack, while Snake puffed away at his e-cigarette and the digital stagehands set the scene for the next "ACT". When you view the game this way, it makes a lot more sense. Liquid Ocelot almost literally pulls an "Exit Stage Left" at the end of each Act, with Snake following shortly behind him. It looks wacky as fuck if you take it seriously as a development in-universe, but if you understand the purpose of it in the sense of this new story method (for the series) that Kojima wants to employ, then it isn't nearly as jarring.

Obviously he hit on some things that if you really, REALLY dig into each scene are absolutely stupid, but if you play the game like you are supposed to, and really only let things sink in at the end of the act, they're not really significant to what you're supposed to focus on. Naomi's death was dumb? That wasn't the important part of the closing sequence of events of that Act. The Metal Gear action sequence, FOXDIE, Outer Heaven, these were much bigger developments, and between Acts 4 and 5 you were supposed to be in a state of awe at the turn of events and in anticipation of the closing sequence, not focused on that one scene.

That actual hardware/software limitation is now missing, so something is lost in translation and you have to self-impose that restriction in order to play the game the way it was meant to be played.