Metal Gear Solid 4 was a Mistake

[Music] Metal Gear Solid 4 was released ten years ago I checked it's difficult to put into words exactly what changed with Metal Gear Solid 4 but even if you really really loved this game it's hard to deny that the series wasn't the same after it came out it's not so simple as these games are good and these games are bad although yeah people tend to agree this a dip in quote-unquote quality I hope the opinion that Kojima has never directed a truly bad Metal Gear game but the first three Metal Gear Solid games are all in kind of another level they all individually broke barriers for video games in terms of storytelling his wallets depth of gameplay both mechanically and with how it's used to communicate themes despite having an almost completely unique set of characters in a very different tone they all serve each other perfectly because of how the characters themes and ideas that persist through all three develop and change on the other hand the last three despite carrying many of the best qualities of games previous and even admittedly adding and improving in some ways they all seem to carry at least one huge fatal flaw on top of a handful of other ways they managed to trip up both the standalone titles and as sequels to some of the best games ever the really odd thing is that they all managed to be sloppy and awkward and ways completely unique to them Metal Gear Solid 4 is weird and fucked up but if you wind up all the fucked up things about an XML Gear Solid 5 you'll hardly be able to connect any of them besides if you wanted to stretch it and were unwilling to elaborate I guess bad writing but the writing isn't even bad in the same ways I'm getting ahead of myself and I'm not even here to talk about Metal Gear Solid 5 this video isn't just meant to shit on Metal Gear Solid 4 it was what I decided to write about men with your Solid 4 because I used to hate this game but it's been 10 years I checked they literally don't make games like this anymore where's the Metal Gear series now the smellier survive I didn't play it era was OK at eff Kojima is working on death stranding even though we just saw gameplay death stranding could still be anything of any quality I'm just saying I'm not really in a position to be hating Metal Gear Solid games I don't have that kind of capacity for hate in me anymore I'm an old man now leave me to my Japanese action games what do you mean there's the Devil May Cry 5 oh it looks so good I could probably theoretically if given nine more months write a video similar to this one ignoring all the interesting ideas that metal yourself for these tries to do something with and just make fun of it for everything it'd be really fun it'd be bullying but it'd still be fun it's really easy to make fun of things that are dishonest and ambitious the role of a writer and a critic even an amateur stupid one oh yeah I'm a lot eager I believe has far more value we can help you understand that maybe even appreciate something in a new way where other than just giving you stronger ground too haughtily ignore challenging works of art that's basically what the critics said at the end of ratatouille the best movie ever even Kevin those that friends Romans team in this video is not one of hate but a theme of love get it because when I replayed Metal Gear Solid 4 for this video I realized that this game is full of love this game loves us and you know what I think I love this game warts and all it's a beautiful little mess this game is the story of a bunch of fans who loved something so much that they just wanted more they wanted to know what happened to their favorite characters and they wanted Kojima in the driver's seat so badly they did some real stupid shit this is the story of a man who loved his fans employees in the world and characters he created so much that they couldn't say no even when some part of him knew that it wasn't for the best and maybe it's also the story of me who loves Metal Gear a little too much not to write a huge horrible video about it don't misunderstand me I'm gonna be mean to this game I'm gonna be brutally and honestly mean in a way that only someone with love in their heart can be because I know it can take it if youhave this game today were gonna look a little bit closer and see if there's anything to like if you love this game I don't wanna take that away from you but maybe I can always shed some light on why people are a little bit more mixed on this one hopefully whichever side you're on I can keep you entertained about all I can say without getting into spoilers so I'll kick things off here what's up I'm steak I'll be your tongue cuts of DG of this evening last video I made was 300 years ago right down to the day but you men ments back in this hell to pay this video contains spoilers for Metal Gear 1 & 2 Metal Gear Solid 1 2 3 4 Peace Walker 5 Metal Gear Rising revengeance and also maybe possibly snatcher [Music] [Applause] before we even talk about the aim of sit down and conspiracy theory a little bit as if any a conspiracy will serve with our conclusion and work backwards let's assume something changed between finishing development on mgs3 and the release of mgs4 I quickly want to cut out a neogaf thread put together by username devil fox in 2016 that compiled a lot of information and bulk once on the subject everything else will be set in the credits and in the description the elephant in the room when it comes to the decay of the Metal Gear series is the disappearance of to--because of Fukushima Fukushima was credited as Kojima's co-writer on every single Metal Gear Solid games it's the first one up until mgs3 subsistence after which he seems to have mysteriously vanished if you google this men's name you'll find almost nothing but a bunch of threads not a bunch of websites for people asking where he is and some Theory crafting over how he might just be the secret genius behind the first three Metal Gear Solid games depending on how far you go down that rabbit hole you'll probably either eventually understand that all that's been said about Fukushima's role is that he wrote some of the codec dialogue where he'll start to believe that yes Fukushima was in fact murdered by the Yakuza I can't definitively disprove that so you know fucking maybe Fukushima was credited in a video game called freedom Wars from 2014 his role in the development of that game doesn't seem to be commonly known and is non most websites posting his credits and it's possible that this is someone else with the same name but if you want any piece of evidence that he isn't dead there it is I guess it's regretable what I decided open this video on a topic that's so unbelievably vague but for what it's worth I'd like to offer my hypothesis was Fukushima the secret genius behind Metal Gear and murdered by ryouichi goda on top of the millennium tower I'd say no for no other reason than saying yes what make me sound like a fucking maniac people give Kojima a little too much credit for Metal Gear but that's not to say I think he doesn't deserve a lot of praise for his writing and directing it some people have the tendency to try to pin mistakes and miracles on one person and none of the middle ear Solid games were made by one person it's not so cut and dry as Fukushima was here in times was good and then he was gone and times was bad that is true by correlation and causation baby there were other writers side games and a whole bunch of translators and even some fumbling over the Spotted director Kojima wrote and directed great games before Metal Gear Solid 1 they were great in different ways and maybe he wore his love of movies on his sleeve a little too much statute is cool fuck you based on an early trailer it seems like the plan was for Fukushima to work on Metal Gear Solid 4 too but then for whatever reason left the project possibly because of undiscussed trouble and nice internal struggles leading to a rocky development could explain the correlation between Fukushima leaving and mgs4 missing the mark we just don't know specifically what he ever contributed and if any of it was used even a Fukushima only wrote some codec and radio dialogue in the first three games based on his Metal Gear Solid 2 profile again thanks devil Fox interviews and credit information I'd be willing to bet he had a pretty sizable hand in the story of these games or at least a development of their characters so much of what people remember about Metal Gear Solid 1 through 3 was presented through codec screens brand-new characters each with their own philosophies and personalities were introduced in every Metal Gear game that Fukushima worked on and through the Codex we got to know the men grew to love them then when we get to Metal Gear Solid 4 suddenly were recycling everyone almost everyone who didn't die and some who did from Metal Gear Solid 1 2 and 3 make an appearance but oops they fucking suck now and the new characters Drebin and sunny the beauty and beast unit and if you want to consider him a new character [Music] I like sunny I like it snake another kind got married and adopted a daughter together ten years ago people said that as a joke that's not a joke anymore that's just what happened these aren't exactly classic characters after Metal Gear Solid 4 a writer named su tamari got on board and I believe brought back some of the personality that was missing from Anna Leon Ford a Peace Walker and mgs Times radio dialogue he also wrote all of Metal Gear Rising again that has if nothing else personality but the structure of the story in mainland Metal Gear never really recovered I'd like to talk about an interview from hardcore gaming 101 with Agnes Kaku that was cited in the devil flux neogaf threat and will also be cited below according to her pretty much all of manages Scylla to screenplay translation and localization was her handiwork and she's also behind the translation for the original kata Merida Massey so she's basically my fucking hero this entire interview is three pages long and it's amazing and you should definitely read it there's a lot of memory you're selling to roasting which is hard if you love them to sell into as much as I do but it's probably not unfair particularly though I do wonder NAB her quote from the Kojima's not a writer section yep buckle up I think he's very bad at character and I think he's extremely conventional as in non creative when it comes to plotting I know I'll get an incredible amount of hate karma can you say hey karma about this so I'll just say that I did grow up reading I told you I grew up without TV so I read instead and I liked Cormac McCarthy and the science fiction writers I love Frank urban idol of Alfred Bester and right now I like Greg again so I'm extremely picky and I do have a high standard when it comes to writing I think that if you're ripping off Tom Clancy it's Tom Clancy is Tom Clancy he deserves all the money in Fame the guy has worked hard writing is hard work so the shoot out a bunch of these kinds of things that we've been talking about and then claim yourself as a writer when and you know there's good work being done a game so I think portal is really well written very beautifully written like Kojima's stuff is fine be a game creator and know what you're not very good at and learn to work with people who are Stanley Kubrick famously the one thing he could not do was write he could do everything else but he didn't know how to write so we worked with good writers and work with him in a sort of relentless partnership he knew his limits I don't think Kojima is a writer the fact that he would even be considered one shows how low the standards are in the game industry nothing in Metal Gear Solid's he was above a fanfic level he wouldn't last a morning in a network TV writers room and those aren't exactly turning out The Dark Tower or the wire I obviously disagree with parts of this but a lot of it is a pretty bitter pill to swallow it's worth noting at this interviews from 2011 which is before a lot of games that means June critics like the Heil as indication that video games are finally art came out this is obviously fallacious not only because I don't especially care for these games but because video games have always been art art as the term should not denote quality artists anything that can communicate an idea it can be hard and still be bad that would just make it bad art stop pretending the only fancy shit is art and start appreciating ideas communicating works that some people might consider lowbrow like for example Metal Gear Solid Kaku really does nail what I consider to be Kojima's greatest flaws he's very bad at writing people and the words they say he's very reliant on reference and cliche and both of these to me indicate that Kojima's writing isn't formed much more by movies than it is by books or even just by real-life observation and experience not that I'm one to cast stones Kojima obviously has a lot of big ideas he has ambition that grows with every game and always thinks of some cheeky new way to mess with the player's expectations and some of them are really good ideas there's some fascinating and brilliant stuff in these games but these ideas are scattered unclear and presented through characters and scenes people just fucking ate and with that in mind can you really say Kojima is a writer big interesting ideas don't make you a great writer I'm sure you the viewer have some big interesting ideas regardless of whether you or others consider you a writer I got some big ideas but I'm a terrible writer regardless of what my dad says if I were a good writer I wouldn't be here writing YouTube videos about other people who aren't good writers in a medium that nobody takes seriously so what's my inclusion motel because the Fukushima likely understood Kojima's ideas and they might um make them work you can have every bit of commentary you have on sequels video game culture have all the information that we convey and absorb but that allows us to connect with society and reality itself as the potential of a change it manipulated in the coming digital age and the responsibility web and testing ideals everything in Metal Gear Solid 2 but would any of that stuff hit his heart if instead of being communicated through dialog with snake in the lolly Luna no AI it was just like vamp and fortune ocelots ghost armed man if you look at the world through movies through tropes cliches and catchphrases characters you read are going to feel less human Kojima seems like a smart guy but he also may be a bit too into his own ideas there's at least a decent possibility that Fukushima had a good understanding of Kojima's wild or ideas and through his contributions helped to shape them into a bit more of a real story he brought Kojima back down to earth without sacrificing the themes and honestly raining Kojima is probably a hell of a task this is all just conjecture obviously it could be that I just want to believe in everyone a little too much maybe now that Kojima's been knocked off his pedestal at Konami and is just hanging around smoking weed with meds and rida stuffs training is really gonna bring it home I'd like to see that happen but also people seem to have immediately placed an upon the entire lead-in pedestal so this could go terribly as well game theory hi I'm slap pat wood Metal Gear be great without Fukushima but you just have a bunch of interesting ideas haphazardly stuffed into a smelly barrel even if the game was a dumpster fire would it still be worth thinking about could something be good even if nobody likes it [Music] [Applause] thank you for indulging me it's time for whatever one came here for Metal Gear Solid 4 we're gonna go in or no we're gonna talk about everything Metal Gear Solid 4 opens with a long install screen oh oh wait we're on PlayStation 3 when you actually start a new game you're greeted with a series of cutscenes in the shape of commercials and TV programs that are meant to be understood to be what you would see on live TV in the Metal Gear universe when mgs4 takes place I love these I think everyone loves these every single one of them is a can of worms in itself but on the whole what do they offer they're really indicative of to ammonia cell enforce best qualities they make you uncomfortable and they lend some scale to the world of Metal Gear keep in mind this was 2008 this was relatively new when the PlayStation 3 his lifespan instead of got to get back into this headspace now but nobody really understood the capabilities of this new console anyone remember the original commercials for the ps3 I don't know if anyone else felt this but something about this console just kind of creeped me out this was post-metal your Solid 1 2 & 3 we already knew Metal Gear knew how to take advantage of its tech to freak us out I was already nervous then you slapped whatever a blu-ray disc is and they are horrifying six hundred US dollar Japanese monolith and it hits you with the full motion CGI nightmare world this game is gonna show you a lot of off-putting things I believe mostly on purpose and some executed well and others not so well this isn't the romantic action movie Metal Gear World we fell in love with as doe-eyed ps1 owners one of the first interactions of the game proper is between snake and meryl who wear this comically sexy action movie couple of Metal Gear Solid one not without their own depth in that game but still very shiny and handsome I'm sure you'll read now we're at Metal Gear Solid 4 and snakes old pal Campbell who she thought was her uncle she now knows as her father and snake is aging so rapidly that he now appears to be older than him we didn't even know for sure that Meryl was alive and suddenly we're observing a conversation where if you think about the context for two seconds it's gonna make you want to die so we're uncomfortable good check why so I have been wanting to David lunch a day and sluts stuck back to when I said scale share in real life were after Metal Gear Solid 3 but in universe this is post Metal Gear Solid 2 for those of you just joining us at the end of the last game chronologically we just crashed a fucking fortress housing an AI decided to manipulate the flow of digital information nationwide to further the goals of a shadowy organization into the middle of fucking Manhattan this is a little bit unclear in Metal Gear Solid 2 because they had to remove the cutscene where this happens because of the resemblance it had 9/11 terrorist attacks which happened after the cut-scene was made but before the game was released two takeaways from that one Metal Gear Solid 2 is unfollow up a bull which oops and - we're not playing secret agent anymore civilians are involved the events of Metal Gear games have historically had catastrophic worldwide implications but usually handsome David Hayter manages to save the day at the cost of some valuable people and maybe our heroes sanity ground up and spit out by the war machine Ryden on the other hand did not manage to save the day his only victories that Solid Snake managed to cheer him up after he was manipulated and killing a man who was trying to save us and was also kind of his father and snakes brother and the president even like you saw before the world is in bad shape and you feel that we're not fucking around in jungles and military facilities anymore this is the Metal Gear reality war is everywhere the longer we lay low control everything we didn't stop the military cyberpunk future hey are we still talking about Metal Gear here I don't know if I like being associated with this [Music] Metal Gear Solid 4 proper opens with the Bible a war is hell seen to contrast with the transparently glossy television programming we were just force-fed and then we meet up with our old friends Solid Snake has changed it's no longer about nations ideologies Brett mr. day it's an endless series of proxy battles fought by mercenaries and machines war and its consumption of life has become a well-oiled machine or has changed ID tag soldiers carry ID tag weapons use ID tag gear nanomachines inside their bodies enhance and regulate their abilities genetic control information control emotion control battlefield control everything is monitored and kept under control has changed the age of deterrence has become the age in control only name of averting catastrophe weapons of mass destruction [Music] who controls the battlefield controls history more has changed when the battlefield is under total control information in this in Metal Gear games is usually conveyed through conversation we have speeches but usually we're at least pretending the speaker is talking to one of the other characters we're not oft reciting awkward poems to the audience there are visual indicators that we could have used to show that war is different there's creepy robots now although I guess that's not so much an alternate future either this isn't criticism by the way the change snake is describing is pretty clearly meant to be an invisible change behind the scenes forces and technological developments that have changed to nature of war without removing its brutality only it's a perceived purpose it's good maybe a little heavy-handed but it's effective and efficient most amenable yourself or isn't so hey aces it's for now if we didn't watch the briefing on the menu we don't really know what's going on we don't know why snake is old I guess we don't technically even know that this is snake but come on we don't know what the war is about or why we're fighting in an end based on the opening narration all we know is that none of that really matters men were wrapped into this war site on scene we grab some food from underneath the truck and get acquainted with the movement controls before wandering into another cutscene Gekko revealed references pissed jokes watermelons cinematography but there's a lot going on here and it's all good we're setting the tone we're establishing themes we're world building we're introducing new tech we're naturally learning the controls we get this great hero shot in with your old snakes team [Music] and it's all done with hardly any dialogue save snakes weird opening piece in the words for mana con that feel pretty natural and diegetic at the moment all things considered the title card is in here - yeah we're finally at the title card I'm being pretty positive here and that's because I really do feel that Metal Gear Solid 4 has an incredibly strong opening it's no masterpiece but it's effective it takes advantage of what we love about Metal Gear Solid and hints about what else the potential to be great about this game then we jump back in time to a much more in-your-face Metal Gear reference well that should theoretically be more powerful but I find doesn't land as well because of how in-your-face it is the game immediately prior to this one more or less ends on the parallel shot I'm sure they knew that but it still feels like a weird attempt to try to capitalize on nostalgia only four years after the last one came out but this was the seventh generation of consoles this was when video games were finally collectively decided to be old enough to be nostalgic about and when devs really started going at it with the pandering and that things never really ended but the second half of the 2010s was when we really didn't have the standards to handle it gracefully so we just got really in your face about it thus new Super Mario Brothers banjo kazooie nuts and bolts and Metal Gear Solid 4 so we're here to explain why snake is so old in a conversation that I don't really believe happened four feet away from this grave a helicopter where Campbell is about to explain half of what we need to know to understand what's going on here but you have to put your information somewhere the game this kind of cold open into flashback is a common narrative technique in games and movies and it's one that I'm pretty fond of I'd like to propose a heavy use of flashback in this episode no I bet don't do it thanks Abed stop that we're putting in this close to the beginning it just kind of feels like you're taking a mulligan writing in a separate beginning so nobody gets confused I don't even think I would have cared if none for the briefing that takes place after this flashback but before the opening which makes up this part I'll explain along the way and then you have to access from the menu which you could only have conceivably accessed after a save point or before you started the game and if you already feel like you're taking crazy pills okay good news and bad news briefing is very similar to the mission briefings that open the other acts and opens with sunny cooking eggs which are also where this would presume be in the actual game based on that it would be safe to assume that this cutscene was originally part of the main game and we'd go right after this cutscene in the cemetery and if that were the case it would probably help with the pacing of the sequence because the 15-minute briefing would put a little bit more time between the coal open and the start of the flashback but this isn't a movie in case anyone forgot this is a video game and after such a long install and already a decent amount of time watching and not playing getting you with a 15minute dump of exposition would probably be considered a bit of a faux pas even by the standards of what Metal Gear usually gets away with cutting out all of your information besides that you're old and you're going after liquid also kind of puts you right in the shoes of a soldier fighting in a battle without substance the briefing is also the only obvious example to my memory of anything cut for time besides a gameplay segment at the end of act 3 this seems courteous but considering that it feels like the entire rest of the game scripted cutscenes were either edited by an insane person at AO Kojima both or no one to me this comes off as kind of deceitful as for the contents of the briefing aside from being where you would put two and two together that the hands that lay the egg sunny is cooking our names after all it's all phones Talib which is insane but fine and also the colonel complaining that the United States suddenly has to think about the consequences of its actions this is really where the series goes balls deep on the concept of PMC's both at the same as mercenaries right no snake this is something else and completely different the colonel explains their benefits and how war has changed again private military companies have kind of taken over and here's why and how a lot of the seeds are planted that just kind of come out of nowhere in the main game including brat Patrol Sonny and the mark - there's a lot of interesting background information and theoretically this is where we would first be introduced to the term the war economy this is also the most respect Ryan's character will get in this game but we're not ready for that discussion yet I think establishes that he is one of the only characters and the game capable of doing anything cool fun or campy I don't need your money thank you but if you're going to spark something spark this five I'll start my own fire the information in the first half of the breathing is largely flop we need the information about PMC's to know the liquid Ocelot is controlling a lot of them allegedly to fulfill big boss's Ephesian of this world and by extension the boss the stream which has been sent down and ruined through the telephone game a world where soldiers always have a place in purpose this is not what the boss wanted at all but big boss is a fucking peanut brain chimp so here we are we also learned some background information about the war that's going on in act 1 which doesn't fucking matter at all because it's only in act 1 and is basically a stand-in for generic we're happening across the planet perpetuated by liquid how you can't just say ethnic minority is the reason why snake has to be the one to take down liquid is pretty floppy the kernel needs someone who isn't connected to any nation because every nation has something to lose from toppling out or heaven a big player in the war economy run by liquid and since Metal Gear Solid 2 sneaking Otacon have been more or less a nonpartisan force for justice so it works but it's fucking wild that the colonel only has one soldier he can trust with this job and it's a dude is functionally like fucking seven day I suppose it's expected that you would have played the previous Metal Gear games so you're already supposed to have a decent understanding of liquids general motivation and snakes role in the world maybe you're not really supposed to question that snake would be going after the liquid because of course he is there the twin snakes that said putting the one and only clear explanation of the main villains role and motivation in the game an optional cutscene on the menu that's really easy to miss is pretty fucking Shmack especially considering that it's going to be subverted by the end of the game now the bats over with we can finally talk about the gameplay sorry I like the iPod Metal Gear Solid 4 has a lot of what people tend to call quality of life changes and just to be clear there changes from Metal Gear Solid 3 this game plays very similarly to that one in this context quality of life changes refers to adjustments to the game playing controls that make the game feel more intuitive they use the connection between how the player wants their character to behave and how they will end up behaving likely very complicated in terms of programming but they make the combat and cell flow more naturally for example you no longer have to manually equip camouflage you can have the octo camo do it for you however this is not the only option you can still manually apply camouflage and you can acquire new camo that you can access to the menu by a number of means including saving ones that you've absorbed many of these have their own unique attributes that affect gameplay making this not only a quality of life change but one that adds additional depth depth of gameplay to boil it down that's usually defined by the number of ways a player can approach any given scenario more tools with more unique properties more hardcore players tend to value depth more and consider additional depth to be generally how you measure improvement in gameplay but more casual players value ease of play and think additional depth and challenge at the cost of accessibility is more of a downgrade hence where the general public considers Bayonetta - a straight upgrade from Bayonetta 1 but the crazy combo junkies don't like it as much indeed my older brother Chris + better things to do than obsess over anime and Japanese video games - that of all the Metal Gear games he played which I believe were the first for Metal Gear Solid 4 was the only one he really liked playing would you make sense you know the guns aim like guns you don't have to stop and shoot camoflauge applies itself there are tons of weapons to access free camera and a pretty good radar as far as down grids and depth yeah you can't interrogate people there's no fun stuff you can do with the wildlife because there's basically no wildlife there aren't as many quirky ways to handle your character Metal Gear Solid 3 even now and especially for the time will blow you away with how far it takes even the smallest details and it's stealth and survival mechanics and that's not even including the insane amount of Easter eggs in Metal Gear Solid 4 most of the improvements to gameplay depth come to in world improvements in technology mark 2 is a real fun and cute palette of snatcher ref I appreciate you can buy a ton of new weapons and items a lot of them are kind of redundant but there's some good stuff in here as I mentioned the camo system is good Metal Gear Solid force based gameplay is definitely kind of a sigh grade 45 degree upgrade if I'm being very generous but the changes do suit its world this isn't a Rambo survival story this is a globe-trotting futuristic adventure with globe-trotting futuristic consequences there are two camps of Metal Gear fans ones who feel like Metal Gear Solid 3 is the mechanical peak of the series and once you felt that the gameplay improved with every iteration although probably not including Peace Walker I could see arguments for both phantom in score is sort of a reconstruction and you could pick at it but its depth is undoubtedly impressive between Metal Gear Solid 3 and 4 I find that I do enjoy playing 3 a lot more although I would wager that's more due to the vastly superior level design and enemy design and must a matter of the court mechanics we'll talk about this case by case because where it's pretty consistently solid in Metal Gear Solid 3 with a couple of massive Peaks and Metal Gear Solid 4 words more like a couple of massive dips that's for act 1 it's fine functional but kind of uninteresting it's mostly a straight shot and a bit of a schlep more often when I get spotted it feels kind of unfair don't misunderstand I am bad at this game but so much shit going on in the background the buildings and alleyways noises a new sets of eyes flowing in and out all the time it'd feel a little bit more difficult to focus on immediate threats than it was in previous games it's not game breaking it's just a little bit worse there's also this mechanic where you can befriend rebel soldiers on one side of the war by fighting with them and giving them items but it just comes off as kind of completely fucking asinine I believe the intent was for this to have some sort of meaningful effect on the outcome of this battle but that doesn't go anywhere we're kind of dragging guarding here if I meant to sympathize with these cylinders more could definitely have been done to make them stand out as human beings to me but that would sort of defeat the soldiers have become tools without identity or individuality theme I want to talk about this more in Act two because that's where it last appears which is incredibly strange if it only if your tact one you could pass it off as trying to give that act its own identity but being only in the first two acts is a blatant symptom of this being an unfinished concept Kojima has talked in interviews from before this game was released about plans for how this game is going to play differently as well as many other ideas but since he listens to everyone and doesn't look at his budget until the game has been out for three weeks the ideas and themes he describes are all over the game as half-baked shadows of the intent they represent anyway we do this for a while and then we meet up with Drebin let's talk about Drebin guy was like and a weird shirt he's flipping a coin because he's trying to get a coin thing going he wants to really go with the coin that's me I'm the guy that scared you invest but grabber there's a lot of gimmicks he drinks soda pop he's got a catchphrase and a hand motion to go of it he's got a weird animal that follows him around and he drives a big crapper but he's really only here for three reasons one he has a very funny monkey - he's a way of supplying you with weapons anywhere at any time the explanation for which strains believability but it works for gameplay and it's a way of representing a symptom of the word kana me without muddling around and how you're supposed to acquire weapons if everything is controlled the first thing that he shows up and he throws down a little bit of information about how his business works and in turn about how the whole war economy works he also explains that he is not the only Drebin that they're a whole bunch of others out there all operating is one driven network based on that I wouldn't blame you for assuming that this is going to be the last appearance of Drebin in the game he comes off as sort of a shady neutral who's in the know willing and able to assist you but only as long as there's something in for him the network of ribbons is inadequately feasible excuse for how snake is able to take advantage of this business from completely different areas of the world then this happens the fact that it would not register to snake whose greatest asset on any mission is stealth that the man who managed to track him from unnamed in the Middle East to unnamed in South America might be a threat that needs to be dealt with his flock in ridiculous he tracked him with nano machines that he injected him with he put robots in your body to alert him to your every move why would you trust him the third thing he does is drop a ton of information about basically everything that our main cast wouldn't already know particularly about the Lali Louie low the war economy and the B&B unit it would make sense that Drebin wouldn't know about nano machines weapon IDs and the more technical elements of this world I get that he would be the one to explain the specifics of them so that his customer understands what he's paying for once again I don't necessarily buy than here would be waxing poetic about the themes of the game to a guy who as far as we believe he thinks is just another soldier with a sharp look in his eye and that looks really old for some reason but if I took a shot for every time the character started to endlessly speak in riddles in a way that strain suspension disbelief I'd be dead on a beach in Tijuana before the end of act 3 so I really can't keep pointing it out this is a Metal Gear this stuff happens I thought no one was supposed to be able back into the system are you with the Patriots I know lolly Lulay I mean I know hatred I do like that though that's cool also I guess the joke is over I can say patriot now to jump to the end yet Drebin isn't just a gun launderer he was working for the Patriots the whole time so we can do that again wait if Drebin was working for the Patriots why is he able to say Patriots he says it's because he has a different set of nanomachines but since he was raised by the Patriots wouldn't they have given him a set of nanomachines that made him unable to say or hear Patriot was he able to just so that snake would trust him I guess so whatever the page you didn't know what they're doing Patriot played me what why he was a child soldier so we can do that again he was used by the Patriots to inject snake with a version of Fox tie designed to kill evil liquid in Big Boss so we can do that again and he fills us in on octopus Raven Wolf and mantis the snake hound unit who were all super driven to murder solid snake because of some generic backstories that they keep trying to make sound really tragic and interesting but really these characters are here so that we can do Fox out again there's really nothing else to say about Drebin he shows up after you beat most of the bosses and I'll talk about that stuff when I'm specifically talking about the B&B unit because I have a lot to say because that shit is the worst but let's get back on track Oh baby its Rat Patrol you haven't even taken the safety off are we doing this again so we are introduced to Marilyn the cutscene I mentioned earlier it's very uncomfortable we finally know which ending of Metal Gear Solid 1 is canon we also finally properly introduced Akiba in case you don't know Johnny wasn't mobile yourself 1 & 2 when his grandfather wasn't Metal Gear Solid 3 and he was a fun little easter egg character but now he's here in Metal Gear Solid 4 somehow he farted and shitted and came his way into the main story and everything is wrong and nothing will ever be right again I feel like Rat Patrol could have been cool the idea of Meryl eating a special-forces unit is a decent direction to take her character at least its progression and at this game weren't somehow incapable of introducing great new characters these three could have been really memorable and interesting they didn't have to be super deep they just need to clear roles and personalities instead we get these two guys whose names I can't fucking remember and shit's my pantsu sake that's a cute joke though Meryl has never been the best character in fairness she is only in Metal Gear Solid 4 & 1 and she's one of the few characters in Metal Gear Solid 1 who has a large amount of dialogue outside of codex which tends to be the choppy stuff in the game even if only because instead of looking at Yoji Shinkawa was wonderful portraits you're staring at blocks they tell you as people Jim has a weird history with writing female characters and I want to talk about that because obviously I'm the person you want talking about that that's know but until the script is metal gear selling for really fucking falls apart in the second half I can't say anything Marilyn says or does is really out of character she's on a starry-eyed rookie anymore but she respects snake as a friend Legend and fellow soldier when I joined up they gave me psychotherapy to destroy my interest in men always assumed this line was a joke especially considering how she behaves all the time but the wiki says it actually happens so fucking I don't know considering the abhorrent actions of the colonel in this game following up on what happened in Metal Gear Solid 1 I can't say I really blame her for being a little standoffish towards him and I remembered a lot of this stuff being a lot worse aside from Rat Patrol being comically underwritten it really is just later on this is also where we learn about SOP the system of nano machines implemented in every state army in the world and many PMC's and managed by the centralized AI is controlled by the Patriots this is obviously a very cool sci-fi concept if you can get past the nanomachines are basically just magic medic lorian's now even with the massive benefits of this system the idea that every nation and the world would adopt this system specifically is pretty out there I get that uh numbers a huge tactical advantage which would lead to military pressure driving a new sort of nanomachines arms race but keep in mind this is the Patriots not the Philosopher's this is only the United States behind the scenes here you're telling me there isn't even one other superpower that managed to create its own AI n system of nano machines they really all decided to yield to arms tech isn't the obvious worry here that any one person with the gumption could theoretically access this entire system giving them be-all-end-all Shogun authority over the weapons and soldiers of every military in the world oh that's what happens oh sorry guys guess we really shagged the sheep on that one then Meryl cries about the kernel for a little bit and then we are attacked by frogs the frogs are a unit of female super soldiers that are uninteresting and unless save the purpose to be a boss foot in act one without using a b-and-b member so that we can cease to be and be in a creepy scene I won't say it's ineffective this is the highlight of the beauty and beast unit it's all downhill from here activated [Music] the street [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] then liquid uses magic to drive everyone insane Naomi does some cryptic shit and walks away all right thanks Johnny somehow saves snake's life and that's act 1 overall thoughts take a B b-plus maybe there are a lot of words words words but most of what I said is pretty relevant to this game events or themes at this point that's something we maybe take for granted for the rest of the game we may not be so lucky Naomi's Heroes was referenced but not by name the B & B unit are a total joke yet riding his unscathed gameplay was passable [Music] and we don't know that occupy ruins everything yet maybe he doesn't show up after this maybe things get better from here like to actually isn't that bad in terms of raw stealth actually gameplay it may actually be the best in the game it also has my favorite B&B boss but we'll break it down really fucked up those eggs Hasani [Music] a lot of the active briefing is pretty fun we sort of have to be reintroduced to Sunday because that's a chance you didn't watch the Act one briefing visual cues and Sony's conspicuous white hair along with the context you're expected to have will allow you to figure out the cheese Olga's child from Metal Gear Solid 2 since Sunday doesn't really have any role in the taking out liquid mission for now she's one of the only characters he doesn't spend hours explaining shit she will end up being crucial to the plan later on but for now all she can really do was fuck up breakfast and bounced off snake and how it's a snake also doesn't talk that much compared to the rest of the cast and Hal is kind of an awkward middleman this little family dynamic is one of the only ways that the natural charm of these characters is able to shine grumpy old badass getting his ass kicked by a little girl is comedy that writes itself just asked to negotiate Steven Spielberg guest Naomi explains that she's being held in South America and being forced to do research that will help liquid take control of SOP that's why liquid has to be helping him hijack the system because I know how Fox time work if you're like me your first thought was probably why doesn't they only have an accent anymore Rhodesia was owned by England until 1965 and there were lots of Indian laborers around that's probably where I got my skin colour from but I'm not even sure about that this is gonna happen with mailing later when in reality they probably shouldn't have had the accents they had in Metal Gear Solid 1 to begin with based on their character histories also you would only say they don't have an accent if you're from America but that's beside the point they didn't have these accents in the Twin Snakes so it's possible we're meant to think of that as canon now which is kind of depressing this doesn't matter at all and it's obviously only a localization issue but it's a pretty clear example of a problem in Metal Gear Solid 4 I'm going to call sequel dissonance despite how embarrassingly hard this game tries to make you remember all their Metal Gear games in a lot of ways it just doesn't really feel like the next Metal Gear game again the previous games hadn't almost wholly unique set of characters but there was a more abstract sense of cohesion between them ideas presented in one game would really come into their own and the next either being built on deconstructed or both despite the technology being very different between titles talking on the radio still felt like talking on the codec it's still the same basic set of controls but it's involving between games it's being built musical light motifs [Music] that was the way the government won that was the mission she was given and she had me her death as a duty out of duty she turned her back on her own unless it would have been crushed by such as I'm not crying fuck you you'll get thrown for a loop between games but no matter what you'll feel at home then you get to Metal Gear Solid 4 and the codec looks like this and the guns fire like this and the original Metal Gear Solid theme is gone for legal reasons and they only sounds like this the issue is not that Naomi doesn't have an accent so the character whose appearance and voice and personality and motivation are incredibly distinct and clear to me sadly being presented in an entirely new and confusing way in an entirely new context it was smart to cut out a lot of characters between Metal Gear Solid 1 & 2 because transitioning from Schinkel was memorable portraits to the 3d ps2 models would promote this dissonance the ones brought over were snake Otakon the kernel and melee and we don't even see mailings face P she's only an audio Easter egg so the only characters brought over are the male leads it makes sense because the male characters have much more distinct features that can be carried over to 3d models as opposed to the more consistent pretty woman face with only very subtle differences in most of these profiles I complain about that but that is far from a problem exclusive to Metal Gear so we'll put that in the maybe some other time pile the use of snake avec on and the kernel and Metal Gear Solid 2 takes advantage of the knowledge that you will be familiar with them you'll have an image of them in your head and that image will slowly be broken down over the course of the game there are some fanservice e moments but the callbacks are largely there to serve the game's agenda how do you know that doing it on purpose and Metal Gear Solid 4 as well I don't even know if they were doing it on purpose in Metal Gear Solid 2 but it was working they're not just there for the sake of being there like they seem to be in Metal Gear Solid 4 you're like him they only write well here's Naomi I understand that she's not gonna be wearing a turtleneck in South America but why are we even in South America anyway why did we go from an unnamed nation in the Middle East to an unnamed nation in South America Naomi is being held here but she was in the unnamed nation in the Middle East who were in before in fact the boss of this stage was there to all the key players in this axe a vamp and Ryden were in the Middle East as far as I understand riding is only here because snake is here in vamp is only here to fight riding I can imagine a much better Metal Gear Solid 4 were act 1 and 2 are the same act if the plan was originally to make the rest of the acts more like them but that plane got shafted then why not just make the first two the same act they practically are they will have a completely generic set of PMC's and rebels with liquid pulling the strings they're both said in a broad area of the world where I am they image in my head of what this area is supposed to look like that matches the one in the game maybe we start off with a liquid assassination block the transition to the rescue naomi mission that circumstance has changed make the ex feel less like a series of a two bees and more like a Metal Gear game where our understanding of the rules and characters and play is constantly shifting we didn't need Marilyn right and then we definitely don't need them in the same act but if I had to pick one absolutely cut right in the offers nothing of value to this game and this game takes so much of him although I guess if you cut riding you'd be cutting all of the most interesting action sequences in the game so I don't know maybe set it in a real country I don't know I have a harder time getting invested in the sneaking mission when the soldiers I'm sneaking past are just minding their own business and have practically nothing to do with what I'm doing besides a tenuous connection to liquid when you get there remember the conflict between the PMC's and the rebels has nothing to do with your mission there's no reason for you to get involved or take sides it doesn't have to be in South America or the Middle East just anywhere with a clearer sense of cultural identity really feeling that Wars and about nations or ideologies anymore element here isn't that the real sacrifice isn't that the real dissonance don't get me wrong the war economy is a fun idea there's a lot of great ways to take advantage of it but did it really have to come with the loss of all national identity in a Metal Gear game are we really throwing away the theme of the identity of the individual being crushed beneath the clashing of nations and ideologies with him the change in cultural time for the hot new theme and concept we're totally in love with Fatima did you even play Metal Gear Solid 3 you can have the war economy without taking out the role the United States and other countries play in it instead of having any relevant commentary on politics in the real world like for example having the real tension between the US and Russia during the Cold War both serve as a backdrop and cause of a personal tragedy between characters instigating the events of the entire rest of the series initially indirectly but thanks to the clarification provided in this game completely directly we've sacrificed a little bit for this ultimate nation less clash between liquid Evo's snake and the Patriots and I guess the shadowy hands of the Patriots controlling everything is common knowledge now or at least known to some degree by some arbitrary group of people for the first time aside from the tanker mission which again was a tease our hero is not upon being manipulated by a national government but a totally independent soldier with totally independent operations make his own decisions but still abiding to the kernel for some reason because that feels familiar even though it doesn't make much sense the power has shifted away from Nations and on to the faces we were already familiar with practically all of the players involved with the Patriots or in taking down the Patriots just happened to be the characters from Metal Gear Solid one two and three even your random support people and Olga's child yes all tonight was a legend at the start of Metal Gear Solid 1 that someone was still holding his leash because while being a single the Metal Gear 2 Metal Gear Solid 1 was also a soft reboot for the series in every Metal Gear in previous you're a soldier you're being used as a tool by the US government and you slowly start to figure that out and find your place find something to believe in suddenly our main character is completely autonomous nation lists and one of the most important people in the world and he's sneaking through random irrelevant conflicts between people that don't matter so we have an excuse to have a gameplay segment that looks and feels like Metal Gear before we can get back to conversations and fights between the most important people in the world but to me that's some really Metal Gear and that's sequel vestments anyway I kind of like mailings X and I'm sup I get rid of it remember what the goals Thanks actually we're in South America we're here to save Naomi let's go actor was one kooky bungle in the jungle let me tell you I'm in the gameplay sections of acting work a lot better than the ones in act 1 they are similar but these more open-ended jungle areas make me feel at home make me feel like I was playing Snake Eater but also wish I was blind Snake Eater but making friends with soldiers mechanics shows up here for the last time in the game to elaborate on that taking advantage of it is technically a new method of getting from point A to point B without receiving harm and that's technically depth so fine and also feels a little bit more like Metal Gear here on account of I'm wearing their outfit and dealing with snipers disguising yourself feels very natural and maybe like we've done this before but this is an active combat zone so we're hiding but we're hiding in plain sight and continuing to fight without drawing too much attention to ourselves sort of a hybrid of classic stealth and a more active modern third-person shooter games it's good against I prefer to the peaks of raw metal gears stealth and but it works on the zone and suddenly lens this section of the game a more unique identity instead of just being a cheap snake eater or Peace Walker after running the segment I read an interview with Kojima explains that this game was meant to explore this new style of stealth gameplay I felt very vindicated we are also gonna do a lot of pure stealth after this and it's gonna be just awful so let's appreciate this what we can we meet up with Drebin and talk about who the b-and-b are and the Patriots we covered this already it's a blatantly suspicious amount of information and then we move on between the opening and meeting up with Naomi the rest of the gameplay is pretty solid and there's a good amount of it there's a lot of variety too we're flipping in and out of active combat zones in and out of buildings for crawling through canyons and rivers we shoot down a helicopter there third third out of every active metal you're selling for active feels the most like it you were to reach a certain degree of skill you'd have a big playground to try a bunch of fun stuff in that's the incredibly high precedent-setting Metal Gear Solid 3 and at least here we're trying to live up to it it's not railroading you but it's not confusing and aimless either I'm proud of you guys unfortunately I can't speak as highly about the story elements as I've already complained about the conflict going on here is largely meaningless after the briefing has snake wiggles and Wiggles his way onto the battlefield a ghostly past conversation between snake and the colonel play out is narration where they say in no uncertain terms the Patriots embody the war economy this is exactly what solidus was trying to prevent in Metal Gear some of to liquid in the Patriots both white control so no matter who wins we lose we need to take down the whole system but it's modern society's so reliant on these AI is controlling everything it might not be so easy I probably could have reached any of these conclusions by myself with the insane amount of information you've already presented or you can just let it come up naturally later or I guess you can just put it here just explain it the story of this game is actually not to audibly complicated but you wouldn't know that if you played it because they draw a lot of connections and threads that don't really go anywhere and there's a lot of fluffy dialogue like this where we're just restating things that we know but slightly differently so you feel like your brain is skipping vamp is here guys vamp is here you guys aren't gonna believe this but vamp its back you know vamp she's here you guys are never gonna guess we're vamp laughing octopus our first B&B member to get any individual time and the spotlight shows up here by vamps side similarly to bully some people and monger some war I thought this was gonna go somewhere but it really amounts to very little aside from establishing the face candle in the first place I guess I could explain one of the rebels will consider snake an enemy but he's a creepy old guy in a Bonnie suits sneaking around covered in guns I'd consider him a threat and I know who he is somehow in this scenario with snake is free he'll I am not complaining by the way I do like this scene octopus with snakes face is memorably creepy and at least she's speaking semi coherently and not just making noises she's got decoy octopus octo camo but she also has Doc Ock arms some more than probably any other B&B members she's taking what made the Tekken abilities of the Fox I'm member she's based on interesting and expanding on it rather than watering it down awkwardly imitating it or just going for something completely different granted decoy octopus was all but removed from the original Metal Gear Zone so she doesn't really have anyone's legacy to sully maybe that speaks to the fact that the original bosses would have been better though the emotion she's connected to that would give her a parallel and the Kobra unit is probably the joint but that would be the boss and the roles have basically no similarities that I can think of but I generally think less of the emotion comparison in all the bosses I'm pretty sure laughing crying etc I just meant to show that they're not exactly in control of their emotions not to make you remember the fear or whatever it is time and the one who is connected to a Cobra unit member is screaming mantis to the sorrow and those don't line up so I'm pretty sure it's nothing this is also where rosemary is properly introduced as really your only Kodak pal besides Otacon rosemary was introduced another salon too with someone for riding to talk to there really aren't that many codec panels and that gave me other and well rules is not famously charming she has a personal connection to Ryden so she can talk about stuff besides the mission in fact your personal connection to Ryden is why the Patriots snuck her on that team in the first place in order to manipulate him little food for thought middle your salon once word of the day is Gina Naomi's a genetics expert will mow your solitude says Neiman Rhodes was the data analyst from the final hours of Metal Gear Solid 2 Shinagawa says creating the female heroes for Kojima games are always much more difficult sometimes taking months to perfect why well to be honest having characters like rose and Naomi R mr. Kojima is ideal women but they are not my ideal woman he says laughing you know mr. Kojima likes those intelligent scientist types in Metal Gear Solid 4 we got a whole new set of themes but we don't want to have to ask Shankar to draw another beautiful brunette scientist so naomi is suddenly repurposed into the world's greatest hacker in nano machine expert and Rose is here now as a psychologist we will see this a lot characters being rewritten to better fit into Metal Gear Solid 4 I already went insane rambling about sequel dissonance and this definitely qualifies it shrinks the world and makes all the characters too special to brilliant to multi capable and relevant where they wouldn't be but hey at least we got this great new mental health theme out of it and it manifests in gameplay decently I guess it is just kind of another attack done layer to the stamina mechanic which made sense in Metal Gear Solid 3 because that was for the most part one long mission where wilderness survival was more relevant here it's just snake as an old man his back hurts and that makes him stressed which means less stamina which means less health it's just another layer also I don't know about you but if every character in Metal Gear snake is probably the one who's mental health I worry about the least he's grumpy he goes through a lot people are always lying to him but he's goal driven and confident if you asked him a question like do you think love can bloom on the battlefield he's got an answer for you he's a soldier he's always questioning if he's doing the right thing and he's not terribly happy but post Metal Gear Solid 1 he knows what he's doing he's solid fucking snake he does one thing and he does it well he's not gonna be done in by a kidney stone or sciatica I'm not saying if somebody comes off as confident shouldn't have people keeping an eye on their mental well-being snake has been through a lot and he's gonna be through a lot more and it's good that someone's making sure he's okay but you know who could really have used some therapy and never got it ridin you know Rose I realized that the entire Big Shell incident was orchestrated by the Patriots to manipulate writing and part of them is going to involve making ridin question his sanity a little bit so they probably wouldn't have assigned riding a psychologist to make sure he was okay during Metal Gear so - unless - explicitly Gaslight him but that would have been a much better place to implement a stress meter it just doesn't really land when you're attaching it's the snake and mental health doesn't really come up all that much in his story or the main plot of the game at all really the only characters who are used to explore mental illness are riding in the b-and-b unit both of whom I'm still saving to talk about for later I do think they both embody some of the biggest issues with Metal Gear Solid 4 but I'm also saving them for later because they're the ones that I'm actually the most angry about and admittedly that is because I have my own history and trauma involving mental illness I mean these days I think just about everyone does if it didn't already and are just more willing to be open about it we all got problems we're all trying to heal this help each other also my own experience has little to nothing to do with PTSD so it's possible that its portrayal in this game is actually very accurate I doubt it but I can definitely rule out that this might honestly speak to someone it just said to me when I see mental illness being written in this kind of shallow or cliche way to generate drama to have characters to take advantage of other characters or just to creep you out I personally find it pretty lazy and disrespectful I'm not trying to villainize Kojima or anyone Kojima is an angel he would never hurt a fly I just want to be clear about where I'm coming from on this since writing has so much history with PTSD and mental health problems it makes the fact that Rose became a doctor and then did what she did to him that more fucked up I know there's a good reason I know it's supposed to be fucked up it doesn't mean it's not fucked yeah fuck you Roy Rose is why I became a psychologist let's talk stress and mental health angle is much more relevant to Ryden than it is to snake because Rose as a character really has no connection to snake she had vamper mostly here to give riding something to do to have someplace for his story to go because in a game mostly populated with Metal Gear Solid 1 characters what would ridin be doing what about you Jack disappeared you just moved in on Rose I was consoling her over her loss and one thing just led to another she's young enough to be your daughter yeah lucky me well Ryan's actually not here yet so for now Rose is just our friend let me regain my composure where where are we right after we're done talking to Roy and Rose about what happened to Marilyn ridin [Music] who is this snake that voice there's an ambush ahead government in PMC troops he could be shot from anywhere watch your surroundings look to the distance is this jack jack is dead snake I made you side wait is this real so Ryan's doing the whole I'm on your side just call me rod hey deep throat so if you're not fucking stoop you know he's gonna show up as a cyborg ninja in a bit between it back and forth between snake and riding and then snake in rows because sense of what happened after Metal Gear Solid 2 I'd like to clearly establish what they are saying happened for reasons we'll see later on riding and rose lips together at some point due to his history as a child soldier riding became unstable and started drinking he became distant from his family and his job and The Slits of ridin n roses relationship ending and Rose eventually starting a relationship with Roy this is sad but I understand that it could happen I would have liked to believe that everything worked out between rose and ridin but this is another way things could go riding is a broken man and rosemary is only human so the only person I can find at fault is Roy also ridin was able to save Sonny due to information he got from a resistance group that we will later find out is run by Metal Gear Solid threes one and only Eva in exchange for him helping them retrieve big boss's body then he gave her to stay canonic on and now house the world's greatest anime dad so a lot of what I've just said is not true but we think it is moving on [Applause] [Music] Froese we found Naomi she was in the shack of the whole time we fund the helmi and then get a nice shot of her cleavage Nayomi snake I knew you'd come neither of us can escape yeah nice to see you too since naomi is our de-facto nanomachines expert we're about to get in even more bloated but still somehow kind of engaging an interesting dialogue about practical applications of nanomachines and the effect they have on battle this time though it's less about the system either how it affects the economy like with Drebin or a moment-to-moment battle like merrill but about the biological and psychological effects the nanomachines have on soldiers and short nanomachines can suppress or stimulate emotions which means soldiers can more easily be dropped in the battle and mid to violent and horrible acts without worrying about how their psyche will be effective instead of naturally coming to terms with the horrors of war through experience and possibly never actually getting over it properly as those it can be made to simply feel nothing or even be rewarded it won't block the memories though just the feeling so back there when everyone went nuts it was actually their nanomachines getting shut down and being here with the weight of everything they'd done all at once flat-out love this aside from being the premise of a number of mine break doujins and my sad panda favorites wait don't say that it feels like the next step after stinks classic training juxtaposed against ridings VR training before riding was a rookie you felt like he understood the battlefield because he'd been trained in a computer became to understand that nothing can really prepare you for real combat it goes in a different direction later on but that's what we're starting with and that was kind of to Bogut people who played video games not like me though other people we're doing that again but it's kind of flipped because now the people who are in actual combat are the people who are emotionally unequipped to deal with the horrors of war and because of the system they never have to it's real combat that feels like a video game and that's fucked up these soldiers carried inside and returned to assault the war move unimaginable shellshock the meaning and the system may have changed until that point war was like a game to them and then suddenly reality came crashing look at this shot right here this is fucking everything this is a fascinating core idea that I believe Kojima and Marana really wanted to explore Metal Gear Solid 4 but kind of got lost on the way see in Metal Gear Solid 2 you were starting with the perfect video game reality your Solid Snake the coolest man on the planet doing all kinds of badass shit sticking on a boat and that's yanked away and you brought into a new world that's not so pleasant no more they are training pretending to be captain had been now you're the skinny nerd you are in real life and you're not ready for what's about to happen at all maybe yourself or to contrast is always the real thing these are the characters you know this is the soul and snake you love but it doesn't really feel the same it's greater it's washed out it's older and less fun I'm not just crapping nonsense out of my butthole here snake is constantly for him like people aren't impressed with him anymore these are people who used to think of snake is a real-life hero but now they just treat them like some bumbling racist grandpa it's sad and I really don't think it's on purpose on some level but you're still on four wants to be a game about watching something you love shrivel up and die not shamefully but not honorably either and maybe for that reason the sequel dissonance could be seen as a positive but unfortunately that whole idea is sort of at odds with the other goals this game had including trying to be the ultimate Metal Gear fanservice game that satisfyingly tied up every loose end and even if all of the unpleasant shit in the game were to serve some central theme would that make it good that's up to you speaking of watching things shrivel up and die it's time for a physical we went a lot about snakes biology and current physical health thirty percent of the Fox died adjacent nanomachines it was given for the Shadow Moses mission are still in his body and won't stop functioning until he dies or they're removed they're not affected by a soapie but are probably making him sick or messing with his body other ways however he's aging rapidly because as a clone he was designed to same reason he's incapable of reproducing snake it's get a fucking die and he's never gonna have a family I'm Hideo Kojima fuck you nice try Kojima but snake has a family and they're happy together you just go ahead and kill him and if that weren't bad enough Fox Day is mutating not just gonna kill the baddies it's gonna kill you and everyone the only way they can get rid of is to die snake isn't just gonna die he has to die to save the world my so put text on screen saying this story ends with snake dying the game how can I put this chickens out but it's pretty upsetting the first time through limit ribbon pops snake with a new strain of Fox die as well you're supposed to press X to find that out here but I think it's funnier if you don't ya Drebin has Fox sigh now I wonder who he's working for you said yourself we must allow ourselves to be chained to fate lo poetry slam little back and forth name drop the title and then it's a boss fight this is the laughing octopus fight and as I mentioned it's my favorite of the B and B's like a lot of good Metal Gear bosses it's creepy to men and toys with your expectations it's a back and forth between hunting her down and being hunted and you got to use all your tools a lot of the boss fights have a number of Easter eggs and the bee and bees are no exception but they have a lot of the same Easter eggs non-lethal kills Mega dolls of them after they answered their beauty stage if you wait awhile you can end up in a white room and you can make them dance and pose for you they'll slowly walk towards you and you have to take them down and then they do their creepy dying animation and Drebin does this whole speech with the exception of mantis it really is pretty much the same every time after the flight right and helps you track down Naomi you find her palpable and VAM said and then he calls it and hits the head Jevon shows up to help because I guess he's just part of the crew now we have Naomi now so we're gonna park on top of jebin's tank and fight our way out this is the first of two on Rails shooting segments in the game and then look you're selling one in three of these segments were used as an explosive way of ending the game when you're Solid 4 has no plans of ending with an explosion so the ones here are both in the middle of the game in X 2 & 3 the second one is a much more deliberate callback whereas this one feels like more of a natural way of breaking up the end of the act the freedom to walk around on some of the armored truck and blasting your way through PMC soldiers and Gekko make this one a better fit for Metal Gear Solid 4 it's this game's rail shooter sequence not Metal Gear Solid threes I still find it to be kind of forgettable but it's harmless and flashy so we make it out crash play with a monkey and make sure our necks aren't broken we almost got a fun little ragtag group of misfit rebels going on here all the way now is someone who can fight with a sword all right so aside from a short gameplay segment running through town and dealing with gecko the entire rest of the act is dedicated to showing off a ride into the Banff superpowers I'm not mad this is though riding more or less wins but when he climbs on board he's losing a lot of goop liquid a vamper going after big boss's body because their plan won't work without it naomi explains that a vamp is in fact nanomachines based on the one she designed that's how he got his crazy superpowers that's why I can't die and they're in Naomi's body too snake right [Music] act 3 of Metal Gear Solid 4 is really where the beat by beat discussion and an analysis of this game kind of starts to fall apart because it's where the game falls apart to which it's about to hit the fan everything that happens from here on out is either going to be the best stuff in the game or cloud driving the bus stupid or somehow both there's no more well this section of gameplay has some interesting ideas and a trip supper in a few places but at large they works well well act in 900 miles an hour's straight to stupid town let's rock baby slow down grab some tea let's relax watch the briefing no rush to stupid town it's it's coming no matter what here's some good news we just passed the Bechdel test granted it's mostly a conversation about cooking but a pass is a pass the relationship which we Naomi and sunny is sweet it's so it a little bit by how it cheers a scene with the only real development of Naomi and Allah Khan's relationship and that's pretty terrible but it's more nefarious purpose is that it's being used to set up what will become our deus ex machina because Sony's inexplicable computer genius and Naomi's sudden the infinite understanding of nanomachines in the AI used to control them allow these two ladies to hold the key to fixing everything because everything is nanomachines now [Applause] [Music] [Applause] since the character from a previous game superpowers have just been explained to be caused by nano machines we might as well go ahead and finally address that elephant in the room yes everything is nano machines now yes it is stupid when you allow yourself to establish that you can fill your body with millions and billions of microscopic robots that can heal you transfer and store information increase and limit your physical capabilities and control your emotions you've basically totally bypassed every relevant technological limitation in the Metal Gear universe besides maybe time travel they speak to one of this game's greatest curses Kojima said himself that he entered development with the intent to answer a lot of questions and mysteries that when he wrote older Metal Gear games he never had any intention of answering in the first place certainly we have to rewrite all of the wacky superpowers to have either been nanomachines or parasites they're the same thing he really only had the one trick in the bag and the case of characters like vamp it's bad if just because giving those elements an explanation and later works cheapens their effect in the work they were written for but the details of the power and abilities being explained away as nano machines doesn't bother me as much as how the overabundance of nano machines cheapens the main story of this game Kojima really likes Blade Runner and ghost in the shell' talk about Beauty and the Beast in fact he made a whole game about how much she loves Blade Runner these are both movies set in the future where societal and technological development leads to the loss of the identity of the individual the lines between cultures and even the divide between man and machine starts to blur everything is chaos and you have control over nothing not even what you think comprises your identity and how you view the world and those in power want it that way because it keeps them in power this is to me largely what defines the cyberpunk genre that in Robo geishas I'm sure if you played Metal Gear especially Metal Gear Solid 2 a lot of this is sounding pretty familiar I am not yet familiar with the rest of the ghost in the shell' series my boy Mountain Tim informs me that in the second season of Santa long complex something closer to a takedown of a government authority occurs but in any case without spoiling too much many of the classics in the genre 10-man with a character abandoning their roles upon under an oppressive Authority try to develop a better sense of personal identity because in the end that can never be truly taken away from you no matter what this game looks format as well and in fact the theme of sense is very tears and rain I'm not saying it to be a great story you have to adhere to seanrid conventions but it's clear that this is what Metal Gear Solid's who was going for the point is that when the Patriots were introduced in Metal Gear Solid's who they weren't introduced to be the final boss of the series they weren't meant to be a series of bowling pins but you can knock down and fix everything everything has to be nanomachines now because everything has to be connected to one network of AIS that anyone with the right key can access or shut down that's why nano machines are stupid not biggest vamp ease in the sparkly bisexual vampire anymore although yeah I'm sad we lost that part too and the actory briefings sunny finally gets those eggs just right and I guess that means something good is about to happen speaking of the right key it turns out that the key to seizing control of SOP is big bosses DNA Wow how conveniently snake centric big boss is literally the key to all of this Metal Gear Solid 1 liquid 1 a big bosses body well for one because he had a weird obsession but wasn't at the key to fixing the genetic defects and himself and the genome soldiers Metal Gear Solid 1 everything was about big bosses DNA so what does SOP have to do with big boss I mean facetious of course the answer that that question will turn out to be a lot actually a pretty stupid amount but for now it seems like this is something that people in the plane should be questioning more like what's been testing how well his and snakes the enable work as a substitute which is probably pretty difficult considering he doesn't have his own DNA anymore because everything about this isn't the same what do you mean we home bad I don't understand snake I thought you knew that liquid spent a whole game whining about that oh hey police nuts I thought having us go wasn't enough you need his biometric data at the same time don't you that's right and big boss is already dead no he's alive sustained oh oh that makes more sense can you imagine if Big Boss was actually all the way alive just like walking around after all that shit that'd be crazy Sonny hacked into the patriot systems and located big boss's body fuck good work Sonny Otacon it's a little bit of his Kojima's self insert fourth wall breaking I can't believe they're making me do this shit dialogue Naomi sad because Craig Fox was her brother and they're still doing cyborg ninjas snake and Sonny are still delightful positive female role models Ryan's dying because he needs is his blood dials knives by a robotic machine the only one who can do that is dr. Madden are from Metal Gear classic and he's out in Eastern Europe where big momma and the body liquids after happened to be too so we got a plan Campbell's gonna help us out so I guess we're still friends for a reason then we get some pretty hard to stomach back and forth between Naomi and an icon I used to be an anime otaku how she just made sure you don't have a girlfriend you really whipping out the guns in the collection there's a little bit of chitchat explaining why Sonny understands computers so well and here we're tying together the three characters who will ultimately directly or indirectly be responsible for our deus ex machina so there's foreshadowing here but yeah it's mostly it's just bad romance I can't imagine this was way better in Japanese Naomi's relationship with an icon is spontaneous and baffling and it doesn't get much better later on and that's the briefing [Music] Europe so once again we are thrown into an unnamed nation surrounded by a spat between a local resistance group and a PMC hired by the local government and controlled by outer heaven so liquid is at the helm again I complain about this but at least this time we have business with the rebellion at least it's part of the story we're not just shifting everything to somewhere else for no reason this act also plays pretty differently from the rest that's not gonna be a compliment for very long when you enter this act for the first time a lot of it is pretty surprising snake is now officially an enemy of the state whatever is saved this is so that's pretty fun for someone trying to deceive the fuzz he's behaving pretty conspicuously for someone trying to deceive the fuzz go to this guy's looks an awful lot like himself one is I am I am a metal gear fan and I do appreciate being serviced like this but I am pretty naturally mixed on suddenly being allowed to play his young snake or as anyone else is though Kojima is saying okay fine I guess I made my point about the K by making you plays an old man for act 1 & 2 you can be whoever you want now me and all the gamers slurp their big gulps and said yeah that's fuckin right know your place yeah we got to face camo from octopus it goes really well with the off-brand face camo we already had the COS house a little thief Rat Patrol is back baby jokes aside the scene with Merrill here is pretty effective Chiana Kahn and riding are really the only characters that he can feel have any emotional connection to snake in the first act that she appears in she's mostly used for callbacks and some discomfort and sadness over how snake is getting older in the world doesn't have a place for soldiers like him anymore here now that she and snake essentially had the same mission of taking out liquid she's asking him to hand her the reins and to trust her to deal with this mission which is very in line with their characters in Metal Gear Solid 1 however now instead of a rookie asking a pro that she thinks of his legend to trust her she's a fully vetted soldier in her prime asking a guy well past his prime who she considers a friend to let her handle this mission so that he doesn't get hurt and possibly die in both situations sake has exactly the same mindset he's all mission mission mission that's probably how he's been since the day he was born Meryl probably knows she can't stop him she bullies him a little bit but she doesn't have him arrested or anything which she surely has the grounds to do it's sad and it's effective and it's pretty good unfortunately Meryl is simultaneously holding the classic action-movie role of establishment fuckhead who wants our badass protagonist to step back an old man let the police handle this ultimately leading to her in her entire squad and the entire world getting dunked on resins fine by the way dr. Madden our is very sorry about his behavior in Metal Gear - it won't happen again whoa this is different we're in the city now and I'm Otacon in a trench coat very very nice Kojima those actors mostly when I was talking about when I said Metal Gear Solid 4 lends some scale to the world of Metal Gear this is a real-ass civilian district in a real-ass city people live here yes the streets have a curfew to explain why there are no people on here besides PMC troops and the resistance member you're tailing but that works too because civilian life is under military control this is a brilliant idea and this area is beautiful the atmosphere here is intense it's almost completely silent save the distant sirens and announcements over the speakers your footsteps and the whistling of the person you're trying to track it's haunting [Music] unfortunately this is far and away the shittiest act to play in the entire game because 3/4 of it is this fucking endless and completely asinine tracking mission where if you explore go try out new things or go off the beaten path I make mistake the consequences are almost always that the person you're following will get spooked and run off which is worse than a fail state because relocating them and tracking them down again almost always takes more time than just loading a save and this is the only objective attached to the standard stealth gameplay in this act a frustrating linear stalking mission there aren't really any new mechanics to speak of in the stage either the face camo is the only one that I call significant PMC soldiers will react and treat you differently depending on whose face you're wearing which makes sense because they're looking for a snake we're in public now just as important as concealing our location is concealing our identity it's not especially a deep but it's new and cool and fits the level it's really such a shame I'd love to have done more with this Metal Gear missions set in civilian areas were espionage hiding in plain sight tracking down leads and managing information as a fun idea I'd never wanted to consume an entire Metal Gear game because that's better suited for the likes of hitman but they were gonna bother doing this at all I just wish it was done better here all we have is boring repetitive and totally linear with a nice backdrop and cool atmosphere and that's the whole thing although maybe I'm just mad because I kept fucking up trying to get the snatch you're opening you gotta be fucking shitting me anyway we blow past all this and we finally made it to Big Momma's House I can't believe this is dude over here never noticed Otacon was following him this dude just drops an apple he just had an apple and he dropped it Oh dag y'all it's Eva still doing the whole cleavage thing but aren't we all aside from the reference in the opening this is our first serious Metal Gear Solid 3 pull and oh boy is it'll pull listen up until now I know I've nitpicked a lot I've been very negative about some things very up-close and critical but in truth I wouldn't have even considered talking about Metal Gear Solid 4 like this if the entire game stayed consistent for the first two axé the first two acts of metal gear selling for on their own work they're goofy there's too many cutscenes the cutscenes are too long the writing and the action scenes are pretty campy the game is all in all pretty up its own ass but that's true of every Metal Gear game and somehow they all work it's hard to explain what I mean and not everyone is going to feel this way but you just have to play the first three Metal Gear Solid games they're silly but they work the first three Metal Gear Solid games have a tone and a goal and a style of gameplay and the story twists in all behaves the one way throughout serving a theme and a purpose that's true of the first two acts of Metal Gear Solid 4 they both take place in active combat zones where you can befriend soldiers who are rebelling against PMC's under liquids control yeah the fighting gear isn't relevant to your job specifically but this whole game could have been set in danger zones with rebels everywhere and the connection you build with them matters over the course of the game and you help each other fight back in this world where war is everywhere and the Patriots in outer heaven are pulling the strings but I'm so much more critical of all of that stuff because it feels like it doesn't really matter at all because none of it comes back after act 2 because everything changes in act 3 if you were at a pinpoint where Metal Gear Solid 4 becomes unsalvageable II fucked it's this cutscene the one word that dude drops the Apple this is for the purposes of this video the explanation of the Patriots the shadowy completely mysterious untouchable organization that controls everything this is the end of the facade this is when in The Wizard of Oz we see the man behind the curtain and he's not particularly impressive I don't think that's how you're supposed to feel but it's how you feel all the same all right let's go [Music] eva is the surrogate mother that bore the clones of Big Boss Big Boss as femme fatale from Metal Gear Solid 3 is now kind of the mother of big bosses kind of children how was she in the right place at the right time to play this role she was a founding member of the Patriots the Patriots were created by zero for Metal Gear Solid 3 during the Cold War in order to quote-unquote manage and control the American state sometime between Metal Gear 2 and the Metal Gear Solid 1 the Patriots became a eyes fulfilling zeros role they created the war economy then we recount the plot of Snake Eater with some Genesis metaphors that don't really make any sense and then we follow up after either gets kicked out of China I guess she just met with the people she'd double-cross after failing the nation she'd double-crossed them 4 and then said hey can we be friends again zero used the money Eva failed to steal the form a secret society with the intent of fulfilling the boss's dream of a united world after I assume misunderstanding what he heard from a man who misunderstood what she said and then invited Eva other original members include Big Boss sig and paramedic and Ocelot I know give me one second boss Second World War known as the mother of special forces she had an almost overwhelming charisma about her the CIA feared this so they had her eliminated that's not what happens denizen even really makes sense as a metaphor for what happened yeah her skills and charisma made her the only person both valuable and capable enough to convince Logan she had defected leading to her becoming a necessary sacrifice to his Cold War attention but the CIA didn't have a problem with her charisma anyway zero propped a big boss as a symbol of their ideals hyping him up as a hero and a legend he used the power of big boss's name to draw in power for the Patriots whether it be the Stars and Stripes Big Boss and zero began fighting and worried about losing his symbol he had paramedic clone Big Boss [Music] okay but don't say it like that zero cloning him without his permission made big busts say Wow okay what the fuck I'm done with you you're all nuts then he takes off and makes outer heaven zero snowballs his way into mass control Eva just outright says the zero and big must both a misinterpreted the boss as well God the fucking shots in these scenes get it it's like religion who made this painting hence the Patriots as we know them Eva says that all this was because of a misunderstanding in small differences in ideology jot that down that's important Big Boss returns to command Fox sound and stages the outer heaven and incense of our land and incidence as a coup against zero these are the events of Metal Gear one and two zero was behind great Fox's reconstruction as a cyborg ninja zero got big boss's body and turned it into a key because he has a weird obsession with Big Boss because everyone does including Kojima Big Boss turning his back on him made him really sad and led to his desire to control information hence Metal Gear Solid 2 leading into Metal Gear Solid 4 SIGINT is the DARPA chief now really we're going with that it's true paramedic is SIGINT are both dead naomi was brought in to do everything Ocelot took off and did his own thing because of his crush on Big Boss at some point riding and Eva met up right and once it's sunny if it wanted big Maus and neither of them are big fans of the Patriots so mutual interest and that's how we got here Eva takes us out back and shows us quote-unquote big boss's body which is being kept alive and his consciousness is being contained by nano machines because of fucking course it is we got a call from Alec on Naomi's gone then this happens and it's wacky time again turns out liquid found us and the PMC's are after us we gotta grab big boss's body and go because he's literally the key to all this suddenly if it starts talking again because I guess we need another really quick really shallow really on the nose criticism of video game culture before we go nowadays anyone with a computer can get combat training the FPS games that these children love are distributed for free by these companies to fight like this and then we're doing this again [Music] [Music] with so many wars being we stopped talking here we go this transitions into the second on the rail shooting segment in the game and then this cutscene is finally over so as mr. fusion says they say in Paris is burning let me put on my reading glasses because the library's open [Music] there's a lot that immediately registers is completely ridiculous here zeroes again and paramedic or the Patriots really these jokers from Metal Gear Solid 3 2004 will be Godzilla's 50th birthday you think they're still going to be making Godzilla movies then of course everybody loves customer Tom was one of the unlucky tunnels that was discovered by the Nazis before it was finished I watched the movie again just to make sure in fact I even ordered the actual film from the movie company well a big drama staged by my good good friends who would never hurt me why would you do that Kojima but that's not the main issue here it's just a symptom of a huge problem that arises right here and almost ruins this game this game should not have been about Big Boss now if you've played all the Metal Gear games you might be thinking how can this not be about big boss isn't big boss the guy who caused all of this well he wasn't before here's what we knew about big boss before this game big boss was the villain of Metal Gear 1 & 2 these two games are very similar and the second one is better but they are both Canon big boss was a legendary soldier and the commander of fuck sounded a 1995's and gray fox to infiltrate the independent military nation of outer heaven in South Africa due to information received by the US indicating that outer heaven was developing a dangerous nuclear weapon gray fox was captured so big busts and the rookie Solid Snake next big boss was actually the leader about her heaven and fully expected snake to falen's mission but snake kicked everyone's ass and discovered that the weapon they were developing was a metal gear on the way out big boss meets Solid Snake face to face they fight and Big Boss supposedly dies this is later retconned by Metal Gear Solid 5 but that doesn't matter outer heaven is destroyed and snake goes home but it turns out Big Boss is alive by 1999 almost every nation in the world has disposed of its nuclear weapons with the exception of a small recently independent military nation Zanzibar lands sound familiar Zanzibar land it's been attacking neighbouring countries stealing nuclear weapons Roy Campbell sand snake in his and Zabar land to save some guy in a bunch of shit happens turns out that Big Boss was pulling the strings behind Zan's Lanta and gray fox continue to work for him snake fights gray fox and gray fox mostly dies then snake meets Big Boss again Big Boss explains that his goal is to perpetuate war day of soldiers like the two of them were placed in a purpose because a soldier's mind could never leave the battlefield until they're killed Big Boss is a war criminal who tried twice to create an all-powerful nation of soldiers because he believed in this idea more than anything Metal Gear Solid 3 takes place before the first two Metal Gear games and big bosses two protagonists it's also like the best fucking game ever but that's not important and this game big boss is a regular soldier and a good person but a whole bunch of extenuating circumstances led to a situation where he has to kill his mentor before he does though she explains her dream of a united world to have a division between nations and ideologies made this tragic situation not avoidable this changes Big Boss permanently and leads him to do the horrible things he did in the first two Metal Gear games not because he's a villain by blood but because he wanted to create a united world as he believed was the best way to do it then he dies he's a person of importance and outstanding personal qualities who falls to disaster through a combination of a personal failing and circumstances with which he cannot deal with big boss the person has nothing to do with Metal Gear Solid 1 & 2 but his legacy and impact in the world are still felt through the actions of the men who were meant to be his successors Metal Gear Solid 2 & 3 have a thematic connection but the literal events of the two games have almost nothing to do with each other and they're better for it Metal Gear Solid 3 being a prequel with nothing to do with Metal Gear Solid C it was a genius move for two reasons one a lot of people didn't like Metal Gear Solid 2 a lot of people did but it was mixed so now instead of having to continue the story of a game a lot of people don't like begin return to forum with a prequel much more in the spirit of the first Metal Gear Solid which is still pretty universally popular we'll also taking that chance to expand on big boss's character and add some depth to the entire rest of the series and aside from some camera issues with the initial release history looks pretty funny on Metal Gear Solid 3 in many ways it's still the perfect Metal Gear game and it adds depth to the games that had already come out as any good prequel shit if this game weren't handled as well it could be the title people that makes a bunch of connections that didn't need to be made and while there is a little bit of that it's mostly pretty reserved the other reason making a prequel was so brilliant it's what I explained before metal your cell to didn't need a follow-up it's its own perfect conclusion it introduced a lot of mysteries but they're meant to go and answer to serve that game's goals we take a step back and re-examine a story we're less familiar with so Metal Gear Solid 3 comes out we did it three of the best games ever made all in the same series but now we got a problem we got to make a Metal Gear Solid 4 and we're going in with the intents of following of Metal Gear Solid 2 directly and we know we're going to turn the Patriots into a target that we're going to have to take down by the end of the game a flawed premise on its own yes but not impossible to work with however the most recent Miller you sold is Metal Gear Solid 3 a prequel and people really liked that one that one revolved around Big Boss so we're trying to do in Metal Gear Solid 4 what we did in Metal Gear Solid 2 only instead of being a point about house owned snake became a huge icon and not letting he plays him we have a couple of throwaway lines about how big boss is a similar sort of icon in this world this has developed more in later games peace walker and five but here and right now it's just the seed of an idea and some more lazy pod shouts at people who play video games can get too into their war games I'm not against that on principle it worked really well in Metal Gear Solid 2 but this game really doesn't take the time to make it work again as a sequel to Metal Gear Solid 3 we're just kind of dragging a big boss and his team to try to give them a place in the story set 50 years after their story as a sequel to Metal Gear Solid 2 we have to answer the mystery presented in that game surrounding the Patriots we have to give them a face but it can't be a new set of faces because that's not a reveal so it had to be a set of faces we already know but nobody in the West played the first two Metal Gear games so it has to be characters from Metal Gear Solid 3 and the only American characters in that game are the team of operations Snake Eater so BAM problem solved the Patriots are these guys these fucking guys no seriously suddenly the Patriots are all about their warped understanding of the boss as well spoiler alert when Solid Snake takes down the Patriots he's inadvertently fulfilling the boss's dream of a united world can you imagine how powerful that would have been if nothing from Snake Eater was mentioned in this game if the genetically inferior clone of big buzz and his comrades managed to take down the Patriots and unite the world without ever knowing who the boss was wouldn't that have been wonderful to have the next generation save the world yes by being good people and having better ideas from the one that came before and to have us the players put those pieces together and understand what happened ourselves now they have it all shoved in our faces with hours of dialogue explaining how many times we were tricked as we played a role in this nine dimensional chess game between characters who I really liked a couple of years ago but I'll never be able to look at the same way again because they were sacrificed for the checklist of goals that a fourth Metal Gear Solid game had to achieve but that's just not the case so paramedic made the clones of big boss the DARPA chief is Sagan zero is the man behind the Patriots if you had said that before Metal Gear Solid 4 K now the dumbest people on the internet would have laughed in your fucking face and suddenly this story revolves around Big Boss and it didn't need to this game shouldn't have been about Big Boss but it is now and we got to move on so after we officially jump the shark we get on a blank with Eva and have a non-real shooting sigmund yeah it's a pretty force to call back to Metal Gear Solid 3 but after the one that just happened you're probably pretty numb to it it's nice looking at least we're taking advantage of our beautiful level to have some really nice looking set pieces we're getting a nice look at whatever city in Eastern Europe this is it's also only 10 minutes which would feel long in most games but it's mercifully short for Metal Gear Solid 4 we blow up crash the black crashed the van sorry mom man I can be reading one piece right now it's done the 1v1 Raging Raven we get another reminder that we have this syringe and then Raven busts through he's so angry and it's a fight the structure of this flight is largely the same as the one with laughing octopus and that's not really gonna change for the other B&BS it's just a matter of hitting her before she can hit you either by staying out of her field of view or just out skilling her one on one this time though instead of being said in a small lab the fight is vertically oriented with you running up and down a clock tower and her on the outside trying to spawn you shooting rockets dropping bombs and setting her drones after you you're most likely gonna find this one with either a rifle or a rocket launcher that's about all there is to it it's actually very similar in structure to the Vulcan Raven flavored metal you saw one but it's kind of hard to tell because of the camera angle staged loud the weapons are using no take it on old classic it's good it's fine the extra stuff is all the same beam B nonsense same white room same reward for a non-lethal kill same stupid Drebin speech we don't have from that little sideshow and get back to the main plot turns out we were tricked and the real body is not with us and is safe all right we did at gamers liquid successfully evaded things are finally looking up liquid shit guess not we were sold out Naomi why I felt this little back and forth snake is always the best part of every conversation in this game except when he's talking to liquid B his liquid is just delightful he's all Abbas a lots weird wacky Russian cowboy mastermind charm but with all of liquids obsessions and a centricity he's just fun that's fucking awesome he always was then this happens this is so stupid it's awesome steak says that even with big boss's body liquid will only be able to control the part of the end that runs military operations but it rinse out the liquid already has control over GW you know the AI that Emma managed to completely scramble and liquid drove into Manhattan he just has it now he fixed it now it's inside JD the quarry I liquids already fucking running the show he's gonna take control of the whole system and throughout her heaven again this time for real then he punches snake I'm just gone man liquid is out of his fucking mind and so am I looks like Big Momma's also having brain problems and drops the Apple fuck that Apple the cops converge on liquid and it looks like he's up against the wall let it happens [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] look I don't know how this sequence was supposed to play I don't know what I'm supposed to be shot goodbye liquids actions I don't know this is supposed to upset me or if I'm really supposed to care about the part where Meryl and Johnny fall off the boat together I know I'm supposed to cry when Big Momma dives into the fire after big boss's body because brain problems I guess I don't know if I'm supposed to be mad that I think Big Boss is finally dead like I already did before this game like he was supposed to be but he's actually not in almost every scene in every Metal Gear game it can be incredibly difficult to discern exactly what the office intent was I almost never know what emotion I'm supposed to be taking away from a scene when I'm playing Metal Gear but you know when I took away here you know what everyone took away here hope the hope that maybe just maybe lik was finally gonna inject some fuckin life into this dog-and-pony show the game up until now has been at best drab an average but effective but two hours ago swerved right in the stupid town and hit the fucking orphanage the stupid town orphanage but now liquids here and he's gonna like this motherfucker up so that happens and and Jonathan of Rat Patrol had this little back and forth like this is the end of an action movie about them about whoever these men were they don't die here but it sure seems like they're supposed to Merrill's unconscious so Johnny takes off his mask finally hoops he's super hot there's a weirdly long kind of sexual CPR sequence she's fine then they kiss and it's horrible the shit between Johnny and Meryl mexicana nailed his little fling with like fuckin Casablanca eva is the snake's arms still speaking in riddles that are entirely worthless and 90% meaningless basically all she's saying is that in the process of fixing the world snake is gonna die then she dies then Drebin and his fucking monkey show up to drag us back home I'm done that was act 3 get us the fuck out of here [Music] sunny speaking some good old Japanese [Music] clearly Naomi has had a very positive impact on sunny which is nice at the end of the last act snake how old for Otacon and nanak on swiftly piloted the mark two on two liquids boat together in self we get some demeaning camerawork biotic on but essentially what we learn here is that having big boss's body and GW planted inside JD gave liquid access to standard weaponry but non nuclear weapons in order to gain control of the system that controls nuclear weapons liquid as to the destroyed JD and the only way you can do that is with a nuclear weapon catch-22 so his workaround is to find nukes that aren't on under the systems control so he's going after Metal Gear Rex also it turns out but JD is a disguised satellite but that doesn't really matter because all this is just an incredibly transparent and roundabout way of getting everyone on shadow moses i like it then we get stepped on ICU kojima mark ii is dead so time to make a new friends here all the country explains the system in today eyes for a as though everything JD is the king GW was the one we crashed in the new york and the other two are yes they've mom and qaeda the explanation of how liquid used to repair GW is covered to gain access to JD is pretty sketchy but it makes enough sense from a sci-fi perspective KW is being housed on liquids secret private island somewhere in nailing is tracking them guns are falling silent across the earth it's the first total cease-fire in human history she looks so sad - there's no more war at this point out of god has basically accepted that liquid one and starts crying it's not about winning or losing I know we started this and it's our duty to finish it that's not really an argument but it works for me snake wants to drag riding out on the front lines and everyone says no the writing says let me fight a proxy life a slave to someone else's will I'm a shadow one that no light will shine on as long as you follow me you'll never see the day you're the unmeet I'm the real me you wanna be me kiddo I was the real me when you were still in my short pants hate to break it to you but I wore them first me bequeathed the the psychopathological hand you down so you're the one who stained them whoever found it well that you'd like me to be you wouldn't me but it's too late you snows you lows you sleep you whips you nappa you get slap or you slumber a cucumber this whole sequence is just staking right and riff and gurgle and uh metaphors that other people have fed them about their role in the world trying to cheer the other person up and convinced them that they're more than that it's 50% shock to Sherry blow down 50% that one seated nichijou where you go and me are having a fight that turns into a compliment battle silly as this is I really do like the relationship between snake and ridin not just because I like both of these characters so much riding is in a lot of ways the only person who can really understand snake gray fox probably good but snake had to kill him Merrill is a felon soldier who was there on shadow moses but played a very different role same with Otacon scribe being a soldier but they've spent more time together writing however has gone through a very similar experience as compared to snake in fact before the other layers ran on on top to the nine hundred dimensional go game that was mentally or sell it to riding was stated to specifically be a successor to Solid Snake in the same thing that the first three snakes were meant to be successful - big boss riding is not a genetic successor but a memetic successor is that a word and attempt to create the perfect soldier not by manipulating DNA but by manipulating information and circumstance as successors to legends a lot it's expected of both of them and as tools of war there regularly manipulated usually by the Patriots who they're both trying to break free from snake being the genetic clone of the world's greatest mercenary and war criminal could have easily fallen into becoming a brain-dead to all the government or basically total insanity like liquid did but using what he learned from the first for Metal Gear games he decided not to let his genes to find him and fight for a better future for everyone else even if he can't really enjoy it for himself so in that sense he's a straight improvement on the man he's succeeding riding on the other hand has a dark past that could have similarly turned him into a tool the Patriots they tried they literally turned him into a weapon and took everything from him and that could have completely undone him like it did gray fox but he's still fighting both for everyone else's future and because unlike snake he stills a shot at living a life free from the Patriots control despite having nothing they're always both focused on the mission because they know what they believe in and they won't stop pursuing it no matter what that's why the two of my favorite characters both very different approaches to exploring a theme of what defines you and both are realizing that everything affects you and makes you who you are but only you can decide what you want to be I have a lot of issues with the use of ridings character in this game and I'm still delaying talking about them until the end but just know that even if I don't like his role in this story and I don't like that he was brought back for this game at all and I really hate how this story ends his character is not inconsistent in this game everything he does is completely in line with how right and should act and what he should believe in toad a tip this is a rydym the rest of the briefing doesn't really matter but mei-ling shows up cool hi she's also certainly acting like mei-ling here's submits to heaven shall live you defies heaven shall perish [Music] I've fallen asleep on my dreamcatcher again judging by the amount of dream goo it was some powerful stuff [Music] just quick note here good amount of the footage here until the end of the crying wolf late is from a long play by Ricky see from long plays done net it has a sob for a more explosive approach i ashamed fully lost the original footage so sorry for no subtitles and lower quality and Thank You Ricky see act 4 is the one where we just say fuck it and really let loose with the Metal Gear Solid 1 nostalgia pandering we're back on Shadow Moses Island we're giving a face camera lets us plays and just one snake upon entering the heliport the game starts to play the best is yet to come from the end of Metal Gear Solid 1 once you walk past certain areas the game starts playing a lot of audio flashbacks two lines for Metal Gear Solid 1 out of everything in the entire game a game that has been desperately trying to make you remember older Metal Gear games the opening back tour is the most blatant on-the-nose embarrassing heavy-handed shameful attempt at capitalizing on nostalgia and it's fucking awesome the first half of act 4 is one of the only places in the entire game or I can confidently say that the game hits the notes at once still with respect to nostalgia and the theme of decay steak waking up and suddenly becoming older and more detailed as beautiful that's it that's the whole game his back immediately gives in upon touching the islands there's some enemies before the heliport not humans but gecko and they're concealed by the blizzard so once you get there you can really take your time walking around and appreciating how different it looks especially since you just played this sequence catch all the flashbacks and take in the atmosphere the archipelago is slipping into the ocean because of climate change but I don't know how that would affect the weather here I imagine that even nine years ago would probably snowed a lot on shadow moses but even so the blizzard is a nice display of how console tech has improved and it really feels like this whole area is consumed by time like fucking uh Ozymandias so the music fuck me this flu what doth life are we just flesh you blips and some meaningless stew of cosmic oblivion or is it vice reverse' that's my last Xavier Paul it's one of the most memorable uses of score in the entire game which is kind of a shame because music could have really been the missing piece that made a lot of these scenes work nothing really brings back a feeling like a melody from a long time ago Billy Joel wrote a song about this you can listen to a song from a game or movie years after you first experienced it and sometimes that feeling will hit even harder than it did the first time believe me this game doesn't slouch on music the Sohus T is incredible Harry gregson-williams crushes it every time old snake is beautiful loves him by Nobuko toda is haunting and they got any oh fucking Morricone t to a song over the credits and the sound design and placement for a lot of the classic none of your songs is pretty on point that said it's a little it's all mmm that can't say goodbye to yesterday and a way to fall don't appear anywhere there's obvious reasons having either of those songs play anywhere besides the credits of the game they were made for might detract from them a little bit they have one purpose and they serve it well too maybe the point is that those songs kind of belong to riding and Big Boss and this is snakes game but if that's the case it just goes back to what I keep saying which is that riding in big boss didn't need to be in this game their stories were told and to bring them back and to say no this is the real ending for them it's where that they would just suddenly show this reservation bringing back those two songs although possibly maybe there was a licensing issue so I guess my issue was still just that riding in big Buster in the game and I should give it a rest the real issue is that the original metal of yourself theme is missing and I know why that happened I know it wasn't the choice but I'm just saying it becomes a big problem later on because it really hits you hard when it was played in Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 and to not have it play at the end of this game such a it's just a sad thing so we're gonna go through most of Shadow Moses pretty quickly for going from the heliport to Rex which is really the whole way we went in Metal Gear Solid 1 it's just that there isn't much stopping us this time there's no detours there's no backtracking so suddenly Shadow Moses feels a lot smaller and emptier than it did 10 years ago I guess 20 years ago now there's a lot of Easter eggs there's tons of references and callbacks and some of them land better than others but it's just cool there are no human enemies in this part it's all gecko and dwarf gecko although I guess door fyodor being called scarabs in this game which helps keep the feeling that this place has been abandoned while keeping this you know a real level in theory there could have been people here like we could have sent a human beings out to patrol to make sure nobody sneaks in but he didn't because I wouldn't work as well it's a fun little walk down memory lane and even though Metal Gear Solid 4 is as old as Metal Gear Solid 1 was when this game came out the sequences aged surprisingly well Metal Gear Solid 4 on the whole is held up visually better than most ps3 games in spite of a lot of the bland their choices for colors and scenery this still feels like a modern look at a retro game same as it did when this game came out I'm sure if you made Shadow Moses in the Fox and Jenna whatever would make this feel a lot simpler and more shallow but this works they made a nostalgic flashback to a 10 year old game still feel nostalgic 10 years later and that's a hell of an accomplishment we're also being constantly reminded of snakes deteriorating health here more than ever there's a segment where you punch in a password that you can get past if you forgot the password you could even put in a bunch of other passwords for a bunch of unlockable goodies but if you put in anything besides the password you're supposed to all the cod makes you feel like an old man and that's really sad yeah further in the shuttle anyone we have to acknowledge the area we're sneaking Hal first man which gets us talking about gray fox which of course leads into talking about how Naomi stabbed us in the back after you know nailing Otacon this is where we start to really question what Naomi's up to she stole snakes blood during a physical in South America she stole snakes blood which was used to test on SOP but it's really unclear what she was doing after that oh it turns out naomi is here you can get an audio flashback in this room regarding gray fox when we try to leave a gecko shows up so we're in trouble you can easily deal with it by controlling the mark 3 to zap the panel that snake blew up with a nikodem missile and mvs one to turn the floor off which turns it back on and fries the get-go it's very cute and relatively subtle I appreciate this one after a short sequence where we have to protect the mark 3 from another gecko that shows up we make our way outside into a beautiful snow field and oh boy it's time for this chapters B&B member it's crying wolf I'll be honest I kind of had crying wolf fucking blows besides mantas out of any B&B member she definitely draws the most from the Fox hound member she's based on which in this case is sniper wolf it helps that were on Shadow Moses in the snow which makes this this games version of the sniper the wolf however instead of having a sniper rifle she has a big fuck-off rail gun like the one on rex but it's actually the same model that's the one that fortune used you remember fortune right there's also an element of hunting and tracking this find as wolf can smell you from downwind and even chase you down as well as being able to pick you up from a distance with a rail gun the hunting theme is obviously meant to match the wolf theme but it also has parallels to the fight with the end which is mgs3 sniper duel however whereas sniper wolf is simple but effective and a strong argument can be made that the end is the greatest boss fight in video game history the crying wolf fight is little more than the forgettable clusterfuck in fact since a weapon is not a sniper rifle and this fight has a pretty different format it feel unfair to compare this fight to either of those but then again this fight tries really hard to make you remember Sniper Wolf so you get what you pay for apart from you know her big dumb robot suit she also summons a bunch of frogs that are also looking for you this summoning mob nonsense is and every B&B member fight in some capacity at least offensively and laughing I like to post because you fight them before her fight but here Jah does it detract making a boss fight more difficult by shoving in a bunch of enemies that you have to manage at the same time as almost always a cop-out that I really dislike but here especially it's a pretty brazen rejection of what makes the original two sniper duels so memorable in a word that is intimacy the sniper duel at its core is exciting because it's two people wielding an incredibly precise incredibly deadly extremely skill heavy weapon and trying to eliminate the other person in a one-on-one that's what makes it a duel I know it's a single-player game and it's actually massively tilted in the players favor no matter what I know it's designed for you to win I'm not a dummy I know how video games work and he's talking about the presentation the game makes you feel like this is a real mano-a-mano test of skill the sniper wolf fight is thrilling in its simplicity every time you're capable of doing damage you are also completely exposed when you're looking through the scope you're looking for a person who is also looking at you and you know that if you don't work quickly that person is gonna be aiming right at your head and pulling the trigger you need to take medicine to stop snakes hands from shaking the fight with the end on the other hand is much more a test of patience self and endurance which is why it suits Metal Gear so well and especially Metal Gear Solid 3 it can take you an hour is slowly tracking down a master of sniping camouflage through and through its hunt or be hunted and all of them besides the first sniper won't fight which you have to snipe your way through you can opt to use your other options because snake is a jack-of-all-trades and you can use this massive set of skills and tools to outwit someone who were told is hands-down the best at what they do and in fact given at the end is a legend but also a sleepy old man there are a number of much cheekier ways of getting around fighting him properly crying wolf is just a fucking person and a wolf costume a way of tracking you as a wolf thing it's completely different from how you track her which is your eyepatch you can also hide in a number of places where you can spot her but there's basically no way for her to get to you like under the truck or in the tower so just a matter of waiting for her to be done running around and screaming and then she pops out of the top and droves to take a shot at you but I found she never really hit me when this happened since this isn't my footage you'll just have to take my on that but it's true just take out the frogs wait for her to pop up and then put one in her head it's dull it's tedious it's bloated with extra stuff and I'm not a fan what is this next generation of soldiers so much lamer than the older one with all this robot nonsense shouldn't this person be way more difficult to fight than the end I know the end has vocal cord parasites but he's just a guy with a gun I feel no tension in this flight whatsoever it's just bad anyway after the standard B&B sequence we see a wolf carrier off it really wants to be Sniper Wolf again and yes I am emotionally susceptible to a wolf howling but I just don't know who this character is Trevon explaining her backstory in the matter how fucked up it is it's never gonna connect the way Sniper Wolf talking to snake in house she's dying does snake just walks away like huh that was weird I like there's some pups hanging around though there's an audio flashback calling back to house emotional crisis when sniper wolf thighs I suppose of any flame were to try to imitate the emotion of an older boss fight it's whatever one happens on Shadow Moses I'm just saying it doesn't really land for me the audio flashback actually hits me harder just because I the concepts so upset by the way we got the railgun nice we bop our way down past the blast furnace past the cameras past the big geckos past a little geckos and we'd finally make it Metal Gear Rex with a Big Apple it turns out liquid actually doesn't need all of Metal Gear Rex to fire is no key just it's the railgun attached oh it turns out he already got it so I guess we lost again probably should have we stupid please understand the entire rest of this act will be about sneaking right and trying to escape shadow moses without being killed sneaking Otacon it basically accomplished nothing in this entire game they've taken down some people and some PMC's they saved Naomi but she just went back on every level every attempt to hinder liquid thus far has gone apocalyptically wrong I guess this is just kind of how snake does things just keep getting tricked and I was killed by your brother until you finally have all the information and then just totally kick his ass blood it's vamp oh I don't really understand why naomi is suddenly all about vamps D it doesn't really make any sense but we'll talk about that in the minute because it's time for another boss fight it's time to fight vamp and this time it's for real this fight is kind of similar to the original vamp fighting when we do some loads here but it reminds me more of the fight with the fear from Metal Gear Solid 3 it's just him hopping around while you try to keep track of him and him not doing that much damage to you even if he does hit you which doesn't happen that often because he's pretty slow and dramatic with everything he does he doesn't have a gun or anything he's all melee so he just runs and jumps at you does some flip kicks and you fill them up with bullets for a while it's a pretty nothing fight but I won't say unloading an m10 into vamp isn't cathartic once this help is all the way down an icon will say yeah you did it here if you don't know how to beat him he'll regenerate all of his health because immortality nanomachines remember so the next time you get him down you're meant to grab him and hit him with the syringe because it'll decrease nanomachine control this is where the syringe gets its payoff by the way the only places it's gonna be used for the rest of the game is to give Steve a little boost what I call them Steve I am Steve for Metal Gear Solid hey it's me Solid Steve the goal of this fight is not to kill vamp it's just to make him mortal now you're a mere mortal like the rest of us but can you give this beer water I like this line because vamp is acting pretty smug for a guy who just took 400 bullets to the chest and is now vulnerable to die to one worth mentioning if you do this on basically anyone else in the game the same thing that happens at the end of Act one where they recall everything at once and start freaking out will happen so that's pretty fucked after the band played a bunch of gecko show up snake sorry to have kept you all waiting [Music] so this is the part where three things are happening at once Otacon is trying to get Metal Gear Rex operational using the mark 3 meanwhile we're controlling snake firing the railgun at a bunch of approaching gecko in a bit of a power trip there's suicide gecko meaning that they'll blow themselves up if they get too close and basically kill you instantly meanwhile the screen is split down the middle displaying Ryden clashing blades with vamp this is really the only time anything like this happens in the game aside from one other place where it works a lot better and has a much clearer reason and I have a pretty hard time thinking of a good reason why this was done here consider that writing in vampire fighting on top of a metal here this is a spawn reserved for final boss fights in ultimate clash of ideology for all intents and purposes this is write-ins final boss but why I would imagine that the intent here is to make this feel like a boss fight if a fight with vamp and ridin were to sure to be pretty anticlimactic after snake just fought him but it's also probably a bit too lengthy to put in the cutscene so by making you do this gecko sequence you feel like you're playing the game will riding flights it's an idea at least but it's really hard to catch any of the fight between vamp and riding when you're focusing on beating snake segments I also don't know why the game felt the need to give riding a fine like this yeah it's fun to see a cyborg ride and do cool shit however for this one if you had approached the story of this game with the player meant to believe that vamp had died in Metal Gear Solid 2 I don't think anyone would have questioned that I'm not saying that bringing him back was necessarily a bad idea but he does so little over the course of the game that this is the only bid with vamp that I would say is memorable at all to be a sort of puzzle fight with snake and then a more dramatic boss fight for a character that I'm not controlling so yeah he's here to give riding something to do because if we're gonna give riding a big fight it should be with someone relevant to riding but did anyone really had this perception of vamp at riding as ultimate rivals their fighting were a snake in liquid front but do they have that kind of relationship that kind of chemistry although I guess this game is also overinflating just how intense the rivalry between snake and liquids John Suarez - but really even seem to have any kind of ideals to speak of serving solidus and then liquid since liquids motivation is at this point understood to be completely different from solid asses it just seems like he doesn't really want anything he just does what the villain tells him - it will turn out that liquid enceladus have similar goals later on but as I understand the vamp doesn't know that if you wanted to make something out of this you could say that a vamp as a man totally consumed by nanomachines and a mortal man who welcomes death and has practically no free will of his own and has given in to that is the physical and ideological opposite of riding whose body is a broken machine but who desperately clings to life and is fighting for freedom from the Patriots and that's good enough for you it's yours my friend as I see it though it's just a pointlessly dramatic framing of ridin doing something that ridings been doing this whole game which is backing up snake I don't feel any serious beef between riding and vamp Otacon hates him though so maybe it's just a favor for him when the fight is over riding wins and vamps dramatically falls off the top of Rex [Music] that's awesome he was never his natural healing abilities were enhanced by the nanomachines inside his body but after Sony about he's fine no it was it was because I got him with the syringe and then right and hit him with a sword are you paying attention Naomi walks in and cries because ridin says that Sonny said I cooked them right this is meant to be the emotional slam dunk of the Naomi Sonny connection which will hold on a second because this entire scene is a trash fire but no going in that this could both refer to Sonny have incorrectly cooked the eggs and having finished the flux alive virus Naomi gives vamp another syringe and holds him in her arms as he dies then she cries Naomi's relationship with the vamp is very tenuous the only connection there seems to be that they're both being kept alive by nano machines of her design so she empathizes with him in a sort of I'm sorry I made you into a monster way naomi explains the liquid is running the patriot system and outer heaven from a boat called outer Haven get it he plans to launch a nuke from there she reiterates that snake has to die when this mission ends she says some nonsense about how we're only given life to atone for our sins Naomi plugs us up with syringe and reveals that nano machines were keeping her alive because she has cancer the nano machines have kept it from progressing but there's nothing more they can do is that because you turned them off Naomi dies here are not akan cries here because they had sex in an airplane she keeps talking to a robot as she's dying [Music] [Music] I think this is probably the worst acting in this game mocap and voice acting but with respect to Jennifer Hale there's probably no vocal performance in the world that could really sell this so this scene is a fucking disaster and the game is about to get really awesome so before it does I've heard a lot of people say that Naomi is their least favorite part of Metal Gear Solid 4 and I think a lot of that is due this totally botched totally ridiculous death scene before I talk about me I mean specifically though I'd like to talk about the way female characters are written in Metal Gear two hours in I hit you with the video game feminism gotcha bitch consider if you would that every single numbered Metal Gear game has at least one female character with a romantic or familial relationship to the main character and/or Otacon get hurt and/or die in the second half for an emotional gut punch this too isn't inherently good or bad it's a trope it's a cliche but how well it works all depends on how well that character is developed and if the impact that has on characters it affects feels earned yeah Meryl is your sidekick and in love with you and then gets shot and cries and possibly dies depending on if you're a loser but the game spends a good long time building up to this having steak and Merrill's relationship developed naturally through working together and sharing their perspectives with each other Sniper Wolf is also somewhat effective because you have to kill her to spy not icon begging you not to it's a pretty one-sided relationship between them but you get to empathize with her as she's dying melodic on laments that this had to happen not because Sniper Wolf or snake are plainly bad people but because of the nature of war the writing of female characters is unquestionably the best in Metal Gear Solid 3 when Eva whose entire goal both in her mission and eventually personally is to get the better of snake emotionally but which it gets hurt and she expects him to get all teary about it he's still just focused on the mission and then when he's sure his job is done then he lets his guard down and she gets the better of him the real emotional gut punches in the death of the boss his relationship to snake is that of a superior of a mentor snake is focused on the mission but the boss is the one who made him into the man that he is capable of focusing on and handling the mission as though it is more important than anything else and because of how strong their connection is as a mentor and student he's able to follow that mission all the way to the end which means he has to be the one to pull the trigger and kill her and he's able to do it he's able to kill someone who matters to him more than anything because of the strength of their relation ship and he doesn't understand what her motivation was the letter to portray the us and put snake in that position where he had to do that until after he's already killed or any learns that it was for him in their country and that she had to sacrifice not only her life but her legacy and identity to carry her mission out to the end and then he tries it's fucking great so now he has sex with Kojima's self-insured for no reason and then betrays him for no reason and then kills herself for no reason am I wrong could someone please explain to me a reason for any of Naomi's actions in this game she got aboard the Nomad with the intention to mean Otacon and planned the seed that would become phlox alive the program that would neuter to the a is I understand why she has a relationship with sunny because she switched focus to her to have her develop Fox alive after the program is used she leaves us a video message that explains that that's what took place with a bunch of annoying metaphors scattered and because fuck this character her goal was only to shut down the Patriots AI and according to the video would seem like she planned to die from the beginning she apologizes for lying to snake in Otacon but she doesn't explain why she lied just that she did and things worked out no matter how poorly written it is I can believe that Naomi and I Lacan felt some chemistry and decided to have sex on an airplane that's fine whatever but if the relationship between them was this strong they needed to have a better explanation for why she betrays them after meeting with sunny and then dies by her own hands than not having an explanation at all and the opening of act five they explained that she gave them a bunch of information that helps them infiltrate outer Haven and that she's been working to prevent the launch but when does that happen how does she get the information to them the only time she's in a position to be informing the team on the Nomad is before act three as far as I can tell her whole plan is accomplished before I have three even starts after she betrays snake she seems pretty chummy with vamp and liquid what purpose does this betrayal have that should not have the information she needed about outer Haven the first time it's only launched after she dies if she needed to go back to get more information somehow how did she get that data to us did she just email it they flat-out say that she left her plan in Sony's hands which could only have plausibly happened before her betrayal you could say that her betrayal at the end of Act three is part of liquids planned because her rescue of the end of Act two is part of liquid slammed the beginning but liquids plan from the beginning was to be assisting snake so for all on the same side why are we moving around like this and they dying for no reason it seems like the real reason for her behavior is that if Naomi had stuck around and been upfront and honest sneaking Otacon would have had too much information for the purpose of their goals naomi has a whole plan and only doesn't explain it so that she can reveal it with this dumb ass video bullshit after it's all over this is a problem with the whole game where characters seem to be regularly lying and withholding information for no other reason than maintaining the flow of the story but Naomi just the worst about it they totally write her out of being with sneaking Otacon twice the position where she has the greatest ability to pursue her goal of taking down the AI I'm not usually too concerned with plot holes and missing information like this but I am but it's at the expense of my understanding and appreciation of a main character whoa this is awesome I'm busting out as Shadow Moses on Metal Gear Rex plowed through hallways filled with Gekko I got all kinds of weapons and I can play my ipod as loud as I want and mom can't even stop me [Music] is this really the same game that totally crapped its pants five minutes ago this guy who feels like emotional whiplash not that I'm complaining I appreciate that Kojima thought to get me out of there as hard and fast as he could there's really not much depth to the segment but beyond is it fun this is what people have been dreaming about since Metal Gear Solid 1 this is the kind of dumbass fanservice I can get behind we bust our way out and pride in backing us up it seems like we're home free as soon as we hit the dock but then riding this crushed under falling rubble and if that weren't bad enough [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] some part of me believes that this fight is the only reason why people like Metal Gear Solid 4 this is fucking rad and I'm gonna lose my marbles but genetically inferior clone of Big Boss fighting the genetically superior clone of Bigg Boss again when they fought the first time 10 years later but this time he's in metal gear from ten years ago and the other clone is in a metal gear specifically designed to eliminate the first Metal Gear and snake wins again I know I don't need to explain what's happening here it's just of this scene just the concept is so awesome I feel like I need to say what's happening to make sure you understand no don't worry I know this is the ship this also isn't particularly difficult or complex but it has enough going on and they staged well enough to really do the premise of the fight justice there are a lot of games especially from the ps1 and ps2 eras that offers short segments where you're able to control something huge it seems like it would be amazing if you had described it to you when you were 9 but in practice often don't control very well or just the camera angle or backgrounds just don't do the scale of the action justice we're just don't offer enough for you to do to make it feel fun to play as a dinosaur or a giant robot or a monster but this section just nails it being set outside on Shadow Moses an area we've spent a lot of time as normal-sized people a small snake as small lead snake by the ocean but surrounded by buildings makes these mechs feel huge it's a join there's enough strategy and dodging spacing and how you use your weapons to make the ceiling a real boss fight - there's also some great finisher moves and you know how to trigger them it's the best it's just everyone's favorite part of this game so after we are reminded what it's like to be alive and to feel joy ray breaks down but Rex can keep itself standing either liquid falls to the ground then in April the old Fox jaw hey Tanya ain't again and then sake just falls out of Rex and starts screaming because he's the dumbest man on the planet and like we just laughs at him and makes a break for it snake totally broken and battered hobbles toward liquid he just pulls his forretress out of the ocean and tries to plow it into snake we just kicked his ass how did he turn the tables that badly that fast steak has justly given up and takes a seat welcoming the sweet embrace of death luckily Ryden managed to escape the wreckage by cutting off his own arm and then manages to stop outer Haven with his body how was he strong enough to do that but not strong enough to live that crap off his body whatever this is gold jack-jack do you remember the day we met yeah it was in front of federal hall there were all these tourists around remember this charming conversation it's always been weird to me that riding references to terrible 1998 roland emmerich Godzilla movie anyway ride ins and fucking shreds again then mailing shows up in the goddamn USS Missouri and starts a naval warfare without her Haven now this these are the really good crazy Phil's ridings fuck snake is fucked and that always means the act is over that was act 4 let's blow this thing the briefing for act 5 takes place on the Missouri because mailing scooped us up everyone's here now including Maryland Johnny somehow we finally got a team together we're allegedly meant to be learning the plan for infiltrating outer Haven but can you imagine being in the room when kojima pitches what's going on in this scene why would you the microwaves that'll fry whoever gets close to GWS core are established here as well you'd have to have a death wish to go in there sounds like the perfect job for me snake is the best I love that he's us over this as I am this is sort of where we half-assed try to explain what naomi was doing and Donna Khan gets sad because of the amazing sacrifice she made and an attempt to cheer everyone up and maling pulls out a proverb because we remember mailing I think I'd like it more but I ain't ever gonna forgive what happened here remember what anybody got a smoke Otacon explains in detail how flock saliva was put together basically Naomi wrote the first two-thirds and then left it with Sonny to finish the last third Sonny went through Ali Khan's old crap and found Emma's worm close to her Metal Gear Solid 2 using that she patched up Naomi's coating of the whole thing working somehow what I kind of read of the finished code reminds him of Emma maybe she named the variables after was Emma like birds chopsticks how the country the whole thing so he doesn't actually know what's gonna happen when they put it in and just trusts that Sonny knew what she was doing seems risky but fine Sonny's worm destroys the intellect by triggering apoptosis in the cells remember that word from earlier wit Vienna has cells that doesn't sound right but I don't know enough about apoptosis to dispute it after that we get on a con worrying about snakes health it really is hard watching snake fall apart like this Otacon acts similarly to help Meryl does earlier asking snake if he wants to back off unless someone else did the job obviously the snake doesn't budge I get worrying about snake and wanting to ask one last time but really who else but snake could do this [Music] home stretch all right this party's getting crazy the Missouri is approaching outer Haven so I guess it left and then came back mei-ling commanding her squad is pretty cool this guy just walks in and starts expressing his fears so Malin gets to have this baffling leadership character development moment with some dude [Music] it turns out ridings alive but he's resting Johnny stop grabbing people's asses what's wrong with you through conversation we get a little bit of context regarding how liquids takeover has affected the world without nanomachines a lot of soldiers have suddenly been rendered emotionally incapable of fighting leading to mass desertion once again we're just sort of told what's going on on the outside but it's not immediately relevant the only practical upshot of this is that nobody on this boat knows what they're doing and the only people able to handle this mission are Merrill Johnny and snake and Merrill and Johnny actually totally are I don't know what happened to the other half of Rat Patrol they're just not here I guess the lack of nanomachines really did them in also Drebin is here some hell this is a boat he's responsible for this little operation having any weapons and equipment post liquidus takeover of SOP Drebin has a simile about a soda that doesn't mean anything because he's lying [Music] [Music] enjoy snake gives his cigarette to the monkey and then the monkey gives him the soda and then he gives the so that is some guy who thanks him for it am I having a stroke Campbell uses his Goku telepathy to let us know that outer Haven is based on Arsenal gear the ship is filled with robots and the best soldiers from all the PMC's liquid has fingers in the colonel warns us about what will happen if we don't stab liquid which doesn't matter because it's not true no majora squeeze some botched drama out of the colonel calling Meryl I just want people to stop talking you've said that like five times there's a little fight between the Missouri and outer Haven which is kind of exciting I could come on let's just jump ahead snake is an outer David Merrill hurt her ankle and hockey but fell into the ocean so everyone besides snake is still a colossal fuckup finally we get to play the fucking game during this chapter weapons from Drebin are always super cheap due to the collapse of the war economy which is a nice touch now that we're on outer Haven there's not a ton of regular game play between the start and the sort of final bosses final section but what's here is so good after so many distractions cutscenes and different styles of gameplay since the start of act 3 even the ones that I really enjoy when you finally get to the opening of the final act it's like oh yeah I'm playing Metal Gear Solid I really like Metal Gear Solid 4 basically the first time in the whole game since shadow Moses didn't have any normal PMC guards it's just a collection of different types of enemies including frogs and basic PMC soldiers in a man-made facility and everyone's looking for you it's a clear visible well-defined area with obstacles and where everyone's on the enemy's side they're aggressive and outnumber you but you still hold the advantage and tools and positioning why isn't any of the rest of the game like this not to say I don't like the new sort of like I'm on this team and we're outside fighting a war thing the other acts were going for the outdoor areas are okay snake eater is my favorite and it's mostly outdoor areas but as I said 400 years ago I don't consider the outdoor nature segments of this game as well-designed as those and Snake Eater but here I can see everyone I know when they can see me I know where the hiding places are if I get caught I feel like it's my fault although yeah it is kind of easy I have all of my tools and all the other tools are so cheap that I might as well have access to them too I can try them out on anyone on anything this is my Metal Gear Solid 4 playground fuck act to give me this this is so good what do you mean it's over that was like nothing that was like the most transparent obligatory gameplay section so that we can keep doing the other stuff that's already bloated this game - shit so that was the level part of the last act of the game maybe Kojima ran out of money but anyway it's time for the boss screaming mantises hey remember Psycho Mantis the flight I need to get some sleep okay stake his Elfriede doubt her heaven very quickly he makes his way to the lower deck merrill is mysteriously passed out on the floor snake is ambushed by a bunch of frog so he has to fight his way out as well as protect Merrill what follows is just a pretty standard arena third-person shooter action sequence not much is going on but it's a nice chance to try out your final arsenal of weapons in pure action no stealth sequence because you'll presumably have a lot of guns by this point you'll even have a whole bunch of options if you insist on going non-lethal the frogs will shoot you though for a flash grenades etc same old stuff when that's all over strings pull Merrill up on the ground and make her pointed gun at her head she stops by aki but shooting the gun she's holding saving her life for the second time well we didn't realize when we were so trigger-happy before is that now the arena is filled with bodies for mantis to puppeteer she played us like a damn fiddle then mantis floats in and she literally has Psycho Mantis floating behind her so if you thought that that easter egg act one was just the cute reference no Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid 1 psychic phantom exists somewhere within screaming mantis is psyche it's getting stupid anyway the fight begins and we have three health bars for snake mantis and Merrill now this from a gameplay perspective is the final boss of the game it's not what people think of when they think of the final boss of this game but this is the last chance to really get to use your knowledge of the core gameplay elements to face a challenge so let's run down how this fight plays there is no stealth element to this fight okay good start the fight is similar to the original Psycho Mantis fight in well every way but for one in that it's sort of half puzzle half combat you either need to let your code axiom which here is just rose and Otacon explain how to defeat her or just figure it out on your own if you call Rose the colonel will tell you to try switching the controller ports but Rose says that's not gonna work oh oh wait we're on PlayStation 3 and she also shuts down the idea that you can achieve the same effect by switching the controller numbers in the console menu which you can try but it won't work the fight will have mantas lifting at Merrill to attack you and you have to take her down non-lethal she'll also lift other bodies but you can do whatever you want to them mantas will sometimes take control of snake but you can easily break free from that using the syringe nanomachines on the supernatural are interchangeable now and you should have figured that out well you're under her control we'll pull some of the old fourth wall breaking oh shit did my game reset moves it's cool but since it's a reference to when this happened before it feels kind of played out she doesn't really have any other attacks besides this Devil May Cry ass teleport and then slash at a certain point in the flight you'll get a cinematic where mantas picks up Maryland drives to make her shoot you again take her down non-lethal e eventually she'll do it again but this time she'll try to make Merrill shooter itself seem familiar you don't have to beat her up though you just pop her with a tranq nothing fancy otherwise we'll get a failed state any dry shooting Manda's herself no dice you have to shoot the dude only she's got folding under her arms as marionettes the dolls are Psycho Mantis and the sorrow after they fall you can pick them up and use them as weapons sort of the one you need to complete this fight is Psycho Mantis obviously you don't have to grab the sorrow dome but it's a nice find and it works a little differently the main distillates you puppet living people while the sorrow doll lets you puppet courses and I think he's a real nice guy which is in line with the characters the dolls are based on same old explosive emotions the same old gratuitous shots same old statue but you can always get this one because beating mantis is always non-lethal same old white room same old dancing watch out snake don't let her cling to you keep your distance such agony in those screams you may be tempted to try and save her but don't let sympathy get the better of you remember the other snake she wants to kill you don't let her get too close you're the worst psychologist ever so after the beauty section mantis is down but then again the ghost of Psycho Mantis himself pulls the pieces of the suit back together it tries to read your memory card but it doesn't work oh wait we're on PlayStation 3 he tries to make your controller vibrate but if you don't have a double shock for it doesn't work and then the sorrow vanquishes hem I guess and then same old revin speech within Drebin speech after her backstory and the tail end of it they explained that somehow somehow psycho mantises barrier was contained within the nanomachines inside her body consuming her persona also it turns out that mantis has on some level been controlling all of the B and B's I suppose that kind of explains why they're all obsessed with snake sort of but what psycho made just really have this vendetta against snake he seems pretty happy to help snake before he died however they were summoned his spirit with nanomachines am i expected to believe that as soon as he came alive again he threw away what he had learned from that fight and hopped right back into boss fight mode doesn't that undo what little but meaningful development there was it's like the opposite of the wolf fight instead of shooting for the payoff without any build-up they just imitate the build-up and completely ignore the payoff also I want to restate that immediately after this the game has entered the ending sequence this is the last chance we get to really play the game I get wanting to bring back psycho mantis psycho mantis is one of the most famous and memorable moments in Metal Gear Solid 1 but he's also just a member of Foxhound and unlike liquid and especially unlike aswad no other game after his fight in Metal Gear Solid 1 spent any time developing his character unless you want to count the one that comes after this that he's in that he doesn't speak in his importance here is similar to why Big Boss came back not because he's naturally relevant to this story but because of his place in the legacy and memories of the Metal Gear Solid series and fans it's forced importance to pander to the fanbase it's a mean fight and that's how we're ending the game with a meme fight loosely tying all of the bosses together you can't even say that the B and BS are based on Fox sound because mantis was in Foxhound because their identities and code names have nothing to do with Fox sound they all tie into their terrible backstories everyone remembers Psycho Mantis but nobody ever talks about screaming mantis this could have been a chance to have a really great really memorable original boss fight but they just went for the reference again and if you were gonna do that shouldn't that fight have been on shadow moses i know this whole game is a goofy fourth wall breaking self reference game but if you were gonna do an entirely goofy fourth wall breaking self reference fight shouldn't it have the entirely goofy fourth wall breaking self-reference chapter was the sniper wolf reference really so important I have there was really nothing to it you could have moved every B&B member and act earlier and just cut out the flavor with the frogs you didn't need this dramatic teaser an act one because the payoff for the BnB unit is so underwhelming this is the payoff Psycho Mantis is the payoff in fact yeah let me just go off on the b-and-b unit cuz they're done there's no more after this [Music] I'm about to present a hypothetical scenario I'm not saying this is what happened during development I don't know what happened during development I don't know who specifically is responsible for anything in this game and what I'm about to say is gonna make it sound like I think Kojima is an idiot I don't think that it's just that because of how poorly these characters were implemented I'm feeling how I would feel if Kojima were an idiot let's say you do Kojima you have to make a fourth Metal Gear Solid game because a bunch of shitheads send you death threats when you tried to let your co-writer show you moron at direct in your place you want to put some great new bosses in the game because every Metal Gear game has a cast of great memorable bosses usually I'll a member of a team and with some kind of cute gimmick that ties them together like an emotion or animals a codename however for some reason maybe because you're on a new medication maybe because your other co-writer left or maybe because you just didn't want to work on this game in the first place you're struggling with writing new memorable likable and empathetic characters however you got this great idea for a theme involving mental illness and post-traumatic stress disorder you have some knowledge of how war which this game is about can damage a person's mind but you don't really have that deep of an understanding about it you do however watch a lot of movies and pick up on the fact that in a movie a character who's mentally ill can be violent and act in ways that are creepy and upsetting and irrational so instead of having to write people people that the player can connect with you just have a bunch of people who are mentally unstable screaming and crying and trying to kill you and that's a pretty easy kick in the head another great way to get a cheap emotional response out of a Metal Gear friend is to throw in a Metal Gear reference so we'll give all of them gimmicks that match Foxhound and throw in a bunch of Metal Gear Solid 1 so that you clap when they happen hmm this is sounding pretty good but mental illness and Fox sound aren't really selling it how do I make this even more weird and upsetting but still without adding any characterization oh just make us so they're beautiful mostly naked women based on real-life models juxtaposed their beauty against everything else that's horrible about them including an uncanny valley effect to make you really uncomfortable make it so they slowly walk towards you completely defenseless and you have to kill them while they just scream and cry it doesn't have to have a point it just has to make you feel something then to tie it all together instead of getting to know these people by speaking to them just have some guy who inexplicably knows literally everything about them to tell you about how they became like this after they're already dead right some cheap edgy sob story about how badly war crushed them how they lost everything how their minds just couldn't take it and they completely snapped in a way that makes them perfectly suited to be people in robot suits trying to kill Solid Snake and then working the animal that they're based on end of the story somewhere like this was the fucking Catwoman movie I don't know if that's what happened but it sure feels like that's what happened the BnB unit is so terrible and so completely emblematic of every weakness that Kojima has as a writer that I almost want to think that that's on purpose but I'm pretty sure it isn't because he basically did all of it again except he made it the main plot of the game this time that's been on my chest for a long time at least what's about to happen can't be dumber than the B and E unit right anyway after the mantis fight a couple of frogs hop in but are somehow easily dispatched with a couple of shots Merrill decides to stay back and keep the frogs from chasing after snake while he heads down the microwave hallway well marrow covered snake and acknowledges that he has to make this sacrifice it is a little bit of a kick because we know now that she understands that she can't keep putting up so why don't you just stay out of this old man front and her friend is about to die I'd have been really pleased if Meryl didn't show up after this shot but before the proper ending I think it's a really strong ending for her and a relationship with snake I obviously want to see her make it out of here alive and to know that she's doing okay but I don't need anything else from Meryl while we're still at outer Haven I feel like the focus should really be on snake from here on out when we have control of snake again we're going to be walking down a long hallway all by ourselves it's sort of similar to the ladder from Snake Eater but instead of just letting you have your thoughts to yourself and maybe calm yourself down this section has a different presentation and a different purpose there's a number of audio flashbacks to this game to give us some time to really meditate on snake situation on the impact he's had on other people and all the people who died or became injured for this mission get a chance to appreciate but snake doesn't have any options here he has to die here I wish this had kept going longer but instead we cut back to Meryl she's fighting against frogs and barely holding out then Jionni rolls in to save her again this is really where their romance is gonna blossom and it's gonna be fucking stupid it all plays out over this completely ridiculous mr. and mrs. Smith couples shoot-'em-up section and I hate it but let's slow down merrill asks Johnny why mantis couldn't control him and he says it's because she's probably used people's nanomachines to control them and johnny has no nanomachines in him so Oh suddenly it all makes sense all those times he seemed so incompetent all the weird look at some of the weird behavior the diarrhea the failure to coordinate that was all because he had no nanomachines what made him seem so foolish turn out to actually be a huge advantage that would save Merrill's life multiple times don't you every time we had mandatory shots I've ducked out don't tell me you knew the deposit [Music] there's an anime OVA based on a manga from the 90s called golden boy it's a sex comedy it's six episodes long and it's one of my favorite series besides being gorgeous hilarious beautifully acted and animated and having characters design doable of the best artists in the industry the main character Quintero is one of my favorite protagonists in all of anime every episode starts with Quintero appearing to be a hapless horny loser lusting after women and fucking up all the time and women in this series who are often smarter than he seems to give them credit for look down on him and treat him like the loser he appears to be however by the end of every episode it's always revealed to them that Quintero is actually much more intelligent aware kind-hearted and selfless than they believed he bounces between low-level jobs because he always believes that he can learn from them he has a high libido but he greatly respects everyone to the point that people often take advantage of him but it's never to a terrible detriment because he's incredibly competent and able to take care of himself in the span of an episode everyone's understanding of him changes dramatically and often he'll have totally mastered whatever job he had at the beginning while also totally changing the life of whatever woman happens to be featured in that episode to the point that the episode always ends with them having gone from thinking he's trash to being totally in love with him but by then he's always gotten on his bike and moved somewhere else taking the chance to learn more he's a total MarySue but because of how well he's written and animated you can't help but love him Jonny could have been like Kintaro in this scene Jonny could have totally won me over having some suspicions about nanomachines having some intuition or information nobody else had which in the event of the disaster that occurs leads him to be better than everyone and saved not only his own life but the life of someone he loves this is the scene where I get to be really happy that Maryland Johnny are going to get married let's resume I just hate needles for some reason Meryl is apologizing for being mean to Jionni for his failures and stomachaches even though they're his fault Johnny joined Merrill's team because he wanted to be close to her he corners her and confesses his love in the middle of a fucking gunfight we get a flashback to their first encounter on shadow moses he proposes meryl refuses his proposal and then proposes to him they got shot and fall on top of each other mara wants the real wedding with flowers in the cake Meryl says that it's been her dreams and she was a little girl which sounds so wrong to me because I really really thought Merrill's dream was to be a soldier I'm gonna be a bride take me home Johnny [Music] I have no words we cut back to snake walking down the hallway this part of the walkway has enemies on it so it's sort of different but I would have preferred if this section wasn't divided by the dumbest cutscene in history I like roses and odd accounts emotionally-charged back up here though the section is just tons of enemies one of the last lines of defense GW has besides the microwaves clinging to you to force you back past the hallways snick chokes and falls get surrounded by frogs but then Ryan shows up with a sword in his mouth no arms a trench coat and is the lightning this part is stupid too but as I'm sure it doesn't surprise you I like this one right and is also going to cover his snake while he moves in so again Maryland riding playing the same role as snakes back up riding is more fun though because he's the only one that snake ever talks to when Merrill talks to him he just goes yeah all right the Ryan says my body is a machine and snakes s but your heart is human snake advance is riding that despite what he's lost his life is still worth living snake is still totally consumed by guilt for being what he is I don't know why these people give snake and riding time to chat but whatever I don't know why when snake was on the ground they were approaching so slowly but it sure is dramatic also my friends we have made it to the microwave this games version of the torture sequence but unlike this games version of everything else in every other game in the series I actually think this one is the best that's obviously because this one is when everything hinges on the game took all the time to build to this one this is the ending while we're marching forward our arms burning to keep snake moving forward we see everyone who's fighting to allow us the chance to do this and everyone whose future we're doing this for the specifics of each of these character situations is silly and Nic pickable which is why I've been nitpicking the whole time but right now the specifics don't matter well this hurts we just need to understand that everyone is giving everything to give snake the chance to kill himself for this mission and maybe the most important among them is sunny the literal and metaphorical hope for the next generation but what really gets me about the segment is not them it's snake himself obviously this is what snake has been going through the whole game maybe his whole life but especially recently he's always been in pain he's always been breaking down but he's always been moving forward out of a sense of duty or guilt for his past we're hatred of what he is or for the people he cares about and because he believes in a better future for those people that he loves one that he knows he won't get to live to see but that it keeps walking toward anyway because love is what got us here and it's fucking shredding my arm when this segment is over and it feels like a hundred years before it's over you're shaking out your hand and you're thinking fuck this man needs a break [Music] at the end of the hallway snake is fucking crispy sorely scrambled we get some symbolism Otacon pilots to mark three up to the main console I can't believe he can do this from a MacBook will just sit on the ground snake isn't doing anything which begs the question why couldn't the mark three of coming alone but whatever it probably can't open doors by itself and it ended up needing a lot of protection anyway riding his up against the wall will the Frog slowly approach him again is there a reason they can't go any faster than I miss something Marylin John here out of bullets but they're together and that's what matters I guess mailing is being hassled by a dwarf gecko outside and snake is getting swamped by them leave him alone hasn't he gone through enough we're at the end of our rope but then as you would expect when you shut down a system controlling literally everything causing you problems your problem suddenly go away mei-ling prepares to fire one bullet at one robot but luckily she doesn't have to there's a cool shot of ray falling off the Missouri because Metal Gear RAY are always cool even if they are constantly jobbing so is on akan ones to warm through a machine it turns out that instead of shutting down GW and only removing liquids control over SOP the worm that Naomi Emma and sunny developed is in fact spreading to every other AI and shutting down the entire system this is our surprise deus ex machina that surprises no one because did anyone really believe the one time in act 2 when Campbell said that shutting down the Patriots program might not be so easy it turns out it was that simple we just needed the right program not only that but the program preserves the parts that manage and assists everyone's lives it just removes the oppressive control aspects so it's not even a sunny made a morally ambiguous decision to rip off the band-aid and free everyone but with a great cost hardy said like in the World's End had to put the whole thing in the hands of a child to fix everything and she made something that might hurt people but is for the good of everyone now she just fixed it it totally betrays the built up complexity of the situation to just have it solved cut and dry end of story I said before that I thought the story of these games wasn't meant to lead to the Patriots being stomped but even if we were gonna clean up the Patriots couldn't we have made it a little less clean a little less totally happy a little less easy and you really wanted to make this happen couldn't there have been a more clever workaround than Oh Sonny's code just fixed everything because she managed to do something of the greatest minds in the world had just assumed what's impossible it's insane to me that nobody had the time to read this program to know what it was going to do sunday was the only one who knew how this would play out it's a reveal for everyone else nobody even asked her I know Sonny was raised by the Patriots I know she's an unbelievable genius and I know inside computers is her home but she's also six it makes the point about the next generation being our hope seems so much Dumber when the next generation is this cube brilliant pure hearted and an infallible I still like Sonny though and later they try to say oh there were consequences to what we did but it's just damage control it's just saying how our actions affected the world without really giving us a chance to see it appreciate it or feel it because the game's over at that point and the consequences they mentioned aren't even a huge deal they're mildly problematic at most Sonny's Fox Alive program is an unambiguously good thing after its installed we get Naomi's stupid video fuck that Otto Kahn says snake three times cut to black let's get to the goods somehow Otacon brought snake outside to the deck let him smell the sea breeze but then [Music] you came your new event you came everyday back now to Reno rise and shine asleep look wars over [Music] why - liquid reveals time this is not so I need some snacks like we could have stopped snake but he didn't this is exactly how he hoped things would turn out immediately that seems to contradict everything he's done in the game so far but what's let's hear him out liquid starts talking about the Philosopher's and the Philosopher's legacy zero used the money in the Philosopher's legacy to establish the Patriots big boss wanted to shut the Patriots down he wanted to create a nation free from their control and that was the original outer heaven so original motivation for creating outer heaven changed then he reminds us of the events of the Metal Gear games and uses the words Jean and me and when discussing the first two melih Gear Solid games he explains that somehow all of the events of those games were trial and error attempts to create outer Haven to free the world from the control of the Patriots this doesn't really sound anything like what liquid would know or care about this seems like something revolver ocelot would do ha snake just lets liquid inject him with whatever because he doesn't give a fuck anymore he's like an old dog yeah just do whatever you have to it's probably for the best liquid just says this is over a let's fight to the death because that's how this has to end he wants his yahooza ending two old men ripping their shirts off overlooking the world settling the store with their fists god bless him I really love this because this isn't about the story anymore it's not pretending this matters this fight is just because everyone wants this to happen liquid snake you me Kojima everyone maybe it's because of all that juice but this really feels like the first time in the whole game snakes got some fucking life left in them the gameplays the somber version of the Metal Gear Solid V and the one from Metal Gear Solid 3 not the original and they just go to fucking town you ever see a fight that you can just feel the love in a fight between blood brothers not genetically but tied together by fate this cutscene is fucking wild them they both take their Metamucil their health bars fill all the way back up and then you get to play this is the real final boss time for this Metal Gear Solid game to suck its own dick to completion one last time let's fucking go this is a fistfight with liquid it has four stages one based on Metal Gear Solid one one they cement a solid two one based on metal you sell all three and one for itself just to wrap things up in all of them the camera angles life bars controls moods music and difficulty completely shift to evoke your memories of the games they're based on the music goes from encounter from Metal Gear Solid 1 to the tanker incident from Metal Gear Solid 2 to Snake Eater for Metal Gear Solid 3 and then just goes out on the old snake theme the names changed to snake is usually Solid Snake but changes to make it snake during the middle yourself three segments liquid goes from liquid familiar Solid 1 to liquid Ocelot for Metal Gear Solid 2 to just Ocelot for melody Solid 3 this is not liquids moment this is ocelots moment this has very little left to do with liquid the only piece of liquid left is his shadow and really how else could this game have ended not a little your solid foreign concepts not a different metal gear solid floor that told its own great story and minded its own business a little bit more this Metal Gear Solid 4 the one that's been desperately trying to connect three games as though they were all waiting to this when in truth they probably weren't but if they were who would be running the show it's not liquid it's the guy who's been here the whole time it's the guy who always seemed to have some kind of plan we never really understood who always seemed to have connections to every conspiracy and who loved the big boss more than anything enough to somehow make this about him Ocelot says that he's liquids doppelganger and that snake is big bosses but that doesn't really line up snake his big bosses doppelganger makes perfect sense here but I wish the game would stop trying to force liquid in here just because he sneaks quote-unquote brother and was the villain of the first Metal Gear Solid game forcing him in here is poetry for the sake of itself this should really have only been about Ocelot after finally doing what he's been trying to do for decades the job he had to do to free Big Boss and save the world and then to finally get his mind back after throwing down with big boss's successor who managed to save the world from Big Boss himself and multiple times and giving him a little kiss on the way Ocelot is probably happier than he's ever been in his entire life he should be this is his grand finale rest in peace the greatest villain Otacon does a little speech about when we lost how our society which has always thrived on war will continue without the Patriots and wonders if we did the right thing which come on of course we did and we move out that's the aim the only thing left is the ending cutscenes plural and the credits plural but we're not out of the woods yet we're gonna spend the better part of an hour just waiting for this game to end and a lot is gonna happen so hang tight because we're almost there no briefing cuz the missions over we pick back up at the grounded Nomad and mailing his helping mayor will get ready for a wedding oh yeah that's happening the colonel congratulate some Errol and then walks away Meryl points the gun at him but doesn't shoot its indicate that she forgives him and that she's going to give him a chance to make up to her then she asks him to walk her down the aisle Wow all right character development I wonder if this would have landed if these two characters had talked to each other more than once before this the wedding officiants is one of the guys from Rat Patrol and the other one is just here other attendees include Otacon sunny that's a pretty sorry showing but whatever this doesn't matter at all maybe they wanted a small wedding kiss the bride you stupid asshole go live a beautiful life suddenly Drebin out of nowhere his truck pumps out a bunch of flower petals and doves beautiful you're a good man Trev so he starts making friends with a kid who's probably incredibly confused monkeys getting fucking smashed not a bad idea then they kiss but where's snake mailing asks that guy always keeps you guessing the colonel thanks snake for his service so that was the wedding Marilyn Johnny done what's next we got five more endings to get through oh boy [Laughter] [Music] ridings in the hospital don't worry he has arms again Rose walks enlist some flowers but who's this little guy who could this possibly be Rose presents the boy Brian asks of his Campbell's kid which you know really but fine but it's actually riding son huh when Rosa but she had a miscarriage that was actually a lie Rose had a healthy child she lied and pretended to be Roy's husband too it was in order to protect the child because otherwise the Patriots would go after them Roy didn't even tell maro everyone made huge sacrifices to protect Little John Roy and roses gross relationship all a ruse but now that the Patriots are gone jag gets to meet his son and they get to be a family together ridings done running again he's gonna stay with him forever so now we know the truth like a scene from Beauty and the Beast don't say that you know least my husband and his father what a happy ending what a perfect conclusion of this story so if you think about this for two seconds this is incredibly contrived and roses a fucking monster Campbell - so back in act two when Rose explains what happened between her and ride and she doesn't actually why all she says about their son and Roy's that the baby hadn't been born yet and that Roy was so kind to me but now we know that ridin believes that Rose had a miscarriage and that she married gamble so here's a revised timeline of events after the Big Shell incident but before the child was born memories from Ryan's time as a child soldier began to resurface and he became unstable he started drinking he stopped coming home all kinds of tragic stuff at some point in heroes got close with Campbell also at some point in here ridin took on the mission of saving Sonny from the Patriots which means that he was communicating with Eva so while riding Oh struggling with PTSD and alcohol abuse Roy approached his rose and says hey you know you're currently bearing Jack's child here's the plan we're gonna tell him that his son is dead and then you're gonna pretend that you don't love him anymore in stage your fake marriage with me we'll do this to protect you and your son from the Patriots and she said yes and then she got another degree and became the worst psychologist in history I guess if Ryden believing he lost everything during the most vulnerable period of his life were to kill himself that somehow covered under the risk/reward section of the details of this plan I know were meant to assume that the Patriots don't know Little John was born which I don't know how that could be since they're everywhere and everything but even if that were the case are we really meant to assume that Rose is completely out of the Patriots sights just because she's not in a relationship with Rhydon anymore what's stopping them from just using her to take advantage of him again do they really think that he just wouldn't do anything if that happened if she's safe from Mad with Campbell why couldn't she and Little John have just stayed with Campbell in the first place if Campbell and Rose can both know about his existence why can't Wyden be in the know the explanation for why they had I am like that is so fucking contrived and also somehow barely explained maybe if somehow ridin from the future was able to communicate with Rose who would have okayed this plan this maybe would have been a sacrifice he was willing to make but this was Rosa's choice am I really to believe that she would do that to him and still loves him and that this is going to be a happy family from here on out [Music] listen I'm obviously a little sensitive about this both for my own reasons and because I really like riding I've heard some people say that they really do like this ending for riding and if you do I'd hate to take that away from you I'd hate to undo this for you the way this undoes Metal Gear Solid 2 sending for me and riding going through all of this surviving and continuing to fight and keep making sacrifices along the way and then to turn around and forgive rose for this to speak to the strength of his character but I don't think forgiving Rose was part of the test I don't think you're meant to think about this hard enough to even think that Rose did something wrong for riding to be in this renegade cyborg ninja role his relationship with Rose has to have failed because this wouldn't have happened if she was still a factor in his life but this game doesn't really want to make you feel bad or sad because this game doesn't want to commit to anything it wants to have the same mostly happy ending for riding that Metal Gear Solid's who has so in the end Rose just shows up and says actually you have a son and I still love you but I had to lie about this because of the Patriots and that's supposed to make you happy it's another fucking repeat it's another goddamn cop-out but a rose being with Rhydon doesn't make me happy in this game like it did in Metal Gear Solid 2 because in order for us to do this again Rose has to lie to him and say we won sorry I had to do that but it's not like riding can say I don't forgive you or I don't want to stay with you because he's responsible for his son now so he's just in a family with someone who manipulated and gas-lit him and how is that better than being controlled by the Patriots I might have some issues I know Rose isn't written to be a bad person read the room steak this is a happy ending I know I'm sorry i had the bitchh so aggressively about something so small I just wish there were a Metal Gear game that somehow on this a game that doesn't take itself so seriously and isn't concerned with meeting the standards of what the fans expect from ridings Arc a game where instead of just trusting that now he's with a family and things are gonna be different this time which they won't because why wouldn't the stuff with the guilt on flashbacks and the PTSD happen again riding I don't know accepts who he is and tries to make peace with that and be a good person anyway and also a robot dog yeah it's revengeance a bird people say that revengeance ruins ridings character I disagree I think for ruined bryden's character and revenge and salvaged what was left let me explain at the end of who I can believe that riding lives are better freer life but I don't believe it at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4 last time he tried to do this he relapsed and totally fell apart so what's different this time why is it gonna work this time well for one he's a literal war machine now so maybe we count that as a con Rose is now a psychologist for whatever good that is and he has a son I guess the Patriots are gone but they weren't directly responsible for his relapse this time that was just because as Big Boss kept trying to explain a soldier's mind can never truly leave the battlefield and riding his body and soul a soldier bring riding back for this game was a mistake on his own not even considering the events of this game so if you wanted to do a new arc for writing you'd have to take it in a new direction and oh boy does rising for one the structure and themes of this game are actually very similar to Metal Gear Solid 2 just blown up and made less word which is pretty funny the writing spends the whole game dealing with memorable charismatic characters who comprised the boss fighting God is that such a breath of fresh air but just leave the older characters to constantly gaslighting and manipulating and trying to break him because they understand that he's still unstable and constantly questioning himself this game understands - that doesn't just go away because you wanted it to the second time you wrote the same story so instead halfway through putting up with this shit for the third time Ryden stops putting up with it and then jack is back riding accepts that he's a soldier that his brain is wired for violence and that can't be changed so easily which is of course sad but instead of deluding himself into a happy ending he decides to use that capacity for violence to fight for his ideals which in this case happens to be saving a bunch of children from becoming soldiers like him [Music] it completely solves all of the issues presented in the previous game and reworked them into a new reasonable direction for this character while also working back in the theme of hope for the next generation Bravo wetsuit Temari beautiful shinnok was a handsome as looking man Metal Gear Rising is great give me a sequel with a better camera on the fly weapon switching and less enemies with firearms that was ridin with that over with who returned a snake in the cemetery at this headstone once again and from the words on it it's pretty safe to conclude that this is big boss's grave buried right next to the boss I've heard some people speculate that this is gray foxes grave which would have been nice but is almost certainly not the case war has changed our time has ended our war is over but there's one more thing I must do [Music] [Music] [Music] one last punishment I must endure erase my genes wipe this meme from the face of the earth this is my final mission hello [Music] [Music] when I first saw this it really did me and for a game with no sense of decency and picking its words snake seems to know what to say and how long to keep talking he's a simple guy he probably doesn't know how to do anything else unless he can frame it in his mind is carrying out his mission he knows he has to die or else an unstoppable plank will spread so killing himself is his final mission it's not a mission given to him by a colonel or a commander-in-chief but just by his own sense of duty that's been driving him since Metal Gear Solid's ooh this is a man who was born as a monster brought up as a soldier used as a pawn but somehow figured out wouldn't matter to him figured out what he had to do and carried it out if there's anything soulless they can do right it's the right thing and the right thing to do now is end this story point-blank no more big boss no more lays on Falls daily no more snake no more heroes no more Fox die no more first-generation nanomachines no more Metal Gear we get back to the wedding and Drebin gives us the details about what's gonna happen with him in the war economy Sonny makes her first outside friend Otacon watches the sunset with Sonny and laments his friend memes aside right here man super effective he did have a hard life and that's our ending [Music] but as I'm sure you know that's not the ending the credits roll with the whole cast and we go grab a heat app and quickly run back to see what we unlocked for the new game but then oh but where was Big Boss oh there was Big Boss [Music] snake did not kill himself Big Boss shows up in the cemetery with a big old fucking gun and approached his snake snake draws his gun on him and they're locked but then Big Boss drops his gun and CQC the snake into a hug he's not here to fight snake one two jump straight to the point asks the best question he can how can you still be alive that body wasn't mine that was the body I'll clone solidus Big Boss has an incredibly long explanation that covers a ridiculous amount of information it's basically one huge wall of text explaining everything that you were maybe confused about or didn't make sense and how there was always a plan from the beginning how Big Boss can still be alive but totally out of commission all this time zero and the proxy I stopped solidus was Big Boss and went after his body meanwhile Big Boss was stuffed with man of machines and preserved in hibernation by JD for Big Boss to rise the Patriots had to be shut down even Aslan were working together from the beginning to bust Big Boss out of there but to do that JD had to be stopped in Xero killed somehow when the virus uploading process the location of Xero was discovered and also Naomi was in on this too the stage is set Eva stole the real big boss's body from the Patriots and reconstructed it with the bodies of liquid and solid Asst also I'd used some combination of nanomachines psychotherapy and self a note and self awesome I'll use magic to become liquid sort of but not all the way it's very unclear and I don't know if there was ever actually a ghost involved but Big Boss makes the point that the spine out for our technology has come a person's will can't be fully controlled it can't be contained and moved from person to person will is kind of the theme of this game it's what they mean when they say sense more on that momentarily zero is here Big Boss continues to explain to the Patriots aren't exactly just the a is all of the people working to serve them the systems and societies in place were all part of one grand system on some level they were controlled by something the AIS could manage but you can't say that they're not the system as well the Patriots were everything a system intended to remain steady functional and uniform but at a certain point within that system war began to propagate everything became based on war why for no other reason than that had worked the same reason an idea spreads or genetic code spreads if it's good enough it will survive and propagate for the purposes of running an efficient system war was very effective zero to ten was to use the Patriots to create a unified world but the design of the system led to a world of same as ever just based around an economy controlled by one system rather than independent nation states a new world without substance the furthest thing from what the boss would have wanted with the American system in a state of collapse Patriot Society has reverted to a blank slate this man was the source of it all and he doesn't even realize it he's completely unaware of the fact that he led the world to the brink of ruin little bit uh Pike on the kettle black here upon seeing zero in person big boss's hatred and murderous intent has disappeared it's leaked out of him like piss it's too late to ask zero his perspective on this because his will is locked away these two men are the only surviving members of the Patriots they boss tries to apply a lot of significance to the name zero which sort of works because we're equated life to computer codes information etc what we had helped turn zero into 100 is pretty lame even for this game I'm taking it upon myself to send zero - nothing so is that one big boss pulls the plug in BAM lights out for zero yummy told Big Boss that the Fox tied ribbon put in snake was intended to kill Big Boss Ocelot and Eva it keeps happening and then Big Boss says this over again could you merge just because you acknowledged it doesn't really make it work it doesn't bring the theme home but credit for trying I suppose by the way the new Fox tie stops the old Fox tie snake is fine everything's gonna be just fine Big Boss keeps talking will snake carries him to the boss's grave he asks snake not to spend the life he has left fighting at the grave he admits that the boss was right he understands her now and then gives a pain salute he keeps talking for quite a while and then eventually collapses in snake's arms steak weighs him down at his grave he sheds it's here and snake lights his cigar [Music] this is gone isn't it the ending of Metal Gear Solid 4 is colossal a divisive and for good reason the entire endings what people remember about Metal Gear Solid 4 and what they talk about when they talk about this game every single element of this game is constantly trying to tell you that this is the end the Metal Gear meme has to be wiped from the face of the earth this one small group of people have been fucking the world since the cold war but that ends now this is the end of Metal Gear we know it's not we know Kojima didn't originally intend to direct this game and we know that when he did start directing he did so with the intent of making this game the definitive end of the series as we know it as it exists under his control as I see it there are three choices when deciding how you think Metal Gear Solid 4 should have ended the real ending the fake-out ending in Kojima is unused original ending were sneaking on a console in themselves in and are executed the obvious question being turned themselves into who and for what this ending was unused to two concerns expressed from his staff that one hadn't been used as the rest about yourself or is now I believe would have been a mistake but as it is it's just another incomplete idea it's a part of a larger different Metal Gear Solid 4 that we never got where it might have been a great ending we just don't know the real ending to this game is controversial for obvious reasons if you liked what you thought was the ending having the game immediately step back and completely change it might rub you the wrong way additionally putting a long segment largely a monologue that begins with a twist and then dives into a large info-dump explaining how the twist is possible to be true as well as a number of the other more confusing story elements right at the end of the story after the credits after the player has already been watching way too many cutscenes and has surely mentally checked out by this point is possibly the biggest and most obvious blunder regarding structure and pacing in a game that has already burned and scattered the book on structure and pacing for me personally and all of that was burning in the back of my mind along with my pre-existing belief that this game already focused too much on big boss without having him swoop in reveal himself to be alive and completely gank the spawn light from the main character whose story we have been told over and over that this is supposed to be the ending of that in mind I hated this ending I hated that Kojima seemed to have struck gold in the first ending but then completely yielded to his staff and tacked this nonsense onto the end whatever Metal Gear Solid 4 had a chance of accomplishing and completely tore it down with this one last burning mistake that was how I felt when I first played this game that was how I felt before I decided to make this video since the first time I played Metal Gear Solid 4 I had held a mic greasy hard the belief that the game was a disaster and that the terrible terrible ending was the final nail in its coffin but this game is ten years old I checked the first time I played Metal Gear Solid 4 was a long time ago people change a lot time and experience to find who we are as much as anything else this game is exactly the same as it was but I'm a very different person between the first time I played Metal Gear Solid 4 and the time that I replayed it in order to construct this video a close friend of mine who was an artist and someone I greatly admired took his own life I don't want to get all fucking sappy on you in the last few minutes of you three our Japanese meme game YouTube video essay but I'll just say that this event is a defining moment in my life and echoes in every facet of my personality personal philosophy goals and generally how I view the world I played a large part in defining my sense of self if you will why is that relevant here well mainly it's that when you go through someone you know committing suicide suddenly the ending that you liked so much where your favorite character kills himself maybe isn't your favorite ending anymore maybe even if it's at the expense of brevity and perhaps even logic some part of you knows you'd be happier if you knew that old fuck got to walk away and relax for a little while oh yeah I said favorite character all right last chapter of the video pre closing statement Solid Snake is the greatest character in videogame history [Music] now I know what you're thinking what about the king fair but consider the following as a central character in five games of distinct presentation and quality snake just gets better and better in every way with every passing title as Shin qohen Kojima get a better sense of who this character is with every passing game he evolved from a generic stand-in for the action heroes from Kojima's favorite movies to an industry defining icon in his own right from a nervous but talented rookie betrayed by and forced to kill his own boss for seemingly no reason to a more experienced soldier forced to kill his best friend and his other boss fucking million Solid 5 for reasons that now exist but don't make sense to him by Metal Gear Solid 1 he's a more jaded man with more experience in a famous history but he still retains some of his simplicity his aggression and cockiness here he wants his his best friend die again and learns that he's not quite a normal human being but a clone of the greatest villain he's ever met and then is forced to kill the closest thing he has to a member of his biological family by the end of Metal Gear Solid 1 he's made a fugitive from the country he was made made to fight for but his actions are so legendary and the effect these events had on him so dramatic that by Metal Gear Solid 2 he has fully come into his own this is Solid Snake at his prime operating independently with his best bud fighting for his own vision of a better world his flaws have largely eroded creating the ultimate glimmering perfect snake a character so beloved and so radiantly awesome but Kojima decided you don't get to place him to make a point that you're not him you're you scrambling the scoreboard and setting himself up for an unwinnable fourth match that he never intended to play but when the time came he knew he had to so a snake is thrust in the battle once again despite being completely incapable of handling a job of this size and condition he moves forward anyway maybe because he knows it's the right thing to do or maybe because he doesn't know how to do anything else and this mission takes everything he has left what little there is out of him and during it he learns that it's going to end with him dying by Metal Gear Solid 4 Solid Snake has completely fit in place as Kojima self-insert a lot of people like to say that a Huey and Otacon are Kojima self inserts and they are but they're on the opposite side of the same coin as the snakes they're all talented men with seemingly no control in their lives but who seek to gain control anyway the two of them are led to a fall in the two them flying their piece which is why even those snake and an icon come from very different worlds they fit together perfectly a man on what he understands to be his final mission one that seems endless and impossible that he is completely not because someone is making him but because he can't quite let it go in a long ridiculous brutal mess of a project Kojima managed to at least make one piece of it personal to him snake's character arc is completed past his prime now no longer someone other people consider a hero fitting into how he always saw himself but somehow managing to retain the personality that made him so endearing in the first place he's a relic of a world that shouldn't exist anymore and ready to dissolve to scatter his seeds and let his past actions influence the next generation he's in every way the embodiment of Kojima's philosophy in designing this game as he always has been in every video game he's appeared in I recently read an article containing excerpts from an interview with Kojima we explained how his father died when he was very young and has a theme of fatherhood has become an obsession for him and with that in mind the pieces of this ending fall into place Big Boss beating snakes quoting quote father has never been anything besides to curse for him a lot of this final cutscene is clunky and largely unnecessary but the heart-to-heart from Big Boss to snake is worth the price of admission Kojima carrying his obsession with fatherhood in mind wrote his self-insert meeting with the closest thing he has to a father who also happens to be the word of all terror and misery in his life but for the first time they're not meeting his enemies on opposite sides of a battlefield but as men who don't need to fight anymore if were concerned big boss on the boss snake on grey fox and riding on solidus I see no reason why the battle they've been fighting coming to an end wouldn't allow them to meet on good terms instead of killing himself for the good of the world the man who was snake's greatest enemy in every sense of the word disarms him hugs him and tells him he doesn't have to fight anymore that he respects him not as a son as a clone of the world's greatest soldier as a Jinzo ningún as someone injected with a virus that turns him into a literal weapon and that will eventually kill him in the entire world he respects him as a man which is probably something snake has never gotten to be Solid Snake doesn't need to be a product of genes means or scene he's just himself real person with his own sense his own will live however long you can this isn't the end of Metal Gear it's not even the end of Kojima's work on Metal Gear so knowing the direction this series goes after this maybe this ending Falls a little flat these days and this game can't afford to be letting the parts that do work stop working but even though this isn't the ending it seemed to be this is the end of Solid Snake's story has never been changed or undone so at least we can still feel that we can appreciate this as a pretty good ending for the greatest character in videogame history maybe on our second or third playthrough we can actually feel the love in the scene we can feel happy that Kojima let this man live we can understand what it means but Kojima wrote his self-insert meeting with his father and his father saying to him it's okay I respect you you can stop fighting now because if you were writing a story about yourself when you wanted to have a happy ending [Music] that was Metal Gear Solid 4 it's an unfixable disaster that hits every single note it's supposed to but can't seem to make them sound good together carry it into whatever feats it manages to accomplish by the strength of its main character supported by the talent and heart of a legendary team of artists programmers writers and developers just after their prime given an impossible mission well all eyes were on them if there's anything I want you to take away from this video it's not that Metal Gear Solid 4 is bad or stupid or that Kojima is a bad writer or the George Lucas of video games or that Konami ruined Metal Gear or that Tomoko's of Fukushima Natsu Temari are great and Shu Uemura is bad it's also not that Metal Gear Solid 4 is great some underappreciated masterpiece and a perfect execution of Kojima's grand vision of trickery and subversion Metal Gear Solid 4 as a story he's the perfect 5 out of 10 infinite love and ambition and zero execution and if there's any lesson to be taken from the story of this game under every definition of the story of this game it's that nothing good can come out of trying to control everything Sony wanted a new Metal Gear game to sell their new console to an omni wanted a new Metal Gear game to justify their continued funding of Koji Pro humor auda wanted the chance to prove himself capable of directing Metal Gear on his own and the fans who wanted the perfect ending to this sword just wouldn't let that happen Kojima just wanted to finish this game make it good and get out it's sold and finished a story it reviewed well and it doesn't work the only guy who got out of here looking good was Tomoko's at Fukushima even though we don't know what he in the first place Metal Gear Solid 4 is interesting bad and we can learn from it that's what a mistake is after Konami executed order 66 during the development of Metal Gear Solid 5 a lot of people wept on the chance to pin everything wrong with Metal Gear Solid 5 on Konami because of course Kojima is an infallible genius and Metal Gear Solid 5 is great and the story would have been great too if Konami had just let him make the game he wanted to make I don't want to defend Konami here they're a massive Japanese conglomerate of course they're evil but don't pretend the Kojima couldn't have finished this game if he wanted to he went over budget he's been trying to end this series for 15 years and every game he makes gets more and more ambitious as he tries to do this exponentially growing story justice and it only ended when somebody whose job it was to know when to stop pulled the plug and made him stop and then the series died and no one was happy don't put 2 GM on a pedestal I'm interested in death stranding but it's just gonna be a video game it's just going to be a work of art with themes and goals and flies written and directed by a pretty smart guy who really likes movies and has somehow once again reached Messiah status in the industry and as for Metal Gear it fell apart and then everyone lost interest after it stops being a personal project and just became another regular video game Metal Gear Solid 4 is riddled with flaws and mistakes but the greatest mistake of all was letting the Metal Gear series get that far in the first place Metal Gear Solid 4 as a concept was a mistake not one by Sony or Konami or Mirada or Kojima or tamari or Fukushima or you or me or any other subset of the people who bought this game it's a mistake we all made it's something we all thought we needed and then it turned out we didn't and maybe we can learn from that fuck I guess I'm done none of your song before was a mistake [Music] come quick they're ready they look yummy sort of like the Sun it's rising again anime otaku

Channel: Steak Bentley

Views: 2,851,680

Keywords: metal gear solid 4, metal gear, kojima, death stranding, video essay, mgs4 sucks, analysis, critique, review, documentary, metal gear solid, solid snake, big boss

Id: 93-_r0w7ykI

Length: 206min 54sec (12414 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 07 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/TheKoronisEidolon]

I prefer the TGBS's "In Defence of Metal Gear Solid 4".

[u/anima22]

My problem with MGS4 is that standard gameplay is over after Act two.....of five.

[u/mknecro]

Steak Bentley makes awesome videos, this was the first one of his I ever saw. I also particularly liked his videos about One-Punch Man and Cowboy Bebop.

[u/zombierepublican-]

It's a very well put together video, I wished this guy made more content. I agree with almost everything he says. But I still LOVE this game.

As a standard for Metal Gear games it is a low point in many ways but in terms of video games in general it's still a 10/10.

That being said the game has some of the series highest highs

[u/[deleted]]

MGS4 Is a game where i totally get the criticism's about it but none of them have gotten rid of my love for it

[u/boland898]

A masterpiece

[u/Sepulchure24794]

I Believe all this guys criticism is valid but I still very much enjoyed all of MGS4 Lol Though I can very much agree it's more of a movie then a game, But at least what little game was their was fun

[u/nintendoborn]

I don’t agree with it

[u/capofudo]

Worst of the series