Let’s say that me and you are
playing a word association game, where you say something and I have to then
say the first thing that comes into my head. If you were to say ‘Metal Gear Rising’, then I’d immediately say ‘Music’.
And I don’t think it’d be wrong to assume that quite a few other people
would have that exact same response too. Soundtracks almost always enhance
some element of an experience, but enhance feels like too weak a word when
it comes to discussing metal gear rising. The soundtrack doesn’t just enhance the experience,
it’s a central pillar that makes it what it is. It’s lightning fast and full of dynamic
action, perfectly reflecting what’s happening on screen as Raiden reduces
everything he comes across to pieces. But something that I feel gets a bit left behind
is that the music does so much more than just match and accompany the exhilarating gameplay.
The composition and implementation of some of tracks do some really interesting
things to elevate the storytelling of the game. It’s a lot smarter than you might otherwise think,
and today we’re going to talk about why that is. In the vast majority of stories, there’s a main
character, or protagonist. They’re the one we as the audience follow throughout the story, and when
it comes to video games, they’re usually the ‘good guy’ who we play as and who we hope succeeds.
The opposite of a protagonist is an antagonist-their job in the story is
to oppose the protagonist in some way. These two things can be implemented in so many
different and interesting ways, but at a really basic level you’ve got the good guy vs the
bad guy, which crops up in media all the time. I’m a big believer that to make this type
of framework compelling, you can’t neglect the characterisation of the antagonist.
But it is pretty easy to do just that. After all, the protagonist is the one
the audience is supposed to root for, and is the one they spend the most time with. This
focus means they often end up as far more realised and interesting character than their antagonists.
In the worst cases this renders the antagonist as nothing more than an obstacle for the
hero to overcome. That makes the entire conflict between the two of them far less
interesting for the audience to experience. To get around this, a piece of media has
to put more attention on its antagonists, and usually this means making the
audience spend more time with them. In Avenger’s Infinity War, the main villain Thanos
has 31 minutes of screentime. That might not sound like a lot, but he’s actually the character
with the most amount of screentime of the entire cast, with the runner up only
having 20 minutes by comparison. This extra time gave the audience way more
opportunity to understand his history and motivations, and gain a view into the philosophy
driving his actions. The result was that he’s generally considered to be the best antagonist
present in any of the marvel universe movies. Similarly, in a song of ice and fire the
members of the Lannister family serve as the antagonists for the Stark family early in
the story. But we get whole chapters from the perspectives of Tyrion, Jamie and Cersie to
help us understand who they are as people, resulting in an incredibly compelling story.
But you’ll notice these two good examples of stories spending time with their
antagonists aren’t video games. There’s plenty of great villains in video
games of course, but generally speaking, because of the way the medium works,
it’s a lot harder to have the audience spend significant time with the antagonists.
The vast majority of games are told entirely from the perspective of one character who
you control throughout the entire experience. If you’re not in some sort of cutscene
and have full control over the character, the logical thing for you to do when encountering
an antagonist is to try to stop them. But you can’t be allowed to do this unless it’s at
the specific point the game designers plan, for obvious story, narrative and gameplay reasons.
Usually, this means that most of the antagonist’s character development is done through
cutscenes, but these present other issues. Most people enjoy playing games for the
interactivity and control they offer when compared to other mediums, so to fill a game
with long character-development cutscenes, using techniques from film and
television, isn’t always desirable. (And yes I’m aware of the irony of making
this point in a video about metal gear) The other antagonist-building technique of
having the audience experience part of the story from their perspective is pretty hard to
pull off in games. If you spend some time playing as the protagonist, and come to root for them,
then you’re not going to have any motivation or desire to help the antagonist progress with their
goals if you suddenly switch to playing as them. In Metal Gear rising the main antagonists
throughout the game are the members of a private military company Desperado, who
serve as bosses throughout the game. Some of these antagonists pop up several times,
but in general you don’t get to see much of them before you have to fight and defeat them.
Given that, it sounds as though the game might suffer from some of the difficulties in developing
interesting characters I just described. But this is where the music comes in-or
more specifically, the lyrics written for each of the main villain’s tracks.
It’s often the case that the soundtracks for videogames are largely instrumental. The
goal of a soundtrack is usually to enhance the experience and get the player to have a specific
emotional response. Because it’s enhancing what’s already happening on screen, a vocal layer
isn’t really necessary most of the time. Take the recent DOOM soundtracks as an example
of this-the tracks that play during combat are setting out to evoke feelings of power and
strength. The instrumentals alone manage this, so why bother adding a vocal element to them? The few
tracks that do have lyrics are just chanting and gibberish-it’s there to make you feel like there’s
a crowd cheering you on along your destructive path, thus making you feel even more badass.
In the metal gear rising soundtrack, the instrumentals set out to achieve a
similar goal of making you feel empowered. And they achieve it: the tracks are heavy,
fast, and frenetic, perfectly synced with the gameplay and resulting in you the player
feeling like a really cool cyborg ninja. But that’s just the thing: the instrumental
versions of the tracks achieved the goal. A vocal layer could add to the feeling
even more, but it wasn’t necessary-it’d just be a cherry on the top. But instead of
stopping there, the composers asked what else could a vocal performance add to the experience?
And the answer was to provide characterisation. In the case of the antagonists fought as boss
battles, this allows for a massive opportunity. Because each boss has their own unique
vocal track, there’s an opportunity for the lyrics to focus solely on each
character as individuals. Through this you often get an insight into their history
and their emotional state, both in a general sense and in the present moment of the fight.
Let’s take bladewolf as an example of this. Raiden encounters him in a cutscene just before
the fight starts. There’s some basic exposition and back-and-forth quips between the two, and
then the boss battle begins. There’s not much time to set him up as a character, and he runs the
risk of being one of the paper-thin antagonists we talked about earlier-a temporary roadblock who
exists only to slow down our protagonist briefly. His track is of course snappy and
exhilarating, but take a listen to the lyrics: These tell us so much about bladewolf’s character:
that for his entire existence he’s been a tool of desperado, knowing nothing but violence under
their orders. Instead of being on board with it as we might assume, he hates this life he
leads, and is desperate to break free of their chains and go about life on his own terms, as his
own individual in full control of his destiny. It’s so much more information than we
received in the brief cutscene beforehand, and makes bladewolf so much more than
just a robot dog placed mid-level to check if the player has learned to parry yet.
Bladewolf is a little different to the other antagonists in that later in the story he
switches to Raiden’s team, but even with the extra opportunities for development this gave,
I think the vocal layer of his theme is still the strongest moment of characterisation for him.
And this is true of the other antagonist’s themes too-Mistral, Monsoon, and Armstrong
all have their characterisations supplemented by the lyrics on their vocal tracks.
But my absolute favourite usage of this technique, and the one I think is the smartest
implementation, is the theme of Jetstream Sam. And to understand why, we first have
to talk about the first Halo novel. In my version on page 252, there’s this line that
reads ‘The Master Chief got scared all the time. He never showed it, though. He usually
mentally acknowledged the apprehension, put it aside, and continued . . . just
as he’d been trained to do. This time, however, he couldn’t easily dismiss the feeling’.
This sentence has stuck with me since I read it because it’s so completely different from the
impression you get while playing the game. Especially in the first three, Master
Chief comes across as this unstoppable, no-nonsense tank of a guy.
This kind of characterisation makes him far more human and relatable-I’d
shit myself several times over if I was him. But in the games themselves, chief’s primary
purpose is to exist in such a way that the player has fun. And the way bungie set out to do that was
to embrace the badass, power fantasy side of him. And the truth is that it’s hard to balance
these two conflicting character elements, especially given the limited perspective that
video games can have. The novel was able to get away with it by putting the vulnerable side of
chief within his own head, then allowing us to hear his thoughts. If he was to say something like
that out loud in the game during combat, there’s a disconnect between what the player’s hearing from
the character and what they’re making him do. And once that disconnect happens it’s a lot harder to
get invested in a character, and even harder to win back that feeling of connection.
And with that in mind, let’s talk about Jetstream Sam.
Sam is the antagonist to Raiden in the truest form of the word. We encounter him right
at the start of the game, where he effortlessly thrashes us and leaves Raiden one limb lighter.
He then serves as a recurring rival throughout the game, popping up to cause trouble several times
before a final showdown in the desolate desert. Sam embodies swagger and bravado. The first
time we see him is when an armoured truck points a heavy machine gun straight at him, to
which he responds with an incredibly defiant, cheesy, shit-eating grin.
When he speaks it’s often light and jovial-he chats about matters
of life and death with a grin on his face, and to him there’s no situation too dark for a
joke. It projects pure confidence, and that’s what his theme conveys when we hear it the first time.
This is in the first section of the game, in a battle the player is destined to lose.
There’s no lyrics here, so the track is just trying to achieve that first goal we talked about
earlier of evoking a response from the player. And it achieves it-it sounds really heavy and
dangerous, matching the situation and what we’ve seen of Sam so far. This is right at the start
of the game where you’re probably still trying to grasp how all the controls work, adding to the
panic and impending doom of the fight for Raiden. After Raiden loses, we don’t hear the track
again until the final duel between the two later in the game, and it’s only now that we
hear the lyrics too. By this point Raiden’s overcome the other generals of Desperado, and Sam
is one of the last obstacles preventing him from stopping their plan to cause worldwide chaos.
So what do the lyrics have to say for the swaggering, confident, badass that we the
player see Sam as? Well, it goes like this…. These lyrics are the antithesis to everything
we know about Sam up to this point, or rather, everything we thought we knew about him. They
paint a picture of a man whose entire life and identity is being held together by threads
that feel ready to snap at any given moment. Sam’s purpose in the game was to be Raiden and the
players rival, a powerful enemy who they have to really work hard to defeat. To fill that role
well, Sam needed to come across as incredibly powerful, and showing him brimming with confidence
in his own ability was a good way of doing that. But to make him more than a two-dimensional
obstacle, he needed more character traits, and this inner conflict regarding
his own morals and actions was a perfect way of making him more interesting.
It makes you want to know more about him-why is he feeling this way? Was it something Raiden,
and by extension us, did? Could we find some way to get him to act on these feelings and switch
sides? I think the desire to ask questions like this means the character and narrative succeeded
in getting us invested enough to be interested in hearing possible answers, which like we mentioned
before is especially impressive because they managed to do that with an antagonist.
But these vulnerable traits directly contradict those of his primary purpose of
being a seemingly unstoppable badass-it’s the same characterisation issue that the
halo series had to use a book to solve. And that’s why it was such a smart idea to
have this instead take place in the lyrics of his theme. One of the big strengths of
the written medium is the things writers can do by having the reader directly hear
what characters are thinking and feeling, instead of relying solely on what they say and
infer. The composers here have found a way to translate that storytelling technique into a
video game in an absolutely incredible way. But it doesn’t stop there-during the fight, Sam
loses his sword and takes on Raiden barehanded. During these moments, the lyrics
cut out completely, and only start again when he picks his sword back up.
I’ve got two interpretations of this: The first is that the sword is a symbol for all
of the people he’s killed and bad deeds he’s done serving desperado. The inner conflict described
in the lyrics is a result of these actions, so them disappearing when he drops the
sword implies that if he stops fighting, or at least stops fighting for desperado, his
conflict will disappear and he can be at peace. The second interpretation is that
because he’s lost his weapon, he has to concentrate more on the fight itself,
and he becomes so concentrated on the present moment that his inner thoughts are quieted. You
could say then that the danger of the fight is the only way he knows how to quiet these thoughts
in his head, and that unhealthy coping mechanism has led to him needing to fight stronger and
stronger foes and ending up in this situation. You don’t have to agree with either of these-the
point is more that the game got me to think this way at all. And it did it just by the
simple action of removing lyrics from a song when certain gameplay conditions are met.
Video games are a great medium for storytelling, in part thanks to how they’re able to draw so
many different techniques from other mediums, the big three being writing, visual or art
design, and music. It often feels like the first two get the most attention when it comes
to making a game, and serve as the core base that the music can then ‘enhance’ or improve upon.
But games have the potential do so much more with their music. There are so many opportunities
to leverage soundtracks in truly unique ways to not just elevate or enhance the experience,
but to convey narrative and story elements that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. And
that’s why, as cheesy as it is at times, I love the soundtrack of metal gear rising, and
think it’s a lot smarter than it gets credit for.
