NOTE: Forgive me readers, I just wanted to write this before all of it left my brain. There will be wild leaps across subjects. Also, there will be spoilers for a twenty-two year old game.
I rolled credits on a replay of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty last night. It has been around fifteen years since the last time I played it through to the end.
What a beautiful mess of a game.
There are valid criticisms that can be laid against MGS2. It’s overwritten. There is a lot of needless backtracking that is misunderstood as an aspect of the metanarrative. The marketing cycle misled players into believing that they would get another adventure where they get to play the grizzled mullet man they remembered from the first Metal Gear Solid. Much of this is by design, of course, something that wasn’t picked up on when the game initially released in 2001.
I can imagine that MGS2 in 2023 benefits from context provided by twenty years worth of think pieces on the series, the rise of the video essay, and even the creation of The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2, released by Konami for the PS2 in 2002. Certainly, I didn’t take in every aspect of the inner workings of the narrative when I played the game in late 2008. I took the experience at face value, thriving on the density of Hideo Kojima’s world building and the bleakness of the final hours of the game.
The idea of the game being overwritten hadn’t occurred to me yet. That was pointed out to me by critics of Kojima’s writing and storytelling. They aren’t wrong, of course. Video games being an interactive narrative implies that the game itself should be telling more of the story than the interruptions the game is inundated with. It was a part of the experience that I accepted, though it remained on my mind during my replay of the game over the last couple of weeks (I took a long break before the bomb diffusion section).
While I feel that the metatext of MGS2 has been dissected, I don’t think that enough has been said in defense of the writing. Again, yes, there is definitely too much writing in the game, too much dialogue, too many codec conversations, too many cut scenes. What I have spent much of the last two nights thinking about is how this story could have done what it did with less.
So that I don’t prattle on too long, I will focus this on a topic that I seem to recall annoying people back in the gaming press in 2001: the codec chatter between Colonel Campbell, Raiden, and Rose.
I Need Scissors. 61!
From the first time that Raiden meets Lieutenant JG Plisken some twenty or so minutes into the Shell chapter of Metal Gear Solid 2, Campbell will recount the following to Raiden any time the resurrected Solid Snake is brought up: he was not part of the simulation. This is a break in Campbell’s script, foreshadowing that something is innately wrong with how he communicates with Raiden during the first two acts of the game. Everything else he says is an echo of the events that transpired at Shadow Moses in MGS, a revelation that isn’t clarified to the player until the third act.
Admittedly, this is easier to read into the game on a second play through. The very nature of sequels, something that Kojima was critiquing with this game, cites that a sequel should refine on is predecessor while playing into what fans of the original enjoyed about the first. So much of what Campbell says and does, how Paul Eiding performs the lines, is reflective of the original game, and feels natural to the player. But the foreshadowing is still there, and in the middle of the second act, it becomes a provocation.
As Raiden becomes increasingly suspicious of Campbell and Rose, Campbell reiterates on his comments about the simulation, sparking an outburst from Raiden that see Rose urging him to calm down. The trust between Raiden and his commanding officer has been broken, and isn’t resolved. The fractures in Raiden’s person are growing deeper as the second act pushes on, carrying him into the Sniper Wolf Redux where he defends Emma Emmerich from drone gunfire, snipers, and soldiers alike. What isn’t clear is that Campbell isn’t the only person provoking Raiden, pushing him further and further to the breaking point.
Rose
Rose is difficult for some players to accept. On the surface level, many of her conversations with Raiden do not match the tone of the game. They seem wildly out of place for what is ostensibly a military operation. Campbell never intervenes in these conversations, a fact that I’m only just now thinking of as I write this.
Rose wants her boyfriend to talk about their relationship at a time when he is focuses on his mission. He doesn’t want to dwell on the time they spent watching Godzilla movies, or what April 30th means to their relationship. For Raiden, those topics can wait.
And as the player, it can be easy to align with his point of view. In a game that is already pulling control away from the player for cut scenes and codec conversations at a rate that exceeds even the first game’s verbose jargon-laden chats with Naomi, Campbell, and Mei Ling, having to talk about the shaky relationship that Raiden has with his partner doesn’t seem relevant. Much like Campbell’s comments about the simulation, however, Rose is pressing Raiden.
The third act of Metal Gear Solid 2 does not work nearly as well unless Rose establishes the narrative of her relationship with Raiden along the way. What we should take away from every one of those scenes are an assessment of Raiden as a person divorced from the gameplay. The opening of the Shell chapter and the first half of the following events see him striving to live up to his VR experiences. It’s Rose that pressures the human part of Raiden, to emerge from the cocoon built up by the nebulous Patriots and Solidus.
The downside of all of this is that the ultimate reveals about Raiden’s history are muddied while the reality depicted up to the third act breaks down into the finale. Finding out that Raiden was a child soldier is a contradiction from the opening hours that depict him as a soldier trained by video games rather than experience. It’s a dark twist in the narrative that ties him directly to the villain, and it does prove entertaining as a beat in the story. However, so much is happening by this point, it can be easy for details to get lost in the noise, especially if you’re dining on this particular brand of crazy in the middle of a night where you’re short on sleep. This is also why this little blog post about a video game I like is going to get messier here. I need to go to sleep.
Last Bit About MGS2
But I want to close with a response to a criticism I often see thrown around.
Occasionally, I will see someone defend the Kingdom Hearts series with some variation on the line “it’s just as confusing/convoluted as Metal Gear Solid, but no one complains about that.” First, the statement is just factually incorrect. People have complained about the writing in Metal Gear games for over two decades. But that’s not what I’m interested in responding to.
I think that there is a distinct difference in the complications that are present in each of these series. Kingdom Hearts was launched as a mostly kid-friendly action RPG where you team up with Disney characters to save other Disney characters. As a series, it started clean and neat, only to be disserved by an encyclopedia of terms and half-baked world building that doesn’t come up during 90% of the gameplay. Tetsuya Nomura, as I’ve said in the past, makes fun games, but he’s a poor storyteller, unable to handle the medium he’s working in well enough to layer the story he clearly wants to tell into the series he is famous for – one where he has to also give the cliff’s notes version of a stack of Disney films at the same time.
It is not an easy prospect to handle those disparate ideas, and I do not envy anyone who has to do it. But it is a problem with the way that Nomura decided to evolve the series, and it does make the series difficult to approach, impossible to discuss with a fervent crowd of fans, and frustrating for reasons that aren’t relevant to this conversation.
Hideo Kojima doesn’t have these problems in his games. They are indeed overwritten, explaining a suite of ideas and elaborating on the military shorthand and technojargon as to not leave players out of any the obsessions that Kojima brought to the table. Kojima is an avid reader, a devourer of cinema and music. Reading his book The Creative Gene is an illustration of this love of art, as well as an assessment of where some of his ideas were born.
As a game designer, he designs the game, and as a storyteller, he tells stories. The gameplay reflects the stories he wants to tell, even if the writing could be pared down. There may frequently be a wall between narrative and gameplay, but the information is presented cleanly. Cinematics illustrate the action movie set pieces that have always inspired the series. Lengthy codec conversations delve into the backstories of the characters, grow the intrigue about the unveiling mysteries, and as listed above, always drive the plot forward. For the first three entries in the Metal Gear Solid series, there aren’t any wasted moments.
I can’t say the same of Kingdom Hearts, a series which has its protagonist gawk at an iconic scene from Frozen for five minutes straight for no other reason than the game has to tell the Disney stories. 0
The criticism that MGS and Kingdom Hearts have similar amounts of baggage is a misunderstanding of MGS as a series. Hideo Kojima did not want players to endlessly obsess about things like the identity of the Patriots after Metal Gear Solid 2. He wanted players to leave that game thinking about the passage of information down through generations, not what was coming up in Metal Gear Solid 3.
And yet, we know that he did not get his wish. People and publisher alike pushed Kojima back into the director’s chair, over and over, demanding that Metal Gear continue for as long as it could be profitable.
I’m going to sleep now…
ADDITIONAL TASTY THINGS
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Creative-Gene/Hideo-Kojima/9781974725915
WordsThing 