MAKE ME LIKE: Metal Gear Solid

Kojima fans, cry havoc and let slip the Gekkos of war. You like that clever reference, right? I had to look up what they were called.

If I run through a list of all my favourite games in my head, there’s one particular standout, cardinal rule – almost all of them have extremely limited cutscenes, and thus reserve most of the storytelling for the gameplay. I don’t have anything against cutscenes, but I’ve always felt like video game storytelling works better when you aren’t disconnected from the experience, admittedly this is a lot easier now than it used to be, but we’ve come a long way since the scrawling text plot summaries of every space shoot ’em up this side of R-Type.

For this reason, it seems like I’m almost hardwired to hate the MGS series, and yet, I’ve tried to like it, I’ve tried to like it so many times. I remember playing the first Metal Gear Solid over at my PS1 friend’s house (I was the N64 friend, we also had a Dreamcast friend, I grew up in a village, you see), and while he ranted and raved about how clever and interesting it was, all I could think about was how much I wanted him to take it out and put Syphon Filter back in. The only part that appealed to me was when you died, simply to hear that gloriously cheesy trumpet of ‘Snake! SNAAAAAKE!’ blare out like somebody had just seen one, and remembered what they were called at the exact same moment it bit them.

By the time Metal Gear Solid 2 arrived, my entire school was in an uproar about it, but once again, since I had a Gamecube, I was relegated to my own little island with things like that most of the time. You can imagine how hard I laughed at everyone when Resident Evil 4 came along, but I digress. It took me a while to finally get to play it, but once again I remember the person next to me spending a solid 5 minutes demonstrating that you could slip over on seagull poop in one of the early missions, and how amazing that was. Once I actually got into the game I did enjoy the mechanics of it, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was playing a game which thought it was more clever than it actually was.

Despite owning the right console for it, I never owned, or even encountered Twin Snakes, I liked the idea of the Psycho Mantis boss fight, and still do, but if you want to talk about forth wall breaking in a Silicon Knights game, Eternal Darkness is holding all those cards. By the time Snake Eater came out I had a PS2, and I did play it, albeit not all the way through. Like many others, this was the exception to the rule for me, I liked it, I liked it a lot. The injury tracking was unlike any health system in any other game I’d played, and matching camouflage colours, climbing trees and generally using the jungle to your advantage was enormously satisfying.

The stamina system was also an inspired way of keeping you on your toes throughout, since you wouldn’t be able to sneak or take baddies down effectively if you hadn’t munched down a markhor in a while, it broke up the core gameplay with short hunting excursions, like the later Far Cry games, but far better implemented/contextually justified. Then there’s the end boss fight, which is one of the most exhilarating boss battles I’ve played in any game to date, From Software included. It probably helped that by the time I actually got around to finishing Snake Eater, I was in my 20s, and more able to appreciate what it was trying to to.

The problem? Once again all this wonderment was marred by a clunky story, riddled with characters I couldn’t have have given two vampire bat shits about. Snake Eater has perhaps the most stripped down story of any of them, so how Kojima still managed to make it feel so convoluted is beyond me. From there, it returned to business as usual, I couldn’t get on with the 4th one, Rising had one interesting new mechanic which didn’t even work properly and since then I haven’t played a single Metal Gear game, my waning interest in the series had been extinguished. And yet.

You see the thing is, and it’s perhaps the thing that frustrates me the most about MGS, is that through all the badly presented, badly paced, badly scripted stories, rife as they are with characters who are at best cartoonish and at worst outright offensive, there are always glints of something amazing. For all his inconsistencies, Raiden’s “I am the lightning” moment from the fourth instalment is still spine-tinglingly badass, and the unmarked grave moment from the end of the third is incredibly, almost overwhelmingly moving, no matter how many times you revisit it.

The thing is though, whereas something like The Lord of the Rings is an amazing story, poorly presented (at least as far as the books go), as far as I can tell the amazing part of the MGS story would take up all of about 10 minutes, and everything else is either padding, smarmy bullshit, or both.

It’s the same with the gameplay, there are interesting, enjoyable mechanics and depth in all the instalments I’ve played, but Snake Eater aside, I’ve never been able to silence that voice at the back of my mind saying ‘stop playing at the end of this level’. It’s the same voice that tells me to put a different game in the drive next time I go back. All the inventive mechanics are fine in isolation, but they don’t gel, or at least they never have for me. They all feel like disparate parts of a whole that never comes together, a compound with no catalyst. Perhaps I’ve just never been able to commune with that X-factor that will allow the whole MGS experience to make sense for me, or perhaps I’m just blind to its appeal, and always will be, I hope not.

I will probably take the time to delve into the 5th instalment at some stage, given everything I’ve heard about it, but I can’t justify paying anything close to retail price for a game I stand such a high chance of hating. With that in mind, which one should I revisit, or discover anew to finally prove once and for all if I’m capable of heading down Snake Way? Should I wade through the bird shit of Sons of Liberty, give Twin Snakes a shot, or just jump straight into Phantom Pain? Let me know in the comments.