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dkirschner's Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (PS3)

[January 4, 2016 09:32:23 PM]

Ok, so this has been a much longer experience than I anticipated. I clocked over 20 hours and this game draaaags on and on. I estimate that for every hour of gameplay there is, there is 1 hour of cut scenes (usually overdramatic). I'm not exaggerating. The gameplay is pretty great, and some of the cut scenes are cool, but many are not (see the last chapter of the game + the epilogue + the "debriefing" aka epilogue pt 2).

I also started taking issue with the weird sexism in the game. I'm not sure what to chalk this up to...Japanese gaming culture? This having lots of Metal Gear fan service? Catering to otaku boys who have never had girlfriends before? Seriously, I would never make these kinds of generalizations about "otaku boys" or anything, but some of this game was painful for me to sit through. At one point, Naomi (hot scientist female with unnecessarily revealing shirt) is flirting with Otacon (Snake's nerdy computer scientist genius friend) and Otacon can't believe it. Naomi takes his glasses off and says he looks better without them, so he proceeds to not wear his glasses, rendering himself practically blind, and stammer on and on about being an otaku and never having a girlfriend. Then she has sex with him, pure male fantasy. Another male character continually slaps the ass of a female soldier, right in front of another soldier whom he likes and who marries him at the end of the game (again pure male fantasy; marry one, slap the ass of another at your leisure and suffer no consequences). All fights with the four "Beauty and the Beast" bosses end with the women unnecessarily sexualized, slithering toward Snake in skintight clothing and almost moaning. Sunny, the little girl on board Otacon's base is a science genius, but also appears responsible for cooking everyone's food. Naomi at one point "bonds" with her by showing her how to better cook eggs that the men will like, sticking a flower in her hair, and stating that "Us girls always have to look our best." Come on, these are both supposed to be scientific geniuses! But Sunny is being trained to cook and look pretty by low-cut-shirt wearing Naomi who uses sex to get things. Why can't they JUST be smart and valued for those qualities, the qualities that Otacon is valued for? Like, a couple sexist things, okay fine, it's the story and I get it. A pattern of hypersexualized women and unnecessary pandering to the male gaze? That's some bullshit!

Rant over. The story is typical Metal Gear complexity. I didn't know what was going on half the time, especially as the plot thickened near the end. Who is doing what why? I should have just skipped it all and played the damn game, haha.

This one changes up Metal Gear gameplay a little bit. There's less emphasis on stealth with many parts rewarding run 'n gun methods of getting through levels. You can sprint to checkpoints without killing anyone or taking cover sometimes, and that's what I did. When you do need to take cover and move stealthily around an area, it's really fun, and the early game excelled at this. You get a lot of toys to play with like everyone's favorite cardboard box, a barrel (which reminds me that there is a game-long poop joke, thumbs down), a Playboy magazine with which to distract guards, various guns with various bullets, etc., etc. There is also some intermittent emphasis on close quarters combat (CQC) which I never remembered how to do and had to look up in the manual every time I was required to use it. There are some levels where you control mechs or shoot a turret from the back of a truck and that kind of thing.

Boss fights were pretty cool, though the last two Beauty and the Beast ones took a while. The one with the dog took me probably an hour and was really intense. I liked it a lot even though it was very difficult. The last Beauty and the Beast fight took me a while to figure out too, but it was neat and involved mind control.

One other thing worth noting is the amount of nods to previous Metal Gear games. They are everywhere, from items to in-game computer terminals to characters breaking the 4th wall. For example, when you fight Psycho Mantis (forget the name in this game, but it's basically Psycho Mantis), your crew tells you to plug the controller into port 2 (that's how you beat Psycho Mantis in whatever previous game he was in). But of course you're on a PS3 and there are no controller ports, and the characters make comment of this (you have "upgraded hardware" and you'll have to figure out some other way). The Shadow Moses level was really neat with audiovisual flashbacks to an earlier game. There is a lot of theme music from previous games. Very neat touches. I played all the main previous games, but don't necessarily remember details, yet the nods to them were fantastic when I caught them!

So that's that. I hear Metal Gear 5 is quite a different beast in many ways and I've heard great things. I heard great things about Metal Gear 4 too, but I only thought it was okay. I'll grab 5 at some point and look forward to a Metal Gear sandbox.