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Be warned - this thread's going to be riddled with spoilers. There's no other way of doing it, I'm afraid. It’s also something that I’ve been struggling to put into some sort of coherent order, so bear with me.
MGS2's hated by an awful lot of people and I'm not sure if this is because they didn't understand what it was trying to do, because both the game and story are, at best, glorious failures, or because the narrative complexity that was eventually revealed frightened them. Or, of course, because they just didn’t like it.
One of the common aspects of the series is that it deals with big themes. At various points, the first game asks questions about the futility of war, what it means to be a soldier, eugenics, terrorism, revenge. It has one of the most superbly realised casts of characters in games. It also has a storyline told primarily through cut scenes which, when removed from the game itself, run to over three and a half hours. It would have been a bit of an important milestone if that was all it did – I can’t think of any game before it that had such a mature narrative or artistry of direction (the camerawork and physical acting in cut scenes is amazing, and the areas in which the actual gameplay takes place are just as memorable). In Solid Snake it provided a character with a stupid codename who appears to be the standard gruff action type (based on Snake Plisken), but who’s actually forced back into the service of his government against his will, is consistently lied to about the mission objectives and spends most of the story questioning the morality of his orders.
But that’s not all Metal Gear Solid does – it also expands on the basic idea of a videogame to make it something more than just controlling an avatar on a screen. There’s a great quote from series director Hideo Kojima on this subject in an old issue of C+VG:
I didn’t want to limit the game to the player and the information that comes from the monitor. I want the game to be the player, the controller, the monitor, the manual, the packaging and bring all that into one game.
Examples are cited by Triplets and Paleface in this thread, but the best is perhaps the character who tells you that the radio frequency to contact a certain ally is on the back of the CD case. Cue much searching around the base looking for the elusive case, before finally realising that it’s on the back of the CD case – the case that the game CD came in. Without experiencing them, it’d be easy to believe that these fourth-wall breaking moments could utterly destroy any sense of immersion, but they actually serve to reinforce it. Reviews of the series always tend to complain about the destruction of the gameworld’s reality – subdued enemies dropping items that appear as spinning boxes, exclamation or question marks appearing over the heads of surprised enemies, zzzzzz’s floating from their heads when knocked out, a particularly memorable piece featuring a deliberately censored nude bum – and Kojima himself says that Japanese players complained about the memory card and controller tricks mentioned by Triplets in the above link.
The complaints miss the point, imo. Sure, at first these things appear to be intrusions on what would otherwise be a ‘realistic’ game, but as you allow yourself to get swallowed up in its world they begin to make absolute sense. They’re consistent with the game’s internal logic, which is all that matters. It’s similar to the stuff I was saying about Pac-Man here, albeit slightly more complicated. It’s also refreshing to see a game tackle the problem of a lack of interactivity in ‘interactive movies’ by refusing to pretend that it’s anything but a game – in fact, it takes pride in that.
It should all be one huge mess of contradictions. It isn’t.
Kojima uses the sequel to expand on all of these ideas, but its main area of focus is the notion that the game can be the player.
But first of all there’s the sequel’s pronounced borrowing from film. The introductory ‘Tanker’ chapter provides a reintroduction to the core game concepts and brings us up to speed on what’s happened, story-wise, in the years since the last game. Snake’s gone underground and helped to form an anti-Metal Gear group dedicated to revealing the truth about the nuclear ambitions of the world’s governments to the people, via the Internet. There’s an unexpected twist, right there – you’re now fighting for another side (note: not the other side – Kojima refuses to paint the world as a binary good vs evil thing, instead going for the theme that good and evil don't exist, there are just different motivations). It pulls some tricks on the player again, but not as many. There are a few smart bits played for laughs where you’ve got to sneak past a couple of rooms full of marines watching a speech, which cleverly parody the whole stealth game deal, and a neato section where you’ve got to take some photos of a new Metal Gear and upload them to the web.
To understand why the second game attracted the sort of venom from the fan community, you need to understand just how effective Snake is as a main character. Because what happens at the end of the Tanker chapter means that you play the rest of the game – the Plant chapter, which is significantly longer than Tanker – as somebody else. Raiden.
Raiden’s an awfully dull character. He dislikes what he’s doing as much as Snake did in the first game, but he moans and whines where Snake would ask questions and then grumble a bit. He’s almost entirely void of any real character, instead being indistinguishable from the troubled, damaged, emotionally retarded teenager with a mysterious past of a depressing number of games (but most closely resembling Squall from Final Fantasy VIII). He’s one dimensional at best. Unlike Snake, you simply can’t feel any connection with him.
This is made worse by the inclusion of his girlfriend as one of the characters you have to communicate with via radio. Rose is the person you go to in order to save the game, and on almost every single occasion the script breaks out into the worst romantic melodrama imaginable – Sunset Beach has nothing on these two. The screaming fanboys have a point here – Rose is a miscalculation on Kojima’s part. There are solid reasons why Raiden is as he is, which we’ll get to in a second, but there’s simply no justification for the excruciatingly painful sub-plot with his s/o.
MGS2 is a wonderful mess, and Rose is part of what makes it a mess. Raiden is another. The third (bear in mind that there’s a fourth) is what happens during the majority of the Plant chapter.
In the first MGS, a nuclear weapons disposal facility called Shadow Moses has been taken over by a disgruntled group of ex-government employees, Foxhound. Snake himself is a retired member of Foxhound. He enters the base from the water. Once there he starts to get hints that things aren’t as they seem, most of them from the Foxhound members themselves. The nuclear weapons disposal facility turns out not to be a nuclear weapons disposal facility. Snake comes upon a scene of absolute slaughter. A cyborg ninja appears on the scene and confuses matters, apparently working separately from any of the other organisations present.
In MGS2’s Plant chapter, a pollution control plant off the coast of Manhattan is taken over by a disgruntled group of ex-government employees, Dead Cell. Raiden is sent in as a member of Foxhound, now apparently reformed and once again under the supervision of the government. He enters the base from the water. Once there he starts to get hints that things aren’t as they seem, most of them from the Dead Cell members themselves. The pollution control plant turns out not to be a pollution control plant. Raiden comes upon a scene of absolute slaughter. Cue the cyborg ninja.
Kojima and his team are smart enough to make the cloning of the plot from the first game appear to be nothing more than simple coincidence at first, but when you step back and look at what you’ve been doing it starts to worry you. It suddenly hits home when you/Raiden are taken prisoner and tortured, in a scene that’s visually identical to one from the previous game. It’s at this point that the big trick is sprung.
The game falls apart. Members of the backup team who’ve been in radio contact with you throughout the game up until this point begin to a bit... odd. The guy in charge starts telling you to turn the games console off, or provides advice on how to trim a clematis, or burbles gibberish about purple headed worms doing flip-flops in N-space, before his face is replaced by images from the very first Metal Gear game, circa 1987. Rose becomes similarly weird. Your radar suddenly becomes video footage of a woman lying on a deck chair.
You’re sneaking around naked at this point, balls cupped in hands.
The eventual revelation is this: the second game is a rerun of the first because that’s how it’s supposed to be. The people Raiden is working for aren’t Foxhound – Foxhound were disbanded after the events of the first game. Instead, the people running the show have set the entire thing up from the start. They’ve manufactured a terrorist threat based on the events at Shadow Moses – MGS1 – as they believe that the mission that took place there will provide the perfect training exercise for a future generation of super-soldiers.
You. The player. Not Raiden. The pollution control plant is in actuality a brand new, giant Metal Gear, this time designed to house the world’s most complex AI. And Raiden’s inside it. You’re inside the game, your actions being dictated by the program.
It’s an astounding idea. Somebody might be able to present examples of a similar trick from other media and claim that it’s passé, but games had never attempted this before. I don’t think anybody had even considered the possibility.
So here you are, in the game, and you’re now faced with examining your actions. Kojima’s holding a list of what you’ve done up to your face and saying, look, see how easy it is to turn you into a killer? Okay, so it’s a game and it’s not real, but d’you understand just how much I’ve managed to condition you? The guy’s openly asking you to question the validity of playing his own games as a leisure activity.
This is why Raiden’s such a non-entity. The intention is to provide a blank canvas onto which the player paints hir own features. That it fails to engage the player in the same way as having control of Snake does suggests something that I find very interesting - that it’s easier to get pulled into a game when you’re given control of a fully-formed character with their own backstory, their own destiny, their own personality, than it is with a blank avatar.
The fourth of the reasons why MGS2 is a mess, as well as being wonderful? That’s what happens next. Having revealed the true purpose of the game, having made his point and provided one of the most daring money shots games have ever seen, Kojima realises that he’s got a story that he needs to finish. But where do you go when you’ve not just broken the fourth wall, but smashed it into tiny little pieces and cemented over the foundations? In MGS2’s case, the answer is to turn the entire thing into a bizarre conspiracy tale, involving shadow governments, non-human lifeforms that live inside the White House (there’s a whole thing about how ideologies take on an existence of their own here, which is further hinted at in MGS3), memes and Internet piracy. It’s a real Spaghetti Junction of a conclusion, but it’s one that you can mould into some sort of shape if you’re determined enough to do so. There’s a pretty great story analysis FAQ over on GameFAQs which does a superb job of this, although it falls down badly on some of the other aspects of the story.
So then, discussion. There’s a *lot* of stuff here and I’d love to see this thread end up becoming a serious attempt to discuss it all. The way that breaking the fourth wall in a game can, if handled properly, increase the sense of immersion and actually solidify the illusion of reality. The use of complex narrative in games and how they can best be told without harming the more important gaming aspects. How narrative can add to a game.
And also, just how far is it possible to push narrative in games? Does MGS2 present a form that can be developed further in future, or is it a dead end? Does it suggest the possibility of an entirely new form of narrative that’s not been seen in any medium before? Now that the surprise has been sprung once, is there any way that something similar can be done in subsequent releases without appearing obvious? |
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