That is an IGN opinion piece from Charlie Lopresto, who believes that love can bloom, even on a battlefield. He first encountered Metal Gear Solid on a demo disc from Pizza Hut and has since accomplished 300 missions in VR– the type that’s indistinguishable from the true factor.
Like Outdated Snake, Metal Gear Solid 4: Weapons of the Patriots is a fossil. A genetic dead-end of gaming evolution, the unhinged and overflowing masterpiece that hardly left a mark on the artform. Regardless of its industrial and important success, MGS4 is never thought to be prime tier Metal Gear. However is that really honest?
Trapped on useless console {hardware} for the higher half of its laborious life, due to the brand new Grasp Assortment Vol. 2 it’s lastly attainable for everybody to expertise MGS4, from sequence diehards who first fired it up in 2008 to individuals fully new to Metal Gear who’ve completely no concept what they’re in for.
All of them will reckon with the numerous, many questions MGS4 brings to thoughts, like: Will we ever see a sport like this once more? Why did we cease speaking about it? And, maybe most significantly: MGS4 is actually good, is not it?
“The Lightning in That Rain”
Hideo Kojima didn’t need to make Metal Gear Solid 4. He publicly declared his need to finish the franchise as early as MGS 2, then proclaimed that he was completed with the saga after Snake Eater. Kojima’s phrases have been weary however his deeds stated in any other case. He wasn’t actually prepared to maneuver on– each of these video games ooze with a way of momentum and life.
Weapons of the Patriots feels totally different. There’s a depressing weight to the sport, like a funeral – the raucous sort the place mates, grudges, and flames collect to settle scores, awkwardly hook up, and have fun the top.
Previous to MGS4, we’d final seen Solid Snake in 2001, when he dropped a prophetic monologue and vanished into the streets of decrease Manhattan shortly after the previous President of the US crashed into town with a large sci-fi submarine. As conditions go, it’s actually one which begs for some followup, and after years of followers demanding the return of the Legendary Mercenary, Kojima obliged in trademark trolling vogue.
You don’t get the cocky, mech-smashing tremendous soldier who slays Tengu by the dozen with a metafictional bandana. Kojima, who reportedly acquired dying threats over his reluctance to maneuver the story ahead with MGS4, as an alternative delivers a feeble, actively decomposing relic. Outdated Snake grunts, screams, coughs and gags wetly as he crawls in agony by means of his remaining mission, all for the privilege of being allowed to die earlier than his poisoned blood wipes out humanity. Outdated Snake was punished earlier than Punished was cool.
It’s a trope we’ve seen so much these days: the beloved hero of a bygone age, bitter, damaged down, and humbled, all in service of passing the torch to a spunky new recruit earlier than the credit roll. However there is no such thing as a Rey to don the cardboard field right here, no Adonis Creed, no Robin, nor any sort of chipper next-gen protagonist queued to proceed Snake’s legacy by promoting some video video games. Almost everybody in Metal Gear Solid 4 is previous, useless, or extraordinarily married by the top of the story, a bittersweet and fantastically conclusive eulogy to a deeply heroic and completely decrepit previous man who reeks of cigarettes.
Fashionable media is designed to guard itself, to maintain mythology marketable and go away endings open for future exploitation. Kojima does the precise reverse with MGS4, performing peaceable euthanasia on his life’s work to that time. It’s a courageous transfer delivered with so much of love and earnestness, and anybody upset at geriatric Snake have been too busy feasting on a buffet of fanservice to remain mad for lengthy.
Not often do sprawling tales wrap up as neatly as Metal Gear Solid’s, even when “neatly” right here means bursting on the seams and barely slapdash. Kojima didn’t have a decades-long grasp plan when he made Metal Gear for the MSX in 1987, however managed to B.S. his method into satisfying solutions for almost every little thing. It’s an bold, messy, and honest sendoff to Snake and the sequence. There’s actually nowhere else to go from right here.
Which brings us to the elephant within the room, dangling precariously from a Fulton balloon over this dialogue: Weapons of the Patriots is not the final Metal Gear Solid sport. Regardless of his protestations, Kojima had two extra Metal Gears in him: the moveable Peace Walker, a numbered entry in all however title, and the tragic MGS5. Each respect the brick wall he constructed on the finish of the timeline and tread water safely previously as an alternative of pushing ahead. Kojima determined to maneuver the sequence horizontally as an alternative, experimenting with tech and kind till Konami kicked him out.
Kojima’s precise remaining chapter, when it got here, was compromised and ignominious, a casualty of his ugly exit from Konami and a bitter observe on which to finish. Weapons of the Patriots was Kojima ending issues on his personal phrases; a bombastic epic with an enormous price range that bursts with supreme confidence and unfiltered honesty. It will be the final time he ever made a sport like this.
“Struggle Has Modified”
Weapons of the Patriots, like each mainline Metal Gear sport earlier than it, is structured like a linear, cinematic action-adventure story. It’s virtually quaint from a 2026 lens, when half the business runs on open worlds and the opposite on live-service menuslop, however this was Kojima’s M.O. all through the early half of his profession.
And but for one thing so dedicated to telling one steady story in agonizing element, MGS4 feels oddly episodic. Every of its 5 acts is virtually a distinct style. One minute you’re scooching throughout a battlefield, then subsequent you’re skulking by means of the streets of Jap Europe in a trenchcoat. Kojima drops us into warzones and weapons amenities throughout the globe, introduces new concepts, and strikes previous them simply as rapidly.
A much-hyped faction loyalty system stops mattering after Act 2, and the mechanic to govern enemy feelings isn’t actually an element till New Recreation Plus. There are a whopping 70 weapons obtainable for Snake which are largely superfluous, whereas the omnipresent Psyche meter rapidly fades into the background exterior of some perfectly-timed comedy. It’s like Kojima is cramming each single cockamamie “Metal Gear” concept he had left into the sport as if it have been his final likelihood, or so he hoped.
Kojima’s Hollywood aspirations run wild right here, and whereas some of the sloggier cinematics are a chore, I’d sit by means of a thousand torturous mission briefings to relive MGS4’s queasy, white-knuckle fusions of story and mechanics, just like the sicko mode cut up display motion setpieces and the tactile desperation of the microwave hallway.
The sport’s linearity is a big energy. We embody Outdated Snake by means of each second of his grueling ordeal. We wince with each damage and each brutal negging. Solid Snake was our stand-in from the second he infiltrated Outer Heaven, detours apart, and we really feel each second of the lengthy journey as he slugs it out with “Liquid” one final time. That sense of embodiment, being inside Snake, a component of him… you possibly can’t get that from a mission choose display. However Kojima’s subsequent and final video games in his Metal Gear Solid saga can be constructed with these impersonal menus in thoughts.
Pissed off with the PS3’s limitations for his grand scale imaginative and prescient, Kojima went small as an alternative. Additionally obtainable in Grasp Assortment Vol. 2, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker was initially constructed for the hand held Ps Moveable, so a sprawling linear opus was just about off the desk with out the posh of blu-ray discs and Cell processors. As a substitute, he designed for the hand held system’s strengths: quick, snackable stealth missions chosen from a menu, good for a practice trip or ready room.
Earlier Metal Gears relied on blockbuster storytelling to maintain you coming again, however Peace Walker leans on moreish base-building, optionally available challenges, and RPG methods borrowed from Monster Hunter to maintain you hooked. Seven years after Snake bluntslid throughout the Huge Shell, grinding was again in Metal Gear, and this time it was right here to remain.
Kojima is clearly fond of the outcomes. He considers Peace Walker the fifth mainline MGS sport, and due to rereleases it’s had much more endurance than the common PSP sport. He favored the method a lot that he made it his default going ahead: each MGS5 and the Dying Stranding video games run on the identical skeleton, embracing timers and stats and judging your efficiency in remoted missions chosen from a listing. At this price we’ll in all probability be chasing S-ranks in OD.
It really works fantastically for a handheld, and for a taciturn cipher like Sam Bridges, however it actually doesn’t swimsuit conventional Metal Gear Solid. MGS5 was free from the shackles of a 272p display, however even with the complete glory of the Fox Engine, the menu-driven mode of interplay retains us at arms size from Snake.
The story turns into one other guidelines merchandise, grinding by means of facet ops till an truly essential mission seems on the record. We’re watching from a extra omniscient take away as Snake sizes up the stats of future subordinates and navigates a tech tree. For a sequence that likes to mess instantly with the participant and collapse the area between them and the character, shedding that intimacy comes with a price. MGS4 made Snake’s struggling really feel like ours, and the sequence by no means approached that degree of pathos once more.
Being inside Outdated Snake’s head for dozens of hours is genuinely disagreeable at instances, to the purpose it makes the sport virtually laborious to revisit, and it’s one of a number of the reason why MGS4’s legacy is so quiet.
“Zero Turns into One”
It’s laborious for a sport to have an ongoing affect when no one can play it. Metal Gear Solid 4 has been unavailable for years, buried alive on {hardware} that Sony hasn’t offered for almost a decade. Numerous basic titles are trapped on historical tech, however it’s uncommon for a numbered entry in an enormous, triple A sequence.
The PS3’s Cell Processor was notoriously depressing to develop for, with weird structure far faraway from business requirements that made porting something off it a nightmare. It’s additionally why emulation, so very important to protecting commercially deserted video games alive, couldn’t save Outdated Snake both. Strides have been made not too long ago, however MGS4 stays a real bear to run exterior of its native {hardware}.
None of these technical woes have been insurmountable, and neither have been the tremendous particular Sony references or the licensing entanglements from MGS4’s frankly ludicrous product placement. It simply wanted a writer that cared sufficient to dedicate the assets to porting it and had the braveness to get Uniqlo, Apple, and Playboy again to the negotiating desk.
Konami was content material to let the sequence languish for a very long time because it explicitly deserted video video games for pachinko parlors. It solely as soon as actually wrestled with following MGS4 within the timeline, in Platinum’s audacious spinoff Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. In any other case, it didn’t matter to Konami if no one may purchase or play MGS4.
Fortunately, that’s modified. Konami’s prodigal return to video video games has gone nicely sufficient to this point, and now MGS4 is having fun with an immaculate rebirth, iPod and all. How will trendy avid gamers obtain it after so a few years within the wilderness?
Weapons of the Patriots is an aggressively unfriendly sport by trendy requirements, and the cutscenes are fully out of management. A typical Kojima criticism is that he’d slightly make motion pictures than video games, however it’s laborious to suppose of any movie that’s 9 hours lengthy, constructed largely out of static codec calls, and options prolonged scenes of individuals ingesting soda and smoking round little ladies whereas weeping about nanomachines and infectious illnesses. No matter MGS4 is, it’s not a film, and it’s actually not made for newcomers.
MGS4 isn’t spoken of in the identical breath as the primary three video games, and when it does come up it’s hardly ever for what it truly achieved. And since virtually no one’s been capable of play the sport for therefore lengthy, its fame as an uncomfortable cutscene parade is all that is still. Opinion calcifies when there’s nothing round to contradict it.
That’s to not say no one’s tried to select up what MGS4 put down. Resident Evil Requiem virtually looks like a tribute at instances, a final trip for a long-suffering hero who makes a pilgrimage again to the place his story began whereas dying from a sci-fi illness that makes him cough so much. By the top, Leon is upgrading his weapons with counterfeit Drebin Factors, dueling hand-to-hand together with his longtime rival, and dragging himself inch by agonizing inch by means of a high-tech hallway.
With out spoiling the place it lands, Requiem doesn’t have the nerve to exit on a limb like MGS4. Its tribute to Raccoon Metropolis despatched us on a nostalgic journey by means of a spot we’ve already walked by means of twice in HD, stopping far quick of the wobbly PSX vertices in MGS4’s homage to Shadow Moses, one other holy gaming area launched in 1998. The ending stops quick as nicely, a clear minimize affair that leaves a lot of room for additional adventures and worthwhile sequels.
Triple-A gaming didn’t go in an MGS4 path within the intervening years. Budgets are too massive and executives too demanding to permit a freakazoid like Kojima off the leash once more– except you’re the person himself, of course. However Kojima solely will get away with that as a result of he had the facility to depart the system that made MGS4 attainable. Everybody else remains to be answering to a spreadsheet and, understandably, gunshy about unfettered visionaries.
Fashionable gaming’s play-it-safe instincts may do wonders for MGS4’s fame. George Lucas and his Star Wars prequels suffered an analogous rap over time, dismissed because the bloated self-indulgent work of an auteur nobody may rein in. However a decade of focus-tested corpo Star Wars sequels has sparked a real re-evaluation of the much-maligned Episodes I, 2, and three, and now that it’s obtainable once more, MGS4 deserves the identical remedy. Each the prequels and MGS4 are messy, overstuffed, and infrequently embarrassing, however they’re by no means as soon as detached. Sincerity ages so much higher than warning.
In the end, everybody has to evaluate Metal Gear Solid 4 for themselves, to witness the grandiosity, endure the hour-plus uninterrupted cutscenes, and gaze hypnotically at Outdated Snake’s buttcheeks amidst a bombardment of jargon and lore. A minimum of now you’ll get the possibility to, and while you do lastly sit with Kojima’s wayward masterpiece, you may prefer it greater than you’d suppose.
Charlie “Moose” Lopresto graduated legislation college, handed the bar, and made a financially questionable determination to jot down about video games and flicks as an alternative. Contributing to IGN since 2021, he collects solo board video games and reworking robots.