While making my slow exploration through the uncharted “Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,” I’ve also been watching “Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots” with my partner. The Metal Gear Solid games are subtitled “Tactical Espionage Action,” a title which betrays its political edge, stealth-action gameplay and its total pretension. The series is named for a ridiculous bipedal mechanical suit, designed after the rise of Mecha anime in the ’80s, one supposedly representing total military superiority because “it can launch a nuke from anywhere.” It’s also a series which has featured cyborg ninjas, a Russian commando who shoots bees out of his arms, a terrorist named Revolver “Shalashaska” Ocelot and a severed arm which, attached to said Revolver Ocelot, takes over his entire personality with that of the deceased.
My partner and I had played the two previous games together over the past year and loved them. The first game in the series was “too boring” to hold my partner’s interest (we never made it to the cyborg ninja), so we settled on rushing right into “Guns of the Patriots.” I’d been dreading “Guns of the Patriots” because when I played through the game for the first time in 2009, it wounded me deeply.
The fact about these Metal Gear Solid games is that part of their appeal is largely similar to that of The Fast and the Furious franchise. Ridiculous, outlandish action combined largely with character-focused stories, and the importance of “mythology” and “canon,” which becomes more and more important as the series goes on, even when things appear disconnected. Both series treat their characters with intense emotional investment, and give their actions grandiose romantic weight. Also, no matter how much of the most base, embarrassing, populist, regressive garbage winds up seeping into the DNA of these games, they only seem to attract more die-hard fans—more on that in a minute.
What makes “Guns of the Patriots” such a betrayal is that it intentionally seems to be about how disinterested the series auteur, Hideo Kojima, seems to be in these characters and their stories. Long-standing mysteries, character arcs and even the game’s own internal narrative are intentionally given dissatisfying conclusions after dissatisfying answers. Kojima has actually wanted to stop making Metal Gear Solid games since the first entry; the second game, “Sons of Liberty,” is largely a rejection of sequels as homogenous, formulaic attempts to recreate one’s own success. Yet where “Sons of Liberty” not only manages to make surprising critiques about storytelling and the world which fosters “The Franchise Machine,” Metal Gear Solid 4, perhaps intentionally, divorces itself of value, replacing intelligible critique with pseudo-philosophy and quality characters with banal, trite and offensive stereotypes.
“The Phantom Pain” marks the first time this series has come under fire for issues such as its portrayal of women, warzones, including child soldiers, and the supposed immaturity of its lead developer, Kojima, who finally seems to have been dismissed from his position at his parent company, Konami, after years of demonstrating his disdain for his own work. The primary target of criticism is a lead character, a sniper named Quiet, who is nearly nude throughout the game, with an absurd science fiction traumatic backstory, which Kojima promised would make critics of the character’s design “regret [their] words and deeds.” Kojima has made it harder for those of us who see value in Kojima Productions’ work, a studio now effectively shuttered by a company that would prefer to make slot machines.
What is so frustrating about this criticism isn’t that it’s wrong, but that it couldn’t come sooner; “Guns of the Patriots” is so offensive as to make “The Phantom Pain” feel like a huge step forward. The primary boss characters of “Guns of the Patriots” are a squad of superpowered robot suits referred to as the “Beauty and the Beast Unit,” so called because they also contain near-nude ladies who were traumatized into acting like monstrous war-beasts. It’s on the nose and offensive; a primary feature of these women is that defeating them in a certain way allows the player to “take their photos,” and they pose for the player like they’re shooting for Maxim. It’s gross, tasteless and is not even correlated to the story; the “Beauty and the Beast Unit” encounters feel like the game has to take a break to tell its story. When “Guns of the Patriots” came out, it was lauded for the two or three things it managed to do correctly and no criticism ever appeared. As that game’s opening line reads, “War has changed.” I feel like I’ll find more to say about “The Phantom Pain” as I come nearer to that conclusion.
