Retronauts - 624: The Metal Gear Storyline, Part I

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

Jeremy Parish, Shane Bettenhausen, and Tomm Hulett inject their daily dose of nano machines and attempt to tap into the mind-bending matrix of unreality that is the Metal Gear saga storyline—a web so tangled we only manage to unravel the first half! Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week in Retronauts is OSP-only, on-site plot analysis. Welcome to Retronauts. I am your host this episode, Jeremy Parrish, and we have snuck our way into Outer Heaven to talk about the legacy, the history, and really, above all, the plot, the spaghetti plate of plot of the Metal Gear games. And with me here, I have two of the world's foremost Metal Gear experts, or at least people who really enjoy the series. Let's go in alphabetical order by first name. So that would be you, Shane. Welcome. back. It's been a while and I feel like we've done Metal Gear over the last 15 years a few times. So I woke up this morning a little stressed out like it was a test and I was going to be having to answer minutia. So I'm glad it's not a solo, I'm glad it's not a solo sneaking mission and that I have someone else here to help back me up. If you do it, start asking. Yeah, absolutely. No, no. It's, um, you know, I feel like this episode's going to be really kind of a softball episode. Like, I feel like this is just something we can BS about and extemporize about.

I didn't put together notes for this episode, which is something I would normally do, especially for an episode about something as Byzantine as the Metal Gear plot line. But I thought, you know what, Hideo Kojima always winged it. Why can't we wing it too? I do appreciate you. And so... Yeah, it's very cavalier. To have no notes for something that has like 10-hour explainer videos on YouTube.

So, yeah, I'm glad we're just going to make it up as we go. Those are just YouTube padding. And also, we have our ace in the hole here calling in from California as well. We have another recurring guest on the show. Although, have we been together on an episode recently anytime soon? I don't think we have. It's been a little bit. Anyway, I'm Tom Hewlett, everybody.

And this is just like one of my Japanese anime podcasts. That's true. More than you know. Well, and hopefully, Tom, you can... I don't know what that means. Hopefully you can fact check us because you're like a wealth of knowledge for all the minutiae of the Metal Gear saga. Oh, yeah. I do remember your old online handles, yes.

Probably, do you still know codec? If I ask you codec designations, you probably just know them. No, that gets, that got filtered out after MGS4. It was like, I don't know. I don't know if I need another codex. Just call them on the iPod, whatever. So we have talked about Metal Gear many times over the years on Retronauts. And you may go back to those.

episodes and enjoy them and explore them. But what we haven't really talked about is the actual storyline of Metal Gear and try to unravel it. And now that the Metal Gear saga is for all intents and purposes complete, although not really, because it just kind of fizzled out at the end there when Kojima left. But even though he didn't actually finish his final game in the series, I feel like it ultimately kind of arcs back around. So I feel like we can, you know, it's been almost 10 years since Metal Gear Solid 5 came out. That's a long time. I mean, we could do a Metal Gear Solid 5 podcast next year, although I don't think we've done four yet, have we?

I don't believe we have. So maybe we could do a double header. And just for it did just turn 16, so I think it is, you know, yeah, so there we go. Yep. It's been a while. So we've talked about the individual game. and things like that. But unless I am just totally blanking out,

what was the last Metal Gear podcast we did in San Francisco a couple of years ago? That was a ranking one with you and Cat, and it got pretty exciting. And it was very broad. We talked about the whole series and kind of the legacy of it. So, yeah, there was a place to leave off. And, like, you know, I think we've never approached it from this angle. And, you know, this series has a very piecemeal jumping all over the place, filling in the cracks chronology of release.

And, you know, it really bounces around. Yeah. Yeah. And if you look online for explanations of the Metal Gear Solid storyline, you will find references to an article that I wrote in EGM back when Metal Gear Solid 4 came out because I used to do like little plot deconstruction flowcharts for EGM in the back pages and did, you know, a few different series, Metal Gear, Resident Evil. just, you know, the more Baroque, the more interesting to tackle. So even that's out of date, but, you know, that is a little tiny piece of my legacy. It's one of the reasons I'm on Wikipedia, even though I don't have my own page. So, yeah, I feel, you know, a little fondness for it. And Metal Gear, you know, I think all of us are here in kind of the same boat. We have a lot of fondness for the series dating back all the way to the NES. Am I correct in thinking that?

Yeah, we think we all probably had a similar experience. And as American players, that meant having a fragmented, confusing exposure to the series as it went on. As one of the major games early on, we didn't get to play. So Metal Gear One for the NES was kind of this refreshing, interesting, neat, more adult, serious action game that had more story than most of those, top-down military action games for 8-bit Nintendo. So I remember as a child just thinking, oh, wow, this has more story. It's a little confusing, but it's cool that there's any story at all.

I actually didn't I actually didn't like the NES game That's one of the The few Konami games I was not a fan of I don't know why Is it just too inscrutable? Because it was kind of weird and difficult Tom was like

Kojima doesn't like this version So I don't He just knew I don't know who that is But I don't yeah No it's like the Worlds of Powerbook I didn't buy Which I super regret now

But yeah I got into it with MGS solid When he rewrote Not with Snakes for Vinge Surprisingly not Right. And then even though I liked Metal Gear, 8-bit Nintendo version, Snake's Revenge, which seemed like the sequel, I didn't think was nearly as good. And it didn't grab me. I didn't even buy it. I only rented it. And then, yeah, then I kind of forgot about the series for 10 years. Yeah. I, having gone back through the chronology that we received of NES releases in America

through my video series, NES works, it was kind of refreshing to go to, to get to Metal Gear, because really the only game that had even something close to the equivalent of that much story in it for NES at that point was Rambo, actually, weirdly enough. And that was, you know, based on a movie. So it was just kind of a summary of the film, basic, more or less. It took some liberties. But Metal Gear was the first game to really have, like, the narrative driving the events where you had to talk to people in order to unlock events where you had to go through certain steps, find certain people, acquire certain items, in kind of a narrative sequence. And really, in terms of console games,

it was pretty revolutionary, at least here in the U.S. at that point, because we didn't get things like Portopia or Dragon Quest, at least not until much later for Dragon Quest. So, you know, that was kind of a sort of big jump. off point for the American NES. And, you know, it married that to the storyline and the plot and the betrayals at the end and all of that to a game that was basically the legend of Zelda plus guns, which was, you know, like, that's kind of cool too, you know. It's Zelda, but instead of being fantasy trappings, it's, you know, sort of action movie, military settings, real world, modern era. So that gave it kind of a different flavor, you know, somewhere between Zelda,

and Rambo, I guess. To me, to me, it felt like Carri Warriors met Zelda, because I liked that, I liked that the Carri Warriors at the time. And, yeah, it felt very complicated. Surely not from the NES version. No, from the arcade. They also felt complicated. I remember they marketed it with like, oh, here's the huge arsenal of equipment you'll

be using, which at the time was, that alone was exciting. Like, oh, look at all these implements I will be using. And the number in the, you know, coverage in the magazines was like, oh, this is difficult. There are hard puzzles. There are tricky bosses. and, you know, a large map to explore. So, yeah, my friends and I all thought it was very cool.

And it felt adult, for whatever reason. Like, it was on, like, the Konami Ultra label. It felt kind of for teenagers and adults. So, yeah, and I hadn't seen the great escape at the time. But, like, you know, looking back on it now, a lot of it is kind of inspired by that era of film. And obviously, like, you know, other action movies and tropes of the 70s and 60s and 80s. There are killer robots, androids called Arnold in this game. The cover painting is stolen from a film cell of The Terminator.

So, you know, it's kind of wearing its inspirations on its sleeves, which so many games back then did, and that's totally fine. There's so much cagier about copyright these days. But back then, it was the Wild West. So we all know that's So we all know that Metal Gear started out on the MSX home computer in Japan and came here for NES the following year. And there were a lot of changes to the structure of the game setting, the flow of action, even like the final boss, which in Japan was, in fact, a killer mech called Metal Gear.

And here was a big computer that sat there while you blew it up, passively. So, you know, some changes were made and not necessarily for the better. But narratively, nothing really changed unless you read the American manual. So we can talk about this sidebar to the Metal Gear saga, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual Metal Gear story, which is that you are a recruit named Snake. Okay, cool. Working for Foxhound, the elite unit. Okay, that's cool. Reporting to Commander South, not to be mistaken for Colonel North,

Absolutely not. Definitely not. Trying to infiltrate a country run by a guy named Vernon Kataffi, who was a shepherd boy born into a family with like 20 sisters and that turned him deranged. Some weird choices made with that manual. And then you play the game. And aside from, you know, being a guy named Snake, none of that is relevant whatsoever to the game. Are you going to explain the Iran-Contra affair to our young listeners? That would be an entire podcast to itself. I do, we are kind of working on some podcasts that go into, you know, American history. Geopolitical, yeah, the geopolitical effects on video games of the 80s, you know. Yeah, I mean, we just did an episode on NARC, and we have an upcoming episode on the satanic panic of the 80s. So, you know, we're touching on the... I enjoyed Nadia's post-apocalyptic, uh,

kind of detention episode recently. Yes, yes, yep, yep, yeah, the Cold War. So, yeah, like, that's kind of following on from the sort of direction my videos have been taking on YouTube, which is to say, like, increasingly when you look at video games of that era, you have to understand the world that they were created in. So, yeah, Konami, or rather Ultra Games, attempted to tie Middle Gear into current events with the Iran-Contra affair and our escalating tensions with Libya at the time. But none of that is actually part of the game.

That was just like a weird window dressing that they put in the manual, which, you know, when they did that for games that didn't have any story, like Bayou Billy or even Top Gun, that made sense. It was fine. But this is a game that inherently is story-driven and character-driven, even though you never actually meet almost any of the other characters, it doesn't matter because that is kind of fundamental to the game. So it was a mis-aimed choice on the publisher's part.

But what the important thing is... But was it really? Because I'd say that did kind of draw me in, like at that time in late 80s, like mysterious military wrongdoings in Latin America did feel kind of ripped from the headlines. And I think I did kind of associate Metal Gear as instantly like Rambo was kind of like cool, violent, jingoistic military stuff. And, like, I think that patina was on Metal Gear.

And then if you think about it, like, 25 years later, Kojima often did return to these themes of, like, corrupt military influence, paramilitary groups, you know, armistrade. Like, I don't know. Like, in a way, I think Konami might have kind of been smart in trying to market it that way here. I mean, Kojima turned snake into Che Guevara eventually. Right. So, Konami was just ahead of the game. Yeah.

even if it wasn't actually But the Nias already had a game about Che Guevara This is true Literally called Che in Japan Yeah So yeah Called Guavara You're right

It was a bit of a bait and switch With the narrative of this game But I think it wasn't a wrong marketing choice For North America I guess I kind of get it But I mean That wasn't even a marketing choice Because it's not like that's how they sold the game

They sold the game by saying Look at all the cool weapons And iron gloves and stuff you can get And that was great That was just like you know, the stuff I'm talking about is when you open the manual and you read through this and kind of set yourself into the mindset of the game and then the actual game unfolds with totally different characters. You don't report to Commander South. You report to a guy who

says, hey, it's me, big boss. Jeremy, did you write the big boss? Did you later write a very strongly word of letter about Paula Abdul and Fred Ascare after they felt like Paula Abgoal and Fred Ascair? After you felt like they were mischaracterized in the manual for Supercastle? No, I thought that was hilarious. I love the goofy names like Konami gave to characters. What I'm saying is that in this one case, and this is really, we're not going to make it through the whole story line at this point. Because there's also the narrative changes they made to Snake's Revenge Manual. And quick question, at the end of the...

No, what I'm saying is that it was unnecessary to have that because the game fundamentally told a really interesting story that unfolds as you go through the adventure, which I think is stronger and more interesting than like, hey, here's our men. ad magazine version of Iran-Contra. You are correct. I know. Also, I was trying to remember if at the end of Metal Gear for NES, do you realize that the big boss that you just beat was not the real big boss? Or is that a thing that was revealed much later? I can't actually remember.

That was not part of the story. We'll come back to that at the end. It's been so long since I played the NES instead of the MSX version. I don't remember at all. No, the big, that's way too many twists. You're giving this much too much too much, much credit. for complexity. I mean, the fact that you get to the end of the game and the guy who's been giving you orders and guidance the entire time is like, oh, yeah, actually, I'm really the villain

and we brought you in here because we thought you were an incompetent sucker and that, you know, we could just do this false flag thing and you'd die. And that would be the end of it. But no, you were too good. So now I have to kill you myself. Like that was, I remember that. That was a lot of, that was a lot of story for an NES game. Where normally it was. like, there is a princess and you need to save her. Go find the gizmos that you need to save the princess the end. Right. Yeah. I do recall the big twist of the like, oh, you were a pawn and you have to beat your own boss at the end who you thought was your mentor. But then like, when I were reviewing it, I was like, I don't remember that being psych out. I'm not rid of that person. So that was a

retcon much later. That makes sense. Got it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I mean, even as of Metal Gear Solid 4, Big Boss was still big boss. Right. And there's a lot This was a lot of like, well, actually, this is what really happened in the middle of years. What happened? And we could talk about this, but it's the Star Wars prequel problem where the creator decided to dive into the backstory of the villain and accidentally created a character that he liked more and found more interesting than the original protagonist. So, yeah, so Big Boss got kind of Anakin Skywalkered. And so the saga actually ends up being more about him than about the original protagonist. I mean, there's like four or five movies with Luke Skywalker and them.

And then there's how many movies with Anakin Skywalker plus the Clone War series plus all that other stuff. Yeah, the parallels, as I was reviewing it, I did see some weird Star Wars Metal Gear parallels in terms of like, well, this character actually knew this person or was related to this person. or that's a clone of this and another clone of this and oh, Darth Sidious is actually there. You're like, yeah. But as, yeah, as Kojima developed Big Boss Moore and turned him into an actual character with motives and allegiances and sympathies and frustrations,

he kind of realized, whoa, that cackling guy, he fight at the end of the first Metal Gear game, that doesn't really make a lot of sense. So there's a lot of contortions that he started bending himself through to be able to justify the original game. instead of, you know, just doing a remake of the first game where you see more of like what's behind the curtain. So I don't know. There's a lot of, you know, it's like they had a nice little house, a little shack, and then they built a mansion around it.

And then they were like, ooh, that's shack. That's not a great place to walk into the house. So let's move the main entrance over here and just keep the shack there and never talk about it. True. And, you know, for an 8-bit game, there's, as you'd expect, there isn't a ton of characterization. Snake isn't exactly like, you know, this amazing protagonist, more of just kind of an avatar. He never talks. Right. He never talks. He's kind of an avatar. Oh, wait, no. He feel asleep. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, that one... And the truck have started to move. That's about it. It wasn't expected this time. And also, this game is fairly realistic and mundane, except for the robots and stuff and stuff. But, you know, some of the magical realism that we come to associate with this franchise later is not really present early on.

Yeah. I mean, there are, like, dancing scorpions in the desert and stuff like that. But, well, they don't dance. They just kind of spin in circles. animation for an Nintendo entertainment system They're like popping around I mean that would also

make up giant scorpions by your definition They're big ass scorpions They're big ass scorpions So the original Metal Gear, let's talk about the story briefly, and then maybe make it to Metal Gear Solid by the end of this episode.

The original Metal Gear takes place in a world not unlike our own, where you travel to... You said Latin America. I thought Outer Heaven was actually in Africa, or maybe... It's an island off the coast of... I think you might be right. Instead of being South America and maybe Africa, but it's not a real... It's not a real place.

No, no. Yeah, actually, no. South Africa, it's like Outer Heaven is kind of adjacent to South Africa. So I guess it's like an area that they just sort of carved out for themselves through, you know, one of the many military coups that rippled through various African nations in the latter half of the 20th century. So not unrealistic. At this point, we know nothing of the backstory that will come to know of things that happened 50 years before this, right?

None of that is, we don't, there's no, none of that is known now or written. That's all to be put in the future, right? Right. So the premise of Metal Gear is that you are a rookie, a special ops rookie, I guess, for whatever, whatever sense that makes, name Solid Snake. That's your code name. You don't get named Dave for a few other games. And you're actually not there to stop the enemies, the bad guys.

You're there to rescue another agent from your group, Greyfox, who went to investigate and figure out what was happening in Outer Heaven and went missing. So basically, it's a search and rescue operation. And everything sort of unfolds from there. You drop into the jungles of Outer Heaven, which is a jay. sent to South Africa, unless I'm mistaken, as just a little dude. Actually, there's like four dudes in the NES version. It shows like the airplane flying overhead and there's some music and then like four guys parachute down. But you never see them or hear from them. So I

don't know what that's all about. In the MSX version, you actually skip the whole jungle sequence, which is good and just swim into the fortress and sneak in. But what's consistent both ways in both games is that you have nothing with you. You are like a guy. parachuting with your uniform. You've got your battle dress uniform. And that's it. Maybe a backpack. I don't know.

But no weapons, no guns. You've got some cigarettes. That's it. And so everything you find and acquire and use, you have to acquire OSP on site procurement, which was not actually named until metal gear solid. But that's the premise is that you have to find your way through this jungle and desert and fortress complex and figure out where Gray Fox went.

and, you know, eventually what the hell is going on in Outer Heaven, which was, you know, supposed to be Grey Fox's job, but that dude just slept on the job. Terrible. That's a very good synopsis. And I like that you added the only start with cigarettes because I remember thinking that was really cool when I was a kid. Yeah, that's why it felt so adult to you, Shane.

Because it's a game of cigarettes. And you use a cigarette to solve a puzzle. That was neat. That's true. So there is a lot of puzzle solving involved in Metal Gear, but a lot of what happens is kind of relayed through your radio. I don't think it's called Kodak. It's just transceiver in this first game.

But basically you start by receiving a call from your mission commander, Big Boss, who forgets to tell you so many things. It's really weird. But he kind of gives you the mission briefing and says, go figure out what the hell is happening in outer heaven, even though he actually knows. and so you make your way in, and throughout the course of the game, he gives you various contacts, or other people give you contacts that you can reach out to at different radio frequencies, and it's kind of up to you to make connections with these people. You need to write down the frequencies and then call those people basically on every screen, you know, try to make a communication attempt, and sometimes they'll answer, sometimes they won't, sometimes you know, you know, Diane is in the bath and can't take the call.

Who's, is it Diane who, uh, will only talk to people who are of a certain rank because otherwise you're not classy enough? Or is that Jennifer? Anyway, there's Schneider, Jennifer, Diane, and, uh, someone else. Anyway, but yeah, you talk to all these people. They give you advice, different kinds of advice. Like Schneider is mostly about weapons. Jennifer kind of tells you about the layout of the fortress.

And Diane, I think, gives you just kind of general, like, pointers to, you know, your quest attempts. So you have to talk to these people in addition to reaching out to Big Boss and taking calls from Big Boss and sort of piece together the story and also your mission objectives and where you can find weapons and tools and weapons and guns and things like that. It felt really innovative for a console game in America at the time and very adult. Yeah. And, you know, I think I had played some PC adventure games that had similar things calling people on a. phone, but, and I'm sure from visual novels in Japan, this was kind of more of a thing, but yeah, it was very neat, and it definitely

added tons of story to the game. And now I'm wondering if it was, if Kojima was like a ham radio guy or something in the late 1970s. That would not surprise me. Because, you know, we're all too young for ham radio, but it was legitimately cool for a while to be on the CB and the ham radio.

You'd call, you'd sit down with your pet rock and your, your CB radio and talk to truckers. Is this really that different, retronauts? Oh, it's pretty simple, actually. Retronauts is basically ham radio for the 2020s. And it seemed, and again, compared to the other games at the time, it seemed like a ton of text. If you play it now, you can, you kind of see the strings and you're like, okay, well, they're going to say this for the next 10 screens.

But back then, it was like, it could be anything. I got to call everybody all the time. And back then, in a game, like, if there were NPCs, they only had one little line dialogue ever. It never changed. Yeah, true. Well, for the most part, you don't actually meet the NPCs. like I said earlier, Schneider and Jennifer and Diane, and until the very end, Big Boss, are all just voices on the radio. You contact them by Transceiver. They give you advice sometimes. But otherwise, the only characters you meet in person are Grey Fox, who you do eventually meet and rescue. Dr. Petrovich, who is the scientist who created Metal Gear, and also his daughter, whose name escapes me. But you have to rest. rescue her also.

Or is that in Metal Gear 2? I feel like that's two. Or maybe that's the MSX game. Yeah. Maybe I should have done some reading. Okay, see, see. MSX does have a hang glider.

There's a hang glider. You get to ride. And you also parachute from the third floor of a building, which I don't think would actually be that safe. I think you need a little more height to parachute. The Kidnapped Scientists is in Solid Snake. That's in Solid Snake, the Kidnep Scientist. No, Dr. Petrovich is in Metal Gear.

Okay, it's a different scientist in Solid Stick, I think you said. Yeah, I think the doctor in Metal Gear 2 is Dr. It's Dr. Madnar, isn't it? Madnar, yeah. Yeah. And then, like, in Metal Gear Solid 4, they turned him into one guy. He's Madnar Petrovich, and you rescue him again. Maybe that's why we're confused.

I believe you. Okay, yeah, his daughter, Ellen. That's right. I knew I knew I wasn't making that up. That's in the first one? Yeah, and the first one, you have to rescue his daughter. I think it's before he'll help you or something. I can't believe she doesn't show back up somewhere.

Oh, I'm sure she does. Now I'm going to look that at two. She's prime MGS4 or fodder. She should have just shown up and remember me. She's one of the beauty and the bee's squore, obviously. She's now, I'm writing that down. Drego Petrovich Madnar. So he is, uh, yep, they, they've, they combined it.

Okay. So she does not, Ellen does not show up again, though she does get mentioned a few times. When you meet Dr. Petrovich or Dr. Madnar, whatever, in Metal Gear 2, he mentions that she's a big fan of Solid Snake because one of your fans is like an ongoing meme. And that's part of the scene and the gene, I guess. And then in Metal Gear Solid 4, there is a codec conversation where Dr. Petrovich mentions that she got married. had kids. So there you go. She had a life, a life, she had exterior, you know, interiority and exteriority. She had an existence. So congratulations. So congratulations, Ellen. Anyway, yeah, you have to meet these three NPCs. That was a sidebar. So, yeah, those are the NPCs you actually meet in person. Otherwise, it's just a lot of generic soldiers that you rescue who say, thanks, and then run off. And if you rescue enough of them, then you get a rink up.

And if you kill any of them, you get a rink down and can't actually finish the game. Cool. Yeah. So aside from the bosses that will say like, hi, my name is this and I'm going to kill you before they die, that's pretty much it. But then the narrative sort of unfolds that things start to seem a little weird midway through the game. The quest objectives and mission information that you receive from Big Boss doesn't quite line up. And over time, it really starts to kind of wear on you.

You start getting bad information from him. At one point, he says, turn off your video game and stop playing. So Kojima did the meta-text thing early with that one. And so finally, eventually, you know, you're told, yes, the big villain of Outer Heaven, the guy running the whole show is Big Boss. And so once you blow up Metal Gear and or the computer, you have to face him. And he says, ah, you know, I thought you were just a sucker, but you're not. So I have to kill you. And then you kill him.

And then you write an elevator and escape. And Outer Heaven blows up. And that's the end of big boss. And none of the themes of identity are introduced, but the theme. of, you know, don't trust the establishment and military and control. Those are, those are said here pretty early. And, like, yeah, the whole kind of hyper-reality, is this real? Is this a simulation?

Yeah, that's interesting. That is injected so early in the franchise. And the Greyfox is your buddy. That's important later, too. Yep, yep. We don't know. Later, he becomes one of your fans. We don't know that he was a child soldier yet.

That's later, right? Okay. Yeah. I believe that is introduced in Metal Gear, too. Okay. You're right. Yeah. Where it turns out, even though Outer Heaven exploded and a nuclear fireball,

Big Boss is not dead. How? Outer Heaven's gone, but Big Boss lived somehow. I mean, we kind of knew that because we played Snake's Revenge, where he's a cyborg, and it's really stupid. But, no, like, canonically, he does live. He's, you know, kind of in bad shape after the encounter in Outer Heaven. but he has raised up another fortress called Zanzibarland,

which is kind of a ultimately going to be like a self-contained paradise for soldiers. So these are themes that would pop up, you know, later in the Big Boss saga. But it really is kind of explored here early in Metal Gear 2. And there's much, much more text in Metal Gear 2. And I've never finished this game. But, yeah, you get a lot more dialogue from people that you meet both in person. There are like some missions where people accompany you and, you know, you talk to them that way, as well as through more extensive codec dialogues. And the enemies you encounter, the villains, bosses, et cetera, have a lot more to say.

And a big boss drop some truth bombs on you. And you also have to fight Grey Fox because apparently Big Boss's message of a cool place for soldiers to live really resonated. with gray fox. So he was like, yeah, I've decided to forgive and forget. You captured me and made me wear gray clothes and stuck me in a warehouse. And I just sat there tied up for a long time. But let's be buns now. I'll be your ninja.

Also, Big Boss had built a new Metal Gear because that's what you do. You make a new Metal Gear. Yes. Metal Gear D, I believe, right? Yeah. Yes. Much bigger than the original Metal Gear. The original Metal Gear was kind of,

kind of dinky actually. But you see, you see Metal Gear D on the cover of Metal Gear Solid Two, or sorry, Metal Gear Two Solid Snake. And it's kind of a big, big honking thing. There's like helicopters flying by it. You don't actually fight it like that in the game, but it's like a kind of concept idea. Hey, here's what this thing can do. Go stop it. But there are a lot of interesting ideas woven throughout Metal Gear, you know, or Metal Gear 2, since there is so much more dialogue space. You get into things like the oil-eating bacteria. Oilix.

Isn't there a new energy source that's better than oil that is created by Big Boss? And that's why we're getting rid of the oil or something. Yeah, Oilix is supposed to, something about it generates energy? Something. I don't remember exactly what the story was with Oilix because it's kind of a sidebar to everything. It's sort of a MacGuffin to get you going. into the adventure. The real story there is Zanzibarland, which is, you know, it's a place where you do stuff

and you fight soldiers, but there's a lot of kids running around, just like little kids that, you know, obviously you don't fight those. I was going to say, it's the first time we touch on child soldiers, which the series gets back to, but you can't really, it's, you don't get the gravity of it because there's a cute little sprites that they're very cheeby, and they say wacky stuff. about Big Boss. So, I don't know. I didn't pick up on how serious it was supposed to be at the time.

So anyway, at the end of this one, you have to fight Grey Fox, you know, man-to-man, mono-a-man, fist-to-fist. And once you defeat him, then you fight Big Boss, but you have none of your weapons. So you have to improvise a weapon, again, OSP. And this time, it seems like Big Boss is well and truly dead. and this leads us to Metal Gear Solid where everything is much more elaborately explained

it's worth noting that the big... Does the Snake retire after the events of Solid's name? I think he retires after every game. He's like, I'm done. Just when I thought I was out. Yeah, no, he retires after Metal Gear 2 because it's pretty harrowing.

He saves the world from oil-eating bacteria and Metal Gear D and so forth. And also, I like that fight again his father figure was pretty rough. And it is not actually revealed in Metal Gear Solid or Metal Gear 2. That big boss is, in fact, Snake's father, so to speak, that is retconned into the game in Metal Gear Solid, which there's a lot of that. The retcons do a lot of heavy lifting in Metal Gear Solid.

I don't think it's a retcon is about to say revelation that Snake and his brother are genetic clones of Big Boss. Well, no, it is a redcon because he says, you know, when I fought my father, when I fought Big Boss, he dropped the truth on me that, you know, he's my genetic father, which doesn't actually happen in Metal Gear 2. So, like, that is just added in whole cloth. And Kojima is kind of a big fan of that of just, like, saying, yeah, I'm changing what's come before, and this is just how the continuity is now.

And I kind of respect that. Once upon a time that bothered me, but at this point, I feel like he, you know, I understand that he treats facts and narrative as pretty malleable. So he's just like, what's going to make the most interesting story at this moment in time? I didn't correct you when you said that Big Boss returned in Solid Snake because, spoiler alert, we later, five games later learned that was actually a different Big Boss in Solid Snake anyway. Well, is it, though, like, at what point does Venom Snake become Big Boss and Big Boss take back the mantle? I think... The Big Boss in Metal Gear is Venom Snake. Yes, but what about Middle Gear, too?

But the Big Boss talking to you is Big Boss. Right. He's playing... He's fooling... Okay, guys. He's trying to fool Cypher by being in Fox Sound, so that's the real Big Boss, I think. And Venom is playing the villain so he can do the bad stuff. And then Snake screws that up by killing Venom.

So then Big Boss has to then go be Big Boss, and that's what Metal Gear 2 is about. And then he's dead. Okay. Okay. So you kill Venom Snake in Metal Gear 1, and then you kill the actual big boss in Metal Gear 2. But he doesn't really die. So even though the boss you fight in Metal Gear 2 is like, hey, you really messed me up last time and now I'm pissed at you. He's lying.

He's committed to the vet. He's committed to the bit. He's playing it, but he's horribly burned at the event of Thalasnake, but not killed. Right. So he's kind of doing the thing that Ocelot did with the hand, where it seemed like he was possessed. But it was actually just a bit. He was just making it up. Right.

But we won't learn about Ben Estique for a long time. So this is fine. Move forward. But that's so that, so to bring it back around to what you're saying, Jeremy, the hand thing is what really bothered me. Because Kojima gave us an explanation in part three with the sorrow. And it made enough sense. There was a great explanation there. And then in four, it was like...

Nanomachines and acting. But I think it is, obviously, moving to Metal Gear Solid was a giant retcon of what came before to set up this big story he had planned. But I think he does that with every game. He's like, this game's about jeans. So I'm going to write everything. Like, everything's always been about genes. And this game is about AI.

I'm going to write it all about like it's all about AI. And that's just how he approaches each game. Right. And I think as he goes forward, he actually kind of enjoys undoing and unraveling and reworking what he had done before in a way. Right. That son of a bitch. It keeps us on our toes.

And the stakes are getting increasingly more like, you know, kind of over the top and, you know, less, less realistic as we get to Metal Gear Solid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, once we hit Middle Gear Solid 4, it's just ridiculous. And I kind of feel like the later games dial it back a bit. Like you get to Peacewalker and it's, you know, the technology is totally out of sync for the time period. and, you know, there is the whole AI thing, but it just feels more grounded than just the wackiness that was happening in Metal Gear Solid 4.

Metal Gear Solid 4, it really seemed like, maybe we should say this for the Metal Gear Solid 4th podcast, but it really seemed like he was just like, I'm tired of this, I'm, I just want to be done with it. Let's just put together a bunch of cutscenes and say everything was nanomachines. I'm done. I think he's getting increasingly more adventurous and unafraid. Meligersault, one, two, three, and four. Although three, he reined it in and decided to tell a more, you know, complete, traditional story. That is, you know, I think many people's favorite now. But, yeah, I think that's why that was so good.

I think one, two, and four are all very daring and different and, you know, foundational in the kind of like what a creator can do with narrative in a action game. Yeah, I would say one and three, I would say one and three actually have pretty buttoned down narratives. Like they don't feel like they're so outlandish. They feel much more about, you know, like, here is a character fighting through circumstances that he doesn't really understand. They're bigger than him. But he's doing his best. And there's some weird stuff happening. But it's not so ludicrous that at some point you're just like, hang on.

What is this? No, but I think the villain, like the roster of villains is very over the top and fun and memorable and more like an anime. Oh, sure, sure. More anime influenced in a way. I think that kind of turned the time. I think that brought a lot of people into the series was that, because the previous games didn't really have that, you know?

Yeah, I mean, Metal Gear 2 had some of that, but not a lot. And also, who played Metal Gear 2? Because it was released for the MSX in 1990. Like, who even owned an MSX in 1990? It was only released in Japan, and

it was for a platform that was dying. So what a weird choice. And the audio visual appeal of Metal Gear saw it was huge. I was at E3 when it was revealed with that CG video. And as a fan of that first Metal Gear, I was like, whoa, that's shocking that that's coming back and it looks so cool and weird. I

can't wait to learn more about that game. It was instantly, incredibly exciting and kind of surprising to see that game being made. The reason I even gave the series a chance after not liking the original was reading about the they described the

interrogation that the first Fox die attack with the DARPA chief. in EGM. But, you know, they were like, you're talking to this guy. He has a heart attack. And it's all in the dual shock. You feel it. And I was like, this is the craziest gameplay story fusion I've ever heard of. I have to play this game. And I pre-ordered the game and the dual shock that, like that afternoon. And then, you know, eventually fell in love with it. Yeah, I played the demo on OPM, the demo disc before the game came out. And it was, you know, what you described. But what really got me was the fact that once you get into the hangar,

or after you get through the sort of water docks, I guess, the docks, yes, and take the elevator up and get inside the building, I was like, wow, this really feels like a 3D realization of Metal Gear. Like you're sneaking around, there's these tanks all lined up, you're crawling under them, you're avoiding soldiers, like this is really, like this takes me back to the NES, but realized in such an amazing way. Yeah. And the interface is kind of, you know, this wonderful evolution of the interface of the original Metal Gear. And yeah, I imported this game for PS1 when it came out and played through it with my Japanese diction. To get that two-week jump on on everyone. I couldn't wait. I was so excited. And then I bought the American version. But yeah, I loved this game from the very beginning and like played the hell out of it and just thought it was like, you know, so much better than I had expected it to be. Because I was excited. But like, it kind of like, it kind of like, punched above its weight, I felt, and was instantly this kind of, like, you know, a revolutionary title from its presentation and the story, because like the story was more interesting. The characters were cool. I liked Merrill. I liked Odecon. I liked Liquid Snake. And, yeah, and like Solid Snake was still a bit of a cipher, but the world and the other characters were so interesting that, yeah, I instantly thought this was a huge

level up for the franchise. I mean, the thing that really pulled me into Metal Gear Solid, aside from the demo disc for OPM, was the fact that when you sit down with the game, there's this pretty chunky manual for it. There's a lot of information about the characters, and like it tells you some stuff about Big Boss, and you're like, oh, that's interesting. It makes references to Zanzibarland, which at the time, I had no idea what that was all about. But it gave the sense of like, hey, here's backstory, here are characters, here's what it's all about. But then you sit down with the game and instead of like jumping straight into the game, you can actually go through mission briefings and there's like half an hour of backstory. And it's

pretty much just told, you know, like a guy sitting in a cell and his portrait is, you know, his mouth is moving and sometimes his expression changes. But it's all very interesting and kind of like sets up this really hard-boiled sort of military action story where the The protagonist is capable and committed, but also dragged into it somewhat unwillingly. And that's a really interesting dynamic. It does a good job of using that space to introduce some of the players and also some of the plot elements that would come up, like Naomi's peptide injection and things like that. If you sit down and watch those sort of mission briefing videos, those little clips, you get a lot of context. and substance for the actual story.

And it's not mandatory. And, you know, fortunately, Kojima would move more toward that style of storytelling in the later games, as opposed to the plot dumps that he like to do to kind of, like, really bogged down the end game into this long drag-out, dragged out. I don't even know. Are you talking about the four-hour-long ending of M.J.S.

I mean, all of the games are like that. Metal Gear Solid 1 is guilty of. I'll say, I remember, you go and you take on Metal Gear, and from that point, it's mostly liquid snake standing around and saying, let me tell you about Les en Fort Terrib, the son's a big boss. And just goes on and on and on. There's a time and place for a soliloquy, but there's also something to be said for kind of sifting through data and kind of feeling like a researcher. I do remember, like, oh, this is looking about the information on the different Foxxite members and stuff. And, like, yeah, the fact that it felt kind of more, yeah, like more real in the way that it was being presented than just a cinematic, that's true. It gave it a real sense of world, like, even though, like, you know, it's a world not unlike our own, right?

But this really filled out, like, these are these people in these organizations and here's why you care. And then in the game, they were just interacting with each other. But you could, you kind of figure out why and get the context on your own. Yeah, there's a lot more conversation that happens in person in Metal Gear, solid versus, especially the original Metal Gear, where almost all text is relayed through the transceiver. A lot of important plot and mission guidance is given through the codec, and a lot of those are, you know, kind of mandatory calls that you can't really avoid.

But, yeah, a lot of the story is told out through just cutscenes where Snake and some other person are talking, and it's usually while they're dying. They're like bleeding out and telling you, you know, their life story for 20s, minutes. Like, that's not how I want to go out. Personally, I would like to use my last minutes on Earth in a different way. But, you know, I'm not psychomantis who can say. But that was so cool. That made it so cool. And I'd say, like, you know, interacting with the codec is more entertaining and fun than it was ever previously with Transceiver, because now you have voices and you have little portraits. And yeah, I definitely have fond memories of spending time with the

codec in MDS one. Yeah, when the codec kind of, when it sort of plays against, um, it's its presentation, which seems very sort of stayed and simple. And you get like these little moments like Oticon, like leering into the camera and saying, snake, look out. It really like, it just kind of, it adds a little something. It makes it seem much more human. But, but a great thing about the codec is that there's so many people you can call in basically every room of the fortress of the game. And they'll tell you something. And again, it's kind of like in the original Metal Gear, but even better realized. So you have Naomi, who's going to tell you about kind of mission parameters and science-y stuff. You have Mei Ling who's going to give you moral

support and advice and read, you know, aphorisms to you. You have Master Miller, quote, unquote, who's going to tell you about the weapons you pick up. So anytime you get a new weapon, he's going to be like, Snake, let me tell you about this cool thing that you just got. And the history of this weapon in real world military applications. Also, be sure to take a rest after you eat. You don't want to get too low-gee. So there's just a lot of extra supplemental content that doesn't just build on the story.

It also builds on the world. It shows a lot of it is Kojima's really kind of a military nut and did a lot of research. He got a technical military advisor involved in this game. And he was like, I'm going to use all my notes in this game and share them with people. But it's framed in a way that makes it relevant to the adventure. And, you know, you can even call your mission commander, Colonel Campbell, and get advice.

There are other kind of characters that show up sort of temporarily, like Merrill. Maybe I'll call Decoy Octopus, see what's going on. Yeah, exactly. So you have a lot of sort of temporary connections and things like that. And all of it just enriches the game. All of it makes the world feel more real. and also gives you more context for some of the messages

that the game is about. You do actually learn about, you know, real world consequences of the end of the Cold War and materials unaccounted for and so on and so forth. If you ever wanted to know about Muff,

metal yourself is your game. Or the start treaties. There's some history. There's a full motion video. It begins here. And like, it's heavy. It's doing things that are daring

and more, the more, most adult, the franchise is ever felt, you know. Yeah. Yeah, and I think a lot of that is due to the localization by Jeremy Blaustein. I know Kojima was not a fan of that. I don't know if it was a personal thing with Jeremy or if it was just the liberties that Jeremy took with the text to make it feel more like natural English. But I would say that's the best Metal Gear localization has ever been, just because it does feel like there's a lot of slaying being tossed around that feels natural. There's a lot

of just, you know, the construction of the language, the euphemisms, and the sort of the mix of casual and formal. It's, it just feels fluid and natural. And the voice acting, of course, really sells it too. The way that, like, Snake and Oticon, just like the way they're directed in their relationship, it feels very real and American and good, yeah. You know, going back to Star Wars analogies, Harrison Ford Famer. pushed back on a lot of dialogue in the original Star Wars. He would just say, George, people can't say that. You can't talk like that. You can write this, but you can't say it. Yeah. Exactly. And I feel like Kojima after Metal Gear Solid got big enough that, you know, it was the Anne Rice, J.K. Rowling effect. He just didn't, he was big enough that he could say, I don't want to be edited. And, you know, speaking as a writer, every writer needs a good editor. The better your editor, the better your writing will be. And it's kind of a shame that that was lost in the subsequent Metal Gear games.

But, you know, for Metal Gear Solid, it really does, like, it just, it all works. It all just feels so good. And it's a game that really, you know, kind of getting away from the narrative even, I would say the technical limitations and the resulting abstraction of the graphics helps sell the game as well, sell the story. Like, it's okay that it feels a little ridiculous in places, because, the characters are all kind of puppets. They don't have real faces. If you want to see their real faces, you look at the codec and you see hand-drawn versions

of the characters. But you don't have, you know, 3D models with animated faces. It's just kind of like puppet movements and shadows. And I feel like that helps sell the ridiculousness of Metal Gear in a really important way that, again, is lost with the better technology. like you move to more realism and you get things like Metal Gear Solid 4 and you know

a submarine that has Mount Everett or not Um Pffan Everest You're talking about Mount Snake Moore? Yes. It has got it's got like a snake version of Mount Rushmore on it on it.

I forgot about that. Yeah, no. How can you forget? How can you forget? Like that doesn't work in Metal Gear Solid 4. I think it might have worked in Metal Gear Solid 1 just because the dialogue and the animation and the graphics still felt kind of comic bookish. And that sort of like zany weirdness works better in the context of a comic book. But you take away, you take away

that abstraction and you do get to something where you're kind of cringing as you watch the saga come to a conclusion in the weirdest possible way. Well, and it is interesting because there's a huge transition of visuals from, you know, Metal Gear to Solid Snake, less so between those two, but a huge one between, obviously, to Metal Gear Solid, and then, you know, we're going with Sons of Liberty and then to much more photorealism after that. And I do feel like MGS and MGS 2 have very unique looks that kind of set them apart and make them be their own interesting, weird thing that's very memorable visually and of a piece, you know? And Meligerson, most of all, almost. Yeah, and, like, playing something like, you know, the remakes of this game, you do lose a bit of that original visual cohesiveness. Yeah, and it was a big point. At the time, everyone else was using CG for their cutscenes, and Kojima made a point that he was going to use in-game, which, which, again, he made sure the graphics were really cool, but that does also make it, like, like Shane just said.

I think it holds up better. Yeah. Because you know what MGS looks like, and all of MGS1 looks like that. Right. Well, then we cut away to this weird cutscene, the next. looks dated. Yeah. And the reduced color palette, it all looks really interesting and unique.

Yeah. Was this the first video game to incorporate color grading? I feel like we've had this conversation before. But yeah, cinematic color grading was not really a thing you saw in games. And then, you know, at the time, it was Unreal Engine. It was like, how many shades of light can we put in this one quarter? We can get yellow and purple and green and blue and different shades of red? Cool.

Whereas Metal Gear Solid is very much like, here is gray and green and black. And that's more or less the color palette throughout most of the game. And I do remember... Like when you see red, it's like lights or something dangerous or something, a weapon. Yeah. Yeah, like Ninja's Eye or something. But like, I do remember at the end of this game being surprised when it kind of went where it went with the clones, with, you know, the Osloat cutting off the arm and putting it on his arm and being like, oh, it went there.

this game is now kind of insane, and I'm on board for the ride wherever we're going to go. But I could think if there are people who are more in like the military serious aspect, it would be like, it's gone too far. It's jumped the shark at the climax of this game. I don't know. The First Metal Gear, solid, I don't feel like it jumps the shark. It has a really fuzzy understanding of how genetic science works. But I don't feel like it ever jumps the shark.

And, you know, Ocelot's final phone call as the Coda, I feel like that's a great. hook. So if you were starting to be like, oh, what the hell? Why are these dudes riding off together in a snowmobile? Like, what's going on? This is so, so out of keeping with the rest of the tone of the story. But then it goes back into, hey, here's me making a phone call to the guy who's behind all of this, the ultimate snake. The president. The president. Mr. President. Yeah. Bum. Yeah. It was so good. It was a great hook. They didn't really. follow up well on that. And then, you know, to go where we go next,

which is not any of what you'd expect from the ending of this, really, you know, a real bait and switch. But, yeah, there's still a few things I want to say about the original Metal Gear Solid, because we're not going to make it all the way through this saga in one podcast. Let's just admit it. First Who doesn't love a series? Everyone loves a series.

Everyone, I mean, you know, it's, we're taking it on the fly just like Kojima. Metal Gear Solid 5 had to be two games, so why not this podcast? So first of all, this is the first Metal Gear game that is a remake of an existing Metal Gear game. And that would become kind of a thing for a while. It's like reframing the events and the actions and mechanics and basically beats of a previous game, but doing it in a way that, you know, adds new context to it, tells a new story, furthers the saga, which is, I don't know, by the end of Metal Gear Solid 2, I was kind of feeling like, hey, it would be nice to actually play a new game with this as metal gear, as opposed

to Metal Gear 2 for the third time. But I feel like it works with Metal Gear Solid because, one, so few people play Metal Gear 2, but also, like you say, Shane, the visual leap from Metal Gear 2 to Metal Gear Solid really creates a different experience. And on top of that, Metal Gear 1 is maybe the most sophisticated 8-bit game that anyone ever made. It's so advanced. It's so beyond its time. Like, it's a 1990 game. You look at what was happening on other consoles at the time in 1990. I mean, even on computers, like in the action space, you had Prince of Persian, which was really cool, but pretty shallow. And you had this game, which predates, you know, the Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past, which predates, you know, the Final Fantasy 16-bit games and the Dragon Quest 16-bit games and so on and so forth, Fantasy Star 3.

It's really kind of mind-blowing just how sophisticated the design of Middle Year 2 was. So just taking that framework and making it cooler and more immersive in 3D was great. but yeah there did get to be kind of like this sort of repetition hey I've already done this yeah I've already fought a hindy yes okay it's it I know how this goes but that was this was kind of you know like the beginning of that that trend I guess I don't think it felt like a derivative work to me at the time because I hadn't played Solid Snake and it was

although it was similar in its approach to the original military was unique enough especially with the presentation and then I think all the other times he's gone back and remade Metal Gear Solid or directly referenced parts of Miller and Solid again again. It's very intentional. And that intentionality is kind of enjoyable to me. And like I think bring back Star Wars again, like I remember walking out of Forest Awakens back, that is literally a beat-for-beat remake of a New Hope, like straight up, right? It's like poetry. It rhymes. The other thing I want to say about Middle Gear Solid's plot is to actually describe it because we haven't really. We've just kind of talked about it.

But it begins very much like Metal Gear 1 in that you infiltrate an enemy fortress through the water. You swim up. You don't actually have to swim yourself. If you go into the water, you will die. And Shadow Moses is up in Alaska or something. It's an archipelago in Alaska, yes, where snakes don't belong. It's actually Shadow Moses Island as part of Fox Archipelago, if I recall correctly, the mission briefing at the beginning. It does begin with that really cool, like if you skip the mission briefings, you just get Colonel Campbell giving you sort of the mission overview as an overdub on top of, you know, scenes of action, of Snake making his infiltration through the miniature submarine.

But basically, a bunch of terrorists calling themselves the sons of big boss have taken over a military installation in Alaska and they are military, they are armed with nukes. And obviously, this is a point of concern because our newly minted friends in Russia are very close to Alaska and, you know, don't like the fact that there is a rogue military element occupying an American base with nuclear arms. So Snake needs to go in and put down the rebellion or figure out what to do about it as quickly as possible. So he's sneaking in to take Intel and possibly defuse the situation if possible. and he's much better armed this time. Well, not literally because, you know, he still only takes in cigarettes. But he has many more people guiding him from the start. He's got his mission commander, Roy Campbell, who was also in Metal Gear 2.

He's got Mailing, who is your philosopher and will save your game for you. He's got Master Miller, his former basically his sempai in the military, who taught him everything he knows about killing people real good with weapons. And finally, you have Dr. Naomi Campbell, who is the advising scientist and will give you recommendations on what to do about all the stuff that you find and, you know, salt treaties and things like that. Oh, yeah, there's also Natasha.

Don't forget Nastasha. Sorry, yeah. Nastasha, yes. She will tell you about salt true, too. now that I think about it. So that's a lot of people to talk to. And you can call them pretty much at any time, and you don't have to punch in their number.

Your codec now will save it. So you just go to that menu selection and talk to them, and they'll give you advice. Or they'll say, why are you calling me again? And sometimes they'll call you to say, hey, here's an important thing you need to know. So there's a lot more story that goes through, goes throughout this game.

The other thing you need to do is find some high-value hostages. who are trapped in Shadow Moses Island, including the Chief of DARPA, which is a military, you know, government division, and also arms tech, which is kind of like our Boeing, I guess. I don't know. They make a lot of weapons that blow things up real good. Both of them are being held captive, and that's real bad because they have the secrets that the sons of Big Boss need in order to do.

do terrible things with nuclear weapons. And the big twist is that the leader of the sons of big boss, actually, I guess they were calling themselves sons of big boss yet. They were calling themselves Foxhound. It was Snake's old unit. And they are being led by none other than Snake's twin brother. Liquid Snake. How curious. Do we know that at the beginning?

I think we know it's the man with the same designation as you, Snake. I think we don't learn that these liquid stakes your brother until the climactic finale. Yeah, yeah. Right. But, I mean, they look exactly alike. They have the same code name. They've got different haircuts. They've got different haircuts.

Very different personalities. One has a trench coat, trench coat, no shirt. That's true. Liquid is really over the top, like Shakespearean, like chewing up the scenery villain. Liquid is Roy Batty, basically. Yeah. Yeah. He literally is.

Yeah. And I think maybe it happens midgame. I think there demands. the beginning that they want, they want the corpse of big boss. Yes, that's correct. Right. There's so many details to keep track of. And doesn't Foxside declare a war on the United States at some point?

Like, I think so. Do they? They have a nuclear weapon. I don't know. They're threatening. I think they're threatening to use it. So Foxhound now consists entirely of the kind of guys who would have been a villain, a boss in the first

Metal Gear game and the second Metal Gear game. So it's, you know, the company you keep. But all of them have a part to play. The one boss that you never actually fight is decoy octopus. Because they all have animal style code names. There's sniper wolf. Vulcan Raven, Decoy octopus, Revolver Ocelot, Liquid Snake. Am I forgetting one?

Oh, yeah, Psycho Mantis. You never actually fight decoy octopus. And there's a plot twist there, my friends. But the rest of them, you. have to face off and each of them has a different gimmick to them and a different way of fighting them. It's a great set piece. And all of them give you information that you need to know in order to complete the game, which is really weird. Why would these people who are dying be offering you helpful advice? How curious, how strange. Yeah, very memorable approach

to those villains. And each of their encounters, you remember, even if the battles aren't all great, some are way better than others. Yeah, and they're kind of like stringing you through. this little thing, the storyline, bringing you, you know, slowly parsing out the information,

taking you deeper and deeper towards the final confrontation to lure you in. Yeah. And I don't know. It felt like maybe it was coincidental. Probably not. It may,

Snake talks about himself because he's very down on soldiers, right? He's this monster that's been created. And you see through all these other soldiers that were in his unit, like, oh, you kind of get that like,

oh, these guys are kind of monsters. You're kind of a monster. Look what? The military industrial complex does. I don't know. But it was just, thematically, it was a nice thing that was never directly stated.

I guess Psychomantus kind of says it. But, you know, it's just kind of a cool. It made it seem cool an adult. Yeah, I would say solid snake is to super soldiers, what blade is to vampires.

There you go. He's one of them, but he kills him. Yeah. And some of these are tragic. I always remember, like, the sniper wolf battle is specifically feeling really sad and tragic to me.

Like, I wish I had to, how to end it in that way. Yeah, and it's interesting because the narrative, the character is actually intrude into the gameplay at certain points, probably most memorably at the very end, where you're fighting Metal Gear, if you finally really having a Metal Gear battle. And Grey Fox, secretly a ninja now, a robot ninja, returns from the dead and attempts to take down Metal Gear. Gear and gets himself skewered, and he's blocking the line of sight of your bazooka. So you're trying to, like, fire a rocket into Metal Gear's cockpit and destroy it and Liquid Snake at the same time. But if you press the trigger, Snake just says, I can't do it. I can't do it.

So you can't actually finish the game because the game sort of takes over and prevents you from performing that action that's necessary to win. So that's actually kind of interesting. future, I think that either is kind of flip on the script in future games when you're kind of forced to pull the trigger or can, or later on, can leave character himself, pull the trigger.

Also, Gray Fox is the only character to truly understand the message of the boss. So there's a nice little tie in there about pulling triggers, but we don't know they yet. We're only on MGS. Can you explain that a little further? Are you talking about grounds,

not ground zeroes? I'm suggesting that soon In a couple games, there will be a mentor character, the boss, who delivers a, tries to deliver a message to Big Boss that should make the world better. And both Big Boss and Zero misunderstand it. But I think that Greyfox is the one character that somehow gets the message, does understand it, passes it on to a snake, which is why Snake is, solid Snake, which is why Solid Snake is able to break the pattern and defeat what the boss accidentally created. Right. The message being that we're not just tools of the government. Or anyone else. Or anyone else. Yes. There's a lot of great memorable dialogue in Metal Gear Solid. And it really stood out at the time because, again, like the original Metal Gear, console games just didn't do that. I mean, you had lots of RPGs. And you had action games that had, you know, cutscenes and stuff like that. But you didn't have messages like this. And so.

such extensive story disclosures woven throughout the entire game. Almost no action game had nearly as much story of this, even like a tenth the story of this. And even role-playing games at the time, at least a lot of the JRPGs, the translations weren't great. And often, like, the good writing would get lost in translation. So, yeah, the fact that this was well localized with the voice acting, you know, that was pretty new at the time.

It was actually quality voice acting. I think it really went a long way. Yeah. I don't think a lot of console games tried to. maybe a lot of games tried to deliver meaningful messages at the time. True. In 1998. Yeah, this had more of a point of view and a message and a lot, a lot of the story,

you know, just tons and tons of stuff for the genre. And, like, you know, I was the right age for it. I was in college and it's just like, I ate it up. You know, I was like, wow, games can be more. You know, games can deliver more. Even if it's a bit, you know, confusing at times or, you know, overstuffed, like, I'd rather have more than none at all. Yeah.

like, I was, I was like, Shane, I came up with RPGs, so if you think about FF7, which was a year earlier, and that has a big death in it that I guess is a spoiler again, but that's just like, here's the character that you care about, or you either care a ton about or care about enough, and the villain kills the character midgame, and that's impactful, and there's a cutscene for it. But then compare that to Metal Gear, where it's like, here's Cyber Ninja, he seemed like a crazy villain. He's actually Greyfox, who you have a relationship with, and then he's actually connected to Naomi. And he actually, and then he confesses he killed her parents, but she doesn't know. And then he dies. And then Naomi's like, is he cool? And you're like, I'm going to keep his secret. That's all packed into like 20 minutes of game. And you can remember that to F.7, it's like night and day. It's like list metal gear things. This is the new hotness. Right. And also, I think another element is because this game, with its 3D visual presentation and camera work and direction, that's all new. We hadn't really been seeing that in games. Like, a lot of my memories of this game are like, oh, actually it's like directed and they storyboarded this and thought about it and how it was being visual storytelling in the game.

Yeah, I would say probably the one game that kind of came closest to this before Metal Gear Solid came out was Resident Evil, which had a lot of in-game dialogue, even though it used pre-rendered backgrounds. the difference between the pre-rendered backgrounds and the Metal Gear Solid fixed backgrounds is not that different. It meant you couldn't have the first-person view for the binoculars or whatever, but it wasn't really that different. But, you know, Resident Evil didn't aspire to be anything more than a B-movie. Like, that was it. And it really did feel like there was some real thought put into Metal Gear Solid's messages. Yeah. You know, it spends a lot of time talking about disarmament and, you know, it spends a lot of time talking about disarmament.

the imperfections of that in the wake of the Cold War, and about biological warfare, about the question of, like, what is, you know, genetic conditioning good for? Is it a problem? Like, what are the issues with the military? Maybe America is actually a bad guy on the world stage, which I don't think Americans were necessarily ready to hear in 1998, but then, you know, fast forward a few years. And, oh, yeah, okay, I kind of see what he was saying there. Right. Just the fact that it tackled the themes of the military industrial complex at all in a mass market video game in 1998 is shocking. And I think, you know, when we get to MDS2, it pushes everything so much further and so much deeper, more intellectual territory. And I was, again, thrilled for that. I mean, obviously it pushed a lot of people too far. But if this was a daring thing to do, just to be this intellectual in a mass market video game. Yeah. And at the end of the game, you do get the comic book plot. twists where you discover that, yes, solid snake has been manipulated all the time by the

mission commander, well, not by the mission commander, but, you know, by some of his advisors and by the villains to basically be their stooge to help them accomplish their ends, just like Big Boss did in the original Metal Gear. The difference is that this time, the, uh, the scheming seems like it's being masterminded by Liquid Snake, the leader of Foxhound. But actually, he's just kind of the patsy for the real mastermind, which is Revolver Ossolod, which is an interesting twist because Revolver Ossolot is the first boss you fight. He seems like kind of, you know, a minor threat. He's like an old man with a revolver. Like, he's only so dangerous.

Yes, he's good at trick shooting in that one specific room he's in, and you have to be careful not to let the president of arms tech die during the battle. But really, he's just kind of a nuisance. But then he turns out to be not only, you know, the sort of the mastermind behind it all reporting directly to the president and behind this scheme. Like, why would the president even, you know, start a terrorist insurgency within an American military base that could destabilize the entire world? That's interesting. And so, Osloat, you know, just with that little conversation at the end, And the few times you see him sort of nursing his missing hand and advising Liquid Snake, oh, and also torturing you, you know, that really makes him this enigmatic character who seemed like kind of a nobody, but actually turns out to be deeply integral to the plot and really sort of kind of the force that instigates the entire Metal Gear Solid saga, even though it's ostensibly a big boss behind the scene. Yeah, I remember being kind of surprised and disappointed that he was the one who got to survive at the end and, you know, carry on this plot.

But then in MGS 2 and especially in MGS 3, his character is so much more interesting and fleshed out and lovable and kind of steals the show in MGS 3 in some ways that, yeah, it's great what Kojima does with him. So any final thoughts on the story of Metal Gear Solid 1 before we dive into the one that's going to bring this episode to an end? It was very good. I mean, it goes weird places and the games obviously get even better in some ways. But I was hooked from here. Like, this was enough story to carry me for the whole series because it was just so, so different and awesome. Shame.

I think I've said all, you could say, but I'm just one. Like, yeah, it's revolutionary. In many ways, I think my second favorite, perhaps, overall tight storyline in terms of, if I was going to recommend someone a Metal Gear Solid Story, this is one that is very easy to, easy to grasp and kind of captures everything that's great about the franchise. All right.

So we're only talking about canon Metal Gear games here, which is why we're not discussing Snake's Revenge. But that does bring us to our next game, which is Metal Gear Ghost Babel, or Middle Gear Solid for Game Boy. And before you say, hey, wait a minute, that game is not canon, it's totally incompatible with the story events of Metal Gear Solid. That's correct. You are correct. The story in Metal Gear Solid for Game Boy is not an actual event,

an actual story adventure that happened to Solid Snake. It's like a sort of like a fine search replace version of Metal Gear Solid's plot where a bunch of Foxhound terrorists have taken over a fortress and are armed with Metal Gear. This time the fortress is called Galwade. You might say it's like you fed an AI a prompt of Make Me a Metal Gear Solid game. And it's what the AI came up with. It does kind of seem like that.

But if you take the time to do the VR missions and complete them, which is a big ask, if you take the time to complete them all, you start to get these messages from someone who is kind of overseeing the VR missions. And at the very end, they call you Jack. And then when you play Metal Gear Solid 2, when the AI starts glitching, the kernel AI, you start getting little snippets of previous games. but also of various simulations. And that includes the mission to infiltrate Galwad, or how you pronounce it. So basically, Metal Gear Solid Ghost Babel is Rydin's VR training. It's one of his missions that he underwent to become the new snake, even though they also change his code name right away. I like that tangential kind of connection where it is.

kind of acknowledge, but not important, really, in the narrative of what really happens, you know. Yeah. And there's, there's even basis for that because, you know, Metal Gear Solid did have a spin-off called VR missions, which is, I guess, canonical, but nothing happens there aside from taking photographs of a giant meiling. But that's about it. You get to play as a ninja. Oh, that's true. That's true. Which is kind of like focus testing the controls for writing at the end of the next game. So really, that leads us into Metal Gear Solid 2, which in some respects is basically just a remake of Metal Gear Solid, which is a remake of Metal Gear 2. But it's very deliberate. And of course, there is a giant swerve because it doesn't seem like it's going to be that way at the beginning. And the game starts out as a pretty normal sequel to Metal Gear Solid, where you're controlling Snake, who is now a criminal because, you're, you know,

you know, he says, hey, Metal Gear is bad. Me and Oda Khan are going to blow up all the Metal Gear's. And the governments of the world don't like that. It's set four years after the events of Metal Gear Solid. It's kind of like keeping up in real time in a bit with where we are. It's not like going way back in the past or way into the future. Right. So the big threat, it seems, in Metal Gear Solid 2 is that plans and schematics for the Metal Gear Mech

are going to be released into the world, you know, sold to the highest bidders, unleashing the ability, we haven't really talked about what Metal Gear is, but basically it's a walking nuclear battle tank. Okay, but what does that mean? It means it is a mobile weapon capable of launching nuclear strikes from any place in the world. So it really kind of negates the entire concept of military security. Because if a military, you know, if a nuclear strike can arrive from anywhere, without warning, then that's kind of a problem for anyone who wants to not be exploded by

nuclear weapons. And it kind of destroys the concept of mutual assured destruction that existed and kept the Cold War in check and ultimately ended it. So, you know, Metal Gear, bad, very problematic, especially Metal Gear Rex from Metal Gear Solid, which was not just a walking nuclear battle tank, but launched its missiles as a rail weapon, which meant, that it couldn't even, like, you couldn't even detect the, uh, the ignition of a rocket launch because it, it treated the missiles as basically a, a bullet effectively. It's more like a slingshot, really. Um, so you don't get, you know, missile launch detection with satellites. So that's super dangerous. You can understand why Snake and Ossa, or, uh, Odecon are like,

hey, maybe it would be bad if, you know, people got a hold of this. Let's put a stop to it. Also, in classic MGS fashion, in, you know, there's a twist to come. And as it turns out, Metal Gear Ray as being the main adversary is a bit of a bait and switch in that, like, oh, wait, there's a much more dangerous Metal Gear being developed. And one Metal Gear Ray is nothing, none of your problems, really, you know. Although the idea behind Metal Gear Ray is that it's kind of a Metal Gear Rex killer. The idea is that it's supposed to hunt down and destroy Metal Gear Rex. So it's bad, but maybe not as bad as the previous Metal Gear's. It's less about, you know, nuclear strikes and more about nuclear deterrence.

And at the beginning, you are just trying to stop Metal Gear wrecks, or so you think. But then that whole mission, the tanker mission, goes awry. And, yeah. Well, I'll say this game is more, the previous games were a bit straightforward in the presentation, Whereas this is a bit of like a Russian nesting doll of like what's really going on, you know, what you think you're getting into isn't anything that you end up being in in Meliger Solid, too. And I think the way it was presented to gamers in the West and Japan was different, obviously, in terms of what we knew in terms of protagonist and storyline before we played this game. I mean, they didn't mention the existence of Riden in any way whatsoever in any American marketing. The Japanese version launched like a month later.

so by that point they were like Look, he's on the cover A very pretty guy He's so pretty, play as him But in case any restaurant's fans Wouldn't know more There is a MGS two episodes That we did four years ago

That's epic I think is like hours and hours long I remember that one So yeah It's important to note They kept it a secret Until you open the manual Right

And then it was like Hey you're gonna play As this other guy who's not snake Here's what he's about And it was cool in American To have only seen things From the first part of the game Which was also released

as a playable demo on a disc before the game came out. Yes, with Zona Vinders. Right. So that was like six months before the game came out. It was, I think, March or April. The game came out in October.

And an epic E3 trailer revealing things from that Tanker mission with the unbelievable graphics, incredible animation, just a depth of gameplay. Profound level of detail. Profound level of detail. And, you know,

shoot some ice cubes, why don't you? And just like graphics and animation of us. type you'd never seen in the console game before. And it turns out all of that is just a fakeout because that lasts about 90 minutes and then you never play a snake again. And I spent the entirety of Metal Gear Solid 2 waiting to take over to play Snake again. I was like, at some point he's going to come back in here and I'm going to play him and it's going to, it's all going to come together. But Jeremy, you can call it, you can call it Iroquois Pliskin on your Kodak and it's kind of like, stay right there with you.

He's, it's very similar. It's curious. Did you know that Iroquois means snake? And Pliskin might be referenced to escape from New York. Snakes Pliskin? How curious. Also, he doesn't really seem to know that much about American military mottos. It's the weirdest thing.

Anyway. We all love Riding, right? I love Riden. I'm fine with Riden, yeah. Riden has grown on us, I would say, collectively. At the time, we were all still kind of smarting from Jar Jar J.J.R. Binks. Not me. Have you met me?

I love. Not you, Shane. Not you, Shane. Senator Jar Jar Jar, tragic figure. I've seen your desk. I've seen your shrine. Senator Jar Jar Jar was manipulated by evil men in power to basically bring about the death of billions. It's all very tragic.

He was kind of a solid snake type figure there, a dupe being manipulated. I was fine with Ryden once Pliskin showed up that I didn't obviously I didn't know where he was going with any of it because none of us did. But I was like, okay. Even if you hated how he looked, how he spoke, and the fact that you weren't playing Snake, it was so fun to play his writing and it's different. You know, it gave the game a really different feel that, yeah, I always thought the haters were kind of misguided. Because, you know, even if you don't like him, he's fine. Yeah, I think it's Rose that people had more problems with if you get down to it.

Yeah, that was a, that was a swing and a miss. Yeah, the thing about Riden is that I felt like the gameplay in Metal Gear Solid 2 never quite came into its own. and never really coalesced around him until the very end, when you do become, you know, the future robot ninja. At the, like, throughout most of the game, it just feels like there's a lot of systems,

but it's very rarely interesting or challenging. Like, you can do a lot of stuff. But it just didn't feel quite as meaty as the original Metal Gear Solid, which is kind of weird, but for me, the issue... Like the boss battles, for example, just feel like, it just kind of feels like, like you're coasting through them. Well, they're fewer. I think some of them are really good. I think

BAMP is a good fight. But for me, the biggest issue facing MGS2 is that the big shell is kind of too samey in a way that outer heaven didn't feel and the way that, you know, shot on Moses didn't feel. But like, I think just because the visual presentation of Big Shell and the way it's laid out is very repetitive. It gets a little bit like, oh, I felt like I've been here from a long time. Yep. And I guess maybe that's thematically appropriate. But it does feel much more sterile compared to the tanker section where there's just so much happening.

It's so densely packed. And everything feels more spread out and more mechanical. And it's only in a few places where you start to see, you know, like the physics models and stuff. You know, like when you are kind of traversing through the water and swimming around, like there's a bunch of debris floating in the water. I remember that standing out as like, oh, yeah, this is all like the, you know, the physics stuff that we saw with the ice cubes and the watermelons and the tanker that hasn't really shown up anywhere else. Yeah, I agree. And I think because the moment-to-moment gameplay interversal isn't quite as thrilling as it could have been, the fact that as the last third of the game kind of lays on more cutscenes and more interesting, weird narrative stuff with a codec, that kind of keeps you going.

And for me, like, the narrative almost becomes, like, the main draw towards the end game as the gameplay and game design is, you know, a little falls into the background in MGS too. Yeah. So what happens at the end of the tanker is that Snake searches around. He starts to uncover information on the new Metal Gear project. It's shocking and scandalous. And then he's sort of caught in the act. The tanker sinks.

and Snake disappears forever, believed to be dead. So then, you know, the game jumps ahead, what, like a year, six months, something like that. And you play as Snake, a guy with a mask who infiltrates the military installation. Well, it's almost like the whole new game is starting again. Like that was all a prologue and now a solo insertion, sneaking mission. You're two hours into the game and the colonel is giving you instructions on how to do basic gameplay mechanics. Yeah. Yeah.

So it's very deliberate, but it also, at the time, you're like, what is happening here? He takes off his mask eventually and you realize that this snake is definitely not solid snake. He kind of looks, you know, more like liquid snake with this long, light hair. Kind of Bishonan snake. And, yes, he's given a new code name, Riden. And his mission is, I believe, to rescue the president from hostage, who is a hostage of terror? on an installation called the Big Shell, which is basically an environmental disaster mitigation project.

When the tanker went down in the Jamaica River in New York, they had to set up an environmental containment space. And so basically, the entire remainder of the game, aside from one very brief part at the end, takes place inside this spill containment space. So it makes sense that it's repetitive and samey because it's a hastily assembled, very functional space. It's a series of hexagons connected by corridors. It's just meant to contain an oil spill and convert it into safe water.

I don't know why they didn't use oilics. You'd have to ask Kojew. Or is it, is any of this what's really happening, Jeremy? That's a good question. Or is it perhaps the Solid Snake simulation? No, it's the selection for societal sanity. It's actually the selection for societal sanity. Spoiler alert.

S3 projects, different than S2 engine. Similar, but different. But different, yes. So, yes, the further you get into the game, the more arcane the story becomes. And. Question. When do we learn that solidness is the president? Do we know that yet?

Or is at the end of this game? No, it's before that. I mean, well, he presents himself as solid snake. He doesn't use the word solid does. No. No, he, the leader of the terrorist's dead cell calls himself Solid Snake, which really upsets Iroquois Pliskin for some reason. That man is not the real Solid Snake.

So there's just so many things that line up. Like, we know who Solid Snake is. And we know that Iroquois Pliskin looks a whole lot more like Solid Snake than this guy who looks kind of like heavily armed Doc Octopus. War changes you. So it does, it does, but maybe not that much. So, yeah, so there's all these things that don't line up. You meet, you know, a Cyborg Ninja who gives you advice and, you know, just go through all these beats that are very similar to the things that Solid Snake did. on Shadow Moses Island, you know, like getting a remote guided missile to take out a security

grid and things like that. But things just don't line up. And then you have this Iroquois Pliskin guy who seems to really, really upset your mission commander, the colonel, who seems a lot like Colonel Campbell. You just assume that's who it is, right? But, you know, he's kind of cagey when it comes to that man, because that man, for some reason, he doesn't seem to recognize him, even though he looks so much like Solid Snake. It's the weirdest thing. Well, it is kind of interesting that you're kind of going through the motions of the events of the previous game in a slightly half-hearted attempt on purpose, and this isn't the first time that he's got to rehashed the events of a previous Metal Gear game. Yeah.

Yes. But, you know, in the end, it does all turn out to be deletive. deliberate, and Iroquois Pliskin is sort of the, oh, my God, I just totally lost my metaphor. What's the expression for it? When he's revealed to be the... The fly in the ointment? Yes, the fly in the ointment. I was like the wheel on the grease. No, that's not right.

Yes, a snake in the grass. Yes, he's solid fly. No, yeah. So he's kind of messing things up. He's the school simulation. trying to hone right in into the ultimate super soldier just like Solid Snake by putting him through the same

series of events as Solid Snake. So this is basically a process to create like custom-made soldiers of fortune taking capable fighters and so on and so forth and transforming them through events. And a lot of this intensely cryptic backstory story is being revealed to Ryden and the player through Codex,

you know, increasingly convoluted codex towards end of the game. And that is where we get the reveal of the Patriots, which is kind of the first real, like the big secret show behind the events of Melodyear Solid saga. Right. Because Solidus is doing some of this in an attempt to destroy the Patriots. Right.

Which are described as like unknown entities pulling the strings from a multinational conglomerate forged in the past. And all of that's well and good, but the way it plays out at the end is kind of chaotic. It's quite chaotic. There's a whole lot of people stepping into say, like, no, no, no, I was the one pulling the strings. Like, you know, the double cross at the end of Metal Gear Solid was interesting. You thought Liquid Snake was the secret leader behind everything, but actually, it was Ocelot reporting to the president.

But there's like five people who come out to say, this was my MET scheme all along. True. And when some of them are like Patriot AI shadowy figures who you never really encounter, it's a little unsatisfying, but it kind of shows you that the canvas of this world is much different and weirder than you originally had thought. It was. Yeah, the AI stuff is one thing because at some point it becomes clear that, you know, things are not what they.

seem with the mission commander and the messages you get on Kodak. You know, it's really kind of taking that element of the original Metal Gear where Big Boss is saying, hey, no, mission's over. You're done now. Thanks for playing. You can go home, turn off your NES, turn off your MSX. It takes that to the next level where things start to get trippier and weirder. And I have to say, I played this through to the end at the first time, for the first time, late at night. So it felt really hallucinogenic. You know, the colonel starts calling you up and just tells you weird stuff like, oh, hey, let me tell you about the flying saucer that I saw. Or just

like spouting nonsensical strings of text. Vision mailed, you know, famously. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, we're actually, we're kind of seeing that now in the modern era, the year 2024, with, you know, quote unquote, AI, which is just, you know, just, you know, large language models that, you know, once you start training them on themselves, they break down. They, they cease to be able to create a convincing simulation of human thought and human communication because they're, you know, too far removed from the actual process of human thought. And like the, you know, I haven't played Metal Gear Solid 2 in a while, but thinking back at it, I'm like, oh, I bet that would really seem like,

you know, chat GPT breaking down at this point. Well, and the fact that the stated theme of this game was the word meme, which I don't know if I knew exactly what that meant when that was revealed. I think a lot of people, like, meme was not in the common parlance in 2001 in the way it is now. Seriously. I feel like I had seen it in Wired Magazine. Yeah, it just started. It was an old idea. I think it actually, doesn't it go back to Richard Dawkins in the 70s?

Not that I want to give that guy any credit. I think you're right. And like memetic and stuff. But like, yeah, it was all I'm going. to bring this into gaming and about the dissemination of information, about relativistic thought. Like, you know, it goes deep at the end of this game. And I was on board for it. A lot of people lost the thread. Thought it was just nonsense. But yeah, I think if you go back now, there's things about the internet that were really pretty profound for a video we have in them back there.

The idea of information, integrity, and like, what can you, what can you believe when you see it online? And, you know, even, we've talked about this before. But just the way Metal Gear Solid 2 was presented, especially to the American press, was kind of a case in point. Like, Kojima was basically saying, here's, you know, here's my message, and I have incorporated it into my marketing campaign. The previews that you have seen are misleading, or even deliberately false. Like, not only have I not shown you Riden, I've shown you snake in situations where he doesn't

actually, like, that are not actually snake-based events in the actual game. There are things that happen with Riden, but we changed out the character model. So now your expectations are totally different than what we're going to give you. Which, you know, that's a tough pill to swallow when you expect one thing. It's like, when you pick up a glass of something, you're like, oh, orange juice. And then it turns out to be coffee and your taste buds are just prepared for orange juice. And so the coffee is bitter and horrible. If you'd been expecting coffee, you'd be like, hmm, coffee.

But, you know, you're expecting orange juice and it's horrible. Your brain isn't ready for it. And that's kind of the way Metal Gear Solid 2 entered into the world, I think. Yeah. When I played the ending the first time, I remember it felt like he was explaining the magic trick, like you just said. But I was into it at the time. I thought like, oh, good on you, Kojima. You did this to us.

I didn't know how president it would be to work. Yeah. We played us like a damn fiddle. I didn't know how president it would be in the future, but it seemed like a fun trick at the time, so I wasn't too mad at it. Yeah, wow. You know, I feel like every 10 years, we have to kind of reevaluate, maybe every five years, we have to reevaluate Middle Gear Solid, too, because, you know, on its 10th anniversary,

I wrote a piece at OneUp.com talking about how, oh, yeah, it hoodwinked us, you know, the marketing shenanigans. That was pretty clever. But then, you know, a few years later, we started to really see the breakdown of reliable information and propaganda and disinformation online with Facebook and other social media. You know, that was like late teens, I would guess. And now, you know, five, seven years later, we're really seeing the unreliability and dangers of artificial intelligence in a way that's different than what science has predicted, you know, sci-fi. Like, it's not like Star Trek where

there's a, you know, the Terminator, where there's a giant computer brain that wants to destroy humankind, it's just this information is bad and breaking down and getting worse and destroying the integrity of online communication and the

reliability of, you know, this network, this global network that we rely on for our interactions with other people and to learn about the news. So, yeah, this game... It's interesting, the adversary at the end, the big ridiculous ending

of this game isn't actually solidness, it is these Patriots, and then you get the disc, and you find that they're all dead. And it's like, oh, and they're just AI? Like, that's kind of wild. I felt like the big conclusion, the end of the fist-cups of solidists was like, or fighting all those rays. It was all just kind of like ridiculous over the top. Didn't quite match what I thought was going to happen, given what came up to that. Yeah, at the end of this game, it's kind of ludicrous and insane. Yeah, I don't recommend playing this game on hard mode, because you have to fight 25 Metal Gear Rays, and

that's just a lot. It's too many. It's not actually that hard of battle, but it's very repetitive. Hey, we didn't let you fight Metal Gear in the first game, so here's 25. Enjoy. Yeah, in normal difficulty, you just

fight five, I think. And that's a lot, but it's not unreasonable. After that, it just kind of grinds. It drags. But, you know, maybe that's the idea. Maybe that's some clever thing that Kojima did. I don't know. In any case, yeah, there's a lot of interesting story here.

This kind of almost concludes Solid Snake's story. It sort of turns him into a secondary character in his own saga. The next game, there wouldn't even be a Solid Snake because it predates his life by however many years. But here, you know, it's almost like because Snake kicks so much ass and kept saving the world, Kojua decided, you know, it's not interesting to play as that guy anymore. Like, you know he's going to win the day. When we do get old snake, he's not exactly the same. No, he's not up to.

Yeah. Sometimes it's tough to go back, you know, and see what someone has become. Which is a bummer. I'm team solid snake. I disagree with Kojima, but whatever. Yeah, solid snake was great. He was a monster. Team naked snake.

Naked snake is kind of an idiot, actually. He's a dope. No, Solid Snake, I think, is a great character because, you know, Psycho Mantis was right. He is a monster. He's even worse than Psycho Mantis who, like, murdered children and slaughtered entire villages. But Solid Snake was created to be a weapon. Like, he was, you know, carefully cultivated from the genes of Big Boss. But he rejects that.

He fights against, you know, his programming and his quote-unquote death. destiny and tries to put things right. He, you know, joins a, an organization or creates an organization with Oticon dedicated to maintaining peace and preventing nuclear annihilation for the planet. He basically gives his life for good causes. And yes, he does kill, but, you know, that's kind of up to the player because the games do give you lots of non-lethal options for combat. It's kind of hard to pull that off in the first game. If middle, Solid, and definitely hard to pull that off in the early games. Like, you're just gunning down dudes left and right. But even that kind of works into the narrative. Like,

you kill so many dudes in Outer Heaven and Zanzibarland. But then with Metal Gear Solid, Snake, you know, he's looked back and questioned what his life is about and, you know, said, how many murders have I been responsible for? I don't necessarily want to be part of that. And that's when non-lethal options enter the picture. And it's hard to play that. way. But you do have the option. You do have the ability. Yeah. And I feel like snake you are definitely, you know, especially with the Saur and everything, it really kind of brings that to the forefront of like you don't have to kill all these people. And when you do kill all these people, it's not necessarily fun and you shouldn't be proud of it.

So any final thoughts on Metal Gear Solid 2 before we wrap up this episode, The Retronauts. I think in many ways it is, in my heart, story-wise, my favorite, just because it's so out there. It goes so far. it is such an affront to the player and such a defeating of your expectations but it's also a mess

and like it's it's hard to recommend to people unless you're like you kind of pre pre like you know of the right on its wavelength it's kind of a vibes game but yeah if you are that person it's very special but yeah I can see it's souring some people

on the franchise because it's just it's such a left turn yeah I think it's unfortunate that it was billed as like you've got to get a PS2 to play this game because I think it turned a lot of people off the series that probably would love three and five let's say but they were like

I don't even why did you make me buy this game like the first hour was great and now it's just this weird thing with this kid I don't know so it's unfortunate that that was what people expected even outside of the fan base because like Shane said it's it's worth playing if you're in the right spot to play it

and think about it. I was like he had this leeway because he had this huge success and like he did the thing. He did the daring thing. He didn't just, you know, do what was expected, give people what they wanted. He like drove into the ditch and took you with him. It's kind of like, I love Neil Young and the late 70s. He did the ditch trilogy and it's like, you're going with me and like half his fans jumped off the truck. Yeah. Okay. So I think Metal Gear Solid 2, another big problem with it is that the storytelling throughout is kind of bad in a lot of ways.

Like, the stuff around Riden is interesting. The stuff around Iroquois Pliskin is interesting. Like, the core plot stuff is interesting. But there's all these secondary characters, like Peter Stillman, who just, like, why are you telling me all of this? Why is it mandatory? This is painful to sit through. Like, I don't care. He never comes up again.

It's so irrelevant. It doesn't go anywhere. And this would be a thing. Now, you know, Metal Gear Solid 4 did that a lot, too, where Dennis Rodman kept telling you about the ladies unit. I can't remember their names. I need to read up on them. I'll see, we haven't mentioned Odecon and Emma. I mean, maybe it's best.

Oh, yeah, the whole weird, sibling thing. Let's forget about that. It's called the whole thing. Well, relevant, relevant, that parrot gets more of a series backstory than Peter Stillman. Like Peter Stilman is less relevant than Emma's parents. It's true. Yeah, but then, yeah, it's not even the Emma thing. It's the Otokane and his mom thing.

Oh, yeah. Or stepmom. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of revelations where it's just superfluous and also really, we didn't have this word back then, but cringy. Yes, it's very cringe. I remember playing this with my, the, the, the. woman I was dating at the time, like, replaying the game. And, you know, I was like, oh, this game was really cool. There's a lot of interesting stuff. And we kept getting to these

dialogue drops. And after like the third time, she was just like, I can't deal with this anymore. Please stop playing this. And, you know, she was like big into Kingdom Hearts. She could deal with cringy, corny crap. But Metal Gear Solid 2 was a bridge too far. She was like, please stop playing this. I don't want to see this anymore. Wow. Yeah. It's a lot. But I would say it's iconic.

You take those parts out and you have a really good, interesting game. But again, like I said, you know, it's the Anne Rice problem where you have one mega hit under your belt and suddenly you feel like no one can tell me what to do. I'm going to write everything. And it's going to be good. And it's not. I mean, the whole autour theory of cinema, you know, you're kind of. in or out, right, with an outdoor. And, like, gaming doesn't have a whole lot of that.

And Kojima obviously is put in that in that canon. And I think things, choices he makes like this that are uncompromising and maybe anti-commercial and maybe, you know, he can't be contained or edited and we get this unfiltered, you know, expression of what he wants. And I think we're better off for it than something that's watered and, you know, watered down, sanded, yeah, just sanded down, super corporatized. Like, and, you know, we'll see with the future of this franchise holds, if There are, and there had been games made since he left, but like, yeah, like, I think, again, that, that unique visionary perspective, worth and all awkward at times is more interesting. You know, I'm a huge David Lynch fan. And like, I'd rather have someone, yeah, like, do what they want to do, give you their vision, than just give you what they think you want.

I was actually about to bring up, is it episode five of Twin Peaks of the return? The one that's just, episode eight, okay. Are you ready? Are you talking about the, just pure abstraction? Yeah, that's episode eight. I thought maybe you were talking, I think there's another episode where the guy just sweeps the floor for eight minutes, which is also, you know, daring and amazing. I've seen that. The old man just sweeping that floor.

Yeah, I've seen it all of it. Yeah. But no, like, I want to see Kojima's episode eight is what I want to see. This is not it. And maybe we'll get that eventually because that's true. Like, yeah, like we've gotten close. There's moments. There's flashes of brilliance on that.

But yeah, I think he has it in him. And maybe one day. Well, any final thoughts on Metal Gear Solid 2 or the Metal Gear Solid 2 or the Metal Gear Solid 2 or the Metal Gear saga to that point before we break to reconvene another day. My final thought is I still want the game. I love what we've gotten, but I still want the game that was promised by the end of MGS1.

Because it set us all up for something that I don't think we've gotten it yet. But it would be cool to do it. And I don't think we can now, but it would be cool. The role of the president, I don't know, it was, yeah, not quite what I expected. I mean, I think the idea that the third snake clone was the president is inherently fraught with problems, because at no point did anyone stop and look at Solid Snake and think, you know, this guy looks so familiar.

Where have I seen him before? Oh, that's right. The news every night. Well, I mean, like Shane and I joked, I don't think Solid and Liquid looked that similar at the time. It was kind of a joke. Like, these guys are clones and none of them looked the same. Even in their key art, like even in the Shinkawa art, they don't exactly have the same face or any, you know, exactly.

They have pretty similar faces. It's similar, but similar. It's Shinkawa art, so it's interpretive. Yeah, that's true. It is interesting that we never quite got that, you know, the sequel we thought we would get. And, you know, MGS 3, I think, gave everybody what they wanted, but it wasn't, you know, it was a prequel, it wasn't there in a sequel. And then MGS 4 is totally not the sequel you wanted to MBS 1.

And then 5 again is another prequel and all the other ones are prequels. So, yeah, it's... Yeah. Which I guess is my last piece of trivia is when Kojima sat down and he started writing MGS 2. He did write Snake and Otokon follow Liquid Snake to the Middle East, which is where four picks up. So he did kind of return to that, but then he was like, what am I doing?

But war had changed so much. The world had changed so much games had changed so much. Yeah, and like, I do think MGS 4 is ripe for reappraisal, but yeah, it definitely is not on the same par as MGS 1, MGS2, MGS 3. All right. So that wraps it up for the first half of the Metal Gear Saga storyline. I don't want to drag this episode out anymore because it's almost 7 p.m. here and I'm hungry. So I'm going to let both of you gentlemen go. And like I said, we'll have to do this again sometime soon and wrap this up. So it's not one of those episodes where we record it. And then the follow-up comes two years later. Because who wants that? No one wants that. We want quick succession. That's what we want. Um, anyway. He's getting a remake. So, you know, we'll have it out before that.

We'll try to have that before that. We can sail everything. Before Delta, Redcons everything. Yeah. Exactly. All right. Thank you gentlemen for taking the time to join me. Uh, this has been Retronauts, a podcast about old video games and about the stories behind

them, or at least the stories they try to tell. Uh, you can find Retronauts. Uh, if you enjoy this episode, uh, pretty much anywhere you find podcasts. except on Spotify because they suck. You can also support us through Patreon because that's how we actually pay for this to happen. So check us out Patreon.com slash Retronauts. Subscribe for three bucks a month.

And you can listen to every episode early with no advertisements at a higher bit rate quality than on the public feeds. Five bucks a month. You get all kinds of cool extra bonus stuff like exclusive podcasts, exclusive podcasts, exclusive columns, Discord access, yada, yada, yada. It's an amazing value, maybe the best value in podcasts.

So I highly recommend it. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. That's my spiel. Shane, where can we find you on the internet these days? On some of those social media, you can find me at the Shane Watch sometimes. Are you on Blue Sky more these days? I need to be. I need to make the move.

Did they ever add animated gifts? Yes, just recently. Okay, then I'm going to start going there more. it's a little limited but it's still there thank you because yeah that was like oh come on jack you give me that many gifts man all right good to know see me there more

and jack was like no leave me alone what about you Tom I'm on the social networks as at hypnocrite yeah I'm straddling Twitter and blue sky like Shane but I'll try to blue sky up more

and you can find me on blue sky just blue sky as Jay Parrish at buski app or whatever the nomenclature is, I occasionally, like once every few weeks, post something on Twitter just because there's a lot more reach there. Well, see, the brand does exist there still, the retronauts brand. You have to do for the branding. I mean, for my own personal stuff, you know, 30,000 followers versus 4,000,

get more reach that way. But how many of those 30,000 people are still actually active on Twitter? I bet not a lot. Don't forget to plug your amazing books that you do. as well, Jeremy. Sure. I do all kinds of stuff through limited-run games,

including books. And also, I have my videos. Beautiful and large. You could subdue an attacker with them sometimes. You could. The SG-1000 book in particular, if you can't subdue them physically,

you could make them read it and make them fall asleep. It's a shame because no one cares about that book. No one's bought it. But it is by far the best book I've made, both in terms of the writing and the amount of information

and the layout. It's an amazing. book. I'm super proud of it. If you want to know more about the origins of Sega at home, you should check out SG-1000 Works because it's a phenomenal book. I can say that without reservation, without exaggeration. But otherwise, just listen for me here on Retronauts and on my YouTube channel, Jeremy Parrish. That's it. We'll be back again much sooner than a next Metal Gear sequel, because there won't be any more of those. So at least you have more retronauts to look forward to. We'll never stop talking about Metal Gear. We'll always find

excuses, so look forward to it. Bring the old, bring the new yesterday. It's there that I'll find inner peace, not warm, and dreams that I slip away. I'll find the joyless, Looking for way back in yesterday. So, yeah, I'm a big fan of Solid Snake. I think he was a character who was kind of done wrong by his own creator.

he doesn't quite qualify as a tragic figure, but kind of, almost. Kind of like Luke Skywalker. Yeah, no, I don't know. I feel like Luke Skywalker, his last Jedi arc, made perfect sense to me. But that could be a debate for a different time. But yeah, I actually was going to, uh-oh. If you Jeremy may have fallen to the portal. Yeah, I think he fell into the portal.

Oh, he may have fallen. I think the Patriots, the Patriots. got him. Maybe he was a patriot all along. When did we learn about the philosophers? Does that back introduce until, like, I was trying to remember. When does that even come up? So, at the end of, this is going to be fun for the editor to try to fit this into the episode.

At the end of two, we know the patriots are dead people. But we still think they're people. Right. And then he's like, hey, we're going to go back to the origins of it. And then he's like, so there's these philosophers. And that's when you're like, oh, this is the first time I'm hearing of this. And then they're just the guys with the money, right? Right.

That everyone's after. But then you find out. But the philosophers were specifically like former, the U.S., China, and Russia, which is it just, oh, Jeremy. Right. But then the Patriots are actually Naked Snake, Zero. Right. But we don't even find that out in three. So it is.

You guys are getting ahead of things. We decided that the philosophers got to you. It's true. I found their legacy. You literally go from the twist end of two being like, hey, there's these guys, but they're dead. And then coaching was like, maybe we're going to learn about them. Just kidding. But really, you are.

You're playing as one of them. That's it. Yeah. But you won't know until four. He probably didn't know it to four. That's true. Like I said, at the beginning, he was just making things up as he went along. He was free associating.