Retronauts - 662: The Metal Gear Storyline, Pt. II

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

Jeremy Parish, Shane Bettenhausen, and Tomm Hulett dial in their Codecs and resume their transmission about the story of the Metal Gear series from where it left off. Don't expect things to suddenly start making sense, though... 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 episode of Retronauts is brought to you by Acorns. This week in Retronauts, uh, sorry, we really kept you waiting this time. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts episode. I thought I put the notes up. Oh, damn it, I did it again. That's okay. I'm in charge here.

I can stall as long as I need to. I was about to be impressed. You just knew what number was it. It's 662. And this episode is a follow-up from episode 624. That's nearly four tens of episodes, and that's terrible. Lex Luthor is doing terrible things to our recording session. Yes, hi, I'm Jeremy Parrish.

And this week we are finally following up with our retrospective on the Metal Gear Saga storyline storyline storyline, trying to make sense of it, probably failing, but that's okay because fundamentally it fails to reconcile itself internally or does it. We're going to discuss that this week. And by we, I mean, our guests from last time. Please introduce yourselves, gentlemen. Let's start with you, Mr. Christmas Nights. This is Shane Fox Die Bettenhausen.

That's why I made up a nickname for myself. Are you going to cause the next pandemic? Maybe, or maybe I'm going to take down the AI Patriots. I'm not even sure. Wow. Yeah, man, actually, this... It's way more... It's presiding it, right?

I know. I'm, I was putting together the nose that I was like, wow, I totally forgot about the pandemic part. He got us again, pandemic, AI. There's probably, there's probably a guy in Phantom Pain that I forgot about who is like really advocating for raw milk. Anyway, who else is with us here? Also calling in from the sunny state of California, eh? This is Tom Hewlett. I'm here to hurt you more with facts.

quick interjection Jeremy RFK Jr. is kind of like a good like dead cell member or something like he's pretty yeah right yeah I mean when you when you learn about his brain worms you will be ashamed of your words and deeds well in his voice and everything he's like a coach his voice that's really good

he just needs a mask over his face and it'll sound it'll sound great I don't want to offend any RFK retronots patronauts patron voters so all I know is that the real Tom would never fight with a weapon like this all right so anyway when last we podcasted together we talked about the metal gear saga storyline in the chronological order of game releases and there is actually a sort of underlying logic

to why I did this which will become apparent at the end which is also the beginning bum bum yes it's the uroboros of video game narrative podcasts we're here to eat our own tail. That's a favorite holiday snack. Jeremy, and like thinking back to that first one, to me, it felt a little fractured and convoluted and, you know, kind of circuitous and all over the place. Just like the Metal Gear saga. Yeah, today, preparing for this one, trying to go through it chronologically or like, you know, release schedule-wise, it's, it's like, it's a bit piecemeal. It's, yeah, it's a lot.

Peacemeal Walker. That's my favorite Metal Gear sequel. So Tom did put a great question into the notes, which is, do we try to clean up some of the messiness of the first episode? And while my first instinct is to say, no, that's not Metal Gear at all. We just retcon it. He did bring up the great fact, the great point, that we kind of didn't mention some of the series' major characters who have a huge part to play throughout the saga. most notably Meryl and OdeCon. And so... We were very snake-focused.

There's a lot of snake to talk about that episode. There is. The supporting cast kind of fell by the wayside. And I feel like, you know, Merrill, I think, is given more importance in the overall scope by fans of the MGS-1. But I think, you know, Ode-Con is kind of a more important archetype who appears multiple times. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, Ode-Con is like, he is one of the memes who appears through genes. in every scene, if you will. He's the concept of OdeCon like a wishy-washy nerd who accidentally creates a world-ending Holocaust machine. He's, that's kind of a thing, a motif that recurs in the Metal Gear series, not just with Odecon.

And doesn't his relative, doesn't a forebearer show up in five? Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah. Yeah, the jeans. Yeah. His dad has a big part to play in the prequels because you've got to get those archetypes. The mineral, I'd say, is kind of a one and done, in a way. Well, kind of, but then there's like... Yes, and also there's like hours and hours of her falling in love with Johnny Sasaki throughout Middle Gear Solid 4.

She's like, you know, you shit your pants, but you're still my kind of guy. So, you know, it takes all kinds. But also, Merrill is sort of like a recurring motif in some of Kojima's other work as well, not just in the Metal Gear series, but also in Police Knotts, I believe. So actually, that's kind of where she came from, isn't it? Police Knott's was before Metal Gear Solid, correct? Yeah. Yeah, her all squad and four is from Police Knots. Yeah, so there you go.

So it is worth talking about these characters. And we really didn't talk about the secondary characters that much. It was mostly about the main thrust of the plot and the snake versus big boss relationship. Well, and I think ever since Metal Gear Solid, the overall cast of characters is one of the big draws. Right. As each new game gets revealed, you know, it's like a cast of Snake and his friends and foes. And there's always kind of a lineup of baddies that has a theme. So, yeah, I think it became part of the overall story.

structure that you were excited about these cast. It was really MGS that made that happen because the supporting cast in the first Metal Gear wasn't that exciting. No, I mean, there's Diane who is out shopping and Schneider, who gets killed, and you never actually meet these people or see their faces. They're just, you know, voices on the radio. And Metal Gear Solid or Metal Gear 2 builds on those characters a bit more and gives you a little more time to interact with them. And I can't remember the woman's name Chris. Is it Chris? No,

she's in Metal Gear or Ghost Babel. There's a, there's a woman who has a big part to play in Middle Gear 2. See, I didn't write it down because we're not talking about Metal Gear 2 this episode, except apparently we are, so I didn't prepare right. Already here at the beginning, failure, terrible. You actually have to like go and rescue her. So, you know, you start to see these codec or, you know, transceiver characters in the flesh with Metal Gear 2. And then Metal Gear Solid really kind of brings them into the active play space with you. And Snake interacts with them mostly in cutscenes, but occasionally outside of cut scenes. And there's more and more of that throughout the game.

I think really the introduction of Merrill doesn't hold up under a 2025 lens anymore in terms of like the voyeuristic cheesecake way, kind of like the player is kind of made to be the voyeur anyway. So you can just like hunker down in the vents? and watch her doing sit-ups in her underwear for a while? It was a different time. It was, but I wonder if the creator is a different person. And I feel like if he could get away with doing that today, he probably would. We'll get to Phantom Pain. Ground Zero's back to Grand Zero's.

Thomas signaling, no, no. I was just thinking that, you know, things change with the times. So the boss said it's cool. Okay. You know? Fair enough. All right. So.

I'll see to touch on Odecon real fast in MGS 2, though, like, I do find his character very, very interesting in the, like, he's conflicted. And even in that game, you're like, oh, I don't know how I feel about you and your sister. Like, and this is this there. It's not like subtext, really. Anyway. No, I mean, there's a sister and a stepmom and the, yeah, there's a lot going on with OdeCon. and I don't know I feel like I mentioned this in a previous podcast

about Middle Gear Solid 2 somewhere along the way like that game is oversharing the video game like every character is like hey Snake I know you're on or Riden or you know whatever I know you're on a mission to save the world

but I got to tell you it's time for me to trauma dump can you take 20 minutes here and listen to me tell you about my weird sexual hangups or the bizarre lies that I've based my life around. I know this isn't relevant to you and it's not helping you to stop the world

from nuclear Armageddon, but, you know, I just feel better if before we all die I could get it off my chest that I used to bang my stepmom a lot and my dad died because of it. Wow, okay, thanks. Okay, can we get back to you? it's very deliberate and as someone who likes like Todd Solon's movies or something it's like oh I appreciate that but I can see where 90% of middle girl fans would be like I didn't want to know any of that about your past yeah and you know for for middle gear solid three he kind of dialed that back a lot you don't really get as much oversharing while you're out there like and actually I feel like middle gear solid three is probably the most intimate of the middle gear games so maybe maybe that was kind of pulled back so you could get more into the early

The early 60s were still pretty repressed. That could be. It was before the Cultural Revolution. But it comes back in full force with Middle Gear Solid 4. Oh, yes. But all of that is conveyed through Drebben, which actually makes it weirder. It's like, here's a guy selling you guns. And by the way, let me tell you about how messed up this girl is.

I know you just killed her and you took some weird saucy photos of her as she was dying. But I'm going to make it really weird The Beauty and Beast Corps Is like a whole other level of WTF I mean like yeah Wow Yeah Metal Gear solid everybody

Metal Gear What more can you say But no, we should talk a little bit about Meryl Silverberg because she, you know, really does just appear as a major player in Middle Gear Solid 1 and then in 4. And clearly, like, Snake had a chance for a relationship with her, but canonically chooses to, you know, partner up, maybe as life partners, with OdeCon. So she kind of gets pushed to the side. But, you know, she's there. She's got a big part to play in the first game. She does give you

her bandana for infinite ammo in the sequel. But you don't get to use that. Only the CPU controlled snake does. And then she comes back for Metal Gear Solid 4 to marry the pants crapping guy. It's weird. I mean, in MGS, I think she's awesome and, you know, immediately lovable, kind of like manic pixie dream assassin, hot army chick. But she has a lot of agency and she actually appears in the game play field with you and stuff. And yeah, I think she's instantly everyone fell in love with Merrill. Yeah, you fight with her side by side. And there are some really like memorable action set pieces. And then of course she gets shot and she's the damsel in distress. But, you know, prior to that, she's really tough and cool. And then that just becomes another element that is, you know, here's a little more stress for you to have on your plate snake. Your mission commander, his niece is going to die.

Actually, not niece, daughter. Whoops. Here's another bit of trauma dumping for you. Another saucy revelation from the past to put on your plate as you're trying to save the world. And the wolves like her, too. You learned that, too. That's a big character moment. They do, they do. They only like you if you let them pee on you.

There's probably more to read into that than I really want to. I'll say I always liked, even back in the day, when it first came out, that Kojima clearly, like, wanted to name her after Merrill Streep, you know, greatest actress of the generation. It's, you know, not a very common name, especially for video game heroin. So, yeah, I was like her name. Interesting. I hadn't thought about the Streep connection. There's like literally no Meryl Streep in her whatsoever. I cannot, I cannot think of a single Meryl Streep role that is.

Have you seen, I haven't. Have you seen Ironwood? Okay. Watch Ironwood. I'm sorry, Silkwood. Ironweed is her as a homeless person with Jacksonville. Silkwood. Gotcha.

Okay. I feel like the archetype that Meryl sort of represents when you first meet her and she's kicking ass and stuff. You know, like the tough. woman soldier who basically is presented uncommonly in media at the time as being as competent and flinty and capable as any man. That was like a, you know, kind of a recurring archetype in media. You get Vasquez from aliens. And I don't know if Kojima ever watched Babylon 5, but I just watched through it. And there is a recurrent, like a character who shows up a couple of times, who is just like, you know, just a female soldier who ends up dying in

battle, but she's just kind of like devil make hair. Let's enjoy this moment while we have it because we're going to, you know, run out and die tomorrow. So I feel like Merrill kind of taps into that media stereotype a lot. And then I'm trying to remember what part does she play in middle gear solid four besides just kind of being in the background and and sort of helping out and doing stuff with johnny sasaki it felt like kind of a glorified cameo to me maybe tom remembers it better but i just think it's like oh kind of for the fans like fan service you know a cameo it it um shows that snakes aged and she hasn't she's aged a little bit you know so it's like you know comparing them and then the love thing is weird because they made such a point in

one that said like, oh, she doesn't fall for men and she's had nanomachines that repress all that. And then she's like, oh, but that guy, that guy without nanomachines is pretty hot. And she's always wanted a wedding. I don't know. I mean, I think it's just hilarious. It's like that Johnny Zazaki would end up with her. It's, yeah,

I think it's just pure comedy. It really seemed like a little sidebar for that game that was not entirely necessary. And there were a lot of those in that game. So, you know, that one stands out, which really says this must have been extremely unnecessary if this seemed like the most unnecessary tangent in Middle Gear Solid 4.

Yeah, not to skip ahead, but like, I guess depending on how you take, hey, let's do a shout on Moses again. And whether that like goes down well for you completely or not, I think Merrill's comeback is just being kind of being a joke too. Like, yeah, it's, I mean, you know, he's kind of like be afraid what you have. for, because sometimes you get it, and then it's like, oh, well, I got it. And is this really what I wanted? I don't know. A cameo to make you ashamed of your words and deeds. We will continue coming back to that all throughout this episode. All right. So I think we did talk about

Odecon a bit, and he does have a big part to play, and his father has a big part to play in the future games. So we'll get to him more. The other sort of major characters, again, mostly from Metal Gear. You have Grey Fox who showed up in the very first Metal Gear game, but he becomes an actual character to speak of in Metal Gear 2 and then has an even bigger part to play in Metal Gear Solid. And that's kind of the end of him, at least chronologically, because he gets squished really, really conclusively by Metal Gear. So that's it for him. But then you have Naomi Hunter, the doctor who is also Grey Fox's, sister-ish

like adopted sister maybe I can't remember exactly there was a relationship was not blood correct it was like he was her adopted brother or something

and then adopted her that's what it was what a pal but Snake kept that secret as you do right and she wanted to kill Snake because Snake killed Grey Fox she thought until she revived him as a cyborg

and then created the fox die virus, which was designed specifically to kill Snake. But at the end of Metal Gear Solid, it kills Liquid Snake and apparently can kill lots of people besides Snake. And then he's living with Fox Die, and we'll get back to that in Metal Gear Solid 4. And then you have other characters like Master Miller, who is actually not Master Miller in Metal Gear Solid, but in later games, which are prequels, he is Master Miller. yes and who else you have folks like the DARPA chief and so forth

and the DARPA chief actually you find out shows up in the next game we're talking about in a younger form and that is Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater and subsistence and I guess Delta coming soon as far as we know until they pull something crazy

soon to be Delta and Snake Eater 3D and yes okay it's the it's the most remade of all the Metal Gear games, actually. Metal Gear solid has been remade of Twin Snakes, but... In many fans, you know, estimation this is the series... I'm one of those fans.

Thank you. All right. I'm also one of those fans. And I think, you know, we were all there at the time. And, like, MGS 2 was such a, you know, shocking, interesting, weird left turn. And this is, again, like, another interesting departure. Because at this point, like, a prequel like this hadn't really happened in gaming of this magnitude for a franchise of this import you know so like yeah i thought it was an interesting move

that like you know brought all these new possibilities to the space you're being very vague what are you what are you talking about specifically just the fact that it was like the origin kind of the origin and you were playing like the bad the bad guy you know like like i feel like in gaming at that time there was a really interesting daring move for cogent i i mean this game did come out less than five years after the first of the star wars prequels which about baby Darth Vader and I this is I said it in gaming I said in gaming I said I just I find there's a lot of parallels between big boss and Darth Vader because he's like the bad guy keeps dying keeps getting defeated but don't you think this is more successful

than Phantom Menace? Oh for sure for sure but I'm not just talking about Phantom Minnis I'm saying like eventually Lucas kind of got so fixated on on Anakin Skywalker that he became, you know, the main character of the Clone Wars and everything. And there's actually much more media about Anakin Skywalker than there is about Luke Skywalker who was ostensibly the hero of the series. I mean, when you look at Clone Wars and, you know, some of the prequel animations, there's a lot more Anakin out there than Luke. So it's the same thing, I think, with Metal Gear, where Solid Snake kind of disappears from the picture. I mean, you get the prequel with Metal Gear Solid 3 and another prequel with portable

ops, and then you get one last adventure for Solid Snake, and then that's it. After that, it's Big Boss or... Yeah, this is the first of five games where we find out how the villain came to be, and then we don't really find out at the end. Yeah, that's great. I really like that. That is true. But yeah, I was just excited, and I think all these years later, I still look back the most fondly on this one.

And I think it's, I think also the story kind of is the most fulfilling, maybe overall in terms of a narrative arc for me, for me. So, yeah. The story and the characters feel most realized in this one, I think, most fleshed out. The motives feel the most compelling, the most human. And I think that's kind of why Kojima started to gravitate more toward. naked snake big boss because he's much more flawed than solid snake who is just sort of like I'm an amazing killer and I hate it I don't like being what I am but that is what I am and that's all that I can be and that's very limiting whereas big boss is like he's more human I feel he's like

a big dumb poluka who's bumbling his way through the jungle and eating everything in sight and constantly making mistakes so yeah that's you know a flawed flawed character. There's more to work with it. I also feel like this game for the first time really made me love Acelot because there was a lot of focus on him in the first two games, but here it's kind of clear that he's a central character to the whole franchise in a lot of ways. I mean, he's got that meow. What else, like, what do you expect? That's all you need. That's all you need. It seems like everyone's always scrambling for money, even the world's greatest soldier. Of course, big boss and the philosopher's legacy or just works of fiction in an increasingly goofy international political thriller saga.

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Compensation provides incentive to positively promote Acorns. Tier 1 compensation provided. Investing involves risk. Acorns Advisors LLC and SEC registered investment advisor. View important disclosures at Acorns.com slash retro. Tom, I feel like you were going to say something, and then we just steamrolled over you. Yeah, I was just going to say, now we all talked about how it's a prequel, but what, like, the very first time they debuted it, Konami acted like, like, well, this is weird, snakes in the past. What could be going on?

And I just know that me and all my Metal Gear friends were like, it's Big Boss. You're playing Big Boss. Like, it was no mystery. Like, Snake is time travel. Yeah. It was kind of a weird ploy. But I don't think that was Konami. I think that was Kojima.

That's like, you know, probably, you know, he took a heavy hand in all of his own marketing at that point. He was, he was a name with a capital in. So I feel like that was him trying to, you know, obscure things. things and be secretive because he'd had such success with it with Metal Gear Solid too and totally hiding the existence of Ryden. So I feel like he kind of wanted to play coy about the mystery, but it wasn't quite as compelling. Like, hmm, it's a guy who looks just like Solid Snake, but 20 or 30 years before Solid Snake, who could it be? Certainly not the legendary hero from whom Solid Snake was cloned and had many adventures 20 to 30 years before

Solid Snake's time. Gosh, I wonder. Hey, just a few years before, he was, this is Iroquois Pliskin. I do remember that. He thinks we'll believe in. And that pulled all of us. None of us figure that out. No.

But then he was like saying that's not the real solid snake. I was like, how do you know that Iroquois Pliskin? It's so confusing. All right. So, Metal Gear Solid 3 is set about 30 years before the original Metal Gear, which I think was set in the mid-90s. This is set in 1964, that's important because it was just a few months after JFK's assassination, and you'd better believe that, yes, there was something to do with JFK's assassination in this storyline. But it's actually a two-part story.

There's a prequel section that you play through, and then you jump ahead a short period later and have to complete the story and prevent basic. the West and the East from going to nuclear war with one another and at the very least prevent the U.S. from having to eat humble pie and make a big apology to the Soviet Union because, whoops, we exploded

a nuclear bomb in their territory and that's not really great for international relations. So in the prequel section, you play Operation Virtuous Mission as the operative naked snake taking commands over the radio, the transceiver from the boss.

And that involves sneaking around, shooting hornets nests, climbing bridges, and eventually having your boss break your arm and blow up a big chunk of Russian territory with a portable nuclear device. Neat. And like, and the idea here is that she is defecting, right? but she's actually not defecting. She's pretending to defect. What's really going on here? So what happened?

I remember this much. She was, there was, you know, some sort of double fake, double cross, double blind, whatever, you know, the usual shenanigans that Kojima and spy stories

alike are always up to. And the Russian agent that she was dealing with Vulgan ended up having access to a nuclear device and it completely derailed her plans so basically she came to accept the fact that the only way she was going to maintain the peace

and help America keep face was to die at solid or sorry at naked snake's hands right so that was not the original mission plan but because she was a dutiful soldier she was willing to die for the cause of the country and maintain the peace that way. Well, and it's interesting that the game both opens and closes with, like, making a tragic decision sacrificing yourself to keep up appearances for international order.

Anyway, it's a wild game. Yeah, so a lot of Metal Gear elements have their quote-unquote origin here in Metal Gear Solid 3. including the whole Metal Gear thing except in it's in the original Russian it's called Shagohad because I think that means

metal gear doesn't it? I think so and I think what's interesting is saying this in the past it's kind of one of the issues of like oh well the technology is all going to be really antiquated and boring and low tech but I think it kind of excels and like you know that that makes your radar

less useful but also like the design of the shagohad is kind of bulky and box and primitive but still interesting and you can kind of see the DNA of what would eventually become the other Metal Gear's in it. It's a giant transforming tank. But there's a, yeah, there's a cohesion to the aesthetic because it's still Shinkawa

who designed it. Yeah, and I feel like he became less and less interested in kind of grounding things in contemporary like period accurate aesthetics and technology as it went by. And I actually asked him at an interview

session once like do you find it hard to do prequels and have to kind of like dial back your designs and make them look more primitive and, you know, more appropriate to the era? And he was basically like, I don't care. I just make stuff that looks cool. So, you know, that's totally valid. I'm okay with that. I'm okay with watching, you know, Star Trek Strange New Worlds. And the tech on the enterprise is way cooler and more sophisticated than the tech on the same enterprise from the 1960. original series because it's just media. It's fine. Like, things are going to change according to standards and according to the technology that's available. So, yeah, it's whatever. Who cares? But, you know, and I know this isn't about visuals, this podcast, but MGS3 has, like, the best, some of the best visuals for the, for that generation of games. Like, you know, beautiful, beautiful graphics for a PS2 game. And I think, like, and that really did help sell the whole.

world that they were, you know, creating in MGS3 and kind of like made it more inviting. It also was the first one to be out like not in a military corridor or on the ocean. You had all sorts of different environments. Yeah, it was a big jump. Being in nature, right, yeah, it was huge.

And that's actually why I took a while to play Middle Gear Solid 3 because the Metal Gear's before that, all of them had been very much about these kind of like rigid environments. And, you know, stealth was so much a part of the the backgrounds and about the architecture

and you take away the architecture how do you have good effective convincing stealth? I wasn't sure that that would actually work and so I was kind of reluctant to go into this new space and potentially play something that really got away from what I thought was interesting about Metal Gear but then it just turned out that

by taking away the artificial barriers and forcing you to sort of come to terms with a much more chaotic and unpredictable space that you're working your way through. It forced you to be creative and clever and really, you know, it became as immersive as you wanted it to be. And when I play Metal Gear Solid 3, I really go in for the camouflage, the active camouflage and the indexing and everything and, you know, trying to be as invisible and silent as possible. And, you know, when I played through the first time I fought the end,

I spent probably an hour and a half, two hours on that battle, really creeping around, really trying to lay low, get them in my sights, and eventually, you know, came out ahead. But it was super challenging and tense, and you have the ability to take the game and play it that way. You can also be much more like the Scotcharky approach and just run around with a shotgun and shoot the end in the face. And that is valid also. but, you know, the fact that it does kind of open itself up for those different interpretations makes it a really interesting game. And also, if you play it the way that I do, you spend a lot less time at the river than if you play the Scott Sharky way and you have to deal with the ghosts of the hundreds of people that you have shotguned. So there are advantages to playing stealth,

which is that, you know, that sequence takes a whole lot less time to play through. And I'll segue from your boss. your boss discussion there. This is one of the last Metal Gear's where the bosses have a story role as well. They were, sorry, the boss characters you fight were in the boss the characters unit.

And so that gives them ties to the plot and also a little backstory that's interesting. You find out their sorrow is her lover, potentially Ossolat's dad. Which is a nice call back to MGS1 where you were fighting the Foxhound unit. MGS 2 kind of was looser here and then after this it's just kind of like we need bosses right

I don't know here's some ladies one of them I think she's an octopus yeah I think these are right up there with MGS ones yeah if not even better if not better yeah but it's just you lose something when they aren't also characters you know it's like oh here's a here's a boss enemy like no I want to know I want him to cry after I beat him and tell me why he's crying well and I also think like you know the end and the sorrow are such memorable encounters right like incredibly memorable um so i think this game like especially the end and like i don't know jeremy did you did you review this game i did do i did it no so i had to go play it at konami for like four days to review it and like it was balanced to be even harder when i played it so it took me like three hours to be at the end um it was it was epic

yeah no i i did not review this game like i said said it took me a few years to get around to actually playing it. But once I did, I was like, whoa, this is amazing. I played the subsistence version as opposed to sneak eater. Which is a much easier experience in some ways. Yes. And just, you know, kind of better balanced, I would say. But yeah, this is a game where I feel like all the components really flow into the story.

Not just the bosses, but the environments, the mission that you're under. taking, like, the way it evolves, just like the story beats really line up with everything. Even the mechanics, like, there are, you know, details with environmental mechanics, not just the stealth, but also, like, the food element, the fact that there is a time element, a real time element, where food can go bad. Like, all of these things make sense within the story, and they also reflect into the game and you can come up with really clever solutions that they've built into the systems that may not be immediately intuitive, like feeding rotten fruit to the fear. And, you know, he has to maintain his stamina so that he can keep up his active camouflage.

So if you leave food out, he'll like run down and snatch it up. But if you leave rotten food out, he'll run down, snatch it up and get sick. And then that leaves him vulnerable. and it's much easier to take him down that way. And like all of these things are kind of hinted at within the dialogue and just within the way the game works. But it leaves a lot to you to sort of figure out. There are, you know, there are hints you can get from Sigint and the rest of your codec crew or receiver crew, transceiver crew. But it's not as it's not as on the nose as some of the earlier games.

Like Metal Gear Solid 2 is kind of the. the apex of metal gear like saying hey anything that you do and can do and should do and might do we're going to call you and we're going to tell you about it for five minutes in a codec call and that kind of pulls back for metal gear solid three and you have a lot more flexibility to just kind of experiment but you do always have that resource to call and say hey i'm in this situation what's some advice? And it's kind of good at, like, building the context from that. So I just feel like all the systems are integrated best with the narrative, the story and the

and the characters, to the greatest degree in this game. And it all works the most smoothly. And I feel like Metal Gear never really found that balance again. And that's a darn shame because this is kind of like apex gaming. Yeah, all the parts. come together in a cohesive hole and it kind of yeah it really hangs together and has it has a solid feeling of beginning and middle and end and that doesn't really lag at any point you know there's not any like you know because I think as good as some of the later games are there's usually high

highs on the lows and this game it's kind of good throughout the whole game story wise and gameplay wise and graphics and sound yeah it's it's a banger So reading back through the So reading back through the notes, the boss was supposed to be a defector to Russia. but as a double agent because she was hoping to find a mysterious treasure

called the Philosopher's Legacy. Pause. Also, like, I always thought, like, a lot of time as a Metal Gear fan, to me, there was like,

I imbued this mystical, you know, like, numinous quality to this, like this, then when I realize, oh, wait, it's just like

hundreds of billions of dollars, that's the philosopher's legacy. It's just like money, power and money for rich people to control the world. It's like, oh, it's... Yeah, I mean, they could just do asset seizure on Amazon.com now and take business as billions. And you don't even have to mess with the Philosopher's legacy.

You've got it right there. Just take it. But no, this was back when I guess the capitalists hadn't quite taking quite so much control. So, yeah, so there was this money just floating around there. And the Soviet Union and America and... China all wanted to get a piece of it. And so this game ultimately ends up being kind of a race to the treasure, like a Pink Panther movie or something. And lots of double crosses.

Who can control the world's wealth. Exactly. And they build off of the philosopher's legacy to create the Patriots and everything. And that's, I never quite understood exactly how that was supposed to work. But it seems like basically everyone who was involved with Operation Snake Eater, the follow-up mission that you take into Russia to stop the Shagahad and kill the boss and so on and so forth, like everyone who was involved in the mission planning, Major Zero and Sigint and Paramedic and so forth, all somehow get their hands on some of that money and are like immediately say, all right, now we're evil. And so they are like the shadowy, evil, mysterious forces who pretty much instigate all the game's storylines from, what, Middle Gear Solid 5 through the end? Yeah. I mean, they're not explicitly involved in Metal Gear 1 or so forth, but the things that they do, basically the early Metal Gear games are fallout from their their manipulations.

And then starting with, I guess, Metal Gear Solid 1, they start to take an active role once you discover that the DARPA chief is, in fact, Sigint in an older form. And so he's, you know, he's parlayed that philosopher's wealth into a lot of power, but he gets Fox died. So, wait, when does zero start, when does zero start less infauntary? When does he start that? Gazero's friends with Big Boss, right? Like, they're friends back in the day. Yeah, so I think Les Enfant Terribes, the terrible children, begins after... Which he does to his friend without telling him, let me take your DNA here, right?

Well, it begins after Metal Gear 2 when Solid Snake defeats Big Boss at Zanzibar Land. And at that point, Big Boss is in a coma, again. And so that genetic materials just sitting there. What's he going to do with it? He's not using it. He's in a coma. So they build an entire genome army out of this guy while he's taking a power nap. But, you know, even before that, Zero was doing stuff.

And he, I believe, created the, crap, what is it called, Cipher organization? Because he kind of wants, Zero kind of wants to control the people, of the world, right? He's kind of the bag, big bad, if you had to choose one early on. Kind of, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he's your mission commander in Metal Gear Solid 3, and he's a pretty okay guy, but it

does seem that once all the fallout happens with the, you know, the acquisition of the philosopher's legacy, and Ava running off with a chunk of it to China, he just, he goes off the rails. He he's off the reservation.

It's also, it's also them misunderstanding the boss what the boss's message was and that zero I don't know how they say later zero loved her too and you wanted the right but she kind of triple crosses everybody right right she's saying

like know what you're about and then you're fighting for yourself because if you fight for somebody else they're going to use you and so Naked Snake took that to mean don't have any allegiances have the bigger gun no one can mess with you sort of and then Zero took it to me like

control everything because if you're in control no one can use you and so that is the breaking off point and that was kind of the neat little sleight of hand he did which I think last episode I implied might have been clever retconning but the boss is telling you

allies change she's talking about the Cold War and you're like I know this from school but she's also then talking about everyone on your mission with you like the people you're with, you're going to hate each other in three games time. So, like, know what snake is about. And I feel like the only one who really got the boss's message was someone who never even met her, which was Grey Fox. And when he, you know, as he's dying, getting squished by middle year wrecks, he tells Snake, you know, we're not just tools of the government, you know,

don't, don't let yourself be used like that. Kind of know what you're about, make your own choices. and that's ultimately what the boss's message was, you know, like make a choice, make an informed choice, do the thing that you think is right, and be true to that. And so she does that. She, you know, she's willing to die to maintain the peace. And, you know, also out of patriotism for the Western powers and to maintain their, you know, to maintain their power. But that's, that's her choice that she makes. She feels like that is, you know, the thing that she needs to do and is morally correct for her. And I guess there is sort of some contradiction inherent in the message of saying,

be true to yourself, but also if the government says, please die to protect our power, you got to do that too. So maybe the ambiguity in what her personal choice was made her message a little murky for everyone else. and that's where all the troubles of Metal Gear came from. So if she had just sat down and spent a little more time writing a manifesto and not just, you know, espoused her personal philosophy as she was dying in a field of flowers, things might have gone better.

That's why you need to sit down with a lawyer and leave a will. Just make it clear. The climax of the game is gorgeous. And, you know, you've never wanted to not beat the last boss more than you don't want to beat the last boss of that game. But, like, it's interesting that her not wanting. you to be a tool of the machine where very much that is the plot

of Guns of the Patriots is like yeah, soldiers have become literal automaton tools of AI machines. Yeah, and in Metal Gear Solid Force, Snake basically, Solid Snake basically begins by saying, okay, hit me up with those juicy nanomachines. I'm going to become

a tool as well. And then basically the entire game from that point on is him trying to figure out like, well, how can I complete my mission now that I've given my opponents the power to basically stop me in my tracks and prevent me from completing my mission. So lots of bad choices all around. Anyway, some housekeeping with Operation Snake Eater, Metal Gear Solid 3. The main characters in this obviously are Naked Snake, who becomes big boss later, and he becomes big boss by defeating the boss, his mission commander turned

Defector turned secret patriot protecting the West while trying to procure the philosopher's legacy. There's her underlings, the cobra unit. There is Vulgan the Soviet, is he a colonel? Yes, a colonel

who is kind of in charge of the Shagohad project which is being developed for him by a scientist named Sokolov that your initial mission is to extract from behind Soviet territory and and bring to the west.

But it turns out later that he's like, I'm okay with the Soviets. I'm going to keep working on Shagahad for them. There's also Rikov. Do we care? He's not really a character. He's just a joke. But there is Adam,

aka Shaloshaska, aka A.k. A.k.a. A.k.a. A.k.a. Aselot. Yes. And finally, Ava. Adam and Ava.

Very clever. It's funny, I kind of forgot about Ava. Like, oh, the bond girl, like, oh, yeah, disposable bond girl. But she's not disposable. She comes back in Metal Gear Solid 4 to be disposed of. That's a big mama you're talking about. Oh, right, right. She gets thrown from the train or something.

Yeah, so basically, and then you also have the Kodek crew, which is Paramedic, Sigint, Major Zero, all of whom turned out to be horrible. I don't think paramedic actually shows up again in the series, but wasn't she the scientist responsible for the operations? Great Fox, yeah. Yeah, cool. She seemed so nice. She was like, hey, have you heard about this Godzilla movie? It's really good. Now I'm going to murder a man and turn him into an undead machine creature.

Yeah, I wouldn't have thought she was like responsible for crimes against humanity. She seemed kind of nice. That philosopher's legacy Absolute money corrupts absolutely So at the end of the game Naked Snake has killed big boss Or sorry boss And everyone's like

Ah now you're a big boss And he's like I don't know Ava has betrayed him And stolen a big chunk of the Philosopher's legacy for the China And I believe What goes on with Osolat What's his deal?

He has access to the money. Like, and they, they form the Patriots, right? Him and Big Boss, right? I think we find out that in the, in Portable Ops. Oh, okay. That actually isn't in the ending of this. It's after the end. Yeah, also, that's just in the background when you're getting your handshake.

He's like, later. Yeah. But I'll say, he's lovable. Like, he becomes very, you know, likable in this game. Like, I definitely left the game being like, oh, he's fun. Absolutely. I like him. Yeah.

Yeah. And he's he's a triple agent. Everyone's a triple agent, except naked snake. The snakes are always just like the straight shooters. They're the player avatar. They just kind of do what they're told based on the mission briefing. And everyone else is playing them for fools. Like a damn fiddle. Yeah. I mean, this game definitely like ramps up the triple crosses. But to me, it fits the Cold War setting. And like it didn't go over the top. For me, in the way that, you know, I love MGS too. But this felt more ground. grounded somehow than MGS too. Thank you. So after Metal Gear Solid 3, the HD generation begins, and it costs a lot of money to make those games. And it takes a long time for the first Metal Gear game to come out with HD visuals. So in the meantime...

But also, at the same time, PSP, blowing up in Japan. At the same time, PSP and DS, but for the sake of Metal Gear, just PSP are all the rage. and they are much more affordable to develop for. So we get a whole bunch of PSP-based Metal Gear games. I don't think we need to talk about Metal Gear Acid because it has no bearing in Metal Gear Canon. Is that correct?

It has no bearing. I play both of them. They're very weird and interesting, visually. Yeah, but like, you know, kind of side guide end, not important to the story, but like worth investigating if you're curious. It's a little bit like what if Ghost Babel didn't have to tie into two as a ride and training project like how weird would it get

that's acid there you go and acid two is even weird than acid one so it's middle gear on acid and kind of hence the name I think you would like it though

it's very tactical very difficult no it's it's cool I've played a little bit of it just it wasn't it wasn't enough metal gear for me to spend any time with when I had so many other things

demanding my attention and that's video gaming for me now if I'm not doing it for work. I'm not doing it. But we get along to Middle Gear Solid Portable Ops, which was not actually written by Kojima. He, like, produced it. But this was kind of his first real hands-off, like, this is in canon, but I'm not, I'm not overseeing it kind of project for Metal Gear. And I think its importance is somewhat a matter of debate. I think the people who worked on it feel like, yes, it is very important. And everyone else kind of says,

it's a totally fine little game it's it's cromulent as they say well it felt very slight at the time I recall like you know it looked pretty good it like replicated a lot of the gameplay experience but like in terms of narrative and stuff it's very very small and like it was grindy and the recruiting dudes wasn't as fun without a fulton

so it was like drag him to the truck drag him to the truck yeah they had some interesting ideas that would be fleshed out in later games, but this is kind of it's kind of the game where a lot of seeds are planted

that later games just kind of take for granted and don't credit back to this game. Like literally the only reference to the events of portable ops in all of the Metal Gear games after it made afterwards is at the beginning of Peace Walker

when Miller says something to the effect of all that nonsense in San Hieranamo. And that's it. that's the only acknowledgement you get. But there are some connections that stick around. I think obviously you meet Roy Campbell for the first time. He's a green beret, but also a hippie, which seems very contradictory to me. I feel like you don't become a green beret by having a devil-may-care attitude and being like,

what's up, man? But it was a different time. there's Zero who comes back in a different role and then there's null

who oh the notes say that Tom has a rant about null so Tom I leave It's like zero

do you get Yeah my rant on null which I can be shorter now because Jeremy covered it in that Grey Fox is this really great character that passes

the memetic legacy of the boss into the future onto Snake, and then he can see it through to the end and defeat all the machinations that were spawned in the misunderstanding. And then Null, instead, they're introducing the character. They're like, ah, he's like riding. He's like a child

soldier. He's a ninja. There you go. And it's like, no, that's not who Greyfox was. And then when I heard they were retconning this, or light retconning the game a little bit, I thought, oh, we're going to find out are you going to flesh out

Greyfox better? Are you going to use and all he's never brought up again? Five, he's not brought up. It's just, it's such a waste. Like, they had this opportunity to introduce him and they wasted it, and it pisses me off. Well, yeah, and they, you know, they have no qualms not introducing Meliger babies in five. Yeah, there's plenty going on. Yeah, we got Mantis.

Right, yeah. Yeah. Fletting of Meliger babies. So it's just, it was such a waste, and it was just recounting riding story. By the way, Cuttomy, Muppet Babies, Metal Gear Babies, just giving you an idea

for a franchise expansion here. I like Metal Gear Babies. And the Kodak call can just be wha-v-wab-v-v-v-v-v-up. All right, so do we want to talk much about

portable ops? Basically, this is the game where Snake, aka Big Boss, decides, hey, I'm going to create my own nation-state that's built entirely

on principles of having the biggest gun, the biggest stick. I'm going to, the United States of big stick. And he takes this idea from someone else because apparently it's impossible for any of the characters and any of these games to have their own original ideas and to be motivated by their own vision. So in addition to like trying to carry on the boss's legacy, he's also like, well, I fought this guy named Gene, which is a very subtle name.

and he was building a nation state of military renegades and mercenaries and that seems like a great idea so I'm going to take all of his resources now that I've killed him and this is me now. I'm going to create military sons frontiers and there you go. Big boss did nothing of his own.

I mean, to me the premise of this game kind of feels like just kind of a workaround for the central gameplay mechanic that they came up with of capturing soldiers and getting them joining your squad? Like I said before, it's the second game where we're told you're going to find out why Big Bus became the big villain, and then by the end you don't.

You just, well, there's money. Basically, Snake says, oh, this mission is too big for me to complete on my own, so I need a bunch of soldiers to help. So he recruits soldiers by knocking them unconscious and dragging them back to a truck where they are, you know, just kind of impressed

into his forces, which that's, I guess, one way to build an army. I mean, if you're natural, you know, word of bath recruiting isn't working, hey, this is one way to get people on your team. See, this is what the Democrats need to do in 2028. Just

knock out and abduct potential voters. Yeah, let's reach you across the aisle more chloroform. Yes, exactly. It's much easier to reach across the aisle with a very, very long nail bat. Yeah. Yeah, it's a really like to me that's not winning hearts and minds it's just you know creating uh cranial trauma

and i don't know how useful that i mean you know maybe like a a half brain dead soldier is very pliable and obedient but i question their tactical thinking i don't know but but jimmy isn't this game kind of even like deleted it's like not in the collections that happen now right isn't it kind of like like not so much a thing anymore yeah i don't know that this was even uh I don't know that this one was even backward compatible on Vita, was it? I think it was. Oh, okay. Maybe, but it's funny, I do own the special portable ops camouflage PSP.

I own that. I don't know why. I know why, because you're Shane Bettenhausen, and damn it. But I don't have the Peace Walker one, which is actually cooler. I do have that one. It's green. Sometimes the battery explodes and I have to replace it. But I feel like this game existed so that we could have the real game Peacewalker a few years later.

Kind of. This was like an appra-appertive, you know. The bitter amorrow you have to get the real appetite flowing. Okay, but before we can get to the real game, we have to go through Metal Gear Solid 4. And I don't want to disparage it too hard because, Tom, I know that you're in it. I appear. You are the star of this game, actually. Yeah.

Right, right. So top billing. Top billing. I appear on the supplementary DVD that came with a special edition for Metal Gear Solid for it. Only I have journalistic integrity about this game, because I got dragged through the mud on the internet for adhering to a Konami embargo on the review. I would argue that aspects of this game are among the finest aspects of the entire franchise, asterisk. And also, all these years later, much, as I said, like, it is kind of. end of ahead of its time with its narrative and its outlook.

And yet, looking back on it now, I think I look back more fondly than I would have expected to. I think we need a full Metal Gear Solid 4 episode at some point. But for now, let's just talk about the story, which is, in fact, a goddamn mess. It is just, it is Kojima saying, I have painted myself into so many corners and I wanted someone else to step in and take over for me, but I don't trust them. So now I've got to do it myself. So now I just want to wrap all this garbage up and move on to other things. And so that is what this is. This is housekeeping the video game. It's narrative housekeeping. And this house, this is like a hoarder's house. It is one of those, you know, like you're buried alive by

narrative nonsense. And somehow it's all got to be wrapped up with a bow at the end. And there are some convenient tools that Kojima makes use of, first and foremost being nanomachines. He had left himself some threads that he then ignored because nanomachines as well. Exactly, yes. We can talk about those in a minute. But, you know, there is the observation that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I feel like that's nanomachines.

Like, if you need something done, nanomachians. can do it. As the man said, nanomachines, son. That was a different game, but nevertheless, it's just anything that doesn't quite work out, let's get some nanomachines. Okay, there we go. And actually, the nanomachine element

of the Metal Gear Solid's Four story starts out really strong because the premise for this game is that after Metal Gear Solid 2, Snake and Riden didn't really pull off their mission. They didn't keep Metal Gear tech from leaking into the world to enrich Ocelot and his crew. And so the whole world, like the economy for every major nation is propped up by proxy wars that are being fought by, one, Metal Gear derived tech. And two, private military groups, basically military organizations,

mercenaries that are being controlled with nanomachine technology, which basically is the fundamental backbone of the modern battlefield. And so they've gotten to the point where there's basically like weapon ID. And if you want to use a weapon on the battlefield, you have to have been injected with nanomachines that will enable that weapon. So, at the beginning of this game, Snake meets a weird guy who knows a lot of weird facts about beautiful mind-washed women. I don't know what Dreven's thing is, but he's got a monkey with a diaper and knows way too much about the Beauty and the Beast Corps. He's a strange and a little unsettling man.

But he's like, hey, Snake, I've got a lot of weapons, but if you want to use them, you guys. gotta have some nanomachines. So Snake is like, all right, whatever, and get some nanomachines, and then everything falls apart for him. I'll say, you know, the beginning of this game, the first two acts in this game, I think, are spectacular. Especially, you know, the very beginning, it definitely feels like, wow, the world has changed.

The world isn't the world of the previous games. Like, the geckos are coming down. There's all this chaos. And it does feel like, you know, like, like, like Snake is, you know, everything, everything, everything in combat has been altered and society has changed. And I feel like the presentation of this game did feel like a big step forward from the previous games. But it was kind of bewildering and like, you know, like a lot of things are kind of left behind as well.

But I did like how different this game's opening was compared to the previous game. I feel like as with a lot of developers in this period, the costs and challenges of moving to HD were significant and resulted in a lot of design compromises. And I kind of feel like Metal Gear took the same design compromise approach as Final Fantasy, which is that Final Fantasy 13, you know, it's pretty much the quarter video game.

And that was directly inspired from the design of the Call of Duty games. Metal Gear Solid 4 doesn't have quite that degree of linearity, but it's much, much more linear. Like, it feels like more so than the previous games outside of Middle Gear Solid 2, there is like a start point and a finish point that you're moving toward. And it's not just a quarter,

but you don't have nearly as much freedom as you did in Metal Gear Solid 3. Camouflage is dialed way back. You've got just like this, you know, automated system that kind of generates camouflage for you. So it stops being this sort of crunchy, tactile hands-on experience and much more of just like a press against this thing and you'll become slightly invisible. And you can see how invisible you are with this weird little visual

display that surrounds you and is not as clear as just a nice number up in the corner of the screen. So it feels like it's trying to take some steps forward and in some ways steps way backward from the design of Metal Gear Solid 3. But narratively, it just, I feel like this game can't decide what it wants to be. Does it want to tell a prescient story about the nature of

global conflicts and things like that? Or does it just want to like wrap everything up for Metal Gear? Does it want to try to do both? I can't tell like why is so much of this game just a rehash, a redux of concepts from previous games?

Like the whole Beauty and the Beast Corps, they are just Metal Gear Solid One's Foxhound. like there's you know the wolf lady who shoots at you she's a sniper wolf you see there is the octopus who has camouflage a decoy octopus if you will except that instead of being like interesting people with you know backstories and histories it's like here is a supermodel and uh something bad happened to her that drebbin's going to tell you about but none of that actually plays into the actual gameplay, and now you have to stop for 10 minutes while he tells

you a sob story that you didn't ask about. I don't know. They're literally transformed into, like, absurd high-fashioned couture models who you are supposed to just take sexy photos of. I mean, it's kind of like surreal and avant-garde and also kind of terrible at the same time. Yeah, terrible. I mean, there was the photo mode in Metal Gear Solid VR missions, and you could take pictures of I believe May Ling

but also you could take pictures of like giant genome soldiers so it was just all it was all over the place and weird here it's just like that's what the photography is basically for us to take sexy photos of of the octopus

am I remembering correctly didn't they try to combine them with the cobra unit like it was crying octopus like sorrow plus like it was so tacked on yeah yeah I mean the beauty of the beast unit I think is one of the darkest worst parts of this game

or the series really or the series but I feel like again the first two acts of this game I think are very strong and narratively kind of hang together better and gameplay wise and the structure and there's more exploration in those and more gameplay systems happening and you're still

kind of on board I think with like the AI and the you know the you know they a lot of the new story concepts but I think the last half of the game they really start like trying to clean out the closet of

Metal Gear story, and it just keeps piling on itself so much to become almost laughable at the end. And I think it's a very disjointed game because of that. And I like long cutscenes. I like a lot of talking, but like in between the acts, like it does stretch some

people's patience with Sunny and everything. Yeah, we'll get to... Oh, I like the little Sunny vignettes. Those are nice. Yeah, I love them too, but I think some people don't love that. Yeah. No, the problem I have is just like, here's a really long piece of exposition about something that doesn't affect the game in any way

and you don't care about. Like, you know, you see the characters who evolve. That's fun. I enjoy that, except for the Meryl thing. I don't know. I don't know what's going on there. But, yeah, I really feel like in the second half of the game, the narrative takes over, like the final three acts in Eastern Europe

and Shadow Moses Island spoilers. And finally on Arsenal Gear, which is now called Outer Haven. those there's almost no freedom to those like after coming off of Middle Gear Solid 3 where you had these vast open spaces with so much chaos so much you can do and so much to figure out to be kind of shunted into like

here is a little place by the Charles Bridge in Prague and you got to follow a guy around without being seen love that Here is a You know Here's Shadow Moses Island Remember that place that you loved But it feels so small

It feels so tiny Because you're not really You're not really challenged on your way through it You're just going to structure to it Yeah No you're literally going to emotions Yeah when you have a space in video games

That is you know Populated and designed It can feel immense And challenging But if you know Once you play through Metal Gear Solid and you kind of learn the ropes or you backtrack through it and you have the ability to just kind of like sneak past everyone you're really confident in it, you realize, oh, like Shadow Moses wasn't that huge. But, you know, the first time you're in the tank hanger, you're like, oh my God, this is so overwhelming. The first time you have to go between buildings, you're like, oh, you know, this is like a no man's land. I'm going to die out there. And it takes like 30 seconds to run across. But it just seems to you. Just like Hyrule field, you know, in ocarina of time. The first time, whoa. And then after you get used to it, you're like, oh, and Metal Gear Solid 4 just kind of throws you into Shadow Moses Island and doesn't give you much to do there except to have like a duel. And it just, it diminishes the first game in a lot of ways.

It just makes it seem small and tawdry. And the fact that, you know, Atakan calls you up to say, wow, remember when you used to have to swap between disks, when you have a 20 minute install for each. new chapter. You didn't think that through. I miss the disc swapping. Boy. Well, the smoke breaks, long, long smoke breaks in MGS4. Yeah, that's why you're dying snake.

It's, oh, that's, we haven't even talked about that. The whole premise here, snake is not like hero snake, the awesome snake. He's like old snake. He's dying snake. But it's only been a few years since Metal Gear Solid 2. What's up with that? It's because he was built as a clone with built-in obsolescence, planned obsolescence, in human form now.

So he's basically a, he's, you know, he's a replicant? Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, yeah. That's more of a stature thing, really. Yes, so once again, Kojima borrowing from Blade Runner. But at the same time, you also have, you know, snakes getting older and he doesn't know much, much more life he has. But at the same time, he still got fox dye ticking around inside of him.

And it turns out that it's going to mutate into a form that, you know, that, you're going to mutate into a form that, can become transmissible into humans, and that will cause a global pandemic, which, you know, reading about that now, I'm like, wow, I've been hearing some things about this flu that's been showing up in California and some other places lately. That's not a little slice of reality that I really wanted Kojima to predict, but here we are. So, yeah, his goal is to finish off this mission to put a stop to Osolot, who now has control over the nanomachine codes, which is called

SOP, and there's probably like five different definitions to SOP. I didn't even care to look it up, just like, you know, I thought it was sons of patriots. There's, I think there's a couple of other, a couple of other acronym meanings for it, kind of like the, the societal, simulation for societal sanity and solid snake simulations. and so forth, the S3 from Middle Gear Solid 2.

But anyway, yeah, somehow Ocelot's gotten control of these. This is how Ocelot is able to counter Snake once Snake has nanomachines, because Snake finally catches up to Ossolot at the end of the first chapter, and Ocelot's like, oh, you have some nanomachines? And it's like Magneto's saying, does that marvelous metal run all the way through your body? That's interesting. Good idea. Way to go with the planning there.

So then the rest of the game is just Snake trying to figure out, like, how can I stop a guy who can literally stop me in my tracks if I get close to him, like he has total control over me, how is this going to work out? And the answer is nanomachines. And also like

a bare chested fist fight in front of the Mount Rushmore of Solid Snake. Well, and also, as you say Oscelot, you mean actually liquid snake who has possessed. Except it turns out that. It's oscillate via hypnotherapy to

convince himself that he thinks he's Liquid Snake controlling Oswald. Hypnotherapy and... Spoiler alert. And, oh, right, yeah. So, yes. There was the potential for a story hook

here, a tie back to Metal Gear Solid 3. Why would Osolot be susceptible to being taken over by Liquid Snake's mind after grafting Liquid Snake's hand onto his body? Is it because he is the son of the psychic the sorrow?

No, it's because of hypnotherapy. All right. That's actually, like, this is one of those cases where I'm like, on one hand, it's actually like a more scientifically plausible approach, but it just feels less in narratively satisfying. Like, if you're going to give us fan service, come on. Like, tie the games together. Give us that family. Like, you're all into the meme gene scene thing. And then here's the genes.

and you're not, you're not giving it to us. Come on, Kojima. At the time, it really felt like, because that was a theory on the internet, ever since the sorrow was hinted, fans were like, oh, that's why Liquid, that's the thing in MGS2. And it really felt like this was Kojima going,

uh, I've changed my mind because I, because you can't be right. He did it at J.J. Abrams. Yeah, and I just hated that as a fan at the time. I was like, no, is it? Also, well, so in the climactic battles, the divisive fisticuffs of an act five,

At the very end, it doesn't Osloat kind of reveal that, like, he wanted Snake to come because he wanted, he wanted Snake to destroy the Patriots. Yeah, they were all working together to stop the Patriots. Yeah, he was kind of like manipulating everything, right? He kind of redeems himself at the very end. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He killed Dumbledore, but he's not actually that bad a guy.

Yeah, it just, it feels like this is another one of those cases, you know, like in Metal Gear Solid, too. where there's all these revelations of the last minute that are supposed to re-contextualize everything. But if you stop and think about them for more than, like, two seconds, you think, why even do that? That doesn't make sense. Just go with a simple, like, Occam's razor this shit. Like, it's fine to have a straightforward logical explanation that's both narratively consistent and, you know, emotionally satisfying for fans. You were saying, like, this felt like Kojima saying, uh-uh. you didn't figure out my story.

That's exactly what the creators of Game of Thrones, the adapters of the HBO series did. People figured out the game plan that they had. They were like, well, you know, some people on the internet figured it out. So we have to do something else because we can't have people predicting it.

So let's come up with the least possible and plausible and predictable outcome. And it just, it didn't feel good, man. It didn't feel like this was, you know, what all of this story. had been building up to. And, you know, you have that with Metal Gear Solid 4, the Star Wars, sequels, Game of Thrones, like people trying to outsmart, the creators trying to outsmart their fans. And sometimes it's okay for the fans to be right. And as long as you tell a story that

is interesting on the way to that conclusion that someone else figured out, that's okay. there's a lot of people sleuthing a story that a lot of people are into and you know some people are going to stumble across the correct solution but that doesn't make it invalid it just means that hey you've you've created a logical consistent story there's an outcome that makes sense and people have pieced together the elements and it's okay like you're not a failure as a storyteller because people are going to continue watching that and if you bring them to that conclusion in a cool interesting, satisfying way, they're going to go away, one, you know, the ones you figured it out can feel good about themselves. But two, everyone else can just be like, man, that was great.

Of course. That's how it worked out. That's totally awesome. I love this. And I think there's an impulse for people to kind of have this knee jerk, you know, like, oh, they figured out my saga and my plans. I have to walk it back from what I had planned at the beginning and do something totally different. And it just, it never works out. And, you know, in a lot of ways, Middle Gear Solid is innovative and prescient, and I feel like it predicted Game of Thrones 10 years early with Metal Gear Solid 4. Thank you, Kojima. And then Big Boss was going to say, at the very end, like, you know, because like, Osloat dies and you're like, okay, that's the ending, right? And then like...

Well, okay, so Big Boss's corpse is like the thing that they're after this entire time. Like, that was something in the background of Metal Gear Solid was, oh yeah, Big Boss, he's dead, but they're tapping that for genes, for the genome soldiers. And now everyone wants to get Big Boss's corpse the actual thing, not just because of genome soldiers, but because that was sort of like built on for the SOP system. And the nanomachine control system is derived from Big Boss's code. So having access to his genetic code gives you control over SOP. So that's what everyone wants. He's the new philosopher's legacy right there, his body. And his body gets burned, but it's

not. They figure that out because he's missing a hand that curiously appears to be attached to Ossalon right now. Yeah, so after 20 minutes of credits, then you get the post credit scene of Old Snake at Big Boss's grave

and who would show up but Big Boss with zero in a wheelchair. In a wheelchair, zero in a wheelchair. Big Boss has the boss's gun and he hands it to Old Snake and uh yeah and uh snake can't do it snake can't pull the trigger can't pull the trigger against his dad isish person or against himself either one or is it or him yeah and uh so big boss dies a fox

die but not before turning off zero who's basically in a vegetative state turning off his oxygen right so they both die pulls the plug yeah and he tells snake time to put aside the gun and live and and saying is like well that's okay because even though I was going to cause a pandemic. Now it turns out Fox Die is been, it's been altered somehow, and it has to mutate again inside of me so that it won't cause a pandemic. So morally, I'm obligated to live. So he lives out, you know. Wait, is it called, is its new name Fox alive? Is that

I think so, right? Yeah. Clearly it is. Yeah, so he and his life partner also, Adakon and their adopted daughter, Sonny, who was Olga Galercovich's daughter. Did we even talk about her in the previous episode? Olga is the minor character who you see for like three minutes and she dies. But we hadn't mentioned that Sunny was her daughter, who's a genius and makes fried eggs. Yeah. They go off and live a happy life together.

And that's pretty much it. I don't think they really explain what happens to all the nanomachines or the, the PMCs or all the Metal Gear's running around or anything, but we do know that Merrill and Johnny get married. And chronologically, this is the end. This is, yes. There is one game after this, but it's not canonical

because of nanomachines, son. Yeah, so, I, yeah, the ending for Metal Gear Solid 4 really, I was like, well, I'm glad they wrapped everything up, but the longer I thought about it, the more I disliked it. And I've said before, like, I gave this game a pretty good score in one up and maybe as a side perspective in EGM. I think I gave it an A minus.

But that's not the score I would give it now. It's probably like a B minus. There's some really good stuff in Metal Gear Solid 4, for sure. But also, if only because of the story, story is just such a train wreck. And it's such an, like, it's, it's got to be the game that wraps up the story. And it just kind of feels like, you know, contractual obligations, going through the motions. Just get it out of the way over and done with Kojima wants to move on.

It's, it's unsatisfying. Yeah, it's, if it's really disjointed. I mean, at the time it felt that way and even more so now, thinking back, it's like, there's like really some good ideas here, but it, unlike MGS3, it does not hang together. at all. I feel like anyone who is ever a character with a speaking part in a Metal Gear game shows up either as a character here or is at least reference. Like in Eastern Europe, which is clearly Prague, there are some overt references to Dr. Madnar

from, well, actually, they kind of combine him. Like, there's the Dr. Petrovich and Dr. Madnar. weren't those two separate characters in Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2? And now he's like Petrovich Madnar, the cybernetic scientist in Prague. Liquid Snake is dead and buried, but his hand lives on. And that's how he lives on. Oh, actually, no, the corpse of Big Boss was solid a snake, wasn't it? It was his body.

There was a swap in there somewhere. Yeah. I thought it was one, but it was actually the other. Yep. There's Sonny, Oticon. Oh, yeah. Campbell, apparently, like, Rose left Riden. Rose's, uh, Riden's girlfriend who wanted to remind him that it's Washington's birthday.

And, um, she, like, left him and hooked up with Colonel Campbell, who's now a civilian. But it turns out they weren't really hooking up. he was protecting her from the Patriots and that's why she left Riden to keep her safe and then Riden got really sad and turned himself into a full-ass, no-meat cyborg and is really, really cool now. And it feels like he basically read all the criticism of him

in the American press and message boards after Middle Gear Solid 2 and was like, fine, I'm going to go turn into a badass. And he does. And then VAMP comes back and they turn off his Mito Machine so he can't be a VATO. vampire anymore and he dies.

I mentioned Marilyn and Johnny. Who else is there? I don't remember if Fortune. Is Fortune mentioned? Yep. She's back. It feels weird to bring up Vamp and not Fortune. I don't think so. Huh. I don't remember a mention of Fortune, but

her ending was so like, what just happened in Middle Gear Salat 2 that it's... I'm okay to just kind of... So, Kojima said even nanomachines... I'm not trying to erase her. Even nanomachines can't explain that. Yeah. No, no.

It's beyond. It's beyond redemption. Anyway, yeah, like all of that sound in fury to get to Metal Gear Solid 4 and just kind of, it's a big letdown. And so that is why when Konami announced Metal Gear Solid Peacewalker, I was like, eh, okay. The only reason I even paid any attention to it at all. It had an MGS3 vibe from the outset. It felt like MGS 3 to me. I was like, oh, MGS. has three vibes immediately I got it didn't you I did like the art everything like I don't know like I just I had zero interest in it and I paid no attention to it but then uh at at Tokyo game show it was like the very last hour of the last day and somehow um Konami PR called me in I think it was Matt

Casamacina at that point um called me in and was like hey we've got this demo you want to come sit and write about it I was like okay fine So I went to this, like, hidden room that's underneath, like, the international section of Makuhara Mesa, where nothing actually happens. And it was, like, this classroom. And there were, like, there were, like, these long tables with, with seats at them. And there were about five of those seats with PSP units in front of them. And they were like, here's a new Metal Gear game. And I said, okay.

So I sat down to play. I was like, oh, wow, this is actually really good. This is a follow-up to Metal Gear Solid 3 that already, just from the opening, like, 30 minutes, feels way stronger than... Sorry, not Matt Kossamacina. Jay Borr, my bad. Wrong X-I-G-N guy.

Sorry, Matt. Sorry, Jay. Anyway, yeah, I was like, this has a really great, solid vibe to it. The dialogue seems really strong. Like, it's good, well-directed cutscenes, but it's not getting in my way. The gameplay feels really good.

good. They figured out the camera system to give you a good 3D camera system on PSP despite the lack of a right stick. This is legitimate. So it caught my attention. And when the final game came out, it did not disappoint. It was way better than it should have been. And

as Tom has said, it was another game that explains how big boss became big boss without actually explaining how big boss became big boss. Yeah. Well, also, you know, compare it to portable ops, like a lot

had happened in the years between that. Like, Monster Hunter Mania had taken off in Japan. So, like, four-player co-op, you know, RPG things were a hot experience. And I think, like, the visual leap from portal-wop's to this is pretty big in terms of, you know, it's the same console. And just, like, the aesthetic and the way it's presented, the vibe, you know, being in the 60s, being another prequel, like, to me, it did take me back to the MGS3 vibe. And, yeah, and the fact that there was more story, more characters, you could tell it was more of a real game. this time, you know, like a real mainline Metal Gear, not just a tiny little guide in. No, it felt legitimate, although the longer you played, the more you kind of said, there's

some weird stuff happening with the story. But basically, the premise is that Snake took all of that money from Gene and said, okay, now this oil platform in international waters is my home base and I've got a little army there and we're going to create our own nation and we're going to do basically like mercenary missions as you know soldiers for hire for anyone who wants to hire us and they get a mission from the country of Costa Rica because apparently Costa Rica had a military treaty that allowed them not to have their own standing army so a bunch of people were operating within the boundaries the territory of Costa Rica and Costa Rica itself the government couldn't do anything.

So they hired Snake and said, can you please get these guys out of here? And it turns out that this is some CIA rogue agent banana republic shenanigans happening with a guy named Hot, hot, hot, cold, coldman, cold. What does the XOF stand for? That's the rogue CIA group?

What does they mean XOF? I don't know, but this is before XOF. Oh, this is before XOF, okay. This is, yeah, he's, this was, was this the origin of Cipher? Oh, crap. I wrote it down. Let's see. Yeah, Cipher. Cipher is where POT. Spoiler,

Cifers is where Paws got sent from. Oh, okay. It's an organization. So, yeah, he meets, he meets a school girl out in the jungle, as one often does, named Paz, and she has Intel and helps him. Peace. Yes. Just like Kazuhira means peace. Cause and Paz. They're like two peas and a pause. Two piece and a pause?

Yes, there we go. Okay. Anyway, yes, she is a vital ally and helps you in your battle against hot, hot, hot, cold, cold, cold men. And let's see, there's another, another Metal Gear kind of thing. This one is actually called Metal Gear. No longer is it a Russian weapon. It is a true Metal Gear called Metal Gear Zeke. I don't know why they didn't just call it Metal Gear.

It's the first one, but here we go. It's Zeke. And the thing about this one is that it's guided by AI. And as we've seen in the real world with AI, all it can do is badly reproduce existing knowledge and information. And in this case, they train their AI on the boss. And they've done an imperfect job of it. So you're getting, you know, like the equivalent of Google results

telling you to eat Aminita mushrooms. that they're totally safe. But this, you know, in the context of military armament, like here are nuclear-armed drones and weapons with the boss's brain inside, and they want to basically create nuclear war throughout the world. The plan is that hot cold men, sorry, hot, hot, hot, hot, cold, cold, cold, Men, does not believe that humans can really enforce the tenet of mutual assured destruction because he feels like, very optimistically, I think, that humans could not press the button

to wipe out all life on the other side of a battle if they found that they were under attack by nuclear missiles from an enemy. So because he feels that someone who was in imminent danger of dying in a nuclear fire would not say, well, you assholes, I'm going to blow you up, too. He wants to create nuclear weapons that are powered by AI because AI is dispassionate and is not susceptible to the moral foibles of humans and their soft sentimentality and will go ahead and create true mutual assured destruction. So his idea is that having AI powered nuclear, self-driven platforms will create true nuclear deterrence and cause peace in the world that, of course, he, as the instigator of it all, will be in charge of. It'll be his piece on his terms.

But that's the way to create true peace in the world through AI-powered deterrence. And God, this sounds like a really dipshit idea that Elon Musk is going to put out there in six months. Yeah. Wow. We're months away. All right. This is, okay. Yeah.

Another Kojima prediction special. I'll say, you know, 15 years ago when this came out, the threat of AI didn't seem quite as real as it does today. And the funny thing is, what we've discovered is that the threat of AI is not like the Terminator is going to travel through time and kill us because SkyNet became sentient. It's that AI is a derivative... technology that cannot think for itself. It just processes and uses existing database information to generate outcomes and come up with the next step. But ultimately, AI is under the control of the

people who program it for their purposes through their biases and so on and so forth. So it's basically a tool for people to consolidate power, which is exactly how it's being used here and really is not a concept that I saw in fiction. Like, even Star Trek is constantly going back to the, oh, my God, AI, it's illegal in the Federation because it's going to kill us all. But it never gets into the human element of AI. It's always like, oh, the machines are going to become smarter than us and kill us, as opposed to, oh, the machines are very stupid, but they're going to be used by people who are very smart and cunning, and they're going to kill us. So, polite golf clap for Kojima, you did it again, you bastard.

All right, I'm depressed, so someone needs to take over. This is where the story lost me. Four, like we said, kind of broke the gameplay and the story apart. So at the time, I think we were like, no, you paid off the story and the gameplay. It was weird. And now we're looking back, like, there was some really good gameplay. Story's a mess. Peacewalker didn't even try.

It was like, there's this really compelling Monster Hunter game loop where you're collecting dudes and you can make them invent Doritos. And then there's the story, which to be was, it's two bonkers. I think you mean snack chips. Sure, yeah, yeah. There's also energy meals, not calorie mates. Don't get twisted. But anytime I try to think about the story, my head hurts and I'm sad.

You know, there's big boss, here's boss singing. And so he falls apart. And it's so weird, guys. It's so weird. Yeah, yeah, I forgot that the boss is inside these AIs, but she's a vocaloid now. She's Hatsune Miku. Right. And that's very upsetting to big boss for some reason.

Also, Otokon's dad is here. Huey. Huey, Imerich. And he's in love with a scientist named, that's right, Dr. Strange Love. Didn't even try on that one. It wasn't like weird affection or something. It was just, yeah, there's that movie that I saw. This is her.

Anyway, eventually stuff happens, and Big Boss takes down Metal Gear Zeke. Actually, he takes down Hot, Hot, Hot, Hot, Cold, Cold, Coldman. He takes him down, but that's not the end of the game because then it turns out Paz, his purported ally was actually a secret agent for Sniper, who came to steal Metal Gear Zeke, and she does this by jumping into it, locking herself into it, Evangelion style, going on a rampage as opposed to just, like, running off into the jungle. And so that gives Big Boss the opportunity to take her down. Metal Gear Zeke is destroyed.

Paz falls into the ocean, never to be seen again, wink, wink. And Snake is like, you know, after all of this, I realize that really the boss's dream was for me to just keep fighting. and killing and so I'm going to turn mother base into a country called Outer Heaven and this is the future

this is what I've got to do because that's what the boss wanted. I don't think that's what you really wanted. He seems a little confused. His interpretation of the boss's directives is no better than the AI. Isn't there part of this where he resents

how the AI interpreted it? I'm remembering that right? The AI walks into the ocean or something and destroys itself. And then he's like, that sucks. I guess I don't care about what the boss would want. I'm going to do my own thing, which is the thing you just said, which is jeans thing. But whatever.

Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. He's like, oh, the boss would never give herself up and willingly die to preserve peace. When that's exactly what she did, and he was the one who pulled the trigger. So you'd think he would remember. You'd think he would say.

Oh, you know, that reminds me at the time that I plugged my mother figure in the head to save the, you know, world peace. But evidently not. Like I said, I'm so mad at the story. Man, now that you frame it like that, yes.

That's very frustrating. I still think it's a great game, though. Yep. But story-wise, yeah. Metal Gear Solid. honestly, if we're being honest, Metal Gear has always been kind of ridiculous.

But yeah, I do feel like the characters literally lost the plot, which I guess you know, that's valid. Like, Big Boss was a flawed man. And so it does make sense that, you know, his tragic flaw is that he didn't get what his mom

wanted. He didn't understand his parents. It's the reverse of what DJ Jazzy Jeff in the French Fresh Prince said, kids just don't understand. Take it from me, parents. So, I mean, there's

some validity to that, but yeah, it's always very messy. And I really feel like this was just sort of inevitable from the very first Metal Gear because it did have this big plot, twist. Like, hey, you're the good guy.

You've been following your commander's instructions. But it turns out the good guy's boss is actually the bad guy. Now what? So, you know, on an 8-bit machine, that was pretty much holy crap. I've never seen a twist like this in a video game. This is amazing. This is some crazy, you know, crazy pants right here. It's bananas. But as technology advanced and storytelling became more complex, more elaborate, more detailed in video games, I guess Kojima just felt like he had to keep upping the ante.

and coming up with more and more crosses and triple crosses and God knows what else. And so you do get all these, like, weird narrative choices and stupid decisions by characters. And that's where we end up here with Metal Gear Solid Peacewalker. Shane, any thoughts? No, but in some ways, you know, I do feel like in terms of PSP, this is, you know, one of the, this in Christ, Crisis Corps of that era were kind of like B games where they put a lot of effort behind it and it kind of pushed the story forward, but maybe not in the all the directions you want. But I still applaud them for the effort put into, you know, kind of a, you know, not a mainline game, not a numbered game in the franchise. But it kind of rises above its station, even if the ending is not narratively that compelling.

I'll go to bat for Crisis Corps because it gave us Eris in a Sundreth dress. And, you know, I respect that. It's a good look. And I'll respect this one because it did give us Doritos. And actually, no, this one, I really feel like this is where narrative became sort of optional in Metal Gear, which is the way it should have been a lot sooner. So you can sit down and you can listen to mission briefings and tape cassettes and just go absolutely wild into depth on backstory. And, you know, it is a flaw that some of the character choices and some of the character choices and some of the

the plot events don't make much sense unless you do this. And then all of a sudden, like, oh, I listen to 30 minutes of context and now it all makes sense. But I prefer that over having all of that context forced upon you, especially if it's all, you know, backloaded into the final two hours and there's five minutes of gameplay amidst an hour and 55 minutes of forced talk. So, you know, it's kind of swinging the balance the other direction and it's not perfect. but I think it is, you know, a move in the right direction. And it was probably inspired by, you know, contemporary games of the era, like Bioshock and so forth, the mission logs and things like that.

And also, I'm happy, you know, Metroid Prime scanning, things like that. I'm happy this game isn't stuck in like, you know, PSP. It got the HD remaster and, you know, it's small, bite-sized missions. You can definitely can go back right now and experience this and have a good time with it, which, you know, not a lot of PSP era games are like that anymore. Yeah, that's true. yeah i haven't paid as much attention to the um the reissues the metal gear collections that have come out the first volume is out correct and it's like the early metal gear now there's like a whole new

set of collections but like this was hd remastered like 10 years ago sure sure sure so this hasn't been re remastered yet but um there is a version you can't no but they've i feel like i i can't remember i don't keep up with game news anymore because i don't have to and it's nice um but i feel like they've they've said there's going to be a second collection, right? Which is going to have some of the later games. And they said if that's going to have Metal Gear Solid 4 in it, because that game is trapped on PS3 for better or for worse.

That's the big question mark. Yeah. But hopefully they can get ground zero, or not ground zeroes. Yeah, Peace Walker, HD remake, you think would be, yeah, because that's only been HD remade in the last, like, 10 years. So, yeah. Yeah.

Well, fingers crossed, because even if the story is iffy, which Metal Gear game is that not true of. The gameplay itself is really good and very compelling and the multiplayer stuff is fun if not essential, but I do enjoy it. Let's see, are there any characters in here that I did not mention? Nope, I mentioned them all. Okay, cool. So we can move on to the end of Metal Gear Solid,

the, like I said, the Oroboros eating its tail. And that is Metal Gear Solid 5, which is a two-parter, kind of like you had Virtuous Mission and Operation Snake Eater in Middle Gear Solid 3, except here they said, we can charge you twice for those. So please pay us money for Metal Gear Solid 5 ground zeros, a game that lasts for an hour and a half, and then later you can buy the full Metal Gear Solid 5 Phantom Pace. Yeah, thinking back, in post, the fact that, like, the audacity to have, like, a separate release that's just the prologue, you know, like, clap. in fairness it wasn't it wasn't full price they did not charge you 59 99 no but it wasn't like

ten dollars either wasn't it like 30 or 40 no i think they were just funding their their new engine the fox engine not the x of engine that's a totally different engine don't want to talk about that one it's evil um so ground zero's is a very brief experience that takes place a year after uh peace walker and answers the question of what happened to pause after she disappeared into the ocean with the defeat of Zeke. And the answer was, she was taken prisoner and put in a cell in a Guantanamo Bay type place. And someone put a bomb inside of her. The less said about that, the better. And when you rescue her, which is the point of the mission of ground zeros, she explodes and kills everyone. The end of the snake saga, except not. So there are some

interesting and important characters and factions introduced in here. There's more learned about Cypher. Is this where you actually learned that PaaS was part of Cypher? Or is that actually mentioned in? I think it's in Peace Walker. Okay. But that's kind of the organization of the background. You need to find her to get Intel on Cypher.

Also, there's a child named Chico who has a Walkman in his chest. You've had hot, cold, now there's chest walkman. Thank you. But this was six or seven years before Sony invented the Walkman. So these crazy surgeons in Camp Omega in Latin America, they were way ahead of their time. Sony scientists were like, you know, I heard about this crazy, horrible human experiment that was happening in South America. What if we did that but took the horrible element out of it and just made a little portable tape?

player and that's where the Walkman came from. Anyway, yes, this is all about like children having terrible things implanted into themselves. And when you rescue pause, you catch a glimpse of a guy named Skull Face who got that name because he wears a hat and under the hat, his face kind of looks like a skull. He's pretty ugly. But not in like a, not in a red skull kind of way. It's not actually a skull. It's just he's kind of ugly looking. But then pause explodes. And And that is the end of Ground Zero's. Any final thoughts on Ground Zero's? I guess it's worth pointing out that you were sent here and Huey was back home because there was a nuclear inspection going on at Mother Base.

So he was handling that. And then it turns out that this was a ruse so that Mother Base would be unguarded and it was then attacked by Skull Face's soldiers. So Mother Base is destroyed. and pause blew up. So it's a two-pronged attack. And then... And then you wake up in the hospital. He played them like a damn fiddle.

I mean, it's also weird that one of the random characters on the helicopter at the end of this game doesn't have a name becomes an important character in the rest of the game. I think that's a strange choice. All right.

We might as well just address that up front because when this game first came out, when Phantom Pain came out, I interviewed Kojima. This was before the game had actually shipped. And I was like, so now that you're kind of reaching the point in the timeline

where Metal Gear began with the original Metal Gear, have you thought about revisiting the original Metal Gear with the level of fidelity that you expect from your games now? And he gave me this kind of evasive answer like, I don't really think that's necessary. And at the time, I thought that was

because he didn't think it was, you know, worth revisiting an old game. But, you know, once I discovered how the Pan of Pain turns out, I think what he was saying was, no, actually, this game explains why, I specifically said, like, you know, because big boss in Metal Gear is not consistent with the big boss that we saw in the prequels. Like, he's a very different character. He's just this kind of like cackling villain and over time you've built him up into something of much more of a sympathetic character who has more nuanced motives and this just doesn't really you know it's not really consistent with the the big boss that we see at the end of middle gear solid four and now I realize what he was saying was like yeah no this takes care of it because at the end of

this once you you see the coda with ishmael um you discover that the reason that big boss at the end of Metal Gear is not consistent with every other big boss in the series is because that was not the big boss that you know and love at the end of Metal Gear. It was a different big boss. Which is a guy, a guy who is told to be big boss. Which is silly. Before nanomachines. Again, hypnithotherapy. We talked about how three had a, he was trying to be secretive and it didn't work. And he kind of pulled the same thing here, because even though Phantom Pain was originally revealed as a not Metal Gear game by

Moby Dick Productions or whatever he'd already announced he'd already announced and we'd play Grantares that Kiefer Sutherland was big boss now. It's not David Hader anymore it's Kiefer Sutherland and then he plays a trailer

where you wake up in the hospital from first person and there's another guy's like I'm Ishmael but it's Kiefer Sutherland's voice it's like that you're not fooling anybody like we don't know the details Kajima but you kind of played your hand here man. We know there's something fishy with that guy right there because that's key for someone. But, yeah, he's, yeah, there's one moment of glory in the year

2001. And ever since then, he was just chasing that, that hoodwink dragon. Yep. Just couldn't pull it off. But, yeah, so it turns out that the character you play as throughout Phantom Pain is not Big Boss. Big Boss was injured grievously during the Paz-Cucci explosion, and which is now canonical in Smash Brothers so I'm not just making this up anyway I was not like we need a new big boss

we need one basically like yeah well for some reason he was injured but also the medic who was trying to operate on pause to keep her from exploding was also badly injured but he was injured way worse and spent nine years in a coma

although apparently that was like artificially induced and he was being hypnotized and having plastic surgery done on him so that he would look like big boss and think that he's big boss. And I guess if it looks like a big boss and quacks like a big boss, it is a big boss for all intents and purposes. But yes, you play this entire game as a medic who somehow has become the effective embodiment of the world's greatest soldier on the battlefield, conducting missions, doing all the things,

the big bossy things that a big boss would do. Meanwhile, Big Boss himself recovered and decided to be secretive and go into hiding, but checks in on you occasionally as Ishmael. I will say the creation of punished Venom Snake is like such a far-fetched ridiculous thing. And like it doesn't make you immediately like love this character. Like, I don't know. Like to me, like it's a bit of like a weird choice that kind of put me at arm's length with MGS5 in a way. I mean, where do you stand on the issue of Harry Kim in Star Trek Voyager, who died in a fairly early season, but was immediately replaced by an alternate universe clone or version of Harry Kim? I'm kind of a Voyager stand.

Do you still accept, do you still accept Harry Kim for who he is, even though the Harry Kim who began the Voyager mission is dead? good call well i'm also not the biggest skullface fan i guess we'll get to him yeah he's not really much of a of a villain he's what is his plan is actually maybe the most ridiculous of all the metal gear plans which is that he's creating all the english speakers right he's created a parasite that apparently infects the body and sometimes it gives you psychic powers or something. But mostly he's going to use it to cause people to die from speaking English. And I guess it like worms its way into the language center of your brain. This is what happens when you eat bear that you find roadkill. So skullface, I'm saying Skullfaces, RFK Jr.

So he's chosen to weaponize, weaponize his powers, his illness. Yes. No, but that's why quiet. The cool sniper who needs more clothes because it's a little weird that she's out there in the jungle and a bikini and fishnets. It is, but bugs, man, bugs. Like BDUs exist for a reason and it's not because it's so temperate in the jungle is because bugs. Anyway, she's out there, never speaking, not because she can't, but because she's infected with a parasite. which is why she can't wear clothes, and that's why she can't speak, because if she spoke English, it would, it would not kill her. It would explode into a pandemic that would infect all around her. So at the end of the game, she finally speaks to save Big Boss's life by calling, or sorry, venom snake's life by calling in a rescue chopper and then wanders into the desert so that she will never be around another human again and will prevent a pandemic from waiting out the faces of the game. It's the fox die thing, right?

that's what that's what he's trying to do is analog analog fox die pretty much old snake yeah but you know with uh with a bear meat parasite which so yeah it's a ridiculous like if you speak Dutch will you halfway die I mean Dutch is really close to English I don't know like it's if you you know if you speak pigeon you know when you throw some English word words in there. Because, you know, my in-laws, they speak Vietnamese to each other, but they throw in English words for concepts

that don't really translate into language is a cultural contract. The idea of anything being able to, like, determine that and kill, it's insanely ridiculous. It stretches crudulely. Yeah, it just... That's, that's, that's

skull face, sorry. I'm going to be a skullface apologist for a minute. That's his motivation, though, is because his his nation was destroyed. And he's saying the first thing they do to take over is that they force you to speak their language. And so he was saying, I will destroy you for doing that. And so the most imperialistic, own the most of the world English, he will then set the world on its proper course by destroying the imperialists. And now everyone has to exist without that language and that culture that took over.

But it kind of sucks for all the colony nations that were taken over by English or by English speaking imperialists. you know, forced to begin speaking English. Like Singapore, you know, I don't really consider Singapore an imperial nation. I haven't heard about the Singapore empire. They're not out there crushing all in their wake, but they speak a lot of English there because they were, you know, colonized by the British. And that became sort of the lingua franca, same with Hong Kong. Like, are we, are we just going to kill all those people who are victims of imperialism? Skullface did not think this through. He is not a sympathetic villain. There's also some cognitive dissonance because like Kojima is the ultimate like cultural appropriator and like, you know, kind of, you know,

dilatant and like, you know, I love Mason David Bowie. I love the diamond dog. So you're kind of having it both ways, but like making references to like Western pop culture throughout all of your games and then like having this, you know, crusade against English colonialism at the same time. I mean, I'm not defending colonialism, but yeah. Thanks. Thanks for not. To kind of bring it back to Star Trek again, this whole thing reminds me of the deep space nine speech with Cork and Odo talking about rip beer and how it's so insidious just like the Federation.

Like, it seems horrible, but you can't help but like it. And that's the way the Federation works, which, you know, the Federation just being a stand-in for America or NATO in most Star Trek. So it's fighting against, I guess, the soft cultural power as opposed

to military power, which is an understandable impulse. But I mean, maybe it's cogem working something out for the way he loves to throw English terms into his games that really don't scan for people who grew up speaking English as opposed to just like someone who kind of

has picked up parts of English and is like these are cool things to use cool terms. I've heard these terms. I've seen these in other media. I'm going to mash them around. And they're going to be a defining element of my work. Like I think it's fun that he does that. but, you know, he takes, he takes some crap for it, for sure.

Phantom Pain also has, in my estimation, the worst named Metal Gear of the entire franchise. Oh, yeah, it's like, I didn't even write it down because, like, that would be, that'd be Metal Gear, excuse me, Chex notes, Sahelanthropus. Yes, of course, that one. What is that? Rolls off the tongue. What the fuck? Is it a Hathylantipus? It's a mech.

Well, I mean, Anthro is human and puss like foot, I guess. Sahelan. What is the prefix? What does the prefix even meet? I don't know. I don't know. Anyway. Skullface achieved the goal of having to be an actual mecca.

It's not a tank anymore. It's a mech. You are. You are a skullface defender logged into the chat here. Peace Walker walks around. It's a mech. It's not, you know, piece roller. It's not piece treader.

It's piece walker. Shogahahod's rolling on up, yeah. I was trying to segue away from me. guy into the, into the Huey factor, because there's some fun story there. No, Huey's a helicopter. No, Oticon's dad. Oh, him. Oh. Dr. Strangelove. Yeah. Well, and doesn't he help kill?

Doesn't he help kill the skull face at the end? Like, right? Yeah. They go but they go full Evangelion and you find out that the pod on Sahelanthropus, that looks like the pods from Peacewalker, has Dr. Strange Love inside it.

So they replaced the boss with Dr. Strangelove? Yeah, and Oticon was there when his dad shoved her in there. So they just were like, yes, I've seen Evangelion, here you go. So that, yeah. But also that kind of ties into the other weird part of Skullfaces plan, which is that he wants this metal gear to be controlled, not by AI, but through psychic power. So he has a couple of kids with psychic powers, one of whom apparently is Liquid Snake, who hits puberty and becomes vulnerable to the parasite's effects somehow. I don't know.

There's a whole thing with like the third child, not the third children, so it's not Evangelion. It's totally different than the third children in Avonelian. It's the third child. Thank you for understanding that difference, Tom. and also a guy named the man on fire yeah it's

there's the whole like XOS X OF thing which is a splinter faction of Cypher and Cypher was run by zero so skullface is isn't one of the other kids baby psychomantis right?

Yeah yeah yeah oh is he I forgot about that I think so he has like a Russian name he's the reason man on fire came to be because it was Vulgan's rage that Psychomantus accidentally awoke somehow.

And that said, all of this is a little bit Star Wars prequels of like, oh, he built a three PO. A little too neat, right? I mean, the parasite is called a mini-chlorian, so. No. Yeah, I mean, there's not a lot of story in Metal Gear Solid 5,

but I feel like, you know, ounce for ounce, the ratio of story to bat shit is higher than in any other Metal Gear Solid 5. your game. Yeah, there's a bunch of, there's a big lore dump when you beat the game. You get Zero's tapes and you find out, we didn't really touch on it much because it's again, but in Four, you

find out the whole thing with the Patriots is Zero lost control of his organization because he put it in AI and there were proxies that were supposed to do the boss's bidding, but they, whatever, became self-aware. This is taking place during that period. So you find out that

zero was keeping was partially responsible for the plan the swap big boss so big boss could exist and then you were a proxy big boss because he'd lost control of Cypher and so he was now working with you kind of

but not really it's a whole messy he gives you two hours of tapes to listen to but you finish the game already so there's no game to play to sit there and listen to them that's weird right hmm yeah I mean there is room for another Metal Gear game

to kind of clean all of this up. You know, like I don't think a remake of the original Metal Gear would be remiss, but you know, it wouldn't happen under Kojima's guidance at this point. Although it does sound like he's kind of made amends to a certain degree with

Konami. So maybe at some point they could bring him back in. I could see him coming back in consulting or something maybe. And that said, they... Just one last mission. Yeah. Maybe. But, you know, I'm very hopeful about Delta. Like, I think it looks beautiful and, like, it's my favorite of the franchise.

And the recent, Konami's recent remake of Silent Hill, too, is very faithful and good. And, like, I think, you know, like, all of these games are right for remakes and, like, a little bit of tweaks and stuff. So, yeah, I'd be happy. Even the ones we, you know, we're saying are questionable, like, Four or Peacewalk. I'm like, yeah, you know, I'd be happy for them to revisit these and try to tweak them or fix them a little bit. any of them, really. I feel like there's the potential for, like, the grand unifying Metal Gear game that brings everything together.

That actually does circle back. You get a six, like a six, like a real, like remake Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2 or something. I don't know. Like create, you know, a two-chapter thing where you've got Operation Intrude 313 and then whatever Zanzibar's operation is called. You know, it's a two-part, the introduction of Baby Solid Snake. and just make it, you know, very explicit what the deal is with Big Boss in those two games because there is like the split Big Boss timeline theory going on here where the big boss in

Metal Gear is punished Snake, the medic who's been hypnotized into thinking that he's big boss. And then the big boss in Metal Gear 2 is actually Big Boss and, you know, they're two different people, and that explains why he came back. I don't know. Maybe they could fit the Snake's Revenge Big Boss in there somehow just for the hell of it. Maybe they could do that as like a guy savage

hallucination or something. That'd be fun. Justice for snakes. But, you know, exactly. No, like flesh out some of the support characters, like Schneider and Diane and Jennifer. I feel like, I want to know more about coward duck and the guy who looks

exactly like The Terminator, but he's too two of them. I was thinking the thing I might want is more of a prequel, prequel, prequel with everybody from the virtuous mission, like an earlier, like, you know, like something even before that. No, I know I've invoked Star Wars here, but doing too many prequels, that is a fool's game and the only one who's ever pulled it off successfully so far, I think is Andor. Like, I didn't need Rogue One, the prequel to Star Wars. But it was pretty good.

It was pretty good. And I definitely didn't need Andor the prequel to the prequel to Star Wars. And yet, the first season was phenomenal. And I'm sure the second season is also going to be really good. Tony Gilroy seems to be like he's got the right mindset. But, you know, that's just playing with fire. Not everyone, not everyone is going to give us an Andor. I feel like a prequel to the prequel to the prequel is for Metal Gear.

there's just not a high enough batting average with the narrative in the series. If you want just a good, cohesive, meaningful story, if you want something that is just going to go off the rails and, you know, violate everything that you've come to cherish to this point, there's a good chance of that. And I feel like maybe that's kind of baked into Metal Gear. Like, that is kind of what the Metal Gear saga is about, is about like, here are your expectations. and here is Hideo Kojima flipping the bird to them and saying, no, and you're just going to have to deal with it.

So maybe in that sense, going a few layers deep into the prequel thing could be good. Could be appropriate at least. So you're saying there's a virus inherent to the brand and you don't know when it's going to kill it, but the longer it lives, the older it's going to look.

Exactly. Maybe the virus has to percolate through another prequel so that it becomes safe again. It's funny. In this modern era, I feel like Riden weirdly is a more resonant character these days.

So part of me wants an MGS2 remake, like a giant over the top, like almost Final Fantasy Stephen style remake of MGS2. That's kind of what I want. Like three games, MGS2 expanded to three games. God,

can you imagine how long Stillman would go on about that goddamn church bomb? That would be like an entire afternoon. You just have to sit there and listen to him moping about it. Absolutely not, Shane. No. But Revengeance should be the subtitle for the third Final Fantasy 7 game, for sure. Yeah, we're not talking Revengeantz here, but it's a cool, weird, messed-up experience.

And I do think, like, a sequel to that would be interesting. Yeah, who knows. Yeah, and we didn't talk about Revengeance. We didn't talk about Metal Gear Solid Survive, because those are not canon. We did talk about Ghost Babel, Babel, even though it's not canon, because it actually kind of is canon. But these other games, no. They are lurid fantasies, peeps into an alternate timeline that, oh, there's the new Harry Kim. But yeah, that's about it.

But yeah, in total, looking back, there is nothing in the world narratively like this franchise. It is really on an island of itself. And I think a lot of it is questionable, but I'm glad we have it. Yeah, me too. It's like, I don't know how you feel about Autour. theory, but I feel like the Metal Gear series embodies the good and the bad of Autour Theory in a way that I really can't think of any other games that do that. I mean, you've got, you know, David Kaj, but like, there's no, there's no unifying consistency

between his games. And also, they're not actually that fun to play. Whereas, you know, Metal Gear does combine an increasingly incoherent and lurid narrative tapestry to what is usually excellent video game with some interesting and often fully realized mechanics that you don't find anywhere else or that really expand on the expectations you might have of games in a similar genre. So, you know, as a narrative experience, Metal Gear is a disaster, but as a disastrous narrative experience paired to some brilliant video games, perfect, chef's kiss, no notes.

Now we have Death Stranding, which is all the weirdness without the memories of fans when he used to be more grounded. It's just full on MGS 4 and 5, let's go. Yep. I mean, when you're starting with Jeff Keely as your base level, you know you're off the rails. All right. That is more than two hours of conversation about the back half of Metal Gear's narrative.

And we still left so many gaps and holes. And there's so many other things we could say. But I do think that we should properly revisit Middle Gear Solid 4 as a dedicated podcast. And maybe even go back and do another Middle Gear Solid 3 podcast once Delta comes out. Because who doesn't love Middle Gear Solid 3? Bad, horrible people, that's who. Everyone else loves it. Sometimes just when I need a moment of Zen, I think about climbing down that ladder and hearing the music, hearing the music and it makes me happy.

I think about rolling around on the rug with Ava wearing Kabuki face paint because that was the best for the camo index in the field of flowers where you fought the final battle. It really, really put you in the moment. Like, you understand why Ava's like, yeah, you know, I'm just going to take the money and run. Like, this guy, there's something wrong with him. He killed his mom wearing face paint. All right. Gentlemen, thank you very much for this podcast. This is, I believe, a patron exclusive podcast.

So I don't need to tell people listening where they can find retronauts because they already have. No, actually. Nope, nope. This got moved around. This is not a patron exclusive episode. So I will tell you where you can find Retronauts. You can find it on the internet. Yes, well done. Check out Retronauts.com, or better yet, check out Patreon.com slash Retronauts where you can support the show. And maybe someday you'll be able to support us long enough that we'll talk about more Metal Gear Games. Finally do that Metal Gear Solid 4 podcast. Who knows? The future is full of mystery and uncertainty. but the only thing we can promise is that as long as we continue to have support,

we will keep making great podcasts about old games. Shane, where can we find you on the internet? You can find me on the blue sky, I guess search for my name. How does it even work? I don't know how that works. I should look into that. Yeah. So Shane Bettenhausen.

Yeah. On the blue sky. All right. Is that your handle on Shane Benhousen? Or is it Shane watch? That's a good question. Maybe it's Shane watch. Is it blue sky weird where you don't actually?

I think it's, let me look it up. Shane watch. Like, it's always like some long thing when you look at it, right? B-S-K-Y. It is Shane-Watch? Thank you. I am happy that the Great Exodus has occurred ever since a certain thing occurred in November. We're like, now Blue Sky is happening and full of good people.

It's lively, yeah, it's hopping. Yes, okay, ShaneWatch.B-S-K-Y dot social. Tom, what about you? I'm on Blue Sky as at hypnocrite or just search for hypnocrit. I don't know. And if you like me in Konami adjacent games, please check out Contra Operation Galuga and or Bloodstained Ritual of the night. I directed things on those. Yeah. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, here on Retronauts quite often at limited run games, always, but mostly

doing stuff in the background that you won't necessarily see up front. And on my YouTube channel, which you can find by looking for my name, Jeremy Parrish, or NES works. That's the main series that I'm working on, although as of this recording, I just published a video retrospective on Fantasy Star, so that's not Nintendo at all. That's, that's master system. And finally, on Blue Sky, J. Parrish, 1R and Parrish, J. Parrish.bsk.Y.com. All right. We'll be back very soon with more episodes. If you're a cool patron supporting us at the exclusive Patreon level, Patreon exclusive level, yes. Then you'll get a cool Patreon exclusive episode soon.

Otherwise, you'll hear from us next Monday. Thanks. And I'll melt into you What a fear in my heart But you're so supreme I give my life Not for honor But for you

In my time There'll be no one.