The culmination of Solid Snake’s tale is about to sneak out of the PS3-shaped prison it has inhabited for nearly 20 years inside the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol 2 box, and boy, people just aren’t ready for it. Why were they back then, and aren’t anymore? Well…
The world has changed, and the media landscape has been overtaken by Netflixified content. Safe enough for everyone to enjoy at least a bit, and understandable even if they’re looking at TikTok videos while they’re watching a show or during the loading screens of a game. Metal Gear Solid 4 demands your full attention, and shows a modern auteur at his most unrestrained, for better or for weirdest.
MGS4 was easily the most divisive entry in the mainline series, and I’m willing to bet that even the people who liked it back then will likely find it utterly bizarre nowadays. 18 years is a lot of time, and whereas modern gamers will just have no option but to go “wtf just happened” repeatedly throughout their playthroughs, longtime fans have since been blessed with enough perspective to understand just how wacky many of these plot elements truly are.
This is not Disney’s Beauty and the Beast
In every MGS game, the appointed Snake, or Raiden’s, main obstacle is a team of super soldiers. In MGS4, Old Snake is pitted against the Beauty and the Beast unit, which is easily the dumbest and most questionable team of villains ever put in a game. The only good thing I have to say about them is that they look very cool.
…when they’re dressed, that is. That’s because this unit is composed only of women who are both very sexy and good at killing, hence the name. That’s as deep as it goes, meaning-wise, but it gets way weirder and more questionable. Once you defeat each of them and right before they die, most of their gear mysteriously falls off, revealing a poor, conveniently attractive woman underneath.
…and it gets worse. A not-so-secret Easter Egg allows Snake to perform a photoshoot with each of the Beauty and the Beast Unit members right before they die. It’s a very weird parting gift for the guy who just mortally wounded you.
And you’d think they at least have cool badass personalities to somehow drive your attention away from their oversexualization. Nope. Even though the actual role boss characters play in the story of these games kept diminishing from MGS 1 to 3, they always had their own personalities and unique quirks. Not here. These are just conventionally attractive women with traumatic backgrounds, which somehow makes them the best killers. But wait, there’s more. Kojima didn’t even want the Beauty and the Beast members to wear those catsuits, but rather to have them fully nude during their final cutscenes. That got scrapped for fears of censorship, but the actresses still had to perform their motion capture work fully naked, for some mysterious reason.
Kojima learned from this, as the female companion in MGS5, Quiet, spends the entirety of her life wearing a bikini at best because she suffers from a very convenient condition where she must breathe through her skin. Ok, maybe he didn’t learn crap, but at least he was shamed enough to come up with an excuse.
MGS4 is hard to understand, whether or not you’re versed in the series’ continuity
Having played the MGS trilogy should’ve been enough to set you up for what’s about to take place in MGS4. Nope. Right off the bat, you’re confronted with this little Sunny, a tech genius who’s popping out of nowhere and will make you think you must’ve missed a game along the way. She’s the daughter of Olga from MGS2, who Snake rescued in between games. She has been adopted by Otacon, the guy with the worst track record of keeping women that he loves alive.
Sunny doesn’t really do anything in the game that couldn’t have been done by a pre-existing character, and she’s also now a sort of emotional core to the weird dynamic where a little girl lives and works with a grown-ass hacker and a very overgrown killer on very dangerous missions. Sunny’s presence is at best superfluous, but mostly confusing. And this game, already too infatuated with its own silly cutscenes, spends one hell of a lot of time having her teach you how to cook eggs.
Kojima likely learned from this, as for MGS5 Ground Zeroes he very practically dealt with characters abruptly introduced to the main timeline by blowing them up in the prologue.
Then there’s the game’s own main plot, which involves trying to prevent Liquid Ocelot from controlling all of the world’s weapons systems by hacking their biometric scanners, a then big tech concern that more or less evaporated since then, and has thus lost its gravitas for the world of today. Sad, as the Metal Gear Solid series wisely predicted many of the dangers of social media and even AI. To its credit, MGS4 still touches on those subjects, but not with the same level of depth and tact of the good old days.
Finally, Metal Gear Solid 4 occupies a very strange place in modern gaming
This might be more of a pet peeve of mine, but “war has changed”, the game’s big slogan, directly contradicts “war never changes”, that of the Fallout series. I can understand Kojima putting that in the game if he didn’t know the original Fallout from 1997, but the Fallout series was only getting more popular by the release of MGS 4, and is now arguably as popular as ever, so many might not help but see it as a dig. Pretty weird, even if very likely unintentional.
And, let’s be honest, there’s no way I’m able to list all the weird parts of MGS4. I’ll leave the rest for you in the comments.
