#and now i’m playing mgs2 and i call snake on the radio over and over

[klaxonsynth]

when the snake is solid‼️

[juanbreaksitdown]

Playing MGSV for the First Time Knowing the Twist, Part 0: Ground Zeroes

I’m a big Metal Gear fan but I dropped out sometime after MGS4. I’ve recently begun playing MGSV but I already know the twist about a certain character’s true identity. Still, the rest of the game is new to me and I’m ready to let Hideo Kojima break down my perceptual reality and teach me war is hell all over again. I’ll be chronicling my takes on the game as I go through it, starting with this post.

MISSION START

It’s been a while since I’ve done some tactical espionage action, so I died a bunch playing even this tutorial level. Good to see the ol’ TIME PARADOX death screen, reminding us that history is already written.

On PS4, the graphics on Big Boss look great. Kiefer Sutherland slots into the voice nicely. Admittedly, David Hayter will always be Snake to me, thanks to nostalgia.

I love that the series has added a ton of quality of life adjustments since its last main console release, with hints and instructions given without too much handholding by both Kaz on the radio and the design of the level itself. Kojima’s design chops have always been as strong as his penchant for indulging in meta-fiction. I remember being dropped into the first challenge of MGS1, where you have to enter Shadow Moses from the outside, and finding it difficult to know what I was looking out for.

Granted, I was a child. This game is easier now.

Speaking of children, I’m pretty comfortable saying that this is the darkest opening to a Metal Gear game full stop. To begin with, you’re rescuing children as part of Big Boss’s MSF. Metal Gear has spent a good long time telling us that child soldiers - and children being involved in war at all - are not good. MGS2 sees E.E. die trying to help Snake and her step brother Otacon. Raiden himself is a child soldier, which leads him to be emotionally closed off. Sunny ends up helping save the day in MGS4, but Snake and Otacon, having seen the brutality of war and how it permanently harms children even if they survive, keep her away from the fighting as much as possible. Kojima’s stance on child soldiers has always been - unsurprisingly - that they are a heinous crime and a symptom of a system which knows no morality, only conquest accomplished by feeding humans into a flesh-rending machine for money.

The existence of children that you must rescue from a PoW camp shows that this is far beyond Big Boss realizing the President made him kill his mother figure, lied about why, and still wanted to shake his hand. We are at the precipice before the inevitability of Outer Heaven and Solid Snake. And it’s only getting darker.

Paz, the little girl I just rescued, has had a bomb sewn into her gut. Here I become impressed with the care put into animating Big Boss - Kojima has always seen himself as bridging the gap between film and games so he treats his characters like actors. Their body language matters, not just their voice acting and mechanics. Big Boss’s body language couldn’t be clearer when he realizes what’s happening aboard the helicopter. Gone is the confident super soldier and master of CQC: he raises his hands nervously, like an overwhelmed new parent whose child is sick. He doesn’t know what to do; he knows his skill set as a soldier is completely helpless against a medical crime such as this. He believes in a world where this doesn’t have to happen, but to make it exist, he has to endure this part. He is just as much of a child as he was when he was deceived into killing the Boss. The child is raising children and all his strength and cunning won’t stop the hurt.

Kojima forces us to watch Paz’s guts get opened up and sifted through while Snake holds her down. The panic in her body conveys the pain viscerally. Kojima’s stance that war isn’t a game and treating it like one only removes humanity from the greatest aggressors is clear even as he makes war games. He wants us to know that this is the cost of using war to battle a world controlled by war. It’s not to be fetishized.

The bomb is retrieved, and all seems well. With a little bit of quiet, Kaz rages against their situation impotently. They were played like damn fiddles.

And the tune isn’t over.

Paz announces there’s a second bomb in her… (we don’t get to find out where specifically, I’m going to assume something only mildly horrific and not speculate too hard for my brain’s sake). She jumps out of the chopper, but it’s too late. Her proximity to the chopper immolates all inside and our mission ends. Kojima’s theming is already strong here. The bomb you see, the bomb you catch, is bad. Horrible. More awful than you ever wanted to deal with.

The second bomb is worse.

Indeed, in this series which began on the dangers of nuclear proliferation, Kojima has called out the two bombs which make his message a necessity. The Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima, was the first and only uranium bomb dropped. 98% of the material did not undergo fission. It obliterated the city nonetheless. The second bomb, Fat Man, was plutonium and devastated Nagasaki, cementing the nuclear bomb as the ultimate in material destruction.

In Metal Gear Solid 2, the first bomb, that the S3 plan was the Solid Snake Simulation, blew the audience’s mind as they learned anyone could be Solid Snake, soldier genes be damned, so long as they experienced the right soldier memes. The second bomb, that your perceptual reality was constructed by sociobiological AI too vastly powerful to be understood by a single mind and the true S3 plan was to curate digital media to its normative liking in the Selection for Societal Sanity, is the one people remember Metal Gear Solid 2 for.

In Metal Gear Solid 3, the Virtuous Mission ends in the disaster of the Boss defecting and Volgin firing the Davey Crockett nuke. Operation Snake Eater ends with Snake realizing his life is a lie; that the nation he has given his life to will never respect it, only burn it as fuel for its own ends.

Here, we have begun with Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and one bomb has gone off.

The second bomb, I can only assume, has been armed and left for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

I’m already excited.