What it means to be 10/10 - 2/2 of MS(g)B on MGS4

I am of the opinion that videogames, rather than predisposing people to violence and war, give the player the important experience of being a part of war-like conditions. Call of Duty 4 and other titles seem to make war cool, but as Army of Two (also made war cool ) dealt with the growing private military complex and its possible moral ramifications; Haze, like MGS4 also tells the story of soldiers watering down combat for better effectiveness, and even the movie Ironman dealt with the US lack of accountability for civilian casualties, Metal Gear Solid 4 is part of a re-emerging (historically, this shit be cyclical) social critique on those who wage war, war profiteers, war's effect on people, and, especially, the future of war.
Unlike the complicated plots of MGS2 and 3, more dealing with soldiers as the plaything of planners, MGS4's focus on war is a throwback to the original Metal Gear Solid. MSG2, in particular, seems to have thrown a lot of people off . I've talked to a few people who kind of lost interest because of 2, bought the third game but never really played it (the third game was hard as shit). Playing the previous MGS games is nigh essential for playing MGS4. You can get by, but you're gonna be confused.
What's been nice about the Metal Gear Solid series is that while most sequels show you the characters soon after the events of the previous title, MGS1,2, and 4 take place years later and don't waste time in the beginning on you catching up on what's happened. The passing of time has created many new problems for the characters involved in the story, most prevalent would be Snake's inexplicable, rapidly-progressed aging. MGS4 starts off in combat and takes frequent breaks for exposition to catch up on the past years, and when it comes it leaves you with even more questions to keep you going.
While a throwback to the original in story, what's weird about 4 is that in gameplay, it resembles a first-person shooter more than a stealth game despite the tools used for stealth being very user-friendly and fun. For stealth purposes, a circle appears around your octocamo (which unlike the constant adjustments you had to make in three, automatically adjusts to your surroundings) indicating enemy position, distance, and awareness of you. In addition, the Solid Eye provides data on troop movement by sight and sound data represented in a sonar-like manner. Instead of 2 and 3's stamina bar, there's a psyche gauge. Its level is affected heavily by the percentage of stress Snake's body experiences due to getting shot, getting shot at, or even crouching for too long. Lower levels of psych makes you run slower and aim shittier. High levels of stress and shooting can induce a combat high making you more effective and take less damage.
For combat, there are many, many weapons (Example: at least 5 different rocket launchers) with very many different appeals. New weapons can be picked up or bought through your start menu, accessing Drebin, a war profiteer, and his store. All extra guns you pick up are automatically sold to Drebin (presumably because Otacon's toy robot has taken them to Drebin), and upgrades and more weapons can be bought at any time (saved my ass in the middle of several boss fights when I ran out of ammo). Resource management is challenging because health and psych recovery items must be found (a.k.a. Procure On-Site); however, they are plentiful.
So, how does this change Metal Gear Solid's gameplay?
While taking down every enemy was my only stealth strategy in MGS2, in MGS4, collecting weapons for Drebin (the weapons pimp) creates an incentive to take down all enemy soldiers instead of sneaking by. In addition, several rail-shooter or team gameplay elements emphasize shooting over MGS' really fun and challenging stealth action.
PMC and Rebel NPCs are often infinite and their bodies disappear over time. This and the Drebin point system creates an incentive to farm enemy respawn spots for Drebin Points to get new weapons, and I think this system, besides discouraging stealthy play, took away from what could have been a powerful vision of the battlefield. See, Snake actually steps around bodies in this game, and him stepping around a battlefield riddled with corpses fighting for (and this too could have helped Kojima's themes but the detail on the Rebel's objectives are slight; however, the Private Military Company troops are motivated by economic profits which is, you know, sick) what seem to be lost or foolish causes as a consistent image everywhere Snake went would really bring home the way war devastates lives, maybe throw in some crying children and parents for emotional flavor.
Instead, like a shooter with RPG elements (RE4, for example), every time a soldier dies, a sound that a gun pickup is available goes off, and you, the player, internally jump with glee at the Drebin Points it's going to get you. So, despite killing being a disincentive in the previous games, the more you kill, the better weapons you get, the better damage you can do to your enemies. Killing more drops some of your end-of-chapter Drebin Points, but so what? You can make more from farming troops anyway. I tried to kill as little as possible which gave me about 5 weapons to choose from with little upgrades available, so Drebin Points stopped mattering to me after a while, which detracted severely from my enjoyment of this game.
It's also really distracting that all the rebels sound like Americans. What are Americans doing in the Middle East fighting for the previous regime? Aren't the Americans part of the PMC? Why does every dying person have the same death rattle (and since people die a lot, this noise gets frigging spammed)? I think this is because there's only two voice actors for the troops. There's also only 5 different types of enemies besides the boss, so really, to summarize, gameplay is hide, find enemy troop, line up shot to take down enemy troop, then progress. In the most fun parts of the game, environmental factors like a mortar or APC or ambient warfare force you to vary your strategy. Level design also helps mix up the line-up, shoot combination. Various mini-games like tracking footprints and tailing also vary gameplay.
Boss battles do not vary gameplay so much. They get repetitive too: (1)find hiding boss, (2)enable normal combat situation with boss (you know, do something so he or she will actually die), (3)line up shot, (4)take shot, repeat. I'm exaggerating a little bit, but I did spend a lot of in-game time lining up shots, which to me is repetitive as hell. It really pales in comparison to boss battles from previous games.
Don't get me wrong, I loved this game. In my every waking moment, the bleakness of various elements called out to me, pulled me in, and distracted me from everything else. One boss kept trying to hug me to death, and if you let her, she lays you down and her and snake both finally seem at peace. I had trouble wanting to retry the segment. The world is sad. The music is amazing. The graphics and motion-capture are so intensely beautiful and realistic that in everyday life I often still feel like I'm in the game, and I loved that while I played it, I felt linked to much bigger things than myself. I felt like I was saving the world, but I kept getting pulled out of that by the weaker points of this game.
Like the fact that the story really lacks consistency. Kojima's sense of humor is cute and doesn't distract as much as the fact that the characters are larger-than-life then human then larger-that life. They're badass, but to create tension and suspense they make mistakes and get hurt, but then they keep coming back. To me, MGS4's epic qualities don't qualify as good when Kojima keeps picking and choosing when to bring the game back down to reality. I mean, it's really hard to kill anyone in this game, much less stop these motherfuckers from talking because they talk a lot.
It's like first somebody has information, then after a level ends they miraculously have more information, and then after that they get some more. Much of the cinematics involve explaining events or phenomena instead of showing events or phenomena (although even that has too much detail at times), which is fine in smaller doses but MGS4 has a lot to explain, so the cinematics dragged on very long.
Even cinematics that show are problematic because this is a video game. Many action cinematics in MGS4 easily could have made for very fun gameplay elements. I think part of the reasoning for this is due to the fact that although the story mainly deals with the lives of people around Snake, he is the only playable character. I think Snake's biggest character development and sketching happened in MGS1. Now Snake's old, but at his core he's still Snake. At first, Snake gets the biggest focus, but in terms of story, he's not the main character. The cast of MGS4 is an ensemble with roughly equal parts to play in the main story, but still Snake is the only playable character.
I really did not mind playing as Raiden in the second game, and I really wanted to play as him this time around. Goddamn that boy's cool! If only the community had accepted him. Right, the community...Part of the gameplay experience, although we at MSGB (unlike Penny Arcade ) and other fine publications try our hardest to minimize it's effects, is expectations based on hearsay, personal preference, and past experiences. There is a lot of press on MGS4 saying it is the best game ever. You hear this and go, "Wow, ok! I'll check that out" or "Bullshit" or you say "Damn, of course! It's Metal Gear Solid!"
And, in response, I would say that MGS4 is a game everyone should suffer through. It's steps away from being perfect so when I say suffer through, I mean there are really good bits (bits that should go down in history as really good bits), and I'm really happy with the conclusion of the series, but that there are other bits that really bring the game down, and given the caliber of the game's good bits, they bring it down more for me because the good bits give me such high expectations. The level of storytelling in this game is so fucking high at times, but then some cheesy or questionable element comes up, and it frustrates the hell out of me.
But then again, I told a friend the way I felt about MGS4 (Really good with some really bad parts), and he said, "Sound like a Metal Gear Solid Game." How true. Throughout the series, the almost-trademark elements of these games that have bothered me have made others fall in love and rediscover that love over and over. So, I can sit here and be bitter about the cheesy bits and no one will care, because they love those cheesy bits for their cheesiness, and in the end, what makes a game a ten out of ten, to me, is if (like MGS fanpeople) on your first time playing you are hooked in mind, body, and controller to the game despite its shortcomings.
While I'm an avid MGS follower, I've always been on the fence about the series. I think I focus on the weaker points of the series because I see them as part of bigger trends that bother me, and that, in turn, makes me judge MGS4 unfairly. For instance, I see in MGS4 that the largest Japanese market likes or the entertainment industry of Japan thinks the market likes cheesy shit. I see translations that could have been better, awkward or unnecessary foreign language use (Raison d'etre, Guns of the Patriots, etc.), and a Japanese predilection to connect everyday situations to more abstract concepts or use analogies in a way that confuses rather than adds to meaning, and also, (shit...I'm sorry) Fanboy/girlism really bothers me. It's a stupid pet peeve. Becoming more attached to a label or set of characters or whatever is natural as time goes on and increases enjoyment of said franchises which is really what matters, right? Good entertainment.
I've just been burned so many times by companies that take advantage of these fanboy/girl-attached labels (Square, Troika, X-Men, etc.) to cater to a specific audience or make money with subpar products. MGS4 is not subpar. It's better than most everything out there, but I expect it to excel like it was the first time we'd ever heard of Metal Gear or Hideo Kojima, and it doesn't always do that.

and that MakeS me a (g)rand ol' Bitter coot about Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

Lynny B cooked