Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker – Walks Among The Best

It’s true that we never tried to hide our blatant distaste of Metal Gear solid 4, a crappy piece of work that Hideo Kojima tested his fans just to see that he could get away with doing such disservice and he was right — most people didn’t notice it was bad; juxtaposed against the masterpiece MGS3 Snake Eater, which we thought to be one of the best told story of all times. Peace Walker on the PSP follows the footsteps of Big Boss, 10 years after the events of Snake Eater and earning his title of Big Boss, and not to our surprise, the game doesn’t disappoint. Forget the unremarkable Portable Ops which events we totally could not recollect, MGS Peace Walker is very much a “core” series game (which was widely rumored to be MGS5 at some point), and its story is tightly interwoven into the events of Snake Eater and the rest of the Metal Gear series. It’s too bad that Peace Walker has to be made on a handheld system that is losing its popularity — PSP was at one point the king of handhelds, now overshadowed by the multipurpose and just as powerful (if not more so) iPhone and the much more popular and arguably with much better selection of games Nintendo DS, if you didn’t have a PSP already, you probably should never ever get one at this point. There just isn’t ever any reason that we should play a MGS game on a handheld system because we are expected to sit there for 20 hours straight and not put it down why couldn’t we just enjoy this on our plasma TV?

MGS Peace Walker tells an amazingly well-written story with its twists and turns. Taking place mostly in Costa Rica during the era of the Cold War, Peace Walker is about nuclear power deterrence,  and a journey of redemption, of staring into darkness and becoming that, for Snake — not the Solid Snake we know well, but the original father of the Fox Hound, a very different, damaged man who later will become the villain and lead the Outer-Heaven Uprising — events of the first Metal Gear. If MGS3 Snake Eater wrote the great prologue of the series, Peace Walker told the most satisfying Epilogue one could ask for — the game makes references to and answers questions for every Metal Gear game that ever existed.

If the 2-hour long cutscenes that told you nothing in MGS4 were a huge turn-off for some, things are a lot milder and clearer here in Peace Walker — told with comic book style stills with a lot of optional voiced Briefing conversations that the player can choose to unwisely ignore (the whole game is voiced; amazing what they could fit into an UMD) — there’s plenty of story here , with well-researched political analysis of the era, and it is broken up into sections well. The stealth gameplay of Peace Walker takes precedence here, and it’s not a matter of walking from A to B and advancing the plot. Snake takes on dozens of missions with different varieties — your major goal is to gather resources to advance and expand Outer Heaven. The  enemy recruit system, lifted from Portable Ops, is much more improved, suspension of disbelieve aside, all you had to do is attached some kind of balloon to the fallen enemies and a helicopter will automatically pick them up in midair, amazingly it even works with a roof in the way but we don’t need to get into that; it beats having to carry bodies onto trucks a mile across like we did in Portable Ops. In between missions, the game feels like the classic Bullfrog game  Syndicate, where you allocate resources and develop technology — which of those will become essential in solving future missions and defeating epic bosses. Yes there are huge epic boss fights in MGS Peace Walker — none of them humans, but vehicles and Mechs and AI weapons — some of them resembling Zone of the Enders — I believe at one point the theme song of ZOE played — we can’t play a Metal Gear game without fighting an actual Metal Gear right? But in Peace Walker, it feels like you fight nothing BUT Metal Gears; not that it is bad or anything, but the game can get pretty tough — a good change of pace from piece-of-cake boss fights from previous titles — here Snake constantly has to fight towering gargantuan colosus who could crush him with a tiny footsteps; thankfully if the player has done the right research, he can get constant supplies of ammo and healing items with supply markers and support from Outer Heaven — most boss fights can become  battles of attrition and patience, and they can last as long as half an hour if not longer depending on the player’s skill level, for sometimes you would drain your RPG ammo on a boss and you have barely dented him, and that is taking into account that you are targeting weak points and such, health bars of enemies are so resilient that they literally refuse to go down.

There are so many references fans can pick up from playing this game it would seem like a wet dream coming true for them, to discuss it in details I am probably going to have to write 5 college essays about them that are not entirely fit for any educational curriculum. From your 2nd in Command Kaz Miller being someone you would later meet (or have already met) as Solid Snake in MGS1, the scientist having obvious ties to another certain nerdy individual in MGS4, the tapes from Eva explaining the true objectives of the Boss, the mention of the Philosophers… everything in this game gloriously expands and explains just about every tiny knots in the vast expanse of the spider web that is the Metal Gear series.

MGS Peace Walker is fun, with a well-told story and sky-rocket production values,  is another masterpiece from Hideo Kojima and it will go down the path of history as the best game on the PSP (if not it will at least make you happy about owning a clunky PSP), not that we suggest purchasing one for Peace Maker specifically; but for PSP owners and MGS fans, getting this game is a certain no-brainer.

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