Metal Gear Solid 4 is the Worst Best Game Ever

Widely known as one of the best video game ever, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is in fact not, but one of the worst games you have to play. And to not play it would be like not reading the last 10 pages of the book while everything culminates to the false promise of a climatic conclusion, and basically drop that ball on you and crushes you with that sour feeling. Metal Gear Solid 4 is like having a cake with worms crawling out of it after the best 10 course meal you have ever had. It reminds me of Déjà Vu, the movie with Denzel Washington, when the ending of the movie invalidates the very foundation of the time travel theory that the movie built itself upon, and threw the greatness of everything the movie has built up leading to that point when plot is flushed down the drain (and amazingly critics don’t recognize that). Sitting through Guns of the Patriots is exactly that, having a Déjà vu moment of the movie Déjà vu. And if you haven’t watched Déjà Vu, you have probably seen Matrix 3, and shuddered as the plot destroyed everything that came before it.

People who complain about the cut scenes being too long is missing the point, it is the utter stupidity of the cut-scenes that is the main problem here — try to sit through 90 minutes of watching an Albino girl cook eggs is an understatement of what is in fact the underlying foundation of everything that is wrong with MGS 4. The content of those cut-scenes, while looking technologically satisfying,  oozes ridiculousness — watch the cyborg ninja Raiden defend the decrepit solid snake against a ship ramming onto the dock, with a 2-handed slash cutting the ship in half. Has anyone not thought of the sensible thing to do? Carry Snake’s ass and jump out of harm’s way.

This is the game most hard-core fans would have bought a PS3 for if they already had an xbox 360, as of Summer of 08 that was, the truth is that before MGS4 came out there was little reason to own a PS3 (and even less after you’ve finished the game), unless you knew about the hidden gem Folklore, or anticipate the excellence of later exclusives like Demon’s Souls, Valkyria Chronicles, and Infamous (arguably the 3 best  on the system to date), of course there’s also Uncharted but you could just pop in the Indiana Jones Trilogy DVD. If you only played MGS4 for 10 minutes it would probably look like one of the best games ever — that the plot starts by you being the intruder between two clashing forces at the battlefield, and old snake constantly muttering that war has changed… keeping you wondering what kind of profound journey Hideo Kojima has installed for us.

The rest of it, if you bother to sit through the cut-scenes, which you have to, or you won’t be experiencing MGS4 like it is intended to, is mumbled garbage. Lets take a break from the plot and examine the gameplay a little bit. You go from point A to point B, that’s the gist of MGS gameplay.  What happened to the sneaking action that started the 3rd person action stealth genre from the first Metal Gear Solid, yes you can still bloody sneak around here but the immediate danger factor of what makes the game fun is gone. As long as you run straight to the point marked on the map as the end goal and you are going to survive. Screw stealth, that just gets in the way of the plot — you can’t wait until the game ends.

When I am talking about gameplay, I instantly remembered the joy that the first MGS brought me. There was Snake crawling through the air-duct and dropping onto unaware enemies, your goal was pretty clear, it was infiltration, stealth, you could not be discovered, or you would not survive the gunfight, running away and staying out of sight was a necessity. You watched the bird-eye view on the screen meticulously and paid the least attention to the gorgeous 3D graphics (yes the blocky polygons in the first generation Playstation). The eyesight of your enemy was represented by the path of  a beam of light like from a mag light, and how to play the game was clear, you had to stay beyond your enemy’s sight, like the darkness staying just beyond the light from the  protagonist’s torch in Silent hill. Watching the bird-eye view reminded you of the older Metal Gears on MSX and NES, that even while the game was in 3D, the gameplay had not changed. Snake came across the invisible laser beams detectors, he had to resort to the only item in his inventory, the pack of cigarettes. Either he used the smoke or he could brave detection, so he could get to the keycard to access the locked doors that was hindering progress, very much like in Dragon Quest 1 when the hero was in plain view of the evil lord’s castle right at the start of the game. Those were the moments of exploration, adventure, light puzzle solving, very much added up to the unique espionage stealth action. And who could forget the boss Psycho Mantis, who could tell you what game you have played from reading your memory card. That was the awesomeness that struck the world and brought Hideo Kojima into the status of international star designer/director.

Then there was MGS2, where it was apparent that it was the big joke that Kojima played on his fans. The first quarter of MGS2 was the answer to the worthy sequel to MGS1, and the rest of MGS2, where the real plot began was the facetiousness that was the prelude to MGS4. If MGS4 had nothing to do with MGS2, it might have been a better game. As the direct sequel to 2, MGS4 is like the punchline to a bad joke. Telling the first half of a bad joke may not be as mediocre as it is on its own, but telling the punchline to a bad joke by itself is disastrous. That is Metal Gear Solid 4.

Then there was the virtuoso masterpiece that was MGS3, the prequel to all of the Metal Gear universe — the Dragon Quest 3 of all Dragon Quests, the Last Crusade of Indiana Jones, the T2 of Terminators. An immortal tale with spirit that was so masterfully told it could not be topped. Even the name of the game Snake Eater was created with its multi-facet-smart-wordplay in mind. If MGS 4 was a Stanley Kubrick movie directed by Michael Bay, MGS3 was Shakespeare told in a James Bond movie. In fact the game had so much class that it sold poorly compared to the other MGS games. For every three people you meet that claim they bought a PS3 for MGS4, you would have met 2 people that did not play Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

Kojima directed MGS4 to answer every question you had about the series — all the whys, whos, whens, and hows, the nonsense that began in MGS2. It is the game that you have to play to get those ridiculous answers, that at the end it will be a relief that things will finally end — like if you were to find out at the end of ABC hit drama Lost  that it had just been a bad bad dream before the plane crashed, you would curse at the writers but still feel relieved that there was closure. Despite the incoherent plot and the barely existing gameplay,  all the so-called-credible reviewers out there gave it raving scores, scores higher than MGS3, and for once I don’t know whether they gave such a score out of respect for Kojima or they simply sold their integrity they didn’t have to keep their jobs. Famitsu awarded a perfect 40 to Metal Gear Solid 4 like they did with the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and I shudder to think of the sacrilege that suggests this two games as equivalent, one as one of the top 10 games I have ever played in my life, the other , one of the top 10 games I thought I would be playing before I got my hands on it. If I were to give out a real rating, I would rate Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriot 5 stars below MGS3, in a 4 star system. Hideo Kojima is no doubt a talented designer and director, but he needs to realize that this accursed Metal Gear universe is now but excess baggage which is smoldering and shackling his creativity. Perhaps MGS4 sucked on purpose, to see if the fans would still embrace it, they did. But for the rest of us sane fellows,  bring us something else, like Snatchers, Zone of Enders, or better yet, go properly direct the next Castlevania, do something new and original for a change.

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