MGS3 - continued
Nov. 24th, 2004 07:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
croikI’m only writing this stuff down because otherwise it’ll swim around in my brain forever. And I’m only posting it to see if anyone felt the same way, or otherwise wants to discuss it – I like reading other people’s opinions of the stuff I play/watch, so I figure someone might enjoy it, too. It’s all MONSTROUSLY SPOILER FILLED, so best not to pay any attention unless you’ve already beaten the game.
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.
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No really, lots of spoilers.
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.
.
.
.
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Okay, here I go, then.
Naked Snake – “Jack”
First of all, is it Jack or John? Because everyone called him Jack, but when he introduced himself to Ocelot at the end, it really did seem like he was being honest. Ocelot, too, for that matter. But then when you find out that Ocelot was really Adam, which appears to come straight out of his name Adamska, one has to wonder if he was telling the truth. Which means Snake might not have been, either. *_*
I did like this incarnation of “snake.” I didn’t, however, like him as well as Solid Snake, or even as well as Raiden (*gasp!* Did she just stay that!? My god, she LIKES Raiden!)
Yes! I liked Raiden. And not just because he was a bish. So there XP
The thing is, when I look back at MGS1 and 2, I can really make a picture in my mind of “Solid Snake.” He was bitter, gruff, cynical, haunted, no nonsense, but he also had a subtle sense of dry humor, and of course, a softness for the ladies. I know not everyone got into him because he was carrying so much baggage, but it was his history and his professionalism that gave him so much character, and so many changes to go through. You could see in MGS2 that he’d gone through a big change, but he still had his past with him, and that’s what I thought made him interesting. Raiden was still bitter and cynical, but also a n00b (haha I’m so l33t) with a lot to prove, a lot of extra attitude and just as much baggage of his own. A lot of people were turned off by his complaining (not to mention his girlfriend) but I thought that only gave him more dimensions. A Metal Gear character involved in a steady relationship!? And not to condone him bitchslapping his girlfriend, things like that which surprise the audience I think only serve to make him more real. In the span of one game we learned all there was to know about Raiden, how he grew up, how he lived, how he was trained – even a little of how he’s going to live. You didn’t have to like him, but you had to admit he had a lot of character.
“Jack” on the other hand didn’t seem as deep to me. Not to say he has to have a tragic past to be interesting, but when I try to think of how I would describe his character, all I can think of is, “he was a decent guy.” He was a little green, a little naïve, and for the most part loyal, but he didn’t have any quirks or personality traits that were especially striking. His biggest opportunity for that was his relationship to The Boss, and though he reacted to it with a certain degree of uncertainty, I didn’t feel like we really got into Jack’s head enough to know what he was really thinking. He was basically led by the nose from place to place, completing the missions, but he didn’t really have any reaction to most of what was going on. Even when he lost his eye, he just kind of shrugged it off. And he sure got captured/held at gunpoint a lot. And beat up *_* But it didn’t seem to affect him once he was out.
That, and everyone keeps saying, “It really helps you understand where Big Boss was coming from.” I didn’t really see it that way. By the end of the game, he learns that The Boss was willing to give up everything, life and pride, for the sake of her country. The way the game portrays it, it was a noble and worthwhile sacrifice. But what Big Boss does later is nothing like that spirit of patriotism – creating his own dictatorship military country? Threatening the world with nuclear war? You could stretch it and say he was doing it “to make the world whole again,” but Big Boss’s ideal of creating a world where soldiers are necessary goes directly against what The Boss was trying to tell him about healing the world and putting an end to conflict. Which basically means that all her pretty speeches, and all of Eva’s, went to waste. Whether Big Boss was later acting under Patriot orders or not will never be known if MGS3 really is the last game, but it just left kind of a bad taste in my mouth. I wanted Jack, throughout the game, to pull a Darth Vader and become bitter and jaded. But that’s not how the game ended, so…whatever it was that caused him to become the enemy of the first two Metal Gears must have developed later.
Unless Kojima’s saying that Big Boss had to have been justified in all his other actions, and we just don’t know the reason. Which is totally cheap, Kojima XP
Eva
I didn’t like Eva all that much. Not because she wasn’t a good character, she was as well developed as anyone else in the game, just…she was a little ho-ish for me. She was pretty sweet on the bike, I’ll admit, and I really didn’t suspect by the end that she wasn’t what she said she was. So she wasn’t bad. I just didn’t find her as likeable as Snake’s other partners, like Meryl and Otacon.
The Boss
I really liked The Boss, up until the end. She was just about everything I wanted a MG character to be – not only a powerful female character, but her voice fit her excellently, she was strong, capable, involved, interesting, and cool looking. Despite what I thought of Snake, her end of their father/son-ish relationship was held up at every opportunity. I really did like her, and her fight at the end certainly was beautiful, if not frustrating.
What I didn’t like was her speech by the end. Her back story, though interesting to a degree, was so sloppily related. I couldn’t really draw together a picture of what her life must have been like. “I was a famous war hero, and then I was in Nevada testing nuclear weapons, and then I went into space, and by the way, I was sent to WWII when I was nine months pregnant (WTF??), and then I was on some mission where I killed my lover, and then I invented the smiley face and worked on a shrimp boat.” I just stared at the screen going, “Huh? So…wait, huh?” Too much, in my opinion. It was enough to say she gave birth during a battle and her baby was taken, but…Normandy? A pregnant mother thrown onto one of the bloodiest and infamous battle sites in modern history? That’s not exaggeration, that’s just ludicrous. Not that stranger things haven’t happened in Metal Gear…
That, and the fight itself seemed a little cheap. Considering everything in The Boss/Snake relationship revolved for the most part around the CQC they developed, I would have thought the battle to rely more on that, rather than sniping your mother figure from a distance. In the end I just equipped the survival knife and charged her. Can’t say the damage was as great as a bullet to the head when she’s not looking, but it was less frustrating that way, and it got me in under the 10 minute time limit. I'm not sure if it’d work on the higher difficulties, though.
Snake’s Support Team
I didn’t mind the team. I even liked Major Zero; his actor did a great job, and he was really likable. Para-Medic wasn’t so bad but her movie trivia got tiresome – after about the 20th movie you’d think she’d realize Snake’s not a movie person! She was better than Rose, but I still like Otacon best as my saver. The military advisor I never pay attention to, so I don’t really have an opinion on Sigint. I would have liked it if the team played a more active role, or at least make a comment when I called each from my box, but all and all I thought they did a good job.
The Cobras
The Cobras were the biggest disappointment, character wise. The only one of them I wasn’t indifferent to (other than The Boss) was The Sorrow, and he was already dead! The others had maybe a hint of a back story, or really nothing at all. Their “powers” were creative, to be sure, and your fights with them innovative, but…maybe too much innovation and not as much skill involved. The Pain was simple to avoid. The Fear was cool looking and it was kind of cool having to wear the goggles to find him, but the hardest part of the fight was worrying about having enough bandages to stitch up the arrow holes. The End was looooong. Took me about forty minutes, I think. The Fury was probably the most traditional, and gave me the hardest time. And The Sorrow was just creepy.
But in the end, The Sorrow is really the only one that made any difference to the plot—for as short as he was around, I felt attached to him. The rest were just filler bosses, which was a shame. Even Fatman had a history, and a link to the rest of the plot via Stillman and the Patriots (not to mention a big bald guy on roller skates setting explosives is just plain funny).
I have the feeling they didn’t get into the Cobras just because they wanted the player to be able to focus more on the other enemies. And that’s a shame.
Col. Volgin
Volgin was a semi decent villain. His power was kind of cool, but I think they relied too much on his sadism as a means of giving him character. Other than that, he was just an asshole who wanted to blow shit up. He didn’t have the charisma that Liquid and Solidus had. Which was maybe the point, but Ocelot and The Boss were just so much more likeable and effective than him, it was hard not to think of him as a grunt.
On the other hand, it was kind of refreshing not to have an enemy motivated by higher ideals. He was just genuinely nasty, an ego freak, an unredeemable enemy. There was never a question that what he wanted was selfish and wrong, and sometimes those no-brainer villains are just as effective as the insightful ones.
So…I could go either way on Volgin. But he’s not as cool as…
Ocelot (yay!)
I suppose with that, it’s pretty clear who my favorite character was. Which isn’t really a surprise, because I think they went almost out of their way to make you like him. He was cool, funny, interesting, and at times even noble. I’m sure a lot of people were wondering about how Metal Gear’s infamous traitor would be represented, and I wasn’t disappointed. His actor did a great job. His scenes (with maybe the exception of juggling, that made me giggle) were well done, with the right amount of humor and respect. And I love the hat, not to mention his hilarious little “cat call.” How can you not love him?
The one thing that bothered me a little was that Ocelot was maybe a little too likable. This is the kid, after all, who grows up to be nasty sadistic backstabbing rapist Revolver Ocelot. It’s a shame to think that later in life he maybe lost some of that honor. Especially in the sadism department. Through the whole game Ocelot played fair, refusing to fight Snake with help from his soldiers, not shooting him when ordered, and especially in the actual torture scene he spent the entire time wincing and looking away. And then suddenly at the end he decides it was cool. I thought he was being sarcastic until I remembered that Ocelot really is a sadist in the later games. I didn’t think that particular transition was very believable. He’s been killing people for a long time now, presumably. Sadism is not something you just “decide” you enjoy.
And Ocelot really is The Boss’s son, isn’t he? The son she lost in WWII. I remember when the pictures first came out for the game she was described as that, but it never became totally clear in the game. Except that her son was taken by The Patriots and Ocelot was raised as a Patriot spy… And her son would have been twenty years old. I don’t see why they would have brought it up at all if her son wasn’t a member of the cast, and Ocelot’s really the only one in the proper age group.
In any case, I like Ocelot.
Raiden and the Patriots
No, neither of them were really in the game. But I think what bothered me the most in MGS3 is that they felt they had to make up for MGS2. Everyone complained about Raiden, so in MGS3 he’s a pantywaist, a fairy, and the lap dog – sex toy? – of the sadistic Colonel Volgin (in a thong). They made fun of him at every turn, and hey, I liked Raiden. It was funny of course (my god when Volgin grabbed him by the balls I was rolling across the floor, thank goodness my mom was watching me and not the screen). But I don’t like how it felt as if they were covering their tracks. Kojima wouldn’t have used Raiden in the first place if he thought he was a wasted, pathetic character, and I feel bad if he and his team felt they had to mock him at every opportunity just to get themselves back in the fans’ good graces. It’s business, I know, but it wasn’t the most flattering cameo. The game raises enough anti-MGS2 spirit simply by existing.
And then there’s The Patriots. It seemed to me that they changed the premise of the Patriots, again to cater to the fans who “didn’t get” MGS2. Well…no offense to anyone reading, but I’m going to indulge myself in a little bravado and say I got MGS2. It was complex and weird, of course, but it wasn’t that difficult a concept to wrap your head around considering all the other weird shit in the game. By the end, they pretty much say point blank that The Patriots is not a group of old men in an office somewhere, but an entity. A consciousness. It may be trite psychobabble to some, but I loved the idea of The Patriots – the fanfic I’d considered writing centered on the idea quite a bit. In MGS3, it was as if Konami felt they had to give The Patriots bodies, identities, and children, for the sake feeding a simpler explanation to the fans. People didn’t like the idea of an enemy that wasn’t tangible so they altered the idea to suit those preferences.
Now, I am a huge supporter of supply and demand – video games are made so that people can enjoy them. But I feel like what they tried to do was rewrite some of MGS2 in the process, distracting us with a new concept to block out the memory of the ill-received older concept. And that’s just selling out.
Don’t be a tool, Konami!!
The End
That’s about all I can think of to say. Despite my complaints I did enjoy the game a great deal, and will play it several times over before I’m done. It lives up to the Metal Gear name, it’s just not my favorite.
Like I said at the end of my review, I hope this isn’t the last Metal Gear. But at the same time, if they’re going to start changing shit and nullifying plot points in previous games, then maybe I’m not interested in another game, either. Maybe it’s time we got a new series of spy games. I love the MGS gameplay engine too much to see it die, but it might be cool to start over, as it were, with a fresh story and characters.
But until then, I’ll be waiting for DMC3. <3
.
.
.
.
No really, lots of spoilers.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Okay, here I go, then.
Naked Snake – “Jack”
First of all, is it Jack or John? Because everyone called him Jack, but when he introduced himself to Ocelot at the end, it really did seem like he was being honest. Ocelot, too, for that matter. But then when you find out that Ocelot was really Adam, which appears to come straight out of his name Adamska, one has to wonder if he was telling the truth. Which means Snake might not have been, either. *_*
I did like this incarnation of “snake.” I didn’t, however, like him as well as Solid Snake, or even as well as Raiden (*gasp!* Did she just stay that!? My god, she LIKES Raiden!)
Yes! I liked Raiden. And not just because he was a bish. So there XP
The thing is, when I look back at MGS1 and 2, I can really make a picture in my mind of “Solid Snake.” He was bitter, gruff, cynical, haunted, no nonsense, but he also had a subtle sense of dry humor, and of course, a softness for the ladies. I know not everyone got into him because he was carrying so much baggage, but it was his history and his professionalism that gave him so much character, and so many changes to go through. You could see in MGS2 that he’d gone through a big change, but he still had his past with him, and that’s what I thought made him interesting. Raiden was still bitter and cynical, but also a n00b (haha I’m so l33t) with a lot to prove, a lot of extra attitude and just as much baggage of his own. A lot of people were turned off by his complaining (not to mention his girlfriend) but I thought that only gave him more dimensions. A Metal Gear character involved in a steady relationship!? And not to condone him bitchslapping his girlfriend, things like that which surprise the audience I think only serve to make him more real. In the span of one game we learned all there was to know about Raiden, how he grew up, how he lived, how he was trained – even a little of how he’s going to live. You didn’t have to like him, but you had to admit he had a lot of character.
“Jack” on the other hand didn’t seem as deep to me. Not to say he has to have a tragic past to be interesting, but when I try to think of how I would describe his character, all I can think of is, “he was a decent guy.” He was a little green, a little naïve, and for the most part loyal, but he didn’t have any quirks or personality traits that were especially striking. His biggest opportunity for that was his relationship to The Boss, and though he reacted to it with a certain degree of uncertainty, I didn’t feel like we really got into Jack’s head enough to know what he was really thinking. He was basically led by the nose from place to place, completing the missions, but he didn’t really have any reaction to most of what was going on. Even when he lost his eye, he just kind of shrugged it off. And he sure got captured/held at gunpoint a lot. And beat up *_* But it didn’t seem to affect him once he was out.
That, and everyone keeps saying, “It really helps you understand where Big Boss was coming from.” I didn’t really see it that way. By the end of the game, he learns that The Boss was willing to give up everything, life and pride, for the sake of her country. The way the game portrays it, it was a noble and worthwhile sacrifice. But what Big Boss does later is nothing like that spirit of patriotism – creating his own dictatorship military country? Threatening the world with nuclear war? You could stretch it and say he was doing it “to make the world whole again,” but Big Boss’s ideal of creating a world where soldiers are necessary goes directly against what The Boss was trying to tell him about healing the world and putting an end to conflict. Which basically means that all her pretty speeches, and all of Eva’s, went to waste. Whether Big Boss was later acting under Patriot orders or not will never be known if MGS3 really is the last game, but it just left kind of a bad taste in my mouth. I wanted Jack, throughout the game, to pull a Darth Vader and become bitter and jaded. But that’s not how the game ended, so…whatever it was that caused him to become the enemy of the first two Metal Gears must have developed later.
Unless Kojima’s saying that Big Boss had to have been justified in all his other actions, and we just don’t know the reason. Which is totally cheap, Kojima XP
Eva
I didn’t like Eva all that much. Not because she wasn’t a good character, she was as well developed as anyone else in the game, just…she was a little ho-ish for me. She was pretty sweet on the bike, I’ll admit, and I really didn’t suspect by the end that she wasn’t what she said she was. So she wasn’t bad. I just didn’t find her as likeable as Snake’s other partners, like Meryl and Otacon.
The Boss
I really liked The Boss, up until the end. She was just about everything I wanted a MG character to be – not only a powerful female character, but her voice fit her excellently, she was strong, capable, involved, interesting, and cool looking. Despite what I thought of Snake, her end of their father/son-ish relationship was held up at every opportunity. I really did like her, and her fight at the end certainly was beautiful, if not frustrating.
What I didn’t like was her speech by the end. Her back story, though interesting to a degree, was so sloppily related. I couldn’t really draw together a picture of what her life must have been like. “I was a famous war hero, and then I was in Nevada testing nuclear weapons, and then I went into space, and by the way, I was sent to WWII when I was nine months pregnant (WTF??), and then I was on some mission where I killed my lover, and then I invented the smiley face and worked on a shrimp boat.” I just stared at the screen going, “Huh? So…wait, huh?” Too much, in my opinion. It was enough to say she gave birth during a battle and her baby was taken, but…Normandy? A pregnant mother thrown onto one of the bloodiest and infamous battle sites in modern history? That’s not exaggeration, that’s just ludicrous. Not that stranger things haven’t happened in Metal Gear…
That, and the fight itself seemed a little cheap. Considering everything in The Boss/Snake relationship revolved for the most part around the CQC they developed, I would have thought the battle to rely more on that, rather than sniping your mother figure from a distance. In the end I just equipped the survival knife and charged her. Can’t say the damage was as great as a bullet to the head when she’s not looking, but it was less frustrating that way, and it got me in under the 10 minute time limit. I'm not sure if it’d work on the higher difficulties, though.
Snake’s Support Team
I didn’t mind the team. I even liked Major Zero; his actor did a great job, and he was really likable. Para-Medic wasn’t so bad but her movie trivia got tiresome – after about the 20th movie you’d think she’d realize Snake’s not a movie person! She was better than Rose, but I still like Otacon best as my saver. The military advisor I never pay attention to, so I don’t really have an opinion on Sigint. I would have liked it if the team played a more active role, or at least make a comment when I called each from my box, but all and all I thought they did a good job.
The Cobras
The Cobras were the biggest disappointment, character wise. The only one of them I wasn’t indifferent to (other than The Boss) was The Sorrow, and he was already dead! The others had maybe a hint of a back story, or really nothing at all. Their “powers” were creative, to be sure, and your fights with them innovative, but…maybe too much innovation and not as much skill involved. The Pain was simple to avoid. The Fear was cool looking and it was kind of cool having to wear the goggles to find him, but the hardest part of the fight was worrying about having enough bandages to stitch up the arrow holes. The End was looooong. Took me about forty minutes, I think. The Fury was probably the most traditional, and gave me the hardest time. And The Sorrow was just creepy.
But in the end, The Sorrow is really the only one that made any difference to the plot—for as short as he was around, I felt attached to him. The rest were just filler bosses, which was a shame. Even Fatman had a history, and a link to the rest of the plot via Stillman and the Patriots (not to mention a big bald guy on roller skates setting explosives is just plain funny).
I have the feeling they didn’t get into the Cobras just because they wanted the player to be able to focus more on the other enemies. And that’s a shame.
Col. Volgin
Volgin was a semi decent villain. His power was kind of cool, but I think they relied too much on his sadism as a means of giving him character. Other than that, he was just an asshole who wanted to blow shit up. He didn’t have the charisma that Liquid and Solidus had. Which was maybe the point, but Ocelot and The Boss were just so much more likeable and effective than him, it was hard not to think of him as a grunt.
On the other hand, it was kind of refreshing not to have an enemy motivated by higher ideals. He was just genuinely nasty, an ego freak, an unredeemable enemy. There was never a question that what he wanted was selfish and wrong, and sometimes those no-brainer villains are just as effective as the insightful ones.
So…I could go either way on Volgin. But he’s not as cool as…
Ocelot (yay!)
I suppose with that, it’s pretty clear who my favorite character was. Which isn’t really a surprise, because I think they went almost out of their way to make you like him. He was cool, funny, interesting, and at times even noble. I’m sure a lot of people were wondering about how Metal Gear’s infamous traitor would be represented, and I wasn’t disappointed. His actor did a great job. His scenes (with maybe the exception of juggling, that made me giggle) were well done, with the right amount of humor and respect. And I love the hat, not to mention his hilarious little “cat call.” How can you not love him?
The one thing that bothered me a little was that Ocelot was maybe a little too likable. This is the kid, after all, who grows up to be nasty sadistic backstabbing rapist Revolver Ocelot. It’s a shame to think that later in life he maybe lost some of that honor. Especially in the sadism department. Through the whole game Ocelot played fair, refusing to fight Snake with help from his soldiers, not shooting him when ordered, and especially in the actual torture scene he spent the entire time wincing and looking away. And then suddenly at the end he decides it was cool. I thought he was being sarcastic until I remembered that Ocelot really is a sadist in the later games. I didn’t think that particular transition was very believable. He’s been killing people for a long time now, presumably. Sadism is not something you just “decide” you enjoy.
And Ocelot really is The Boss’s son, isn’t he? The son she lost in WWII. I remember when the pictures first came out for the game she was described as that, but it never became totally clear in the game. Except that her son was taken by The Patriots and Ocelot was raised as a Patriot spy… And her son would have been twenty years old. I don’t see why they would have brought it up at all if her son wasn’t a member of the cast, and Ocelot’s really the only one in the proper age group.
In any case, I like Ocelot.
Raiden and the Patriots
No, neither of them were really in the game. But I think what bothered me the most in MGS3 is that they felt they had to make up for MGS2. Everyone complained about Raiden, so in MGS3 he’s a pantywaist, a fairy, and the lap dog – sex toy? – of the sadistic Colonel Volgin (in a thong). They made fun of him at every turn, and hey, I liked Raiden. It was funny of course (my god when Volgin grabbed him by the balls I was rolling across the floor, thank goodness my mom was watching me and not the screen). But I don’t like how it felt as if they were covering their tracks. Kojima wouldn’t have used Raiden in the first place if he thought he was a wasted, pathetic character, and I feel bad if he and his team felt they had to mock him at every opportunity just to get themselves back in the fans’ good graces. It’s business, I know, but it wasn’t the most flattering cameo. The game raises enough anti-MGS2 spirit simply by existing.
And then there’s The Patriots. It seemed to me that they changed the premise of the Patriots, again to cater to the fans who “didn’t get” MGS2. Well…no offense to anyone reading, but I’m going to indulge myself in a little bravado and say I got MGS2. It was complex and weird, of course, but it wasn’t that difficult a concept to wrap your head around considering all the other weird shit in the game. By the end, they pretty much say point blank that The Patriots is not a group of old men in an office somewhere, but an entity. A consciousness. It may be trite psychobabble to some, but I loved the idea of The Patriots – the fanfic I’d considered writing centered on the idea quite a bit. In MGS3, it was as if Konami felt they had to give The Patriots bodies, identities, and children, for the sake feeding a simpler explanation to the fans. People didn’t like the idea of an enemy that wasn’t tangible so they altered the idea to suit those preferences.
Now, I am a huge supporter of supply and demand – video games are made so that people can enjoy them. But I feel like what they tried to do was rewrite some of MGS2 in the process, distracting us with a new concept to block out the memory of the ill-received older concept. And that’s just selling out.
Don’t be a tool, Konami!!
The End
That’s about all I can think of to say. Despite my complaints I did enjoy the game a great deal, and will play it several times over before I’m done. It lives up to the Metal Gear name, it’s just not my favorite.
Like I said at the end of my review, I hope this isn’t the last Metal Gear. But at the same time, if they’re going to start changing shit and nullifying plot points in previous games, then maybe I’m not interested in another game, either. Maybe it’s time we got a new series of spy games. I love the MGS gameplay engine too much to see it die, but it might be cool to start over, as it were, with a fresh story and characters.
But until then, I’ll be waiting for DMC3. <3
