Playing through MGS V, I fucking love this series and this game but ngl, I can’t help but think so much of MGS is nonsense, which I’m totally fine with.
But I haven’t really done a deep dive into the story or it’s commentary, so it’d be cool if someone more uhh analytically inclined could explain this shit to me if it’s worth explaining.
Edit: really cool to play in Afghanistan, not cool to be killing Soviet soldiers
It’s been years since I’ve touched the games but it can be all over the place at times but the central theme of war being awful and soldiers being pawns of people much more powerful than them runs pretty consistent through mgs 1-3.
I don’t understand the politics of MGS all that well (I just enjoyed the gameplay, story and characters) but I do recall being put off with how the game was treating soldiers as being these poor victims.
Cry me a river; families are wiped out in wars and entire nations torn to the ground and then sanctions applied so they can barely if at all ever rebuild, and it’s soldiers (invading soldiers) they’re trying to make out as the real victims in all this? If this isn’t a parody of American military worship then it’s absolutely ludicrous. It’s like having a scene of a soldier shooting an Iraqi child and it’s the soldier you’re supposed to feel sorry for because it hurt his feelings and he just wanted to pay for college.
The Metal Gear Series can be interpreted as a story about how we go from
soldiers (invading soldiers) they’re trying to make out as the real victims in all this?
to
We tried to build a better world for the poor soldiers and just exponentially increased the amount and scale of conflicts, guess militarism and interventionism were bad the whole time!
Along with it’s other themes of nuclear disarmament, anti-imperialism, govt. surveillance, information warfare, surrealism, a few episodes of the xfiles or twin peaks chopped up and randomly inserted, all in various stages of being coherent or half-baked.
Like, Solid Snake, Big Boss are fucking dumbos who need to have everything repeated to them twenty times before they grasp basic concepts, near every character in these games can only understand information by relating it to their experience on the battlefield, when they talk about how sad they are at being used as a human pawn in unnecessary conflicts it’s because they tried to get a job at a grocery store and got fired after a day for radioing their supervisor every time they had to press a new button on the cash register and then instinctively destroyed every cctv camera in the store with one of the 17 guns taped to their back, and maybe this is why it’s bad we raise people from birth to be part of a cult of killing machines.
If this isn’t a parody of American military worship
It is, this is a game where you get so mad at being betrayed by the US you join the Sandinistas and blow up Guantanamo bay
Kojima is super pilled. However he is an artist and great art admits negative capability. No matter how coherent or incoherent the artist’s politics, great art always admits elements that are contrary (perhaps not even by intent but because creating something truly human means that like humans it will have inconsistencies).
However the politics are not “bad” in any of the games. Kojima operates on the astral plane, knowing the future before it happens (see MGS2 and the memes, Death Stranding and COVID).
I’ve never played 5, but 1-4 are top tier.
However the politics are not “bad” in any of the games. Kojima operates on the astral plane, knowing the future before it happens (see MGS2 and the memes, Death Stranding and COVID).
I love how rising also predicted the future by the sheer power of being a metal gear game even without Kojima’s involvement.
Metal Gear Solid 4 must be almost impossible for anyone new to the series to understand wtf is going, still a good game
Edit: really cool to play in Afghanistan, not cool to be killing Soviet soldiers
It’s Metal Gear Solid, why are you killing them!?
……I’m really bad at this
Pro tip: Use non-lethal methods to take down the guards, and Fulton balloons to make them into your comrades!
if you dont balloon literally everything you can in mgs5, are you even playing correctly?
Plus a balloon on a cargo container for your evac!
I have only 11balloons!
Sounds like 11 comrades.
you can call in a resupply mid mission to get more balloons, or it might be resupply flares. which the resupply will also give you more resupply flares
IIRC you can do both ( and also call in air support after awhile) re-supply flares are so clutch in the early game because suppressor lifespan is so short and popping open the iDroid every time is a hassle, esp if you just fucked up and triggered an alert
really cool to play in Afghanistan, not cool to be killing Soviet soldiers
The game actually incentivises not killing. It has a score system where if you manage to not kill anyone you get a huge bonus, and if you do the whole thing undetected you get even more. Play with tranquilizers, knocking down enemies, or suffocating them until they collapse, but don’t kill em!
A lot of MGS is just copied from movies, animes and mangas/comics Kojima and his friends liked. The good stuff inside there comes from Kojima genuinely having good politics, the bad stuff comes from him coping american movies and some weird horny brainworms he have.
