Resident Evil Requiem

Introduction

So I guess you would call me a Resident Evil fan. I didn’t really think about it until playing the most recent entry, when I began noticing all the mechanics of previous games this new one was riffing on. I've played and enjoyed to varying degrees the remakes of Resident Evil 1-4, the original Resident Evil 4, 7, and 8. Plus, I’ve opened the wiki once or twice before. But like I said, I didn’t really consider myself a fan before. Maybe it was how every game seems to end with a sour taste in my mouth, but more on that later. Point being, that when Capcom announced Resident Evil Re9uiem, the 13th mainline Resident Evil game, I knew I would play it, but I wasn’t excited per se. It was more of a yeah, that seems fun and I’ll play it if I hear good things. Months later, the game released, reviewed, and sold well, and so I decided to rent it from my local library and give it a go. Quick shout-out to your local library, by the way. Anyways, I have some notes on the experience, but my overarching note is that this is a greatest hits album in video game form. 

What’s Resident Evil?

Because I said that Resident Evil Requiem is a greatest hits album in video game form one sentence ago, I feel the need to explain a bit what Resident Evil is, so my points make a little bit more sense. 

Resident Evil began in 1993 with director Shinji Mikami. On the suggestion of his mentor, Mikami began working on a horror title for the PlayStation by himself at first. The next 3 years consisted of some pretty slapdash development, but eventually Resident Evil released in 1996. Despite the slapdash nature of development and some clunkiness throughout, the game was a hit and defined horror in video games for the first time. Weird camera angles, limited inventory, item management, tank controls, walking up to a crank to open a door only for it to break so you gotta walk across the entire map to find a replacement crank, finding notes on the ground of guys going “y’know maybe it was a bad idea to create giant monsters who can rip my spine out of my body,” etc. all became pillars of survival horror in games that continue to this day. The game itself featured its main characters trapped in a spooky mansion that became overrun with zombies, with that cool setup ending in an underground lab revealing the whole thing to be a conspiracy orchestrated by the Umbrella Pharmaceutical Corporation. 

With this success came two more main entries and a couple of spin-offs, with Resident Evil 2 taking place in the fictional Raccoon City as Leon Kennedy arrives in the city for his first day of work, only to find it overrun with zombies, and he must navigate his escape. Cool setup that once again ends in an underground lab, with the whole event being a conspiracy caused by the Umbrella Corp. But as the entries went on, they got a little more up their ass about their own lore with more and more underground labs by Umbrella and every game ending in a fight against a wall of snot. More importantly, however, the games were becoming more action-focused as time went on. After all, it's hard to have a game about stopping global conspiracies, just about walking around scared in the dark, so the games began to have more of an action bent but never fully committed. It always started with that spooky start, but it couldn't keep it up. Ending action sections always feel kind of half-assed. With this, the games began to become bland, and they needed a change. 

Then, on my birthday in 2005, Capcom released Resident Evil 4. This was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment that revolutionized video games the second time in the same series. Gone were the fixed camera angles (where the camera only showed one angle per room), and now the camera was free to move with the player’s control. There was free aiming instead of auto-aim and a full commitment to action and fun. You play as Leon Kennedy, on the search for the President’s daughter in Spain, where a village has become overrun by a cult worshipping a mind-controlling parasite. Resident Evil 4 leant into an Army of Darkness kind of campy vibe that gave it that crucial edge. Sure, it still had the Resident Evil hallmarks of picking up documents, item management, the beloved Leon Kennedy, and ending in another fucking underground lab, but it may as well have been a stand-alone title unconnected from the series. Resident Evil 4 was electrifying, and I’ve reviewed its remake and sort of the original. Both games are phenomenal, and you should play them like right now. Fuck it, I’ll stop writing to play them right now.

But with this electrifying change into a more action-oriented territory, Capcom shifted the series into increasingly more over-the-top action while taking itself more and more seriously. Once again, we’re back to the global conspiracies of the previous games as the lore begins to get up its own ass yet again. Resident Evil 5 had zombies that could wield guns and mechanics that made it feel like all the other brown, washed-out cover shooters of the day. Resident Evil 6 had explosions happening constantly and a long, underbaked story. Still ended in the lab and wall of snot, though. With a few spinoffs around the same time that reviewed poorly, the games became bland, and they needed a change. 

    Then, around my birthday in 2017, Capcom released Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. This game came with a first-person perspective and a brand new tight focus on survival horror. You play as newcomer Ethan Winters, who is captured and hunted by a family of hicks turned superhuman by a powerful black mold in the Louisiana bayou. Again, cool setup and in truth a great game that loses steam when it ends in an underground lab as part of a conspiracy, and you fight a big wall of snot. More games released, mostly remakes of older games, we got Resident Evil 8: Village, which had more of an action focus, and you see where I’m going with this. The Resident Evil games all kind of function in this overarching pattern, so while I enjoyed my time with Resident Evil Requiem, I am concerned for the series future. 

So What’s The Cool Set Up of Resident Evil Requiem?

Grace Ashcroft, an FBI agent who’s afraid of her shadow, is sent to investigate the hotel where her mother was murdered, after a body matching the pattern of recent deaths has been found. While there, she gets captured by a big gray man named Victor Gideon. Meanwhile, series veteran Leon Kennedy is investigating the string of deaths and arrives at the hotel to find Victor Gideon leaving the scene with Grace. Leon then trails Gideon to a health care facility he runs in an effort to find out the truth behind these deaths and why he kidnapped Grace. At the facility, we see Grace and Leon take two completely different perspectives on the game as we switch between them chapter to chapter.

When you’re playing as Grace, the game is meant to be a horror game. You have the claustrophobic first-person view of Resident Evil 7 and 8, combined with a lot of mechanics from 1 and 2. You have limited inventory management, zombies that take a while to kill but can get stunned more easily, zombies that will come back stronger if you kill them, a mansion layout with a staircase in the center of the main hall, and on harder difficulties, you have the limited save mechanics of Resident Evil 1 and 2. It’s a throwback to the early tight design of the original era of Resident Evil games. And the design here is tight. I was getting quite scared trying to avoid all the zombies, as the limited ammo and health don’t make it practical to fight them, but I still had a smile on my face throughout Grace’s section. I was having fun. The new addition to the formula, one of the few, really, is that the zombies each have quirks that you can use to sneak past them or get them in a position to kill them. For instance, one likes to be in darkness and will keep flicking the lights off if you turn them on. 

The scares also work for me in Grace’s section. At one point, a giant fat baby monster bursts through a wall and chases you and I, out loud, said “Jesus fucking Christ!” not loudly but y’know. The headliner of Grace’s section, which surprisingly isn’t in it that much, is an unkillable stalker monster. Harkening back to Jack Baker from Resident Evil 7. I did find this monster scary in its introduction. So much so that I felt like turning the game off and stopping. Even more so when it broke the cardinal rule of these games by bursting into a save room. However, I do think by the second or third section with the monster, you get how it works well enough to not be too scared by it. It doesn’t become annoying, but rather it becomes a decent challenge to overcome. Even if by the end I’m flash-banging the shit out of the thing and moving around it, no problem. 

Ultimately, what Grace’s sections work is control. When you’re caught by a zombie, you’ll start to run away from it and maybe bump into more zombies on the way. Lose enough ammo, and you’ll be unable to shoot a zombie later on. The fuck ups pile up and make you lose control of the situation. Good horror comes from the characters not having control over the situation, not knowing what’s next, and their safety being in question, and the actions of the player can make that lack of control natural. That early section of the game is so strong for this reason. But even if you do get control of the situation by carefully planning and conserving your resources, that gain of control is fun because you feel smart for having planned those steps. Either way, control makes Grace’s section excellent. 

What’s equally but differently fun is Leon’s sections. Leon gets the third-person action of Resident Evil 4-6, but mostly 4. If Grace is a horror final girl, Leon is an action star. Leon starts his section, roundhouse kicking zombies that don’t laugh at his terrible one-liners. It’s a good way to let off steam after Grace spends her section cowering in fear and sneaking around zombies, that you get to run in afterwards as Leon and shotgun blast the heads off of every zombie that stood in your way before. It’s an incredible lurch to go from 1st person horror to 3rd person action, but it works for the most part. 

It’s just as much fun as it was in RE4 to suplex zombies into the pavement as it is here. Leon’s weapons have a good punch to them, and the zombies seem like they notably get downed in fewer hits from Leon than with Grace so as to not disrupt the flow. Leon practically gets all the boss fights and the action set pieces, which can be a lot of fun. Most of all, I just like Leon. He’s a good character, and hats off to his voice actor, Nick Apostolides, who has played him as the young, bright-eyed Leon in Resident Evil 2 Remake to the now grizzled 50-year-old in Requiem without ever missing a step. It shows great range on his part in making this seem like a continuous character with a large arc. I was willing to buy his arc of a guy who is reliving some part of the trauma of the events he experienced in 2. Set all that aside, however, his one-liners rock. When Victor Gideon is about to torture Leon and says “if you won’t answer my questions then I guess we’ll have to go straight to your… treatment.” as he picks up a syringe, only for Leon to say “the silent treatment, I hope.” it doesn’t make a lot of sense as a response or a joke, but that’s what he’s been since RE4, so I was saying “I LOVE YOU, LEON” in my impression of Troy McClure doing the Planet of the Apes musical every time he was on screen. 

All that said, Leon’s sections might get a little too much action by the end. You get the second half of the game as mostly Leon and some Grace, as opposed to the mostly Grace and some Leon of the first half. You get a weapons shop and the attache case management of Resident Evil 4, though without the fun merchant, which condenses the growth of your arsenal in those games into half the time, and without much of the personality. I’m also not sure why you get a limited inventory attache case as Leon, considering you can’t store items, and there was never a moment when I had too much inventory for what I could carry, like you do with Grace. I mean, I know why the attache case is here; it’s because it’s a throwback to an old game. 

References to Old Stuff

As indicated by my references to the old game in the review thus far, most of Resident Evil Requiem will remind you of older stuff in the series. I didn’t find any idea, besides the zombies having their own personality in Grace’s section, that was new. There’s a bit with a car driving towards you, like in 4, the snarky remarks about “who builds this shit” from Grace, like in 7, and we return to Raccoon City, the setting from 2, and so on to infinity. Not to say that I think the game is one filled with references like Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. In that game, references and callbacks are meant to endear you to a plot without a lot of good substance. Rather, in Resident Evil Requiem, these references are meant to be pieced together to give you a good time by giving you all the good ideas of the Resident Evil series. Like I said, it’s a greatest hits album. And we like listening to our favorite bands play the hits, which is why we like them. Even if it is old stuff, it’s stuff we fell in love with that completely works in the context it's presented.

Not to say that clunky references aren’t in the game. One of the boss monsters from RE2 just shows up, and we kill him non-ceremoniously. The bit in Raccoon City as a whole takes some time in locations we spent time in during RE2, trying to convince us of Leon’s character arc. Oftentimes showing us flashbacks of his time in RE2. Which kind of worked for me, but not so much for others. Leon’s arc throughout the games is this: he started his journey as a cop. In Resident Evil 2, he arrived in Raccoon City to start his first day as a cop, only to find the city overrun with zombies. Throughout the game, he fails to save most of the people he meets, and takes a train out of the city as the place he swore to protect gets nuked by the U.S. government to control the spread. So Leon’s character arc, the game tells us, is of a guy who fails to save people, and he feels the need to protect and save Grace, just to save anyone. As this game goes to Raccoon City, we tie together Leon’s failure with his chance for redemption. I’m willing to believe that the Leon in the remakes of 2 and 4 has survivor's guilt and he’s having redemption, but you don’t need to throw an old locale and an old boss at me to convince me of that.

STOP FUCKING AROUND AND GET TO THE LAB AND WALL OF SNOT

I don’t know why, but I’m surprised the game ends in an underground lab, and you fight a wall of snot. I feel like such a schmuck every time. It’s like even though I’ve been to tons of theme parks, I’m still surprised it ends in the gift shop. So sure enough, the game takes more of a turn to over the top action at the end, as the game gets more up its ass about the lore of the Resident Evil franchise, going back to grand revelations about the founder of the Umbrella Pharmaceutical corporation, and the main villain becomes a wall of snot. As is tradition. But every time it happens, it deflates a lot about the whole experience. We spent most of the game in this great hook of an interesting villain, claustrophobic horror, and a well-designed setting. Only for the game to end in hoard rushes and lame giant monsters, where we mow down a ton of enemies and are learning about how this all ties together with the past games. It's boring because you’ve seen the game be more interesting with less.

 A perfect example is when you’re fighting armed guys. Towards the end of the game, in the lab, you’re confronted by men with guns, whom you have to shoot and kill in a brief cover shooting section. This is egregious for two reasons. Firstly, you haven’t really developed the skills to fight armed guards throughout the game. Fighting zombies through third-person shooting out in the open or slow creeping first-person stealth is different from shooting military men in a firefight where you’re hiding behind a chest-height wall. It’s a weird lurch because it’s asking for skills from the player not developed throughout the runtime of the game. And we only use this new skill once and never again. Because of this, the section is more difficult in an annoying way than this being a meaty challenge. Secondly, the game has spent most of its run time in survival-horror or action-horror, and just shooting armored machine-wielding guys is less interesting. The zombies in Grace's section are tough as nails challenges you have to puzzle your way around, and Leon’s section makes them fun canon fodder with both sections using the environment of the Rhodes Hill Medical Centre and the destroyed Raccoon City to their advantage because those sections were intelligently designed around them. The section with the armed guards does not feel tightly designed. The lab section as a whole feels like there's a lack of thought in its design. Even if the visuals of the lab are pretty good. 

How Up it’s ass does the game get about the Lore of the Franchise?

Another issue with the lab is that the game begins to get up its ass a little about its lore. In fairness, the game tells you this is about Umbrella and Raccoon City’s destruction within the first hour, but the lab section takes the great hook from the opening and blows it out.

The main villains of the game are hunting an underground lab underneath Racoon City. No, not the underground lab in 2. No, not the underground lab underneath the one in 2 in 3. An underground lab inexplicably underneath all the previous ones. In this underground lab, the founder of Umbrella, Oswall Spencer, developed a brand new bioweapon right before his death. Also, right before his death, he gave away a child, our main character, Grace Ashcroft. So, because we know that he developed a brand new bioweapon and Umbrella experimented on children, the villains make the Hail Mary assumption that Grace is somehow the bioweapon or can unlock the bioweapon.  None of this is true. Grace is just some child, and the bioweapon is actually a cure to all variants of the bioweapons Umbrella ever developed. The key to accessing the cure is a password screen that, if you type in the wrong password, blows up. 

I find this reveal kind of funny, but it is pretty dumb. It’s such a big jump for the villains to assume that Grace is a bioweapon or could unlock it. Their only evidence is a video recording of a girl who looks like Grace wandering around an Umbrella-controlled orphanage. But we know this isn’t Grace. She was given to her adoptive mother as a baby and stayed with her until her mother was murdered when she was in college. So who is this? What’s this reveal? Some bullshit that shows why the villains make their big plan? More than likely, it will be explored in the DLC that was announced the week the game came out. But as the game stands by the credits, the villains and Grace are interesting until we get to the end, where it’s just dumb and confusing. 

The most egregious example of the story kind of falling apart at the end also relies on the game being a greatest hits album. The Resident Evil fans among you may remember Albert Wesker. He’s the closest thing to a series antagonist the franchise has and was present in some form or another for most of the games (even if in passing or easter eggs). That said, he was killed in 5. So you can imagine my surprise when Albert Wesker kind of shows up in Requiem. I say kind of because the mid-game reveal is that this guy, Zeno, is the main antagonist of the game. Despite the fact he looks just like him, has the same superpowers, roughly the same motivation with a thing for Umbrella’s founder, dresses the same, and has the same voice actor and face capture actor as Wesker, he is not Albert Wesker. This twist that we clearly see Albert Wesker, but is just a different guy and is killed by the end of the game, shocked me. It’s once again playing the hits by playing the Albert Wesker song, but it's too much. Bringing back a dead villain, calling him something different, having him be kind of uninteresting, then die, is bewildering. 

What does this mean for the next game?

Resident Evil games tend to follow a pattern, but so does the franchise. The first game is electric, then the games get too action-focused and up its own ass, so the series practically reboots itself with an almost stand-alone title that has different gameplay styles and a change of scope with a good hook. This happened with RE4 and RE7. It's a cycle. And sure enough, that’s true here. But unlike the games that right before the soft reset, we have some hanging threads here. The previous games have been setting up a criminal organization called The Connections, which the main villains here work for. At the end, Leon Kennedy says he has a call from the main character of RE 1, 5, 6, and 8 (yes, I know he’s not the main character of 8, but he’s on the fucking box art, so let’s be real here). We are told this call is for “something important.” 

My point is that we’re probably not getting the rebooting/reinventing RE10. The global conspiracy shit of the Resident Evil games necessitates that we get to more action-oriented gunplay and shooting waves of monsters, which is so boring when it happens. How can you fight a global criminal organization by being a cowering guy sneaking in the dark with a gun that has 1 bullet in it? Especially when this series is known for going to the action-focused nonsense as we get to the global conspiracies. I have a sinking feeling that the next game will be huge action that somehow out bores the giant monster fights of Requiem. 

So, Do You Recommend Requiem?

I know I spent the past paragraphs kind of lambasting the game, but I would recommend Resident Evil Requiem. Grace’s and Leon’s sections are so much fun until the final 2 hours of this 12-hour experience. I was scared, but I was having fun. The design of the Medical Center is so tight you can’t help but marvel at it. Plus, Leon Kennedy is here saying shit like “erm, I think I want a second opinion” when a zombie doctor picks up a chainsaw. It’s good stuff, I just think it kind of falls apart in the final hours. You have to wade through some bullshit as the game begins to wrap up, and you’re desperately hoping it will wrap itself up a little quicker. Sure, there aren’t a lot of new ideas here, but it’s a greatest hits album. You love the stuff of the older Resident Evil games, and here it is, repackaged in a new context for your pleasure. If you’re a fan of the series, you might even enjoy these mechanics and the big dumb reveal even more. 

    I’ll also add, as an addendum, that I played this game on the Switch 2 (switch to what?). It’s a surprising day-and-date release on other consoles, and I would like to say that the game runs perfectly on Switch 2 (switch to what?). I never had a dip in frame rate or thought it looked ugly when playing on TV or handheld. Sometimes during handheld, there would be that lower quality fuzz around a character’s hair, and the battery drains like a mother fucker when you’re playing on the go, but ultimately it’s a perfectly good way to play the game. I love having games on the Switch 2. Beating the final boss of Resident Evil Requiem on the way home on the LIRR will be a pleasant memory of my time with the game.  

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

 Introduction

Rejoice fellow gamers! For Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (MGS4) will be released from its PlayStation 3 prison! Yes, with the announcement of the Metal Gear Solid Legacy Collection Vol. 2 bringing MGS4 to current consoles, the game will no longer be exclusive to the PS3. Now everyone will get a chance to play it and realize it's just not that good. Yeah, sorry. I mean, don’t get me wrong, preserving old games regardless of their original quality is always a good thing, and I will buy the collection myself as a huge fan of the Metal Gear Solid Series, but MGS4 is just not a great game. At least, that was how I remembered MGS4 being the first time I played it before the pandemic, and I wanted to know if I would still hold that opinion if I revisited it. So, I picked it off my shelf and played through it again, and I would like to share my thoughts. 

What’s the Game About?

“War has changed.” These are the lines that open MGS4 as told by our main character, Solid Snake, as arrives in the “Middle East.” He goes on to explain that in the years since the last game in the timeline, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, much of the world has done away with their standing armies. Instead, they pay private military corporations (PMCs), armies for hire, to do their fighting for them. They fight in developing nations across Asia, Africa, and South America as a battleground, and are used by everyone employing anyone and everyone. Rebelling ethnic minorities have hired smaller PMCs while bigger ones are being hired by the brutal dictatorships they seek to overthrow. In these armies are people from across the globe who are fighting in these conflicts that only care about getting a paycheck.

The destruction of the developing world through cyclical battles from corporations and large monetary interests has become so prolific that the world economy has now become based on war. In the same way that AI is now what props up a decent chunk of the economy, so too do these PMCs. Also like AI, the war economy seems to have invaded every other sector of life. In the opening of MGS4, we see live action TV shows in this world; Cooking shows, exercise programs, talk shows, movies, advertising, and yes, video games, are all constructed around the military with the goal of trying to funnel people into jobs that create weapons for war or join these corporate armies. 

The cyclical nature of this war for profit is that there are more refugees and orphans that will be funnelled back into the war economy. If an American PMC orphaned a child in Iraq, then he will resent that company and may take up arms with another PMC to avenge his family. A child in Germany purchases a video game or watches Top Gun Maverick about killing “the enemy”? He will be convinced that war is fun and exciting enough to join a PMC in the developing world for the money, healthcare benefits, and coolness factor. The irony is that all these Private Military Corporations are all owned by 5 major parent companies, which themselves are owned by one single corporation. A monopoly has been made on death and destruction. 

Snake actor, David Hayter, in an in-universe Interview

The sci-fi element of this world is that each soldier’s blood is artificially replaced with nanomachines. These ID mark soldiers so their weapons can only be used by those who have had their PMC specifically purchase their weapons for them. Again, this is a way of fueling the war economy through proprietary equipment. These nanomachines regulate a soldier’s emotions to prevent PTSD, panic, depression, and repress any and all sexual urges to prevent sex crimes. These also track the soldier’s movements, register all combatants, etc. The point is that war has become increasingly efficient. Time is money. But again, the irony is that these machines and AI that keep track of the soldiers fighting each other are all controlled by the exact same AI system. 

In gameplay, we see this play out well in the first two chapters. you must sneak across the battlezone while two sides try to kill each other in this conflict without getting killed yourself. Bullets and bombs are going off right next to you with great sound design making it feel visceral and scary. NPCs are fighting each other with their own scripts, making it feel like an active battle that can kill you for being caught in it. And in chapter 2, you see innocent civilians running away from automated drones. Homes have well-detailed interiors to give you the sense of the people displaced from these areas when those homes collapse under the weight of bombing and drone warfare. And when enemies are killed, they drop their locked weapons that, while you can’t use them, you can collect and sell them for cash to buy your own ammo and weapons. So, even death in the war economy is monetized, and it's done so in gameplay. When I was playing, trying to avoid bullets whizzing past me, hearing a tank advertise the PMC that owned it with a chipper corporate female voice, before entering a camp of people injured and wailing in pain, I was sold on the themes of the early chapters of MGS4. It sucks and is miserable in all the right ways. The war economy is told partially through gameplay and your own experience of it, so the horrors of capitalism’s ties to war as profit gone to the extreme come through. And many people will say that it’s not even that far off. In the fervor of the Iraq war, American television was in full support of the war, many sitcoms had terrorist plotlines, the U.S. military made deals with movies to promote the military, American paramilitary corporation Black Water made a video game for the Xbox 360, and we’ve all agreed that those wars were for oil and profit rather than whatever the U.S. said it was supposed to be. 

During the gameplay of the first two chapters, I do feel MGS4 is untouchable. The anxieties and horrors of the 2000s American aggression and war for profit gone to the extreme are convincing, heavy, and connect with me through the gameplay. It’s good satire that makes the interesting depiction of the capitalist systems gone to their endpoint as much as RoboCop or Judge Dredd. However, notice how I said earlier that this is true for the first two chapters. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t keep up the war economy theme and gameplay motifs for the entire game,  because MGS4 is the final episode in the Metal Gear Solid Saga. It’s the thrilling conclusion to the entire series and the last one in the chronology. It’s the Star Wars Episode 9 of video games, and I mean that derogatorily.

So what is Metal Gear Solid?

Because MGS4 is a conclusion to the entire video game franchise, I’ll briefly explain what the franchise actually is. This will help me talk about why the game fails not just as a conclusion but also disappoints me as a fan of the series. 

Metal Gear Solid starts with its auteur game director Hideo Kojima. Hideo Kojima was born in the 1960s to a WW2 veteran father who passed away when he was young, but during his youth he also got a good dose of U.S. soft imperial power so he got a lot of exposure to Hollywood action movies while he was growing up. By the 1980s, Hideo Kojima began working on Metal Gear, a video game that broke new ground by focusing on avoiding enemies in stealth rather than attacking them. This pretty much created the entire stealth genre and made a huge impact in the west with Metal Gear Solid in 1998. 

Part of that huge impact was a late 90’s Japanese culture boom in America, but Metal Gear Solid broke new grounds in other ways. Firstly, it was one of the first games to have lengthy voice acting, so much so that all the games voice actors are credited under pseudonyms as it was unclear if the SAG would cover video games. But more importantly, the Metal Gear Solid games were some of the first games that were about something. 

Post-war nationalism, the pointlessness of armed conflict, the fallacy of nuclear deterrence theory, social media scandals 15 years before they started happening, post-modern twistings of hype and audience expectations, passivity vs activity, the question of free will, the use of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, war for profit, projecting shame onto your fetishes, etc. All of these are topics discussed in Metal Gear Solid and combined with the superhero/comic book antics of scenes that play like action figures hitting each other, the dumbest character names and quirks, and a little too much cleavage. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, has a genuinely fascinating point to make about the farce of nuclear deterrence, but the villain who wants to turn the cold war into a hot one is named Hot Coldman. Scientists still can’t decide whether Metal Gear Solid is really smart or really stupid, and jumping between those readings is part of the fun. But MGS4 decides the answer is stupid after the midpoint of the game. 

Wait, so Why is Snake in the “Middle East”?

As we learned in MGS2, back in the 1970s, a secret society called The Patriots began to create a global conspiracy to control politics and economics, but by the late 1990s the main members began to die out. So, they had created an AI system to carry out their schemes and plans. This grew from controlling economics and politics to controlling the internet and censoring information. Now, it has expanded further to the AI system that controls the soldiers of the world and their weapons. 

Snake is in the “Middle East” to kill a guy named Liquid Ocelot. Don’t worry about it. Anyways, Liquid plans to take control over the AI system that regulates the soldiers of the world and their weapons. Despite it being deemed impossible, he has discovered a hole in the AI system. Concerned for what can be done with one psycho controlling the AI that controls the world’s armed forces, the United Nations asks Snake to travel to Liquid’s last known location and assassinate him. What Liquid actually plans to do once he has control of the world’s armed forces will depend on who’s speaking. Which brings us to the first major problem of MGS4. The story is told so poorly. 

How is the Story Told?

The Metal Gear Solid games have always had lengthy cutscenes, and MGS4 is the most extreme of this. The cutscene(s) between defeating the final boss and when the credits roll are around an hour and fifteen minutes. That’s insane. And truthfully, you spend a lot of time without your hand on the controller overall. Cutscenes can last up to twenty-five minutes apiece throughout the game. What’s worse is that if you choose to play multiple chapters a day, which I wouldn’t recommend, you get the ending cutscene of that chapter back-to-back with the briefing of the next chapter. This means you get 45-50 minutes of cutscenes. But once you get into a chapter, you’re not exactly spending a lot of time playing the video game. The first 2 chapters have lengthy gameplay sections, especially on harder difficulties, which I recommend, but by the end of the game, there’s maybe 40 minutes of gameplay compared to the hour-plus of cutscenes. This crosses the line.

Because look, the Metal Gear Solid series has always had lengthy cutscenes and frankly. I’ve never minded them generally. Usually, because the characters are talking about something interesting or the scenes are choreographed to be fun, interesting, or just fucking cool. I mean, who could forget the scene in MGS2 where Solidus Snake stands on top of a jet to aura farm, or Gray Fox’s violent introduction in MGS1? The Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has a 17-minute cutscene where she explains how she got disillusioned by the U.S. government enough to betray them, and I don’t care about the cutscene length because the cutscene content is interesting. Plus, you get a great amount of time playing the game in those games. 

But MGS4 spends large amounts of time doing slideshows to attempt to explain plot points, like what Liquid wants to do once he gets control of the world’s armies. And it’s boring! Having your story told in a brown and black slide show is the most flat way you could tell a story. Plus the game repeats the explanation through multiple different characters saying it differently with that character’s level of information. It makes the actual plot of the game muddled if it repeats itself so much. That is to say, the game reiterates itself. I mean, the game’s explanations have multiple recurrences. Meaning that there are echoes of the plot points. And so on to infinity. It just makes me confused about what it is we’re talking about when multiple characters repeat similar things in different ways. Especially because I don’t think stuff like the war economy or the AI systems that control it are that hard to explain, they may not even be that far off from real life. And through samey brown slide shows of characters flatly monologuing, it's hard to get invested.  

A screenshot of one of the many slide show cutscenes

When there’s not slideshows confusing what should be easy explanations, we spend some time with some characters that suck so bad. I’m not sure why Naomi Hunter is really in the plot at all, but to die so a man can cry over her like he did to female characters in previous games, but without the lengthy development needed to make those moments work before. We also spend an agonizing amount of time with the returning gag character, Johnny, a guy whose deal is that he has diarrhea. We spend so much time with Johnny, seeing him have a romantic subplot that is so fucking brutal in how awkward and unbelievable it is. And all to make a reference to something that happened in a previous game. 

Wait, What Did You Mean When You Said This Game was Like Star Wars IX?

MGS4 was billed as the conclusion to the Metal Gear Solid franchise. However, instead of concluding the themes of Metal Gear Solid, the game chooses to conclude its characters. Just like how Star Wars started as an allegory for the Vietnam War, and the prequels, for however bad they are, were about democracy backsliding into authoritarianism. Then the series had a concluding trilogy about guys building bigger death stars with a returning villain, bringing back elderly characters, and the entire commentary track of the final film is littered with the director saying “we wanted to reference something from the original films” or “we wanted to take this back to what people remember.” That’s what Metal Gear Solid 4 is. Not trying to make a conclusion on the statements that the entire franchise was getting at, but reminding you of old shit. 

The setting of MGS1 revisited in MGS4

The bosses are named emotions, like the bosses of MGS3, combined with the same animals used for the bosses of MGS1. For example, Crying Wolf is a combination of the Sorrow from 3 and Sniper Wolf from 1 and she uses the weapon from a boss in 2. Most characters from previous games show up or are referenced, and in fact there’s only 1 new character with speaking lines. Characters repeat old lines and catchphrases ad nauseum. One character gets injured in the exact same way and manner as she did in a previous game. Another dies in the same spot where an old character died because it's a reference. A character returns as a ghost and does his entire schtick about reading the players memory by reading the console’s memory card and commenting on the games they’ve played. But because this game is on a console without a memory card he goes “Argh! I can’t read your memory! Your skills have improved… or rather your hardware has” in such a smug fashion you just kind of want to shut the game off. The entire fourth chapter of the game takes place in the setting of the first game. The last area of the game has a Mount Rushmore of the franchise’s main characters. There’s even a fucking dedicated flashback button to show you images of scenes from old games when they get referenced. It makes for a thoroughly uncompelling story and one that takes up most of the run time of the game. Plots that are just references and repeating old shit are so thoroughly hollow. Why should I give a shit that Petrovitch Madnar is name dropped when the actual plot and characters that take up the screen time is so fucking brutal in both how its told and the actual content of it. 

An enlarged example of the Flashback button prompt, of which will appear 400 times

Even if the war economy theme is genuinely good, it is lost by the midpoint of chapter 3. Because in Chapter 3, the game answers the question of “Who are the Patriots? Who are the original members of the illuminati that enslaved the planet through AI?” with a reference to an old game. 

So Who Are the Patriots?

A returning character from an old game tells us in Chapter 3 that the Patriots are the surviving cast and comic relief of Metal Gear Solid 3. That’s right. The amateurish doctor who loves Godzilla, the Russian cowboy who meows like a cat, the offensively British guy who says shit like “James Bond is the biggest thing to come out of England since the Mayflower,” the world’s greatest soldier who will try to eat one of every animal, and a normal technician somehow discovered human cloning, AI powered thought control, the ability to enact global conspiracies, and enslaved the human race. It’s an stupid answer to a stupid question. The question of who are the Patriots is a mystery you weren’t really supposed to know the answer to because it was such a big question. You’re supposed to enjoy the reveal that there's a secret Illuminati in its relation to MGS2’s theme. Enjoying the subtext rather than the text. Answering the question is just meant to satiate people who took the game too literally. Although, I’m not sure who actually enjoys such a lazy twist.

You can tell the twist is poorly thought out because MGS4 is the thrilling finale of Metal Gear Solid, but we in the future know, that Hideo Kojima directed two more Metal Gear games after it. Those two games, Peace Walker and The Phantom Pain, spend a fair bit of time trying to explain how those fun and likeable characters from MGS3 became the Illuminati and practically the series villains. In fairness, I do think I appreciate that further explanation and can enjoy it, but as for the twist as it stands by the end of MGS4, it’s nonsense. You need to play two more games to come to terms with and even enjoy the twist.  Hard not to call a thrilling conclusion an abject failure if you need to make two more games to explain said thrilling conclusion. But that’s what happens when fan service overtakes good writing. 

The original tease of the Patriots in MGS2

Aren’t You A Fan? Are You Serviced?

I’ve already mentioned that the game is filled with references and “remember this?” which I am not a particular fan of. What I’m also not a fan of is the way the game treats women. The women of MGS4 are pretty objectified, rarely do they ever get anything good to do, and their plots/arcs often revolve around men in some terribly awkward way. The biggest offenders are the bosses, the Beauty and the Beast Unit. So-called because they’re killers but women. After each fight (Most of them not great), you get to see the women outside of their armor in tight latex suits covered in some kind of goo as they try to hug the main character. I’m sure this gets explained somewhere, but I could not for the life of me remember why they do this. And then you get a five-minute talk about how fucked up their backstory is once you kill them. It’s really bizarre, and I spent most of the time cringing as I recalled the tweet that went “[character] after an MGS4 Boss gives Snake a lapdance and dies: ‘Snake, that was Angry Armadillo! She was forced to eat cement as a child.’” It’s just such a bizarre juxtaposition to have this clearly weird and horny fan service going on and trying to be like “well her family was killed as a kid so don’t you feel bad?” Like, no, not really. I just feel bewildered. It’s a shame because I like a lot of the female characters of the franchise, but all except maybe Mei Ling are just not good here. 

Not that anyone gets a lot of good stuff to do, really, but there is stuff in MGS4 I like as a fan. I like Snake and his best friend’s interactions, I like the stuff with Snake and Raiden, and pretty much every time the main villain, Liquid, is on screen, I’m hooting and hollering. In every Metal Gear game, you fight a giant mech, and you finally get to pilot one here. Which is a lot of fun in a sort of action figures hitting each other sort of way. And the speech in the epilogue between Big Boss and Solid Snake genuinely makes me emotional. Seeing the setting of MGS1 fall into disrepair did manage to convince me on a theme of growing old in a changing world that some of the game is going for. When Snake meets his long-lost mother, and she gets on her motorcycle and says her line from the MGS3, “I only fall off my bike when I fall in love, or I fall dead,” I am eating that fucking shit up. It’s just that those moments aren’t the majority of the game. The majority is explanation after explanation of the same thing, and ole Johnny Diarrhea.

You Sure Haven’t Talked a Whole Lot About the Gameplay, Huh?

Wow, look who’s Mr. Observant, it’s almost like there isn’t a whole lot of gameplay here. Like I said earlier, most of the game’s run time is spent doing uninteresting explanations in slide show cutscenes, but when your hands are on the controller, the game is fun in the first two chapters. The problem is that the control scheme for MGS4 is more in line with the 3rd person cover shooters of the day, like Gears of War or Uncharted. So I guess they’re easier to play than the previous awkward controls of Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, and 3, but the controls make it easier to just shoot your way through a set piece rather than use stealth. Moreover, half of chapter 3 and all of chapters 4 and 5 are designed for you to just shoot evil soldiers and drones rather than be engaged with the high-tension gameplay of sneaking past them that the series is known for. 

Look, I get it. People would rather be shooting a guy than waiting for him to scratch his ass so you can crawl awkwardly behind him, but the action gameplay of MGS4 is so boring. Because you’ve played it before, man. If you’ve played Gears of War, The Last of Us, Uncharted, hell, even Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, or Resident Evil 4, you’ve played 3rd person action games with more interesting stuff going on than MGS4. There’s not a single set piece in it, besides the giant robot fight, that’s fun or interesting outside of the first two chapters. It's fun and terrifying to sneak around war zones as horrible crimes of war and capitalism surround you, but that ends as war zones are not the setting for chapters 3 and beyond. You then get a sequence where you tail someone in Europe, shoot at drones, walk through an area filled with drones to shoot at, and rinse and repeat till the game ends.

Conclusion

I don’t know if I can recommend Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. It has some stuff in it I like as a fan of the series, and some stuff that I genuinely think is great outside of that reverence I have for the franchise. You just need to wade through a whole lot of bullshit to get there. From a lackluster second half gameplay-wise, lengthy cutscenes with characters giving boring explanations to simple concepts, an overindulgence in references, the worst kind of fan service, and a real dumb twist, it’s hard to call MGS4 anything other than a failure and a trainwreck. An indulgent train wreck, sure. I don’t know if we’ll ever see a game billed as the finale to a long-running franchise with this much fan service quite like MGS4 again. Which makes it worth experiencing to some extent, I guess. But I just don’t know how much enjoyment you’d get after all is said and done. Besides, Liquid saying “Brother!” that rocks every time.