Starting with the Man in the Mirror – a Fractured Analysis of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (SPOILERS)

Note: much like many of the articles I’ve been publishing in the last month or so this blog post has been sat in my drafts queue for over a few years now. In fact I wrote this immediately after the review that gets mentioned in the first paragraph. Why did it take so long to publish? I needed images and hadn’t collated all my PS4 recordings into one place. It’s a daft reason to not publish an article but it’s nice to illustrate and break up these walls of text. Anyway, hope you enjoy.

This article follows up on my main review of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. I would like to get a few thoughts down in writing regarding the story, which involves spoiling it (a lot). If that is not clear, this article contains MAJOR SPOILERS.

The best primer I can give for the story in MGSV is the story analysis video by SuperBunnyHop (I regularly mention George Weidman’s little journalistic enterprise on this blog as he has a very enthusiastic take on gaming which I find refreshing), which I highly recommend:

If you cannot watch (or don’t want to watch) the video, I will summarise the main reveal: the man you have been playing as is not Big Boss – instead you are a body double (previously a medic) who underwent facial surgery in order to help hide Big Boss.

The entire game, in my mind, is a long joke that builds up to a hell of a punchline. Unfortunately I was one of the many who saw the punchline coming from a mile off because, as mentioned in the video, the prequel game Ground Zeroes played its cards too soon by offering far too many hints.

MGSV was a punchline to the set up that was the entire Metal Gear series. To that end, it contained many smaller jokes and references; I would like to discuss a few of them.

Narcissism is an ugly thing

Metal Gear Solid 2 infamously revealed that not only was the main character not Solid Snake to much backlash, mostly because Raiden wasn’t even hinted at in any of the marketing materials and, most egregiously, only featured Solid Snake’s face on the box art.

Well guess what? MGSV doesn’t star Big Boss, it stars some nameless customisable medic who used to work for the Boss. One subversion is that it technically shows Venom Snake’s face on the box, in that his face looks just like Big Boss’s after the surgery. However, there wasn’t a massive backlash to the reveal that we weren’t playing as the one “true” Big Boss, probably because we all like playing as “ourselves” via our created avatar.

One wonders if the MGS2 backlash would have been so heavy had Raiden been a customisable character?

Never mind turning up to the party late, the party ended several years ago…

MGSV is practically a side story that hardly has any bearing on the main events of the Metal Gear canon. All of the main characters who feature – Ocelot, Miller, Huey¹, and Zero are basically just cameos².

The villain, Skull Face, is a remnant from an MGS side-story not particularly monumental to the canon – he doesn’t even get a mention in any of the numerous slide-shows in MGS4 during the hour-long expository cutscenes!

This guy, this Batman rogues gallery wannabe, is the big bad. The most heinous thing he accomplishes in the game is expositing at us in the back of a jeep.

Basically, Big Boss f*cks off after he gets a spanking and leaves us to deal with some douchebag who was on the sidelines. A douchebag who leaves no remarkable traces on the canon. A douchebag who was cleaning up after Big Boss in MGS3³!

All the real important shit has already happened by the time MGSV takes place, during the nine year coma the game starts with. Long story short, one of Zero’s underlings took him out and wanted to be a big player, but couldn’t be. He’s basically a fan character villain pit against our fan character version of Snake. We spend the entire game chasing revenge after a guy who’s already dead; a “phantom” if you will.

Speaking of fan characters, our fan character has a hot animu girlfriend who doesn’t wear much in the way of clothing: good ol’ Quiet. Kojima said on Twitter that fans would “be ashamed” once they realised why Quiet doesn’t wear clothes; while everyone mocks the “it’s because she breathes through her skin” reason I do feel ashamed, because Quiet is giving the fans what they want. She’s what Kojima thinks his fanbase wants in a woman – a woman who doesn’t talk back and shakes her tits in our face⁴. She has superpowers and is an elite assassin. Quiet is Kojima’s commentary on his adolescently-minded fanbase.

You see, this is why I took the dog on all my important missions. He never stuck his arse in my face.

Venom Snake lacks all the character growth of his counterpart, too. This Awkward Zombie comic underlines the maturity of the average player; while Big Boss shunned his bandanna after deciding that the Boss had betrayed him, the average player is all too keen to wear this iconic MGS apparel (even I’m guilty of this, admittedly).

Oh, our fan character also has a horse, a cute dog and a kickass robot too. It’s almost patronising at this point.

Extract from a typical MGS fan-fiction:

And then Big Boss’s twin brother turned up and he looked almost the same but he had more scars and a pet wolf. His name was VENOM Snake (original character plz don’t steal also plz don’t sue me Marvel). Venom was riding a smaller Metal Gear and was followed by his sexy girlfriend Quiet who was a 1337 Sn1p3r and could do 360 no-scopes like a boss (not the Boss though).

“Don’t worry brother,” said Venom, “I will deal with the evil SKULL FACE since he is too strong for you.”

“Where did you get that bandanna,” asked Big Boss. Venom shrugged nonchalantly while smoking his 80’s vape because smoking is bad for you and cool people don’t smoke.

“I have not forsaken the Boss’s teachings brother but I still love you,” said Venom. “Also it gives me infinite ammo.”

The two Bosses laughed.

“You are so cool Venom,” said Big Boss, “I wish I could be more like you.”

THE END…?

Venom Snake is my character and is not at all based on me well maybe just a little bit.

Half-Life: Full Life Consequences was more inspired than this!

Our super original fan character, ladies and germs!

For what little actually happens in MGSV, we’re probably not even needed

Most of the plot resolves itself in spite of your character’s actions. The eponymous Skull Face is eventually defeated by his underling the young Psycho Mantis changing his allegiances after meeting lil’ Liquid Snake. Muppet Baby Liquid Snake only makes his appearance because you get sent on a mission to capture him to dissolve a rogue group of kids with guns. You could argue that Miller and Ocelot would have probably done the mission anyway with or without Venom Snake’s presence.

D’awww, he’s so cute when he scowls after we whupped his arse!

Meanwhile, while we’re busy trying to take revenge on a man who’s practically been dead for the last several years and chasing Skull Face to take revenge for what he did to Mother Base, the Man on Fire⁵ is trying to get revenge on us…and yet we spend most of the time wondering what we’ve done to piss him off. You have to consider if Skull Face has the same thoughts about Venom Snake and Diamond Dogs during the course of the game!

The story isn’t really much of a story

MGSV is very plot-light. It’s mostly a series of individual missions in a sequence with titbits of story every five-to-ten minutes or so. People have always criticised Kojima games as having too much story – this game is clearly his attempt at doing a “game before story” game⁶ and it is amazing. It’s just not great for the subset of fans who, like me, are mostly into MGS for the story.

The worst part for most of the fans was that we saw most of the twists coming, which is sacrilege for a Kojima game. We already deduced that we would be playing as the medic in the chopper from the end of MGS: Ground Zeroes, we already realised that the Man on Fire was Colonel Volgin, Eli was young Liquid Snake, etc.

The only twist that didn’t come to fruition was the theory that Quiet was actually a transgendered Chico – fans had pointed out that Chico’s grandfather looked suspiciously like the End from MGS3 and the theory was that Chico, tormented by Skull Face forcing him to rape Paz⁷, has a crisis of self and undergoes a transformation. Adulthood meant he’d gained his grandfather’s abilities too. I had also evaluated part of the trailer, where Big Boss holds a knife next to a prone body, as being the Boss about to cut Chico’s nuts off; either due to his betrayals or because XOF had stuffed a bomb into his scrotum (hey, it could happen!). I liked the idea of Boss emasculating Chico and Chico just embracing it.

Instead, it just turns out that Quiet is full of magic parasites (NOT nanomachines!) and Chico just died horribly in a helicopter crash. The latter point is a particularly sore point because the story just sort of drops him like dead weight once he’s served his purpose in Ground Zeroes. Chico gets an unhappy ending just to prove a point that MGSV is darker and edgier. I genuinely wonder if Chico’s sister Amanda ever found out what happened to him?

The real meat of the plot in the later game centralises on the “vocal chord parasites”⁸ and it feels like Kojima got really stuck into explaining the abilities of the Cobra Unit from MGS3, which is probably one of the very few parts of the plot that fans didn’t need (or want!) explaining. I think we were just happy with the idea that the Cobra Unit is “weird”.

If I’d have known that rescuing this old man was going to lead to literally hours of discussion about some made up throat parasite I’d have probably left him chilling out in that basement smoking weed. He seemed happy enough.

There’s hours of audio recordings about these bloody parasites and, while it’s nice to see the precursor to the proliferation of the magic nanomachines from the later games, the whole subplot is a little bit jarring when compared to the general theme of subplots across MGS. It’s an excuse for a mission that heavily cribs from zombie horror films that sort of comes and goes; the characters don’t seem to acknowledge the massive outbreak of mind-controlling parasites after Snake goes in and shoots up half his infected staff.

A few random ruminations

• Do we have any idea if Huey might have been an actual better person under the real Big Boss’s guidance? Would the real Big Boss maybe have stepped in to intervene more in Huey’s many interrogation sessions with Ocelot and Miller? Maybe he would have just shot him in the face?
• Metal Gear Sahelanthropus looks like the futuristic Zone of the Enders mecha Jehuty had sex with Metal Gear REX. Is it just me that thinks this? While I appreciate that the last ever Metal Gear we face needs to be impressive (and by this point in the series it makes sense for the final boss to have iterated to the point where it’s standing upright) it doesn’t make a great deal of sense for it to be so advanced! Okay, so it’s only stood upright because lil’ babby Psycho Mantis is controlling it, but it lessens the achievements of Otacon because the implication in one of the audio logs is that Huey sat him in the thing at some point, so in later life he would just recycle his dad’s design into REX.
• When Volgin temporarily reverts to his old self during the final confrontation with the Man on Fire, his fiery steed reverts to a white horse. Is this supposed to be the Boss’s horse from MGS3/Peace Walker? If that’s the case, why was Volgin riding the Boss’ horse? Did Shadowfax have a grudge against Big Boss because he rode him too hard in Peace Walker?

HEEEEEEEEEERE’S SALLY!

Not the ending we deserve, but the ending we need right now

I love MGSV to bits but it’s always going to be the stunted entry that didn’t get the chance to be everything it could. Would it have been better without all the cut content? I’d certainly like to think that 20+ missions wouldn’t have got recycled for Chapter 2 if Kojima and his team had been given the opportunity to finish the game properly.

It’s a bit of an odd bird, MGSV. Great game, though!

Post by Sean Patrick Payne+ | March 1, 2020 at 1:00 pm | Articles, Video Games | No comment

Tags: Big Boss, bitching about video games, Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, MGS, Venom Snake