'Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots' Lives Again

'There's one last thing I must do…one last punishment I must endure,' snarls clone supersoldier Solid Snake at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, in a string of back-to-back cutscenes totaling the length of a feature film. Those cutscenes include a wedding, a family reunion, an attempted suicide, and an end credits roll interrupted by Snake's estranged supersoldier father, presumed dead for the entire Metal Gear Solid saga, arriving on the scene to deliver a half-hour monologue before dying for real on the spot. The bizarre Metal Gear saga suggests a postmodern Greek tragedy with a soulfully mulleted '80s action-movie hero at its center. Depending on your approach to the games' diverse stealth-action toolkit, Snake can be a hardened killer or a master of non-lethal mercy as he infiltrates vividly realized and responsive environments. But in Metal Gear Solid 4 he'll always end up in the same place, as envisioned by the strikingly grim title screen: shriveled, sickly, and alone in a twilit Arlington National Cemetery, surrounded by flower petals drifting in the breeze, slowly putting out one last cigarette before sticking his trusty sidearm in his mouth. Snake doesn't actually kill himself at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4. (Director Kojima Hideo's even bleaker original proposal, in which Snake and his buddy Dr. Hal 'Otacon' Emmerich were executed as outlaws, like anarchist icons Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, after saving the world, was abandoned early on.) The mountains of exposition and increasingly unhinged plot twists doled out over roughly nine hours of cutscenes account for every last surviving character and suggestively hanging plot thread from two decades of Metal Gear games into an ouroboros of franchise lore meant to definitively resolve absolutely everything. Advertisement The bloated narrative can seem downright passive-aggressive in its fulfillment and frustration of fan expectations: Snake's love interest from the original Metal Gear Solid, for example, makes her long-awaited return here, only to end up married to the joke character whose defining trait is shitting his pants (and this isn't the game's only cringe-inducing romantic subplot). And yet, compromises aside, Metal Gear Solid 4—newly released for the first time on modern hardware by Konami as part of the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 2—remains an utterly idiosyncratic and awe-inspiring chimera 18 years on from its industry-shaking debut. This is a game uniquely, morbidly obsessed with aging and mortality. Its story and game design emphasize the prematurely aging Snake's fragility and impending demise, from that title screen to the mechanic of making players apply compresses to his aching back from too much sneaky athleticism. As he hacks, sputters, and pukes his way through a globetrotting suicide mission to kill his terrorist archnemesis Liquid Ocelot—a maniacally cackling, possibly supernatural fusion of two villains from prior installments—Snake's former comrades and lovers respond to the sight of his rapid deterioration with of mockery, alarm, and patronizing concern. The game's potpourri of bespoke high-concept levels and set pieces turn the traditional rules of Metal Gear Solid on their head. Snake, and by extension the player, is never allowed to fully gain his bearings in a rapidly changing, grimly desaturated high-tech world that seems to be leaving him behind. No game has ever been so viscerally terrified of getting old, and few have embraced such a grueling and fatalistic march into decline. Yet Metal Gear Solid 4's other triumphs still deliver fully on the series's adrenaline-pumping promises: tactile stealth, unforgettable level design, outlandish action spectacle, and thrillingly original boss fights. Advertisement The game's signature mechanic is a futuristic camouflage suit that takes on the appearance and texture of any surface the player presses Snake's body against. The opening act is set in a labyrinthine ripped-from-the-headlines urban warzone in which Snake must handle, assist, or evade two rival factions. The big set pieces include a cyborg ninja breakdance-dueling a nanomachine-powered vampire, which singlehandedly inspired a spinoff game. And one of the weirdest boss fights in all of gaming inverts the roles in the game's standard hide-and-seek structure, pitting Snake against a traumatized Scandinavian beauty who dons a Doc Ock-like tentacled mech suit that turns his camouflage and ambush toolkits against the player. Metal Gear Solid 4 is also one of the few games to be approvingly cited by eccentric Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. As heady sci-fi text baked into a pulp-opera veneer, it draws from Kojima's prophetically paranoid cyberpunk musings about the future of the digital society in Metal Gear Solid 2 (which hypothesized a world-changing terrorist attack on Manhattan in 2001) as well as post-9/11 events including the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, the record-setting deployment of private military companies to the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, and sea changes in A.I. research from rules-based systems toward large language models. The synthesis of these inspirations is an eerie dystopian vision that feels like a crystallization of Bush-era fears, and it's a warning more urgent now than it was in 2008. Touching on mass surveillance, A.I.-guided war, autonomous weaponry, and military-business models, Metal Gear Solid 4 posits a grim totalitarian future in which technologies of control—control of information, emotions, weaponry, and the human body itself—have restructured the global economy around a cycle of stabilized chaos, 'routine' and 'managed' wars fought by privatized forces that render ideological or national loyalties, and the old soldiers who embody them, thoroughly passé. Advertisement The game's unifying theme is sense, which it defines as those qualities possessed by human beings that data-driven mechanisms can simulate but never truly experience: to see, touch, and smell, to suffer and despair, to feel the danger and ecstasy of overwhelming emotion, to exercise intuitions built up from a lifetime of experience and conviction. Metal Gear Solid 4 tries to digitally simulate all these sensations—yes, even smell—yet its supremely confident directorial hand makes it, for all its awkward missteps and byzantine bafflements, an ultimately triumphant and unmistakably human work of high technology maximalism. Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 2 is now available.