Metal Gear Solid

Among the most widely used theoretical concepts in talking about games is ludonarrative dissonance, the idea of the messages of gameplay and narrative being at odds with each other. The lovable protagonist who happens to murder hundreds of people kind of thing. It’s something I’m bound to end up talking about as mainstream games devote more of their time to increasingly separate narrative elements. One of the few things I knew about Metal Gear Solid going into it (most of which came from Super Smash Bros.) was that its narrative sequences famously border on the excessive, so I was on the lookout for how it handled that one. It turns out that ludonarrative dissonance is the least of its concerns, barely getting a look-in when the gameplay and narrative are capable of generating dissonance within themselves, thank you very much. More than that, dissonance-a-gogo is all part of a unique plan which it pulls off better than it has any right to.

The intro of Metal Gear Solid throws you right in at the narrative deep end, with a bunch of artful camera angles and TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) as protagonist Solid Snake gets given his very detailed and very important briefing on his mission. He is to infiltrate a terrorist base in Alaska, rescue some very important people, and check out the terrorists’ nuclear capability. And while in this base he won’t need to take any breaks from being briefed and can carry on talking to his support crew at almost any time, which obviously makes total sense.

From there it’s time to start understanding the basics of tactical espionage action (sadly never referred to as TEA), sneaking up on enemies and running away and hiding if seen. The pitch is roughly if you were James Bond like in GoldenEye 007 but actually got to use more of a box of tricks (with Q on the line) and do more of the painstaking routine work, with the results being by turns more realistic and even less realistic than the films. You get to do ingenious things like use cigarette smoke to make infra-red security beams visible, and also to become inconspicuous by remaining a short distance away from someone who just saw you. The game is very clever in giving you different ways to approach things, and in giving you the opportunity to make leaps of intuition but also not leaving you dangling if you don’t figure them out. Fail a couple of times and you’ll get a call with some extra hints, and within the internal logic it’s pretty reasonable to have knowledgeable remote support intervening.

Along the way, conversations help set up more of the plot and characters, with David Hayter’s gruff performance as Snake getting across his war-weariness while still being able to let some lighter moments in. And then you reach the first boss battle, and Metal Gear Solid really lets loose. The incredible music hits its peak, for one thing. And placing remote explosives and then triggering them while your enemy walks past them off screen is a fine way to do battle. Before that though, the introduction to the boss. He is a guy called Revolver Ocelot, and his character is that he loves revolvers. As he talks, he spins his gun around in his hand. And keeps doing it. And keeps doing it. And keeps doing it. And keeps doing it. And keeps doing it. And keeps doing it. It goes from weird to funny, then right through and out the other side into something else entirely in keeping with the game as a whole. Problems with balancing different elements? What if… we just pushed every one of the sliders up to 11?

Metal Gear Solid leans into serious espionage and political commentary about the horrors of war and the people running America. It leans into how cool it is to play with destructive gadgets. It leans into grimdark, with sermons about how there are no heroes. It leans into slapstick comedy. It leans into anything and everything, sometimes all at once. It has some delightfully complex implications about the relationship between Japan and America conveyed in dialogue that goes from “it’s like one of my Japanese animes” to the legacy of nuclear bombs in no time at all. It has Confucian-wisdom-as-gameplay-hints whenever you call up to save your game. It has the kind of galaxy-brained thinking that says that close-ups of a female main character’s butt aren’t gratuitous if you make them part of the solution to a puzzle.

There is almost no highwire that Metal Gear Solid doesn’t try to dance across. It’s a complete and utter tonal mess. But one of director Hideo Kojima’s key realisations, I think, is that a game allows for very different pacing that can make that work in a way that wouldn’t be possible is something that doesn’t have such different modes of interaction available. The process of moving Snake through the facility can act as a break from some parts of what it does while remaining totally involving through others. When things really jar, it mostly feels intentional enough to get away with it.

The other key thing is the sheer level of bizarre invention.

Shortly after that boss battle, there is a bit where the arms company head you’re attempting to rescue, during an interruption to a lecture about nuclear arms, casually tells you that the frequency you need to call next should be on the CD case. On the back of the game’s box is a screenshot from the call you’re about to make, with the frequency displayed. I was partially spoiled on this one, as well as the famous Psycho Mantis trick, and yet the brazen straightforwardness of it still took my breath away.

The whole game is alive with a sense of possibility that sings even when elements start to drag (mostly my being very bad at playing it, but also the treatment of women, with the line about your wannabe soldier companion’s “compassionate eyes” a low point). There’s something slightly bittersweet in looking back at this era when Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII could come sweeping in and, backed with good reviews, upend the ways of games telling stories which were popular here. It feels like everything was up for grabs, and could have resulted in freedom and invention being put to better ends. As we’ll see, that’s not exactly how it played out.

I kind of wish that I had experienced Metal Gear Solid back when I was playing PlayStation games the first time round, because it might well have blown my mind. To be more precise, just about the same time as I was getting super into music like Mansun’s Six would have been perfect. Six is an ornate, gonzo punk-glam-prog record featuring “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”, Tom Baker, and more ideas than any sensible album should contain. That was also the time when I was absorbing Pitchfork reviews of everything I listened to, and Brent DiCrescenzo’s review of Six there started with with “The sheer audacity […] demands respect and ridicule”. Metal Gear Solid continually made me think of that line. And while the game didn’t blow my mind like it might have done back then, I still get a kick out of anything which so confidently backs up its core value that there’s actually zero difference between the sublime and the ridiculous.