Playing through the UK’s chart-topping games of the PlayStation era cemented a link in my mind between two of the biggest of them. Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII both arrived in the UK just about out of nowhere (the original Metal Gear did get released here, unlike any previous Final Fantasy game), with spectacular narrative ambition and visuals to match. They both mixed fantasy, sci-fi and strong political messages as well as frequently mixing tones in their own unique ways. By the second half of the ‘00s, it felt like the mainstream in Western games was only just catching up to them. What happened next for each of the series also feels rather similar.
Both stayed big, but weirdly standalone. There were a lot of Final Fantasy fans still around, and there were a lot of Metal Gear Solid fans still around. Metal Gear Solid 4, despite being confined to the struggling PlayStation 3 in exactly the way Final Fantasy XIII wouldn’t be, almost matched the first week sales of Metal Gear Solid 2. That has to be set against both a general increase in numbers across the board in between and the comparative lack of competition, though. Both series were mostly selling to those existing fans, but the comparison gets interesting in how they were doing so through very different means. For Final Fantasy, a narrative clean slate with (almost) every game, a constant appearance of reinvention. For Metal Gear Solid, the opposite of wiping anything clean, instead looping back into itself to become ever more Metal Gear Solid.
Metal Gear Solid 4 finds excuses to bring back characters from the original Metal Gear Solid in all kinds of new roles, deftly introduced with graphical reminders of their past appearance. It is almost as heavy on continuity as it is on cinematic cutscenes (as someone who hasn’t played all the previous games all the way through, both were a bit of a struggle at points). It also puts some very deliberate distance in there, chiefly through its treatment of Solid Snake himself, or rather Old Snake.
Some kind of premature ageing thing has turned Snake old and even more grizzled than he already was, emphasised by David Hayter’s wheezing performance. He has an impressive new suit which adds a pretty awesome camouflage mechanic, changing pattern as he is next to different surfaces. He also mentions that the suit is the only thing keeping his muscles functioning at the level they are – he is a decaying remnant kept going inside the symbol of his role. If it sometimes feels like he’s going through the motions, it’s certainly thematically appropriate.
The weariness and disconnection goes further. Metal Gear Solid 4 takes place in a world at permanent war, in service of a war economy benefiting a select few. Its opening act takes place in the Middle East and starts off with discussion of “ID tag solders” over footage with a resemblance to Call of Duty 4 that’s difficult to ignore. The places you travel through are impressively open and detailed, and are the setting for a war which Snake is just trying to stay out of the way of, wishing for the merciful grip of irrelevance.
The mood is an unusual and impressive one, which filters through the gameplay that matches previous smart sneaking with minor twists. It’s also subject to the usual Metal Gear Solid crunching tonal changes. You see a guy get interrupted, pants down, in a barrel before you get to do a bit of barrel-rolling in cardboard box style. There is repeated discussion of diarrhoea, with a point at which it is followed by a cut to a line that it’s “four days since Liquid arrived” giving me the biggest laugh from a game in a while. There’s also the typically inventive use of the variety of gadgets and items available to you, even if a lot of it feels particularly optional this time.
Items are the source of some patented weirdness too. Snake picks up an iPod at one point, rendered in loving detail and with its click wheel controls transposed to your controller’s right stick. You can use it to listen to music, or you can have Snake listen to a Metal Gear Solid 4 “integral podcast” in which the hosts talk about how listening to music and podcasts will help to calm Snake down. It’s both beautifully meta and head-spinning, and given how comparatively new podcasts were at the time, a moment of predicting the future like Metal Gear Solid 2’s misinformation prophecies on a smaller scale.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is the kind of game to have an integral podcast; the kind of game to show off beautifully detailed and pointless graphical flourishes like embroidered hankies; the kind of game to have cutscenes of numbers being sung over frying eggs. It’s the kind of game where when a solider in one of its detailed realistic environments gets knocked out, they have stars spinning around their head, and patting them awake removes those stars one by one. There is little else like it. As far more of a Final Fantasy fan than a Metal Gear Solid fan, Metal Gear Solid 4 can be particularly heavy going at points, but I am still glad that it exists.
Top of the charts for week ending 14 June 2008:
Top of the charts for week ending 21 June 2008:
