Metal Gear Solid is a game of two halves in so very many ways; the story and the gameplay, the stealth and the combat, the first disc and the second, the dichotomy of Solid and Liquid, and the dualities of nearly every other character in the game. It seems fitting, then, to likewise review it in two parts, with each part’s focus on one element of that first dichotomy of story and gameplay – I really do feel they need to be discussed separately.
I.
“Bullshit”
1. A term that is used to described [sic] lies or untrue stuff.
2. A term used to describe stupid things people do.
-Urban Dictionary
When we say a game is bullshit, the implication is usually that it’s Unfair or Unreasonable in some capacity. I think Metal Gear Solid is bullshit in a truer sense; it loves to intentionally obscure its intended strategies and provide only vague hints in their direction, so as a blind player you end up doing a lot of stupid things in order to progress.
In order to find the first boss, you have to use C4 next to a patch of a wall that’s a very slightly different shade of grey that’s difficult to make out from a top-down perspective given the PS1’s resolution and color palette, so it’s easy to get lost and just start running around the Tank Hangar like a headless chicken.
Sometimes you’ll just walk into a claymore because you didn’t think to equip the mine detector or thermal goggles before walking into an area. Sometimes you’ll step on a floor trap and by a stroke of sheer bad luck not continue walking afterwards, falling to an instant death. Sometimes you’ll be shimmying across a ledge and fail to hold the analog stick far enough in the direction you initially held to hug the wall in the first place even though the camera has shifted to the point where that’s not the direction the wall is in anymore, and as a result you’ll fall into a pit of lava and die. Sometimes there will be an enemy or a camera turret off screen that notices you before you can see it, and the only way you could possibly have avoided it is by knowing it was there in advance or flipping to first-person view every few seconds, obliterating the game’s pacing.
All too often, a boss fight will seem astoundingly frustrating because you either didn’t call the right person using the Codec or you did and none of them actually told you what you need to do. Psycho Mantis hurls objects across the room at unreactable speeds, but they can be dodged by crouching. Ocelot and Sniper Wolf have “modes” that they occasionally go into that make them less aggressive and allow you safer openings to attack, but there’s no indicator for this, you just have to notice their behavior and intuit that their AI state has changed despite no other enemy having such complex patterns. When Metal Gear Rex fires missiles, you have to figure out that they can’t hit close to him, and when he fires his laser, you have to figure out that the pattern he draws with it can’t hit you easily if you’re moving clockwise and away from him, and until you figure these things out you’re just gonna take a lot of damage.
None of this is unfair, nor is it unreasonable to expect a player to reliably deal with it, but it’s not the kind of thing that really rewards skill either. Once you know what to do, the act of doing it is generally really easy. Consequently, playing the game blind usually ends up requiring you to bullshit your way through at least a huge chunk of the game, spamming rations and trading hits until you figure out the “correct” strategy. It feels less like a tense tactical showdown and more like headbutting a wall over and over until you find the loose brick that causes it all to come crumbling down anticlimactically.
There are exceptions of course, as there always are; what surprisingly little there is in the way of true stealth gameplay is decently fun, albeit rudimentary due to the simplicity of the guards’ AI and the generous layouts of the rooms. It’s certainly far too punishing early on when you lack a silenced weapon or a substantial health pool, but it gets the job done; distracting guards by knocking on walls and then walking around a different path to circumvent them is a nice feeling, and so is slipping around a corner just in time to avoid a guard’s line of sight.
There are a couple good bosses, too. Vulcan Raven capitalizes on the game’s strengths, line of sight-based stealth and a map filled with loops that gradually get closed off over the course of the fight, enabling you to maneuver around him and sneak in potshots with your Stinger or Nikita but forcing you to constantly re-evaluate the safe paths and vantage points based on his position. Despite my earlier complaints, Metal Gear Rex is a model for how I’d have liked more of the combat in this game to look: enemies which can be easily baited into specific attacks based on your position, but where the safe opening to attack is not after those animations but rather during them, requiring you to understand how those attacks control space and position around them in advance.
It’s just a shame that when the game isn’t making you sneak around or pulling gotchas, it’s usually making you do something insanely tedious like walking up an excessively long stairwell with enemies infinitely spawning to chase you, or fighting a helicopter on a roof that keeps fucking flying below the roof so you can’t hit it for like 10 seconds straight, or backtracking through areas you’ve already traversed more than once. For a game that seems to love Metroidvania-style progression, it sure didn’t do much to borrow Metroidvania world design, as there are effectively no shortcuts between major regions of Shadow Moses. Fixing this would require a full redesign of the world’s layout, though, as adding shortcuts to the existing one would just cut down further on the already lacking quantity of genuine stealth gameplay.
I’ll grant that there are some pretty creative ideas here. Psycho Mantis’s “plug the controller into slot 2” gimmick is famous for a reason, even if that fame somewhat dilutes the genius by making it unlikely for a new player to end up solving it blind. Grey Fox’s insistence that you fight him hand-to-hand and the frenzy that he gets sent into if you try anything else is a cool way of softly forcing a melee playstyle and hinting at his identity in the process. The usage of gameplay conceits to enhance story beats is well-documented and well-discussed and there is no shortage of examples.
I don’t think any of this is enough to save the gameplay, though, nor is the game’s age an excuse. Better stealth games like Thief existed around the same time and besides, the core issues of MGS1’s gameplay boil down to a flawed fundamental design ethos, not technical limitations. The existence of good gameplay within this very title proves that. The fix isn’t stronger tech, it’s more stealth segments and fights like Raven and Rex, and fewer awful forced combat tower climbs, fewer hallways solved by chaff grenade spam, fewer Sniper Wolfs, fewer Hind Ds. More dynamic interaction, less gimmicky bullshit.
II.
SPOILER WARNING
The first time I experienced Metal Gear Solid’s story was years ago. What stuck in my memory since that time were its tone and its plot twists. I still like them today. MGS is cinematic as hell, and that level of presentation was enough to hook me in even back when I didn’t really understand the deeper themes that it was getting at. It’s nice to be able to say that the game actually holds up better under scrutiny than it does as a “popcorn flick”, as it were.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the way the game foreshadows its reveals is pretty effective. Most of the puzzle pieces are there if you know to look for them, even in the early parts of the game when the story seems pretty straightforward and frankly, from my current perspective, a little dull. Some of it’s a little heavy-handed, sure, but in those cases the reveal usually goes a step deeper than anticipated. Liquid isn’t just Solid’s brother – they’re clones of the same man, created as part of the same program as all the soldiers in the base. What felt like passé signposting of an obvious twist suddenly feels much more clever given full context.
What’s fascinating to me about Metal Gear Solid, though, isn’t in its plot twists, its flashy cutscenes, or its brazen and repeated textual acknowledgement of its status as a video game, but rather that even over a quarter of a century later it still feels like it has so much to say. This isn’t a game that’s simply anti-American, it’s anti-imperialism; anti-war in all its forms. America is simply the target of its most scathing critiques for its position at the center of the global political stage. Its critiques don’t end at “war bad”, though. They cut at the corruption and bloodthirst of the most powerful people on the planet and at the capitalist war machine that fuels the nuclear arms race.
Perhaps I’m giving the game too much credit. It stops short of directly criticizing imperial governments by pinning the blame at the end squarely on one corrupt Secretary of Defense. Sure, there’s the twist that the President was in charge of Ocelot the entire time, but the truth about capitalism is that when things equivalent in spirit to the Metal Gear project happen in reality, the corruption that leads to them is systemic in nature. It is not a product of individuals, but of a system that is designed at a fundamental level to engender the creation of bigger and deadlier weapons and their usage in the slaughter of countless innocents.
At times, Metal Gear Solid feels like it understands this. The people in charge of the Metal Gear project are not, on their faces, bloodthirsty monsters. Otacon is horrified to learn he helped create an unprecedented weapon of mass destruction. The ArmsTech president was only ever in it to line his pockets. But that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? Complicity in the war machine is one of the most insidious ways that careless self-interest can turn into mass murder. The game understands, but it still chooses to pin the blame on one guy at the end.
Then again, that’s how it tends to go in the real world, too. We look on in horror at the consequences of a fundamentally evil system and then we pick a scapegoat to blame, take them down, and go on as though everything is fine without ever really addressing the system itself. Metal Gear Solid has a happy ending. An ending in which its protagonist rejects his assigned purpose at the hands of the military, yes, but ultimately one in which the system itself goes unaddressed.
And yet, I’m inclined to give the game credit, because at the end of the day, the villains of this specific entry aren’t really the ultra-wealthy warmongers fueling the war machine – that’s for the sequel to address, as is hinted at in the post-credits scene. Instead, MGS1 is about the everyday people egging them on. Liquid represents the ideology of the average American conservative, and in light of recent events, the readiness with which the game utterly mocks and dismantles his ideology is unusually cathartic.
Liquid represents a rugged, every-man-for-himself kind of nationalism while also espousing the deep bioessentialism at the heart of the modern conservative movement. He romanticizes a time when fighting wars was the purpose of every man all the while lashing out at the world for what he sees as an injustice of having been born with inferior genes. In the end, he is pathetic – a failure on all fronts whose misguided promises led otherwise decent people to fall into a destructive cult of personality.
By showing the backstories of FOXHOUND’s key members, MGS reminds us that those with ordinary or even tragic backstories are not immune to radicalization. That alluring promise, of destroying some great worldly injustice and taking what is rightfully yours, is not made less alluring by a life of struggle – indeed, in many cases, such a life can make one more susceptible to this temptation. Critically, though, Otacon does not blame Snake for Sniper Wolf’s death, nor does he blame her. He understands that she is responsible for her own actions all the while lamenting that he couldn’t save her from Liquid’s, and by extension Big Boss’s, violent ideology.
That ideology permeates the entire narrative. The Les Enfants Terribles project aims to create the perfect soldier, and in doing so it enforces a bioessentialist notion of “perfect genetics”. The idea that all men are created for the sole purpose of making war is precisely the ideology that Metal Gear Solid 1 is interested in criticizing. It is therefore crucial that at the end, Snake does not win with the knowledge that he is the “inferior” clone. Instead, Liquid erroneously tells Solid that the latter received the “superior” dominant genes – a prospect rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of biology that I am not interested in correcting here – and he does not even acknowledge it.
From the perspective of anyone except Ocelot, the protagonist’s final victory is not in spite of his “inferior” genetics – it is separate from the notion altogether. It is in this way that Metal Gear Solid most fundamentally rejects bioessentialism: by refusing to frame its core conflict through a bioessentialist lens. This is why, when Naomi delivers her monologue about choosing to live on her own terms instead of defining herself based on her genetics, it feels earned.
Metal Gear Solid ends on a note of hope. The notion that people can choose to live how they want is not merely an indictment of those who choose to live for violence, but a message that in spite of our circumstances we can choose to live for kindness too. We live in a world teetering on the brink of fascism. It’s during times like these, when it’s so easy to slide into despair and disillusionment, that it is most important to remember that the world can be a better place. In spite of Metal Gear Solid’s faults, its frustrations, and the ways in which it falls short in its critiques, maybe this is why I’m willing to forgive it; it sees the darkest sides of humanity and decides we’re worth believing in anyway.
