indefinite articles

This week: Things take a turn for the worst in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.

By their nature, the great films of history are manipulative, selfish bastards. Leveraging expectations, they exploit their power over the viewer, tugging the mental puppet strings of their unsuspecting audience. And it’s what we want: to have our frame of mind altered in some meaningful, though not necessarily pleasurable, way.

Not coincidentally, the worst cinematic experiences are those that grow from grand ambitions, but resolutely fail to meaningfully address their audience. No matter the genius of the initial conception, the end result becomes a nauseating monument to self-indulgence.

But in even the worst case, a film will rarely last longer than three hours. My play through of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty took fourteen.

Looking back at it, the game almost seems proud of its myriad flaws. The player begins the game controlling Solid Snake, in his usual role as the tenacious, hard-boiled infiltrator. But a mere two or three hours into the game, the rug is pulled out from underneath him and without explanation the game changes scene, diverting the player’s control to a platinum blond by the name of Raiden. Next to Snake’s razor-focused demeanor, Raiden is a meandering novice, and he reeks of the fey, tortured protagonists that series like Final Fantasy typically employ.

For the first few hours you control series standard Solid Snake, left. When the perspective switches to Raiden, right, the game loses the little spark of life that it has.

Throughout the underwhelming adventures of this milquetoast military brat, it feels like creator Hideo Kojima is slowly losing all ability to self-censor. Despite its extravagances, the first Metal Gear Solid was safely within the confines of what one might expect from an action game. In Sons of Liberty the reins begin to come loose, and both the gameplay and the story come across as bloated and fermenting, the children of a stream of consciousness approach to game design.

Atop the surface of a surprisingly well-thought out narrative setup, Kojima has laid a veneer of soap opera antics. Raiden, whose real name is Jack, talks continually over the radio with his girlfriend Rose — the two are named after the lead characters in Titanic, which should give you an indication of what the dialogue is like. Joining them is a circus of melodrama that plays out in unrelenting expositional dialogue, all of it heavy-handed and inconsequential.

In contrast to this unwelcome softer side, everything else in the game is pushed to a disturbingly hardcore note. The set pieces and bosses, often fun little sandboxes in the first game, become tedious, punishingly difficult exercises that require more patience than tactics or skill.

I get the impression that all of this was meant to be humorous in some way, but instead of laughing I played most of the game with wide-eyed disbelief. How did anyone allow this to happen?

In the last few hours, the game descends past the point of mere mediocrity. The brunt of the game is irritating and cloyingly verbose, but at least it’s a tolerable, perhaps even pleasant, awfulness. But turning on a dime, the game descends into a Naked Lunch haze, twisting the knife that it has slowly been pushing into your back the entire time.

Pushing Raiden aside, the game begins to address you directly through the voice of Raiden’s superior, Colonel Roy Campbell. In a startlingly creepy voice, being filmed from bizarre angles, his face suddenly replaced with a skull, the Colonel scorns you for playing too many video games, and instructs you to turn off the system, immediately. He goes on to explain that the Metal Gear Solid series is in fact designed to brainwash you, to implant specific memes as part of some malevolent political conspiracy to enlist the country’s youth.

It would’ve been one thing had Kojima followed-up Metal Gear Solid with a series of self-indulgent attempts at art, but to push his audience’s face into the nightmarish horror film that is the game’s final act is little more than abuse.

Next time: Onward to greener pastures (or perhaps jungles) in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.