To wrap up my 7 days of Metal Gear series I will talk about the two game I will not be reviewing and my thoughts about the future of the series as a whole.

PREAMBLE
The reason I did not review MGS4 or Peace Walker is because they are the two newest games in the series and I didn’t want to spoil it, it also meant having to do two more articles (counting this conclusion), which as you can see it would not fall in line with the original plans.

Also, I did not write this article a day after the last one like I’ve been doing since it fell in the 25th, and that, aside from being Christmas, was my birthday, so you can try to guess that my overall cerebral activity was drastically toned down by external, albeit legal, sources.

Also, I don’t want to spoil anything story-wise when reviewing the next two games, so don’t worry about that, and they will not be such a big review as all the other games due to the fact that I do not want to make a huge *** post.
That aside, let’s see what I have to think about MGS4, Peace Walker and the future of Metal Gear.

METAL GEAR SOLID 4: GUNS OF THE PATRIOTS

Released in 2008, Metal Gear Solid 4 is the game that ends and concludes the Solid Snake saga and its connection to the Big Boss saga.

MGS4 takes place 5 years after MGS2, and while I won’t disclose any plot element, MGS4 starts with Snake tracking down Liquid Ocelot (Liquid’s mind in Ocelot’s body) and ends up learning all about the patriots and destroys them.

The entirety of MGS4 is about answering questions that were left open at the end of MGS2, and like I said in the MGS2 article, Kojima never really intended them to be answered but fans got up in rage wanting to see more of Solid Snake and his battle against Liquid and The Patriots. This means that A LOT of questions that you might not wanted to see the answer for, will now be answered, and the answer given to MOST, if not all, of these question is exactly the same: Nanomachines.

The entire game centers around the evolution of the Nanomachines technology and how The Patriots use them to control everyone, and they are used as the wildcard for every question, every little detail that we might have just let skip aside, like why Vamp was able to walk on water, is answered in this game by simply saying that it was the nanomahcines.
Why is Vamp inmortal? nanomachines, why can Frogs walk on walls? nanomachines, why can The Patriots control firearms? nanomachines, why are soldiers with little to no experience fight so good? nanomachines, why did Kojima made it like that? nanomachines. It is a plot element that was greatly exaggerated and overused, almost as if Kojima had already ran out of ideas, or was too lazy to come up with interesting plot details, and was the major critic point amongst fans, and the only real thing I hate about this game as it destroys some of the Metal Gear magic and mysticisms that existed in MGS1 and MGS2.

Gameplay-wise we are still facing a linear game where there’s only one way to do things, although many parts of the game are much more ope world and allows for some exploration to be done, but I really don’t care about linearity, it’s the sole reason I replay these games, because it’s easy to replay without loosing all your progress (unlocked weapons, items, camos, etc). The game greatly improves on the camouflage system that Snake Eater introduced by having the Octo Camo, which changed colors matching the environment instead of having to manually navigate through menus. CQC has also be improved by not limiting it to handguns, and creating many different combat strategies to disarm the enemy without alerting others.

This game has three key stealth elements: sneaking in a war-zone, following a guy up and preventing the enemy to neither see you nor the guy you are following nor letting the guy see you, and solo sneaking against either unmanned weapons (Geckos and Scarabs) or other human enemies (such as Frogs). The game tries to explore many different types of sneaking situation, unlike previous games where it was mostly the same “avoid getting seen by guards with the same path pattern”, but I can’t help but feeling that it could have been improved a bit by having these different sneaking elements combine in the same Acts, much like how in Act 2 you go from war sneaking to following someone’s trail with a nice explanation for the sudden change in between, and unlike Act 3 where it’s all following a guy around from begin to end rather than sneaking around guards by yourself for a while until you actually find the guy.

For completionists, people who like to unlock everything, this game is challenging, but it’s not brutally evil like Peace Walker becomes. It has a nice share of weapons (70) and other items that you can either unlock a certain way or you find randomly, some of them being more rare or challenging to obtain than others, but never borderline impossible nor ultra time-consuming, again, like Peace Walker is.

This game is not the storytelling masterpiece that previous games were, and some parts of the gameplay are flawed, but this game is actually pretty good and a good conclusion to a good storyline, although I wish they would work a bit more on all the answers given to all the question, I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t say that I enjoyed this game and the story, even today and the game has way more good in it than bad. My final score for this game is an 8 out of 10.

METAL GEAR SOLID: PEACE WALKER

Only on PlayStation my ***!

Boy oh boy where do I start? this game was released in 2010 for the PSP and later ported to the PS3 and Xbox 360, breaking the PlayStation exclusivity and proving once again that you can’t trust Kojima, not that I care that Xbox owners can have the game, is just that this little thing, coupled with the ongoing idea that Portable Ops in no longer canon, and other things, make me not trust in whatever comes out of Kojima’s *** these days.

Peace Walker starts somewhere around San Hieronymo in Columbia, where the events of Portable Ops took place, and 4 years after these, and shows us a bankrupted Naked Snake that has started his own small military unit that does some dirty jobs around the area while also trying to escape from the CIA for whatever reason. The game then takes an unexpected turn when recordings of what appears to be The Boss’ voice is presented to Snake, who agrees on taking a job for some really trustable russian guy in exchange for a military base. Well, Snake digs in what where the heck that recording comes from and learns a few things that are useless for the overall Metal Gear series as well as a ridiculous plot that serves no other purpose than to retcon MGS3 and Portable Ops to heck.

All I’m gonna say about the storyline of this game is that it sucks, big time, it’s sloppy, repetitive, unnecessarily stupid and has a lack of charismatic characters, so you just can’t really love anyone in this game: chico is annoying (and his name is very stereotypical and stupid, it’s like if I meet an American boy named Boy), Cecile is just filler, Huey is cheap, Paz is dumb (not her, but the story behind her), Hot Coldman is a very stereotypical cartoon villain, not exactly what you’d expect from a Metal Gear game, Galvez is obviously a bad guy so no surprise when he is revealed that he is, and Amanada is never developed outside of the “hasta la muerte” revolutionary ***, Strangelove are the only two characters that might have had some decency, but Strangelove is overshadowed by all The Boss *** that should have never been brought up by the game, they already brought it up in MGS4 and they already brought it up in Portable Ops, we get Kojima, Big Boss is butthurt about The Boss’ death, for god’s sake move along from that already and come up with new stuff.
On top of that, much like how MGS4 overused the nanomachines plot, this game overuses the peace and deterrance element, but on a larger scale, it’s like if Kojima was saying “In case you haven’t noticed yet that this game is about peace by the title of the game and countless references to peace, let me shovel another reference to peace down your throat”.
At the end of the day you just want the damn thing to finish so you can enjoy the Extra Ops, cause that’s all this game is worth for.

Who the heck came up with this line? they should probably fire him.

The only thing this game has going for is the gameplay and graphics, they are pretty good, but I have a few problems with the gameplay that I will tell you later, first, graphics-wise this game has an impressive level of details considering that it runs at full speed on a portable machine with a 333MHz CPU. This is one of the Metal Gear quality standards that I talk about: all good Metal Gear games must have a good storyline, impressive graphics for its time and unique controls.
And that’s where this game falls flat: it doesn’t have unique controls!
One can argue that this game controls pretty smooth, and that’s true, but it controls smooth because the entire game was changed from being its own genre to now being a half-*** attempt at mixing Call of Duty and Monster Hunter, heck there’s even a Monster Hunter cross-over that further validates the point that this game no longer has its own personality that most other Metal Gear games had, not to mention they removed crawling, one of the most important stealth elements since it was introduced in Metal Gear 2! that alone tells you that the game is going to be fast paced, camouflage will be useless, and you’ll be spending more time on your feet fighting people than on the ground avoiding them.

Rather than trusting on and improving the classic controls that made Metal Gear a genre of its own, this game just blatantly copies other genre’s control schemes to try to appeal to a broader audience, namely the Hunter Type (from Monster Hunter) and the Action Type (from generic shooters).

If you also compare the cover artwork for this game with previous title you can see that this game tries to appeal to a broader, more CoD-ish audience. MGS1 had nothing, absolutely nothing, in its cover, yet it’s a 10/10 game, MGS2 and MGS3 showed Snake holding a silenced pistol, which further denotes the series personality of being a stealth-action game, even MGS4 simply showed the face of Old Snake, and we know how much war MGS4 has, yet this game shows Snake holding a rifle with helicopters and explosions in the background, all pointing out at a full blown action game rather than a stealth-action game. This further validates the point that this game lacks the Metal Gear personality, not trusting the older control schemes and gameplay layout, not trusting the core fans enough, and rather wanting to appeal to an audience that just wants to blow *** up without taking the consequences into consideration, even the enemy AI in this game, coupled with the easy of obtaining supplies, further help the idea of going into full-blown battle without any consequences whatsoever nor without having to rationalize ammo, rations, supplies in general, like in every previous game.

This game is a disgrace as a Metal Gear game, and as such, if you plan on playing this game, please forget that it’s a Metal Gear, just force your brain into thinking that it’s a totally different game, otherwise, if you are a long-time fan, you will be greatly disappointed, and if you are a newcomer, you will have an incorrect image of what Metal Gear truly is.
Other than that, if you stop thinking that this game is a Metal Gear, it’s actually pretty good, pretty damn fun, and gives you plenty of hours of entertainment, this game doesn’t suck as a game, this game sucks as a Metal Gear, not having the Metal Gear personality and quality that other games have. For those of you who are more familiar with Star Wars than with this series, imagine a Star Wars movie that was all about Imperial Clones fighting rebel soldiers rather than the actual story about Luke and Vader, is it fun? yeah, will I like it as a Start Wars movie? nope, that’s how this game makes me feel.
I give this game a 5 out of 10, and I’m being generous.

THE FUTURE
We already know what we are talking about here: Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain.

Let me cut to the point: I’m scared of what will come out of those two games. You have already seen all my criticism against Peace Walker and why it meant a huge step back from previous games, and these two new games are showing signs of continuing the things that made me dislike Peace Walker and the things that I disliked of MGS4.

First of all, Big Boss has been renamed to Punished Snake, for real? in a game named The Phantom Pain, he is renamed to that? it’s the entire nanomachines and peace/deterrence *** that plagued MGS4 and PW. I do not want to spend the entire game being told how much Big Boss is suffering, I could already see that in MGS3, MGS4 and Portable Ops, I do not need you to jam it down my throat until exhaustion. If this is where the game is heading, we’re gonna have a bad time.

Another thing is that Ground Zeroes is a direct sequel to PW, I can understand they need it to explain why Big Boss went into a coma and all that ***, but why reuse the same characters? it has already been proven to death that fans disliked them, why keep using them? they could have all easily gone away, but no, we got Chico back, we got Amanda back, we got Paz back, jeez, can’t you already see that you sc*** up with PW? just move along like you moved along from Portable Ops, and Portable Ops wasn’t as big of a f-up as Peace Walker was.

Other than that, I’m glad Snake can crawl again, they should have NEVER removed that from PW. But aside from my two clear fears about these two games, I’m still having a bit of hope that Kojima will do it right, and while I don’t think he’ll ever reach the level of quality he reached with every Metal Gear up to MGS3, I do think he can at least get closer than the *** he did with Peace Walker.

CONCLUSION

Metal Gear is a great series overall, but as you can see, it’s starting to show its scars, and the level of quality has started to drop down over time, with perfect masterpieces to simply great games to mediocre games that don’t know if they want to honor the fans or newcomers, and fail at doing both, after seeing what I saw with Peace Walker, and seeing the reasons why people like MGSV, which are not at all Metal Gear-related, I fear this game will turn into Konami’s answer to Call of Duty rather than Konami’s answer to Metal Gear fans. Again, enjoy the classic glory, and if you haven’t play the classic games yet then go and play them, and don’t expect much from the new games, maybe by the time you get to play them they actually end up being better than your expectations, which is never a bad thing.