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a review of metal gear solid 3 (konami/playstation2)
by tim rogers
Hideo Kojima is a great guy.
It took me until about four months after I met him, on an unseasonably warm day in the middle of February, 2004, to realize how great he is. The realization wasn't too explosive. It just happened, and then I moved on and finished eating my ramen.
It kind of scares me to think deeply about great men. I met a few of them, in 2004, and I wasn't a single one of them. The only greater man than Hideo Kojima, wouldn't you know, happened to be a rock guitarist. A man who equalled Kojima in terms of greatness also happened to be a game producer. I guess if I wrote about movies and had a lot of odd fans willing to send me envelopes full of rubber balloons because of their fanship, then if I talked about the "great men" I met this year I'd probably be talking about movie directors, or movie producers, or movie actors.
Why is Hideo Kojima a great man? It's not easy to say so simply. In contrast, it's easy to say why Big Boss, the hero of Metal Gear Solid 3, is a great man. Look at all the people he kills. Look at his personal conflicts. Look at his eyepatch. Look at the way he serves his country. Look at his muscles. Kojima's not so obviously great. He does, however, dress very smartly. In person, when you first meet him, he's a little quiet. He's certainly not anything like Tecmo's boob/ninja/gun/leather-loving Tomonobu Itagaki, who, at E3, agreed with me when I told him, jokingly, that he was "THE WORLD'S STRONGEST GAME PRODUCER." In my interview with him, when I asked the questions that videogame journalism as a decades-old archetype forced me to ask, I was met with disappointing, look-at-me-I'm-so-modest answers such as "of course videogames are not art" and "of course videogames will never be literature."
When I met Kojima at E3, he was a little out of it. By out of "it," I mean out of everything. He was tired, unshaven, and a little hung-over. He didn't seem to want to be there. He didn't seem to want to be anywhere. At the time, I was disappointed that my appointment time met me with a Kojima that was bored of answering the same questions from lookalike journalists over and over and over again. The reason for his boredom didn't matter -- he was bored. His pre-installed boredom disappointed me. How . . . postmodern -- a "gamer" disappointed that the producer of his favorite game is bored.
Does Metal Gear Solid bore Hideo Kojima? The answer is yes, and no. Yes, it bores him on superficial levels, in the way giant marlins under seventeen-and-a-half feet in length bore the eighty-year-old fisherman: making games about American soldiers hunting giant robots is something he's been doing for a long, long time. It has been his career. Kojima told me that making Metal Gear games has been, until now, like destroying Metal Gear robots has been for Solid Snake. Their destinies are intertwined, so to speak.
After Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Hideo Kojima vowed to never do another Metal Gear game again. He passed Metal Gear Solid 3 off to a new generation of programmers, leaving them only with the keyword "jungle." That was his only advice -- set the game in a jungle. He chose the setting because the music composer Harry Gregson-Williams said he would only score another Metal Gear title if the story were set in a jungle. Perhaps he said that as a joke. Just as well, maybe he didn't. Maybe he was damned, dead serious -- maybe he had an artistic hunger to write music for a story that took place in a jungle? Can we deny him that? I'm no artist. I've written an unpublished book or two, though hell, even I can understand that a guy who writes music might seriously, honestly feel a pain in his gut when he realizes he hasn't composed music for a military story that takes place in a jungle. To wit: I really, awesomely want to write a Tolkien-style fantasy novel, something with a hundred thousand insignificant throwaway details, a simple good-versus-evil story, windy length, and ultimate moneymaking possibilities.
When Kojima was yanked back onto the project, all that lay in place was a jungle setting, a vague 1960s motif, and the requirement that your main character eat constantly to keep his stamina up. Kojima's hand-picked MGS3 Team called their master back to the project, says he, because they were "afraid of making a Resident Evil kind of sequel."
I butted in here, and asked Kojima if they weren't, really, just insecure in their story-writing abilities. He said maybe that was the case, and maybe it wasn't. Then again, insisted Kojima, telling a story is never the main goal of a game producer. The story, as something that cannot ever be literature, even "modern" literature, is not the most important part of the game. Yet Kojima is continually slammed by various prose-hating gamers for making his games too wordy, too preachy, too heavy-handed when it comes to the political views of the characters. Kojima says that politics are to videogame storylines like rulebooks are to televised sports. Details that make things real, and keep them from freezing in place and forgetting what they are. He says his stories deal with nuclear war because it's something he's always been afraid of since he was a kid who loved Godzilla. He says that Metal Gear Solid 2's story, admittedly something of an homage to Japanese postmodern author, playwright, and actor Kobo Abe, tells its story as it does merely because it is a videogame; the player is playing it right now, and no time is as right for a videogame's story as right now. In fact, no other time is right at all. Games are a transitory medium by nature, says he; it is more difficult for a hypothetical alien-landing-on-earth-in-30XX to play Metal Gear Solid 2 (required: PlayStation2, controller, memory card, game disc, AV cable, AC cable, compatible television and/or RF switch) than it is for him to read CS Lewis' From the Silent Planet (required: paperback, knowledge of English). He explained with an open-handed gesture that, therefore, games are not, really, anything that special.
I have wrestled with Kojima for at least a verbal compromise -- that games can be, as what they end up being, as the feelings that they end up provoking, experiences that one can call, at least, "more than worthwhile." Kojima doesn't offer more than a shrug at this. Tricky, tricky man.
And so this is Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. I played the Japanese version what seems like long ago. I played the American version, in English, all night on Christmas Eve and all day on Christmas Day, thinking that the game is very much like "Citizen Kane" to Metal Gear Solid 2's "War of the Worlds." (Yes, I like to think of Kojima as the Orson Welles of videogame producers, and he smirks at the analogy.)
"Citizen Kane" is, as films go, rather virtuous. It's a hard thing to describe, that kind of virtue. It's almost like a passion. It's almost like the movie wants to grow up to be something. Peoples' memories of watching it for the first time are seeds that grow, eventually, into some grown-up, adult kind of feeling. Metal Gear Solid 3 is something like that, even if it's not quite as perfect a videogame as "Citizen Kane" is a film.
Metal Gear Solid 3's largest problems are interface-related. ("Citizen Kane," luckily, being a film, didn't have an interface, much less any interface-related problems. It does have a part where you can see a chair move while the camera pans through a wall, though.) The places where Hideo Kojima was bored with the game stick out like pink flamingoes on a black lawn. Kojima's games have been, up until now, almost ritualistically intent on picking up the player and burying him well within the story's environment. The only times we've ever been snapped out of our "I_AM_SOLID_SNAKE" trances are when our buddies are over, drinking some beers and watching us replay the game with stealth camo. They ask something like, "So where does he carry all those cardboard boxes, eh?" And we all have a chuckle. Though let me tell you -- the first time someone asks that, it's kind of freaky, isn't it? The first time you beat Metal Gear Solid, near the end, you're crying at Otacon's "Can love bloom on a battlefield?" speech, you've been wandering the Shadow Moses Island Nuclear Weapons Disposal Facility for ten damn hours of your life, and you've never wondered once where Snake holds all those guns, that's how snapped-in to the game you've been.
Metal Gear Solid 3, according to series despiser Drew Cosner, is a different beast altogether with regards to immersion. Says he: "It looks so damn good in action it makes me wish I liked these games." Oh yes, it does look good. The jungle you creep through is wide, and fierce. It can be lush. It can be rather breathtaking in its fuzzy-mossy-green beauty. Much of the time, the animals look real. The enemies behave realistically.
Yet there is a most peculiar unease undulating just beneath the surface, like a badass in a crocodile-hat about to jump up with a machinegun and start shooting people.
It's the eating system. No, it's the healing system. No, it's the camouflage system. Hell -- it's all three.
When you shoot an animal, it doesn't fall over dead. (PETA would probably have some issue with that.) Rather, it dissolves into smoky polygons and then plinks into a military ration icon. You pick this up, and then eat it later by going into the "food" menu. Eating food recovers Snake's stamina. His health then recovers slowly, with time. As a means of leaving the proverbial door unlocked for realism, to see if it'll come in, the game offers the player no means to instantly heal. This is interesting, yet also kind of pedantic.
I do believe that's the first time I feel I've properly used the word "pedantic" to describe the behavior of a videogame.
I do believe Metal Gear Solid 3 is the first time I've played a videogame I would say "behaves" rather than "unfolds."
The eating system is the lesser of Metal Gear Solid 3's three trespasses. As what it is, it is sometimes obtrusive and annoying -- at least, if you suck at the game (more on that later). The cure system, however, though a "greater trespass," is actually kind of fun. A gunshot wound requires you to first use your knife to fish out the bullet, then apply styptic to slow the flow of the blood, then apply disinfectant, then suture it up, then apply a bandage. Doing this removes a portion of the red bar in your life meter -- the red bar that represents health that cannot be refilled unless wounds are treated.
Healing yourself requires, first, that you pull up the "cure" menu from the start-button status screen. So yeah, you press start, the screen goes dark, we're snapped back into the cursoring and clicking part of the gaming experience, you choose "cure," and then you use the L2 and R2 buttons to select various treatments so you can alleviate your sixteen gunshot wounds to the torso before eating a piece of alligator meat. Which might be rotten, if you've left the game off for a few days.
Kojima says that healing in games is too easy -- pick up a powerup, instantly refill your life. Players don't think often enough about the consequences of absorbing bullets. The cure system is perhaps designed to make players think twice before sprinting into the middle of a room patrolled by Russian soldiers. "Do I really want to have to go through the trouble to heal again? It's such a pain in the ass." So then you decide to do what the game wants you to do, and sneak in, tranquilizing the guards like a gentleman?
Maybe.
The game's greatest problem is the camouflage index system. It is boring. So Snake's in a jungle, right? The jungle is green. Yet there are some places that aren't green. Like, some places that are rock-colored, or even black, so Snake needs to wear different clothes in order to change colors so people don't see him, because not being seen is what Solid Snake does. Right? So he can change the colors of his uniforms and adjust his face paint. And he does this by, of course, pressing the start button, entering the "camo" menu, and clicking a few menu options.
So yeah, Snake is standing against a brick wall, and the counter in the upper-right corner of the screen says he's 10% hidden in his current camo configuration. We click the left stick, to ping the sonar, and we see that a guard is coming around the corner. We duck down next to a barrel, hit the start button, and change Snake's outfit to the red-and-black "squares" pattern and put on the black face paint. We exit the menu. Snake is now 85% hidden. The guard comes around the corner, and doesn't know Snake.
By about the, oh, second time you do this, though you may be huddled in front of the TV with headphones on, like me, you might say aloud, "Where is he keeping the extra uniforms?" The story makes no effort, even, to inject a videogamey explanation, something like, "Snake, your suit is space-age fabric, the colors of which can be changed with this little wrist-mounted console." It's just a hanging little detail. And more than that, it's boring from even the most basic perspective.
After changing our camo index at enough opportune moments, the eating and healing systems, too, start to feel like annoyances rather than gameplay innovations. The eating system is clearly not Kojima's idea -- it's something that PR companies love. Something you can put on the back of a game box. "THIS GAME IS SO REALISTIC, YOU HAVE TO EAT ANIMALS YOU FIND AND KILL IN THE FOREST. WHOA!" As though finding and killing animals in a forest were something the typical, most realistic real human beings have to do regularly.
The "cure" system, at least,I can shrug off as a Hideo Kojima kind of misunderstood mischief. Although it does feel strange to call it "misunderstood." Kojima's decision to make the whiny, blond-haired, wimpy-acting Raiden the hero of Metal Gear Solid 2, relegating Solid Snake to the role of super badass guy who we see only from the confines of our lame-o player character's perspective -- that was genius. I thought that was hilarious. I got that one.
Maybe I don't "get" why the "cure" system is funny. I'm fairly certain it's not the same level of humor, exactly, as Raiden. I'm more than mostly sure that it's meant to be kind of unnecessary and silly. And I'm balls-to-walls convinced that to Kojima, the "proper" way to experience Metal Gear Solid 3 is by using these quirky interfaces as little as possible.
Know this: Hideo Kojima had considered, for the longest time, making Metal Gear Solid 3 impossible to continue. It was his deepest wish. It was more than his deepest wish that the game would not allow you to continue if you died. The game nearly ended up published this way. It would have been completely unknown to the players of the world until the game's release, at which point the "great spoiler" would hit the internet within twenty minutes, freaking the hell out of everyone about as badly as Raiden freaked everyone out. It was Kojima's trump card. It would have been horrible. It would have been terrible. It would have been brilliant. It would have been something else.
To a person who plays videogames more than semi-regularly, it very likely would have been the biggest feat of mischief ever pulled in game design.
It would have gone like this: you can save the game if you want to. After you save, the girl, Para-Medic, talks about a random old movie. When she's finished talking about the old movie, you're told it's okay to turn the game off. You do so. You turn the game on the next day, play a little bit, get careless, get shot, and you die. That's it. You can't continue your saved game; saves are immediately deleted upon being resumed. Play carefully, now.
Why wasn't the game released like this? I don't know. Maybe Kojima was jerking me around when he told me this. Maybe not. Maybe the whistle-blower on the team who tried to get him to pull Raiden out of MGS2 managed to squeeze the courtesy of conscience into Kojima’s head. Either way:
Playing Metal Gear Solid 3 while possessing this knowledge is a kind of revelatory experience. As far as the play is concerned, it makes no mealy-mouthed suggestions at ungreatness. Every area Snake enters is laid-out as a virtuoso set-piece that can be either stormed through with blazing machineguns or snuck through while investigating every tree, crawling under every run-down warehouse floorboard, and choking every patrolling guard. The latter method is how the reckless, sneering, mischievous Kojima wanted to force players to play. The former method is how many reckless, sneering players end up playing, and winning, anyway.
For a moment, imagine, please, how you would play this game if you knew that you could not continue. It would be a sense of urgency we don't get out of games very often.
Yet the angel on Kojima's right shoulder breaks in, and says the story, the story has to go on. People want to know what happens to the story. The devil on Kojima's left shoulder says to hell with the story -- the hero is Big Boss, he's going to lose an eye somewhere down the line, and of course he's going to kill everyone and win, and oh yeah, war is really bad you get it already.
Kojima says that a videogame "story" is not really a story that needs to be told so much as it's something to keep the player pressing buttons and advancing the "flow". He says that he told the story of Metal Gear Solid 2 the way he did simply because that kind of story could only be told in a videogame. For the most part, he was right. I would call the story he intended to tell "successfully told," even "very, very successfully told."
What of Metal Gear Solid 3's story, however? Here, Kojima tells a story that could very well be told in a movie, or even a series of movies. The story of Metal Gear Solid 3 could even be told in a very, very bad movie. As a story for a game, it's damn good, even if, leading just up until the endgame sequences, it only feels thoroughly adequate and halfway predictable, the way a marble cake is halfway chocolate and halfway vanilla: A solider with the code-name "Snake" is dropped off in a forest in Russia. He has to rescue a scientist. The scientist had previously defected to the US. Now he's been given back to Russia as part of an agreement to end the Cuban Missilie Crisis. Kojima's story this time takes several sweeping, violent hacks at rewriting modern American history, and for the most part, it comes off courteously not feeling like it's blaspheming at all, really. Chalk it up to the story's involvement of "secret missions" and "shady characters." The things that are wrong feel like they're wrong for the right reason. All is in peace when it comes to the storyline elements of this war. They're all in the right places. What they do while sitting in their places doesn't matter so much. They're merely things for us to press buttons while looking at them.
For example: Every Metal Gear Solid game needs a comic-bookish assortment of bad guys with snappy names, all grouped together into a team with a snappy name. The original game had the brilliant, understatedly eclectic "FOX-HOUND." This game has "The Cobras," five soldiers named after the emotions they take into battle -- The Pain, The Fear, The End, The Fury, The Sorrow, and The Joy (okay, that's six, though two of them don't count at the same times). They're all fought, for the most part, very closely together in the storyline. This is because they're not characters in a story so much as they're bosses in a videogame.
What the flow of Metal Gear Solid 3 represents, to me, is utter maturation of Hideo Kojima's Orson Welles-y game-designer schtick. In Metal Gear Solid, the token sniper character was Sniper Wolf, a Russian woman who died and was then mourned longingly by the man who loved her. She is fleshed out, given a backstory, made tragic. We're told about people who died in some village in Russia, and how this spurred her onward, making her all sad and lonely. In Metal Gear Solid 3, we have The End, a soldier so old he might have fought in the American Civil War, who is always asleep in a wheelchair until he enters the stage of action. One character asks another, "Is that old man going to be okay? All he does is sleep." The other character says, "He'll be all right when the time comes." The End is dumped somewhere in the jungle, and of course he wakes up when Snake comes near, setting a boss battle into motion. The battle is long and rather epic (unless you realize you can shoot him while he's asleep in his wheelchair earlier in the game). For reasons the game rightfully does not feel the need to explain, The End happens to be quite photosynthetic, so you're scrounging around for food while he lies in wait, taking potshots at you. When he dies, he appears thankful for having one last formidable opponent. It's then the end for The End. Kojima has learned the literary rule of "show, don't tell." Though I do believe in a videogame that should be modified to "Make them feel it, don't tell them about it." It's a little longer than the writing rule, though hey, making games takes longer than writing manuscripts.
Kojima says, of the cinematic videogame, that pacing is more important than anything, even than content. By this standard, Metal Gear Solid 3 is a qualified masterpiece. The pacing is impeccable. At every turn, the player barely suspects that he's the one pushing himself. If the story is unnecessary (what story, in any form, is necessary, really? will the day come when a man dies for lack of entertainment? would it make your town's local news?), and the game is merely an unnecessary piece of work cast in a transitory medium, the strongest motivating force to push buttons must be the player's mind.
Metal Gear Solid 3 feels a lot more linear than its two predecessors. This is not because it is, actually, more linear. It's merely because it moves more. The scenery is constantly changing, when compared to Metal Gear Solid and Sons of Liberty, with their heavy reliance on key-cards and backtracking to warehouses with armories containing weapons we can't get until we get the next key-card. In Metal Gear Solid 3 there is a distinct lack of location-related down-settling: earthquakes occur, things explode, and doors become unreopenable with alarming frequency. All along this breakneck trip, the player is checking himself and thinking, "I'm killing too many people." Or maybe "I'm not killing enough." Or maybe "I'm not stopping to . . . experience anything." This is because the game can be played as many times as necessary, at the player's own pace, and it can be sampled in the player's own taste. It's curious. At the end of the day, it's a game that plays very well despite any of the politics of its comic-bookish villains or the motivations of its kind of boring archetypal hero.
What it amounts to in the end is a story with a respectable emotional core that doesn't embarrass anyone, fueled by the visible-in-countless-yet-still-fun-to-count-references cinema-loving vigor of its director (a far more talented stager of interesting action scenes than Ryuhei Kitamura), pulled along by a gameplay experience that's rock-solid enough to forgive its damned interface quirks. It also gives me the impression that Hideo Kojima has grown out of the mischief-making fit that spurred him to make Metal Gear Solid 2 the way he did. Let's face it -- he didn't want to make that game at all. At least respect that he decided to be funny about it. In Metal Gear Solid 3, the concept-loving Hideo Kojima who made Boktai, a game you have to play outside in direct sunlight or else face impossible difficulty, the man who revised the genre of Japanese graphic adventure into the dating-sims they are now with Tokimeki Memorial, to the man who produced Zone of the Enders merely so he could make a game with a final boss that is defeated by running away, the man who considers his greatest achievement requiring players to look at the CD case to find Meryl's radio frequency in Metal Gear Solid shows off in execution, and shows off grandly.
Once, though, the old wildness rears its head, during the battle with The Sorrow. If all Kojima's previous in-game pranks, including MGS2’s stupidly many player-tempting flashes of “FISSION MAILED,” were practice, the battle with The Sorrow, what might be the most ingenious videogame boss battle in the history of videogames with boss battles, is the payoff. I will not describe the battle, and not because I'm afraid of spoiling it. You all know how it goes by now, anyway, probably. It'd just be tedious to describe it, knowing a million other journalists have done it already. It'd feel dirty. Instead, I'll leave you to imagine how the battle would have felt if Kojima's plan to release a no-continues version of the game had come to fruition: it would be much, much more saddening of a revelation -- the battle banks on the player having seen and hated the "Snake is Dead" game-over screen at least once; late as it comes in the game, its unavoidable, pointed, stored-up, poignant crash of the game over screen would have, in the game's intended, no-continues format, had only one option: restart.
Also: the most significant part is that The Sorrow has a life meter. Kojima says so himself.
(In the same way, yes, the most significant aspect of the Raiden segment of MGS2 was that you could see Shell-B on the map menu, even though you never once set foot on there.)
**
So why did I come to the decision, months later, that Hideo Kojima was a great man? Well, many things, actually, piled up. He told me many times about the greatness of the Gyakuten Saiban games, though at the time I'd only played the third installment. I played the others, and almost felt like thanking Kojima for them. He obviously did not make them. He is, however, in awe of the games' creator, who is a fan of Kojima's Snatcher and Policenauts to begin with. It's an odd little circle of respect, and it makes me wonder about Kojima and movies.
Kojima wants to make a movie. "Something small, and independent." A love story, probably. He wants to make a game based on an old novel he’s loved for years. He wants to build a robot of a little girl. He wants to go into outer space. He says all these things with a modest, straight face. It makes me wonder about great men, or good men. Could I ever become one? Does any person to ever wonder if they could become a good man, ever, really, become a good man? These times we live in are mysterious.
Videogames, being a transitory medium, are something that Hideo Kojima imagines he will finish with some day. Imagine that. Could you imagine Shigeru Miyamoto finishing with videogames? I get the impression from Miyamoto's words that he would have excelled at whatever field supplied him with a steady career, supplying that field with modest, brilliant innovations with a natural knack for execution. Shinji Mikami chose videogames because he loved videogames and wanted to make them, and advance them as a medium. Hideo Kojima jumped into them because he was addicted to Xevious, had computer experience, and was able to slip in at Konami. He began making games that mimicked his favorite movies -- starting with "The Great Escape" -- because of what he says was some vague idea that making games would bring him closer to his ultimate goal. And what is his ultimate goal?
He'd seen a movie when he was a small child. It was a movie about a meteor coming to hit the earth. A rich old man built a spaceship. There was a lottery to see who would be allowed a seat on the spaceship. In the end, these two young lovers were going to end up separated. The rich old man, filled with compassion, offers his own seat on the ship to the one of the lovers that was going to be stuck on earth.
"I want to do something that makes someone feel like that." Kojima says this with the tone of voice of a man listing a few of his favorite bands.
Playing Metal Gear Solid 3 in a good, solid groove makes me feel a lot like listening to Hideo Kojima's explanation of that movie's plot. It doesn't make me feel like I've just been offered a seat on that spaceship, yet. I suppose he's got the rest of his career to work on that one.
PS. Oh yeah, I killed all the bosses.
PPS. Well, okay, I killed all the soldiers, too.
PPPS. Yes, on Extreme difficulty, too, I killed everyone there.
PPPPS. With machineguns, usually. Undetected.
PPPPPS. I killed all the scientists, too.
[next: march]
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