Volume 7: Back to Where We Began
If you cast your mind back to the beginning of the year, you’ll remember my very first game in this ongoing project was Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty; a landmark title for many, and one that managed to impress me even decades after impact. I’m sure some were left puzzled that it took me so long to jump to Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, but I have my reasons. At the time, Metal Gear Solid 4 was out of my reach, and to be honest, I didn’t want to play the third game if I couldn’t go all the way.
In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.
With the fourth game’s remaster coming soon, I thought it’d be best to actually play a version of Metal Gear Solid 3 to give myself enough time to get it done and dusted. And after finishing the remastered version in the Master Collection, I’m left conflicted. Far more conflicted than I was when finishing Sons of Liberty. In fact, I don’t know if I liked it much at all; but that doesn’t mean I didn’t find it interesting.
In short, I think Snake Eater has great ideas that are lost in the self-indulgent power fantasy of a director who loves the sound of his own voice. Hideo Kojima is talented, and driven by a vision, but he clearly wrote this game with his own pedigree in mind.
Snake Eater is situated concretely during the Cold War. I know this because I had to sit through the equivalent of an entire history documentary in setting up the Actual Cold War to explain why Snake was on a mission in Russia. This isn’t a fictional artifice of the Cold War, it is The Real Cold War. There isn’t some metaphor for a worldwide pandemic like in Death Stranding, this is the actual, real-life conflict.
The decision to use a real historical framework is intentional, and informs every aspect of the narrative how we are meant to interpret it; there is an absurd dissonance throughout the whole of Snake Eater which speaks to Kojima’s opinions on the world at large, seemingly commentating on the Cold War’s inherent stupidity. He considers the war so unserious, that the absurd world of Metal Gear Solid can exist within its bounds and nothing changes.
Similar to both Metal Gear and Metal Gear Solid 2, this game introduces a group of “bosses” at the start, before steadily spreading them throughout the journey, with the big bad of the game having the ability to biologically generate his own electricity. You’ll fight a man who can shoot bees from his mouth, a comically old man whose eyes bulge out of his skull when he sees a target, and the equivalent of a human spider scuttling through the trees. Any of these could tip the balance in reality, so the abject refusal to engage with real-world context feels bizarre. The Cold War does not exist in a world where some guy can generate his own weaponised electricity, so pretending that it does feels stupid.
In a detail that initially reads as a cute nod to later entries, Metal Gear Solid 3 does in fact care about history, just not ours. Early on in the game, you’re given the chance to kill a young Revolver Ocelot without any real pushback. Should you do so, you’re greeted with a game over screen, a telling off from a disembodied Colonel Campbell, saying you’ve “destroyed the future” given Ocelot’s importance. Cool detail, but also demonstrates where Kojima’s priorities lie. Real world events are convenient backdrops to make people take the story more seriously, where in reality it proves the entire narrative of Metal Gear Solid as a series is built on an inherent convenience which doesn’t make sense, being Snake’s decision to just leave Ocelot knocked out. He’ll happily kill every other member of the Cobra unit, but Ocelot is the step too far.
This choice to constantly treat Ocelot as the untouchable rival, protected by an obligatory non-lethal fate, shows how slapdash the entire concept is. The opportunity to non-lethally engage enemies is interesting in that it makes sense at the start of the game, narratively and mechanically. Not killing people is quieter, and is far easier to pass off as a weird event rather than a covert assassin picking the enemy off and causing alarm. Instead of this being the dynamic and sticking to it, Metal Gear Solid 3 instead uses the mechanic purely as fodder for a single boss fight, being The Sorrow.
Full disclosure: I did know about The Sorrow going into this game, but that foreknowledge didn’t massively change my perspective. What it did do was expose how truly flimsy the idea is. The Sorrow is less of a boss fight, more of a brief interlude where every person Snake has killed comes back to haunt him, which is directly related to the number of enemies you have killed, including bosses. On paper, a cool setpiece, but Snake Eater immediately undermines the point of non-lethality within minutes. Directly after this boss is a turret section that essentially demands you pick violence and murder at minimum seventy or so guards.
You’re given an infinite ammo RPG; you cannot tell me I am seriously meant to consider using a tranquiliser gun.
The obvious answer is, yet again, highlighting the absurdity of armed conflict. The arcade style shooter section is meant to show how dopey the entire idea of war is! I instead argue it completely undermines the great parts of Metal Gear Solid 3, and this obsession with impressive setpieces ultimately damages the overall experience.
I loved when I was encouraged to sneak through encounters, and carefully consider camouflage and disguises to make my way through an area. Slightly silly at points, but so was Sons of Liberty. Snake still has bizarre conversations with his teammates over the codec, and still acts as if he hasn’t led any kind of life outside of war. Dude barely comprehends the idea of cinema, and consistently responds to normal statements with questions that make him sound like the world’s oldest toddler. I do not get the charm, but there’s clearly something there for someone.
Metal Gear Solid 3 is mechanically a worthy successor to the earlier games in the series. Similar to my playthrough of the second game, succeeding came from confidence and understanding, rather than brute force. I was genuinely struggling with early game encounters, where I slowly learned what I can get away with, and how to do so. Shooting a guy to sleep and hiding him in a bush without raising an alarm feels great. That doesn’t mean I didn’t feel the clunk at times. I never found Snake’s trademark CQC moves explained to me well, and left me fumbling around trying to choke out one solitary guard before accidentally causing an alarm.
To end on a slight positive note, because I did somewhat enjoy Metal Gear Solid 3, I think it explores interesting themes that do legitimately feel timeless. One aspect of the game is enhanced by the use of real history, being the story of The Boss and Snake, and how their story is ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of the world. Before fighting her in one of the most inappropriately beautiful arenas of all time, Snake’s mentor lays on her history, saying how she was forced through awful experiments to do with radiation exposure, being forced to give birth on the battlefield, and more.
If there’s any character in fiction who’s had a bad time of it, she has. Of course, none of this ever happened in the eyes of greater history; The Boss was an expendable resource of powers above, and was never anything more than a pawn. Despite being the inherent requirement of writing historical fiction, it speaks to the erasure of real people from real conflict. As The Boss says at the start of the game before her defection to the Soviet Union, we are all victims of the times.
We as individuals are beholden to the actions of Certain World Leaders, and it’s up to us as a collective to defy that. We must not let our stories end with just us. We historically speak in broad strokes about world leaders, forgetting the hundreds of people with real stories carrying out the dirty work. It’s just the “important” ones who get the luxury of the textbooks.
And it was here, right at the end, where I began to understand where the reverence comes from. As harrowing as it was to play a game all about disinformation states and the inevitable dissolution of society, it was similarly sobering to play a game about the futility of armed conflict, in a world where airstrikes barely make breaking news anymore. This is where Metal Gear Solid 3 soars, and I wanted it to stick to that.
In explaining my grievances, I’ve often been told “that’s video games!” I don’t think that’s a fair dismissal. This game is made of two halves that rarely come into dialogue with each other outside an obsession for miniscule details. I do not need to be plied into playing a game about the evils of armed conflict, by giving me an infinite rocket launcher.
I get the need to make a game engaging, but this feels like low-hanging fruit, instead of designing a game to properly house those themes, and mechanics. If you’re gonna make me stew in the real world, at least have the decency to make it worth the documentary I’m sitting through.
I’m sad that I didn’t get this one as much as I got the ones that came before. I can see why people swear by it, but damn. Until next time, it’s never too late to play, I suppose.
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