As always, spoilers.
I don’t want to address the rhetoric surrounding the game like I did with Grand Theft Auto 4. I don’t think the game “deserves an 11” as IGN puts it and I’ll leave it at that. Personally, I’m more interested in talking about the game itself and some of the issues that it raises.
First of all, I should point out that I am completely un-invested in the series. I had a PS1 and I did play through some of the first game when it first came out. However, because I skipped the last generation of consoles, I never had a chance to play MGS2 or MGS3. I recently picked up the Essentials collection, but of course I got sidetracked by work and other games so I never got the chance to go through the series before I started MGS4. I don’t know if this is good or bad, to be honest. I don’t have the history with the game and I can approach it with a fresh perspective. Yet, I am sure that I am missing some aspects of the game that veterans of the series would find old hat. But, I just wanted to put it out there that I come to the game from the outsider’s perspective.
Of course, I should probably start with the 800 pound gorilla in the room – the number and length of the cutscenes. I have no idea how long the cutscenes are, but the estimates of 6-8 hours probably aren’t far off. I realize that I shouldn’t ignore the cultural context of the game. I don’t claim to be an expert on Japanese games, but many of them rely on cutscenes to introduce plot and for exposition. Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey are recent examples of games that use cutscenes to tell their stories, but there are countless other examples. MGS4 isn’t any exception and it probably shouldn’t be. As a man who is a major voice in the Japanese development community and who has been working for over two decades, Kojima has informed Japanese game design as much as he has been influenced by it.
As a “western” gamer however, the length and number of these cutscenes do standout. Again I’ll point to Ken Levine and his insistence on not forcing story on a player but on using the game world to tell a story. The question is whether or not the cutscenes are a crutch that developers use when they cannot figure out a different way to tell a story in a game. I’m not saying that developers should ignore filmic storytelling techniques developed over the last century, but perhaps there should be an attempt to push the game medium forward as well. I don’t want to discount Kojima’s attempts to try something different with some of his cutscenes. The most prominent example is the number of times the psyche meter makes an appearance during the cutscenes. The psyche bar usually depletes by one segment when Snake is told that he can’t smoke or that he is old. In one case, it severely depletes when the he discovers that he only has six months to live (and then again when he discovers that he has to kill himself in three months or the mutated FOXDIE virus that he carries will infect the entire world) and near the end of the game when the nanomachines in his body fail. The integration of the game HUD into the cutscenes is very clever and helps teach the player the game mechanics while also reinforcing the characterization of Snake.
Intriguingly, I found that much more interesting than the other attempt to introduce a game mechanic into the cutscenes – the use of a mechanic similar to QTEs. During a cutscene, either the L1 button or the X button will appear. The L1 button allows the player to watch a scene from Snake’s perspective while the X button will trigger a quick image from the previous games. While the former lets you see a scene from another perspective and the latter lets you contextualize the current dialog with a previous game, their importance isn’t emphasized enough to make them anything more than curiosities (although you get extra Drebin points for viewing the flashbacks, so there is a small gameplay incentive for viewing them). It’s possible that for someone nostalgic for the previous games the flashbacks would have much more meaning... but unfortunately, I’m not that person. But, at the very least, they do break some of the monotony of the cutscenes. Of course, I should mention that during the mission briefings, you are given the chance to control the Mark II and you can watch the scene unfold from any angle you wish and also find some extras strewn about the plane. But still, this doesn’t change the fact that you’re sitting for 20 minutes waiting for plot to be delivered to you.
I should be fair. The cutscenes aren’t all plot exposition... although there is a fair amount of it. I imagine part of it is to make the story accessible for people who may be playing the game for the first time. So, not only do characters repeat information for you, they also do it as slowly as possible. I think I just turned off my brain when the fourth person explained the role of nanomachines/SOP in the game’s soldiers/PMC recruits. It’s the equivalent of Data trying to explain some made up scientific fact in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. You can tell when exposition is about to begin when there is a cut to an animatic of the Patriots or of the PMCs or the AIs or something else. But, there is also a lot of characterization in these cutscenes... indeed, most if not all of the character development is found in the cutscenes – from Snake’s reaction to the fact that he was designed with a degenerative disease, to Naomi’s personal conflict between her wish to live and her desire to stop the Patriots and the various other characters. Meryl, Johnny, Drebin, Otacon, Sunny, Big Mama, Ocelot/Liquid... all of their growth and development comes from how they are depicted in the cutscenes. As with GTA4, this aspect of the cutscenes certainly helps make the characters sympathetic and explain their motivations. My only criticism would be that, unlike the GTA4 cutscenes, the MGS4 cutscenes could use some editing to make them faster paced.
That said, not everything is overly explained in the cutscenes. A moment that pops up for me is during Act 1, when Snake first meets Meryl. He asks her about the Patriots, but she only hears “La li lu le” (or something similar). When she asks him why he’s speaking nonsense, he just drops it and the exposition moves on. Later on, Snake meets up again with Drebin and they begin to talk about the Patriots. Drebin first says “La li lu le”, Snake looks at him suspiciously. Drebin then says the world “Patriots” and reassures Snake that he’s free of the nanomachines that control the typical soldier. It’s a nice little moment where a small plot element is introduced and is explained later on.
Could they have used alternatives to cutscenes to tell their story? Probably. But I think Kojima wanted to tell his story this way and I certainly respect his choice to do so. I just think the more interesting story elements come from the times when he does not rely on cutscenes.
First and foremost is the “dream sequence” that starts Act 4. I must admit I found it hilarious that when Act 4 starts, you are right back in MGS1, PS1 graphics and all. What better way to put the player into Snake’s head than to have him or her go through the second screen at Shadow Moses? The player feels nostalgic for MGS1 since it invokes his or her memory of the past game, just as Snake is dreaming of the first time he was sent to Shadow Moses.
The end of Act 5, from the moment that Snake tries to get to GW to the point when Snake fights Liquid Ocelot, also stands out. Going through the microwave corridor by tapping the triangle button does, as some posters have suggested, put you in the physical state of Snake. The slowly depleting health and psyche bars also reinforce the player/Snake relationship. The fact that the player needs to pound on the triangle button faster as Snake struggles against death to reach the end of the corridor only adds to this relationship. During Snake’s crawl, the top half of the screen shows a montage of the entire cast of characters as they fight their individual battles. Meryl and Johnny fighting the FROGS, Mei Ling tries to maintain her composure as captain of the Missouri and Raiden is trying to survive a fight without any arms. It’s a nice way to bring the entire storyline to a head and connect it with the player’s interactions with Snake.
The fight between Snake and Liquid turns into a fighting game, complete with health bars for both characters. The controls for this section are very simple – there’s only block and attack – but it’s definitely a moment that stands out, reminding the player that this is the climax of the story. Not only that, but during each round of the fight, music from the past games is played in the background (and there is a “music video” style title that tells you the name of the track and the composer, in case you aren’t sure where the music is from), emphasizing that this is the climax of the entire series. Despite being largely contained and a bit shallow, the different experience makes the scene stand out from the rest of the game and gives it the importance that it deserves.
And of course, there are the many times when the game breaks the fourth wall. The ones that come to mind are when Otacon telling you to switch discs during the Shadow Moses mission in Act 4... before remembering that the game is being played on a PS3 so they don’t have to switch discs and the (Psycho) Mantis fight, which harkens back to the original MGS game where Psycho Mantis could do things like “read your mind” by looking at your memory card and reading your control inputs. I’m sure there are several other examples, but I can’t think of them at the moment.
Personally, I just find these moments far more interesting than the fairly non-interactive cutscenes that make up the majority of the story telling in the game. As a game, the player should be involved for the majority of his or her time with it, but when the designer demands that the player sit for 10 to 15 minutes while being fed plot, it takes the player straight out of the game. The lack of a theatre mode or even a way to fast forward through these cutscenes means that you have to sit through them if you want to follow the entire story. For a game that would take 15-20 hours to complete, nearly half that time is spent watching the cutscenes and I’m not sure if that’s a complete game experience or an HBO miniseries with some interactivity thrown in. For me, when I play a game, I want to play a game. That means that I am looking for an interactive experience. Even Mass Effect, which is essentially a 20 hour long cutscene, felt engaging because I was directing Shepard’s actions even when I wasn’t going through a level blasting bad guys. There’s no such interactivity with Snake here... and when the dialog is clunky and awkward, I can only sit in frustration hoping for the next game sequence to start up.
There’s one last thing I wanted to point out which I thought was clever and wish was done more in this game. One of the “secrets” that you can find is a camera that you can use in game to take screenshots with. Now, you can pick up the camera any time using the Mark II during the first four mission briefings. However, if you wait until the last briefing to pick up the camera, you get a “bonus” picture of Sunny and Naomi. This works as a story telling mechanic because Act 3 is when the characters get close to each other (not just to write the virus that takes down JD and the Patriots) and bond, so it’s almost perfectly natural that the characters would take a picture together. Yes, there’s a bit of a meta-game there where you probably have to have outside assistance to know that there’s a special picture only if you wait until Act 4, but it’s a nice moment that combines gameplay and story progression.
I’ve already went way too long here, so I’m going to save the rest of my thoughts for another post. I do have a couple of other points that I really want to write about, so bear with me as I complete my ramblings.
