New Video (1 of 2)! How Metal Gear Solid's Bosses Changed (ad-free!)

Hey everyone!

IT'S FINALLY DONE (well, basically—I still need to do one more small pass to sort out more music before I make it public, but I figured you'd want to see what I've spent the last several months working on). I recently felt compelled to replay Metal Gear Solid 1, which I enjoyed so much that it morphed into a revisit of the entire series, at which point I realised—what other series has this many bosses that are truly iconic of their series? Not simply "fights that were challenging/fun" but characters where you think of the series, and you think of them. It got me thinking about why these characters have so withstood the test of time, and why the quality of said boss rosters declined over time.

And so, in my infinite wisdom, I decided to make my longest video yet (yes, eclipsing even the Armored Core piece at a full, feature-length 1.5 hours) mapping a trajectory of the series' boss design in a manner akin to my Hitman analysis videos. In this video I dive into every mainline Metal Gear Solid game (including Peace Walker) and talk about character designs, cinematic influences, mechanical scope, ludonarrative, the whole shebang. It ended up deepening my appreciation of what were already some of my favourite games of all time, and even the series' failures ended up being super interesting to examine. No series like it, man.

So yeah, I sincerely hope you enjoy this one. Frankly, I'm exhausted from working on it—mentally and physically. I don't do super longform stuff like this very often because I value conciseness above all else, so believe me when I say this kind of ended up taking the form of about eight regular videos worth of work. Ended up writing about a dissertation-and-a-half. Everything about it, from scripting to voicing to editing, took its toll. It was a super rewarding process, but I hope you'll understand if I put this through as a paid post so I don't have to worry so much about income for the next month (I really hate doing it, but people have consistently told me not to worry about that stuff because they just want to see me able to keep going, which is greatly, greatly appreciated).

Without boring you with the details, I've also been dealing with OCD—something my doctor and I are realising had been more severe than I'd given it credit for, especially over the last few years. The process of dealing with it has been unbelievably rewarding and I'm genuinely doing so much better, but trying to make videos (especially big ones like this) while also putting in the associated work with this... it's been a lot! I don't say that to garner any kind of pity, just to contextualise a bit about why things have been a bit slow on the channel front the last couple of months.

YouTubing is weird in that if you take a bit of time away from uploading (in my case about three months since the Elden Ring DLC review) you feel a bit like an imposter... even though I was working on this (and other projects) pretty much constantly during that time. That said, I now have a bunch of scripts backed up that I'm ready to turn into videos as well. Feels good to be getting back into the swing of things properly.

For those that aren't into Metal Gear, I've got a more traditionally structured video (albeit on a bit of a leftfield subject) coming... probably tonight (?) that I couldn't be more excited about. Think it's some of my best writing in a while. I'll keep you posted.

Once again, I cannot thank each and every one of you for your continued support and belief in this project. You allow me to keep going with this work, and it means the absolute world to me. Thank you all so, so much.

I really hope you enjoy the video and see you soon with the next post!

Thanks again,

Hamish

Writing on Games