Update and script 1 of 2! How Metal Gear Solid's Bosses Evolved (extract)

Hi everyone,

First off, sorry for the lack of posts on here this month. As usual I've been working on about a billion things at once, and this month one of the things in particular has been a biggie—a video in the style of one of my Hitman mission analysis pieces on the evolving boss design of the Metal Gear Solid series. I'm just going to be posting an extract today (the section on Peace Walker) because there are some parts I'm wanting to alter throughout the rest of the script

I'm really sorry I don't have an actual video to post right now. As you'll be able to tell when the thing is done, this project in particular ballooned beyond the original scope. I don't know if it'll quite reach the length of the Armored Core video when all is said and done, but I'm willing to bet it'll be close. I've mentioned before that for these longer videos I end up essentially writing the equivalent of around 8 separate videos and joining them together in service of a common thesis. That has ended up being a lot of work. Way more than I expected for a project I originally envisioned as just a bit of fun, and has unfortunately taken up basically all of my time at the expense of other projects.

The next post will feature another script ostensibly focused on something Metal Gear-related, but ends up talking about games and how we interpret them more generally. It's been fun to work on a more regular video like that alongside this relative behemoth.

All that said, a fair chunk of the work on next month's video scripts is already done, so once the video portions of these current scripts are finished, I can get cracking on with a... well, another massive video on Demon's Souls. And hopefully, hopefully, the fabled Ace Combat video. That's another beast entirely though, and I've been writing away without end for what feels like forever. We'll see what happens. God I'm exhausted.

I hope you can understand why I'll be putting these scripts through as paid posts just now—as in the past the way that Patreon works is that I need to set paid posts by midnight at the end of the month for it to go through. I sincerely hope this isn't too much trouble but it means that while I finalise the video portions over the next couple of days, I'm not worrying about income for the next month.

Again, as has been the case before, don't worry—these scripts go through as a paid post, but the video itself won't be. That is to say, you won't be charged twice for the same project. This just means I can sleep somewhat soundly knowing I can pay my rent while I work, haha.

So anyway, here's the Peace Walker segment—focusing on the fact that, despite the boss roster consisting almost entirely of basically identical, AI-controlled mechs, the gameplay narrative that emerges from these battles might be some of the best across the entire franchise. Enjoy, thank you so much for your patience, and I'll be back soon with the video portion.

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With Snake Eater, a large issue with around half the bosses was that they lacked any real discernible identity beyond their immediate job—to take you out in service of The Boss. In Guns of the Patriots, Kojima and team decided to double down on this approach, rather than focus on the truly transcendent, narratively resonant battles of Snake Eater’s latter half. And so, as the humanity of these encounters seems to dwindle with each subsequent entry, it would of course make sense for a follow up to truly turn things around by… having you fight a bunch of vehicles. Near-identical mechs that are almost exclusively controlled by AI rather than a human. Right?

This, as we’ll come to see, is the case with perhaps the series’ definitive portable entry - 2010’s Peace Walker – and upon initial glance, despite the game being a standout for many fans, its boss roster is as disappointingly mundane as it sounds.

In a way I can see what the team might have been going for. If you view the Metal Gear (or Metal Gear-adjacent mech) battles as the climactic encounters in these games—the ones where the bad guy’s plan comes to fruition and you suddenly have to dismantle a gargantuan beast before you against all odds, then a whole game of that probably sounds pretty cool.

The battles increase in enormity from a lowly armoured vehicle through to these hulking machines of death, great fortresses that need to be physically traversed in some cases—representing perhaps the greatest chasm in the franchise between their enormity and your relative insignificance.

Indeed, it can be difficult to even know where to begin with some of these machines, and ostensibly there are a bunch of different means by which you could approach them—do you attempt to weaken them by taking out some of the weapons that adorn this vast chassis, or do you aim straight at the glowing weak spot, ensuring you endure the maximum barrage, but hopefully for a shorter time if you’re smart about it.

The problems, however, largely arise from the alterations made to the game’s larger design—namely its focus on collaboration. Beyond the fact that Peace Walker’s plot is not merely a solo sneaking mission, but rather a larger attempt to build an army, a nation of some kind—with all sorts of features by which you are not the sole operator in any given scenario—this kind of camaraderie was also intended to extend to other players in the real world. That is to say, while these bosses can very well be taken down solo, it rarely feels like that was the intended experience.

The issue mainly just comes down to how spongey these enemies are—while the scale may be similar in some cases, old school Metal Gear battles in which you identify a weak spot and quickly take it out these are not. Damage numbers fly out of these enemies as rapidly as you can pile round after round into them, but rarely do you get much of a feel for how much damage you’re actually doing.

Contrary to the game design’s emphasis on compact missions well-suited to pick-up-and-play portability, as per its original PSP release, as the game progresses, so too does the time investment required for these hulking behemoths. Seriously, you can be piling rockets into the AI pods for up to fifteen minutes in later encounters, and wondering when your barrage is going to be sufficient to take even one bar off of these seemingly endless health pools. Those fifteen minutes are rarely broken up by any kind of alternate phase either, like when Grey Fox destroys the radome or Volgin takes physical control of the Shagohod.

And so, playing solo, your experience is going to alternate between near-constant fire, broken up only by the frequent need to resupply—a potentially compelling experience as you flip between ever-dwindling resources on the fly and manage the time between recharging supply drops as best you can, but it’s an experience whose ever-so-slightly sluggish controls (another remnant of its PSP origins, where camera controls were limited to face buttons) can leave Snake feeling more than a little underequipped to bob and weave through the relentless onslaught of these comparatively nimble foes. Further, the sheer drawn out nature of these battles not only contributes to a creeping sense of monotony, but you perhaps start to wonder if you’re playing the game right, if this method of play is the intended one.

Because look, back in the day I played through Peace Walker with a friend accommodated by heavily emphasised network features, and believe me when I say in that instance, all talk of tactics went out of the window. In co-op, I remember absolutely demolishing these things in record time—the potential strategy of whether to take out the weapons or the weak spot first would simply be answered with “why not both?” I could be wrong on this, but I don’t remember the boss health or damage output scaling to match an increase in player force, turning these once monotonously protracted encounters into something potentially worse—downright trivial.

But the thing is, when it comes to what little strategy does exist here, it turns out you don’t want to be doing too much damage to the weapons in the first place. To do so, is to deny yourself resources, in what ends up becoming one of the cleverer narrative tricks the game pulls.

See, at the end of every encounter with these machines, you blow the lid of the AI pod controlling them and clamber in, so that you may disrupt its programming by removing modules. Importantly, these modules are themselves collectables. The more damage you do to the weapons, the less modules you’ll have available to you to pocket, which themselves contribute to what ends up becoming your own project – Metal Gear ZEKE.

You are incentivised to fight as cleanly as possible, so that you may be rewarded with a more advanced version of the very thing that has come to define villainy throughout this series – your very own nuclear-equipped walking battle tank. You fight hard for it, you grind for it, but that in itself doesn’t represent some noble act of heroism, worthy of reward.

That building a Metal Gear turns out to be the ultimate goal is a neat bait-and-switch in itself, but its revelations go far beyond that. See, while the game nominally ends after you take down Peace Walker, the true ending is locked behind the completion of that ZEKE, and the many, many missions you have to do in order to see it finished. After slogging to find an escaped Zadornov for the zillionth time, Paz reveals herself to be a double agent, hijacking your own mech and unveiling the actual climactic boss battle of the game – ZEKE itself.

It's a fight whose sting is sharpened by the realisation that, the more extensively you built up ZEKE, the more grinding you did for those AI modules and the optional parts you were able to graft onto this beast as a result, have now created a far more difficult fight for yourself. Even at its weakest ZEKE still represents ten gruelling minutes of dodging railgun fire and hoping your supply drops contain rations, as your health is unceremoniously stomped away – the kind of slog that will make you wish you hadn’t invested in all that extra armour or jetpacks currently making your job concretely harder.

As soon as Snake Eater revealed Big Boss to be the player character, talk had always turned to how and when such a charming, likeable protagonist in Naked Snake was going to turn into the moustache-twirling villain we were initially introduced to him as – what heinous act was he going to indulge in that would cement his legacy as one of evil.

What has become clear, especially in the wake of the disappointment surrounding future games in the series, is that this one, definitive moment was never going to come, and instead this ZEKE fight serves as something of a focal point, where you’re forced to reflect on all these little moments throughout the series that see a man gradually turned against a government, a country, an ideology he had previously fought so hard for – that while Big Boss’s actions may not be definitively evil, they’re hardly those you’d associate with a decent, upstanding moral figure.

And Peace Walker, with its reward system ultimately revolving around and incentivising the development of a devastating weapon of war – one that will eventually turn against you and you will have to destroy – manages to gamify that lurching realisation about Big Boss’ character in a way that lays waste to the typical criticism Kojima endures, that he just makes movies rather than games. Nah man, this is straight up ludonarrative at its purest – subversion of the rewards systems we’ve come to expect from this medium, in order to convey a character’s subtle downfall (as well as your own complicity in that fall from grace) in a manner that goes far deeper than just words.

And sure, the actual process of retrieving the AI pods begins to represent a frustratingly protracted exercise in itself, as you find yourself unable to exit even when you’ve picked up everything you can, requiring you to awkwardly wait out the clock, but this simple mechanic also represents further opportunity for character development.

Take the last battle with Peace Walker, where after spending upwards of fifteen minutes taking this thing down, you are tasked with surgically dismantling the closest thing that remains to your mentor—The Boss, the person upon whose character, whose principles this AI was based; both as a means of deterring nuclear threats, as well as provide answers to what happened at the end of Snake Eater; a clarity, a closure that’s as tantalising to Snake as it is to the AI’s creator, Strangelove.

And before that clarity is afforded to the people seeking it out, in order to stop Peace Walker from causing a nuclear strike, Snake must destroy this AI, piece by excruciating piece. The process is as languid as it ever has been, now requiring that every single module be removed over the course of several minutes, but such protraction is imbued with a real melancholy here, distinctly absent from prior encounters.

As butterflies inexplicably swarm around you, you’re treated to minutes of this facsimile of the Boss going from a regular cadence of speech, proclaiming the grand philosophies the character is known for, to reciting basic rhymes, to simply stating plain facts (such as the exact value of pi); decaying into an approximation of pi, before slumping into pained gasps of your name as you gradually remove what humanity exists here. Just as Snake was tasked with doing back in MGS3, as the Boss chose to tarnish her own legacy for the sake of the mission—a mission which left Snake jaded and bitter enough to believably turn against the world he had fought so hard to save. 

It's a moment dense with wonderful thematic meaning, and represents Snake at maybe his most nakedly emotional in the entire series—as a mix of repressed sorrow and fury erupt in a futile outburst, with Big Boss hammering against this wall of circuitry, desperate to find the closure he’ll never get, seeking a humanity that never really existed. 

And I guess that predicament sums up my issue with Peace Walker’s boss roster as a whole. For all that its bosses end up playing into some of the best gameplay narrative of potentially the entire franchise, nothing can disguise the fact that said gameplay amounts to piling bullet after bullet, missile after missile into similar looking, similarly functioning machines—leaving you grasping for the humanity, the character that made those prior enemies so deeply memorable. At the end of the day, it’s all just hunks of metal.

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See you in a minute for the next script!

Thanks so much again,

Hamish

Writing on Games