GameTavern - Renwood's Blag for GameTavern Fora NO SUICIDE POETRY HERE

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Renwood's Blag for GameTavern Fora NO SUICIDE POETRY HERE

I completed Metal Gear Solid 4 early Saturday morning. As an experience, it was amazing. The gameplay, especially in Act 2, felt like great progress for the series while still retaining the core of what makes Metal Gear Metal Gear.

What I was less captivated by was the actual story. Presentation was good, and the voice acting, while still not as good as 1 or 2 (I feel the series has gone down a bit with each passing game in this area), is still better than the majority of games. I think a part of the problem is how the dialogue and script are structured. Its always been stilted with these interludes of character monologues of the atrocities of war and nuclear weapons, and full of corny unrealistic dialogue, but, for me, it has never been as awkward as it can become in this game.

Maybe its the localization, but characters seem to explain out everything multiple times. Lines like "your father" are immediately followed with "...Big Boss," as if beat the player over the head about what precisely is being discussed.

The bosses continue their backstory decline from 3, and this again can be partly attributed to a lack of good explanation via the story structure. You are given little to no context when actually fighting bosses. Only after they are beaten do you receive the standard MGS boss sob story on why they are so damn evil. The problem is that in MGS1 and 2, this backstory was partially revealed or at least touched on before you fought the bosses, and then, those bosses themselves gave the final word as they lay dying. In MGS4, you get all the info from a third party, and it just makes these characters' already detached stories feel all the more irrelevant in the scheme of things.

The answers... Metal Gear Solid 4 does answer nearly everything in some manner. It makes Metal Gear Solid 3 an even more essential piece of the storyline, and leaves little unvoiced. The problem here is that the answers just aren't always that good or convincing. If you turn your brain off a bit to what the series has shown thus far, it can work, but some of the revelations are a bitter pill to swallow, and really draw into questions the way a lot of previous events played out, especially in MGS2.

In fact, these revelations almost feel like they necessitate a prequel of their own, between MGS3 and the MGS1 (not Portable Ops!) to truly flesh out what is described as a pretty titanic moment in the MGS universe.

I look at what I've written and know how negative a lot of it sounds, and thats disappointing to me, because I don't think it truly frames my idea of the game. Simply as an experience, the game is amazing. The climactic ending gameplay segments of Act 5, the entirety of Act 4, and scenes throughout Acts 1 through 3 are what made me enjoy myself so much in spite of my complaints, and that enjoyment was so high as to almost negate all the problems. I've restarted the game, and free of the overhanging plot, the game feels all the more open for the parts I enjoyed.

I feel like Jeremy Perish from 1UP has come closest to my feelings about the game in that respect: Acts 1 through 3 walk that good line between gameplay moments and cutscenes. And I want to replay them a lot. But Act 4 and, especially, Act 5 skew harshly in the direction of the cutscenes, and I don't know how many times I really want to skip through those portions.

Overall, fantastic game.

Oh, and I killed some boars in WoW, lol.