[Adilegian]

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Also shrug what is your feeling on MGS1 at this point?
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Would like if this were somehow foreboding press material to give us hints of what to expect from PP.


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[Adilegian]

Someone asked me in another context if I thought the end of MGS4 was good or not. I figured I'd crosspost here since it's been a topic in this thread.

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I think that it served a purpose that runs below the surface of the evident narrative. I think that MGS4's core is a metanarrative that, like MGS2's, gives rise to a lot of apparently bad elements (like, in MGS2, Vamp being a vampire-not-a-vampire who runs on water). These apparently bad elements appear, as the adverb suggests, bad when taken as events whose meanings are self-evident.

There are enough cues in MGS4 that point toward a metanarrative whose movements are as broad as the base of material the game has to work with -- that base being no less than the entire Metal Gear Saga.

The evident narrative is sloppy because its details obey the metanarrative. The metanarrative communicates with the player in terms that utilize the evident story while also utilizing patterns of organization that underlie the evident story.

In a sense, MGS4's story is as much about its working through its own disorganization -- curing its own defragmentation -- as it is telling an evident story. This suggestion is sometimes met with a skepticism, even incredulity, that adheres to a very concrete and literal sense of what storytelling is.

Here's perhaps another way to explain my position. Narrative and metanarrative communicate using different techniques. They can be provisionally described as different languages for communicating to an audience. For the sake of illustration, let's liken narrative communication to Finnish and metanarrative communication to Anatolian. If you're looking for a coherent story in Finnish, you're probably going to be confused by someone telling you a story using Anatolian.

Anatolian comes off as bad Finnish if you think that only Finnish exists.

So I think it's a good ending that a lot of people didn't enjoy because the metanarrative was underemphasized. It also requires an abstract, non-linear approach to thinking about storytelling that isn't delivered easily, which requires an investment that a lot of people aren't interested to make.
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Also going to start including duo commentary on these MGO videos from SBers who appeared on the vidcast (and anyone else who wants to join, let me know and we can set something up with vent).

Here's one with just me. Raiden in MGO, some analysis on the character design as well as reflection on how MGO tried to convey Raiden's verticality in a largely lateral game design.


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[Adilegian]

Grant showed this to me tonight.



Not sure if it's legit or not. Thoughts?
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[Adilegian]

Looking more and more like the whole removal of Hayter thing is legit.

http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/05/06/metal-gear-solid-v-snake-loses-his-voice-up-at-noon

Pretty cold how he found out. I'm glad to see he's being forthright about how they seem to have treated him. Blaustein lite.
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Something I wrote in IRC that's relevant here, re-written because I lost the log. Reed had mentioned that it bothered him that people found the MGS games intellectually substantial. This was my explanation of my interest.

Kojima's Metal Gear titles interest me because they show a high level of awareness of game design. The design can be flawed, but it rarely seems flawed out of laziness or inattention to detail. They earn my close attention because they have twice married that awareness of design with thematic concerns. This marriage makes the game a unique object that explicates itself. While this might sound tautological, the very self-involvement of MGS2 and MGS4 on the levels of design make them interesting objects to me.

Other analyses of the games exist, but I don't think that they do a whole lot to illuminate the games themselves. Learning about any of the themes expressed in the MGS games apart from the games' design largely shows how lightly the games tread on those themes themselves. Videos such as the following illustrate this nicely.



I mentioned this in IRC and elsewhere as a recent creation that's taken content from my Driving Off the Map essay without crediting its source, both in terms of critical content and media content. (In one instance, the screencaps it shows to illustrate its points are lifted directly from my site. I know this because I took a handful of MGS2 caps using the free camera from The Document of MGS2, meaning that they aren't found in the game itself.) Cutely, the use of content without attribution fits into the pattern of media construction that the author describes as "post-modern." Given the lower ambitions of the video analysis itself (to talk about what the game wants you to talk about), this is harmless enough.

I bring up this video as an example of how the MGS games acquire gravitas by referencing ideas without fully manifesting them. I come away from the video above with a broader (not necessarily deeper) understanding of some of the things that MGS2 talked about, but I don't come away with meaningful conclusions about the game itself outside of the reaffirmation that, yes, MGS2 did mention those ideas. Without discussion of the games' design, there's just not much interesting to sink into outside of reading more widely in themes that are interesting apart from their presentation in the MGS games.

As a fan, it's certainly rewarding to learn more about these extrinsic ideas and apply that knowledge to the imaginative world of MGS. It makes the fantasy bigger because you have more mass in your own head to enlarge what's there. If you've read a lot of Dawkins, and if you're willing to accept that a reference to Dawkins legitimately should be trusted to represent actual knowledge of Dawkins beyond an arbitrary namedrop, then hearing a Codec conversation in MG Rising about "memes" will make the game's fantasy seem bigger because it connects to stuff you already know. When references are done well, your knowledge from outside of the game magnifies the game.

But that's from the POV of a fan, and it's also from the POV of someone early enough in their reading about the thematic topics to elide over the inadequacies of the MGS games' presentations. Peace Walker's name-dropping of Neruda is an example of this. I'm sure "whoa poetry" is an adequate response if you're not invested in poetry, but, when you've read a lot of poetry, a prosaic offering of Neruda in a game about shooting giant robots comes off as exactly what it is: a feint to gain atmospheric gravity.

The elements of the MGS games that are often put forward as talking points by the publishers just aren't that interesting the more widely I'm read. Kojima plays with these ideas with kid gloves, and what he really knows about -- game design -- remains interesting to me as I mature.

So if "race" is a dominant theme of MGSV, okay. For my own interests, I hope that there's something else going on.
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I can see that.

I look at the pairing of "flawed, recessive" as causal because the default mode of communication when it comes to IMPORTANT THEMES in MGS titles tends to be causal rather than correlative. There's an effort to appear versed in the materials that make up the games' explicit themes, even when the level of knowledge reaches only "competent enough to use the right words" to someone familiar with the field of knowledge.

That's part of what gives the retonning and surprise reveals in MGS2 their effect. The conversations are always causal, always about finding reasons why and how X Y Z events happened. It's part of the ridiculousness of the games' worldview, that everything we encounter is causally related, that everything that happens goes back to some handful of conspirators whose designs spawn the current events.

So, generally, I regard conversation about important details and themes as causal unless specified explicitly otherwise. I acknowledge that the phrasing is ambiguous, but I can't really give the benefit of the doubt here when it would be a kind of nuance I just don't see elsewhere.
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Whoever's voicing Ocelot did a spot on job nailing the inflections that Pat Zimmerman used in MGS1 and MGS2. I started the video and then turned away to do something else. I heard the inflection and thought "Oh that's right, Ocelot's back" before I realized that he's being done by a different VA. A+ job.
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I can't decide if the dudes who drop from the sky at 4:31 look more like Python or The Fury without his helmet.
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Also that left hand at 5:20 is looking mighty mechanical. I'm guessing that that scene happens after whatever costs Big Boss his arm.

EDIT: Looking at the skull X-Ray at 5:37, that looks like maybe shrapnel embedded in the skull. I'm wondering if this indicates some physical trauma that gives Big Boss brain damage which causes hallucinations, etc., and then leads to Outer Heaven (along the "Men become Demons" line).

This does, incidentally, work toward the oni horn that analogos pointed out earlier.

Also holy shit Kaz @ 5:45 missing his calf and his right arm.

People getting tore up in this one. =(
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[Adilegian]

Looks like some Deadly Premonition fast forwarding at 5:20.

Looks like some Assassin's Creed platforming at 5:47

Looking at what they seem to be doing, the switch to Sutherland makes more sense. Hayter's Snake isn't bad. It's lovable. This is not a lovable Big Boss.

It's about time, frankly. As I was saying to analogos earlier, Kojima's way of handling bad guys has been to take a "bad guy" and make the player sympathetic to him. This game's finally going to do what Kojima's been putting off for about three series sequels: he's going to make someone we love into a bad man.

We've been on "the wrong side" of the establishment/Patriots for a long time now. I'm really glad that it looks like they're finally making Big Boss a force that maybe it's right for the Patriots to crush.

I've been waiting for them to smash this crystal palace they've made out of Outer Heaven. Glad to see they've finally decided to harden and get off that damn fence.

Emmerich is "a technocrat who stands his ground" with a glimpse of leg braces. Pretty sure "stands his ground" is a pun referencing his disability in PW. Also pretty sure this is going to tap into the whole "Metal Gear is a tank that needs legs" thing.

The surgery and waterboarding isn't problematic if the trailer is representative. It looks like it's depicted to convey atmosphere and events. I don't see the camera work as lingering and exploitative.
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I'm not in a position to get more detailed (lunch hour's up!)
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