Codec Moments Part 2: Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
There is something telling about the fact that after releasing Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake in 1990, Hideo Kojima didn’t make another Metal Gear for eight years. Between the first and second games in the series he had made Snatcher, an adventure game influenced heavily by Blade Runner. Because Snatcher was little more than text with still images, a choose-your-own-adventure picture book, it gave Kojima a great deal of control over the dramatic pacing of the game and how the plot unfolded. Solid Snake is a testament to Kojima’s then growing interest in making cinematic games. Featuring a more detailed plot, with more fleshed out characters than the first, Metal Gear 2 is heavily influenced by another film, Apocalypse Now. For all intents and purposes a young game designer, Kojima laid the foundation for what has become at this point his life’s work. Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake is documentation of a designer coming to grips with a genre, and slowly deciding what he wants to say.
Players are once again put into the shoes of Solid Snake, an agent of the US government sent to infiltrate an enemy base and eliminate whatever threat it contains. The first Metal Gear has you sneaking your way through Outer Heaven with only cryptic messages from characters that mostly ignore you, rescuing generic looking hostages, and collecting every item you can in order to proceed. This is essentially what you do in the second, only with more stuff, and in an even more fantastically named place: ‘Zanzibar Land’. While I find certain aspects of the design of Snake’s first adventure annoying and short-sighted, I still respect the game for its starkness, the simplicity with which it fulfills its goal: to be the military/industrial version of The Legend of Zelda. Shigeru Miyamoto by way of Tom Clancy. Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake should properly be called Metal Gear+, as it retains much from the original, including the basic inspiration, and simply expands on all the elements without much question as to whether they worked or not in the first place.
Take, for instance, those goddamn Security Cards. They are easily the most frustrating aspect of the original. In a game whose structure can generate a great feeling of momentum, the Cards serve only to break that momentum by forcing the player to constantly search through their inventory every time they approach a door. They return in Solid Snake, though slightly altered to make them a little more tolerable. With enough searching one can find a series of rooms which each contain a Card that acts as a master key for a set of regular Cards. The Red Card, for instance, is the substitute for Security Cards 1,2, and 3. However, this is a slight balm to what is at its core an odious mechanic. Though it might be suggested that this is sort of a charming ‘Kojimaism’, similar to his insistent on using the same camera in the first three Metal Gear Solid games, it comes off as a lack of imagination. The master Cards then seem like a lame excuse, put in place because he didn’t want to really think about the problem.
Like I said, finding the master Cards takes a little searching, and the first time I went through the game I didn’t even have the Blue and Green Cards. Your support team, which was conspicuously absent the last time around, is now pretty chatty, if no more helpful. Colonel Campbell, who fills the role left by Big Boss, typically has no better advise than to ‘think like a game designer’, and Master Miller gives tips on what kind of diet is best for optimal brain activity. Holly White, an undercover CIA agent was probably the most helpful of the people with which I was in contact. By the end though, even she simply repeated the same useless trivia over and over again. This is not to say that when some event was happening in the narrative, they didn’t have interesting color commentary, just that for the most part they rarely said anything that was very informative. In contrast, the Solid games feature a great deal of extraneous dialogue, but they still consistently offer real assistance if the player is any kind of a bind.
Metal Gear 2‘s central theme seems to be extraneousness. In addition to all the hints that Solid Snake’s support crew offers that don’t apply strictly to the game, there are the numerous ancillary items, like the master Cards. They can all be found with relative ease, but are by no means necessary, and don’t actually offer that much of an advantage. In fact, the basement of the main structure in the game, the Zanzibar Building, contains a cache of weapons and tools like the RC Rocket, a submachine gun, and a mat that you can crawl under to become invisible. During my second play-through I completely skipped these items, finding that all I really needed was the cardboard box and a handgun. One of the characters I encountered, Natasha, who is clearly the model for the strong but broken hearted blond that has appeared in every Metal Gear since, gave me a brooch which would turn into different keys when heated or cooled. Freezing it turns it into a key that is used to open a locker, the contents of which are needed to progress. Heating the brooch while hiding in a sauna gave me a key for another locker. Inside that locker I found a cassette tape, the use of which I eventually looked up on GameFAQS, because I finished the game without caring enough to find its purpose on my own.
The theme continued to the characters I encountered, both friends and enemies. The second game ends up being filled with characters from the first, all of whom are supposed to be either dead or gone. Dr. Madnar, Kyle Schneider, Gray Fox, and Big Boss all make ‘surprise’ appearances. Someone not familiar with Kojima’s penchant for cameos might find these consistent and identical plot twists wearisome. As someone who has now played all of the Metal Gear games, it’s almost quirky, especially considering that all of the original art for the characters is based on then famous US movie stars. Beyond these recycled characters are the NPCs, orphans that wander the halls or walk in circles in empty rooms. When I found a room with no function, that had an elaborate carpet but no furniture, and contained only a little girl that walked in circles saying that she didn’t like ‘people who use guns’, it struck me how surreal the whole experience actually was.
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake is really a ghost story. Everyone in it is supposed to be dead and/or gone, and yet there they all are, in the heart of the jungle, raging out against the world. Having decided that he wanted to say something about war, and about those that get left behind, Kojima perverted the typical Zelda structure and filled his game with useless items and forgotten people. When analyzing the game in this way it’s hard not to think of Snake’s Revenge, the non-canonical sequel to Metal Gear that was produced for North America and Europe without Kojima’s input. After that incident, the subject of loyal soldiers, discarded for the good of some larger entity, must have been particularly dear to his heart. If you strip out all of the extra stuff, Metal Gear 2 isn’t all that much bigger than Metal Gear. However, unlike in other adventure games, the extra elements aren’t there simply for padding. They may be mechanically irrelevant, but ironically they are integral to the thematic whole.
After Metal Gear 2 was released, Kojima returned to the adventure game genre with Policenauts. Created with animation legend Mamoru Oshii (Patlabor, Ghost in the Shell) it was once again a chance for Kojima to make a more overtly cinematic game. After all, whatever Solid Snake may be, however much it may be informed by the sensibilities of cinema, it is limited to certain avenues of expression. That these avenues may in fact be more compelling is beside the fact. Once Policenauts was finished, Hideo Kojima spent the next four years making a game that would merge his sensibilities with his mechanical talent. The Metal Gear Solid series has allowed him to explore the link between narrative and gameplay to an extent that few other game designers approach. However, the foundation of those games lies in Metal Gear 2. It introduced the tropes and techniques that Kojima has returned to again and again. It has at this point become the ghost Kojima can’t shake, the soldier he can’t leave behind.
This is the second of two essays on the original Metal Gear games. The subject of the next series will either be on Takumi Yoshinaga’s “Feel the Magic” or Shinji Mikami’s career.
Interesting thoughts on the extraneous nature of MG2:SS’s content, and something that’s pretty consistent throughout the game. I’m surprised you didn’t mention the trash compactor sequence, where Snake is able to pick up such useful items as “pigeon droppings.” Kojima was certainly poking a bit of fun at games where all you do is collect things, which are rather meaningless in and of themselves. Remember, however, that the game’s ending both reinforces and turns the convention upon its head– after Metal Gear explodes, all the player’s items and weapons catch fire and must be thrown away, and in fighting Big Boss the only way to beat him is to collect extraneous items– the lighter and aresol can. Kojima’s main message here seems to be about self-reliance, proving to the player that they don’t need any of the huge arsenal they’ve accumulated over the course of the game. It’s interesting how this message gets reversed in MGS3, where the player must master all of their vast arsenal in order to defeat the Boss, but perhaps that’s also a difference in the expressions offered in the characters of Solid Snake and Big Boss.
You’re right about the Cards, of course, and the fact that the system of how they’re used changed in the “Solid” series shows that even Kojima knows they didn’t work. In fact, during the production of the “Subsistence” package, he commented on his blog (back when he actually did a blog) that he and his team were juggling whether or not to keep the old system intact or to update it to the current model of cards automatically opening their doors, without having to be selected first. The fact that he decided to preserve that original, fairly broken part of the game is a nicely honest bit on his part– sure, he’s going to upgrade stuff like the character profiles to keep them consistent with the Shinkawa designs and whatnot, but in terms of how the game actually plays he’s done a good job of giving us the real McCoy, and not merely a downgraded emulation. Still, I can’t help but hope, one day, for him to entirely remake these stories so that people like you and I aren’t the only ones playing them.
There’s quite a lot here, actually, that I’m surprised you’re not considering, so I’d like to raise a few items here– one of the moments you like to bring up in discussions of the MGS series is the boss battle with The End from “Snake Eater,” which you rightly point out as one of the few boss battles from the series which completely integrates the hide-and-seek gameplay of the title’s overall mechanics. It isn’t the only time that Kojima’s found ways to do this, however, and one can find a whole lot of experimentation in this direction in a handful of fights from “Metal Gear 2.” Granted, none of the fights really match the subtlety of presentation or AI, but that’s mostly due to the primitive graphics and genrally unsophisticated processing power of the MSX computer coming nowhere even close to what he would later have at his disposal with the PS2. For my money, there’s a lot of progress made in how many of the MG2 boss-fights are structured as occasions where, for the most part, you don’t see the bosses themselves, and wait for them to open themselves up as you hide. “Jungle Evil” can convincingly be seen as a precurser to MGS3’s battle with The End, while “Night Fright” foreshadows Kojima’s later obsession with “optic camoflauge,” and stands as a rather impressive use of sound, rather than image, as the tell-tale weakness. The mechanical reason, however, these battles don’t work entirely is due to how easily they can both be bested with the remote-controlled rocket, which in the top-down 2D context of the MSX games becomes something of a skeleton-key weapon, capable of hitting anything thanks to its capability of hovering indefinitely, another fault which Kojima later fixed as it became the “Nikita” of the “Solid” series.
Anyway, you know how much I love the Big Boss battle, which is one of the only bosses in the game (and pretty much all of the MG games up until “Snake Eater”) which you could hide from and avoid, until you got your flamethrower. “Solid Snake” is by no means perfect, but Kojima knew which experiments to take further and which ones to put a cap on, for the most part. I genuinely hope he returns to some of the more creative questions he came up with in MGS4, however. For a while he’s been content to merely coast along on the good looks and narrative conundrums of the “Solid” series, but now he’s got a chance to make us wonder what the hell we’re supposed to do all over again. After that, of course, he can get to what’s really important– rereleasing “Snatcher” and “Policenauts,” goddamnit!
My feelings about “Solid Snake” is that there are a lot of good ideas in the game, but almost all of them are broken in some way or half-baked. That’s why Kojima went back to point-and-click adventures, because he realized he couldn’t do what he wanted with the technology he had at his disposal. It’s also why “Metal Gear 2” and “Metal Gear Solid” are so similar. What I think is great about the game, and worth writing about, is how he still manages to create this strange, semi-existentialist, semi-surreal, nightmare.
I’m not sure that I got the whole self-reliance thing that you’re talking about.
I’ll try to keep this one short, as I’ve tried to explain it before– before the Big Boss fight you lose all your weapons, and the simple punch attack you do have is meaningless. All you can do is run, hide, collect food and use Card-Keys (damn their eyes!) on a room-to-room chain-quest to find more Card-Keys, and more importantly, the lighter and the aeresol can. Now, you already had the MacGuyver moment spoiled by my reviews of the game, for which I really should’ve warned you guys, but playing through that sequence without having any explicit instructions on what to do wound up, for me at least, being a rather empowering moment. You don’t have the crutches of any of your other items to back you up at that moment– all you have at your disposal is the ability to put 2 and 2 together, which puts the onus on you, rather than your materials. It’s a sequence with its stress on planning rather than performance, and because I already outlined the plan you only had to deal with the second, almost inconsequential portion of performance, instead. Understand, though, that from the unspoiled, first-playthrough experience it’s right up there with Big Boss’ betrayal in the first MSX game.