Metal Gear Solid Watch-along

[bomaye]

Just in case anyone else wants to jump aboard.

On youtube, someone's spliced together the cutscenes and some cinematized gameplay of the Metal Gear Solid games to make coherent (LOL) movies of each. Me and Enail are going to attempt a watch-along. Each "movie" is about 4 hours long, but I'm going to throw timestamps and indicators on each up to cut it up into about 20ish minute segments so it's kind of digestible like a weekly anime is. MGS1 should come out to 12-14 episodes depending on which version we watch.

Things to know about the watch-along:

- These games are set in the real world, but also have highly camp-y features.
- Generally, each game is about a single soldier sneaking into a highly fortified base to destroy the titular Metal Gear, a bipedal mech with the ability to launch nuclear warheads, and the various political conspiracies and insurrections surrounding the building of these Metal Gears.
- The thing that may make this difficult to watch is that while this was among the first cinematic video games on console, it was still early enough that they had to rely on a lot of talking head conversations. However the voice acting is among the best and most distinctive in video games that I've seen, and this is coming from someone who doesn't generally like English voice acting.
- The other thing is that MGS1's graphics are blocky and awful. The later games have aged much better. There IS the option to watch The Twin Snakes version. Twin Snakes was a remake of MGS1 using MGS2's engine, released on the Gamecube. The graphics are much better, the music is worse, the voice acting is slightly different (in particular, one character loses her Chinese immigrant accent and instead sounds fully American) and the cutscenes are much more Matrix-y and over the top (sort of a canon explanation is that MGS1 is what actually happened, MGS The Twin Snakes is the spoken legend of what happened). Twin Snakes is about an hour longer.

Things to know about Metal Gear Solid 1:

MGS1 is the third game in the series, the previous two being Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, both for the MSX2 home computer. We're not gonna be watching those, and generally most people did not play them before MGS1, but MGS1 did include documents on the menu screen informing you of what happened in the previous missions. I'll sum them up quickly with need-to-know things here.

Metal Gear 1: aka Operation Intrude N313. Takes place in 1995, released in real life in 1987. The west discovers a secret fortified base called Outer Heaven (remember this name) in South Africa, a burgeoning nation built by a "legendary mercenary" that was purported to be building weapons of mass destruction. The Elite special forces unit Foxhound sends top agent Frank Jaeger, code-named Gray Fox to infiltrate the base and discover the truth. Contact is lost with him, and a second agent, rookie Solid Snake, is sent in by the eye-patch wearing commander of Foxhound, Big Boss (think older Sean Connery), to discover what happened to Gray Fox.

Ultimately, Snake discovers the existence of Metal Gear, rescues Gray Fox and finds out that the legendary mercenary in question is actually Big Boss himself, who was feeding Snake false information in the hopes that he can cover up his activities. He was using military intelligence and access to military funding to build up Metal Gear and Outer Heaven and turn it into a world superpower.

Snake destroys Metal Gear, seemingly kills Big Boss, and escapes the self-destruction of Outer Heaven with Gray Fox and other rescued hostages.

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake: Takes place in 1999, released in real life in 1990. Oil wells the world over finally dry up and a massive oil crisis hits Earth. A Czech scientist invents a formula that uses algae to create an oil substitute, but he is kidnapped by soldiers from Zanzibarland, a breakaway republic of the Soviet Union (whoops, just barely missed that collapse). A retired Solid Snake is brought back into action by Roy Campbell, the new commander of FOXHOUND, and his former drill instructor and survival teacher, Kaz Miller.

Snake infiltrates Zanzibarland and quickly discovers that they have a Metal Gear, piloted by a now heel-turned Gray Fox, Big Boss is still alive and still trying to fuck up the world, and basically everyone who survived Metal Gear 1 has somehow turned evil because the world shunned and hated them upon their return.

Snake does his thing, destroys Metal Gear and fist-fights Gray Fox in a minefield like men do and kills him, but not before Gray Fox explains that he owes his life to Big Boss. Snake confronts Big Boss, who wanted to create endless war to provide a home for soldiers like both of them, and tells him that one of them will die and the other will go on inevitably living out their days as a soldier. Snake seemingly kills Big Boss for good with a makeshift flamethrower built out of a lighter and an aerosol can, escapes Zanzibarland

Metal Gear Solid 1: Set in 2005, released in real life in 1998. Retired again and living as a musher and dog breeder in Alaska, Solid Snake is pulled out of retirement by Colonel Roy Campbell. Special Forces Unit Foxhound has gone rogue, kidnapping two VIP hostages and capturing Shadow Moses Island, a nuclear weapons disposal base located in the Fox Archipelago off the coast of Alaska. Calling themselves "The Sons of Big Boss", they're threatening to use one of the Nukes in 24 hours unless the American government hands over $1 billion... and the remains of Big Boss. Snake's mission is infiltrate Shadow Moses, rescue the hostages and neutralize the commander of Foxhound, a man known by the codename "Liquid Snake." He's assisted over codec by Roy Campbell, a returning Kaz Miller, medical specialist Naomi Hunter, data analyst and tech genius Mei Ling, and nuclear weapons specialist and activist Nastasha Romanenko.

I'll post the first one sometime on Thursday.

[Enail]

Whew, that's a lot of backstory. You sure this is gonna work?

[bomaye]

Most of that stuff will be explained over the course of the game itself, that's there for reference if it's needed.

I guess cliffnotes/important version

Big Boss was the leader of special forces unit Foxhound that Solid Snake/the main character was part of but BB was secretly a bad guy who started two international incidents and Snake beat him both times, killing him the last time
Gray Fox was Snake's friend who turned on him and died
Metal Gear is a mecha with a nuke that can tip the balance of political power
Outer Heaven and Zanzibarland were the two previous missions
The new Foxhound has gone rogue and are demanding lots of money and Big Boss' remains or they'll nuke things
A few of the support crew have been around before

[bomaye]

Aight, here we go with trying it out. We're gonna watch The Twin Snakes version because better graphics, the intro is more well-done cinematically and there's an added briefing segment at the beginning that's a bit dry but adds a lot of instructional manual context that the original didn't

Episode 01: Go to the 00:20:00 mark, if you see a black man, you've gone too far.

[Enail]

Between the elderly graphics and feeling like a generic stealth/shooter but without the gameplay to keep it interesting, I'm finding it a pretty hard watch so far. Though, I suppose the setup stage is automatically going to be a little slow, so maybe it'll pick up. The dialogue's really not seeming like it's going to hold up to non-game standards, though.

[bomaye]

This "episode" starts the ball rolling, you should probably have a good idea if you want to keep on going by the end of "Episode 3"

Episode 2 00:20:00-00:38:04 (a few seconds after the word "Draw" and then the scene transitions to gameplay)

[Enail]

Getting more lively now that there's some of the weirder elements coming in and the over-the-top characters. Also, this shut-down's completely changed how I look at things, in the jail cell scene I was totally distracted by being impressed that they managed to get enough toilet paper for the prisoners in such a remote location

[bomaye]

Dat random heart attack, dat Revolver Ocelot (my fav character in the series)

[Enail]

He really goes all-out as a character!

[bomaye]

Episode 3: 00:38:00 - 1:01:36 (the line to shut it off at is "After I open up the cargo door, I'll contact you")

Episode Note: There's a point in the episode where a character tells Snake to "look at the back of the package" for a codec number. It's not shown what that means because "the package" is actually the real life game box and the codec number is displayed in a screenshot on the back of the box.

Really good/edgy line that I liked a lot in that episode

Spoiler:

[Enail]

Spoiler:

[bomaye]

Aight, just let me know when/if you don't want to keep going.

[Enail]

Okay, will do.

[bomaye]

Episode 4: 01:01:36-1:19:27 ("I'd rather not, but maybe that's what he wants" in a codec conversation is where it ends")

Spoiler:

[Enail]

E4

Spoiler:

[bomaye]

Episode 5: (01:19:27--01:39:08 Cut-off Line: "Make sure you're ready, okay?")

Note: There's an IRL FMV that skips a bit, it's not your youtube video doing it

Spoiler:

[Enail]

E5

Spoiler:

[bomaye]

Episode 06: (1:39:08-02:00:00, last thing you hear is "Now get out of here" and a codec ring)

Spoiler:

[Enail]

E6

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[bomaye]

Episode 7 : (02:00:00-02:22:31, last thing you hear is "Thanks." from a codec conversation)

Spoiler:

[Enail]

E7

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[bomaye]

E7

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[Enail]

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[bomaye]

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Holy shit

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She's not in this game, but I'll let you know who it is if we continue after this :p

[bomaye]

Episode 8: (02:22:31-02:41:19, last words you'll hear is "Don't Shoot", it's right near the beginning of a cutscene)

Spoiler:

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