MGS4: Flawed Masterpiece Analysis — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:04] >> 15 years to be precise. An eternity for any tactical espionage icon. Afraid. Like Old Snake, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is a fossil, a genetic dead end of gaming evolution, the unhinged and overflowing masterpiece

[00:19] that barely left a mark on the art form. Despite its critical and commercial success, MGS4 is rarely regarded as top tier Metal Gear. And we're about to find tier Metal Gear. And we're about to find out if that's actually fair.

[00:38] better part of its hard life. Thanks to the new Master Collection Volume 2, it's finally possible for everyone to experience MGS4. From the folks who first fired it up in 2008 to series dieards who've been aching to fill a

[00:50] blind spot in their fandom and even people completely new to Metal Gear who have absolutely no idea what they're in for. All of them will reckon with the many, many questions MGS4 brings to mind, like will we ever see a game like

[01:04] about it? And [music] perhaps most importantly, >> this is good, isn't it? isn't it? >> [music]

[01:31] game. He publicly declared his desire to end the franchise as early as Metal Gear Solid 2, then proclaimed that he was finished with the saga after Snake Eater. Nothing about those all-time classics resembles the work of someone

[01:44] who'd run out of ideas or a series gone stale. Cojima's words were weary, but his deeds said otherwise. He wasn't really ready to move on. Both of these games ooze with a sense of momentum and life. Guns of the Patriots feels

[01:58] different. There's a gloomy weight to the game, like a funeral, the rockus kind, where friends, grudges, and old flames gather to settle scores, awkwardly hook up, and celebrate the end. Prior to MGS4, we'd last seen Solid

[02:11] Snake in 2001 when he dropped a prophetic monologue and vanished into after the former president of the United States crashed into the city with a States crashed into the city with a giant sci-fi submarine.

[02:33] follow-up. And after years of fans demanding the return of the legendary mercenary, Cojima obliged in trademark trolling fashion.

[02:50] super soldier who slays Tangu by the dozen with a metaphictional bandana. threats over his reluctance to move the story forward with MGS4, instead delivers a feeble, actively [music] decomposing relic. Old snake grunts,

[03:06] screams, coughs, and gags wetly as he crawls in agony through his final mission. Are you okay? All for the privilege of being allowed to die before his poisoned blood wipes

[03:21] out humanity. Old Snake was punished before punished was cool. It's a trope we've seen a lot lately. the beloved hero of a bygone age. Bitter, broken down, and humbled. All in service of passing the torch to a spunky new

[03:35] there is no Ray here to dawn the cardboard box. No Adonis Creed, no Robin, nor any kind of chipper [music] nextgen protagonist cued to continue Snake's legacy by selling some video games. Nearly everyone in Metal Gear

[03:50] Solid 4 is old, dead, or extremely married by the end of the story. A bittersweet and beautifully conclusive eulogy to a deeply heroic and thoroughly cigarettes. >> War has changed.

[04:06] Our time has ended. Modern media is designed to protect itself, to keep mythology marketable and leave endings open for future exploitation. Cojima does the exact opposite with MGS4, performing peaceful euthanasia on his

[04:20] life's work to that point. It's a brave move delivered with a lot of love and earnestness. And [music] anyone upset at geriatric snake were too busy feasting on a buffet of fan service to stay mad for long. Let it go. Rarely do [music]

[04:34] sprawling stories wrap up as neatly as Metal Gear Solids. Even if neatly here means bursting at the seams and slightly slap dash. Cojima didn't have a decadesl long master plan when he made middle gear for the MSX in 1987, but he managed

[04:49] to BS his way into satisfying answers for nearly everything. It's an ambitious, messy, and sincere sendoff to Snake in the series. There's really nowhere else to go from here, which brings [music] us to the elephant in the

[05:02] Fulton balloon over this whole discussion. Guns of the Patriots is not the last Metal Gear Solid game. Despite his protestations, Cojima had two more Metal Gears in him. The [music] portable

[05:15] Peace Walker, a numbered entry in all but Name, and the tragic MGS5. [music] Both respect the brick wall he built at the end of the timeline, and Treadwater safely in the past instead of pushing forward. Cojima decided to move the

[05:28] series horizontally instead, experimenting with tech [music] and form until Konami kicked him out. Cojima's actual final chapter when it came was compromised and ignaminious, a casualty of his ugly exit from Konami and a sour

[05:42] note on which to end. Guns of the Patriots was Cojima ending things on his own terms. A bombastic epic with a massive budget that bursts with supreme confidence and unfiltered honesty. It would be the last time he ever made a

[05:56] would be the last time he ever made a game like this.

[06:21] mainline Metal Gear game before it, is structured like a linear cinematic character from the beginning of their journey to the end, carving a straight line through the plot without any sort of side quest to speak of. It's almost

[06:34] quaint from a 2026 lens where half the industry runs on open worlds and the other on live service menu slop. But this was Kojima's MO throughout the yet, for something so committed to telling one continuous story in

[06:48] agonizing detail, MGS4 feels oddly episodic. Each of its five acts is minute you're scooching across a battlefield. The next you're skullking through the streets of Eastern Europe in a trench coat. Cojima drops us into war

[07:03] zones and weapons facilities across the globe, introduces new ideas, and moves past them just as quickly. Cojima's Hollywood aspirations [music] run wild here. And while some of the sloggier cinematics are a chore, I'd sit

[07:16] through a thousand [music] torturous mission briefings to relive MGS4's queasy white knuckle fusions of story and mechanics like the sicko mode, split screen [music] action set pieces, and the tactile desperation of the microwave

[07:30] hallway. The game's linearity is a huge strength. We embody Old Snake through every second of his grueling ordeal. We [music] wse with every injury and every brutal negging. Solid Snake was our stand-in from the moment he infiltrated

[07:45] Outer Heaven. Detours aside, [music] and we feel every moment of the long journey as he slugs it out with liquid one last time. That sense of embodiment, being inside Snake, a part of him, you can't get that from a mission select screen.

[08:00] But Cojima's next and last games in his Metal Gear Solid saga would be built Metal Gear Solid saga would be built with these impersonal menus in mind. Listen up. For us, there is no victory.

[08:14] or die? >> We don't do either. Frustrated with the PS3's limitations for his grand scale vision, Kojima went small instead. Also available in Master Collection Volume 2, Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker was

[08:29] originally built for the handheld PlayStation Portable. Though a sprawling linear opus was pretty much off the table without the luxury of Blu-ray discs and cell processors. Instead, he designed for the handheld system

[08:41] strengths. Short, snackable stealth missions selected from a menu, perfect for a train ride or waiting room. Start talking. Previous Metal Gears relied on blockbuster storytelling to keep you coming back. But Peace Walker

[08:54] [music] leans on addictive base building, optional challenges, and RPG systems borrowed from Monster Hunter to keep you hooked. 7 years after Snake slid across the big shell, grinding was back in Metal Gear, and this time it was

[09:08] here to stay. Cojima is clearly fond of the result. He considers Peace Walker the fifth mainline MGS game, and thanks to re-releases, it's had far more to re-releases, it's had far more staying power than the average PSP game.

[09:20] He liked the formula so much, he made it his default going forward. Both [music] MGS5 and Death Stranding run on the same skeleton, embracing timers and stats and judging your performance in isolated missions chosen from a list. At this

[09:34] rate, we'll probably be chasing Sranks in OD. It works beautifully for a handheld and for a tacitturn cipher like Sam Bridges, but it really doesn't suit traditional Metal Gear Solid. MGS5 was free from the shackles of a 272p screen.

[09:49] But even with the full glory of the Fox engine, the menudriven mode of interaction keeps us at arms length from Snake. Boss, >> I know you haven't been back long, but I prepared a list of missions for you.

[10:03] >> Please select a mission. >> The story becomes another checklist item, grinding through side ops until an actually important mission appears on the list. We're watching from a more omnisient remove as Snake sizes up the

[10:15] stats of future subordinates [music] and navigates a tech tree. For a series that loves to mess directly with the player and collapse the space between them and the character, losing that intimacy comes with a cost. MGS4

[10:29] made Snake's suffering feel like ours, and the series never approached that level of pos. Being inside Old Snake's head for dozens of hours is genuinely

[10:41] unpleasant at times, to the point it makes the game almost hard to revisit. And it's [music] one of several reasons why MGS4's legacy is so quiet.

[11:02] influence when nobody can play it. Metal Gear Solid 4 has been unavailable for years, buried alive on hardware that hasn't been sold for nearly a decade. Countless classic titles are trapped on ancient tech, but it's rare for a

[11:15] ancient tech, but it's rare for a numbered entry in a massive AAA series. Embrace my jeans. Wipe this meme [music] from the face of the earth. There's more than one culprit behind MGS4's absence, not least of

[11:28] which is the hardware it was designed around. The PS3's cell processor was notoriously miserable to develop for with bizarre architecture far removed from industry standards that made porting anything off of it a nightmare.

[11:41] It's also why emulation so vital to keeping commercially abandoned games alive couldn't save Old Snake either. Strides have been made recently, but Strides have been made recently, but MGS4 remains a genuine bear to run

[11:53] these technical woes were insurmountable, and neither were the super specific Sony references or the licensing entanglements from MGS4's frankly ludicrous product placement. [music] It just needed a publisher that

[12:06] cared enough to devote the resources to porting it and had the courage to get Unilo, Apple, and Playboy back to the negotiating table. Konami was content to let the series languish for a long time as it explicitly abandoned video games

[12:20] for pachinko parlors. It only once really wrestled with following MGS4 in the timeline in Platinum's Audacious spin-off, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Otherwise, it did not matter to Konami if nobody could buy or

[12:34] matter to Konami if nobody could buy or play MGS4. >> Snake, are you all right? >> Yeah, I just Thankfully, that's changed. Konami's prodigal return to video games has gone well enough so far, and now

[12:49] has gone well enough so far, and now MGS4 is enjoying an immaculate rebirth. iPod and all. How will modern gamers receive it after so many years in the wilderness? Guns of the Patriots is an aggressively unfriendly game by modern

[13:02] standards. The cutscenes are completely out of control, nearly double the time actually spent playing the game. The common Kojima criticism is that he'd rather make movies than games. But [music] it's hard to think of any film

[13:14] that's 9 hours long, built largely out of static codec calls, and features extended scenes of people drinking soda and smoking around little girls while weeping about nanom machines and infectious diseases. Whatever MGS4 is,

[13:28] it is not a movie, and it's certainly not made for newcomers. Who is this young woman in an age gap marriage with Colonel Campbell? Why does beating a boss summon a [ __ ] suited ghost? What are all of these incredibly verbose

[13:41] people going on about? >> I used to be an anime otaku. Wow. If you're expecting a welcoming onboarding experience, you're in for a migraine the size of Mount Snakemore. And if the lore doesn't kill you, the cringe will

[13:57] diarrhea. MGS4 isn't spoken of in the same breath as the first three games. And when it does come up, it's rarely for what it nobody's been able to play the game for so long, its reputation as an

[14:12] uncomfortable cutscene parade is all that remains. Opinion calcifies when there's nothing around to contradict it. That's not to say nobody's tried to pick up what MGS4 put down. [music] Resident Evil Reququum almost feels like a

[14:25] tribute at times, a last ride for a long-suffering hero who makes a started while dying from a sci-fi disease that makes him cough a lot. By the end, Leon is upgrading his weapons [music] with counterfeit Dreban points,

[14:38] dueling hand to hand with his longtime rival, and dragging himself inch by agonizing inch through a high-tech hallway. Without spoiling where it lands, Reququum doesn't have the nerve to go out on a limb like MGS4. [music]

[14:50] Its tribute to Raccoon City sends us on a nostalgic trip through a place we've already walked through twice in HD, stopping far short of the wobbly PSX vertices in MGS4's homage to Shadow Moses, another holy gaming space

[15:04] introduced in 1998. The ending stops short as well, a cleancut affair that adventures and [music] profitable sequels. AAA Gaming didn't go in an MGS4 direction in the intervening years. Budgets are too big and bosses too

[15:20] demanding to allow a freakazoid like Cojima off the leash again. Unless you're the man himself, of course. [groaning] because he had the power to leave the system that made MGS4 possible. Everyone

[15:35] else is still answering to a spreadsheet and understandably gunshy about unfettered visionaries. Modern Gaming's play it safe instincts could do wonders for MGS4's reputation. George Lucas and his Star Wars prequels suffered a

[15:50] similar rap over the years, dismissed as the bloated, self-indulgent work of an aur No one could reign in. But a decade of focus tested corpo Star Wars sequels re-evaluation of the much maligned episodes 1, 2, and three. And now that

[16:07] it's available again, MGS4 [music] deserves the same treatment. Both the deserves the same treatment. Both the prequels and MGS4 are messy, oversted, and often embarrassing, but they are [music] never once indifferent.

[16:19] Sincerity ages a lot better than caution. Ultimately, everyone has to judge Metal Gear Solid 4 for themselves to witness the grandiosity, endure [music] the hour plus uninterrupted cutscenes, and gaze hypnotically at Old

[16:32] Snake's butt cheeks amidst the bombardment of jargon and lore. At least now you'll get the chance to. And when you do finally sit with Kojima's weward masterpiece, you might like it more than you'd think. You might even say,

[16:45] >> "You're pretty good. >> You're pretty good. Pretty good." >> Thanks for watching everyone. Now tell us, where do you stand on MGS4? Does it a blessing in disguise? [music] Let us know in the comments, and be sure to

[16:59] Solid and the Master Collection Volume 2.