If there's one thing I didn't expect out of this game it was Huey's change in character. Man, what a big piece of shit. Like Jeff said on the Snakecast, I was hoping to put a bullet in his head, especially after Episode 43. Fuck that guy! If given the option like with Quiet and Skull Face I would've shot him without hesitation.

Yeah I agree with the sentiment. The whole thing is kind of weird with him because I expected an innocence turn given all the clear evidence against him (this is Metal Gear after all) but then it appears to all be accurate from what we get in the game. And I really don't see what his motivations are to pull all the shit he pulls?

I mean in the fiction Otacon ends up sleeping with his next wife and then he drowns himself so he does get his (and boy is that a fucking weird turn of events but whatever). He also almost kills Emma Emmerich in the drowning (perhaps on purpose? it isn't clear I don't think) so yeah he's the fucking worst.

In a game filled with horrible people, torture fetishists, war criminals, and an attempted genocider, Huey still manages to come out as the most hated character in the game.

I cant wait to find out. I've just finished mission 23... 165 hours on the clock.

What? Really? Jesus. I'm at 87 hours having JUST seen the true ending and I feel like I took my time getting there.

In regards to Huey, I do think it's interesting that we never got a clear-cut answer as to his actual level of involvement in the events of Ground Zeroes. In a game full of shades of grey, he might be the blackest. Still, he's no absolute.

After learning what happened to him in MGS2 (drowning himself after finding out Otacon was sleeping with his wife) I was surprised to find myself relishing his fate once his storyline was done in TPP. Really came off as a scumbag without principle in a world of scumbags.

I think the game makes Huey pretty ambiguous. For as much evidence as the game seems to give to his horrible-ness, I'm still not entirely sold on it.

He does later go on to drown himself, and attempt to drown his step-daughter, if that makes you feel better.

I think the thing that really put him over the top is suffocating strangelove. This isn't backed up by anything in the game but I think that his motivation for killing strangelove was a mixture of feelings of jealousy and betrayal. Strangelove obviously still has a deeply lesbonic attraction to The Boss and from what the AI pod tape unveiled she only had a kid with Huey so she could teach the kid to perpetuate the Boss' memes which is why there are times where I almost pity the man. But then every time you are almost ready to sympathize with him you find out three more really fucked up things and its back to nope... you are the worst.

I have to give props to his voice actor, he does an amazing job.

@artisanbreads said:

My big issue with the overall MGS storyline is that the Big Boss stuff and the post-Big Boss stuff feel like they just don't connect at all. Or specifically, the present-day details of MG1 and 2, MGS1 and MGS2 all kinda go with each other, but then all of the Big Boss era stuff feels bolted on. Among other things:

• Miller is this dude who has his shit together, but he is randomly murdered in his retirement by Liquid or something when Shadow Moses happens, and no one thinks to check where Miller is radioing in from and somehow they take forever to figure out that it's Liquid
• All the shit with Hal, and Emma, and Hal sleeping with his stepmom or whatever, and then Huey randomly drowning, is again, a totally anticlimactic death for this character they make a big deal out of in earlier games
• MG1 and 2 is supposed to be the introduction of Metal Gear to the world, but then they pull a Star Wars prequel where the Metal Gears in Peace Walker and Phantom Pain are like, way more advanced than the shit in the first couple MSX games.
• Para-Medic is Dr. Clark, because sure, those are two vaguely explained characters with similar skillsets so why not merge them into one?
• I just don't feel a throughline on Ocelot as a character. His character design changes a lot visually, his characterization with different voice actors is all over the place. There's asshole punk kid Ocelot in MGS3. There's Phantom Pain Ocelot. There's hokey Wild West Ocelot in MGS1. Then there's "I work for the Patriots" Ocelot that is basically consistent across MGS2 and MGS4, because honestly Liquid Ocelot never felt like Liquid, it just felt like spooky "I work for the Patriots, witness the revolution" Ocelot from MGS2 but for a different cause and he randomly said "Brother!" sometimes.
• Also, I don't feel a throughline between Naked Snake, Punished Snake, etc., all the way up to proper Big Boss. There's like, MGS3 and Peace Walker Naked Snake, then whatever the fuck in Phantom Pain, then hokey super villain in MG1 and MG2 on the MSX, then random old dude who has his shit all figured out in MGS4 who feels nothing like those other dudes. They don't feel like the same person.

Yeah cuz Otacon was banging his wife right?

As much of a piece of shit Huey was, most of it was somewhat ambiguous. Maybe he really was just misunderstood in Kojima's grand scheme, making him the most sympathetic character. I mean, in the end he was right...DD was a wolf after all, even the Mother Base soldiers had that discussion a lot.

I'm still not sure if Huey is that bad of a dude. What I got out of the tapes and scenes with him is that he's this spineless character that would change his story and lie through his teeth to save his own skin because there was always a guy dressed up as a cowboy who wanted to torture him. I'm not even sure if any of the conclusions we have about this character is the truth because of how much he lies under torture.

He was definitely in contact with Cipher at one point right? I think there was like 2 lines mentioning that somewhere.

@bisonhero It seems like the plot is made up one game at a time, with hardly anything planned to be carried forward at all. Mostly I'm okay with the retcons, they fit well enough and result in fun things. The identity of the Patriots is the only one I sort of went "Really??" on in MGS4, and they help that one by making the case in this game's endgame tapes for those guys' humanity.

I was expecting Huey to be good the whole time. He probably didn't do everything they accused him of. In fact, I'm pretty sure that in the cut Mission 51(Which I assume is still canon, considering it's in the timeline at the end) they mention that Eli was the one who fucked up the radiation scanners before he left so that the parasites would mutate. But him strangling the mother of his child, that's true for sure, and whatever else he did or did not do he's a huge jerk.

:

@thunderslash: Everyone was in contact with Cipher at some point or another. As far as "Was he responsible for the event of Ground Zeroes?" Not sure.

@bisonhero: Well Kojima must have realized he made a shitty story and then just used the archetype to create an actually good story with MGS3.

Honestly, none of the evidence ever actually linked to him directly even the "recording" by the mammal pod had nothing recorded of him doing anything. His character never had any motivation in this game at all, and just seemed like an excuse to show ocelots torture methods. Why would he betray snake? Why would he kill Strangelove? Why would he all of sudden want to create and sell bio weapons?

All the evidence points to huey 100% of the time, but he has absolutely no motive. In peacewalker he was actively against arming his metal gear with nukes, so why the sudden character change? I feel like something is still missing in the story around him, and if you beat the game you know that multiple characters had contact with the real cipher the entire time, so why would they be buying parasites from huey?

My personal guess is that he went insane after years of torture from skull face I don't think he actually betrayed snake in ground zeroes, he literally got nothing out of it he could have done all that research with outer heaven.

Yeah, I'm so confused about what the fuck Emmerich is doing. Is any of it true, or all incredibly coincidental and circumstantial? Also, how the fuck does that square with Hal's MGS2 story? Did he get to shore, found his son and remarried?

@artisanbreads: If I remember MGS2 correctly, Emma was in the water with Huey(or only know as Emmerich Sr. at that time) when the latter trying to drown himself. Since she is afraid of swimming(the very reason why Raiden had to carry her through that flooded area), I think it's safe to assume that Huey was in fact trying to kill his stepdaughter as well. A piece of s*** indeed.

I thought the character change was pretty weird. Naturally it has to line up with him killing himself due to MGS2; but was there anything to foreshadow him being such a giant shit in Peace Walker? He just seemed like Otacon in that game. I know it's been 9 years but the change was pretty jarring.

@oursin_360:Huey kills Strangelove because she sent their son, Hal, away after Huey used him as a test pilot for Metal Gear. There is also the possibility that Strangelove only used Huey to have a child since she was kind of still obsessed/in love with the mammal pod/The Boss.

As for betraying Snake, the easy answer is to save his own ass. I don't think he set up the inspection knowing it was a ruse, but I do think he did nothing to warn Snake and Miller and took an offer from Cipher once they revealed themselves to him.

In the end, fuck Huey.

The guy is clearly a psychopath. Calling others monsters (not entirely untrue, to be fair) while doing similarly or worse and constantly denying guilt.

@mosdl: Especially when it's the same guy who's been voicing Otacon/Huey all these years. At first I was kinda thinking they should have gotten someone that sounded a bit older, but he handled it much better than I expected.

No matter his reasoning, pretty much everything that dude does ends terribly and he should have been sent off as soon as possible.

When it comes to his motivations, it's super confusing. Like, why? Why any of it? Neither the guilty or innocent sides are all that convincing.

There is a way for something like that to be done in a vague, interesting way. Kojima is not able to do that.

To add to this... seems like a lot of the crew hated Miller and yet he seemed to be the only one that saw all the bad shit coming before the others. He didn't want Quiet there and he didn't want Huey there. I also thought he seemed overly harsh but he was right in the end.

He's clearly a sociopath.

"a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience."

He wasn't right about quiet though at least in my play through, she was a true diamond dog till the end

I get that it was supposed to be shades of gray with a lot of his intentions, but damn if it just ended in such an uninteresting way. If you find yourself going "What? Uh, okay I guess this is why?" then it's not compelling.

@dt9k: Personally, I think Huey makes poor choices, is too married to his work, and and too naive to deal with the groups he is thrust into. That being said, there is some malicious shit he was pulling, and maybe he didn't think it would be used the ways it was, but in the end he is too dangerous to have around, and I forgot the whole MGS2 Huey drowning himself stuff, which is too bad because I wanted to see him executed, I want to scatter his ashes to the heartless sea.

Problem with that is he clearly had morals in peace walker, otherwise he had no reason to go against the CIA at all. Something is not right about any of the stuff involving huey

@bisonhero: I love all the games but overall I agree with all of your points. As far as the tech, like the Metal Gears in Peacewalker and V being the best and most advanced ones, I see that happen in a lot of fiction so I kind of just look past that (and it makes for fun gameplay a lot of times). I think a lot of this is bound to happen when you keep going back and forth in a huge storyline like this so I'm pretty forgiving.

I thought at first that Huey killing Strangelove was ambiguous, but I can't imagine the door on the pod closing accidentally would cause her arm to be chopped off if she put it in the way. That sounds more like someone forcing the door shut to me.

Also, Huey is INCAPABLE of admitting his own faults! He tacitly murdered Strangelove, he invented legs to make up for his disability, he blames Snake for killing the Diamond Dogs that HE HIMSELF INFECTED WITH A WORLD ENDING PARASITE, he creates battle gears and metal gears thinking they could only be used for peace. He is a monster, and an idiot. The smartest idiot the world has ever known.

I don't really agree with several of those points. SPOILERS FOR ALL OF MGSV. DO NOT READ UNLESS ALL ENDINGS ARE FINISHED.

- The post credits convo seems to indicate that Ocelot is the one that killed Miller. In fact, the entire conversation sets up that dynamic and why that eventually happened.

- Huey's death is mentioned as a suicide. In the cutscene where he is exiled in The Phantom Pain, Ocelot mentions how one day he will realize what a horrible human being he is. In the end, he did, and he committed suicide and cowardly attempted to drown his own step-daughter in the process. Appropriate.

- Yeah, I'll give you the Metal Gear one. MGS3 had a pretty low key vehicle due to the lack of legs, but ST-84 from The Phantom Pain is super advanced.

- True, there isn't much set up for that, but I don't feel that makes it an inherent problem.

- I actually thought Ocelot's been pretty interesting. The Phantom Pain is actually probably the real personality of Ocelot, stripped of his double agent status. Even though he is the only one who knows the truth in TPP, he still seems far more genuine there. He started off incredibly arrogant, but chilled out through the years. His appearance in Portable Ops is a pretty good halfway point between MGS3 and MGSV, and all in all he seems consistent. The most important thing is that most of his behavior is an act from MGS1 on, as the plan is in full effect by that point.

- Big Boss has had a pretty smooth development. From MGS3, PO, and PW, there is a clear shift as he becomes a true commander of his armies, and slowly rejects The Boss's last actions. In The Phantom Pain, we don't get a huge glimpse of him due to the presence of Venom/Ahab, but his manipulation and willingness to sacrifice someone's identity purely for his own protection is a cold shift for him to take. His goals to fight Zero have begun to mold his personality. The reveal of Venom being the one who was killed in MG1 nullifies some of his evil vileness, as his MG1 appearance always seemed very simple and evil. Now, that was Venom, and Big Boss was only in MG2. He was already more complex than that, giving Snake a variation of the speech that The Boss gave him. His plans had gotten completely out of control, and he had given in to this soldier rage that fueled him so much since the 70s. It's a natural evolution of his stance at the end of Peace Walker. After getting barbecued, and seeing the world enter a new stage of peace after such catastrophe, he finally realized how far he had gotten off the path, and how much time he had wasted on the wrong thing. Thus, he was filled with remorse and ready to die.

Obviously, they were retconned reasons created over time, but that doesn't mean they are less valid. All in all, The Phantom Pain actually helped connect some pieces and make the flow smoother between Big Boss and Solid Snake.