Metal Gear Solid has always suffered that old complaint about how it's "too much movie" and "not enough game".
The problem with that argument, as I see it, is that the person complaining is always someone who came to Metal Gear Solid with the mindset of: “I want an action game.” But Metal Gear Solid isn’t an action game. To quote the “Colonel” in MGS2, “This is a role-playing game, isn’t it?” Indeed, GW. Indeed.
Hideo Kojima’s stories are over-the-top. They are not realistic, and they’re not meant to be. They’re meant to be complicated and complex, dramatic, character-driven and yes, fun too.
But the funny thing about Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid stories is that they’re tailored to fit in the videogame medium perfectly. Elements that would be a burdon to a movie are a boon in a videogame.
Consider a MGS3 movie. In the span of a couple of hours, a guy, admittedly a super-spy ultra-secret agent guy, but still a guy gets dropped off in the jungle, where he then has to avoid getting caught by a huge number of guards pacing the grounds of a Soviet base, where he encounters numerous super-powered villains who he, as a seemingly normal guy who’s found an arsenal of guns on the base, is able to defeat in a timely fashion, all while finding out about this giant walking tank that can launch a nuke, the political intrigue behind why he’s really there, the backstory of his main enemy and former mentor, et cetera, et cetera.
First of all, that’s going to be a very long movie. But even ignoring that, without taking part in the actual sneaking around, the fighting against super-powered villains, and so forth, a completely passive audience would both have a very hard time accepting the story, and moreover be overwhelmed by the whole situation. It would seem completely unfathomable.
But when you’re playing the game, and when you’re the person that’s sneaking around and defeating these enemies and finding out these truths, it becomes more acceptable. It goes from looking impossible to being completely believable because you just physically did it. Even though these random supervillains pop out of nowhere for very flimsy reasons it all seems somehow sensible. And by the time you reach the giant, nuclear-weapon toting robot at the end, you feel like, “Yeah, maybe Snake can pull this off.”
Anyway, the ultimate point I’m making is that for the story he wants to tell and the characters he wants to develop, Kojima’s best medium is the videogame, not the movie. Admitedly, it’s a videogame with a lot of cut-scenes, but hitch all those cut-scenes together in a movie without any gameplay in between them, and the whole Solid Snake mythos will feel too artificial and contrived.
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