@kasaioni: Thanks for the response. I have finished it now, and in the end most things are... relatively clear, anyway.
Final thoughts on the game:
Ended up liking it, but it's a weird like. I had fun, except when I had to listen to Drebin talk for hours. Can't tell if it's longer or shorter than MGS3. I beat them both in around 20 hours, but a much larger part of those hours were spent watching cutscenes or occasionally setpieces and turret sections. Some of them are cool and some of them are not, but the cutscenes are all painfully slow. Played this way more lethally than 3, killed over a hundred people compared to a dozen that all got blown up while escorting EVA. It's fun, but I get the impression that I cheat myself out of what little gameplay there is when I just run past everything, shooting grenades back at my pursuers. Despite providing more opportunities than ever for playing non-lethally by having many enemies be robots, an efficient camo system and making sleep gas mines of all things, the war zones, turret sequences and number of explosive weapons made me more inclined to murder dudes instead of knocking them out. Most of the chapters aren't significant stages. Except for the middle east, South America and Shadow Moses the rest is all a few bosses, some cool setpieces and tooons of cutscenes. I have no idea how you people who never played any MGS games before liked this game, I can hardly think of a single thing past the first two chapters that is not some sort of callback. Don't feel very good about the Beauty and the Beast unit. Except for Screaming Mantis, they all hide during their fights and have annoying personalities. The "beauty" parts of their fights make me uncomfortable. It's weird enough to have Drebin narrate their gruesome if a little hard to take seriously backstories, but having them be these hot models that are all craazy from their traumas make it look like an odd fetish thing. Other characters talk about the beast inside during later cutscenes, but if there was a message to them, it's lost on me. I appreciated the callbacks to the former boss teams and think their powersuit designs are very cool, though. I suppose they might have been designed so you could attack them with lethal weaponry first and then decide afterwords to kill or sedate them, but the implementation just makes me feel awkward about it.
I'm happy with it as a very fanservicey game that ties up all the loose threads of the earlier games with a lot of skill. I liked all of the elements that were used again, even the characters and plot threads that annoyed me in MGS2. Didn't expect MGS4 to make me appreciate Vamp, but next to the B&B unit he's a fondly familiar face with a will of his own who doesn't scream all the time. Raiden doesn't get on my nerves outside of MGS2 in general, it seems. Even Rose didn't bother me, perhaps because of her small amount of screentime. Loved coming back to the familiar Shadow Moses Island after two modern warfare-like scenarios, and the Arsenal Gear-like Outer Haven. It looks like Kojima winged the whole thing, but the story ended up as well as I could wish for and he makes it seem as intended as he could, in ways like tying the narrative closely to all the former games and naming chapters and bosses after them. MGS4 largely cares for the characters that are left and that I care for, and it gives everyone a proper cool scene and sendoff. I still wonder what turned the support team from MGS3 into different people except for retcons, but mostly I buy everyone's allegiances. I mean, the story is a real mess, you'd have a hard time telling anyone what exactly happens and have it make sense, but if I can't point to specifics I don't get to complain and a lot of cool shit happened. It even ended its story with a finality that changed my opinion on a couple of other games in the series. To be more precise, I now get why some posters in Metal Gear Scanlon don't appreciate Revengeance very much. It's a good game, a slightly worse and significantly shorter Bayonetta with some new mechanics and a way different setting, and I like it. But after 4? I can tell why some fans might feel the same way I feel about how Platinum did The Legend of Korra, although Revengeance is a much better game. Compared to the original, it's a pretty shallow take on the fiction, and it doesn't feel compatible with the way 4 ends.
Also, I have no idea why they decided to make 5 now. I like Big Boss, but man. The story feels completely done, at least for the snakes.
I'm gonna go listen to the GOTY 2008 podcast again now.
Edit: That was not an interesting discussion.
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