So, I just played through, or perhaps more accurately, sat through episodes 28-31 in a single sitting.
I think it's mainly due to the relative sparseness of this game's story that this latest segment seems so overwhelming to me. It feels to me as if Kojima had done his very best to be a good boy, and not fall into his old tropes of showering the players with exposition/mecha porn, but finally couldn't contain himself no more. He reached his boiling point, and apparently, that's where Metal Gear happens.
There's a ton to say on the events leading up to this semi-final encounter, and even more on what might come next, but what I'd like to talk about is Metal Gear Sahelanthropus.
Now, I've played a lot of video games in my days, and seen a fair share of what I consider to be impressive boss fights. As in boss fights that leave an impression on you. By this I mean the sheer scale of the Colossus in God of War 2, the slow and methodical sniper battle with The End in MGS 3 or the serenely disturbing and lonely beauty of the Moonlight Butterfly in Dark Souls 1. Moments that stay with you long after you've stopped playing, the kind of experiences you know that you're going to remember for a long time to come.
I think Metal Gear Sahelanthropus outclass all of those. There's an authenticity to it that defies it's scale. It feels as if it belongs in this world and is moving of it's own accord. Previously, I've always felt that large-scaled bosses were built around gimmicks or an abundance of scripting to make them work. And even then, it was their scale, not the mechanics of said fights that truly impacted. Sahelanthropus didn't feel like a lumbering beast to me, it felt like the perfect predator, and it scared the living shit out of me. Half of the fight, I spent running away, scrambling for cover as it whipped about it's terraforming gundam sword, and I'd hear myself, as if from a distance, gasping and grunting as it nearly got me time and again.
At one point, I called in a tank I'd previously fultoned, and drove down a sloping path, firing as I went. I was finally able to put some distance between me and the beast, and do some damage to it in the process, and then the air changed, turning a dull red. Metallic archae, was it? I saw my tank rust and decompose even as I tried to make sense of what was happening, parts of it peeling away as Sahelanthropus closed the distance.
As the fight went on, the boss changed forms and patterns in ways that felt unpredictable, lunging at me bodily or shifting to use it's rail gun, blowing my support chopper to pieces. At the very end, it stood there, shivering, sparkling, on it's last legs. The damage done to it obvious in it's mannerism and look.
I don't know if it's even possible, but I was at even lower health and with no ammo to speak of. I had a single grenade remaining, and no time to call in a supply drop before it gunned me down. In a moment of desperation, I called out to Quiet to take aim, and threw the grenade, and even as I did, I knew it'd fall short. She hit it mid-air and ricocheted it straight into Sahelanthropus' open maw where it exploded, finishing him off.
By the time I got to the score screen, I was breathing heavily, sweating just a little. In retrospect, I can't believe how tense a video game had made me feel. That just doesn't happen, but it did.
S-Rank, huh? Whatever you say, game.
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