A Wobble Reviews Guest Article by Tom Laakso
This article contains ending spoilers for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Read at your own discretion.
Hideo
Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a stealth combat game,
set in a shadow history of the 1980s in which revolutionaries,
mercenaries, and terrorists vie for global power. The story, set in
Afghanistan and central Africa, unfolds in just two vast environments
which the player is free to explore. This flexibility extends to the
missions, which, once accepted, drive the story but can be completed
using a number of strategies. Stealth, brawling, assassination,
artillery strike, wolf attack, and wormhole abduction. The player is
allowed to choose if the protagonist, Big Boss, is a warrior or a
phantom, and these choices are echoed back in the rumors swirling in the
enemy camps, overheard as Boss slips by in the night -- unless he blows
them up with a grenade launcher first.
This
action is superimposed on a story of vengeance. Big Boss’ idealistic
mercenary organization seeks revenge against a rogue intelligence
officer, Skull Face, who nearly killed the Boss nine years earlier as
part of his own plot to avenge himself of perceived wrongs. Skull Face
and the Boss’ lieutenants deliver many monologues on the subject of
Boss’ rage, going so far as to give him a new code name, Venom Snake, to
reflect the depth of his poisonous anger.
Big
Boss himself, however, is notably silent about his supposed
motivations. It is possible he is driven by anger, but it is equally
plausible that he views Skull Face as a military rival, or as a threat
to peace. Boss rarely speaks at all -- a quiet emphasized by the plot’s
preoccupations with the virtues of silence. These are reflected both in
the selflessness of the mute romantic interest, and in Skull Face’s
belief in the imperialistic nature of language. Indeed, Big Boss is not
only a man of few words, but almost completely without affect. His
blank, slightly twitchy stare is continuously on display: in the title
menu, in the mid-mission helicopter rides, and in the opening cinematic
attached to every chapter of the game. This is not a failure of
technology. The faces of other major characters are extraordinarily
expressive; the face of Ocelot, one of Boss’ comrades, is quite
beautiful in its realism. The lack of both speech and visual cues as to
Boss’ interior state compliments the open gameplay, in which the player
can choose if the Boss is ruthless or merciful, and in the most
practical of terms. Will you spend your time rescuing endangered
animals, or murdering guards for minor rewards? There is an incongruity
between the player’s freedom to infer and act out the Boss’ morality,
and the assumptions expressed by the rest of the game’s cast. In
contrast to the beliefs of Skull Face, there is freedom in the game’s
action, and its reality is not controlled by language.
On
the other hand, the plot structure itself does impose an interpretation
of events on the player. Though he or she is free to make tactical
decisions, the arc of the story is mostly unchanged by these choices.
Every aspect of the plot is explicitly explained through monologue and
third-party conversation, mostly in the form of audio recordings played
as background during the game’s action. Motivations are spelled out,
ambiguities are cleared; strange powers and inexplicable events are
dismissed through excruciatingly detailed pseudo-science. This rigid
control over the game’s interpretation reaches its climax in the final
story mission. There it is revealed that the Boss’ identity crisis, set
up in the opening scenes and apparently played out through the player’s
moral choices, is not a personal or ethical struggle at all. Rather, it
is direct psychological trauma. The protagonist was never the Big Boss
of the earlier Metal Gear games, but is a disoriented coma survivor,
given plastic surgery and coached into believing himself the Boss, a
perfect decoy for the enemies of the real Big Boss. This is a bitter
pill: not only were the events of the game a meaningless diversion, but
all the freedom allowed the player was equally hollow. None of those
choices were actually advancing the development of the character who has
been at the center of the Metal Gear series for decades.
The
ending is the triumph of dictation -- the story erases the choices of
the player as he or she understood them. The sense of constraint is
reinforced by a change in the style of play. Players are forced to
relive the events of the game’s introductory chapter, repeating
themselves while using simplified, tutorial-style controls that are
noticeably constraining after playing with the game’s full mechanics for
many hours. This seems to contradict the conclusion that there is
freedom in action -- ultimately Skull Face is correct, and the words of
others, in this case Kojima himself, are chains.
There
is, however, a possibility of escape. The latter half of the game has
an odd structure, in which all missions become optional and may be
replayed infinitely; chapters become accessible out of order, and the
method of unlocking them is never explained; the plot jumps back forth
in time; and the final story mission is not the final mission overall.
This jumble leaves the elements of the plot re-arrangeable and
discardable. The player may follow the game’s ordained route through the
story, ending on its sour note, or may choose to conclude with one of
the game’s other stirring, late-game set pieces, many of which feel like
traditional cinematic climaxes: defeats, victories, a tragic romance.
“There are no facts, only interpretations”, the game quotes near its
conclusion. Metal Gear Solid V tells us it is in control, but quietly
suggests the story is in the hands of the player.
