The fate of all franchises, of all canon, is to descend into self-referential madness.
Guns of the Patriots infamously tells players that “War has changed.” Whereas conflicts in the series prior to this were primarily ideological struggles, most of the bloodshed in Metal Gear Solid 4 is a matter of business. Viewed metaphorically, it’s hard not to think of what that says about the game itself. It is a product, it exists as much as a matter of money-making as artistic drive. This anxiety, the tension between these two extremes, forms much of the game’s emotional core.
This game is a creator’s panic attack, a multi-hour-long reckoning with the intersection of money and art where the enemies we face are mostly Frankenstein-monster creatures assembled out of the leftover bits of the franchise. Of any game ever made, Guns of the Patriots is perhaps the clearest, most evocative exploration of what happens when a franchise goes on longer than planned. How do you wrap up a story so that corporate entities won’t just cut it into chunks and stitch together more and more games? What do you do when the monsters are so iconic?
What does it mean to inhabit a world where conflict exists only for the money it might bring, to persist in a franchise that’s spiraling inward on itself? You need only look at Guns of the Patriots’ boss fights to understand the horrors that arise. Let’s consider one of the game’s earliest bosses: Laughing Octopus. A member of the Beauty and the Beast Corps, everything from her visual design to the mechanics of her boss fight are a mutant mix of elements from prior games.
She takes her name from Decoy Octopus, the strange shapeshifter from Metal Gear Solid. Meanwhile, she is armed with powerful mechanical tentacles and uses a P90 submachine gun; both of these are signatures belonging to Metal Gear Solid 2’s mastermind, Solidus Snake. Her boss gameplay mixes the hide-and-seek stealth gameplay of MGS1’s Grey Fox battle with Metal Gear Solid 3’s fight with The Fear, forcing players to hunt around a large space in order to find a camouflaged foe. She and all the members of the Beauty and the Beast Corps will mix and match elements like this, something outlined in much greater detail in James Howell’s massive analysis document Monstrous Births. The series is no longer interested in coming up with new ideas, unable to stop and recenter. Instead, it grinds all prior games into a sort of goo and summons a variety of mindless and raging enemies to fulfill the prerequisite of having a few boss fights.
That latter part is important as well. The Beauty and the Beast Corps, even at the game’s release, received a kind of backlash for being paper-thin villains compared to the series’ prior tapestry of foes, which was woven with strange and unique people nevertheless motivated by a variety of personal and political reasons. Players in Metal Gear Solid mourned the death of Sniper Wolf not only because she was an alluring and empathetic femme fatale but because the script made sure we understood her past as a displaced Kurd looking for somewhere she could belong in the world. We’d come to truly care about her motives.
Meanwhile, the B&B unit is comically thin on characterization. They are mostly raging monsters to kill and little else. When Snake defeats one, he invariably receives a call from the support character Drebin outlining an almost absurdly abusive background of childhood violences that warped these attractive women (they are all based on real-life beauty models) into pitiable whirlwinds of iconic imagery. Indeed, Kojima intended for them to be even more dehumanized than they are in the final product. The original idea was to have every one of these women be naked during cutscenes. In a true sense they are simply delivery vessels for the things that players want from sequels: more of the stuff they already know, more action, more sexiness.
Putting the obvious feminist reading away here, it’s important to understand the Beauty and the Beast Unit as the purest distillation of Guns of the Patriots’ nightmarish franchise necromancy. In order to keep delivering action, the series stitches together mindless zombie figures, adorning them with cool details and features that fans will love and recognize. The path to a better future free of this kind of senselessness, for Snake and for the player, can only be reached by gunning these canon mockeries away. To be free of this mess, we need to fight all this canon and kill it.
This clash of canon, this tangled approach to pleasing the crowd, comes into sharp focus near the end of the game. After infiltrating the long-dilapidated Shadow Moses Island where the original Metal Gear Solid takes place, Snake escapes by piloting the scrapped remains of Metal Gear REX. Reaching the surface, he is forced to contend with MGS1 antagonist Liquid Snake—now piloting Metal Gear RAY—in a massive mech fight. This is the kind of thing that players have been clamoring for over the ages; forums fights about which mech was stronger were commonplace on sites like GameFAQs. Damn, this is cool!
It’s also a petty fan squabble come to life. Arguments about whether or not Metal Gear Solid or Sons of Liberty was the better game persist on the internet even to this day. The first is a foundational work of stealth action, undercutting movie tropes in surprising ways. The latter is a grand subversion of fan expectation and desires; Raiden is not as controversial these days but even in 2008 many people hated him. The battle between REX and Ray is not only a fun robo-kaiju romp; it’s a literalized battle of fandom passions that we get to play out.
The result is chaos. The fight between these two Metal Gears is explosive, causing tons of collateral damage to the island. The mechanics themselves are packed with horrible screeching blows and action-game finishers that see the two titans tossing each other to the ground and ravaging each other like mad dogs fighting over scrap of meat. It’s exciting, climactic and brutal. When a franchise starts to tear at itself, when games are pit against each other, the results are not pretty. Crucially, if the question here is “Which idea is stronger: the original or the subversion?” there is an answer! Guns of the Patriots ultimately decides that the first thing is the stronger and more resilient force. Snake and Metal Gear REX win the day, overpowering Metal Gear RAY—the series’ anti-Metal Gear unit—with the potency that comes from being “the goddamn original.”
Guns of the Patriots’ ending is famously messy and extremely long. The final two hours of the game is a lengthy run through many characters’ fates. For some, the spectre of canon is too powerful to escape. Take for instance Meryl Silverburgh’s marriage to series joke-character Johnny Sasaki, famous mostly for shitting his pants. The game’s move toward a sort of Hollywood happy ending requires a marriage, and so these two characters are awkwardly tossed at each other. Even after defeating various canon-mashed monstrosities, the plot finds a few moments to mash a few extra action figures together. It can seem fairly unrewarding.
Crucially, Kojima wanted to have the story end with Snake and Otacon being executed for crimes of domestic terrorism. This would be a way of definitively closing off the story, denying the birth of any more strange canon-monsters, but the decision was so disliked by his production staff that the ending was reworked. Still, the core impulse to end the series and deny any more forward momentum remains. The result is captivating and clumsy as Big Boss is revived through a variety of convoluted means and confronts Snake within the graveyard that Snake Eater’s The Boss has been buried in. Snake came here to die, already poisoned by a mutated disease in his blood; he intended to commit suicide. Instead, Big Boss resets the status quo.
Bringing out the true mastermind of the series’ misfortune, the mysterious Zero, Big Boss embarks on a lengthy monologue. One made a bit comical considering he’s also slowly dying thanks to the disease that Snake carries targeting him for instant death.
Even so, he offers a thesis:
“The moment zero becomes one is the moment the world springs to life,” Big Boss says. “So long as zero remains, one will eventually grow to one hundred again..”
Big Boss kills Zero and then passes away himself. The core of the series was always an ideological disagreement between these two men about how to carry on The Boss’ legacy and protect (or police) the world. Big Boss’ words are a bit clunky but the point is direct: so long as we have all this stuff around, so long as we have Snake and Big Boss, so long as there’s the smallest possibility of Metal Gear continuing, it will. The only way to end the series is to definitively shut the door. And while Snake is not executed in this version of the story, he is left with maybe a few months left to live. It’s a happier ending, but one that doesn’t lend itself to sequels.
If a different path had been forged, one that saved Snake from this fate or left conspirators lurking in the wing, there would have been a risk of horrible creatures like the B&B Corps getting conjured up again. Mashed together canon-freaks constantly rising as the series remixed itself over and over into meaningless iconography. The ongoing unavailability of this game to the general public since release, something finally being addressed this summer in a remaster, muddied the series’ ambitions. For many people, Metal Gear was left incomplete. Which risked resurrections…
Of course, even after Guns of the Patriots, it wasn’t like the Metal Gear series really gave up the ghost. Kojima would famously try to tell one more story in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, but that project was left essentially incomplete as clashes with Konami management and a ballooning production left the game without its true final chapter. Even after this, the anxiety present in Guns of the Patriots—the fear that the series would just become a zombified sludge of canon image and assets—became realized in the controversial spin-off Metal Gear Survive.
Metal Gear is a fundamentally incomplete series without Guns of the Patriots. That might sound obvious to say! The story isn’t finished without the ending? Wow! But it’s important to stress the nature of what’s happening here. Modern games such as Resident Evil Requiem emulate the model set by Guns of the Patriots, summoning up old monsters for us to kill in the hopes of establishing a new series status quo; they perform similar rituals because that is the inevitable fate of franchises. The question is whether you will mash everything into a Ready Player One fan-service multiverse, or find the strength to end things. Guns of the Patriots is almost twenty years old but it foresaw the world of messy cinematic universes and chose the latter.
This is the line. This is where we take a bow. After this? It’s not my problem.
This isn’t always done cleanly. Some characters are turned into sacrificial lambs, dehumanized and flattened into raving beasts. A few others are forced into awkward final tableaus. Underneath that is the message: find the courage to end things. Do it messily if you must but stand firm and conclude. If you leave even a single thread hanging, your story might rise up again as an ugly monster. Let the world return to zero. Let it die. This is good, isn’t it?
A remaster of Guns of the Patriots will be included with Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 when it launches on August 27.
