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reviewed Metal Gear Solid 5 by Andrés Gil Vázquez

Andrés Gil Vázquez: Metal Gear Solid 5 (EBook, Spanish language, 2019, Self Published) 1 star

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Silent War nace como respuesta de no aceptaci{on a Metal …

Fuck Kojima Fans

1 star

This is the wet fantasy of every person who didn't understand MGSV or the Metal Gear saga in general. Kojima is probably the person who has the most fans who don't understand his works in any media I can think of, it's simply amazing how every one of his games is either a critique of the thing it mimics to be, or an interpretation of itself and a meta narrative about the serialization of works, and yet people refuse to see what they are and just want endless sequels and action macho adrenaline pumping blockbusters.

@FossilPoet

They haven't understood the game either, it seems. I just read the abstract and the introduction, but the game isn't about being "neutral" among two "imperialist nations" (let's for a moment forget the assumption that the USSR was imperialist by any stretch of Marxist Leninist standards). MGSV's whole point is for you to be a mercenary in the middle of endless proxy wars caused by an ubiquitous pre-post-911 paranoid all encompassing Deep State that ends up funding both sides of a conflict and maybe another three paramilitary groups meanwhile.

The MGS saga has always been about pacifism, right? In Peace Walker, though, they don't punish you for being violent all the times, and there are missions against "bosses" where you fight a heavy armoured vehicle unit, a tank unit, or a helicopter unit, etc, and the game basically doesn't give you much other option than violently killing the CIA backed troupes in Nicaragua. After the Ground Zeroes incident, shit hits the fan, all of the involvement in anti imperialist activities you had with MSF goes to shit, as Kazuhira puts it:

"Things've changed, Boss. We pull in money, recruits, just to combat Cipher... Rubbing our noses in bloody battlefield dirt, all for revenge. The world calls for wetwork, and we answer. No greater good, no just cause. Cipher sent us to hell, but we're going even deeper."

MGSV hardly punishes you if you want to choose a deadly violent path, and it gives you all the tools you'd like to do it that way, the difference being that here you are not on the good guys side, all pretensions of morality are long gone, you have become a gear in Cipher's/Zero's machine, you're no different from the Taliban when the CIA created it. The only difference is that in comparison to PW, there is a gameplay "mechanic" involved in committing attrocities called demon points where your horn grows and you become red full of blood which can't be washed away.

In the last mission of the game when you find out about something important there's a phrase "V has come to", which you could read as "5 has come 2", because what Kojima did with MGSV is almost a literal extrapolation of what he did with MGS2. The game is divided in two parts, (tanker and the rest in MGS2, GZ and TPP), both of those parts are radically different thematically, both lied in their trailers to what the game ended up being, etc. People wanted a dark grimmy tale with how Big Boss became the evil tragic guy but what you got instead is a mirror to look at your ugly disgusting mind.

So yeah, I don't think that analysis makes sense, what happens is that (which is related to what the Spec Ops developer says about death in video games) Kojima doesn't what to make a corny representation of war crimes, but to prove how normalized that is in the West and you can do whatever the fuck you want as long as you got good cover for it.