Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes

So my infamous review of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is perhaps one of the most glorious things I've ever written. I've shown it to quite a few MGS fans over the years and the reaction usually is something like "I CAN'T READ THIS" or "I am not even going to TOUCH THIS". It is MGS fan kryptonite, a review so scathing that cuts so deeply that they know that, were they to truly look at it with a truthful eye, they would have to renounce their affection for the series. 

It comes as little surprise then that a long-time fan bought me a copy of the new 'Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes' game that's recently seen release on Steam. So I've gone ahead and played that... all 2 hours of it... and am now ready to draw my sword against my old adversary once again.

Don't get me wrong:
The game works well and is a perfectly functional port. And the gameplay is adequate, even if the game is a criminally short two hours. The controls are tight (I used a PS2 controller for it and my only complaint is that I don't like aiming with the right control stick) and the guard's AI is interesting but flawed enough to give you lots of room for error.

But the problem, of course, is that Hideo Kojima wrote it. So let us discuss that at some length.

1) Kojima has no idea what kind of story he wants to write.

There are certain writers who give away their interests when they write. We know, for instance, that over at the Bioware writing desks they spend their lunch hours and break times playing 40k. In just the same way, we know from Metal Gear Solid that Hideo Kojima spends his spare time surfing the history section on wikipedia, reading conspiracy theories and watching ecchi anime.

I just wish he'd decide which one he wants to do.

He'll try to tie his game to real world events. mentioning things like the Sandinistas and Iran-Contra, and then will make his main villain a guy like this:

And then, before you can get your head around what kind of monumentally idiotic person would come up with something like that, suddenly you start hearing a long monologue about a teenaged girl being molested by a female doctor:

The tone in the average Metal Gear game bounces back and forth from gritty historical realism to loony GI Joe bad dudes to ecchi bullshit so quickly that I genuinely think that Kojima does not know how to differentiate between these three things. To him, those are the three things he thinks are COOL and so obviously he'd put them all into his personal wankfest game. The fact that they don't mesh well at all doesn't even occur to this guy because he lives in an impenetrable bubble forged by his own slavishly devoted fandom.


Ich. Fuck you Hideo Kojima.

2) Kojima is not original.

There are a bunch of tapes you have in your inventory at the start of the game that let you hear about a character called Paz. The above mentioned lesbian molestation is from said tapes. In a subsequent tape, you are treated to a description of what happened to Paz when she caught a cold.

First a dude tries to take his pants off in front of her for some reason and she hits him with a pillow. Then the lesbian lady comes in saying:

And she throws her Kleenix box at her. Then the rest of the cast comes in and there are similar WACKY HIJINKS, until at last Snake himself arrives and she gets all blushy and serious...

This scene is in every harem anime ever made. "Dumb love interests try dumb things in wacky montage, snubs all around, then the real deal happens and mushy music plays." Kojima uses this tripe without a moment's regret.

The basic template for Paz, the tsundere, is employed in similar fashion. In this artless and blunt way, with no drop of humanity or soul in there. Kojima's just saying "I'll do this thing I saw in that anime I watched last night that I liked."

Ugh. And yet this man is lauded as an artist! Fuck you Hideo Kojima.

3) This thing is collapsing under its own weight.

For obvious reasons, this is the first Hideo Kojima game I've played since MGS3. In spite of all the summary pages that the game provides trying to bring me up to speed on a guy called Zero and an organization called Cipher, it still is a huge mess of conspiracies and counterconspiracies, with the KGB and CIA involved in some convoluted plan to do something or other for reasons that are quite obscure to me and that doubtlessly would be obscure to all but the most devoted follower of Kojima.

But Kojima isn't willing to let one thread of it go. It's all shovelled out there and you'll hear these melodramatic dialogues with a guy demanding to know "WHERE IS ZERO?" when you're still trying to remember who the fuck Zero is supposed to be.

This is ultimately why Metal Gear Revengeance (the best entry in this dreadful series, which not by coincidence is also the entry Kojima had almost nothing to do with) succeeds where Kojima's work fails. MGR just said 'yeah whatever' to the history of Metal Gear and focused on telling a story. There was no attempt to weave these crippled details together that you'd have to go back to the old 2D Metal Gears to fully understand.

But Kojima, with his charmed life, cannot understand that and simply assumes that his readers will follow along with him. In the world he lives in, which is so completely insulated from legitimate criticism, such thoughts would obviously be forbidden.

And that is why I'll say it again: Fuck you Hideo Kojima.

I think I'll conclude the matter there, as that's about all one can really say about a criminally short two hour hackjob.

Maybe we'll talk about this again when Phantom Pain comes out, assuming someone gets it for me. There's more ...

Dragon Age: Inquisition

Dragon Age: Origins is a game I quite loved.

I loved the branching paths. I loved the mythology of the world, with the Maker, the Chantry and the Fade. I loved the characters. I loved the combat system. It was a game that spanned a good 80 hours of playtime in a single run through, but which still left me with more than a few unforgettable moments.

Dragon Age 2 meanwhile was a bit of a dip from there.

The world at large is unkinder to DA2 than I am. Yes the fact that Bioware shamelessly recycled old maps was somewhat sour, but it had characters like Merril who I could love and I enjoyed the character-focused narrative.

Dragon Age: Inquisition meanwhile is... well, there's no kind way to say it... it's kind of bad.

It's not terrible by most measures. The game's plot certainly clips along at a decent pace and it's still got all of the mythology from earlier entries that I really enjoyed. But the soul of the series has been drained out. There's none of the humour or sense of wonder that punctuated the original (and, to a lesser extent, its sequel). It's a sort of husk of a game that brings memories of better times, but doesn't have much to offer of its own.

So let's talk about why that might be in my normal fashion.

1) Romance.

So romance is probably the thing Bioware games are most known for. No matter who I talk to about Dragon Age or Mass Effect, the first question isn't "Who did you side with at the Landsmeet" or "Did you save the Council" or "Did you use blood magic to save the Arl?" No, the question is always: "Who did your character shack up with." Outside of the JRPG scene, Bioware is the only company that actually puts romance forward as an important aspect of their games.

Which is why it's mind boggling how bad the romances are in DAI.

As a straight male, you've got two romance options. One is Cassandra, a tough all-business woman who secretly reads Fifty Shades of Grey, and Josephina, a lady who is just kind of there. Both these romances are complete and utter chores to complete. To get Cassandra to like me, I had to roam the world and kill five dudes. She never said thank you for killing these five dudes, or even really extrapolate on why said dudes were all that bad in the first place. I just got a 'Cassandra approves' message, followed by a 'would you like to initiate a romance?' dialogue with her afterward.

The dialogue for the romances is so wooden. Just listen to this. I was absolutely cringing hearing my Inquisitor speak those lines. The fact that this is coming from a company renowned for its storytelling is just mind-numbing.

Back in Dragon Age: Origins, I recall sitting alongside Lelianna by the campfire and listening to her stories of the world. I vividly remember her hauntingly beautiful song of the Dalish Elves. I felt how my character Arathen, an Elf of the Circle of Magi who never knew his own people, would be entranced by her voice and the stories she told. The game made the conscious effort to make me, as the roleplayer, fall in love with this character.

In DA:I no such effort is made. It's just assumed that you as the player will pick one of these people. At no point will Cassandra or Josephina do anything to make you care about them. It's simply assumed by the game that you'll care about them, because it's a Bioware game.

2) Gender and sexual orientation.

As far as I'm concerned, Dragon Age 2 solved the question of the inclusion of homosexual dating options in DA2. They took the simple but elegant step of simply making all four of the romance options (two girls/two guys) bisexual. Bing bang boom, solved. That's less work for everyone involved, particularly if you have the romance dialogue avoid gender specific pronouns. So really, it's an elegant solution for everyone involved.

"But wait," someone at a Bioware board meeting said, "If everyone's bisexual and sexual orientation doesn't matter, then how will we make a character defined entirely by his sexuality?"

In a sensible board room, the answer would've been: "We don't."

In Inquisition's board room, however, the answer was: "Oh good point!"

And so it is that the game has Dorian. Named no doubt after Oscar Wilde's famous novel, Dorian is a character defined entirely by the fact that he likes getting it up the butt. Pursuing this guy's questline literally puts you into a 90s "Dad, why can't you accept me as ME?" after school special. All of his backstory involves his previous romantic involvements. And the game delivers all of this in this smug 'we're sending a social message' tone that you just want to strangle the guy and the developers. 

What saddens me is that this really passes for progress in some circles. As if having a fictional character parrot some cheap talking points somehow changes society. No guys, that's not how it works. Didactic works of fiction never go anywhere. Dorian being a guy defined by where he puts his dick does not make for a compelling or memorable character, unless you're the kind of person who's just that desperate to have a person from that group in your book. In that case, whoopdefuckingdo for your low fucking standards.

But let me just say: DA1 and 2, which both had homosexual options and quite pointedly didn't make a big deal out of it, were much more compelling cases for the normalization of homosexual relations than this utterly backward Dorian shit.

3) Gameplay.

I keep hearing people saying this game is somehow like Skyrim, which makes me wonder if any of these people have played Skyrim before.

Skyrim is meant to simulate an organic world that the player is one small part of. It occasionally has glaring flaws (like villagers trying to fist fight Dragons) but that's the whole idea.

Dragon Age: Inquistion, meanwhile, is a single player MMO. It's about walking around in a big field, finding a cluster of dudes standing around in the field who you promptly murder because they showed up as 'red' on your radar screen. Like any MMO, most of the time the dudes appear to be minding their own business and not doing anyone any harm until you show up and start shooting lightning at them. Are they really in fact 'bandits' in that case? Maybe they just wanted to be left alone? We'll never know.

In any case, the MMO represents the most stagnant and boring genre of them all, one that is sustained only by the happenstance social presence of some other actual humans to talk to. In this case, you don't even have that.

I don't understand why this might be. The original Dragon Age was a strategic game. I recall having Alaistar tank up a horde of Darkspawn, while Lelianna snuck around and Sten hewed them down, all while I engaged in a magical duel with the enemy caster and healed. It was intense, it was fun and it rewarded good planning and effective use of resources. In this, you just click and spam skills MMO style. Why? Why would they do this?

I have one suspicion, which is that they originally wanted to make this an MMO and then, after the Old Republic utterly failed, realized that that was a shit idea. But that just makes it worse if you think about it. It means that they've essentially sold us their garbage.

4) Utter laziness.

I'm just going to list off things in the game that Bioware could've fixed if they could've been arsed:
- They took out the old kill animations. No more jumping on dragon's backs to do cinematic finishing moves.
- There are still only 12 hair styles to choose from, 3 of which are variants on being bald.
- Bioware doesn't know how brown people look and thus makes its brown players choose between being grey-brown and black.
- Their save loading feature forgets half your decisions. Zevran appears in the game through one letter sent to Lelianna. Would it have killed them to make it so I could've used their site to define that or was it just crucial that I read that letter?
- The AI settings are so limited that you don't even have to ever touch them.
- Tactical mode does not zoom out enough.
- The music sucks and hardly plays at all, with the game showing a strong preference for ambient wilderness sounds over any kind of music. This coming from a company that made the Darkspawn theme a couple of years ago, one of the most memorable tunes of the aughts.  Bioware has apparently forgotten the evocative power of music.

And that's just for starters

5) Stealing from Gamesworkshop.

Unity Plaza's inaugural post was about how Bioware likes to rip shit off. I like the universe of Dragon Age, but I remember once that the Penny Arcade guy pointed out that it's ripped off from some other fantasy novel that I don't know, so maybe I shouldn't give them so much credit for it. Still, normal Bioware plagiarism aside, I think it's a good universe.

I just don't know why Bioware keeps going to fucking Warhammer 40k for plotpoints.

Morrigan: "These ancient Elves didn't build roads, they had a bunch of teleport mirrors that led to this place in between."
Me: "Oh, I see. So these old Elf guys... they made a network, or shall we say, a web of teleporters?"
Morrigan: "Err yes..."
Me: "And this is a place where they lead... a place in between. So I guess we could call it a Webway?"
Morrigan: "... ummm..."
Me: "And you know, 'Ancient Elves' is such an awkward term, maybe we could just call them El..."

I like 40k well enough (even if I do want GWS to go out of business), don't get me wrong. But Bioware has consistently across their games just snatched up less flashy elements of the 40k universe (they've yet to touch the actual Space Marines, but I'm sure that will come) and just tossed them in shamelessly. Can't you at least pick something else to steal from? Holy fuck.

Why is it that the biggest 'story driven' game companies continues to get away from this? We're not really in the nursery stages anymore, with Bioware trying to inch away from being a Star Wars game creator. They've released 6 goddamn original IP blockbusters and ALL OF THEM HAVE HAD THIS PROBLEM.

Man, and people use to joke about GWS suing Blizzard because of the design of the Marine.

Conclusion:

The game is playable, sure. If you love the Dragon Age universe, it's something to go through. I'm going to try to slog through the remainder of the game even in spite of the above because I do like the DA universe (and I paid 60 fucking dollars).

But there's just so many utterly awful decisions in this game from a design and story writing standpoint that I must warn you away. Don't reward Bioware for shoveling this shit onto its customers. There's more ...