Stealth_Cobra
Member
It really gets to me, Kojima had one thing to do, one very simple thing, to please all the fans, and it was to be faithful to what he himself presented in the trailers and give us a revenge-filled game showcasing the fall of Big Boss and the rise of Outer Heaven... And yet he managed to do a 180 and do the exact opposite, leaving us with a game that doesn't fill in the gaps and is basically needless filler in the timeline once again.
I guess it doesn't matter anyomre, since he's been fired, but Kojima really needs to listen to fan feedback and actually deliver people the game they want.
After MGS1, everyone wanted to see more of Snake, to see how Foxdie was going to affect him, we all wanted a Snake vs Solidus fight. Kojima sold us on the project by lying to us, showing us the tanker and Big Shell with Solid Snake as a playable character, only to piss us off and introduce raiden, the patriots, needless plot convulsions about AI and simulations and a plot that didn't really make any sense.
For MGS3, most people wanted the game they didn't get with MGS2, a proper game about Solid Snake, but Kojima went back to the past, making us play as Big Boss, with the exact same voice and personality as Snake. It was an odd choice, one that could have been terrible, but for once, it actually worked. Kojima nailed it.
Then, for MGS4, Kojima decided what we wanted out of the final Solid Snake game was to see him as an old geezer. He promised huge, dynamic conflict zones where you could slide with various factions, or "let the world be". I'm not saying it was a pure betrayal, but explaining everything with nanomachines, retconning supernatural events and stuff like vamp / ocelot's arm, and Bringing Back Big boss for an epilogue.. Still, it was probably the MGS game where Kojima actually delievered what he promised and giving fans closure, well asides from clearly depicting Snake as a guy that was going to kill himself and setting him up for the deed for 4 chapters.
Finally, comes MGSV, where Kojima promises us Big Boss becoming a "Demon", a plot about "Revenge", the "Rise of Outer Heaven". The marketing campaign is built on the idea of Big Boss training child soldiers, killing people in cages, covered in blood in burned villages and shooting his own men in his own base. But instead, we get a dumb body double plot where the guy builds a meaningless base that is obsolete anyway since the "real" bases are Outer Heaven and Zanzibar Land anyway. It accomplishes nothing in terms of overalll story arc asides from awnsering a question noone asked. How did Big Boss survive MG1 (awnser : He didn't)... Wow, did we really need a whole game to setup a body double just for THAT.... Coudn't he just have been left for dead by Snake due to the detonation sequence being in place and crawl out into a vent leading to an escape route or whatever. It's a MSX game for christ's sake, it's not like we saw a clear boss fight ... He just explodes like all other bosses do and then you climb a ladder out of Outer Heaven.
I'm not talking about Portable Ops and Peace Walker because I consider them as filler episodes, in the sense where they do a small story arc for Big Boss without really having huge repercussions in the lore. Basically, Kojima has perfected by now how to sell us games that seem like they will advance the plot forward, yet end up being side stories when you actually finish them, not really tackling what's actually needed to move the plot fowrward.
I mean, Kojima had like 5 things to do when he decided to make games about Big Boss:
1 - Show us the rise of Outer Heaven... Which he didn't properly do. Sure, you can argue that Diamond Dog's Base perhaps gets retconned into Outer Heaven, or that he'll use the troops and gear to build a land-based base eventually, but really ,how hard would it have been take the existing mother base and paste it into the african tileset instead of being an oilrig base.
2 - Show us the creation of Foxhound and how BIg Boss lead it. Portable Ops hinted at this, since you could recruit freaks of nature like Python, Gene, Null, Ocelot, Eva in your unit... Sad that in the end, it's the closest we'lll ever get to being able to play as Big Boss leading highly skilled, almost supernatural soldiers into battle.
3 - Show us why Big Boss become evil, and why he "played both sides" in regards to the Foxhound vs Outer Heaven situation. We get no awnser about this. Having a body double creating Outer Heaven and taking the fall does not explain the fact Big Boss was the man responsible for that fall. Why is he toppling what his "phantom" built , again ? Because he wants to build Zanzibar Land ? Whatever, at this point I don't care anymore ?
4 - Show us, at least in some form the Solid Vs Big Boss fight. Playable , cutscene, we didn't care. But it was the key "missing link" in the franchise. The MGSV Launch trailer hinted at this, showcasing a burned Big Boss with no hair and the exposed skeleton teeths, and for the whole duration of the game, I was dying to play the last secret mission as Solid Snake, defeating Big Boss and finishing the series properly... Yet we didn't get that. Instead, we redo mission 1 with the same tutorial prompt , but with a dumb plot twist that doesn't make sense since Ishmael has both eyes, no beard, and the talk between "Real Big Boss" and Ocelot occurs at 6 AM when they left on the whaler ship at 4AM. The game can't even make sense of it's own mess, for christ's sake.
5 - Explain what Big Boss was really trying to accomplsh. Instead, we see him drinking pina coladas in vacation after a nine year break while his body double does all the work, then he comes back to Foxhound for reasons, sends two of his best men to kill Venom Snake, then steals Oilix and build Zanzibar Land... It makes Big Boss seem like an asshole, especially when you consider the fact he's basically okay with his best men being maintained in an artifical coma for years, a man that took the plunge and got most of the Shrapnel to save Big Boss. Instead of being treated like a war hero, he's maintained in an artifical coma for nine years, gets his personality destroyed and replaced by Big Boss's memes, possibly gets his eye volontarily destroyed, then is used to take the heat off the real Big Boss for the next ten years as he does all the heavy lifting. For a guy that left the patriots because he found it ammoral that Zero wanted to make clones of him, he sure doesn't mind the psychological terrorism they do on Venom. Honestly, this kinda makes me want to hate Big Boss as a character. He went from a guy that built nations because he was fed up with soldiers being used to a guy willing to destroy someone's personality just to take the heat off him. The "real" Big Boss would have heard Zero's phantom plan and said "Sorry Ocelot, but that's not what I'm going to do" I'll get back into shape, I'll get my revenge myself and if I die doing so, so be it ! I'm only alive when cheating death on the battlefield anyway !
