I don't get the hypnotherapy dumbness. He seems like an amnesiac, but he was implanted with all of BB's memories, it's dumb.
Didn't they just drug him tae fuck and spend almost 10 years hypnotising him with images, sounds and stories about Big Boss's life?
Plus head-shrapnel to make you more susceptible to suggestive images/hallucinations.
Plus high-end plastic surgery to make you look like the guy you've been hypnotised to believe you are
That would mess you up and in a crazy universe might make you basically like the second person.
There is nothing new here really.
When a trend is forming GAF tends to go ballistic with it. To the point of absolute ridiculousness...
Suddenly you just have to sound as if this game is the most shocking trash you had ever witnessed or else you are not in. So typically people start picking everything about the game and start mocking pretty much the entirety of it. Then they turn onto the creators/devs and they exercise their sarcasm skills till there is really nothing left to talk bad about it.
Then after a few months. Dust settles in. People are convinced this game is the worst game ever. But they read something about it, or watch a video, or start a new playthrough.
And then come the threads like "LTTP: MGSV is a great game" etc.
Its a very familiar GAF cycle. MGS2 drew the same (even worse comments) back then. Now suddenly its a masterpiece.
So really, you cant take 80% of the negative comments seriously anymore here. Not because people should like the game, far from it. Hate it all you like, i even have some serious problems with it. Just go borderline ridiculous with everything about it... its... just that... ridiculous.
Damn straight.
If Venom has all of the Big Boss memories why is he skeptical of psychic phenomena, he did fuck with the Sorrow and the Fury exploded into fire Dragon ghosts when he died.
Big Boss was critical of it back then, he just didn't say anything about it. For whatever reason he just doesn't want to deal with it this time.
Edit: that's not a great justification on my part, slightly misread your post - I reckon it's because the MGS3 stuff isn't explicitly psychic/telepathic, it's more physical and actively supernatural. It's the telepathy stuff which is new that he doesn't want to hear about.
It's hard to figure out what he knows cause the fucker refuses to talk, he just passively absorbs information.
I like to think he's got a deeply uncanny, unsettling feeling that he isn't himself and such doesn't comment on things. It doesn't feel "right". The only time we see him show true conviction is anything surrounding Quiet, and at the end when he punches the mirror – when he knows his true self.
It's well-written imo – whenever Venom does speak it's usually with a slight aloofness, as if he doesn't have total conviction about what he's saying. (Which he wouldn't subconsciously.) Then at the end when we hear lots from Big Boss himself, he has that edge of conviction and drive which he always had, that was missing from Venom. I thought that was great.
Edit: misread again - but it's actually easier to answer. We know what Venom knows, Zero/Ocelot explains it. He has been hypnotised/suggestion-trained with all of Big Boss's operations and training. It's pretty clear that from at least the Virtuous Mission onwards, basically everything Big Boss did was recorded closely. All of this has been repeatedly shown to Venom while in his drug-induced suggestive state. But he still doesn't like to talk about any of it.
I think both MGS2 and MGS3 have great, valid themes/messages.)