Is that even an explanation? At least back up your claim. It ended Solid Snake's story as well as Raiden's. What was so 'terrible' about it?
It didn't really end things the way I personally wanted them to.
I thought that despite turning Raiden into a ninja he would somehow still be a unique character, but he became pretty dry and goes through the same "I don't know who I am" to "I believe in my family" arc he does in MGS2. And they never really illustrate how he got to that point, just that he rescued Sunny but got captured and experimented on by a character who was also supposed to be dead and then somehow meets up with Eva and other stuff that is never shown. So he goes through quite a bit but he's just kind of there in Act 2 as a different character than the one at the end of MGS2. Also him shooting lightning bolts was silly.
Snake doesn't have much of a character for the game. He's pretty tired and just goes around doing stuff. He doesn't have the cold bloodedness he did in 1, the wisdom or air of experience he did in 2, or the sympathetic nature of Big Boss in 3. Old Snake is like an empty house that once upon a time had lots of furniture in it and a family but is now empty. He doesn't display any sort of emotions for his friends until the very last part of Act V where you get a sense of the old hero, and of course the Epilogue in the cemetary was moving.
Otacon is truly annoying in MGS4. I think he was kind of like Kojima's self-insert. Nerdy and weird, but kind hearted. The annoying part comes in the form of hammy jokes (this is PS3 remember?! No disc swap!), constant regurgitation of the circumstances and the stakes therein (Snake this is our responsibility! We have to do this Snake! This is our destiny Snake!), and he's involved in another dumb piece of writing: him and Naomi getting together with Naomi dieing afterwards. I think Emma's death in MGS2 stands out to people because it brought up a weird stepmom storyline and may have felt like drama for the sake of drama, but Emma at least starts the drama with Otacon right from her introduction as a character and she is even foreshadowed a bit in the Tanker. With Naomi (a pre-established character): she meets Otacon one moment, and they're both nerds and stuff so they bang, and then she gets cancer and dies.
And then there's the bosses. MGS is famous for death speeches, but it's like no effort went into them this time. Fortune was meant to be melodramatic about everything, but holy goddamn the Beauty and Beast storylines are more "emo" than Fortune every could be. Every single one comes in the same format too. Sniper Wolf was a pretty different character than Vulcan Raven. Vamp was different than Fatman. The COBRAs were similar to each other in the sense that they were just kinda there as obstacles but MGS3 didn't give them much exposition. MGS4 takes the COBRAs and DOES give them exposition and it SUCKS. The COBRAs all got a cool explosion and that was that. The Beauties got a boring and weird scenario where they try to walk up to Snake slowly and grab him followed by a trite Drebin conversation.
And there's other stuff too like Sunny, a 7 year old who writes a virus that completely erases the Patriot AIs while leaving society's infrastructure mostly intact. I understand the concept of savants but holy shit dude she's 7. And the MGS3 codec members all somehow being Patriots in one form or another. And you know the arm thing from MGS2 was dumb, but saying that Ocelot was pretending to be possessed through "psychotherapy" is exponentially even more dumb. And the stupidity really does culminate at the end of MGS4 when Big Boss comes back after canonically being killed twice...once I could understand but you're really going to bring your fictional character back twice? That's some dragonball z level shit and while I don't look to MGS for the meaning of life I'd appreciate just a little more seriousness in the storyline. There was no need to go batshit insane to that level. And he supposedly had all this collaboration with other characters like Naomi and it becomes this big convoluted mess that makes the S3 plan from MGS2 seem like the most straightforward children's popup book about counting apples that you could ever read.
But I mean that's just me.
