Games of the Generation #4 - Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

Even heroes have to die

There are all sorts of games and those games strike all sorts of tones - funny, exciting, DARK, reflective and goofy. But very few games are sad. And that's what Metal Gear Solid 4 is. For all of its massive bombast, its Hollywood level production, orchestral soundtrack and (then) cutting edge graphics, my immediate memory of it is always the quiet melancholy which suffuses the production. All the explosions, all the guns and graphics and trademark ludicrous touches of director Hideo Kojima cannot hide the fact that this is a game about a man dying.

MGS4 partially reaches this position of course through the legacy of its illustrious predecessors. It's standing on the shoulders of giants, but that doesn't make its own achievements any less impressive. Kojima returns to the dystopian future we briefly glimpsed in Metal Gear Solid 2 to layer his themes of inheritance, war and human fallibility even more deeply than before. There aren't many games that deserve the descriptor 'operatic' but this is absolutely one of them, as we pull together every character, every thread from a decade of tactical espionage action for a rousing finale. The conflict balloons to a scale never before seen, and yet it still feels intimate, still personal. The world may be at stake but this is always about Solid Snake, and his battle against his nemeses, be that Liquid Ocelot, old age or the sins of his 'father' Big Boss. It's what makes this fight matter more than countless other 'take over the world' modern military videogames. This time we care if the world ends.

All of this emotion though wouldn't matter much if there wasn't a game to back it up. Fortunately, technology finally matches the grandiosity of Kojima's vision, liberating MGS from tight corridors and small play areas, and throwing us onto vast, dynamic battlefields. The game constantly changes approach and atmosphere, from a chaotic middle-eastern conflict to a tense game of cat and mouse on the streets of Eastern Europe to an emotional return to Shadow Moses Island (complete with astonishing robot-on-robot combat). For the first time in the series you're not fighting the controls, instead appreciating the Resident Evil style pop-out shooting. Octocamo offers all the flexibility of MGS3's camouflage system without the annoying time spent in menus, while the Drebin points upgrade path makes for easy play style customisation. This feels like the game where MGS finally stepped into the modern age without losing any of what made it unique.

Uniqueness is what makes Metal Gear Solid 4 such a memorable experience. There may be elements from other games, and characters and ideas from previous entries in the series, but they've never been assembled in anything quite like this. At the time both Kojima and Konami claimed that this would be the final entry in the franchise, a claim that even at the time seemed ludicrous, and so it's proved. Yet there is something very definitive, very final about the game, a feeling that it can't be surpassed no matter what may be yet to come. And for a game that is so sad, so desperate - it's the only game that's ever made me cry - it's important to remember that the moral is ultimately hopeful. Snake doesn't pull that trigger, he doesn't make that final choice. He's still going to die, but before that, he's going to live for the first time in a long time. That's a worthy message for any story to end on. It's good, isn't it?