I’ve come around on Metal Gear Solid 4.
Back when I first played it, I just couldn’t get into it. Now I enjoy it a lot.
As I continue to add to my now many playthroughs of the game (still haven’t got the Big Boss Emblem, but soon), one particular aspect of its design and storytelling stands out to me more than any other:
The idea of retrograde motion.
Retrograde motion, as I understand it, refers usually to the apparent backwards motion of planets in Earth’s night sky. While the path on which a planet travels through the sky typically remains unidirectional, sometimes planets will appear to reverse their trajectory and move backwards.
The planets aren’t actually moving backwards of course. They keep in their orbits and don’t change direction. The optical illusion of reversal comes as a result of a difference in speed between our orbit around the sun and that of other planets. I won’t pretend to understand it on any more technical level than that.
The appearance of moving backwards when you’re actually moving forwards: that’s retrograde motion.
Metal Gear Solid 4 flips this concept on its head.
In MGS4’s design, setting, and character writing, backwards motion is disguised as forward motion, regress veiled by a guise of progress.
Let’s explore how.
Before we start, I’ll just say that I’ve talked about most of what I’m going to say here before, both on this blog and on my twitter, but I want to detail this stuff again here in a cleaner format to collect my own thoughts and to draw a few more connections.
Retrograde Enemies
Guards and sentries are a core design component in any stealth game. Metal Gear is no exception.
But Metal Gear Solid 4 does something interesting with its guards that I think few other stealth games do: as the game proceeds, guards as the player comes to know them in the game’s early chapters disappear.
Human guards — the kind that populate the Metal Gear series’ maps more commonly than any other type of enemy or obstacle — are gradually replaced with machines. The PMC troopers and rebel forces of Acts 1, 2, and 3 give way to gekko, dwarf gekko, and sliders, unmanned autonomous weapons.
“Slowly but surely, machines render us obsolete.” That’s a theme with which plenty of fiction grapples, including MGS4. For example: Rose. In MGS4, Rose is a psychological counselor who provides support regarding Snake’s mental state, but advances in technology have made calling her on the Codec nearly useless. Why call Rose to find out about Snake’s psyche and stress levels when you can just as easily — more easily, actually — look at a readout in the corner of the screen? It’s more immediate and more informative than Rose’s comments ever are.
Similarly, MGS4’s Codec lacks frequencies that you can use to save the game and to receive information about weapons. In previous Metal Gear games, characters like Mei Ling, Rose, and Para-Medic handled saving. Nastasha, Pliskin, and SIGINT were contacts that you could call to get info on weapons and items. In MGS4, both of these functions are handled manually in the Mk. II’s menu.
Advancements in technology have eliminated the need for people.
But from a game design perspective, replacing human enemies with robotic ones is no advancement at all.
On the contrary: MGS4’s human enemies actually represent an advancement in game design and technology. Its robotic ones represent a reversion in the same.
MGS4’s human combatants, including both PMC soldiers and local resistance fighters, exhibit different behavior from the guards in previous Metal Gear games. For example, each enemy has a readable emotional state that can affect his actions. As well, MGS4 gives its guardes a sense of smell, allowing them to detect cigarette smoke1. And unlike in previous series entries, not every NPC on the battlefield is necessarily hostile to Snake. Snake can befriend rebel fighters by helping them combat PMC soldiers, forming mutually beneficial alliances and even helping resistance fighters win tough battles, albeit only temporarily. In this way, MGS4 uses technology to evolve the series’ classic game design.
On the other hand, the game’s robotic enemies do not advance the game’s design in the same manner. And not only that; though they appear more advanced than their human counterparts, they in fact recall and reiterate the behavior of past enemies in the series, taking the game’s design backwards. For example, the flying sliders serve as target fodder like you see in the series previous vehicle “escape sequences.” And with their rigid patrol routes and lines of sight that are visible to the player, dwarf gekko recall guards in the original Metal Gear, who moved at sharp angles and whose completely linear field of vision was fully comprehensible at all times.
In MGS4, obstacles of a more mechanical nature naturally behave more mechanically than humans do. They reinstate into MGS4’s design an old style of enemy behavior, dragging the series’ design backwards just as the game’s human enemies propel it, for better or worse, forward.
Near the end of the game, human combatants return to the battlefield. Act 5 pits Snake against waves of Frog soldiers sporting powered suits that enhance their physical abilities. As James Howell points out in Sons of Big Bucks: Metal Gear Solid 4 and the Video Game Economy, these “less-than-human” Frog soldiers lack common human features and appear outwardly machinelike. Accordingly, they too represent a regression in design: like enemies in earlier Metal Gear titles, and older video games in general, they disappear completely when killed, Howell notes.
MGS4’s type of retrograde motion, regress disguised as progress, is on full display when it comes to the game’s enemy design. The further you go in the game, the more technologically advanced the enemies become. At the same time, the more regressive the design surrounding them gets.
Retrograde Chronology
MGS4 also uses its setting to thematize its version of retrograde motion, reverse movement hidden by a veneer of progress.
Unlike most previous entries in the Metal Gear series, MGS4 takes place in many different locations all across the world. The game’s chronology is linear, and so is the player’s progression from place to place. First you are in the Middle East, then you travel to South America, then Eastern Europe, and so on.
However, as Futurasound Productions points out in the video “You Missed the Point of MGS4,” a reverse chronology accompanies Snake’s forward trajectory through the game’s linear series of locales, suggesting that your progression through the game entails regress just as much as it does progress, and that time is moving backwards even as it moves forwards.
He talks about it at 8:50 in the video:
“We seem to move in reverse order throughout the game,” says Futurasound (whom I assume everyone who will ever read this is already familiar with) of MGS4’s progression through its five acts, “from the modern battlespace of the Middle East [Act 1] to the proxy-war field of the 1970s in Latin America [Act 2] to the thrill of World War II-era espionage and the Cold War in Eastern Europe [Act 3] to, finally, the World War II-era battlefields of the Aleutian Islands and the Pacific Ocean [Acts 4 and 5].”
MGS4’s five acts cover the history of American warfare in the 20th and early 21st centuries, says Futurasound.
However, they do so in reverse chronological order.
Even as MGS4 impresses on you a trajectory of progress and forward momentum by dividing its action and narrative into a linear series of five acts, it hides a regressive chronology that transports you through a history reenacted in reverse.
Regressive Perspective
In the examples so far, the motif of retrograde motion has taken a notional form only. It exists in MGS4’s design and setting as a concept. Concepts, however sound, necessarily lack tangibility.
But the motif arises in more palpable form in MGS4’s boss battles, particularly those against the Beauty and the Beast Unit, MGS4’s answer to FOXHOUND, Dead Cell, and the Cobra Unit.
During the first phase of each Beauty and the Beast Corps boss battle, Snake combats the boss in her “beast” form, wherein she dons a mechanized exoskeleton outfitted with armor and weaponry.
During the second phase, however, the boss emerges from the exoskeleton to attack Snake up close. While the rules of the “beast” form battle differ from boss to boss, the ones that govern this “beauty” form remain consistent for all four B&B members: the boss walks towards Snake and attempts to kill him when she gets close. Snake must keep his distance and fend them off with his weapons.
Retrograde motion through the game’s physical space marks Snake’s movement in these battles. The most practical and commonplace way to see each encounter through is to face the boss, raise your weapon, and walk backwards while shooting/throwing as she walks towards you. When you do this, you move Snake backwards through the game’s 3D arena, away from the direction that he is facing, producing a physical retrograde motion that looks forward while heading back.
This type of backwards movement is not common in the first- and third-person shooters that MGS4 styles itself partially after. This type of game heavily favors a forward trajectory under most circumstances. Indeed backwards motion is rather uncommon in shooters of any type, going all the way back to old shmups.2 Seemingly few shooters of any type — shmup, FPS/TPS, rail shooter, etc. — commonly direct players to forgo forward momentum. Yet this is what MGS4 does during its “beauty” boss battles.
MGS4 adopts and encourages shooter-like gameplay, but pairs it with a motion that operates against genre norms: shooting with a primarily backwards trajectory.
Contrasting the mechanical functions of its game design (walking, aiming, shooting, etc.) with their lineage, MGS4 suggests that the shooter-esque type of gameplay has little to do with forward movement. In fact, it represents a movement backwards. For a game like Metal Gear, this type of design is a retrograde one, says MGS4.
As both a product and a critique of the FPS explosion of the mid to late 2000s, MGS4 lays bare a preoccupation and anxiety that has been with the Metal Gear series since its inception: the preoccupation with — and anxiety over — the idea of shooting a gun in a video game.
As I’m sure probably everyone reading this already knows, the first Metal Gear originally came about partially because of the limitations of the MSX2 platform. Unable to get the machine to run a compelling enough action game, Kojima and the rest of the team turned instead to a stealth premise wherein shooting would serve only as a last resort. From a video game development company whose shooters made its name came a game that discouraged shooting, that even punished the player for shooting: Metal Gear.
History shows us that Metal Gear, and later Metal Gear Solid, was an integral link in the chain of the history of stealth video game design. Though it was not the first stealth-focused game, it helped to formalize the genre in terms of both mechanical convention and “aesthetic,” as The Game Overanalyzer (a great channel on youtube) notes in the video The Puzzle of Stealth Game Design.
The Metal Gear series evolved from the idea of a military-themed action game in which shooting was not the primary action. So for MGS4, to implement and incentivize shooter-style gameplay represents regression along an evolutionary line, a devolution in game design marked appropriately by a physical retrograde motion during sequences when the player is more or less forced to shoot (or use grenades or mines): the “beauty” phase boss battles.
Reiterated Narrative
A regression in game design isn’t the only type of retrograde motion that the B&B beauty forms entail though. They also represent a narrative regression for Snake, embodied in his physical movement backwards.
Backing away from each boss as he attempts to fend her off, Snake returns to the self-imposed isolation and misanthropy that characterized him earlier on in the series.
After the events of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and prior to the events of Metal Gear Solid, Snake exiles himself to the Alaskan wilderness and chooses to live there apart from the company of other people.
His misanthropy becomes clear over the course of MGS1.
“Other people just complicate my life,” Snake tells Meryl. “I don’t like to get involved.”
“You’re a sad, lonely man,” she responds.
He can’t deny it.
He’s not the only one. As a stealth game, Metal Gear Solid, like its main character, depends on the idea that contact with other people is not beneficial and should be avoided at all costs. Metal Gear Solid uses its stealth premise and design to align its players’ thoughts with Snake’s: come into close contact with other people and you put yourself at risk of Game Over.
At the end of the game, however, Snake finally accepts that “maybe it’s time [to] live for someone else.” He decides to discard his disdain for people and to forge worthwhile connections with other people, or at least make the attempt.
Accordingly, the game ends here. Metal Gear Solid doesn’t continue when its principal characters have refuted the premise of its stealth gameplay. Put another way (a more logical way), the end of Metal Gear Solid’s stealth mission (all about staying away from other people) and the end of Snake’s form of misanthropy (all about staying away from other people) coincide.
Having overcome his apprehensions about human connection, Snake can’t rightly return as the main character of a stealth game. And so in Metal Gear Solid 2, he doesn’t. After a short fakeout in the game’s opening chapter, the scene shifts to Raiden, a similarly misanthropic character in my opinion, and stays with him until the end.
In MGS4 however, Snake really does return to the player’s control, beginning to end. This time, there is no trick. How can a character like Snake who has discarded his misanthropic ideas return in this way? MGS4’s answer is to remodel the series’ classic design to cohere with an older and less misanthropic (i.e. more philanthropic) Snake.
As stealth games, Metal Gear games naturally display a design that hinges on a misanthropic outlook: the idea that coming into contact with other people is harmful, and that staying away from others keeps you alive and well. When you come into contact with guards, you risk death.
MGS4, however, does not necessarily abide by the same rules. At least not at all times. Different enemy factions populate the battlefields that Snake sneaks across in MGS4, and not all of them are necessarily hostile. Befriend the rebel forces in Acts 1 and 2, and Snake can approach them without fear of hostility. The opposite in fact: you can receive items and ammo from them, and even give them gifts of your own. These changes in design correspond with Snake’s narrative and his less detached point of view. Following MGS1, MGS4 rethinks the misanthropic aspect of the series’ design to build a stealth mission that is more about human engagement.
The “beauty” boss battles renounce these advancements. Unlike contact with the guards in MGS4’s early chapters, contact with Laughing Octopus, Raging Raven, Crying Wolf, and Screaming Mantis offers no possibility of alliance — only violence. Snake must keep his distance and fend them off, attack or else be killed. Forming bonds of friendship and approaching them without hostility are not options. These boss battles reinstate the more wholly misanthropic rules of past series entries. They reintroduce the misanthropic outlook that Snake left behind and distill it to irreducible simplicity: human contact engenders pain, then death. Snake’s backwards movement during these encounters is not just backwards movement through physical space. It’s retrograde motion that reenacts the logic of past entries and indicates a regress in Snake’s narrative and the design that pairs with it.
A Problem of Time
Those are all the examples of retrograde motion in MGS4 that I can think of (or that I’ve seen others like James Howell or Futurasound touch on), though I’m sure there are more.
The idea that MGS4 thematizes retrograde motion of this type, where regress wears the guise of an apparent (but false) progress, is definitely correct. But in the end, it falls a little short I think.
The way I see it, the motif of retrograde motion in MGS4 is rather a symptom, an indication of a larger theme or idea. This larger idea prevails in nearly every Metal Gear game and is, in my opinion, the real subject matter or dilemma of all of Kojima’s games:
The problem of time.
In one way or another, all of these games — the Metal Gear series, Death Stranding, Snatcher, probably Policenauts too though I still haven’t played it (yet) — deal with a problem that arises from a corruption in the natural progress or perception of time.
In Death Stranding, this is obvious. Timefall, repatriation (coming back from the dead), sci-fi cloud cover that masks the passage of time (no day/night cycle) — Death Stranding brings to the forefront this preoccupation with a distortion of time. It does so in a very literal way. It also builds gameplay around it, but that’s another story for another time.
But the idea is present on some level in most if not all of Kojima’s other games as well:
- Snatcher: A child who is older than his parents.
- Metal Gear Solid: The threat of nuclear annihilation should have died out with the end of the Cold War, but it didn’t — so it appears in the shape and with the name of a dinosaur revived: REX. The incorrect application of science and engineering brings something that should no longer exist back to life.
- Metal Gear Solid 2: The game’s villains enact a plan to harness the power of information manipulation so that they can extend their rule into an era poised to leave them behind: AI as “artificial immortality.” Most characters repeat past mistakes and tragedies, and fail to create a better future for the next generation.
- Metal Gear Solid 4: The passage of time is characterized by regress.
- Metal Gear Solid V: The game’s structure, its day/night cycle, its multiplayer mode, and the “revenge system” (where guards respond to how you play) all indicate on the surface that time is passing, but none of it matters beyond how it informs how you might continue to play the game. It’s as if time has stopped moving, or rather that the passage of time has become meaningless. The game continues forever with no definitive ending in the traditional sense — just the threads of different mysteries that unravel and then seem to fade away. (“Just another day in a war without end.”)
Maybe I’ll try to write more about some of that stuff here in the future. Till next time, later.
By Kiyan. Hit me up on twitter @dra9onsMGS.
- I believe this is not actually a sense of smell in the sense that a systemic game might build gameplay around a robust interlocking scent system. Rather, I think the enemies can just detect when you’re smoking. But still.
- Backwards movement in old shmups may not be too common, but it’s not unheard of. Some of the more maze-like levels in old Konami shooters like Space Manbow do a bit of this for example, and I’m sure there are other games that do too. I’m not too big of a shmup/STG guy though, so take what I have to say as the opinion of an amateur, not an enthusiast. I guess some zombie games do this too come to think of it. Anyway, if you notice anything wrong here just let me know and I’ll correct it.
Metal Gear Stuff 