This video is sponsored by the Opera GX browser, who I’ll take a brief moment to thank.
Opera GX is a browser designed for gamers, with all sorts of resources such as GX Control which
allows you to set limits on how much CPU, RAM and network bandwidth you want your browser to use so
you can keep a whole bunch of tabs open without it hurting your game’s performance (and I checked,
when opening a bunch of YouTube videos in Opera GX vs, say, Chrome, the difference
in network bandwidth usage is pretty huge). One of the best things about Opera GX in my eyes
is how customisable it is—I’m a big fan of the neon-inspired look of many of the themes available
here. Also, I’ve personally found the GX Corner really useful in how it keeps me updated with new
and upcoming releases, and free game deals from various different platforms around the web,
all in one easily accessible place. What’s more, Opera GX is also available
on mobile (called GX Mobile) and you can connect it to the desktop version.
Opera GX is a browser I’ve been using myself for a long time now and I honestly can’t see myself
ever going back to another browser. So what are you waiting for? You can check out Opera GX for
yourself via my link in the description—again, that’s whether you’re on desktop or your mobile
device, it all works—and doing so really helps the channel to boot. Thank you to Opera GX for
sponsoring this video and now on with the show! ---
Over the years I’ve written a fair amount about Metal Gear Solid. I’ve talked about
the original in relation to its remake; Guns of the Patriots in the context of its wildly
over-the-top melodrama and how this reinforces its themes of struggling with futility and combating
forces you can’t understand, and I’ve talked about Snake Eater while arguing that a more open Metal
Gear Solid perhaps isn’t as novel as The Phantom Pain might have seemed—and oh yeah, I guess I made
a dissertation-length piece about that thing. But out of all this, there’s one game in the
mainline, numbered MGS series that I have said surprisingly little about across the six and
a half years I’ve been doing this, considering it’s easily the one I return to most frequently.
In fact, I’ve stated in the past that I consider it one of my top three all-time favourite games.
The truth is, I adore every single thing about Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and yet,
as its 20-year anniversary loomed (a fact that was pretty damn scary in its own right),
I’ve found myself absolutely terrified at the prospect of writing anything about it.
As silly as it sounds, as someone who ostensibly writes essays,
it can feel like I have to find some completely unique angle from which to tackle a subject,
coming to some universal truth regarding the thing I'm talking about for it to be worth discussing;
and in the absence of such profundity I'm essentially wasting time—especially
when the subject of your pondering is a game that readily invites such lofty interrogation.
With MGS2 I can trace this specific anxiety back to when I first saw Super Bunnyhop’s Critical
Close Up of the game—I mean, where can you really go from there? Sons of Liberty has been torn apart
and analysed so thoroughly since 2001—its crazy twists, its prescience regarding the evolution
of the internet, its questioning of identity and the self—that I’ve long felt there’s no
way I could say something that hasn’t been said about this game, but all of what I just listed
has stuck so deeply with me over the years that not talking about this game has, to me,
remained something of a spot on my channel. And there's a large part of me that,
as I've gotten older, increasingly wonders if all of this should be such a barrier to just
talking about things I want to talk about. And so, I've decided to put my anxieties around
this to one side and just treat this as a love letter, to get to the lofty truth of… why Sons
of Liberty is my favourite Metal Gear Solid game. And even with that simple premise I can imagine
there'll be some who are bristling at that notion. As much as Sons of Liberty is largely well-liked,
general consensus as I've seen it over the years is that 3 is where the series really came into
its own—shedding the mechanical inflexibility of its predecessors and opening everything up (its
systems, environments etc) in order to create a far more tense, dynamic stealth experience
that more fully conveyed the constant pressure of being a lone soldier, largely underequipped
to deal with the enemies before them. On top of that, it's arguably one of the more important
entries in the series’ canon, and while it certainly retains the unique absurdity that
makes a Metal Gear game what it is, you could say it’s a far more grounded spy thriller story—or
at the very least more conventional in its structure and characters—than what came before.
Metal Gear Solid 2 by comparison, sees confined environments force you make to make use of very
particular weapons and items at highly specific points. You know, they often have one sole purpose
and then can be largely disregarded; you could play with your eyes transfixed in the
top right corner with all the dots and cones and you'd probably still do OK. What's more,
its story goes absolutely haywire in a way that actively throws the humanity of its characters
to the wayside as the very fabric of their reality falls apart. It is, by all accounts,
a mechanically blocky, narratively alienating and purposefully distant experience. And yet,
perhaps paradoxically, I can’t help but feel all warm and fuzzy when I think about it.
See, when I picture 2, the image that immediately pops into my head is that of the sunset in the
background as you cover Emma moving extremely slowly between the struts of the Big Shell;
the ocean underneath stretching endlessly into the distance as the chill, ambient soundtrack
both conveys the tension of the situation, as well as the relative beauty of that tableau.
As much as it's a completely dire situation narratively, there's a real satisfaction to
popping all of those cyphers out of the sky, and while you don't get the wealth of means
through which to tackle your objective here as you might in Snake Eater, you’re still
rewarded for poking and prodding at the game's boundaries with different items in your inventory.
It's something that across the game blew my mind back then and still kinda does to this day—sure,
Sons of Liberty adheres far more to the adventure game style of progression found
in MGS1 where you'd just rub different items on a situation until you found the one that
clicked (or someone just flat out told you the answer) but there's just so much weird,
dumb stuff (and I promise I say that lovingly) packed into the game beyond that mainline
progression that adds to its unique atmosphere. In the opening tanker alone, I can never resist
shooting those individual bottles before spin-kicking the whole shelf and watching
those ice cubes gradually melt away. It's not enough that they play that dumb joke of shining
the torch on that Vulcan Raven figurine, but they added in the functionality of being able to get it
to fire little pellets from that tiny gatling gun. I find a great deal of familiarity in revisiting
that game knowing all the answers to the critical puzzle, but also revelling in the flexibility that
knowledge allows me; the same kind of flexibility that saw me placing C4 on enemy soldiers in the
original—affording the kind of experimentation and messing with the set dressing that doesn’t
have much purpose and in some cases is more trouble than it’s worth, but makes the game’s
response all the more rewarding for that effort. You know, I feel comfortable in MGS2 mechanically,
in both the tanker and the Big Shell. And while I adore 3, to be clear—I mean I’ve beaten it
more times than I can count and it’s easily up there as one of the best games ever made—I
still associate it with a kind of noxious moment-to-moment tension where I can rarely be
100% sure of what’s around that next corner that, sure, makes it a more effective stealth game,
but it’s also a fairly overwhelming one for me—and that just isn’t the case with Sons of Liberty.
But it’s all well and good feeling comfortable in an older game, one you come back and play
through every so often and put back down. The thing is, Sons of Liberty has stuck with me—I
legitimately think about it all the time. And I think part of that is that, while it
may be comfortable mechanically, in terms of its narrative it should be anything but.
I think back on that glowing sunset I mentioned earlier, and even before considering the bi
vampire that you’d previously shot in the head suddenly leaping from the water to ambush your
ward—what we could call the enjoyably over-the-top nonsense of the game’s story—I think what really
gets me is the more insidious strangeness of the game’s general atmosphere. With that
scene in particular, I think about how I can’t quite get a sense of place in the game—as I say,
that ocean stretches out endlessly. We’re told of the real-world implications
of the Big Shell’s threatened destruction, its cataclysmic effects on the ecosystem and
everything, but we barely ever see the world in question once Snake jumps off that bridge in the
game’s intro—itself a hazy, busy mess that our initial hero kind of exists outside of,
in the shadows. That said, at least the tanker is recognisable as a filthy, clunky, real-world piece
of machinery—suddenly jolting to the beautiful, but no less unnaturally clean hexagonal design
of the Big Shell. It’s a cold, distant entity, as if it were some futuristic alien artefact
floating in a video game—a fact that becomes even more apparent when you consider its true function
as a disguise for a big dumb video game robot. Contrasted with Snake Eater surrounding you with
plants and animals, nature—the Real all around you at all times—MGS2 instead basks in the unreal,
the synthetic, the ethereal. It’s as if a shift occurs as soon as Ocelot sinks that tanker and
you descend further and further into a kind of dreamlike state, where nothing makes sense—not
even who you are or the ground you stand on can be trusted; the complete existential teardown of
Raiden’s character occurring as the very world around him shifts, from clinical,
alphabetical naming conventions of highly distinct rooms to the internal organs of a machine,
and then you climb a ladder to this weird cyber arena that I can never be quite sure of how
everyone got there or if it’s even inside or outside. And then they fade to white and suddenly
they’re in New York, but one that itself feels distant—where people appear out of nowhere but
don’t seem to take much notice of the havoc that’s just been caused or the two secret agent weirdos,
one with a samurai sword, talking cryptically about how to define their own identity.
What I’m trying to say with all of this is that, sure, I love the outward wackiness of Sons of
Liberty with all my heart—its ability to fly off the handles with the dude on rollerblades and the
vampire and the octopus president and the weird gun-slinging cowboy at the centre of it all and
I need scissors 61 and all that. I’ve also heard arguments that 2 is incoherent or that 3 is a much
more enjoyable, character-focused tale (and it is worth noting that some of those arguing for Sons
of Liberty’s incoherency include the game’s own translator, carrying on the noted tradition of
said translators having more of an influence than you might think on the series’ identity).
But with all of that in mind, I do think to just write it off as wacky for the sake of
it or total nonsense is to do a disservice to the far more subtle ways in which the game undermines
your trust in what you’re experiencing—who this character thinks they are. In an almost Brechtian
sense, you’re forced to examine the nature of your surroundings and how they might define your view
of a character, of your own sense of self. And it’s an introspection that leads to some
truly explosive moments that are imprinted on my skull for how visually exciting they are for sure,
but I think more than anything else the reason this game has stuck with me is the more
unsettling nature of its storytelling—the world un-building going on just beneath the surface,
and deeply reflecting the game’s themes about the growing stratification of our culture;
the terrifying, borderline apocalyptic isolation and fear that that might breed;
the struggle to define your own identity when your environment, everyone around you,
is so overwhelmed with informational noise that you first have to wrestle with.
And while that jumble of ideas alone might be existentially terrifying to some,
I like how I can keep coming back to Sons of Liberty time and time again and continually unpack
layer after layer of the game’s meaning. Again, wrestling with that stuff, that ongoing struggle
to find meaning in a chaotic world, and the game’s conclusion that ultimately we must define our own
legacy is something that, as an absurdist, I find a great deal of comfort in—I kind of always have.
Even though Kojima has told more subtle, character-driven stories that are perhaps
more effective as standalone narratives, I think it’s MGS2’s more subversive elements that make it
so enduring, at least for me. It isn't so anchored to any one time period—it's simultaneously
future and present and past. Right down to its graphical style MGS2 shows its mechanical seams,
nostalgically reminding us of what true cutting edge used to look like, while also holding up
remarkably well—the game still looks pretty crisp. Sons of Liberty can be experienced at
any time and still convey a layered, universal message that, while everyone has stated how
prescient it already is, I think is only going to viewed as more prescient as time goes on.
And of course, the typical video essay thing to do would be to the twist thing and say that MGS2
is really my favourite because it’s the one I grew up with, the one my dad brought home bundled with
the PS2 and my brother and I played through the intro chapters constantly because we didn’t have
a memory card for months. And while nostalgia certainly plays a part, it’s not like I don’t
have nostalgia for Snake Eater as well. You know, in terms of the family, it ended up being mainly
me that played Sons of Liberty over time. And plus, the most prevalent memory I have of that day
is that we all got hit with a major stomach bug all at the same time—so not all happy memories.
So yes, while my fondness for Sons of Liberty in particular does come from my past experiences with
it, I think it’s deeper than mere sentimentality. The ending in particular was so fascinating to
me—that something so weird and metatextual in its delivery could be so affecting to me
as a kid—that it ended up completely shaping my taste for odd, experimental art going forward.
It's probably the reason one of my other top three video games of all-time is Killer7;
why I ended up gravitating towards such weird, aggressive music; or why my two favourite books
are Nabokov's Pale Fire and Alasdair Gray's 1982, Janine. You know, Sons of Liberty taught me at a
very early age that narrative didn’t need to remain limited to the text itself, that, say,
a catastrophic mental breakdown could be conveyed through a paratextual conversation with God.
Sons of Liberty taught me to look out for and appreciate that kind of narrative—that
such a story’s ability to sneak up on you in the margins of the page or its explosive suddenness
could deepen its impact precisely for that unpredictability; for the way it takes you
by the scruff of the neck and forces you into anxious self-reflection; for that bending and
breaking of any given medium’s boundaries. Sons of Liberty is my favourite Metal Gear game because,
more than almost any game before or since, and perhaps ironically for a game that is so
focused on distorting and deconstructing the self, Metal Gear Solid 2 shaped me.
--- Thank you all so much
for watching. Be sure to like, subscribe, do all the YouTube stuff, as well as check out my podcast
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