Readers attempt to explain Metal Gear Solid V’s many endings
Tactical Storytelling Action
The recent “Definitive Experience” rerelease of The Phantom Pain and Ground Zeroes made this week as good a time as any to look back at Metal Gear Solid V. Patrick Lee took a particular interest in Phantom Pain’s alternate ending, scenes from which appeared in the supplementary materials of the game’s collector’s edition. Without the thematic resonance of those scenes, Patrick argued, Phantom Pain was left with an ending that wasn’t much of an ending at all, neither to its own story or the one Metal Gear had been telling for decades. Down in the comments, readers discussed several scenes that also made for meaningful endings to the game. Mr Smith1466 broke down a few. (Obviously, the following discussion will address specific plot details from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Skip ahead if you’d rather avoid those.):
As nice as a completed version of Mission 51 would have been, I think the base game still adequately ends the series, it just does it in a much different way than we would have liked. There are basically three endings in the game: Skullface’s death, which ends the traditional revenge plot; the final M. Night Shyamalan plot twist ending; and, crucially, the second ending with Quiet’s final mission.
Everyone either betrays or somehow fails Snake by the end. Huey screws everyone over. Mother Base is ravaged by a virus. Kaz goes nuts. Ocelot never betrays anyone (for once in the series) but it’s revealed that he never gave a crap about the player’s character. The only one who doesn’t betray you is Quiet (literally the person everyone on the base thought was a traitor). But this just makes Quiet’s final mission all the bleaker. The two of them share a final moment, and to protect Snake and the world at large, Quiet abandons him forever. This is made all the sadder by the fact that to get this final mission, the player has to invest heavily in Quiet’s buddy ranking, meaning you share Snake’s personal investment in her.
Snake loses everything on some level. All he has left is his identity, and even that is cruelly taken from him by the plot twist. Snake smashes the mirror and accepts Big Boss’ legacy because at this point, what the hell else is he to do with his life? He’s forever cut off from people like Kaz and will have to deal with the fact that his beloved soldiers are loyal to a phantom. It’s not a stretch to assume that after the events of the game, he increasingly builds a cult-like fanatic love for himself and eventually creates Outer Heaven, because again, what the hell else is a phantom of a legendary soldier to do?
But I think there’s a danger in taking the final twist too literally. I partly see it as Kojima’s little gift to the players. He’s basically minimalizing the character of Big Boss in the larger narrative in favor of the player. What was Big Boss doing all game? Who knows or cares! The player was the one building an army and hanging out with a one eyed wolf. I think the intent is meant to be that when one plays a later game in the series and hears of the legendary Big Boss, the player can think “no no, not Big Boss. I was the one who created this legend!” This is something Kojima essentially tried to pull with Raiden in MGS2. Give the player an avatar so they could feel like they eventually stand alongside the legendary Solid Snake. Whether or not this worked in either case is a matter of debate.
Several other commmenters keyed in on that final Quiet scene as the game’s most poignant emotional climax. Son Of Now See Here summed up why:
I feel that the moment Quiet leaves is the functional end of the game, and the end of Nameless Medic Guy, the player’s character. She’s the only character in the entire game whose actions are motivated not by the legend and philosophy of Big Boss but rather things that Nameless Medic Guy did and choices that Nameless Medic Guy made. The moment she leaves is the moment Nameless Medic Guy dies. Nothing left in the game is about him. After that, there’s only Big Boss, and all that’s left is for you to build Outer Heaven in an attempt to fulfill Big Boss’ dream and get rocket launchered to death.
In Someone Else’s Shoes
This week, I reviewed Mafia III, a game that proudly attempts to take on racism in America. While I thought not all of its methods were well considered and implemented, it should be lauded for tackling this issue head-on, as opposed to substituting elves or aliens for the targets of social injustice, and for using its Grand Theft Auto-style open world to illustrate the more subtle forms racism takes in this country. Expanding on that latter point, DrFlimFlam reckons this is an important and unique property of games that, while definitely present in many parts of the industry, has largely been passed up by its biggest creations:
Reading about the more subtle elements makes me think there’s a powerful game here stuffed into a blockbuster. It’s like how BioShock Infinite, a game I love, could have been even better if it were more committed to its warped vision of paradise and less about powers and murder sprees. In much the same way, it seems like there could be a fascinating game about the experience of being black in America, what it’s like in different neighborhoods, what it’s like watching people eye you a bit longer than they should or a police car slowing down to take your measure.