Best/Worst game endings

[Zhukov]

My one complaint is that some of the cutscenes near the end get redundant...

Near the end!?

I'm playing the game at the moment and mate, the cutscenes got redundant fifteen minutes from the bloody beginning.

- The game starts with a cutscene. Okay, fair enough, that's pretty standard. And the cutscene was okay in spite of the pretentious voice over.
- The first bit of gameplay consists of walking six steps before you the cutscene resumes right were it left off.
- The second bit of gameplay consisted of running across a street. Then another cutscene.
- Then I got to experience some superb visceral thrills and masterful storytelling by running down an alley. Then you get slapped in the face by an extra long cutscene.

I am not exaggerating here. That is quite literally what happens. Hell, the game spent about twenty minutes introducing the bloody buy-and-sell-guns mechanic. All within a cutscene of course.

When I do actually get to play, I find the stealth mechanics absurdly unbalanced. I have a tranquilliser gun with ample ammo that can silently one-shot almost any enemy. I can turn invisible by standing next to any surface. Oh yeah, and the AI is thick as a fucking brick. Several times I just got bored and ran straight through the enemy for the next waypoint. After all, I know there's going to be a ten-minute long cutscene of Snake opening a fucking door or something and it's not like he can die during a cutscene.

Oh, I almost forgot, the humour is at the level you would expect to find on a primary school playground. Yes game, Akiba/Johnny has the runs, I get it!

In conclusion, Hideo Kojima really, really wants to just make a movie and cannot write to save his bloody life. Also, I'm slowly starting to suspect that he has some serious issues with women.

[Grayswandir]

What bugged me the most about MGS4 was that all those goofy easter eggs in the previous games? You didn't have to find most of them, they were kinda forced on you.

[Ragdollmaster]

Zhukov: That's not redundancy, that's just abundance. The cutscenes are all different and serve to explain different events, albeit in roundabout and lengthy ways. When you hear a character repeating the same three minute long speech three times in a row, that's redundant.

The beginning of the game: You are exaggerating. The second cutscene is like twenty seconds long. The one after that is about a minute or so. And you're not running down an alley, you're running down an alley while being chased by robotic cowlizards armed with heavy machine guns, then you get a cutscene of about three minutes which shows off the Octocamo and leads to the death of some innocent watermelons.

The scene with Drebin is probably closer to seven or eight minutes, which I did still find annoyingly long, but it's not like you're sitting there for hours on end looking at one cutscene. It was, in a way, nostalgic; Snake caressing that M4 bears quite a striking resemblance to Big Boss orgasming over his shiny M1911 in MGS3. I think that allusion is quite a nice touch that makes the cutscene seem deeper.

Poop is hirarious and Johnny is a nice lady

Also, you don't seem to have played past halfway of the first Act. You've literally covered about 10% of the game. Act Two is much more gameplay intensive; there's a cutscene in the beginning and then about 5 consecutive gameplay levels, with the only pause in the action being a Codec call from someone whose name I will not mention because Andy would eviscerate me with a rusty spoon. After that you get to look at some cleavage and then there's more gameplay. The end has maybe two or three cutscenes, but Two definitely has much more gameplay than One. Three and Four are also pretty gameplay focused. Five is the shortest and contains the most cutscenes - probably about an hour and a half of cutscenes alone to maybe thirty minutes of gameplay. Grab some popcorn.



All in all, I'm not disagreeing with you that there's a shitton of cutscenes and that may not be everyone's cup of tea, but some of them are pretty goddamn epic (I can think of one later on in Act One, two in Act Two, and a buttload in the last acts that will be quite enjoyable to watch) You'll probably warm up to the game as you progress further in the storyline, but I hope you're not so turned off by Act One's tutorial-like approach that you won't play the rest


>What bugged me the most about MGS4 was that all those goofy easter eggs in the previous games? You didn't have to find most of them, they were kinda forced on you.

Care to elaborate? Most of the previous Easter eggs took some effort to find iirc. So did the ones in MGS4.

[Zhukov]

Zhukov: That's not redundancy, that's just abundance. The cutscenes are all different and serve to explain different events, albeit in roundabout and lengthy ways. When you hear a character repeating the same three minute long speech three times in a row, that's redundant.

At one point some arsehole rings me up and spends several agonizing minutes spouting irrelevant tracking techniques (taut to him by a tribal elder in Alaska no less) when all he had to say was, "Use the infra-red vision mode". That's not abundance. That's fucking excessive. Any sane game developer would have just used a bloody text pop-up.

At another point some chick (who evidently doesn't know what shirt buttons are for - something the camera man was very eager to bring to my attention) spends God only knows how long yammering away about pseudo-science when all she needed to say was, "Your body is going to start exuding a virus."

As for that Drebin scene... urg. After the guy has explained that he's a black market dealer and I can sell spare guns to him inexchange for credit, Otocon rings me up and spends a few more minutes saying, "Oh hey, that guy back there, he's a black market dealer. I reckon you could totally sell spare guns to him in exchange for credit."

MGS4 is some of the worst writing I have ever seen in a video game. We're talking FFXII bad. Fucking Bulletstorm was better written then this for Christ's sake. At least in that game the characters got to the damn point and didn't make me watch them getting angsty over a plate of fried eggs.

I'd like to tear into the seething cluster-fuck that MGS4 laughably calls a story, but it clearly leans heavily on the previous game which I haven't played so I guess I'm not really in a position to judge.

[Ragdollmaster]

...you started playing MGS4 without having played the previous games in the series.

Suddenly, everything makes sense.

[Zhukov]

I'm sure playing the previous games first would make the story make sense.

However, it would not make the writing any less bad, the dialogue any less dreary, or the cutscenes any less frequent.

(EDIT: Those were two very clumsily written sentences. My apologies.)

[Renegade_Turner]

I'm sure playing the previous games first would make the story make sense.

However, it would not make the writing any less bad, the dialogue any less dreary, or the cutscenes any less frequent.

(EDIT: Those were two very clumsily written sentences. My apologies.)

Aha! Hypocrite!

[Ragdollmaster]

The thing is, the writing in the entire Metal Gear franchise is meant to be over-the-top, movie-like, and at times almost silly in its scale. To me and to most people who've played the series, that's an enjoyable feature, not a fault to criticize. In fact, I'm more impressed with the story because it manages to be an enormously complex epic with deep emotional impact (for those of us who HAVE played the series ) without necessarily being perfect. Considering the depth of the entire saga, I'd have to say that the execution of the games' storyline is pretty damn good. Flawless? No. But it's unique because unlike your standard series- Halo, Call Of Duty, Battlefield, and so on- where the story is more of an excuse to transition between levels than anything else, and is often flat, bland, and outright boring, Metal Gear's storyline was a highly ambitious attempt which for all intents and purposes succeeded.

Seriously, though, playing the last canonical game before playing any of the others? Lookie here boy, if you want to squeeze any enjoyment whatsoever out of this title (because trust me, the cross-references just got more abundant as the game goes on), stop playing right now, go pick up this, play the games in order, and then come back to 4. At that point those oh-so-frequent cutscenes will hold more appeal to you because you might actually know what the fuck is going on. The first three games are amazing in of themselves, even relative to new titles.



And Andy again manages to put a smile on my face

[Zhukov]

I'm sure playing the previous games first would make the story make sense.

However, it would not make the writing any less bad, the dialogue any less dreary, or the cutscenes any less frequent.

(EDIT: Those were two very clumsily written sentences. My apologies.)

Aha! Hypocrite!

Heh.

I don't charge money for my writing.

Besides, MGS4 box doesn't display the words "EDIT: I'm sorry about the writing in this game. I actually wanted to make a CGI movie. -Hideo Kojima" If it did, I probably wouldn't hate it as much.

[Renegade_Turner]

Heh.

I don't charge money for my writing.

Besides, MGS4 box doesn't display the words "EDIT: I'm sorry about the writing in this game. I actually wanted to make a CGI movie. -Hideo Kojima" If it did, I probably wouldn't hate it as much.

Not everyone feels they need to apologise for their shortcomings. What a strange thing to do. So you dislike people who DON'T constantly apologise for what people might see as them lacking in a certain skill? That's silly.

And you actually harbour feelings of hate for a game? That's a bit overzealous. If you don't like it so much, just don't play it, and don't think about it so much. Your criticism isn't going to be very constructive.

[Ragdollmaster]

It would have made for a boring movie, because it's over the top, complex, and long as fuck all. A game is the perfect medium for a work like the Metal Gear series, MGS4 in particular.

In all seriousness, I'm a little shocked to learn that you haven't played the first games, and even moreso that you played the last canonical installment despite that. I know a couple of guys who were seriously impressed by 4, but they knew they wouldn't understand most of the story if they didn't play through the first three games, which they scurried off and did to their immense joy.

Speaking of which: Even if 4 ends up going down as a bad game in your book, I still think you'd enjoy 1-3. The PSX installment of '98 probably remains my favorite of the entire series, especially considering what it was able to do with the limited technology of its time. Even now, 11 years after I originally beat it, I'll occasionally pick it up and play through the whole goddamn game for nostalgia. The same applies to MGS2: Sons Of Liberty; when it came out, it wowed everyone in the gaming with its stunning visuals and the new gameplay mechanics introduced to the series, but it's a little shaky storyline wise. The only really important things you learn about in MGS2 are the Patriots (and hardly- you just get a vague, mysterious impression about them), Metal Gear RAY, and I guess Raiden & Rose. MGS3 easily ties with MGS1 in that it was just as emotionally evocative but with even more stunning visuals than MGS2, as well as what are in my opinion the best bosses in the series.


tl;dr -> The gameplay alone of the entire series is pretty enjoyable. But the story, once you start from the beginning and take it with a pinch of salt, is mind-numbing. There are literally moments in 1 and 4 where I've teared up, 4 because it references a lot of moments in 1 and 3 that made you think, "Wow, that's pretty sad", and then 4 is like "Oh but also this" and you go "BAWWW". Nobody will argue against the fact that the writing can get superfluous and thick at times, but once you play through the entire series and make sense of it all, you'll be pretty impressed. I hope.

[Zhukov]

Meh. I gave up on it after getting past the octopus lady.

I can endure terrible writing if it is accompanied by decent gameplay. Otherwise I would have given up playing games long ago. But in MGS4 the horrible writing is the whole point. Ragdollmaster pointed out that in many games the story is just an excuse for the gameplay. That's very true. In MGS4 the gameplay is just the method you use to walk Snake from one cutscene to the next. I just find it dreary. It alternates between a clunky shooter and a tragically unbalanced stealth-em-up.

I guess I can sorta see why other people would enjoy it. Although that's hardly a compliment since I can also sorta see why other people would enjoy Black Ops, Twilight or The Expendables.

Oh well, not to worry. I'm currently ankle-deep in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. The story is a bit stupid but, despite my serious misgivings, the multiplayer is kinda awesome.

[Ragdollmaster]

Speaking of which: Even if 4 ends up going down as a bad game in your book, I still think you'd enjoy 1-3.

[Zhukov]

Are MGSs 1-3 written by Mr Kojima?

If so, I'm not touching them with a 10-foot pole.

Unless the pole has a point on the end.

[Ragdollmaster]

They're also regarded as some of the best games in history.

Actually, scratch that- 1 and 3 are. Don't touch 2. It's horribly convoluted, probably moreso than 4.