Really. I don't understand it. I bought a PS3 for it so I could buy it the day it came out, and I still don't understand it. What are people thinking when they beat Metal Gear Solid 4 and tell themselves, "This is the greatest game of this generation."?
How do they sit through a game that has over 9 hours of some of the most labored and pointless writing this generation and feel uplifted? When they play through the Frogs fight and listen to Johnny literally crapping his pants through the entire thing, does it bring a smile to their faces? Are they glued to the edge of their seats when it takes a minute and a half for security forces to surround Ocelot on a river in Act 3? Do they find the true origins of the Patriots to make any sense, given the characters involved? Are they brough tot tears by Naomi's sacrifice, weeping alongside Otacon's MKII? Did they find the hour-plus length epilogue act, Naked Sin, to be a fitting end for the series?
I don't understand it.
I've always been willing to explain what it is that disappointed me about MGS4. It's the way the plot swallows the entire game. It's just bad. It's filled with pointless exposition about nanomachines, FOXDIE, PMCs, and some utterly absurd plan of Liquid Ocelot's. Characters act in completely ridiculous ways for the convenience of drama and the plot (The pointless deaths of Big Mama and Naomi, everything Raiden does, Meryl and Johnny's sudden romance, etc.). MGS3's endearing support team is turned into a bunch of heartless monsters (Patriots aside, Paramedic is now responsible in canon for the inhuman experiments on Gray Fox, for example) just to create some sort of stupid tie-in to the series' past. Everyone's actions and plans are absurd, culminating in Big Boss's fanservice appearance at the graveyard where he spouts inane philosophy before killing an old man on life support and dying of a heart attack. The Beauty and the Beast Unit is the worst cast of bosses the series has ever seen, such that when I skipped Screaming Mantis's expository codec story by accident, I didn't even care. They're all the same. For a series that prided itself on interesting bosses, it's a weak effort.
And it's a shame, because there's really good stuff going on in terms of gameplay. I loved Acts 1 and 2. They put Octocamo, the Threat Ring, and the much-mproved controls and camera to good use. But cutscenes completely swallow the gameplay in the following acts, leaving shallow scenarios in their wake. The game only has two boss fights that are any fun, and even those don't rival MGS3's brilliant highs fighting The Boss or The End. At their best, they're about as good as the battle against The Fear. Stalking through the streets in Act 3 wore out its welcome well before it ended, and the chase was too busy being cinematic to feel like I had any control over the outcome. Act 4 replaced the great enemy AI with literal robots, and Act 5 was just two rooms. And over this time, there were at least 4 or 5 cinematic sequences that had save points in the middle of them before I could play as Snake again. MGS4 has twice as many cutscenes as MGS3 for about the same amount of gameplay, spread out over disparate locations, separated by boring installs to present us with areas that gave the illusion of opennness, but were chopped into pieces by static load screens.
I'm not ashamed to explain why I didn't like the game. Many others aren't as well. But so often when this topic is discussed, the game's so-called supporters don't actually offer any real support. They loft up empty platitudes, like, "greatest game of the generation," but they never explain why it's so great. I want to know.
TL;DR VERSION: MGS4 fans, what makes MGS4 such a great game? Why did you personally love it so much more than anything else you've played?
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