First of all, I'd like to thank everyone that gave a thought-out, detailed reply. :)

I'm not going to reply to all of them right away or individually, but I'm going to start here.

First of all, :lol::lol::lol::lol::lol:....

It's 2011. People are still bashing MGS4? Seriesly, the game deserves the score its given because it sums up pretty much the entire series into one game which no other game this gen has ever done.

The game basically outnumbers other games out there when it came to plot, characters, and settings. It wasn't just the whole nanomachines or the Patriots mumbo-jumbo haters are still touting. It was more about its gameplay flashing you back to its roots giving you that nostalgic feeling of unresolved mysteries. I'm pretty sure most of its fans were very curious about what was going to happen in MGS4 before it came out. It was the most anticipated game of 2008. By the time I had the game on my hands, the only thing that ever came to me was how Snake was going to stop his clone brother Liquid. MGS2 was mainly about Raiden as a sidequest story. MGS3 was a flashback explaining the beginning of "La Li Lu Le Lo", the Patriots, and the meaning of "The Boss". When MGS4 came out, it strucked many people to the heart when they saw Snake all withered and old probably asking the same thing other people are wondering, "How the hell is he going to stop Liquid at this condition?"

By the time I finished the game, I was speechless and a little emo at the end because it was epic (true story:P). There were many parts of the game such as in Act 4 when Snake entered Shadow Moses for the first time in 10 years and "The Best Is Yet To Come" started playing. The other part was during the final duel between Snake and Liquid/Ocelot and main theme songs of the past MGS games started playing. MGS4's plot was basically a perfect conclusion to the series.

I can understand why gamers nowadays are underwhelmed by games such as MGS. You wonder why many people in popular places such as Youtube are being nostalgic about a certain game from a series and why they consider it as the best? TBH IMO, this gen are mostly filled with games such as SHOOTERS THAT LACKS STORIES. These games lacks stories and they are completely forgettable. Nowadays we have mindless shooting games that doesn't give specific points about its plots, characters, and settings. It's all about shooting the bad guys (or aliens) and saving the world. Yes I'm talking about Halo and most of the shooting game genre. It's like, what happened to Master Chief? What was he like before Halo CE? Did we ever experience about his history in Fall of Reach? Same with Marcus and Drake. What were they like before becoming soldiers or treasure hunters? Such potholes as these that you won't find inside those games are all answered in the MGS series.

Overall, MGS4 wasn't for everybody. If you never understood even a single game from its series then you wouldn't understand MGS4 at all. I'm positively sure Kevin V gave this game a 10/10 because he completely understood its story IMO.

Bazooka_4ME

Let's get a few things out of the way first.

Yes, I've played all the other Metal Gear Solid games, portable titles excepted. I'm familiar with the series. I know the plot and how everything fits together. I understood what all the nostalgia-grabs in the series were going for.

Yes, I'm familiar with Japanese story conventions. I've studied abroad in Japan for a semester, and many of my favorite games are Japanese. In 2010, I was very impressed with the stories in Nier and Deadly Premonition, for example. They had great characters and plotting that constantly subverted my expectations. And their cutscenes didn't go on for thirty minutes at a stretch. They don't waste eternities of time on exposition. They're good, focused plots that work on their own merits. Kind of like the story in MGS1, actually.

For you, at least, the game's constant callbacks to the past were good enough for you. Every time you saw a character you knew before, or witnessed a flashback to a scene from an earlier game, you felt fulfilled. Pretty much every major moment you list is entirely defined by a reference to an earlier Metal Gear. While I appreciated these things (returning to Shadow Moses and the final battle made excellent use of music), they didn't make up for the vapidity of what was actually happening.

Honestly, I'm not the sort of person that wants all the answers. MGS2 isn't a perfect game, but I really appreciated how Kojima created a title that intentionally left a lot of mysteries open. The answers to the mysteries aren't what's important, though. It's the experience, and what it communicates to the player. I don't have to know everything about Solidus to appreciate his futile attempt to break away from the Patriots, for instance. I don't have to understand why Fortune could deflect missiles even without her device, or why Ocelot was possessed by Liquid. The sequence of events aren't what makes a story interesting. It's about characters and how they respond, and what that response says.

For me, MGS4 sacrifices its characters, who have established pasts and personalities, for the sake of nostalgic callbacks to events, and for the sake of finding answers to the smallest questions. It was certainly quite a roller-coaster ride to follow as a player, but I don't feel like it really left me with anything at the end, which isn't how I feel about its predecessors. The game demanded so much of my time for the sake of plot, and returned little more than explosions and nostalgia. The game's most interesting plot nuggets and potential areas for expansion ("war economy", industrialized, controlled PMCs versus militias, or even the game's structure as a parallel to Kojima's history with the franchise) are shunted aside for fanservice and a tacked-on message about "breaking the cycle" that doesn't feel earned, because it's contained solely in an expository ending monologue.

As I said, I appreciated a lot of the gameplay, and some of the setpiece moments (like the mechs mentioned before) are very well-produced. But the plot really did nothing for me. I guess I'm just not as taken by those fanservice moments and callbacks as the rest of you. I like stories about people that can actually stand on their own, and have something to say.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is awesome because WE PLAYED THE OTHER GAMES!

It wouldn't make a whole lot of sense if you didn't play the other Games.

LegatoSkyheart

If I told you that MGS4's plot was like the mech made of crap in Sigint's dream that he tells Snake about in the jail cell in MGS3, in that everything it touches in the game turns to crap, until everything in the entire game is a giant crap monument, would you believe that I played the other games?

[QUOTE="sonicmj1"]

[QUOTE="xXxQuizzyxXx"]it is easily one of the greatest games of all timeSwift_Boss_A

That's nice.

Can you explain why it's so great? Because that's what the original post asks for.

:|

Some of the gameplay is the best in the series. But there's not enough of it. After Act 2, the scenarios either put heavy restrictions on the freedom you were given earlier, are straight linear set-pieces, or just aren't particularly good. I mean, in Act 4, they go back to making you dodge vision cones. Really?

As I said, by the time you reach Act 5, there's hardly any gameplay left. There is a single open sneaking room, a forced gunfight and boss battle, and then you have the final Ocelot duel with a throwback to awkward MGS1-era fisticuffs. Great fanservice at that point, but not the most compelling gameplay.

And as a fan that had a lot of respect for some of the series' characters, I actively disliked a lot of the game's brand of fanservice. MGS3's support team is the Patriots, led by James Bond fanatic and all-around excellent British chap Major Zero? Raiden turns into a brooding ninja fighter that forgot everything Snake told him in MGS2? Ocelot started this whole evil plot because he really was the good guy all along? Meryl winds up with Johnny? Come on.

MGS4 gets so obsessed with "ending the cycle" that it ropes every surviving character it can find into its insane plot, even if those characters reasons for being around don't make sense anymore. With the exception of Drebin, who could just as well not exist plotwise, every new character is an empty shell. As a fan, it's more insulting than anything else.

MGS2 was bad enough, but I was able to reconcile myself to it when I realized that game's twists and turns served the purpose of demonstrating its theme of "information control". There's no excuse for it in MGS4. It's just poor writing.

it is easily one of the greatest games of all timexXxQuizzyxXx

That's nice.

Can you explain why it's so great? Because that's what the original post asks for.

:|

Figuring out the story made you think, which is something a lot of games don't do. Best game on the PS3 imo.

2-10-08

Well, I can't deny this. It took a lot of thinking for me to fully untangle just how bad the story was. Layers upon layers of terrible plotting and writing.

I can sympathize with people here who liked the gameplay. I liked a lot of it too. But when so much of the game is story (half of my first playthrough), and when so much of that story is so poor, despite excellent graphics and so forth, it seems impossible to ignore, in my view.

Is there anyone here who really enjoyed the story? Can they explain what it was about the story that made them like it?

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?

Those are nice ideals. Ideals would go flying out the window for most of us in the case that we are the ones who have a child brutally murdered and eaten by a sick cannibal murderer. Losing a child is hard enough as is, losing a child like that is entirely different. I'd be willing to bet even you would give in to the need for punishment in this situation, sonicmj1, all your ideals be damned... if you had a kid murdered like that, and you had opportunity to get vengeance, I'd put my life savings on you taking it. None of us can truly stand in judgement of this man as none of us can even remotely fathom the madness that must have been clawing at his mind for the last few decades.

RandoIph

I'm sure immediately afterwards I'd feel that way. But I'd probably eventually get over it after over 30 years.

There are thousands of family members and friends of murder victims created each year, and almost all of them don't respond with further acts of murder. So I think that most people are capable of dealing with those feelings in a reasonable way.

[QUOTE="foxhound_fox"]

Vengeance is not justice.

RandoIph

Punishment he doesn't have the authority to give.

The murderer, if released, will have served his sentence. Any further punishment at that stage achieves nothing.

The father has no right to kill this man, just as I'd have no right to cut off the hands of someone who stole from me after they paid whatever fine and served whatever sentence the justice system decreed for them.

Now I don't have to make the thread.

I was sort of slightly hopeful for it before, but this trailer has encouraged me to buy my ticket for the hype train. Suda and Mikami back in action again putting together the best kind of complete, total insanity.

All aboard!

I can't fathom why this man is entitled to make a mockery of society's laws just to settle a personal grudge.

I mean, I can understand why he feels the way he does. I'm not quick to anger, but if someone did something like that to a person close to me, I'd be livid. I could see myself doing the same thing if caught in a moment of passion.

That doesn't make it right. That's why society has a justice system, to deal with this sort of thing.

What is done cannot be undone. No amount of killing will bring back this man's murdered son, who died 36 years ago. So why is it acceptable? Does "vengeance" sit above the morals of society? It serves no purpose, except to soothe a thirst for violence that is just as dangerous and as irrational as the initial heinous act.

The murderer served his punishment. He was exiled from society and forced into a cell for 29 years. That is likely the majority of his life to this point taken away from him. Why do people believe that as soon as he gets back on the streets, after decades of imprisonment, he'll go straight back to crime? Have you all seen Dirty Harry one too many times? He'll be lucky if he can even interact normally with people again. There is no need for additional punishment. Placing vengeance above justice and the law is completely selfish.

Punishment serves many purposes, but vengeance should never be one of them. Criminals should be reformed and reintegrated into society as healthy, law-abiding citizens, not shunted aside and forced to the margins of society, where they resume their behavior until locked away forever, or killed. The father's unwavering desire for revenge (a desire that has lingered for decades) doesn't deserve to be respected.