Month of Video Games Day 16: Game with the Best Cutscenes

I heaped a lot of praise on the Metal Gear Solid series for my Best Character post, and I do think that the series is pretty genius and that, at its core, it has things to say that are important and universal. What does it mean to be a patriot? Where are technology and the information age taking us? Why is nuclear proliferation so dangerous? I also don't deny for a second that surrounding these core themes is a vastly complicated and meandering plot that is oft-times completely, off-the-wall insane. There aren't many games with a higher story-to-gameplay ratio than the Metal Gear Solid series, and if the story wasn't presented in a way that didn't at least kind of keep you clued in on what was going on, while keeping the forward momentum of the games going, they would be complete train wrecks. The last game in the series is the culmination of everything that had led up to it, and Hideo Kojima and the rest of the creators were at their best in terms of storytelling.

Day 16: Game with the Best Cutscenes
Metal Gear Solid 4

(gonna be spoilers)



Metal Gear Solid 4 had a pretty colossal task ahead of it. It had to put a wrap on the story that had it's roots in an NES game from 1987, continued in a sequel that initially was only released the MSX computer system in Japan and therefore almost nobody played, and then ballooned into something much, much bigger with the three Solid games. MGS2, the previous game in terms of the chronology of events, ended, uh... let's say less than totally clearly. So the challenge was giving the whole opus a satisfying conclusion (note: I have not played Peace Walker on PSP which was released later, and I don't know how much it's story tie into the broader story of the Solid games) over the course of one more game. The game is the densest in a series of very dense games, and the cutscenes are long and numerous. At times, even for someone like me who loves the series, the cutscenes come dangerously close to completely overshadowing the playable part of the game, though to be fair, the flow of gameplay isn't broken up to as much as it was in MGS2 (enter door... cover conversation! walk 10 feet... codec conversation!). Most of the exposition is concentrated in the start of each of the game's five acts.

Getting through all the exposition would be brutal if it wasn't made interesting, but it is. David Hayter adds a sort of sorrow and world-weariness to Snake's gravelly, 17-packs-a-day voice, and Snake is developed more and able to have a say in things more instead of just repeating the last word in a codec conversation ("A Hind-D?!") Improving on the hilarious awkwardness of the first MGS, ("Snake, do you believe that love can bloom, even on the battlefield?") Kojima actually writes a human-sounding love subplot with Otacon and Naiomi. And for good measure, there's also some straight-up preposterous but awesome fight scenes like this to break up the talkiness. There are some long, long, monologues that are all over the place in scope and draw upon information from the previous games in the series, but they're made much easier to stay engaged in by some cool visuals. Look at the last half of this cutscence. The game shows you faces of the relevant characters to help explain what the hell is going on, but it doesn't just show you a bunch of faces, it turns the cutscene into it's own little mini-story. When the Boss is brought up, her image is overlayed in a flower pedal pattern, invoking the final fight in MGS3 where you fight her in a field of white flowers and have to reluctantly kill her. Each big exposition scene like this has its own sort of design motif going on.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is the best produced, best acted, and best written game in the series. I actually don't think it has the most entertaining gameplay. It's more constrained than the open jungle setting of Metal Gear Solid 3 and because of that it wasn't quite as fun for me. The cutscenes then, a bigger part of the total game than any game in a series that was already notoriously cut-scene heavy, had to be damn good. They were, and MGS4 ended up being an excellent capstone to a series that represents maybe the most ambitious undertaking in the medium of video games.

Runner-up: Final Fantasy VII



The CG is dated now, but man, that intro is still awesome.

Next: Day 17 -- Favorite antagonist