Month of Video Games Day 2: Favorite Character

Day 2: Your Favorite Character

Solid Snake / Big Boss -- Metal Gear Solid

It's possible my answer here would be different were I not currently in the middle of replaying Snake Eater and having just replayed Sons of Liberty, but really, I'm not sure a better answer would come to mind regardless. Sure the longevity of a Mario or a Mega Man has given them a certain iconic staying power, but really, their popularity is mostly because the games are fun and they happen to be the stars of them. Characters like Link and Chrono walk through their games totally mute, just kind of absorbing all the crazyness around them. Other RPGs like Final Fantasy are typified with fun and complex characters, but in any good Final Fantasy, there's a big ensemble of memorable playable characters that all play off of each other. So I submit to you that Solid Snake and Big Boss--and yeah, for purposes of this blog entry I'm going to consider that genetic sameness to be good enough a reason for them to qualify being lumped together for the answer--are the best characters in video games. David Hayter's gravelly Snake voice is instantly recognizable, the bandanna and the mullet are as charming as they are ridiculous looking, and for all the fun of them, they're uniquely tragic figures in the landscape of video games.

For all the money and effort that's poured into making video games more cinematic, (the voice actors, the music recorded by live orchestras, the motion-captured martial arts, etc.) a lot of the actual stories are still very derivative and very bland. You're the hero, now go kill the villain to save the damsel in distress or the president or whatever. The fact that the villain is voiced by somebody you've seen on TV before only does so much to add any newness to formula. With the Metal Gear Solid series, Hideo Kojima has always pushed the envelope in terms of how much misdirection and moral ambiguity he can add to a medium where, ultimately, as the guy controlling the protagonist, you still have to have some sense of fulfillment and accomplishment at the end. Really, you can say that the conspiracy-laden plotlines of the games, where you're constantly double and triple-crossed and never, ever told the whole story by your superiors, is like a meta-commentary on how video games usually work. Usually you get some objective--in a lot of games it involves you murdering a bunch of people--you complete it, fireworks go off, you put your initials in, you go home. In every Metal Gear Solid game, you always seem relatively sure of what you're doing at the beginning of the game, and by the halfway point you have no idea what you're really accomplishing or who for. (SPOILERS) At the end of the original MGS, you realize that the whole point of you being at Shadow Moses was just to spread the FOXDIE virus and clean up some loose ends for the Pentagon. At the end of Snake Eater, Big Boss has to kill a mother figure in The Boss (it can certainly be inferred that she's in birth mother too, but it doesn't really matter) and finds out that the woman he fell in love with, Eva, was a spy for the Chinese. At the end of MGS4, a withered and scarred Snake, having rid the world of the clandestine organization that had been controlling all world affairs for about a century, feels it's his obligation to kill himself until Big Boss suddenly shows up and urges him to keep living.

What makes Snake great as a character, then, is how much they work serving as the tragic figure in the center of this, and how they're able to develop over time. In the first MGS and in Snake Eater with Big Boss, they're initially pretty much blank slates. Many, including David Hayter himself, have lampooned how completely verbose Snake can be in codec conversations with Roy Campbell or Major Zero or whoever. "Snake, there's a Hind-D landing!" "A Hind-D?" "Snake, you need to find the launch codes!" "Launch codes?" "Snake, this hold is where they keep Metal Gear!" "Metal Gear?!" And it's true, you can't help but laugh at times when you hear some of it, but it underscores that Snake has no real aspirations other than to be a good and loyal soldier. There's a scene at the beginning of Snake Eater where Eva basically undresses in front of Big Boss, prompting pretty much no response, then Eva hands him a pistol and Big Boss immediately launches into a long dialogue about everything there is to know about the gun. It's really funny, and yet it's kind of sad as you realize that, at this point, Big Boss really has no thoughts on anything whatsoever except fighting. The tragedy of the Metal Gear games is that loyalty and patriotism, universally considered good qualities, are never rewarded and always lead to heartbreak and betrayal. The key to the games, and to the characters of Snake and Big Boss, is that they eventually decide to do something about it.

After the Shadow Moses incident in Metal Gear Solid, Snake comes back in MGS2 no longer with the military but working with a non-profit organization (in what other video game does that happen?) dedicated to nuclear non-proliferation. When he meets Raiden, who is under the same puppet-like control of the Patriots in his case, Snake is the one to convince him to live and decide for himself. After Metal Gear Solid 3, Big Boss creates the idea of Outer Heaven, a world where being a soldier still matters and where they're not pawns. Then at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4, everything kind of comes full circle with Big Boss coming back to remind Snake of his own advice to Raiden and convince him to not kill himself to get rid of FOXDIE the "meme" of Snake (it would take a much longer post to really explain this whole thing). They change and grow as characters and break out of their assigned roles of super-soldiers who complete the mission but don't ask questions. I think that's very rare for a video game character.

Of course, you can really not think that hard about it, and just think that the idea of a guy who looks like and bears the namesake of Snake Plisskin from Escape from New York, has a bandanna and a mullet, hides in cardboard boxes, and has a voice that is endlessly amusing to say stuff in, is kind of awesome. That's definitely part of the charm as well.



Next: Day 3 - A game that is underrated.