Metal Gear deep lore

Posted in Games on 2017-06-21

Considerable spoilers follow for most of the Metal Gear series.

Snake dies at the end of MGS4

Kojima always intended for MGS4 to be the end of Solid Snake.¹ An early idea was that Snake and Otacon would turn themselves in to be executed for their crimes², referenced in the end theme “Here’s To You”, a 1971 a song about two anarchists sentenced to death.

In the finished game, Solid Snake appears to shoot himself at the end to prevent the spread of mutant FOXDIE virus, only for a post-credits scene to reveal that he changes his mind at the last second, discovers Big Boss is still alive, and lives on to usher in a new era. But that’s not the ending Kojima originally wanted.

Kojima ordered an unexpected last-minute dialogue change to Sunny’s ending lines.³ The original line, “Snake, Hal, they’re ready!” was changed to “Everyone, hurry! They’re ready!”, to make it ambiguous who Sunny is talking to. Kojima intentionally made it ambiguous whether Snake ever returned.

How could Snake have survived? We see him load a live round, and hear the gun fire. Nobody would have sabotaged his gun to jam: Otacon accepted Snake’s decision, Sunny didn’t know, Drebin only cares for money, and nobody else knew. The joke answer is that Snake was holding a ration, but game logic and humour don’t apply to serious scenes like this.

It’s possible that Snake pulled the gun away at the last second and fired, but in a stressful situation an expert soldier like Snake is likely to fall back on his training and eject the cartridge instead. Since he did fire, the most plausible outcome is that Snake died.

Heavens Divide

The Sorrow (MGS3) suggests that spirits are real in the Metal Gear universe. Warriors in Kojima’s universe don’t pass on to Valhalla, or any place that would glorify battle. They remain trapped in a purgatory of their own sin and regret until they’re able to let go of the past. It is a battlefield that can only be defeated by peace.

This is where Solid Snake meets Big Boss.

Big Boss carries the Patriot, the weapon with which he was forced to kill the Boss (MGS3). It’s purely symbolic: he left the real one at The Boss’ grave in 1964. He can’t pass on until he puts it down and makes peace with his enemies in life: Solid Snake (the son who killed him twice) and Zero.

Solid Snake only ever considered three people his friends or family: Big Boss, Gray Fox, and Otacon. He already made his peace with Otacon before he left, and Gray Fox isn’t here since already accepted death in MGS1.

But Snake, who has already given up fighting, still has two regrets: that he did not make peace with Big Boss, and that the mutated FOXDIE prevents him from seeing the era of peace he helped create. Big Boss absolves him of both before passing on.

Plot holes

Big Boss says certain things that make no sense, except to rationalize this situation in ways that Solid Snake can understand. If Big Boss was asleep until the System was destroyed⁴, when did he get a chance to learn about FOXDIE from Naomi⁵, who died before Snake destroyed the AI? Even then, why would Naomi tell Big Boss but not Snake? Why would FOXDIE have killed EVA and Ocelot⁶ even though they were unharmed after prolonged contact with Snake and only died after serious injury?

But the biggest issue is that Big Boss doesn’t try to stop Solid Snake from shooting himself. The only logical explanation is that Big Boss wasn’t there until Snake pulled the trigger. Big Boss died in 1999 and has been waiting the entire time to be re-united with his son.

The Boss lives at the end of MGS3

All warfare is based on deception.

Naked Snake’s orders in MGS3 are to kill The Boss, while her orders are to be killed. Instead of simply taking the hit, she carries out a suspiciously elaborate plan where she shows up on a horse, briefs Snake on her goal to unite the world, explains her new goal to retire to civilian life, fires a nuke so nobody will visit the scene of the fight for 50 years, calls in an airstrike to destroy all evidence, then duels Snake before being shot by her own gun.

We only see the Metal Gear games from the perspective of the protagonist, Snake⁷, whichever Snake that happens to be. Anything Snake sees, we see. Anything Snake doesn’t know, we don’t know. Snake is pretty dumb⁸, while The Boss is literally the military genius who invented special forces and taught Snake everything he knows.

It would be trivial for The Boss to outsmart Snake, and since they fought in such a remote location, she only needs to fool him to fake her own death. As long as she doesn’t show her face in the US, Europe, Russia or China, The Boss can fulfil her dream of living out her years as a civilian woman while Snake gets on with uniting the world.

In Peace Walker, Dr. Strangelove finds The Boss’ horse in the Middle East. It doesn’t obey any master or accept anyone but The Boss as a rider, meaning unless it rode all that way by itself, The Boss survived her duel with Snake and rode it there.

The Boss is the woman who literally invented modern stealth warfare, and would have no trouble exfiltrating a country by land without being spotted. Nobody will notice that neither her body nor her horse were ever found: she prepared a nuke to prevent anyone searching the area, and an airstrike to ensure nobody would find anything even if they did. Her cover would remain intact if either the nuke or the airstrike fell through somehow.

But how did she survive? Snake shot her at point blank range, yes, but with her own gun. The Boss could easily have loaded her gun with a blank round after she fell in the flowers at the end of the fight.

Recall early on how Ocelot jammed a semi-automatic weapon by trying to insert a bullet into the open bolt on a semi-automatic weapon. Remember also how Ocelot’s “guns” gesture resembles the CQC stance exclusive to people trained by The Boss, and it’s easy to conclude Ocelot saw her training this technique for her fight with Snake.

Consider also that after he shoots, Snake experiences what can only make sense as a hallucation: the white flowers turning red, and the long scar on The Boss’ chest moving through the grass like a snake. Plausible explanations are extreme stress, and that flowers with psychotropic effects, as certain types of Star of Bethlehem are known to have ; remember that The Boss deliberately selected this flower patch as the site of battle.

In any case, if Snake is suffering from hallucinations like this, he could easily miss something like the Patriot being loaded with a blank round.

Since the game takes place from Snake’s point of view, the player ever learns that The Boss faked her own death, and that’s exactly as she planned. Her final mission, to fake her own death, de-exfiltrate from the Soviet Union in secret and retire, was completed perfectly.

The name of The Boss’ horse

Supposing soldiers have an afterlife in the Kojima-verse, it’s not unthinkable that horses do too. Perhaps one where they are a kind of equine royalty, beloved by all horses.

What does a former astronaut name her horse? Celestia.⁹

Quiet survives in MGSV

At the end of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Quiet breaks her vow of silence to direct a rescue helicopter to Snake’s position, saving him from a deadly snakebite but condemning herself to death since she’s infected with the parasite strain triggered the by English language.

First, let me rant how stupid this scene is. Snake is bitten by a snake despite wearing (in my playthrough) heavy bulletproof armour, then tries to perform a serious scene despite wearing (in my playthrough) the chicken hat¹⁰.

Quiet then uses English to guide in the rescue helicopter. Why? Most Mother base staff speak at least four languages, and they’re random African mercenaries. Didn’t Quiet, an elite assassin operating in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan who will die if she speaks English, think to start learning Russian? Couldn’t she just hum in Morse code?

A better question is this: Why does Quiet believe Skull Face when he says she’s infected with the English strain of the vocal cord parasite?

According to the tapes, Skull Face lies about everything, including, specifically, infecting a Navajo with the English strain of the vocal cord parasite.¹¹

But an even better is that according to an interview with the author of the official MGSV novelization, Kojima said, on Quiet, “She’s not dead”.¹²

Metal Gear Survive is purgatory

In Kojima’s world, war is burdensome, not glorious; if soldiers meet each other in the afterlife, it is a purgatory where they are trapped until they learn to forgive the past.

In Ground Zeroes, Mother Base was ambushed by faceless, unknown enemies who sank entire platforms with C4 on the struts. Hundreds of soldiers died unfairly and without purpose, and their spirits were unable to pass on.

In the afterlife of Kojima’s world, soldiers see things in terms of what they knew in life, rationalized and detailed with symbolism that they can understand and come to terms with.

So in Metal Gear Survive, soldiers cling to the scene of the Mother Base platform they died on, rationalized as being beamed up into some wormhole to another world. There they fight faceless enemies, representing the enemy they weren’t able to fight in real life.

Gas Snake

After MGS1’s release, fans suggested that Solid and Liquid Snake have a secret third brother, Gas Snake. (In fact the third brother appears in MGS2: Solidus, a word referring to the dividing line between solid and liquid.)

Try to count all the Snakes in the series; that is to say, soldiers given the codename Snake. Most will say five: Solid Snake, Liquid Snake, Solidus Snake, Naked Snake (Big Boss), and Punished ‘Venom’ Snake (also Big Boss; it’s complicated).

But there’s a sixth: Raiden, who is briefly called “Snake” at the start of Metal Gear Solid 2 before Colonel Campbell instructs him to change his codename to Raiden.

We never learn what Raiden’s full codename was before MGS2.

What if it’s Gas Snake?

Footnotes