Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker – MMOMFG Review
Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker
The Metal Gear Solid series has always had a unique style. Most people recognize this style with regard to the story. When you pick up a Metal Gear game, you know you’re getting into a magical realist romp, usually with some postmodern gimmicks and horrible dialogue. It’s a unique narrative style that you grow to love despite its flaws (and for what it’s worth, I’m one of those rare Raiden-loving proponents of Metal Gear Solid 2 who believes that that game truly has moments of complete genius).
But the gameplay of the Metal Gear series has always been unique, never really fitting accurately into any video game genre; it’s certainly never really sufficed to just call Metal Gear Solid a stealth series. There has always been a strange blend of stealth, action, puzzles, humor, and some stuff that quite honestly can’t be described with just one word. Each of these elements is handled very differently from how any other game handles them. You get a sense that the Kojima has a strong grasp on what he’s doing and that he goes about designing a game with a lot of confidence, which leads to more methodical and consistent experiences in the end. All this goes toward establishing a style that is uniquely and definitively Metal Gear, a style all the better for defying categorization.
Peace Walker is no different. It has the Metal Gear story and the Metal Gear humor, the stealth and the action (plenty of action actually, this time around), and it introduces some new mechanics of its own that you haven’t seen anywhere else. It’s certainly unique and mostly fun, but it definitely doesn’t get everything right. It has some major flaws alongside that distinct and lovable Metal Gear style.
What’s Good
The Story – Metal Gear Solid 3 had a concentrated focus on one particular plot element—Big Boss’s relationship with The Boss—and this focus led the game to have one of the best (and most coherent) stories in the Metal Gear series. Peace Walker is similarly focused on this relationship. The game delves further into The Boss’s back story and considers her motives in greater detail, rounding out one of the most complex and interesting characters in the Metal Gear series. The game still suffers from silly and repetitive dialogue, as Metal Gear games always do, but it has an undeniably emotional core that really comes to fruition in the ending, just like in Metal Gear Solid 3.
The story also suggests the differing motives that led to the conflict between The Patriots and Outer Heaven and sort of begins to straighten out the origins of these factions. By no means does it completely resolve the mess that Metal Gear Solid 4 created when it tried to pull all of the disparate plot elements of the Metal Gear series together, but it does attempt to work toward a partial resolution by putting focus on Big Boss and The Boss again and revealing their motives with surprising acuity and subtlety.
The Humor – Metal Gear’s brand of bizarre humor is very much intact in Peace Walker. You’ll certainly realize this while you’re completing whole missions where you’re forced to hold up enemy soldiers with a banana as if it were a gun. There are ridiculous missions involving ghosts—sneaking past and photographing them. There are missions that are direct references to the old arcade game Pooyan, complete with the high-pitched music from the game and the premise of shooting balloons attached to people. One of the missions actually requires that Snake take another character out on a date. And there are, of course, the Monster Hunter missions, where you have to take on the monsters from Capcom’s series as Snake. Whew.
As you can see, the humor isn’t merely in the easter eggs (although there are plenty of those, as usual). Full missions are designed with humor in mind and are only made more humorous when you encounter them amidst all of the game’s more normal missions.
The Controls – Metal Gear games have always had unique controls. Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3, for example, used the pressure sensitivity of the DualShock 2’s buttons to create exceedingly precise controls that led to an enhanced sense of feedback from the game.
The PSP, unfortunately, is no DualShock controller. In fact, it’s hindered greatly by its lack of a second analog stick. But Peace Walker’s designers did a remarkable job of working around this limitation by coming up with a few control schemes that actually work quite well and are, in the tradition of Metal Gear, pretty unique. The default control scheme requires the use of the face buttons for camera control, while the shoulder buttons control aiming and shooting and the D-pad controls crouching, general actions, and access to your items and weapons. This is an interesting control scheme, even for those used to Metal Gear’s odd control schemes, and it certainly takes some getting used to; but it does a surprisingly good job of overcoming the problem of the missing second analog stick.
You’ll undoubtedly run into some minor issues here and there—for my part I found that it’s easy to lose your grip on the left shoulder button while trying to do all of these other things with the face buttons, which will make you lose your aim; and having to use the analog nub the whole game can get tiresome—but these are about as good of controls as you can get with a portable game no less expansive than the average Metal Gear console game.
The Expansive Mechanics – Ever since Metal Gear Solid 3 introduced the backpack, the number of items and weapons in Metal Gear games has grown wildly. Peace Walker takes this even further, as item, weapon, and troop management will in fact take up a huge portion of your time spent playing the game. You have to put your recruited soldiers onto teams, leveling them up for different purposes (the R&D team develops items and weapons; the mess hall team cooks food, which will keep your troops’ morale up; the medical team heals soldiers in the sick bay). All of this micromanaging is lightly RPGish. You can also gather parts to build and customize your own Metal Gear, and you can send soldiers on “outer ops” missions in which you can watch your troops fight with the enemy because the game includes a complete battle simulation in a turn-based RPG style.
You can probably tell by the inclusion of this complete RPG simulation that the designers are dedicated to fully fleshing out every one of Peace Walker’s new mechanics. Even the menus are extremely well-designed, aesthetically pleasing and consistent, and easy to navigate, which is something I ended up appreciating a lot because of how much time you have to spend in them. There’s just something really remarkable about the level of dedication and commitment that was applied to the whole game. It’s hard not to respect.
What’s Bad
The Bloated Mechanics – With that said, the sheer amount of content in the game is just too much. The RPG simulation is really impressive, but after watching it a few times, I skipped it the rest of the game. Throughout the first few hours of the game, new features are introduced one after another just when you think they’ve introduced them all, to the point where I have to imagine that this must be part of Metal Gear’s humor and you’re supposed to laugh at how ridiculous it begins to get. It ends up being a pretty big distraction from the actual gameplay, and it’s hard to care about some of it. It doesn’t help that some of the features, while definitely developed in full, are not too well-explained. It took me almost halfway through the game to figure out how to level up my teams correctly to develop the items and weapons that I wanted.
The most frustrating and confusing feature of all of the game’s bloated mechanics is the process of building your own Metal Gear. I know that you have to collect parts from the bosses you defeat. But the whole process of determining which parts you need and how to get them is exceedingly confusing. I’m not even sure whether you’re supposed to destroy the parts of bosses that you want or leave them untouched to get them. Even more frustratingly, you need to complete your Metal Gear in order to get the game’s second ending. It’s really annoying to have to go back and play through these boss missions over and over again to blindly attempt to get the parts that you want just to get to that second ending; it really makes me miss the simple linearity that Metal Gear is known for.
Repetitive Missions – I’m going to dispense with the myth of “replay value” here. Replay value is a bullshit thing to judge a game by how long it will last. I know, you’re paying a lot for these games, so you want to get as much out of them as you can. And you might think that looking at them in terms of numbers of hours of playtime is the easiest way of determining how much you’ll get out of them, because, hey, these are cold, hard, empirical numbers. But consider: if 80 of those 100 hours of gameplay consist of doing relatively the same thing you did in the first 20 hours, are you really getting your money’s worth? I wish game designers would more often just cut out the fat and make lean, focused games that recognize that there is a point that all games reach (in most cases rather early on) when their mechanics have been stretched to their limits and everything that can possibly be done that is interesting has been done. If less game designers attempted to extend the lengths of their games with repetition, players might more often get to the end of a game and realize with amazement that they never actually lapsed into boredom at any point. But then I suppose not all of our games can be Portal.
Peace Walker unfortunately tries to extend its replay value, as games so often do, with repetition. Many of the extra missions are almost exactly the same as the main story missions. They use the same environments, and in a lot of cases the enemy soldiers are even in the exact same positions. The only thing they bothered to change was your objective: now you’re blowing up a crate with C4 or rescuing a prisoner or retrieving some items. The crate, the prisoner, and the items all tend to be located in the same place, and the sneaking to get to that place is exactly the same in all of these missions. It’s odd and pointless to have to play what is almost the exact same mission over again. I think it would have been a lot more fun to sneak through the same environments again if the extra missions picked up in difficulty a bit, but they don’t.
The more action-oriented missions, however, do pick up in difficulty, which is exactly where added difficulty isn’t needed. Like the stealth missions, these missions all tend to be very similar to each other, just with the added annoyance of enemies having more and more health each time. Which brings me to my most major negative point…
Bosses with Crazy Amounts of Health – Peace Walker simply was not balanced for a single-player mode, and this is most apparent in the boss battles. The bosses are huge, and some have something like ten different attacks, which makes them look and seem pretty epic. I didn’t get the chance to try out co-op in Peace Walker, but I imagine it would probably be great fun to strategize while taking on these giant bosses as a team; and their amount of health would probably be a lot more reasonable because you’d have as much as four times the firepower. But, if you’re playing by yourself, the designers made the huge mistake of failing to decrease the amount of health that these bosses have.
To put it into perspective, one of the final bosses takes about 50 rockets to kill (with the rocket launcher I used at the time; depending on the one you use and how much you’ve leveled it up, it will take slightly take more or less). On top of that, you can’t actually just shoot it with 50 rockets: it will take more than 50 if you’re not hitting its weak point every time; the boss also puts up some kind of shield from time to time that makes all of the rockets that you shoot at it fly back at you; and, of course, you only actually have between 5 and 7 rockets at any given time, and you will have to frequently call in for extra ammo using the supply marker item. All told, this makes the boss battle take as long as 30 minutes to complete. This is completely absurd and unnecessary. Despite the unusually large number of attacks that these bosses have, your interest isn’t going to be sustained for 30 minutes. And when you happen to die near the end of these battles, you’ll really start to hate this game for making you start over from the beginning.
Worth Remembering:
The last few missions of the main story and the ending. This is where the stealth missions pick up in difficulty a bit, and you’ll experience a real sense of satisfaction as you sneak past guards. Then there is a pretty great (if slightly too difficult) action-oriented mission that ends in a battle with a helicopter while some rousing background music with vocals plays. It’s a really fantastic moment.
The cinematic ending of the game is also remarkably well done. As I said of the story above, it’s really focused and quite emotional like Metal Gear Solid 3’s, and Peace Walker’s ending really exemplifies all of this.
Worth Forgetting:
Most of the boss battles. These guys are huge and epic and you really want to love them, so it’s really unfortunate that you end up having to hate them just because of their massive amounts of health. But it’s more than enough to inspire incredible abhorrence. They’re a pain in the ass and you won’t get very far into the game before you’ll start to hate whenever an action-oriented mission pops up.
Keep in mind, of course, that I didn’t get the chance to try out any of the co-op or versus modes. Keep in mind that this was because they’re ad hoc only, and you can consider yourself quite geographically lucky if you happen to have friends nearby willing to play Peace Walker with you.
Even if I were able to play the multiplayer modes, I don’t think my view on the game would change too much. It has plenty of flaws but also succeeds in many unique ways. Peace Walker is everything that you would expect from a Metal Gear game and then some.
*MMOMFG purchased a copy of MGS: Peace Walker for review
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Nice one.
