See, this is why I didn’t bother analyzing the trailer much — I knew Threedogg would do a much better job. He connects all the plot points together, including Eli being Liquid Snake, Miller being the Beret Man who tortures Emmerich, and more.
Read on, folks! And make sure to follow him on Twitter @ThreedoggGaming and over at his Twitch channel.
Time for some trailer analysis I guess…
From the latest E3 trailer It’s pretty clear the game is going to show this final step in Big Boss’s transformation in a pretty dark way. Kojima spoke about taboo and touchy subjects being brought up in this game and the trailer certainly shows some messed up shit. We see Big Boss and Chico ripping some device that looks like a bomb out of Paz’s body. It’s quite gruesome as we see her squirming and screaming before she drops dead, as well as a traumatized look on Chico’s face while he’s doing it. It will likely be a lot worse in the game when the music track isn’t playing over it… We also see African child soldiers being trained to shoot and some disturbing torture scenes. It also looks like Big Boss might be killing Chico at the end of the trailer which I speculated about months ago as Chico seems to be being set up by skullface to help bring down MSF. The African child soldiers will likely become part of Big Boss’s army, Outer Heaven. Outer Heaven is built in Africa and Big Boss needs to create an army again after losing MSF so its quite likely he will be recruiting African children. It’s easy to just show gore for the sake of gore and showing child soldiers for the sake of doing it and claiming its taboo, but Kojima isn’t that shallow. The real thing that will make these kinds of things taboo is the context in which they are shown. How they relate to the themes of the game, the morals behind Big Boss and the characters of the game as they are committing these acts is what will make these scenes “taboo”.
Now for a few things I noticed in the trailer. It’s quite obvious that Eli is Liquid. The caption reads “a youth who curses his fate”. Liquid would be 12 years old in 84. He spent time in the middle east in his youth, the blonde hair. So many things point to him being Liquid. Eli is also another parallel to Moby Dick where there’s a character named Elijah. The man getting tortured at about 2 and a half mins after the gruesome stomach scene is Huey. He’s wearing the same shirt as we see him in later in the trailer. When infiltrating the place where Miller is held some soldiers have the fox logo on their helmets. The woman named “Quiet” seems like she was the one getting tortured at the start of the trailer, they were both wearing the same clothes. I don’t think she’s a returning character. I have no idea what to think of skullface anymore. Probably a new character also, or perhaps one of the usual suspects from PW, but I dunno about that anymore. Code Talker seems to be the character that’s over 100 years old whom they mentioned at the GDC conference, also seems to be a new character. He also reminded me of twin peaks. His eyes use the exact same effect as the doppelgangers in the black lodge. I found it interesting how Mantis appeared during the Those who “don’t exist” caption. I guess the caption means that even though these things may not be real people they still exist inside Big Boss’s mind and may as well be considered real to him. The supernatural elements seem very Silent Hill-esque. It reminded me of a line from Silent Hill 2. “To us his illusions are nothing but the imaginings of a busy mind but to him there simply is no other reality”. The man wearing the beret seems to be Miller. He’s missing the entire arm we see at the end of the trailer and also the leg thats been partly removed seems to have been replaced. You can see that the leg is slightly skinnier. This leads me to what I found to be probably the most intrguing thing about the trailer, which is Miller.
Miller seems to take center stage in this trailer. It really made me wonder who is the real parallel to Ahab here, coz in this trailer it’s most certainly Miller. Miller is the one dead set on getting revenge on Cipher and even in looks seems to be more of a parallel to Ahab. He will likely have a peg leg after losing half of his leg and seems to have his entire arm missing. He also looks quite sinister in a very contrasting outfit to his usual style wearing the beret and Foxhound style jacket like Ocelot. I associate the beret with the msx games. In MG2 all the soldiers wear those berets in zanzibar and Big Boss also wears one. Gene wore one in Portable Ops too and he was in many ways a parallel to Big Boss. The metaphor of the term phantom pain also related to Miller in the trailer more than Big Boss. Phantom Pain is when you lose a limb but can still feel it as if it’s still there. Miller speaks about the loss of his limbs and how he can still feel them as well as feeling the loss of his dead comrades. But what makes this really interesting is the fact we know that Millers loyalty to Big Boss is very questionable and his loyalty to anyone really. In Peace Walker we learn that Miller is a business partner with Zero and Cipher and is giving them intel on all of MSF’s and Big Boss’s operations. He also knows about the clones. In this game however it seems Zero has decided to say fuck that to his business relationship with Miller and attacks him along with the rest of MSF. So what is the real reason for Millers revenge on Zero? Is it because Zero betrayed him and broke their business relationship or is it because he was actually loyal to Big Boss all along and only cared for MSF and had ulterior motives behind his business with Zero? It should also be noted that Miller ends up working with Foxhound commanded by Campbell to help Solid Snake bring Big Boss down.
I also wonder if Big Boss really cares for getting revenge on Zero after the Ground Zeroes incident or will it just be Miller who cares for the revenge at first? This leads me to think how will Miller convince Big Boss to also want to get revenge…. the clones! D:< Will Miller tell Big Boss about the clones to get him on his side or will Big Boss find out himself and Miller will pretend like he’s shocked and knows nothing? We are told in MGS4 that when Big Boss finds out about the clones it is the final straw in their relationship and this is what sets off the feud.
I don’t really know what to think of the gameplay. Kojima tweeted that it was challenging to show open world gameplay and how it’s really experienced in a trailer and it certainly seemed hard to judge. We saw snippets of new cqc and some shooting but didn’t really get to see how it works properly. Is there alerts and cautions I wonder, and if so how do they work. The day/night and weather effecting the various aspects of the gameplay seems cool. The world looks nice and choosing multiple ways to access your objective looks sweet too. As I play the MGS games millions of times I hope the game isn’t too easy once you know the areas inside out. But even if it is, it will probably be a lot of fun alternating strategies depending on the day/night cycle and weather. Cleaning out the massive areas of all their guards and looting the place seems like it might be cool. I’m also wondering about difficulty levels and will you choose it from the beginning or will it be like other open world games where you change difficulty mid game. I’d prefer it to be the classic style but I have a feeling it won’t be. Also I have no idea what’s going to happen regarding boss battles in an open world setting.
For people who haven’t played Metal Gear 2 (MSX) it should be noted what kind of person Big Boss is in that game. Even though the game has a very simple and linear narrative and very little dialogue, the “main games” of the series stay very true to the kind of person he is in that game. In the original Metal Gear there is barely any story and Big Boss is basically just a cliche stereotypical villain with no depth at all(We do learn that he controls the military facility of outer heaven and leads an army), but in MG2 he is the character that we hear about in MGS1 and 2 and the character the prequels are leading up to portraying.
In Metal Gear 2, Big Boss rules the nation of Zanzibar and has turned it into a gigantic military organization. He wants a world of never ending war, raises child soldiers and has very twisted morals behind what he’s doing. In MGS1 we hear Liquid say that Big Boss always told him that he was inferior etc.. Big Boss becomes pretty fucked up.