Metal Gear/ Metal Gear Solid

@Charles

The reason GW in MGS 2 is so verbose and able to get under Raiden's skin is because it's really just a chatbot mining Raiden's own thoughts via his nanomachines. It's essentially using Raiden to simulate a personality.

Which means in a way Raiden spends a lot of time talking to and arguing with himself.

Edited by M84 on Nov 15th 2023 at 9:26:52 PM

Huh.

I never got that.

Weirdly, that was an element in my own most recent book. The protagonist gets a brain implant but it causes a portion of his brain to become much-much faster in its thoughts so he ends up arguing with the Interface, even though the Interface points out it's just an extension of his unconscious.

Thanks for pointing this out. I just assumed GW was a person.

Snake's dialogue is pretty much a summation of the VR theory and what it means for Raiden and the player.

"The memories you have and the role you were assigned are burdens you have to carry. It doesn't matter if they were real or not. That's never the point."

The point is not whether it was VR or not. The point is not that you played as Raiden, stopped the terrorists, etc.

"Listen, don't obsess over words so much. Find the meaning behind the words, then decide."

Kojima was very open about the fact he tried to create a story that can only be told through the medium of a video game, and I feel MGS 2 is a story that can only be told though the medium of a video game, particularly with the VR elements.

"I know you didn't have much in terms of choices this time. But everything you felt, thought about during this mission is yours. And what you decide to do with them is your choice."

Otacon actually spells this out for Raiden as well. He points out that GW is just cobbled together from Raiden's own expectations and mind.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Nov 15th 2023 at 9:31:54 PM

GW is the Arsenal Gear AI with a programmed mission to implement the S3 plan. But the personality it demonstrates as the "Colonel" is mined from Raiden's own thoughts.

Edited by M84 on Nov 15th 2023 at 9:29:45 PM

@Red. What scene did Otacon explain the Colonel?

It's right over here from the script:

Otacon: I think it means — you've been talking to an AI.

Raiden: That's impossible!

Otacon: The Colonel probably isn't GW per se. GW was most likely stimulating cortical activity in the dormant part of your brain through signal manipulation of your own nanomachines. The Colonel is in part your own creation, cobbled together from expectations and experience...

Raiden: That's crazy...

Otacon: But it's probably the truth. The virus may be starting to affect GW, which would explain the Colonel's behavior.

Raiden: It was all — an illusion? Everything I've done so far...?

And this scene is why the VR theory is so popular because the writer through Raiden suggests it himself, but most people are willing to shrug it off because Snake told them everything is real.

Just like the Colonel. Bullshit that Snake isn't part of the simulation.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Nov 15th 2023 at 9:37:50 PM

@ Charles Phipps

Actually, Snake's Revenge is why Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake was created. Source:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051103013555/http://www.gamerstoday.com/world_tours/tour9a.html

We talk about the series's retcons a lot. What's the general feeling on Peace Walker's retcon that The Boss's defection mission "going south" so she had to die, and instead it being that it was intended to put The Boss in a scenario where she'd be set up to die all along?

I mean, Hot Coldman causing all of the problems because he was embezzling the money for the payoffs to the spies in the Soviet Union is kind of hilarious in the fact that the ENTIRE WORLD was wrecked because of one mid-level CIA agent's greed.

But I admit the idea that the Boss being sent to die doesn't change much because the government betrayed her is just a lateral move from why Big Boss hated the US government to begin with.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 16th 2023 at 5:27:02 AM

Coldman was such an asshole even the CIA itself had him demoted.

The irony being the worst thing he ever did was due to Idealism.

Coldman couldn't conceive of people believing enough in an ideology that they'd destroy the world over it.

Even if that ideology was Revenge.

In Venom's own words:

Ahab: "Humans are incapable of destroying themselves?" Turns out he never knew what humans are capable of.

Edited by M84 on Nov 16th 2023 at 9:55:38 PM

Yeah, Hot Coldman may be a case of Evil Cannot Comprehend Evil.

He never believed in anything enough to be willing to destroy himself.

Does anyone know what the "NEDW" that Madnar mentioned back in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake as something he was forced to work on by the US government? To quote the man himself:

Madnar: I just wanted... to finish Metal Gear! It is the culmination of all my life's work in robotology. But your politicians were only interested in nonsense like SDI, NEDW, and brain bombs!

No amount of searching on Google or Wikipedia turns up anything remotely relevant. I'm starting to wonder if the devs or the translators had made a mistake.

Probably. The first two games had a lot of typos or mistranslations, and Kojima's understanding of certain concepts were either flawed or at a Hollywood level for the time (which to say isn't very good). He started getting better around the time of Metal Gear Solid.

...Heck I'm not even sure what the "brain bomb" reference is supposed to be, all I can think of is the more socio-political "brain drain" that happens between countries whenever one cannot provide sufficient work or pay for their more talented individuals. Or maybe he just completely made it up, thinking it would refer to some random top-secret project nobody's ever heard of?

I mean, considering Madnar directly calls it nonsense, maybe they were just supposed to be rando wacky sci fi sounding weapons on purpose?

We can assume brain bombs are some kind of weapon considering Madnar's expertise in robotics.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Nov 20th 2023 at 7:24:30 PM

Looking things up, the only thing based on real life is SDI or Strategic Defense Initiative. The other two might be made up stuff or a translation issue.

I learn towards the latter. I get the feeling the writers were trying to make statement about real life military projects.

Considering SDI was the Star Wars project, NEDW might have been another associated project from the 80s that was going around that never got off the drawing board because the Cold War ended, likely the acronym was supposed to stand for "Near Earth Defense Weapon" so likely an offensive space weapon to go against the defensive space weapons that the SDI project was supposed to create and the last, well if a Brain Bomb was a weapon designed to kill a person and only that person I guess FOXDIE is the cloest we could get and remain in canon, part of the problem with Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake is that it was set 20 minutes into a future that never came, the game is set in 1999 where Military research was finally starting to draw down because of the thaw of the cold war, where in reality military research dropped off hard in the Early 90s because of the collapse of the USSR, that and the SDI project was ultimately abandoned. Funny enough he kind of takes a jab at his own mistaken belief in Metal Gear Solid when he has Kenneth Baker complain about how much the Cold War derailed so much of Military Research Funding.

Really there's a lot of future things he got wrong in Metal Gear 2, like how he kept assuming that there would be some kind of Oil crisis in the near future, the whole Oilix thing that was brought up in that game and then never spoken of again, even when it logically should have made sense since in MGS 4 he again made the claim that oil is now scarce leading to the War Economy.

Of course the easiest excuse is that the Patriots sat on the Oilix data on purpose to keep the global economy under their control but realistically it was more something that Hideo didn't want to bother with again. He does seem to enjoy subverting his own previously held views on subjects.

Edited by Roguemind on Nov 20th 2023 at 4:17:30 AM

IT's funny you mention how Metal Gear 2 doesn't jive well with the future because there were a couple of discussions way back on Big Boss' portrayal here.

For some, it was hard to reconcile who he is here, and what he's like in the later games. And some genuinely forgot how Big Boss threatened the stability of the world and a chance at world peace by taking OILIX just to create more wars where soldiers like him can have a purpose.

That's pure evil right there.

It's interesting to speculate given Characterization Marches On and the games have a running theme of soldiers fighting for causes they don't understand or don't. But even if Big Boss has already made his Face–Heel Turn to become a monster threatening global stability, there's already hints of who he will become.

The allies of the original Metal Gear willingly joining Big Boss this time around because he rescued them from Outer Heaven.

Like I said, I blame Phantom Pain for not being enough connective tissue to make sure Peace Walker Big Boss matches up with child soldier using, manipulative, war hungry war criminal, Big Boss.

I do think Peace Walker Big Boss would naturally evolve into Metal Gear 2 Big Boss considering his character.

Funnily enough it could have been easy to retcon Big Boss's motives with the latter knowledge of the Patriots, if you go by the theory that the Patriots would have shut down Oilix because what it would do to their planned out global economy then Big Boss releasing Oilix on the world to disrupt the global economy and derail the Patriot's plans makes sense. Either way on the surface it just looks like Big Boss's plan was not much different than Skull Face's plan for Metallic Archaea.

Both involve using microscopic creatures to mass produce something that would give the people holding it immense political power, in Skull Face's case it's weapons grade nuclear fuel, in Big Boss's case it's cheap oil.

Really having it come out that Big Boss was simply adapting a plan similar to Skull Face's own only further points out how far he had fallen by that point.

Edited by Roguemind on Nov 20th 2023 at 4:31:07 AM

Also, bluntly, anything Snake was told about the mission could be a lie.

Worries about peak oil really were a big thing back in the early 2000s at the very least, it's not something Kojima made up out of thin air.

I mean, that's the lore from the manual, there was going to be world peace between the Soviets and the USA but Big Boss threatened it all by taking OILEX.

Yeah, even if you put in the Patriots into Big Boss' motivation, the latter is still plunging the world into eternal war and creating countless amounts of victims to turn to soldiers to continue the cycle just so he can feel alive.

Snake hates the bastard for a reason.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Nov 20th 2023 at 8:37:07 PM