Honestly, dudes, if Rising is just a game about cutting things with smooth controls, that will almost be enough for me. I'd like a real MGS game, but more than anything Rising just looks fun. It's what Final Fantasy XIII wanted to be but couldn't figure out.
Disclaimer: haven't played FFXIII. However, the stated desire for cinematic, player-controlled gameplay was clear enough, and the x-button tapping execution was also clear.
Aqizzar:
Yeah, I thought the second ending fell pretty flat. On the one hand, the thematic elements Kojima managed to put into place were pretty impressive, and for me provided some food for thought. Not the "taking it back to Zero crap," the impressive foiling between Snake and Sunny. Snake seeing off both his mother and his father, in the same poses (at first), almost incapable of touching either of them... yeah, I was impressed with that, too. I basically couldn't watch Zero's death, though I know next to nothing about the character. Too horrible. The injunction to continue living and stop fighting carried over well from the first game, but in the end I thought it felt very weak in comparison.
I have to say that the awkward stresses with Otacon's voice acting in this game were simply unacceptable. Most of the VAs were very good, or at least okay. He had a rather cute voice in the first game, and the second seems at least workable, if not good. I'm not complaining about his emoting here because I honestly thought it worked. Just the strange, unnatural emphases.
Also, the bit with the blue rose was bloody ridiculous. A blue rose symbolizes a miracle... throwing that in the ending, as well as the "hurr, foxes pretending to be snakes" bit just made me facepalm. I didn't even pay attention to most of the plotty exposition because I was too bored by that point =/
On the other hand, the implication that it is just too fucking late for Snake and Otacon was my preferred one. Drebin's going to be okay; so are Raiden, Sunny, Meryl (all of whom have symbolically managed to recross the line from soldier to civilian/"human")... but for the people who started it and worked so hard to finish it off, there's no more time left. Otacon is stuck in the system and never going to get out, too emotionally fragile despite everything. Snake killed himself to keep himself from ever becoming a weapon again, fulfilling all of the statements that say both he and Liquid are going to have to die. Snake doesn't even manage to give up on the cigarettes on his own willpower... in the end, both genes and memes are inescapable. He isn't capable of any real change from the rut established by society; he has no meaningful control in the end. All he can do is mature into the role provided. The bit with the reversed eyepatch (which then blew up) as a symbol was particularly nice, in my opinion (even without having played MGS3, or knowing anything whatsoever about that game's plot).
Furthermore, the "Snake is a beast and will never turn into a prince" part was obvious in the first ending, and needed no explicit stressing. The B&Bs provide interesting contrast. They're insane, but that insanity is a shell over another self, another existence. As we see from the foetal curling poses post-mortem, our damaged young women are essentially children who were arrested in their development. Snake is "solid" emotionally but possesses no bifurcated identity, no illusion of himself capable of negotiating the world outside the system.
All the same, he has choices, and he makes them.
That the second ending pretended otherwise seems, to me, a bit of a cheap shot. The first game gave us hope and freedom. The last provided us with inevitability, responsibility, duty. I personally thought that from a literary perspective, the entire damn thing--except that ending--was fucking brilliant. Maybe not the underlying kudzu plot or the occasionally clunky dialogue, but like every mythological epic, there's always a bit of a weird underpinning (and I often suspected that Kojima was making fun and parodying as much as he was simply falling flat). On a symbolic scale, every piece of it was prismatic in a way I hadn't anticipated from a video game.
And, you know, there was something very impressive about the way Kojima handled this fundamentally existentialist problem. He opens with the specter of death, chaos, lack of control haunting the narrative, and answers it with the injunction to live, fearlessly, with honor. He closes with that specter looming closer and closer, and shows us how to face it with dignity. And, most importantly, he doesn't look away or flinch from the conclusion. Snake is going to die. He does die, alone, as all of us do. Parentless, friendless, burned by the flames of war as both his parents were.
But only halfway.
I may be overanalyzing this, but man, I absolutely love existentialist narratives to death. And symbolic ones. And I love how this game presented itself.
As far as MGS2 goes, I'm at this point a little bit disappointed even by David Hayter :I Also, I want to know what in the heck happened to Meiling, because Otacon clearly has no idea what he's doing. On the other hand, the more casual and natural tone of their conversations at this point is refreshing. They actually do sound like two guys who know each other well... in essence, they managed chemistry, which cheers me up because so often that tends to be lacking in voice acting.
I'm also going to add that the PC port apparently decided that the controls needed to be both extremely awkward and made of crap. Lordy. At least you can swap up the key configs. Also, there is all kinds of rigamaro needed to make it run on Windows 7, but... well, maybe now I can stop dying in the first two minutes via invisible mook =/
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Topic: Metal... GEAR? (Read 134053 times)