Metal Gear The Soild Ground Pains Zero Five Rising The Backdown

[Bells]

Snake... it doesn't require it. It just has it. Actually.... i don't even think it has it to be honest...

And the female characters are living, breathing persons... able, capable fighters that show as much competence (some times more) than male characters. Both as good and bad people. That's all in there...

But if you actually think MGS is a fantasy series... dude... c'mon now... you are misreading the entirety of the franchise. It has fantastical elements to it... it has sci fi elements to it... but all the way back to the first game, even before MGS... it's a war spy thriller. Closer to a grittier james bond / rambo mash up then anything else really...

[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by Bells

Snake... it doesn't require it. It just has it. Actually.... i don't even think it has it to be honest...

And the female characters are living, breathing persons... able, capable fighters that show as much competence (some times more) than male characters. Both as good and bad people. That's all in there...

But if you actually think MGS is a fantasy series... dude... c'mon now... you are misreading the entirety of the franchise. It has fantastical elements to it... it has sci fi elements to it... but all the way back to the first game, even before MGS... it's a war spy thriller. Closer to a grittier james bond / rambo mash up then anything else really...

There's nothing gritty or realistic about James Bond, it's a juvenile male fantasy wish-fulfillment series at its core.

(But comparing MGS to James Bond absolutely does indirectly prove my point re: both series being godawful places to try to seriously explore the consequences of sexual assault. Can you imagine if James Bond of all people was tasked with rescuing and aiding a woman who had been raped and tortured in a military camp? James Bond, like MGS, is an example of a series that should never try to tackle feminist themes in the context of a gritty "War is Hell" storyline, neither series is at all the right place for that.)

Just because a story's set in something vaguely akin to 'Earth' as opposed to Westeros or Middle-Earth doesn't mean it isn't fantastical. A better example of a gritty war spy thriller that's actually trying to take itself sort-of seriously might be Splinter Cell (I've never played a Splinter Cell game so I wouldn't know.) But at least Splinter Cell doesn't have all the fantastical elements that make Metal Gear Solid utterly unrealistic.

...And, the female characters are "living, breathing persons?" Have we played the same Metal Gear Solid titles? MGS4's Beauty and the Beast team struck you as a team of capable women with agency?!?

[Overcast]

Taking in the evidence as presented and processing it a bit more. It definitely is present that there is a lot of bleedover from the other games and their lead developer making a presence in this one psychologically. If this game had been redesigned and presented without relation to MGS or Kojima in total I'm trying to figure if it would be taken the same way, because his history of Kojimaness is apparently not helping, which I will not deny is totally a thing.

Is it as much of a thing in this game though? I mean from a purely subjective standpoint does it seem that way? I'm biased myself because honestly most of what I know about MGS is through various cutscenes and wikipedia articles so my mental image of the games is much more white washed and medical, I don't have the Kojima sexist factor in my brain quite so heavily.

I'd like someone who is though to really break it down in the ways this game in particular continues the history of outlandishness from the past, and maybe moreso how it doesn't. Bells is doing a pretty good job of the latter but I think I could use more evidence of the former if someone can present it, instead of just referencing all the times Kojima done fukd up before, or at least using it as a segue to help me grasp how it happened this time without it being particularly general and more microscopic.

[Bells]

@Snake on the Not-James bond thing..... i said grit[ier] ...c'mon now dude...

And the opening sequence of Snake Eater also kinda goes against what you are saying right there...

On the MGS4 though, i cannot comment, that's the one i didn't play. I know ''of'' it, but i lack the context of having played it or even watched a full LP of it... i Know the Boss though... and Eva... and Even Paz... i want to say Naomi, but i don't know if MGS4 negates that...

@overcast actully even i would like to see someone bringing that... i mean, i'm hardly a ''scholar'' of the lore here... i just know what this cone vision has given me to see thus far...

[Kyanbu The Legend]

Best I could do was try and reason with what he tried to do. I'm more familiar with his work on the Z.O.E series then MGS.

Is there even anyone here that's familiar enough with the series to give it a thorough break down?

[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by Kyanbu The Legend

Is there even anyone here that's familiar enough with the series to give it a thorough break down?

What do you want a breakdown of? I'm familiar with every canon game in the series except Ground Zeroes.

[Kyanbu The Legend]

Basically a summary of the series as a whole with maybe the inclusion of dev interviews.

[BitVyper]

Originally Posted by Kyanbu The Legend

Basically a summary of the series as a whole

MGS1: Metal Gear?
MGS2: Snake? Snake! SNAAAAAAAAAKE!
MGS3: You've created a time paradox!
MGS4: Metal Gear!

[Jagos]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

I just don't understand why "a grim look at war" requires the inclusion of brazenly misogynistic story elements.

Really, dude? "Misogynistic" story elements? Which do you have a problem with here? The fact that someone died in a game or how they died? I seriously want to get to the bottom of this way of thinking and why people seem to get into panic mode when there's some 18+ stuff in a game. Maybe it's my D&D upbringing, but we dealt with stuff like this in a game meant for teenagers and even then it just seems like a misreading of how a story works.

You can have a grim, depressing, "War Sucks" story thematically with a female character who's a living, breathing person and not just a sexualized, disempowered victim or a conventionally attractive, woefully underdressed pinup doll. Kohima achieved just that in MGS3 with The Boss, and while she wasn't implemented perfectly, her whole storyline was basically "War Sucks, my life was ruined by war, but I'm not just here as some object for men to claim and kill and fight over."

And he achieved that with Quiet, Eva, and other women that have gone on to be very powerful. But Boss died beautifully and that story was one of tragedy for Snake, was it not? He had to kill his mentor. He's seen the tragedy of war and he has to live on with the memory of what he did in the Fog of War. Not every story involving a female is going to end like this. So what is it? Do you want every story to end with a beautiful death for the female characters or is there something else you don't want to deal with here?

You can tell a story about war being awful -- you can even have a story where the undue consequences of war against women are gracefully explored. You can't do that in the same game where your protagonist has an inappropriate date with an underage girl.

... This wasn't a date... Why are you bringing that up?

You can't do that in the same game where one of your female characters is deliberately wearing hardly any clothing and heavily advertised to an audience of predominantly teenage boys.

You're making an assumption here that women won't play the game... And why are you acting as if you're going to change Kojima's mind here? That's just odd...

You can't do that and simultaneously try to court the men in your audience who are attracted to your game precisely because it depicts women in sexually degrading ways. You can't try a serious, grim commentary on rape and abuse in the same series that also frequently shows **the protagonist** ogling his female costars, staring at their breasts, and viewing them as sexual conquests.

Who's courting men here? These are fans of the previous installments, a built in fanbase of which you're a part of. How are you just neglecting one gender to say that men are the only ones hurt here when obviously there may be a few women to have a say on this? This isn't an appeal to men at all. It's a grim story, I'll give you that much, but what are you talking about?

There's just basically a disconnect there that makes MGS the wrong kind of series to include rape in a storyline, because it fetishizes so much else about women and the story's so comedic and over-the-top ridiculous that the audience basically dives in anticipating more juvenile humor.

Snake, I haven't played MGS since 1 because I haven't had the consoles. There were indeed humerous moments in the game but it always told some brutal stories about some characters messed up in a number of ways. That's just like saying King Lear was "funny" because of one of the scenes in Act 1 while ignoring the rest of the game. Maybe it's the nostalgia talking but are you sure that MGS didn't show signs of some darker and grittier content as Bells has stated?

If MGS always had a more consistently serious tone, like Spec Ops did, maybe it'd all feel less jarring. As is, Kojima's most respectful move would be to avoid the subject entirely, and insofar as he might actually desire a feminist commentary, the best he can do given his series' history is to write more women with agency who aren't sex objects like The Boss.

So all of the women he's written before with tragic backstories just don't count? Why should he write more women in authoritative positions while ignoring the soldier types that have made the world and died on the battlefield on both sides of the conflict? You're doing a disservice to the series by trying to pigeonhole a person's creativity because it unsettles you.

MGS is a crazy ass ludicrous narrative with bee-superpowers and mind-readers and nuclear equipped mechs and NANOMACHINES and clones. It is a fantasy series that takes a lot of fantastical liberties and it's a great place to show empowered women, not so much to explore why they're disempowered and victimized in reality.

So here's the Billion $$$ question... Why can't that be explored? And why should every lady in the MGS-verse be just like The Boss instead of characters exploring different themes, different story arcs, and having different endings to their stories both tragic or not?

[Ryong]

Originally Posted by Jagos

... This wasn't a date... Why are you bringing that up?

You can go on a date with Paz in Peace Walker and she'll be in her underwear.

I think she also poses for camera shots?

...But then again, she's also not underage, she's aware that she looks younger than she is and uses that as part of her fake identity.

Never played a whole lot of Peace Walker, though, but I know that's a thing.

---------- Post added at 10:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:15 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Jagos

Maybe it's the nostalgia talking but are you sure that MGS didn't show signs of some darker and grittier content as Bells has stated?

MGS1 tends to set a serious tone, most of the time.

MGS2 has a lot of meta crap and is rather silly or over-the-top several times, is otherwise serious.

MGS3 focuses on war being terrible for soldiers.

MGS4 is a clusterfuck of everything.

Peace Walker is about trying to make war less terrible for soldiers.

Rising, with its comedic over-the-top everything has a guy kidnapping children, removing their brains and then training them to use in robotic assassins.

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

MGS is a crazy ass ludicrous narrative with bee-superpowers and mind-readers and nuclear equipped mechs and NANOMACHINES and clones. It is a fantasy series that takes a lot of fantastical liberties and it's a great place to show empowered women, not so much to explore why they're disempowered and victimized in reality.

The Boss is literally the best soldier in existence who sees a bigger potential on an apprentice of hers and then participates in a crazy plan, with a great deal of self-sacrifice, which will set in motion a drive and a way for her apprentice to make her wishes come true, even if she doesn't live to see it happen. It ultimately fails, I guess, but hey.

On that note, I'd like to, eventually, discuss why women portrayed in roles where they endure things are regarded as weaker than if they were independent. Take Final Fantasy 10's Yuna as an example, who faces the self-sacrifice for the greater good with a smile, is alright with being marked as an enemy of the only religion there is in the world, which is also part of the government and is regarded as being in a weak supporting role and then in the sequel she's independent, eye-candy and definitely not as smart, but she's making her own choices so she's strong!

EVA switches between being a femme fatale, a scatterbrained beauty and a capable soldier, because she's a damn good double-agent.

Para-Medic is also a ridiculously powerful woman, being the main force behind the Les Enfants Terribles project.

Paz is

I can't argue about others because I honestly know the most about the events leading up to MGS1 and 2 than anything else.