Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jbreckmckye 39 days ago
During the mainline of the game you are an anti terrorist specialist sent to rescue the president from a bunch of stereotypical mad bombers

Well, basically, the leader of the terrorists is the 43rd US president, who is a clone of a super soldier despite being ostensibly anti cloning in office. (Yes, he's Dubya). He's planning to detonate a nuclear weapon above Manhattan so an EMP field knocks out all communications. The reason being that the government has been taken over by a conspiracy called the Patriots who are using a sinister AI to filter all internet traffic

However Dubya has been double crossed by an old Russian guy who was infatuated with the super soldier Dubya was cloned from. He claims to be representing the Patriots but suddenly his arm comes to life, claiming to be Dubya's brother. Oh, by the way, he lost his arm and got a transplant from the body of the other clone, Dubya's brother. It's implied in this game to be a supernatural occurrence.

Ghost Dubya 2 (in the body of elderly Spetznaz guy) goes on a rampage and tries to kill everyone. Dubya and the anti terrorist specialist end up fighting on top of Federal Hall, which if you've ever been to Manhattan is just next to the NYSE and TJ Maxx.

When you're there the Patriots phone you and they claim to be dead. Well, not dead exactly. They claim that in the same way life emerged from organic chemicals, life has emerged from the neural net of ideology and content published on the internet. Kind of like if ChatGPT became a bit uppity. They claim that Western Civilization is too corrupt and contradictory to be left in the hands of humans. You have to kill Dubya who is somewhat of an anti hero and it's kind of sad

Eventually another brother of Dubya who is kind of the hero does some digging, and his bromance partner discovers that the Patriots were real people but they all died 100 years ago. Also they were funding the real heroes all along!

It makes a lot more sense in MGS4

3 comments

I am pretty sure I am going to file this away for some copypastas when I want to confuse someone. I’ll just have ChatGPT or whatever swap out some words.

Thank you, my friend.

> It makes a lot more sense in MGS4

I played that game and it did not.

To be clear, great game, banging music and design, and the multiplayer was a ton of fun. 10/10, do recommend.

But the story was "wtf?"

...what?

I watched the Dunkey video linked elsewhere and thought he was making it up, he wasn't? The whole story is just random stuff happening?

It's not really "random", there is a coherent story (and a moral to that story) underneath all the weirdness and you'll sometimes forget how crazy it's gotten because your current objective tends to make sense (ex: "defuse the bombs").

But all MGS games are basically playable Kojima manifestos with sci-fi trappings. The actual minute-to-minute gameplay for them is really, really good so even if you don't dig the story they're worth playing.

The previous poster is right that MGS4 does clear a lot of this up. But MGS4 also slams more weirdness and callbacks to the previous games on top of it.

Hmm, interesting, thanks. I played MGS 1 when it came out, multiple times, as I liked it a lot. I don't remember it being so weird, but maybe I didn't pay enough attention to the story.
The first one gets a bit goofy with the evil twin stuff, and the unintentionally funny dialog like "Do you think love can bloom on the battlefield???", but certainly doesn't go nearly as off the rails as the second one.
they're ninja-fantasy stories with Tom Clancy future-war trappings

everything about them makes sense when you think of them as Naruto or Onimusha but with a gun fetish.

I've only completed the first three, but at least in those, the stories get progressively off the rails and weird as they go on, especially MGS2.

It's one of those weird things, because the stories are kind of incomprehensible, but they're compelling in the same way that a soap opera is; while you're watching and playing, the story is very addictive and it doesn't feel that confusing as it's going on. There are even evil twins!

The moment I turn the games off, I kind of start thinking "....what the hell actually happened there?".

They do try and have a moral associated with it (though they do one of my pet peeves and just outright explain the themes they're going for at the end), so it's not completely trivial.

The games are a lot of fun, and they are certainly worth playing through in an emulator or something. I've played through the first MGS three times, and the second one twice, and I thoroughly enjoyed them both times, even rewatching the story unfold.

Just play the games. They're good fun.
> The whole story is just random stuff happening?

Welcome to Metal Gear Solid. Half the fun is creating a coherent narrative out of the sheer number of random postmodern happenings. You should see MGSV. Its entire existence is an attempt to connect the series back to the original excuse plots of the original Metal Gear games from the 80s.