Metal Gear Solid 2: Bande Dessinée (Motion Comic)

Note: The following review is based on the English Dub of the non-interactive DVD version of the Metal Gear Solid: Sons of Liberty comic featured in Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection.

While I'm in the frame of mind to review Metal Gear stuff, I decided that after reviewing Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake I would take a look at Metal Gear Solid 2: Bande Dessinée (the menu might subtitle it Digital Graphic Novel, but I'm going with what's on the actual box). Like Metal Gear Solid: Bande Dessinée, this is a motion comic created out of a comic produced by IDW, this time being Metal Gear Solid: Sons of Liberty. While the first Bande Dessinée has been made available in multiple forms in the U.S., this year's Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection is the first time that this Bande Dessinée is made available internationally, thus giving me the opportunity to give it a look. Also, this was included in case the player either couldn't finish Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty or found it to be too archaic for their tastes. This three hour motion comic may have been included with good intentions, but when all is said and done, this isn't quite the best way to experience the story of the game it's based on.

After the plans for Metal Gear REX were sold on the black market, new Metal Gear prototypes have shown up all over. A tanker on the Hudson River contains the latest of these variants, an amphibious Metal Gear created by the military and dubbed Metal Gear RAY. Solid Snake, working with Otacon as the organization Philanthropy, infiltrates the tanker to get photographic evidence of this Anti-Metal Gear Metal Gear, but Ocelot shows up to take RAY for himself, having also taken photos of Snake on his mission. In the chaos that ensues from his presence, the tanker is destroyed and Solid Snake appears to be dead. Two years later, a FOXHOUND soldier named Raiden has been assigned a field op, which is a step up from simply trying to improve his performance in VR training. His mission is to infiltrate an offshore cleaning facility known as Big Shell and wrest control of it from the terrorist organization known as Dead Cell, apparently led by none other than Solid Snake, whose reputation has him painted as a terrorist thanks to the photos from the Tanker Incident. At first he's excited to finally be on the field, but gradually he learns that not everything is as it seems.

Variant cover of the first issue, depicting Solid Snake.

Going in, I had a good idea of the plot thanks to my time with the original game, but I find it rather interesting how writer Alex Garner decided to approach it. In contrast to Kris Oprisko from the first comic, Garner doesn't insert things from other material or add in a twist in perspective to help it suit the new medium, but rather he chooses to either rearrange certain events or characters to forge something that feels a bit different from what I'm used to seeing. While a lot of the dialogue from the game is left intact, there are enough differences that make it more of a separate entity, which may work for those unfamiliar with the game, but didn't quite work too well for me. It's not so much the dialogue that didn't settle, but more so the somewhat baffling changes made to the unfolding of the events.

One of these changes is giving The Sorrow a cameo appearance during one struggle within Ocelot's mind. I understand that The Sorrow is Ocelot's father, but that doesn't make the appearance any less out of left field, considering how it plays out (maybe IDW thought they'd get to do a comic for Metal Gear Solid 3?). As I previously mentioned, Garner seems to like switching things around with his take on the events of the Big Shell Incident, but this leads to some things which only serve to make the main story a little more confusing than it needs to be. Having Raiden and Snake do something important at the same time is one thing, but in the game it was Raiden who defeats the members of Dead Cell while Snake (as Iroquois Pliskin) handles other important tasks in the background and gives Raiden advice. In this version however, Dead Cell members, and Solidus Snake, are ultimately defeated by different characters, which gives Raiden less of a purpose except for the important scenes which require him to be there. Also, some major plot twists were given away earlier than they probably should have been. As this approach to the game made things more difficult to follow along, the motion comic became boring to watch (during the day no less) after a while and I needed multiple breaks to stop me from falling asleep.

On another note, Alex Garner once again screwed up Snake's characterization. Rather than Kris Oprisko's approach which makes him cold toward Otacon however, Garner seems to write him as more bloodthirsty, as evidenced by his complaints to Otacon about not being able to kill anyone. As far as I remember, Snake didn't make complaints like that during the Tanker Incident.

While I'm not exactly a fan of Garner's writing with this comic, I still think Ashley Wood is a good artist. His style is consistent from the Metal Gear Solid comic and I still find his art to be good for this, but I still think his style is best suited for horror. Once in a while the art would be difficult to decipher when a lot is going on, particularly in close-ups, but I like how the dull browns used heavily before are now complimented by other colors, like blues and greens, to create more dynamic visuals and capture the world of the game more closely.

Cover of the second issue, depicting Fortune.

The other aspects of the production, however, are very good. The voice acting is amazing, seeing as how it's pretty much the original cast, and the animation work is also of a pretty good quality, about on par with the previous Bande Dessinée. Since the general quality evens out, there's nothing really noteworthy I have to say, but I will commend Patric Zimmerman's work as Ocelot, especially his delivery at the points when Liquid Snake is peaking through him. It ties in better with the revelations made in Guns of the Patriots, which is perhaps the motion comic's biggest plus. In addition, I also like how the original music and sound effects were integrated into the animation, which helped it feel a little more like watching the game, even if the writing couldn't completely accomplish this.

So, with all of that said, is Metal Gear Solid 2: Bande Dessinée worth your time? Well, not exactly. Deviations made from the game would be more forgivable if they were made to help the story flow better, but Alex Garner's writing not only makes it harder to follow, he also managed to give Raiden less of a purpose in favor of highlighting Solid Snake more. Everything else about this production is great, but not enough to completely make up for the rather boring execution overall. If you want to try and experience the story without playing the game, then I'd tell you to try and acquire the individual issues of the comic so that you can read it at your own pace. However, you'd be better off playing the actual game, since it's a little more straightforward and plays with the concept of a suspiciously similar sequel in a much more brilliant fashion.

In case you're wondering, I'd also like to try and get my hands on the individual issues of the comic so that one day I might be able to review the story as read when stripped of all of the additions used to make it a motion comic.

Metal Gear Solid: Bande Dessinée (Motion Comic)

Note: The following review is based on the English Dub of the non-interactive DVD version of the Metal Gear Solid comic featured in Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection.

Since December of last year, the Metal Gear franchise quickly became one of my favorite video game franchises, if not my favorite franchise, thanks to not only its complex story, but also the many issues and themes that the games have dealt with over the course of their existence. The games have also been able to elicit a range of emotions from within me that I normally would not display toward other franchises; I've laughed, gotten riled up over a villain, been bamboozled by legitimately shocking revelations and even cried at points of emotional turmoil since pretty much every game has been able to push those buttons at just the right time and used what it has to its advantage to keep me playing. For this reason, I'm going to continue supporting the franchise for the foreseeable future and play each new game as it comes out regardless of main character or voice talent, such as the upcoming Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (let's see how well Keifer Sutherland does in that one when he fills in as the role of Big Boss) and any sequel they might make for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.

It is my love of this franchise that led me to stumble upon information which revealed that IDW Publishing had at one point released a comic adapting the events of the original Metal Gear Solid. While I have yet to get my hands on the physical comic in some form, I did find out that it would be included with Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection, a collection released specifically to honor the 25th anniversary of the franchise (I intend to eventually review the package as a whole, but that will take some time). Since I had gotten my hands on the collection the day of its release, I only recently decided to begin work toward reviewing it, which I felt this would be a good step toward doing. While what I ended up doing was watching a two-hour motion comic, I feel that this way of experiencing the story is rather interesting, but not without its problems.

After his location is discovered, a man named Solid Snake is convinced by Colonel Campbell to come out of retirement for one last mission. Shadow Moses Island, located in Alaska on the Fox Archipelago, has been taken over by terrorists, who are former members of the FOXHOUND unit led by a man codenamed Liquid Snake, threatening a nuclear strike unless they receive the remains of the soldier known as Big Boss within 24 hours. While he is sent to neutralize the threat, Snake is also instructed to rescue two hostages -DARPA chief Donald Anderson and ArmsTech President Kenneth Baker- both of whom were captured to help further the objectives of the terrorists, as well as locate Campbell's niece, Meryl Silverburgh, who is believed to be on the island. Snake accepts the mission, since not only is he the only one who is capable of pulling this off, but he has a personal stake in it after learning that Liquid Snake is his genetic twin brother.

While I already knew the story and how it would play out based on my experience with the game it's based on, I did find myself surprised at how well it was translated to the comic book medium. Events that are explained in extra material or hinted at in dialogue are integrated into the main plot, which helps give newcomers a better sense of what exactly happened without requiring too much exposition. I also liked the scenes they added to help make the story flow better in this realm; Psycho Mantis' card-reading powers would definitely have been too hard to do and what we get instead still works. Also commendable is how they decided to fuse both possible endings of the game together, a move that makes the most sense considering that though one ending is really canon, both characters involved survive the events of the game. For the most part, Kris Oprisko retained the soul of the game and his additions to what was already heavily preserved shows a sign of effort on his part to stay true to the source material with understandable alterations.

The FOXHOUND cover of issue one of the comic.

However, there are some things with Oprisko's writing that I'm not sure worked quite that well in the grand scheme of things. For one, there's a scene in the game where the Cyborg Ninja (Gray Fox) has slaughtered a group of soldiers in a hallway. While the game shows only the aftermath of his assault, the comic decides to show it in full. Admittedly this does make him look like a badass, but personally I think it was a little more effective when we weren't shown exactly what happened. The only other major thing I thought was off, I'll forgive the increased use of the word "bitch", was Snake's characterization. When he meets Meryl for the first time, he's a little more focused on how great her ass is, rather than learning more about her; It's a little funny that they acknowledged how important her body is to the events, but we lose a little characterization on Meryl in the long run. Also, Snake seems a little more harsh toward Otacon in this version, as he is now more prone to insulting him as opposed to trying to get him out of his shell or help him understand that the reality of war has more consequences than he believes. It's because of this harsher treatment toward Otacon that Sniper Wolf's death was a little less effective to me, despite the delivery.

Ashley Wood's art is very good. I was able to pretty easily read the situations, even when knowing them out of the game, and his approach to the Yoji Shinkawa character designs is very interesting. I like how the style was put into animation, which made the big things seems appropriately big and the small appropriately small. The technology is integrated well and he knew the right camera angles to show the action at. The animators also put it really well in motion and I enjoyed seeing the artwork come to life. While I was watching however, there was one thing I couldn't help but think of, and that's the feeling that his style is more suited for a horror comic. That's not to say that I don't like the art, but the combination of brush strokes, pencils and inks and the uncomfortable combination of the two screams horror artist, even if it was used pretty well for the tonality of Metal Gear Solid. This feeling came partly because I knew that at one point IDW was known for doing horror comics, most famously 30 Days of Night, so I just thought that Wood is most appropriate for that material (though I will stress again that I liked it regardless).

Since this is pretty much a motion comic, there was also full voice acting. The awesome thing to me is that they managed to have most of the original voice actors back to read the lines, which shows that they put more effort into this than something like, say, the Watchmen motion comic, in which one guy was paid to do the whole thing and it was horrible. The delivery of the iconic Metal Gear voices, including David Hayter as Solid Snake and Cam Clarke as Liquid Snake, is very much like in the game, though Mei Ling and Naomi's voices don't really sound the same, which could be due a multitude of factors. I am aware that three characters had their voices changed, those being Anderson, Baker and the Cyborg Ninja. Of these three, the one most noticeable was the Cyborg Ninja, since his voice sounds younger and didn't really suit him as well as the deeper voice from the game, even during his newly written, and awesome, heroic sacrifice. Overall I'm not complaining about the voice acting, since they stayed pretty true to how the characters sound in the game and the effort to get these actors to reprise their roles is very impressive.

While Metal Gear Solid: Bande Dessinée may have its issues, this is still a very good way to experience the story in one go. Veterans such as myself may notice more issues with it, but those who are new to the series, and/or see the original game as archaic, will greatly enjoy it nonetheless and the enjoyment would be entirely justified. If you don't wish to hunt down a copy of the 12-issue comic or play either the original game or interactive PSP version of the comic (subtitled Digital Graphic Novel), try and view the motion comic. It's about two hours long, but it's also entertaining and will give you an idea, for the most part, of why the game is highly praised.

Also, just in case you're wondering, I do indeed plan on trying to obtain the comic and interactive PSP release to see how different the experiences are from this version (and possibly review them as well).