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 2: Sons of Liberty - What the F---?

After the success of the original Metal Gear Solid, a sequel was created for release in 2001 titled Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. This release came with so much hype that many players infamously purchased the game Zone of the Enders for the sole purpose of playing the demo for Metal Gear Solid 2. Over time, the game has become known primarily for its introduction of a new protagonist as well as its infamous mind screw of an ending. This, and the fact that I played the first Metal Gear Solid, got me curious enough to actually see what everyone's talking about. One's thing's for certain: you'll witness the complete evisceration of the fourth wall, and your sanity, by the time it ends.

In the two years since the Shadow Moses incident in Metal Gear Solid, Revolver Ocelot sold the blueprints for Metal Gear on the black market, thus allowing corporations and entities that are rich enough to collectively create quite a few Metal Gear derivatives. Solid Snake infiltrates an oil tanker, U.S.S. Discovery, with assistance from Otacon to obtain information about the latest version, Metal Gear RAY. RAY is designed as an amphibious walking battle tank, thereby allowing it dominance over more territory than thought possible. When Snake finally obtains the information he needs, by sneaking past Russian soldiers and confronting Olga Gurlukovich, Revolver Ocelot shows up to "reclaim" Metal Gear RAY for himself, putting himself in the pilot seat and destroying the tanker to eliminate all traces of his presence as well as kill Solid Snake. This section of the game does a really good job at introducing new elements to the Metal Gear universe as well as continuing the story beyond the first game, the biggest surprise being the mention of a powerful group known as the Patriots. It is a suspenseful section that highlights just the kind of man Snake is and how he's gotten better over time.

Then Raiden shows up. Two years after the Tanker incident, Raiden is sent by a reformed FOXHOUND to an offshore cleanup facility, the Big Shell, to rescue hostages, including the United States President, from a terrorist group known as the Sons of Liberty. The terrorists, headed by a man claiming to be Solid Snake, are backed by members of a rogue SEAL anti-terrorist unit known as Dead Cell, whose core members are Vamp, a knife wielding man who drinks the blood of those he kills; Fatman, an expert with bombs; and Fortune, a woman who's luck prevents any bullet from touching her. With assistance from Colonel Campbell and his girlfriend Rosemary, Raiden must do what he can to eliminate the terrorist threat and prevent a nuclear strike on Manhattan.

What follows is a series of events that are, for the most part, a rehash of the events in the first Metal Gear Solid. The bosses, despite being clever and memorable, feel more like stand-ins for the former FOXHOUND members from the previous game and the plan the terrorists have in mind is also not unlike that of Liquid Snake. A lot of what happens to Raiden in the Plant chapter is very remniscent of what happens to Solid Snake, including the appearance of a mysterious caller named Deepthroat/Mr. X, the need to backtrack to advance the plot (hope you love that Strut F Warehouse!), using an electronic item to try and thwart the terrorists and a section where grabbing the PSG-1 Sniper Rifle is an absolute necessity among other things. My experience with Raiden was filled with memories of the first game that I was simply reliving through another character.

And then about 80% of the way through the game, the player is confronted with insanity in its purest form and is given a mere glimpse into the eye of madness. After Emma Emmerich's death and the supposed death of Vamp, the player is introduced to revelations about Raiden and the video game itself in such a concentration that they might as well be clocked with a freight train. The sudden wave of information includes piling so many gambits on top of each other that it is unclear who the actual bad guy is (if there is one to begin with); a series of convoluted double and even triple crosses; the downright confusing and possibly contradictory motives of the Patriots; deconstructions of several elements of the gaming medium; and forcing the player to question the exact reality of everything they've been doing while controlling Raiden. This is as far as I can go without just rendering an entire paragraph or so with spoiler tags and is in fact just the tip of the insanity iceberg. On top of this, just when you feel safe(-ish), the stinger at the end of the credits twists the knife deeper by revealing that the Patriots have all been dead for at least 100 years! This ending is one of the most confusing and brilliantly frightening things I've ever witnessed in any medium; I thought I would be prepared, but I never expected to witness what I did in the super long chain of cutscenes. What really didn't help however was that some cutscenes that were important to the plot were excised in the wake of 9/11, but even then I'm not sure how much better it would have turned out. I really hope there's a good explanation for what I saw because it's bothering me and I feel I really need to cool off from Metal Gear Solid for a while before approaching the next game in the franchise (don't worry, I'll still cover the other games eventually).

So out of all of this, I suppose you're wondering how I feel about both Raiden and the sheer amount of cutscenes in the game. Well, for the cutscenes, I believe that they are important for fleshing out certain details of the story and introducing the characters properly. The problems with them in this game is that unlike the first Metal Gear Solid, the amount of them gets to the point where you are no longer sure how much gameplay there really is, since there is a disproportionate ratio between them here in favor of the videos. If you were to remove every single video and codec conversation from this game, I'm pretty sure that the actual game, where you're actually in control, wouldn't even last you nine hours unless you're particularly prone to dying.

As for Raiden himself, I was a little thrown off by his sudden appearance in the narrative (yes, it is possible to be surprised about something even if you read about it before the actual experience; there's a big difference between reading about something in a game and actually playing it to get to the event) and just how long I actually had to control him. He felt like a weaker version of Solid Snake, which was in fact a deliberate facet of his design, and his bishonen nature was a little unsettling, if only because he has pretty wide hips for a man. For the most part, I really just feel indifferent about him, although I must say that his tragic backstory comes right out of nowhere and seemed like they were making it up as they went along. The revelations about him at the end also made playing as him borderline insulting, though I have a feeling that Hideo Kojima in this case made his point really clear (well played, Kojima). I hope that if they do bring him back in a sequel, they'll make him a better character.

Moving on from the heavily convoluted story, I'd like to say that the overall gameplay has gotten better. The player is now allowed to shoot from behind cover, which can be helpful in some situations when you really need to get rid of an enemy in the way. I also found the first-person aiming helpful for the handguns, since it gives more precise control over where your shots go. This is especially helpful with the biggest addition to the arsenal: tranquilizers. Both the M9 handgun and PSG-1T sniper rifle can fire tranquilizer rounds that will render someone unconscious rather than outright kill them, providing an alternative method for clearing the different rooms. These rounds also introduce a new mechanic where the location someone is shot at will determine the speed at which they fall unconscious (ex. the head or the heart will have an instant effect, but hand and foot shots take longer).

There's also a new swimming mechanic, bringing some new variety and challenge to the levels with an O2 gauge that determines your available air. However, the player will now need to worry about leaving a trail of blood or water to their location, the former of which can be stopped with bandages. Thankfully there are now also more places to hide thanks to the ability to hide out in a locker until the coast is clear. Being able to roll between cover and hide out in the shadows are also welcome additions, creating new ways to sneak around undetected and even pass certain obstacles.

Being on the PS2 allows the Metal Gear Solid series a graphical upgrade, and this one is a real marvel. Characters look more realistic and are now much more expressive, adding depth to each performance from the voice actors. With the improved environments and effects, the game is also more immersive and pleasing to the eye. This is not to say that the graphics of the previous game were bad, but the improvements help show how well the franchise can look on a newer platform.

Finally, I'd like to mention the score, touted as being done by Henry Gregson-Williams. I am not particularly familiar with his film scores, but I think he did a fine job here creating music that adds to each scene in a way similar to the previous installment. It's perhaps not as memorable at the moment, but I still think he pretty much nailed it.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is an...interesting video game. Thanks to how it handles and deconstructs many themes in video games, including the concept of free will and the difference between fantasy and reality, it can be considered the first postmodern video game ever created. Its gameplay and graphics have improved well from the previous game, but the story is very confusing and complicated with an ending that will question your beliefs about what you just saw. Despite this, I'd still recommend Metal Gear Solid 2 to PS2 owners, as it is a real highlight of the system's library. Even if you've heard the twists by now, this is still an experience that you really have to see to believe.