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Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2008) - The Hero's Journey to R/Childfree
🕑 Added 2025-09-24 14:30:07 +0000 UTCI know video essayists have been running a long term public brainwashing campaign with works such as "Metal Gear Solid 4 Is The Most Brilliant Middle Finger In The History Of Gaming," but we are impervious. As the series shows, people with pure hearts and strong minds can resist any and all psychic programming. Make no mistake: this is easily the worst mainline entry in the series. Depressingly, it marks the first (and perhaps only) time an entry in the "Solid" series fell victim to the worst design practices of its era rather than setting a new creative standard.
Drebin breaks primate law by keeping a monkey as a pet, and it's not even the worst thing about his character. Dr Naomi Hunter drags the plot down so much that it actually calls Frank Jaeger/Grey Fox's legacy into question. I'm not saying he should have just sliced her head off back in Mozambique, but he'd definitely feel ashamed about how her amazing plan to save the world involved having sex with a Romanian man whose job can best be described as Woman Murderer. Weapons that correspond with player progression are gone, replaced by the repulsive Drebin and his disgusting store. Perhaps worst of all is the Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer maps that make up all but two of the game's five levels (one of those two is just Shadow Moses).
This game has so many problems, none of which are aided by the PlayStation 3's bizarre technological shortcomings, or the fact that an exhausted Kojima only took the lead on this thing because NeoGAF moderators threatened to come to Japan "to teach English" if he did not. But through it all, Guns of the Patriots somehow manages to give Solid Snake the send off he so richly deserved. At the end of the day, this is not a very good Metal Gear game. But that does not make it bad, or even mediocre. And you know what? it's still better than any Splinter Cell released after 2006.
Take your nanomachine shot, get yourself a repulsive egg dish prepared by an orphan who lives on an airplane, and remember not to have heroes, because they'll only get microwaved. We're going to see how much war has changed since high school, and maybe, if war has heard of our highly niche but highly acclaimed comedy politics podcast that takes a kaleidoscope view of the news.
Art by Josh Lynch. Theme song by Brendan James, inspired by the work of Tappi Iwase, Kazuki Muraoka and Norihiko Hibino.
Comments
GG Allin Dulles
Hey, I think if snake is flexible enough to top himself why worry about what he does alone in the privacy of his own bedroom?
Kevin Boyle
This is how little they think of the players of this game, and listening to the last hour of this podcast, theyre right.
Dick Wolf
That’s way sirhan had to do it to em
Paul Nakis
RFK be like “these kids don’t crouch walk anymore and obesity has risen 1638628%”
Ksizzle
In defence of writers i’d imagine just because screaming mantis can control people’s nanomachines doesn’t mean she could control everyones across the globe at once like you could if liquid-ocelot took control of the AI’s. Obviously agree that the story in general though has much less thought put in as the previous three in terms of contradictions.
Ana
My feeling with the FOXALIVE thing is that they probably were considering doing the Escape from L.A. "welcome to the human race" EMP ending by having Solid Snake just take out all technology at the end. But while that was the best possible ending for Snake Plisken (in an otherwise sub-par Escape from NY sequel) since Plisken was a stone-cold cynic who didn't give a fuck about consequences and just wanted the annoying people who kept bothering him gone, it would be totally out of character for Solid. Maybe Naked back before he turned into a cult leader, but not Solid. Hence the ridiculous compromised approach.
dog on the roof
Played through first time with a friend, so dying on the suicide gecko section meant we got to pass off the controller and watch some of the vamp fight until we beat it. Small addition to the cqc was the ability to arm triangle in 4, where you could take a crouched person prone and even though it was a slower way to choke people out it was fun. Particularly in multiplayer because it was the most slow, annoying way to knock someone out.
Bellololol
I repurchased a copy of MGS4 to see if I felt as weird about this game then as I do now
Leonardo Restrepo
Hang 10... infidels on the barrel of an abandoned M1 Abrams
MoldyTolge
Raiden says “Europe” then dies dot mp4
Paul Hurdle
the trope of capturing your enemy and making him an experiment that Felix mentions around 1:56 is my nagging issue with the current Ultimate Wolverine series.
Christopher Small
Rosemary roleplayed with the Colonel Campbell Character.AI until she fell in love with it for real The original Mr. and Mrs. Smith was a TV show from the 60s, so I think it's just shorthand for anything where action hero's/spies are a couple. Somewhere out there's a version of SpyXFamily where they're all Metal Gear characters
