Metal Gear Solid 4. Oh how you failed me in the end.

This is my first review. Don't expect all of my blogs to be reviews. This is just something I decided to do after conquering this creation of Hideo Kojima.
The only reason this game, which I can barely call a game, gets a 6.0 is because what little I got to play, I loved. Otherwise, this game gets a 1...or a 0, for not being a game. Let me explain. When I pick up an MGS game, I want one thing out of it. Tactical Stealth Espionage. What it says on the f****ing cover. What I got was about a 1 minute of gameplay for every fifteen minutes I was playing. In other words, I loaded a save, started the briefing, set the controller down after about five minutes of looking around for the battery or whatever the hell I was supposed to find, started the mission, had to pick up the controller to press start, got ready to play, as the game took over the majority of the shooting for me, so I set the controller down again, picked it up, played for a solid 20 minutes, then set the controller down, and waited for the cutscene to finish. By the time I was done, 3 hours had passed, and i had played for 20 minutes. This is not good game design. Especially in an action-oriented game like MGS. This isn't good storytelling either, where games as a storytelling medium are concerned.

Go and pick up a game. I'll pick one for you. Dragon Age Origins. Yes, it's an RPG. Yes, it's longer. However, part of the reason for that increase in length is the GAMEPLAY. In fact, if you don't believe me, I rushed through DA: O on my xbox in 30 hours. On the computer, my friend took 55 hours. Only the gameplay could produce a 25 hour difference in the same game across two platforms. Dragon Age had amazing storytelling. It barely had two hours of actual cutscenes. Not dialogue, it had tons of dialogue, because in a Bioware RPG, the dialogue is part of the gameplay! Metal Gear Solid's cutscenes are non-interactive cinematic messes. Sure, it had its bright points, Raiden was f***ing great. But all the establishing shots, long pans, useless and pointless dialogue, and backtracking through the other three games eventually made me stop caring. I only saw it to the end because I felt like I was letting Kojima win if I didn't finish it. I am also ashamed to say that I skipped cutscenes. Including some at the end.

Moving on this same tangent, there were so may times where the cinematics jacked the gameplay from me. For example, a good portion of the final act had gunfights going. Gunfights I could have played through. And when I wanted a cutscene, well he put gameplay in. Like when two of my favorite characters were fighting, and I was forced to fight a bunch of Gekkos instead of watching a fight I genuinely wanted to watch. The end of the game is another good example, which amounted to me pressing the triangle button to the point that I practically broke my roomate's controller. No joke.

Also, the plot, for the second time in Metal Gear history completely disappointed me. It got way too complicated, and unfortunately required half of the verbal diarrhea to explain it...Which is why games like Dragon Age have a damned codex. After a while, I just stopped caring. Call me lazy, fanboys, I dare you. Since the cinematics kept hijacking the gameplay, I found that I was beginning to become more and more apathetic to the whole thing. Possibly out of spite for Kojima that he kept on taking the game I paid money for away from me. I repeat that I finished the game specifically because I hate leaving games unfinished. It was like a bad movie that you really don't like, but you keep watching to see if it gets better. Well, it didn't. Also, the ending never ended. I saw the credits, and thought, oh! well, there i'm done! Little did I know what lurked around the corner, but another 30 minutes plus of dialogue....good dialogue...after the credits...you know those things that role at the...END of a movie? Well whatever, I listened for as long as it took for them to explain how the crap Liquid Snake possessed Ocelot's through his arm, other than that he was just that damned good......

The good parts: The controls were mostly intuitive and familiar, if a little modified in a stupid way, R1 should've stayed where it was so that circle could be used for melee, square could also have been used for frigging anything. The gunplay got a lot better when I found out I could up the look sensitivity, which unfortunately was at the end of the game. The gun modifications allow you to make the game yours (mmmmm.....M4 with underbarrel shotgun). The characters were mostly true to themselves, although Snake started pissing me off the further and further I got in, up until about the end. Drebin was awesome, as was his monkey...graphics were up to par with PS3 standards, since all the cinematics were rendered in-game, and according to a trusted source, no motion capture was used for the animation, which was impressive, if a little off at times.

Bottom line was that I despised this game by the end. Kojima didn't put together a good movie, nor a good game. He needed to cut the dialogue in half, and many cutscenes completely, and replace all of that with something other than one-shot levels that I can beat in 15 minutes or less(sans cutscenes of course). You know, like in the original...the one that got me hooked on this genre. In the end, the series failed me. Well, at least they explained Liquid Ocelot's goshdamned arm.