Metal Gear Solid V: the Phantom Pain

It took months, but I finally finished and reviewed Metal Gear Solid V. It was a tough game to review, mostly because my dreams for an epic conclusion to the Metal Gear franchise seem to have been dashed by corporate stupidity forcing the game to be released before it was finished. Maybe Kojima (and Konami) have some elaborate trick up their sleeve, and there's going to be some crazy patch that replaces the recycled missions in Chapter 2 with real missions, and which adds the missing third chapter and the "Kingdom of the Flies" mission. Unless that happens, I'm going to operate under the assumption that the recycled missions of chapter 2 were put in as placeholders for missions that were planned but never completed. And I have some ideas of what a couple of those missions might have been about.

There's half of Foxhound from Metal Gear Solid 1, right there!

After retrieving the microfilm in mission 38, you get a couple of intel tapes that might inform exactly what chapter two was supposed to be about.

Informant's Report: Part 2 talks about the "Third Boy", who is a young Psycho Mantis. The first part of the tape reveals details on how Psycho Mantis' powers work. The second part is a bit more interesting, as it poses the conjecture that Eli was projecting his will onto the Third Boy, and controlling Sehalanthropous. This establishes how Eli (who would later be revealed to be Liquid Snake) begins his partnership with Psycho Mantis, the first recruit in his Foxhound team that would eventually take over Shadow Moses in the first Metal Gear Solid game.

Was mission 40 supposed to be about Sniper Wolf?

Metal Gear Solid V - Quiet / Sniper Wolf
Obtaining Sniper Wolf's handerchief from the retread of "Cloaked In Silence" unlocks the Sniper Wolf costume.

With that in mind, let's take another look at mission 40. It's a repeat of mission 11: "Cloaked In Silence". It's a repeat of the sniper battle with Quiet, complete with the same mission briefing and even repeating the cutscene of Quiet shooting down the pursuing plane on the way back to Mother Base. All the repeat missions in chapter 2 are reproduced verbatim from the original mission, right down to the bookending cutscenes (even though they make absolutely no narrative sense). But there's two interesting things about mission 40 that make it stand out. The first is that Quiet isn't wearing her regular bikini outfit. She's wearing a jumper - Sniper Wolf's jumper from Metal Gear Solid 1. She even has blonde hair. Secondly, completing the mission awards the player with a Handerchief item that allows Quiet to be equipped with the Sniper Wolf outfit.

Is this a simple fan-service Easter Egg? Or was Mission 40 supposed to be a battle with a young Sniper Wolf that would establish how Eli [Liquid] and Sniper Wolf first met?

Metal Gear Solid V - capturing Sniper Wolf
Quiet even wears this uniform during the battle.

Sniper Wolf was born in Iraq, and she grew up amongst military conflict, she moved around the Middle East and Africa frequently to avoid the authorities, and she was eventually rescued from that life by Big Boss. So her backstory is actually a near perfect match for an appearance in Phantom Pain! Maybe Iraq was supposed to be a third area of operations? Mission 40 could have been intended to be a mission in which the player finds a young sniper wolf, engages her in battle to test her ability, and then captures and recruits her. Kojima may not have had time to finish this mission, and so Quiet's alternate outfit model was used instead, and Quiet's duel mission became a place-holder.

I would expect that if a young Sniper Wolf had been planned, then Kojima would have already cast a voice and mo-cap artist. But as far as I know, nobody has found assets for any character model or dialogue from any one who could qualify as a young Sniper Wolf. IMDB does list some voice actresses for various soldier roles, but no young girls other than Paz's voice (from Tara Strong). But if the game is truly unfinished, and whole chapters hadn't even been developed yet, then it's possible that such casting simply hadn't happened yet. If early rumors of the mission list are true, then the game wasn't nearly as far along as we think. That mission list, by the way, has a mission late in the game called "Beauty of the Battlefield", which could be a prime candidate for the mission that would have introduced a young Sniper Wolf, and the fact that it takes place during a chapter called "The Cost of Revenge" could also be appropriate to Sniper Wolf's story. Though, this mission could also just have easily been a mission about Quiet.

Metal Gear Solid V - Quiet and Snake embrace
It is implied several times by behavior and dialogue that Quiet has romantic feelings for Snake.

Alternatively, the intent of establishing a link between Quiet and Sniper Wolf might be to imply that Quiet is Wolf's mother. There are hints of a possible romance between Quiet and Venom Snake. Ocelot suggests that Quiet might not have killed Snake because she likes him as early as right after you bring her back to base. There's the infamous "playing in the rain scene", and her final casette tape after "A Quiet Exit" even says that she has "feelings" for Snake. And then, of course, there's her suggestive poses in the brig and helicopter. It's possible that there could have been a point during design in which they were planned to have a romantic relationship and possibly even a child together (assuming Quiet is even capable of conceiving and bearing children in her condition). Alternatively, Quiet could have mothered Sniper Wolf prior to the operation in Cyprus. Her injuries during that operation, and abduction and experimentation by Cipher and Skull Face could have separated her from her young child and left Sniper Wolf an orphan...

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Silent Hill 4: the Room

While I was playing through recent horror titles like The Evil Within, I noticed some interesting similarities with Silent Hill 4 that started to give me a new appreciation for some of this game's stronger aspects. In addition, while doing research for my Silent Hill timeline, I had to go back and play through Silent Hill 4: the Room again. I had only played through the game twice before, so I had to replay it in order to figure out how the timeline would work out. And while I was playing the game, I figured that I might as well go ahead and review it. At the time, it seemed like a novel idea to do a retro review of a Silent Hill game that wasn't Silent Hill 2, but lately, I've been seeing a lot of retro-reviews of The Room popping up other places. I haven't done any retro reviews yet; probably the closest thing has been my review of Demon's Souls. But in light of how unsuccessful the later Silent Hill games have been, the unfortunate cancellation of Silent Hills, and the uncertain future of the franchise (and of Konami as a studio), it's a good time to go back to look at what worked and what didn't about the previous games, and explore the question of whether we even want the franchise to continue.

The Room has the reputation of being the "bad" black sheep of the original Silent Hill tetralogy. I always thought that this reputation was unfortunate, and that the game wasn't quite as bad as people made it seem. I actually liked it better than Silent Hill 3 when I first played it, because I had never played the first Silent Hill. After I was able to track down a copy of the first game and play through it, Silent Hill 3 suddenly made a whole lot more sense, and I came to love it almost as much as I loved Silent Hill 2. So while I tend to agree that The Room is the "weakest" of the original Silent Hill games, I never really thought of it as being "bad"; just "less good". The release of future games by third party developers has only made The Room look better in retrospect.

An experimental formula

The game itself is a bit rough around the edges. It deviates significantly from the controls and mechanics established by the previous games in the franchise, and these changes are very hit-or-miss. This might be due, in part, to the possibility that The Room started out as an independent side project that was developed concurrently with Silent Hill 3, and that was eventually redesigned to work as a Silent Hill game in order to be more commercially viable. Whether or not that's true is still a hot issue of debate among the fanbase, but it's obvious to everybody that The Room plays a lot differently from previous titles.

Silent Hill 4: the Room - combat
Movement and combat controls are radically changed from previous games in the series.

The most immediately obvious deviation is in movement and camera controls. The semi-first-person "tank" controls have been completely abandoned in favor of direct directional inputs, and the camera is significantly more limited than it has been in previous games. You can't snap the camera behind the character by holding the "look" button as you could do in previous games. Almost all camera angles are pre-set angles, and the player can usually only toggle between two possible camera angles in any given area.

This results in some very clumsy navigation of the environment, and it's very easy for the character to get turned around when camera angles flip. Most of the time, a camera change will go without a hitch, but there are a few frames in the game that consistently result in erratic and unpredictable movement. It happens most often when a camera change occurs concurrently with a change in direction of the character (to navigate around a corner or an obstacle). If the player's timing for changing the character's movement direction is not perfectly-timed, then the character ends up turning around, which can result in getting stuck in a loop between the two camera angles. This is the very reason that I prefer the tank controls. They may be a bit cumbersome, but at least they're consistent and always relative to a single frame of reference (the character's position in the world), rather than to an unpredictable camera.

The second major change is to combat. The game was designed to have a greater emphasis on melee combat, complete with new target-locking controls, a variety of breakable melee weapons, very limited ammunition for guns, and an on-screen meter for charging power attacks. The new movement controls do make it a bit easier to maneuver around enemies (especially multiple enemies), but only if you're in an open space and the camera angle doesn't go all wonky on you. The mechanics are serviceable, and I don't think they're as bad as some critics insist.

The designers were probably trying to mimic
the horror trope of fumbling for keys.

Inventory management is where things really start to get bad. Henry isn't a walking closet like the previous games' protagonists, and he has only a limited number of inventory slots. This is probably partly the result of the inventory being accessed in real-time by the directional buttons (which also might have played a role in the changes to the movement control scheme being entirely based up on the analog stick), in a desire to create a sense of frantically searching your pockets for a weapon or item while under pressure. It also adds more relevance to the Room 302 hub (another dramatic departure from previous games) by forcing you to go back to restock on supplies or swap out puzzle items.

But it's hindered by a lot of little mistakes...

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In the comments of a recent post about Silent Hill 2's Otherworld, I had a discussion with a reader about the time period in which the Silent Hill games take place. This is actually an interesting and difficult topic, so I thought that I would dedicate a post specifically to it.

First and foremost, let's remind ourselves of when the games were released:

Game titleOriginal release
Silent Hill coverSilent HillJanuary 1999
Silent Hill 2 coverSilent Hill 2September 2001
Silent Hill 3 coverSilent Hill 3May 2003
Silent Hill 4 coverSilent Hill 4: the RoomSeptember 2004

UPDATE 1 January 2020:
A recent tweet from Masahiro Ito claimed that Silent Hill 2 was set in the "late 70's or early 80's", which would make my estimates about 10 later than Masahiro Ito understood the setting to be. If we take evidence in the first Silent Hill game at face value, this would mean that Silent Hill 2 would have to take place prior to the events of Silent Hill, since Silent Hill can take place no earlier than 1987.

It is also possible that Ito's comment is referring to the aesthetics of the game (in keeping with many of the game's film and literary influences), and not necessarily to its actual timeline. It isn't that I don't trust Ito's memory or his authority, but Team Silent went to great pains to conceal the exact date of the games (as we'll discuss in the following post), so it seems that they wanted the years in which the games take place to be ambiguous to the players -- which kind of makes this entire exercise moot.

Contemporary fiction

It is very important to note that no specific dates ever appear in any of the Silent Hill games that were developed by Konami's internal Team Silent studio. If dates are provided, they are either only the month and day (and not the year), or they are time periods relative to the events of the game (such as referring to the "events of 17 years ago" in Silent Hill 3), or it is just the year of an historical event in the past (such as the document about the sinking of the Little Baroness). Even documents that you would expect to have dates (such as newspapers, journals, diaries, patient reports, and police records) are intentionally left dateless (or at least ambiguous).

In Silent Hill 2, there is a point in which James finds newspapers scattered around a hallway. Upon examining the floor or walls, James comments that the newspapers have today's date. This would have been a perfect opportunity for the developers to provide a specific date for the game, if they wanted to. They could have had James read the date on the paper to the player, or the paper itself (with its date) could have been made clearly visible. The developers didn't do this; they left it completely ambiguous.

Silent Hill 2 - labyrinth newspapers
James notes that these newspapers have today's date, but doesn't tell us what the date is.

The developers went out of their way to not provide any specific dates for the games. Why would they do this? Typically, works of fiction that are not set in particular time period are written to be contemporary. Unless otherwise specified, most works of fiction should be assumed to take place now with respect to the consumption of the work by its audience, regardless of when "now" happens to be. if it's not contemporary to consumption, then it's usually contemporary to creation. This is usually pretty obvious if the work contains detailed descriptions of locations, technologies, and events that can be easily dated.

If we look at the original Silent Hill game in a vacuum, then the game provides no internal indication that it takes place at any specific time period. Players in 1999 probably had no reason to believe that the game took place in any year other than 1999. The same is true for Silent Hill 2, 3, and 4: if looked at in a vacuum, they can all be considered to take place in the same year that they were released. And if you didn't even know the year that the game was released, there's very little within the games to indicate that they take place at any time other than now.

However, this assumption falls apart because there is an absolute time difference of seventeen years between the events of the first game and the events of the third game, even though the difference in time between releases of the games was only four years. So we can't assume that each game takes place in the year of its release. At least one game has to be shifted on the timeline. So which game (or games) should be assumed to have taken place when?

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Dark Souls III

Players of the Dark Souls III Network Beta have revealed some information from the parts of the game that have been playable. I was able to play the Dark Souls II open network beta a few years ago, but I missed the beta for III. So I haven't seen any of this information first-hand; I'm going off what I've read and seen from the internet. Anyway, according to the Dark Souls III wiki on fextralife, there are gravestones throughout the game that have epitaphs that provide some amount of game lore (similar to the lore notes from Bloodborne). One of these gravestones apparently says "Grave of a nameless retainer. Raised his sword for the Lord of Cinder". This is one of several references to the Lord of Cinder that are present in Dark Souls III.

Dark Souls III - gravestone epitaph

The following blog will speculate as to the identity of this "nameless retainer" and the Lord of Cinder mentioned in the Network Beta test. This is only an educated guess being made by a fan a month prior to the game's release, but it may contain significant possible spoilers for Dark Souls III. There will also be spoilers for the previous Dark Souls games. Read ahead at your own risk.

 ... 

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Dark Souls title

Even though the player character in Dark Souls can be in a "hollow" state, the player never truly goes hollow. At least, not in the sense that NPCs and enemies have gone hollow.

According to Dark Souls' mythology, the undead are condemned to repeatedly wander Lordran in search of a cure, being unable to permanently die. But for virtually all such undead, this quest is futile. An undead can temporarily stave off hallowing by absorbing souls or infusing themselves with the humanity of someone else. Eventually, an undead dies one too many times, or is worn down by the daily grind of collecting souls, and loses the will to go on -- or is simply unable to continue collecting souls and humanity. When this happens, that undead becomes hollow, loses his sanity and free will, and continues to wander the world as a mindless zombie attacking any un-hollowed that it encounters on sight.

It is unknown how many "Chosen Undead" are brought to Lordran or the Undead Asyulm, but the Crestfallen Warrior at Firelink tells us that many have come before you. Is it possible that all hollows in Lordran were at some point "Chosen Undead", tasked by Frampt to retrieve the Lordvessel and re-kindle the dying flame?

Probably not.

A great deal of the hollows that you encounter in the game were likely former residents of Lordran, and there was no need to select a "Chosen Undead" until Gwyn's power faded to a "cinder", and the fire began to die. This presumably took a very long time - a whole "age".

Dark Souls - crestfallen warrior
The Crestfallen Warrior informs us that we are not the first "chosen undead",
and suspects that we won't be the last either.

Avoiding hollowness with purpose

Many undead adventurers wandered into Lordran (or were abducted and taken there), and they struggle to hold onto their precious humanity for as long as possible, fighting for their lives in the fear that they, too will go hollow. Some, like the Crestfallen Warrior, resign themselves to the inevitability of hollowness, and find a sense of purpose in warning other new arrivals that they, too, are doomed. Others pursue some seemingly impossible goal or objective in the hopes that the journey will provide them with the sense of purpose necessary to avoid (or at least delay) hollowing. And yet others have taken up crafts or vocations such as blacksmithing, vending, or guarding something in order to keep them focused and avoid hollowing (and to exchange goods or services for the very souls that they need to stave off the hollowing). Keeping such a goal may help keep an undead partially lucid, but they also seem to begin to forget everything else, and only the knowledge of their quest or craft remains. Perhaps, the undead guarding various areas of the game were, at one point, tasked with protecting that place (or something within that place), but have long since lost their mind, and only that compulsion to defend has remained.

Going on "one final quest" seems to provide adventurers with enough focus to hold back hollowing.

But hollowing isn't just a thematic element reserved for non-player characters; hollowing is also a mechanic in the game that affects the player. Whenever the player character dies, you are reborn at the last bonfire in a hollowed state, unable to summon help from allies until you restore your humanity through the consumption of someone else's humanity. In Dark Souls II, hollowing further handicaps the player by cummulatively reducing your total health each time you die, and only restoring your humanity can refill your health meter. In both these cases, the player is not truly hollow; you are only in a state of partial hollowing.

It's unclear whether non-player characters are able to die and restore their humanity, or if deaths contribute to an irreversible progression towards hollowness. There are, after all, apparently hollowed NPCs such as the undead merchant in the Undead Burg and blacksmith Lenigrast in Majula who are sane enough to have kept their shops open. The presence of NPC summon signs hints at the possibility that they, too, are capable of restoring their own humanity through the same mechanisms that you can, but the game itself justifies this with ambiguous appeals to "time distortion" and hypothetical parallel realities that obfuscates the matter - particularly where Solaire and Lautrec are concerned.

Dark Souls - summoned NPC
Summoned NPCs may recover humanity as you do, or they're from another time or dimension, or both.

Solaire's dialogue refers to "heroes centuries old phasing in and out.". Solaire may be using the words "world" and "time" interchangeably. This seems to be the game's justification for how summoning works: you may be literally summoning someone from a bygone era into your own time period. Anytime, you are summoned to someone else's world, you are also being transported to another time (past or future, depending on whether or not you finish the game). Solaire and Lautrec seem to somehow come from another time or dimension, but other characters definitely seem to exist within your world and time: Andre, the Crestfallen Warrior, Rhea and her companions, Big Hat Logan and his apprentice, and so on are all undead who have seen many other "Chosen Undead" come to Lordran seeking their destiny.

In any case, it's not until an undead "gives up" that the hollowing process becomes complete. What do we mean by "giving up"? For an NPC, it means that they gave up on life and went hollow, and the player typically ends up putting them down. For the player, it means that you stop playing the game. As long as you continue to play the game, then your character will continue to hold onto a sliver of humanity and maintain his or her sanity for a little while longer. When you put down your controller for the last time, you have condemned your character avatar to finally succumbing to hollowness, whether you recognize it or not...

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Grid Clock provided by trowaSoft.

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