I just wrapped my third and final The Boss Extreme / Big Boss title run I'll ever do for this game. I have always loved MGS4 and I will always love MGS4. I say this not because I'm some sort of contrarian who always needs to love what others hate, but because I genuinely believe it to be a misunderstood gem in a sea of games trying and arguably failing to be even remotely close to it. I don't believe MGS4 is the "worst-best game ever made" as a way to shield my love for it behind irony. I don't believe you can accurately form an opinion on MGS4 by simply watching a multi-hour long video and taking its creator's opinion for yourself, despite what many people will say. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is better than your favorites, not just because it literally posses the qualities in its narrative, meta-narrative, and gameplay to hold that title, but expressly because it SHOULDN'T hold those qualities. It does not deserve to be as good as it is, especially in the climate which birthed it twenty years ago, and yet somehow it is still an evergreen masterwork about the integration of militarization in daily life, about the casual acceptance of the perpetual warfare state, about the weaponization of innovation.
Unless you watched in real time as this game was thoroughly rejected by its players and the industry at large, you would not understand. Unlike its elder brother MGS2, the world will never paper over the disdain towards MGS4. Sure, you can call it a paragon of its generation's piss-filtered, same-y, vaguely Middle-Eastern, War On Terror inspired brethren, call it misogynistic, call it confusing, call it boring, call it whatever you want, but you will NEVER be correct in the assertion that there is anything like it, even among its own series. Before its successors pivoted to the Portable Ops model of so-called Tactical Espionage Operations, MGS4 is the pinnacle of the series' design from 1987 to that point. It is the ultimate simulator of Tactical Espionage Action, the ultimate example of the line Metal Gear rides between stealth game and immersive sim.
Hideo Kojima is no genius. He is a false prophet, a false shepherd. But I'll be the first to tell you that his message is resonant. Did you like it?
