This is an IGN opinion piece from Charlie Lopresto, who believes that love can bloom, even on a battlefield. He first encountered Metal Gear Solid on a demo disc from Pizza Hut and has since completed three hundred missions in VR– the kind that’s indistinguishable from the real thing.
Like Old Snake, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is a fossil. A genetic dead-end of gaming evolution, the unhinged and overflowing masterpiece that barely left a mark on the artform. Despite its commercial and critical success, MGS4 is rarely regarded as top tier Metal Gear. But is that actually fair?
Trapped on dead console hardware for the better part of its hard life, thanks to the new Master Collection Vol. 2 it’s finally possible for everyone to experience MGS4, from series diehards who first fired it up in 2008 to people completely new to Metal Gear who have absolutely no idea what they’re in for.
All of them will reckon with the many, many questions MGS4 brings to mind, like: Will we ever see a game like this again? Why did we stop talking about it? And, perhaps most importantly: MGS4 is really good, isn't it?
“The Lightning in That Rain”Hideo Kojima did not want to make Metal Gear Solid 4. He publicly declared his desire to end the franchise as early as MGS 2, then proclaimed that he was finished with the saga after Snake Eater. Kojima’s words were weary but his deeds said otherwise. He wasn’t really ready to move on– both of those games ooze with a sense of momentum and life.
Guns of the Patriots feels different. There’s a gloomy weight to the game, like a funeral – the raucous kind where friends, grudges, and flames gather to settle scores, awkwardly hook up, and celebrate the end.
Prior to MGS4, we’d last seen Solid Snake in 2001, when he dropped a prophetic monologue and vanished into the streets of lower Manhattan shortly after the former President of the United States crashed into the city with a giant sci-fi submarine. As situations go, it’s certainly one that begs for some followup, and after years of fans demanding the return of the Legendary Mercenary, Kojima obliged in trademark trolling fashion.
You don’t get the cocky, mech-smashing super soldier who slays Tengu by the dozen with a metafictional bandana. Kojima, who reportedly received death threats over his reluctance to move the story forward with MGS4, instead delivers a feeble, actively decomposing relic. Old Snake grunts, screams, coughs and gags wetly as he crawls in agony through his final mission, all for the privilege of being allowed to die before his poisoned blood wipes out humanity. Old Snake was punished before Punished was cool.
It’s a trope we’ve seen a lot lately: the beloved hero of a bygone age, bitter, broken down, and humbled, all in service of passing the torch to a spunky new recruit before the credits roll. But there is no Rey to don the cardboard box here, no Adonis Creed, no Robin, nor any kind of chipper next-gen protagonist queued to continue Snake’s legacy by selling some video games. Nearly everyone in Metal Gear Solid 4 is old, dead, or extremely married by the end of the story, a bittersweet and beautifully conclusive eulogy to a deeply heroic and thoroughly decrepit old man who reeks of cigarettes.
Modern media is designed to protect itself, to keep mythology marketable and leave endings open for future exploitation. Kojima does the exact opposite with MGS4, performing peaceful euthanasia on his life’s work to that point. It’s a brave move delivered with a lot of love and earnestness, and anyone upset at geriatric Snake were too busy feasting on a buffet of fanservice to stay mad for long.
Guns of the Patriots was Kojima ending things on his own terms; a bombastic epic that bursts with unfiltered honesty.Rarely do sprawling stories wrap up as neatly as Metal Gear Solid’s, even if “neatly” here means bursting at the seams and slightly slapdash. Kojima didn’t have a decades-long master plan when he made Metal Gear for the MSX in 1987, but managed to B.S. his way into satisfying answers for nearly everything. It’s an ambitious, messy, and sincere sendoff to Snake and the series. There’s really nowhere else to go from here.
Which brings us to the elephant in the room, dangling precariously from a Fulton balloon over this discussion: Guns of the Patriots is not the last Metal Gear Solid game. Despite his protestations, Kojima had two more Metal Gears in him: the portable Peace Walker, a numbered entry in all but name, and the tragic MGS5. Both respect the brick wall he built at the end of the timeline and tread water safely in the past instead of pushing forward. Kojima decided to move the series horizontally instead, experimenting with tech and form until Konami kicked him out.
Kojima’s actual final chapter, when it came, was compromised and ignominious, a casualty of his ugly exit from Konami and a sour note on which to end. Guns of the Patriots was Kojima ending things on his own terms; a bombastic epic with a massive budget that bursts with supreme confidence and unfiltered honesty. It would be the last time he ever made a game like this.
“War Has Changed”Guns of the Patriots, like every mainline Metal Gear game before it, is structured like a linear, cinematic action-adventure story. It’s almost quaint from a 2026 lens, when half the industry runs on open worlds and the other on live-service menuslop, but this was Kojima’s M.O. throughout the early part of his career.
And yet for something so committed to telling one continuous story in agonizing detail, MGS4 feels oddly episodic. Each of its five acts is practically a different genre. One minute you’re scooching across a battlefield, then next you’re skulking through the streets of Eastern Europe in a trenchcoat. Kojima drops us into warzones and weapons facilities across the globe, introduces new ideas, and moves past them just as quickly.
A much-hyped faction loyalty system stops mattering after Act 2, and the mechanic to manipulate enemy emotions isn’t really a factor until New Game Plus. There are a whopping 70 guns available for Snake that are largely superfluous, while the omnipresent Psyche meter quickly fades into the background outside of some perfectly-timed comedy. It’s like Kojima is cramming every single cockamamie “Metal Gear” idea he had left into the game as if it were his last chance, or so he hoped.
Kojima’s Hollywood aspirations run wild here, and while some of the sloggier cinematics are a chore, I’d sit through a thousand torturous mission briefings to relive MGS4’s queasy, white-knuckle fusions of story and mechanics, like the sicko mode split screen action setpieces and the tactile desperation of the microwave hallway.
The game’s linearity is a huge strength. We embody Old Snake through every second of his grueling ordeal. We wince with every injury and every brutal negging. Solid Snake was our stand-in from the moment he infiltrated Outer Heaven, detours aside, and we feel every moment of the long journey as he slugs it out with “Liquid” one last time. That sense of embodiment, being inside Snake, a part of him… you can’t get that from a mission select screen. But Kojima’s next and last games in his Metal Gear Solid saga would be built with these impersonal menus in mind.
MGS4 made Snake’s suffering feel like ours, and the series never approached that level of pathos again.Frustrated with the PS3’s limitations for his grand scale vision, Kojima went small instead. Also available in Master Collection Vol. 2, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker was originally built for the handheld Playstation Portable, so a sprawling linear opus was pretty much off the table without the luxury of blu-ray discs and Cell processors. Instead, he designed for the handheld system’s strengths: short, snackable stealth missions selected from a menu, perfect for a train ride or waiting room.
Previous Metal Gears relied on blockbuster storytelling to keep you coming back, but Peace Walker leans on moreish base-building, optional challenges, and RPG systems borrowed from Monster Hunter to keep you hooked. Seven years after Snake bluntslid across the Big Shell, grinding was back in Metal Gear, and this time it was here to stay.
Kojima is clearly fond of the results. He considers Peace Walker the fifth mainline MGS game, and thanks to rereleases it’s had far more staying power than the average PSP game. He liked the formula so much that he made it his default going forward: both MGS5 and the Death Stranding games run on the same skeleton, embracing timers and stats and judging your performance in isolated missions chosen from a list. At this rate we’ll probably be chasing S-ranks in OD.
It works beautifully for a handheld, and for a taciturn cipher like Sam Bridges, but it really doesn’t suit traditional Metal Gear Solid. MGS5 was free from the shackles of a 272p screen, but even with the full glory of the Fox Engine, the menu-driven mode of interaction keeps us at arms length from Snake.
The story becomes another checklist item, grinding through side ops until an actually important mission appears on the list. We’re watching from a more omniscient remove as Snake sizes up the stats of future subordinates and navigates a tech tree. For a series that loves to mess directly with the player and collapse the space between them and the character, losing that intimacy comes with a cost. MGS4 made Snake’s suffering feel like ours, and the series never approached that level of pathos again.
Being inside Old Snake’s head for dozens of hours is genuinely unpleasant at times, to the point it makes the game almost hard to revisit, and it’s one of several reasons why MGS4’s legacy is so quiet.
“Zero Becomes One”It’s hard for a game to have an ongoing influence when nobody can play it. Metal Gear Solid 4 has been unavailable for years, buried alive on hardware that Sony hasn’t sold for nearly a decade. Countless classic titles are trapped on ancient tech, but it’s rare for a numbered entry in a massive, triple A series.
The PS3’s Cell Processor was notoriously miserable to develop for, with bizarre architecture far removed from industry standards that made porting anything off it a nightmare. It’s also why emulation, so vital to keeping commercially abandoned games alive, couldn’t save Old Snake either. Strides have been made recently, but MGS4 remains a genuine bear to run outside of its native hardware.
None of these technical woes were insurmountable, and neither were the super specific Sony references or the licensing entanglements from MGS4’s frankly ludicrous product placement. It just needed a publisher that cared enough to devote the resources to porting it and had the courage to get Uniqlo, Apple, and Playboy back to the negotiating table.
Konami was content to let the series languish for a long time as it explicitly abandoned video games for pachinko parlors. It only once really wrestled with following MGS4 in the timeline, in Platinum’s audacious spinoff Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Otherwise, it didn’t matter to Konami if nobody could buy or play MGS4.
Thankfully, that’s changed. Konami’s prodigal return to video games has gone well enough so far, and now MGS4 is enjoying an immaculate rebirth, iPod and all. How will modern gamers receive it after so many years in the wilderness?
Guns of the Patriots is an aggressively unfriendly game by modern standards, and the cutscenes are completely out of control. A common Kojima criticism is that he’d rather make movies than games, but it’s hard to think of any film that’s nine hours long, built largely out of static codec calls, and features extended scenes of people drinking soda and smoking around little girls while weeping about nanomachines and infectious diseases. Whatever MGS4 is, it’s not a movie, and it’s certainly not made for newcomers.
MGS4 isn’t spoken of in the same breath as the first three games, and when it does come up it’s rarely for what it actually accomplished. And since almost nobody’s been able to play the game for so long, its reputation as an uncomfortable cutscene parade is all that remains. Opinion calcifies when there’s nothing around to contradict it.
That’s not to say nobody’s tried to pick up what MGS4 put down. Resident Evil Requiem almost feels like a tribute at times, a last ride for a long-suffering hero who makes a pilgrimage back to where his story started while dying from a sci-fi disease that makes him cough a lot. By the end, Leon is upgrading his weapons with counterfeit Drebin Points, dueling hand-to-hand with his longtime rival, and dragging himself inch by agonizing inch through a high-tech hallway.
Without spoiling where it lands, Requiem doesn’t have the nerve to go out on a limb like MGS4. Its tribute to Raccoon City sent us on a nostalgic trip through a place we’ve already walked through twice in HD, stopping far short of the wobbly PSX vertices in MGS4’s homage to Shadow Moses, another holy gaming space introduced in 1998. The ending stops short as well, a clean cut affair that leaves plenty of room for further adventures and profitable sequels.
Triple-A gaming didn’t go in an MGS4 direction in the intervening years. Budgets are too big and bosses too demanding to allow a freakazoid like Kojima off the leash again– unless you’re the man himself, of course. But Kojima only gets away with that because he had the power to leave the system that made MGS4 possible. Everyone else is still answering to a spreadsheet and, understandably, gunshy about unfettered visionaries.
Modern gaming’s play-it-safe instincts could do wonders for MGS4’s reputation. George Lucas and his Star Wars prequels suffered a similar rap over the years, dismissed as the bloated self-indulgent work of an auteur no one could rein in. But a decade of focus-tested corpo Star Wars sequels has sparked a genuine re-evaluation of the much-maligned Episodes I, 2, and 3, and now that it’s available again, MGS4 deserves the same treatment. Both the prequels and MGS4 are messy, overstuffed, and often embarrassing, but they are never once indifferent. Sincerity ages a lot better than caution.
Ultimately, everyone has to judge Metal Gear Solid 4 for themselves, to witness the grandiosity, endure the hour-plus uninterrupted cutscenes, and gaze hypnotically at Old Snake’s buttcheeks amidst a bombardment of jargon and lore. At least now you’ll get the chance to, and when you do finally sit with Kojima’s wayward masterpiece, you might like it more than you’d think.
Charlie "Moose" Lopresto graduated law school, passed the bar, and made a financially questionable decision to write about games and movies instead. Contributing to IGN since 2021, he collects solo board games and transforming robots.