My Metal Gear play through streak has hit a bit of a slump of late. After completing the incomparable MGS3: Snake Eater, the question became: where do I go now? Go back and finish the throwback to 8-bit Metal Gear in Ghost Babel for GBA? Take a diversionary trip through deck-building turn based Metal Gear Acid for PSP? Continue the story with MGS: Portable Ops? Or only devote myself to the true mainline games and proceed to MGS 4: Guns of the Patriots? It really is a tough call. I am playing Ghost Babel off and on with my lil PocketGo, just seems right to play it on a portable. I tried Metal Gear Acid, but I found myself bored too quickly. I think I suffered from the high of MGS3 too much and finding something worthy of following that game will be difficult.
Well, I settled on trying to push through Portable Ops. With Portable Ops, you can take it a couple ways. You can be disappointed that it is a less polished MGS game (lower budget, sacrifices made for being on a handheld, willingness to mess with the formula), or appreciate it as a fairly feature-rich handheld game that also innovates on the series in substantial ways. I’m trying to take the latter approach. Portable Ops follows on the story of MGS3, with Big Boss of course being forced out of retirement by more bizarre geo-political happenings. Portable Ops chronicles the birth of FOXHOUND created to foil Big Boss’ unit from MGS3, FOX, which has gone rogue (sound familiar?). Taking place in the early 1970’s South America, on a secret peninsula controlled by the Soviets. Sounds a little crazy right, Soviet soldiers in South America at the height of the Cold War? Well, that’s MGS for you. These soldiers were forsaken by the Motherland after the Cuban Missile Crisis and never evacuated (which is insane on its face). In any case, Gene, the leader of FOXHOUND seizes on this opportunity to carve out a military nation in South America for himself using these disillusioned Soviet soldiers and scientists. Big Boss gets kidnapped by FOXHOUND and soon manages to escape the prison along with a young captured Green Beret, Roy Campbell (if you recall, the Colonel who is your handler and CO in the bulk of other Metal Gear games).
Right off the bat, MGS:PO takes a massively different approach to the traditional Metal Gear formula. Between missions you’ll be presented with a map of the area to choose your next move, and access to a menu where you can manage your supplies and your soldiers. That’s right. MGS:PO is part strategy game, and part tactical espionage. Both parts are actually decently integrated, but neither are terribly deep. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is a good thing, since I’m really itching to get to MGS4. The tactical espionage, sneaking mission portions are kind of dumbed down versions of what you had in past Metal Gear games. Again, for a PSP game, I’m surprised they look as good as they do, and play nearly as well as MGS3. The difference is that you have to rely less on solo infiltration as Big Boss, and instead recruit allies for your squad that you can switch to during the mission. This can make sections almost seem unfairly easy or difficult depending on your approach. Metal Gear is a series that encourages you to exploit it. Often, the best strategy is just to go in with one of your turned Soviet soldiers, have him go up behind a guard, knock them out, drag them back to the truck (hey, another free recruit!), rinse and repeat until you have cleared the area or get bored. Have your soldier with the “delivery man” ability walk around and grab all the supplies you need and send them back to the base. Now with the place largely cleared out, have Big Boss go in and tranquilize any remaining personnel and walk to the conveniently marked “X” on the map to end the mission. Once you learn the system, it is pretty easy.
Now, obviously it is a bit questionable how easy they make it to recruit enemies, but again, you have to suspend your disbelief with the Metal Gear games, or why bother? It takes a bit to get used to this. And especially to the strategy map between missions. Managing your soldiers from the interface will take a while to get used to, and I found the tutorial confusing. But, once you get the hang of it, it is serviceable. You can place recruited soldiers, medics, and scientists into the various units. Like, medics do well in your medical unit producing drugs and med-kits. Technically minded soldiers can go in your tech unit and provide you perks. Everyone seems to do fairly well in the spy unit, but especially characters with special perks for that area. And of course, you choose who you want to take with you on missions in the sneaking unit. It is a nice touch that all individuals in FOXHOUND get animal-inspired codenames like “Goat”, “Donkey”, etc. Except for like the first guy you recruit who is just “Jonathan”.
It is a sharp departure from the Metal Gear formula to be sure. Solo sneaking seemed to be a bedrock of the game. And, in a way, it still kind of is since you only control one character at a time. But, it feels a bit different to have these different priorities and emphasis and to not feel as alone. Inventory is considerably more limited, with character, including Big Boss, only having 4 inventory slots. And, with the stamina limitations that continually drain and the scarcity of rations to restore them (and it is missing the survival system that was in MGS3), you will need to rest characters frequently, or cheese the system. I found myself cheesing the system to get Big Boss’ stamina meter filled up by continually loading the hospital mission, picking up the rations next to the entrance, then aborting and doing it again until Big Bosses stamina meter refilled. While this isn’t a big issue once you have a good stable of recruits since you can just rotate them in and out of your sneaking unit and their stamina will regenerate, you always need to take Big Boss with you on missions, so it is either wait a few days for his stamina to regenerate, or go grab some rations somewhere. If your stamina bottoms out with Big Boss, its game over. It seems like it wasn’t the best idea to bring over the stamina system from MGS3 without the survival system which allows you to keep it topped up and without the regenerating health system that allows the stamina to be an integrated benefit. In the end, stamina becomes an annoyance to supposedly ensure you don’t overuse individual soldiers, but since Big Boss always needs to be used on missions, the system is a bit broken without cheesing it.
On the other hand, MGS:PO, starts to do the necessary thing with Big Boss’ character, starts changing him from Naked Snake into Big Boss. He’s finally going from being a solo operator to being an actual leader as he builds his own special forces unit, FOXHOUND. Granted, it is hardly in the most realistic manner. Rather than going with this fantasy route of kidnapping Soviet personnel that will supposedly just switch allegiances on the fly, I wished that they’d gone with something that special forces actually do all the time, which is building hearts and minds with indigenous forces, getting to know customs and who’s who, and building and maintaining tenuous alliances. But, that’s just my perspective as a long time reader of memoirs and histories of war and special forces. Instead, they opted for the more “gamified” version with building a native force being more like military-themed version of Pokemon, except where you are knocking out and throwing the “Pokemon” in the back of a truck. Again, Metal Gear games are games, they aren’t supposed to be a reflection of real life. While past Metal Gear games seemed to be more focused on emulating cinema. Portable Ops seems more like its emulating comics. It isn’t just the comic book style in the cutscenes, but also the way missions unfold episodically. Comics are often supplemental material to big film franchises to kind of fill in the blanks in the universe, such as with Star Wars or Stranger Things. And, that’s what Portable Ops feels like: supplemental material to the Metal Gear franchise, seeing Big Boss’ rise as a leader of FOXHOUND.
So far, I’m finding Portable Ops more of a chore than an enjoyable game. Its not a bad game per se, its just not up there with the likes of the mainline Metal Gear titles in my mind yet. It may be that I haven’t wrapped my head around the new systems. It is also that the graphics, controls, and presentation are downgraded from what we had in MGS3. We’ll see, I’ll keep at it and report back with how it goes.
Mental Centripetity 