A Dissertation-and-a-Half on Metal Gear Solid's Bosses (and a conundrum I hope you'll understand) (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

I'm so sorry for the lack of updates this month. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your patience while I get the MGS videos done. We are getting there. It's just that the big project—an analysis piece on the boss battles of every mainline Metal Gear Solid game (including Peace Walker) has ended up being even more work than the Armored Core piece was last year. I've essentially spent the last two months with this constantly on my mind. It's been beset by daft file stuff, illness both physical and mental, and mainly just the fact that I ended up rewriting a bunch of it because I wasn't happy with the original version.

What we have is almost 15000 words on the Metal Gear Solid series. I originally tried to keep the length down as much as possible (and still cut about 4000 words from the finalised script) but it's ended up almost as long as that last Armored Core piece.

It leaves me with a similar conundrum to the one I had when I posted that video. I am so, so sorry it isn't done yet. I've been working on another video simultaneously that isn't finished yet, and I'm super sorry for that too.

It's just... man, these longer videos. Same as the Armored Core one, this ended up representing about 8 or 9 normal videos' worth of work across two months. I've been going at this constantly and I just need a little bit more time to get everything over the finish line. It's just that, with Patreon's month-end deadline for paid posts, that potentially leaves me with a month of no income. That would create a whole heap of issues for me, and indeed the production of videos.

With that in mind, if you'll be so gracious as to allow me, I'd like to do a similar thing to when I posted the Armored Core video last year. I know I said I wouldn't charge twice for the Metal Gear script, but when you see this thing you'll probably see what I mean when I say it represents several videos' worth of work. I'm thinking, if it's OK, I'll put the finished script through (as well as the other video I've been working on) as a paid post. It would take so much pressure off of me to do that, and it means that, with all these videos nearing completion, the next couple of weeks will be absolutely bumper in terms of me releasing a pretty constant stream of videos. It's a lot of varied stuff I have a feeling people will enjoy. It also means I won't be freaking out about trying to pay rent next month, which would be a big, big help lol.

The thing is, I worry endlessly about this kind of thing—about not providing enough Content to be worthy of your support, but when I posted that Armored Core video in much the same way last year and was panicking about it, so many of you reached out to tell me that you were more just pledging to allow me to keep doing this rather than expecting a certain Volume of Content. Those people wanted me to be able to do this healthily and sustainably, and that you'd be OK with keeping things going until I could get the videos out.

I genuinely cannot tell you how much that meant to me. Your patience and support makes it all worth it. I seriously cannot thank you enough. Super heartening to read. That said, if you're not OK with that, that's totally understandable—refunds are available, just message me and we can sort it out. 

Anyway, I fucking hate talking about funding and stuff. It sucks, but it's necessary. I'm just beyond thankful for all of you, and I'm so excited for you to see the finished product. I'll post the script below, and I'll post the other surprise script in another post. Then I'll prob post the audio, then the video portion finally. I'm going to sleep for so long once this is all done, haha.

Thank you so, so much for your continued support.

Hamish

Writing on Games

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If you were to think of the elements that make up a good action game, I’m willing to bet bosses would rank pretty high up there—a real number 3 or 4 on the list of Family Fortunes answers. After working your way through minion level foes, you’re presented with a climactic set piece, a one-on-one duel that serves as a final exam of sorts, testing you on the mechanics and systems you’ve been interacting with up until that point.

And yet, for such a crucial component of these kinds of games, such bosses that end up becoming truly iconic for their series are something of a rare breed. I’m not simply talking about boss battles that happen to be fun or uniquely challenging here—I’m talking the kinds of encounters and characters that, when you picture the game or series, you picture them, so etched onto the identity of the wider package that they become the identity of that game to a certain extent.

In that regard, it’s difficult to think of a series with quite so many of these legitimate icons as Metal Gear Solid. Aided in no small part by character designs from Yoji Shinkawa that define sleek, when I think of bosses in games, my mind immediately shifts to the various ragtag groups of unhinged individuals scheming or revolting or defecting or whatever else. Psycho Mantis, Grey Fox, Revolver Ocelot, Liquid Snake, Vamp, Olga, The Boss, Revolver Ocelot again, or any one of the countless towering mechanical behemoths Solid Snake and his various predecessors are tasked with bringing down to size single-handedly.

The list goes on and on and on. These are characters, encounters that intertwine mechanics and story in ways that few games do; that, in many ways, have come to shape how we think about bosses, mechanics, hell even basic control in video games as a medium, as a means of telling stories.

But with a series that has endured as long as MGS, as many icons as it has generated over the decades, there are bound to be some clunkers amongst them too—even in otherwise fantastic games. In fact, playing through the series again recently, it was interesting to consider how the varying quality of certain bosses lined up with the overall design principles of their respective games, shifting standards of games generally at the time and, especially later on, the increasingly and publicly tumultuous production of said games. In fact, I’d say I found myself surprised on this recent playthrough, as to just which boss rosters and games ended up resonating most with me this time around—and which maybe don’t quite hold up to as much scrutiny.

This is a series you can very much track the highs and lows of directly through its boss design. And so, I decided that, in the same vein as one of my Hitman mission analysis videos, I would be fun to examine the various encounters of one of my all-time favourite game series in closer detail, and try to map a trajectory over the years of the franchise’s evolving strengths and weaknesses in that regard – trying to develop a better understanding of why these iconic characters have stuck so thoroughly within our memories over the years.

METAL GEAR SOLID

And when it comes to the bosses of Metal Gear Solid 1, time can certainly be an odd thing. See, I’m not sure whether it’s just the decades I’ve spent acclimatised to the ridiculousness of this series, but there’s something about FOXHOUND and the mavericks and misfits that comprise it, that seems to bypass at least some of the cartoonish absurdity one should probably associate with such a roster.

Indeed, it might simply be the move to 3D, with these fully voiced characters being played totally straight, more thoroughly weaved into the grand militaristic machinations of the game’s wider plot as they are, that might make you forget that these villains are drawing super hard from not only the B-movie shlock vibes of Escape to New York, but the MSX games that came previously.

You know, there’s not some great aesthetic leap between the Russian gunslinging cowboy, the competitive muktuk eater with a gatling gun, and characters like the Machine Gun Kid and Jungle Evil—the kinds of caricatures whose cartoonish nature should become more prevalent with an increase in graphical fidelity, when you get a more detailed look at them.

And yet, at least for me, that FOXHOUND has so endured in the memories of players as part of the great pantheon of characters in video games, is testament to the fact that such silliness—while certainly present and welcome—is far from their defining quality. That, much like their more over-the-top character traits balance out the heavier themes they represent, their respective battles represent a delicate equilibrium between gameplay and narrative; each serving each other in a way that goes against the reputation Metal Gear Solid developed—that the original was somehow the clunky one of the bunch relative to its more fluid sequels; that this was a series you watched rather than played.

All this to say, Metal Gear Solid is the video game equivalent of a Hollywood action blockbuster, but in a way that goes beyond its obvious visual cinematic influences. The arcade-y, distinctly video game quality of its predecessor’s villains carries over and, as a result, while these characters might wax philosophical about the thrill of conflict, the rather frantic pacing of that original game remains something to behold.

Even accounting for the backtracking you’re forced to do, and not accounting for cutscenes and codec calls, in terms of pure gameplay it’s consistently refreshing to see the breakneck speed at which the original whisks you between encounters that are all delightfully bespoke, both mechanically and narratively.

You barrel through a tense cat and mouse duel, to trying to outmanoeuvre a tank, to beating a cyborg ninja senseless with your bare fists, to outsmarting a psychic by physically altering how you play the game, to staring down the barrel of a sniper rifle all in the space of about an hour of actual gameplay if you know what you’re doing.

As a game, as a mechanical experience, its pacing legitimately begins to resemble less the foreboding, wandering horror of Escape From New York (from which the character of Snake was drawn), and more something like the more hi-octane scenes in the later James Bond films, Rambo or Die Hard—with all the disparate set pieces you rocket between, it feels like a borderline boss rush.

I mean hell, despite not having health bars defining them as such, a whole lot of the combat set-pieces are themselves drawing very directly from boss battles in Metal Gears past. There exists very little gameplay here that isn’t a boss fight, or isn’t in direct service of overcoming one.

And it’s not just the dizzying rate at which you move between these encounters, it’s the pacing and lead up to each of them individually that remains super impressive. You have two incredibly tense sniper duels, simultaneously frenzied and subdued as you try to sufficiently steady your nerves in order to prevail, sandwiching the explosive battle against a Hind D—with the actual fight here serving as the climax to a condensed action movie sequence that really is lifted straight out of Die Hard.

You fight your way up the tower, only for the Hind to destroy the bridge to the other tower, so you abseil down in a completely bespoke mechanical sequence that never appears again, before sniping the enemies across the bridge below. You then work your way up another tower before you’re left with no choice but to face down the gunship with a rocket launcher – and all of this takes place over the course of about fifteen minutes. It turns the gunship into an actual villain in itself – its spectre haunting you throughout the entire sequence.

And for as much as Solid is very much drawing from the more adventure game-esque design of its MSX predecessors, in which weapons largely have one intended use, to be rubbed on a certain object or enemy before being largely disregarded, there really is something to be said for the degree of flexibility you’re afforded in some of these encounters.

While the everything about the first duel with Sniper Wolf, from the dire narrative circumstances to the narrow corridor in which it takes place, funnels you into a very specific kind of showdown, the second round, almost immediately following the Hind battle, allows for a bit more lateral thinking. Of course the wider arena can actually heighten the tension found in the first encounter, as the increased possibilities of where she could be hiding require you to up your game – the first go around serving merely as training for this real encounter. Or, you could get a little underhanded with it; the game rewarding your ingenuity with a relative cakewalk of a fight.

Vulcan Raven is a fight that entirely hinges on flexibility of approach—forcing you to get creative lest you get torn to shreds by his minigun. It’s a fight that, rather than segment stealth and action, instead turns the stealth into the action. It’s not enough to react in the moment you’re caught; you have to plan ahead, as with the Ocelot fight, without a comprehensive view of where he is at any given time—just his ludicrously huge cone of vision, making this surprisingly large grid of an arena feel claustrophobically small; like one wrong turn could land you in a whole world of hurt.

What’s more, the risk/reward for each strategy is balanced in such a way that even the sneakiest of approaches leaves you in constant danger. If you use missiles, even from a distance, you’re either trying to get a stinger shot off in what vanishingly little time you have before you’re face to face with him, or you’re navigating this grid with equally little idea of where he actually is; frantically trying to connect your Nikita with the barrel on his back before he notices and shoots you down, or you run out of fuel. Lay down claymores, and any hubris you might have knowing that he’ll be brought down by simply walking around, is balanced out by the mental map you have to maintain in order that this self-created minefield doesn’t instead turn on you.

And even when fights don’t offer much in the way of flexibility, that isn’t to say that they don’t reward thinking outside the box and getting a little devious with things. Take Psycho Mantis for instance—perhaps the most infamous battle in the series; up there as one of the all-time great boss fights. Here we have someone whose power is so all-encompassing that it extends outside of the game and its characters – it fits right in with the game’s casually meta approach in a way that renders the moment delightfully camp, but it’s also downright creepy to have a character more or less address you directly; play tricks on you beyond the torment inflicted on Snake and Meryl.

And in a similar vein, there’s something that at the time felt downright monumental about having to physically alter how you play, the layout of the very console itself and how you interfaced with it in order to beat Mantis – a move whose staggering lack of imitators proves how radical its design kind of still is – and yet simultaneously, that very same move feels hilariously trivial; bring down this all-powerful psychic by simply… switching the controller port. Through the game’s laser focus on its status as a video game, Mantis is shown to be as simultaneously, tragically pathetic as he is terrifying.

It speaks to an interesting aspect of design specific to Metal Gear Solid’s design that I think becomes apparent from its very first fight with Ocelot. On paper, it’s almost comically simple—chase a guy around a square and shoot him. Also don’t go in the middle. And as the remake found in Twin Snakes would show us, it is simple—to the point that I almost read it as a kind of meta joke in itself; where the fight would be over in seconds simply by entering first-person mode and piling tranquilisers into his daft head.

I actually talked about this in my video on Twin Snakes—that the mechanical alterations brought in from Metal Gear Solid’s sequel, Sons of Liberty, all serve to make things feel less uncanny; less overtly like you’re playing a game with rules as distinct and blocky as its polygons.

But as the Twin Snakes also shows us by the fact that such quality-of-life additions also happen to break almost everything about its encounters, Metal Gear Solid was a game fundamentally designed around those rules and considerations. A swarm of guards magically appearing out of nowhere the second you even slightly step out of line might not be realistic, sure, but not knowing how or when the onslaught is going to stop, knowing you have to be super careful to avoid it happening again… navigating that chaos sure is tense, in a way it decidedly isn’t when you can just tranq every enemy from miles away before they have a chance to even spot you, let alone run away and radio in an alert.

Similarly, sure, in a more traditional game you might expect to be able to see the entirety of Ocelot’s arena, some might view the fact that you can’t as some design fault or a “clunky camera” or whatever, but the fact that you are very deliberately limited from ever getting a full picture here, means that you can’t simply aim at where Ocelot is—you have to gain a sense for where he’s going to be; how you might move in such a way that you can manipulate him to be in a certain position at a certain point.

Your resources are limited thanks to the lack of a second tranquiliser pistol to switch between, making that crawl underneath the array of tripwires when you run out of ammo, especially when you likely don’t have a full idea of where your enemy is, even more chest tensioning. This is no mere vaguely interactive movie or whatever—Metal Gear Solid proudly leans into its status as a video game above all else, and this fact plays a key role in the ominous atmosphere created as Snake wanders through these dank, dingy arenas.

And enduring these (honestly still relatively short) treks as you do, to cool and then warm the PAL key, it all culminates in what many might not have realised at the time was already a series staple; one that would be iterated upon in each subsequent release—a one-on-one battle against the ultimate weapon, Metal Gear REX.

It’s just that, unlike the encounters of old, where you were running from side to side planting mines or chucking near endless grenades until the little sprite flashed and went away, here we have a multi-stage dismantling process; an encounter that feels as colossal, as overwhelming as those prior battles were probably envisioned to look. As exemplified by the clever twist that the second phase sees you have to switch from chaff to stun grenades in order to have any effect, the machine is almost of secondary concern here—you’re frantically tearing away at its outer shell to reach the petulant, yet nonetheless animalistic rage at its core, powering it all.

It's just a shame that the battle at the end of this process fails to live up to the grandeur of what you’ve just achieved. The final fight here represents a direct 3D modelling of yet another series hallmark—where the mech goes down in spectacular fashion, but there’s still one more thing to sort out, or you’ve got to escape; where the villain’s grand, world-altering plans lie around them in flames, but their sheer hatred of you invigorates them to battle on in the face of oblivion.

In amongst all the crazy schemes, this is personal. The bombast of any prior action is stripped away, as are the shirts, in a true showcase of raw, animalistic strength; of honour—a one-on-one fistfight to the death. Two men enter, one man leaves. It’s this very format through which Big Boss’s allegiances are made clear, with this kind of one-on-one battle forming the origin point of perhaps the defining question of this series—just how and why did Big Boss turn bad?

It is perhaps the most overtly cinematic, most traditionally dramatic setup for any of the encounters in the entire game, and yet it all falters, collapses, for one simple reason—Metal Gear Solid, as a series, has never had good melee combat. Even in the later games where you saw a move towards a more traditional action shooter control framework, where CQC became a more formalised part of the series’ parlance, it was rare for melee to feel like anything other than an accessory of the guns.

Now strip away any mechanical complexity those later games might have, press circle to have Snake perform the weediest punch-punch-kick combo imaginable, with a swarm of hit detection issues to boot, and what, in an action film, might have served as a powerful, cathartic climax, here turns into a frustrating, flailing mess.

You might argue that the other melee-focused battle in the game, against Grey Fox, shares similar frustrations—and sure, in terms of raw mechanics I do think the Cyborg Ninja fight is a bit of a slog. It’s just that, in that fight, at least hits more or less always connect when it looks like they should; and even then, you can at least say that such unpredictability is perhaps more thematically warranted given the overall surreality of the character and the situation in which you fight them (you know, this doesn’t feel so much like a fight as much as forcefully shutting down a machine gone rogue); and most importantly of all, you don’t have to navigate said unpredictability on the tiniest platform imaginable, under a time limit that Liquid gleefully wastes thirty full, unskippable seconds of. God this guy is just so eminently hateable.

And I guess that’s just it. Even with what few stumbling blocks exist in the roster here, they’re all presented so fantastically, with such striking designs by Yoji Shinkawa and such gloriously hammy performances from the entire cast, that the totality of experience ends up winning out. This roster has its ups and downs but it represents an overall package so brimming with personality and absurdity and genuine pathos—a kind of weird line being navigated between a burning desire to kill Snake and outright respect for him, fascination at his tenacity—that it’s just impossible to maintain much ill will towards the game in terms of its few mechanical shortcomings.

Even by modern standards, these are encounters that manage to balance deliciously campy melodrama and real complexity. The fights are made more compelling in the moment precisely for this wealth of context, and you relish every chance you get to see them on screen, deepening their ongoing, complicated individual relationships with Snake.

I mean, it was playing through the game like this, of seeing this boss rush for what it really is, that recontextualised an aspect of the game’s story I’ve always had in the back of my mind since I first played it. Part of the fascination these enemies have with Snake, the respect they have for him, revolves around the fact that, to them, he isn’t so different—this supposed hero, saving the world from those who wish to undermine the American way of life, is consistently gawked at by those in gas masks and those getting nonchalantly pecked to death by birds; framed as if he is some kind of crazed psychopath just like the rest of them—summed up in Liquid’s pithy retort that Snake, indeed, enjoys all the killing.

It's something that always seemed funny to me, reflecting Snake’s fervent defence from the accusation. This is a stealth game after all—you’re not meant to play it super violently. There exist barely any enemies to kill, in relation to more typical action games, at least. And beyond that, there’s so much talking that such gleeful basking in visceral excess always seemed like it was beside the point.

But ya know, playing it in the way I have done recently… these bosses are straight up fun to engage with. They are assuredly video game-y in the way that the MSX bosses were. You maybe don’t realise it because of the cutscenes and codec calls punctuating them, but there is barely any gameplay that isn’t those bosses. You are given a lightning-fast assembly line of fun foes that, at this stage, your only option is to kill. You are provided a wealth of means to do so—even at the series’ most mechanically limited, each method of despatch creates a dynamic micronarrative of how you specifically killed each boss. Your main mode of engagement isn’t stealth, it’s a veritable cornucopia of violence; one you’re incentivised to go through again and again—where the incentives for doing so amount to more efficient means to kill, to get you to the killing. You have been turned into a gleeful machine of violence and you don’t even realise it.

What Metal Gear Solid is that you can have your cake and eat it to a certain extent. For a series so dubiously renowned for its emphasis on non-interactivity, Metal Gear Solid’s boss battles – their frequency, their pacing and the surprising flexibility they allow for – illustrate a far more integral link between gameplay and narrative than the series in general (but especially the original) has never gotten a lot of credit for. A big part of the reason these characters have endured as long as they have is because, well, they basically are the entire game—the main vehicle through which you experience its narrative and interact with its systems.

I don’t know that there has been a better line-up of bosses in a Metal Gear game precisely because of this deeply intertwined relationship between the two—a relationship that, as we will come to see, is tested to various degrees in future instalments. In its direct sequel’s case, however, I have my reasons to suspect that might have been at least partly deliberate.

METAL GEAR SOLID 2 SONS OF LIBERTY

Sons of Liberty marks an interesting evolution in the series’ boss design, as by its very nature it should act as a pretty direct corollary to the experience of Metal Gear Solid 1. Its story is largely structured around the idea that the events of the Big Shell mimic those of Shadow Moses, so that the entire thing might function as an exercise to control information, to sculpt individuals through that information control.

The hallmarks of that prior title are all there. You have a cyborg ninja secretly feeding you info; you take down an aircraft piloted by the main antagonist with a stinger; you go up against a ragtag group of appropriately comic book agents seemingly mirroring the mercenaries of FOXHOUND in the form of Dead Cell. Even if the increase in resolution might see the realms of believability pushed when it comes to supernatural powers like this, in terms of narrative structure, MGS2 is, very deliberately, more or less that same prior game with the pieces switched around a bit.

And yet when it comes to the boss fights that punctuate your progression, the texture of that game seems different somehow. Again, not accounting for cutscenes and codec calls, there is about as much gameplay here as there is in the first title, but in terms of those traditional one-on-one encounters, it feels as if there are not only less of them, but there’s something distinctly… strange about the ones that remain—a fact that will become increasingly relevant as we go.

But to begin we need to go to perhaps the fundamental mechanical shift that separates the foes you battle in Sons of Liberty from those in Snake’s former unit. Where the first game’s challenge originated from its limitations as to how far into the distance you could see while still moving, aiming and shooting, 2 goes in the opposite direction, with many of the more typical fights being specifically designed around the need to go into the newly added ability to aim (if not move) in first person.

Where that first Ocelot fight had you frantically running around trying to outpace him, to anticipate where he’s going to be rather than figure out exactly where he is, the tiered arena on which you fight Olga gives you very little room to manoeuvre at all; the barrier separating the two levels on which you both operate basically forcing you to look through Snake’s eyes to take her down. In that regard it honestly has more in common with the Sniper Wolf fights later in the first game, as you try to catch her peeking around the corners of the detritus strewn across the arena—all of it placed with absolute precision to keep you from ever developing a complete view of where your opponent could be.

Add in the fact that at this point you only have the tranq pistol, forcing you to engage with the fact that even bosses can be taken down non-lethally, and I’m not sure that there’s a more… comprehensively featured boss fight than Olga’s the entire rest of the game.

The one that comes closest (and might actually be the fight I enjoy the most) is the Fatman fight. He’s a character with next to no screentime, but as he rollerblades into frame and ostentatiously smashes his cocktail glass to the floor demanding to be respected as an artist, boy does he make the most of it.

Continuing the trend of reversing the flow of how fights were structured in the first game, the layout of the Strut E rooftop on which you fight him, brings to mind the grid structure of the cold storage unit where the Vulcan Raven fight takes place. The strategies afforded to you are similarly varied, while the execution of those strategies will likely be similarly frantic—with Fatman adding in the hiccup of periodically placing bombs for you to find and diffuse; meaning you’re simultaneously swapping out your rations for the sensor, you’re having to stop and stand in the one spot while you spray the device with coolant; all while you’re hoping that the man himself doesn’t roll by and drain your health. An over-the-top encounter for an over-the-top villain.

Outside of that though, the Vamp battle feels like the logical evolution of the Olga fight, forcing you to navigate that Ocelot-style arena (replete with an insta-kill danger zone in the centre) as well as aim quickly across two levels, all while your opponent leaps faster than you can keep up with him. It’s a logical escalation in mechanical challenge, but one where arbitrary invincibility, near-constant projectiles and fiddly controls turn this into an exercise in frustration more than hand-eye coordination. 

The harrier fight is swifter, snappier than the Hind battle it evolved from, but I hesitate to call it better. Sure, it’s good ol’ fashioned fun; it’s satisfying to pile rocket after rocket into its frame as Solidus hurls Hollywood one-liners at you, all without the need to wait for the arbitrary video game time limit to run out before you’re allowed to do damage again, but it also doesn’t feel quite so tense—relative to the tower descent and subsequent climb leading to this blood-pumping action set-piece in the middle of a blizzard, this fighter jet buzzing about seems to appear out of nowhere, and is decimated just as quickly. 

Which I guess speaks to the main way in which the fights in 2 differ from 1—their pacing. Perhaps it’s down to the game being broken up into two distinct sections, but where it felt like that first game couldn’t wait to chuck another boss encounter your way - seeing you take on a good deal of the big enemies in the game within an hour if you were quick about it – that same hour in Sons of Liberty, even when skipping the cutscenes, is going to look downright sedate by comparison.

You’ll fight Olga, and then you’ll largely be taking photographs, activating nodes, looking for and spraying bombs. You might say that, minus the grim, dingy setting, with the name of its now bemulleted hero and its “rescue the president with the nuclear football” setup, Sons of Liberty slowing down like it does, actually puts it more in line with the series’ Escape From New York influence than the original game.

I mean, by the time you get to another boss after the first Olga duel, it’s not even a fight per se. You can see it from the achievements in the HD edition—no longer is it simply a case of defeating a laundry list of foes; in many cases, you’re meeting, you’re colluding, you’re surviving.

And for what it’s worth, I enjoy that process of survival—figuring out that there’s no way to hurt Fortune and that you’ve just got to wait out what becomes a flailing expulsion of rage is neat in itself, but there’s also a fun challenge in trying to position yourself in such a way where you can most effectively avoid Fortune’s gaze; almost as piercing as the railgun she wields.

But where this starts to get really interesting for me is when you consider the narrative implications of fights like this. If we view Raiden as an insert for the player, trained on virtual exercises based on the exploits of a hero he now has to live up to, then the fact that you can’t physically beat every enemy in as cut-and-dry a manner as Snake did previously, ends up conveying the game’s narrative through mechanics; a destabilisation of the player’s idea of how games are supposed to work, how something modelled on Shadow Moses is meant to go down.

I mean, outside of Psycho Mantis (and I suppose Decoy Octopus even though you don’t confront him directly), FOXHOUND mainly comprised people who were simply good with guns – the big guy could lift a big one, the cowboy could spin a small one, and the sniper could, well, snipe. Here we have someone who bullets seemingly cannot hit, and a man who can, by all accounts, cheat death (and for whom the sort-of-explanation of nanomachines wouldn’t be made explicit until a game released several years later).

You can get through the Metal Gear RAY fight, but you don’t win it—you merely persist through a battle of attrition; a ramping up of the stakes you’ve become accustomed to for potentially three games at this stage, where you play through the levels and beat a Metal Gear at the end. OK, well how about potentially twelve of the things? And at the end of it all, in a series that would go on to attempt to explain almost every discrepancy in its storytelling, Fortune shows up to illustrate that straight up magic might just exist in this world.

It speaks to the deliberately overwhelming nature of the game’s story; one designed to alienate. As Raiden collapses, exhausted, his identity, his sense of place is systematically razed to the ground, so too is the player’s idea of how a Metal Gear game is supposed to play; how battles are meant to go; how a hero of these games is supposed to operate, succeed, and be rewarded for that success.

The very nature of Sons of Liberty’s boss battles—how often they appear and in what order; how you fight them (or in some cases, don’t); whether you’re allowed to overcome them—all of it serves the larger metanarrative here, in ways that go beyond simply questioning the player’s complicity in violence. 

I suppose if there is a problem to be found with the roster here, it’s that especially as you progress, the spectacle of these encounters can outshine what it is you’re actually doing in them. A fight with an immortal vampire with a pool that will instantly drown you the second you fall into it, descends into a decidedly awkward shooting gallery. A harrier piloted by that same vampire and the former President of the United States in a mad muscle suit, later retrieved by a massive hostile mech, is nonetheless something that you just pile missiles into until it stops.

As thematically appropriate as such a repetitive, grinding procedure is, and for as striking as the image of these machines towering over Raiden produces, there’s little to the fight itself other than “run, shoot at leg, shoot at mouth.” The image of Solidus sprinting and leaping around to stop the rogue RAYs after your fight is burned into my memory as one of the downright coolest sequences in all of video games… with the relatively mundane process of taking them down yourself serving as little more than a means of getting to that cutscene.

But once again, the worst of all has to be the final encounter—a similar setup to the conclusive fight with Liquid in the first game, where the plan to stop the Patriots lies in ruin around our antagonist, and amongst the debris and psychological torment, all that remains is to battle one-on-one. The visual stakes of the fight are upped dramatically—the former president of the United States now dons some Dr Octopus-esque tentacles and throws you a samurai sword with which to sort this once and for all, on top of Federal Hall, no less.

And yet, despite a bigger arena and generally smoother movement afforded by Sons of Liberty’s fidelity, by making the absurd decision to map the sword controls to the right analogue stick, the mechanics of this battle end up wildly imprecise in a completely different way to the first game—the camera completely unequipped to deal with Solidus zooming around the battlefield, while you flimsily swing your katana around (using either the lethal or inexplicably non-lethal blade) and hope that a) your swing connects, b) that he’s not arbitrarily blocking and c) that you don’t inadvertently press down on the analogue stick and commit to a piercing attack, leaving you vulnerable and unable to move. It is an absolute mess of a fight and, mechanically, a real low note for the game to go out on.

But even with these sometimes familiar mechanical deficiencies, it’s the narrative heft of these battles—both their metatextual qualities as well as the complex characterisation of the individuals involved—that more than makes up for how these encounters can sometimes play. It can often be difficult to tell who is friend and who is foe—their motives serve as part of the game’s larger mystery, and for the most part their arcs are explored across the entirety of the game’s runtime; frequently interweaving directly with your own adventure.

Their need to get revenge on those who pulled the strings on all the hardship they endured, is consistently countered with the fact that those same people are still pulling their strings. They are awful, they do awful things, but you could also argue that they are victims in their own right. In short, and despite their powers, they are human. They aren’t just enemies, they’re characters—and outside of maybe Fatman, they are as vital to Raiden’s story as Raiden is to theirs.

And this is an important point, because after Sons of Liberty, we begin to see what happens when this balance becomes inverted—when the mechanical possibilities of boss battles are expanded to an extent previously unseen in the series, but where that underlying humanity starts to waver somewhat; the results, as it turns out, are pretty compelling.

METAL GEAR SOLID 3 SNAKE EATER

This is where things get a little difficult - see, with its vastly increased scope of mechanical possibilities afforded to players (with a level of systemic detail that sees the game border on immersive sim territory), Metal Gear Solid 3 is regarded by many to be the peak of the franchise. Its story represents an absolutely vital part of the series’ canon – the origin of Big Boss – and what’s more, it’s told with an efficiency, a charm that retains the series’ wackiness and complexity, but in a manner that’s less cold; less concerned with deliberately alienating players than simply telling a compelling tale.

If we examine its boss battles, however, in the context of what strengths have emerged in the prior games, then while Snake Eater offers some of the best in the entire franchise in that regard, it also offers what, at this point in the series release timeline, in 2004, could feasibly be considered some of the worst. Bear with me on this one, I’m going somewhere with it.

It all starts off strong, with Ocelot’s return as the game’s first true boss fight serving as a microcosm of the overall experience to be found here. Providing a similarly confined arena and restricted view of proceedings to the Olga fight in 2, in line with the campier tone of the game’s 60’s spy-thriller narrative, Ocelot’s fight here is much more playful in nature; with this arena serving as more of a sandbox with which to experiment in a way that you’ve hopefully become somewhat accustomed to this deep into the playtime, relative to how quickly its predecessors wanted you to get into these big battles.

If the first hour of gameplay in Metal Gear Solid 1 saw you cascading through and finding the solutions to all of these disparate combat puzzles, Snake Eater opts instead to use that same hour to provide a series of lower-stakes encounters; encouraging experimentation as to just how deep the systemic interactions go here. And at the end of that, you have Ocelot acting as a cherry on top, as if to say “all that wild stuff you were messing around with in the main game? It’s all fair play, here.”

The wealth of variables that can affect this first battle alone, that can be messed with, goes far beyond anything seen in any prior Metal Gear prior. Beehives can be shot, his hat can be taken off his bonce, his guards can shoot at you, and crucially your arsenal at this point in the game will be comparatively heaving at this stage; giving you all sorts of choices as to your loadout and strategy; how the weight of said loadout might affect stamina drain and the like; a loadout that can include tools as diverse as the poisonous snakes you’ve collected along your travels.

It’s a flexibility that extends to the very paratext of the game itself, as Ocelot’s proclamations as to the pure joy of reloading during a battle—a kind of mini-cutscene in itself—can be skipped by the player; cutting through the character’s affected grandeur, leaving him standing in the middle of the battlefield like a sitting duck; a move that fits right in with the hubris we’ve seen him pay for so embarrassingly several times at this point, at the hands of Big Boss. The flexibility of approach doesn’t just allow for emergent storytelling—as boss fights like this exemplify it can be tied very directly to a character’s ongoing development. It’s difficult to envision an encounter more aesthetically representative of the game at large, especially when this is the first boss fight you come across.

And so, what is the big problem with Snake Eater’s boss roster then? Well, it’s an issue that begins to reveal itself almost immediately following the Ocelot fight—and it comes in the form of the Cobras; a series of surprisingly rapidfire battles with this game’s take on the weirdo mercenary unit.

And while I’ll be upfront and say I don’t think there’s necessarily what I’d call a bad boss battle in here—I still love this game so dearly and have a great time with it—in terms of The Cobras specifically, it represents the main point of deviation between the original titles and the games going forward. And all of it can be summed up in one question—what do you really know, what can you tell me about The Fury?

See, in terms of raw gameplay, like with many of the Cobra battles, The Fury provides more than enough groundwork for an invigorating encounter, in which the murky depths of the underground labyrinth in which you encounter him, are lit up only by the flames pouring down the corridors from this enraged cosmonaut.

Of course, using the sniper rifle, the mechanics of taking this guy down aren’t particularly challenging, and much like the rest of the bosses here the speed with which you can drain their health bar can come as a bit of a shock, but similarly to the Vulcan Raven fight in 1, all it takes is one wrong turn here, and you’re suddenly caught in the middle of an inferno, that proves devilishly difficult to escape; simply whipping out your gun isn’t an option anymore, and you need to roll to put the flames out; head into your Cure menu to heal the burns, all while getting the hell out of dodge. The ease with which The Fury’s jetpack allows him to vault these uneven walls between corridors significantly outpaces your ability to do the same.

The thing is though, if you ask random players to actually tell you anything truly substantive about The Fury other than… he wears a space suit; or about The Fear other than he’s kind of a bug guy with a crossbow; that The Pain likes bees or The End is old and photosynthesises somehow, I’m willing to bet the vast majority of people would come up pretty short. Honestly, I’ve beaten this game countless times and I couldn’t do much better. It says a lot that despite the obvious gameplay strengths of the fight itself, I consistently forget that The Fury even exists.

For as cool, as creepy as the Cobras are in concept – each representing a distinct emotion or feeling that they take into battle with them; each representing a move towards something more playfully monstrous, almost tokusatsu-esque in some cases - none of them (bar maybe The Sorrow) are anywhere near as integral to the plot as FOXHOUND is in 1, or even Dead Cell in 2—in fact, they don’t really exist for any other reason than to nominally aid the Boss.

Part of the reason the original’s bosses were so memorable and iconic is because we spend actual time with them—they have personalities of their own and, crucially, their engagements with Snake form part of their own separate arcs. In short, they get time to exist outside of that brief period in which their health bar lies underneath your own.

The theatrics of Psycho Mantis illustrate how casually powerful he is—he effortlessly messes with Snake’s psyche, your own understanding of how games and their technology are supposed to work. There’s something downright cordial about the way Raven approaches Snake—he warns the higher ups not to underestimate him, and cuts directly to Snake’s core as he talks of how much our protagonist seems to enjoy this. Grey Fox is an old friend, Sniper Wolf marks Snake as a target, viewing him with as much flirtatious admiration as avarice. I could go on.

The Cobras, by comparison, seem to only make passing mention of Snake as the Boss’s apprentice, and that’s kind of it. It’s a problem by no means exclusive to 3, but Snake Eater marks a definitive point at which its boss roster – specifically the Big Bad Unit Snake will have to dismantle member by member - becomes more and more distant from the story being told; representing a focus on surface level character designs and concepts, with little in the way of actual substance fleshing said concepts out.

And even with the increased flexibility afforded to many of these encounters, it all butts up against the reality that, at least on normal difficulty, there’s not much reason to actually utilise it. Like, it’s a funny, cool idea that, in order to rid yourself of the Pain’s pheromones drawing his bees towards you, you have to change your camouflage—get out of those clothes and into new, fresh ones. It’s also something that, thanks to how effective the shotgun is against him, I’ve never once thought about actually doing. I legitimately only remembered that it was a factor in this fight on this recent playthrough, where I happened to hear it mentioned in a codec call.

Similarly, it sure is neat that you can essentially turn The Fear’s survivalist tendencies against him—balancing your need to eat and maintain stamina, with the potential to use that same food to lure him into a trap. It represents a levelling of the playing field—that this boss, like you, plays by the same systemic rules. It doesn’t help though, that even willingly forgoing the thermal goggles that readily reveal his exact location and straight up break a good deal of the encounters across this game… his movements through the trees are not exactly difficult to track, and only become easier as his stealth suit breaks and sparks from damage.

The mechanical nuances to many of the Cobra battles are fun; they allow for emergent, player-driven storytelling to an extent. I’m glad they exist—it is better that these details are in the game than if they weren’t—but there’s surprisingly little incentive driving you towards these more intricate tactics, other than a need to spice things up, to needlessly toy with your prey a little. The basic strategy is potentially disappointingly vanilla, sure, but it’s also so damn effective.

This might sound odd, but The Cobras specifically represent the first point (for me anyway) where the encounters outside of boss battles often prove more interesting than the bosses themselves. With multiple guards patrolling any given area, each with their own routes and routines, maintaining stealth is of heightened importance; there’s a noxious tension associated with the knowledge that around any corner could lie a guard you had no idea about, and suddenly whatever plan you might have is thrown into disarray. And with restrictions placed on everything from suppressors to radar batteries, previously optimal strategies like tranquilising everyone at a distance are now complicated, requiring you to think about both the short and long-term consequences of any shot, any step taken throughout this jungle.  

And with all of that in mind, suddenly messing around with the more overtly immersive sim elements of the game’s design, finding methods with which to effectively place a spanner in the works using your limited resources (say, for example, using an explosive to disrupt their food supply, leaving them less alert) provides real, tangible, mechanical benefit in a way it perhaps doesn’t in many of the boss encounters here; where there’s simply one enemy, and one health or stamina bar to bring down to zero; where the suppressors can come off, because stealth is far less of a concern.

If typical encounters in Snake Eater are reminiscent of First Blood’s tenser sequences in which Rambo is vastly outnumbered and has to improvise his way through any given scenario, then the Cobras largely represent that bit in Rambo 4 where he jumps on that machine gun jeep and viscerally dismantles the driver.  

An exception to this is, as you might guess, what is considered to be one of the best fights across the entire series—the sniper battle with The End, and I think this largely comes down to the fact that, as evidenced by his being replaced by eight of the Ocelot unit should you manage to take him out earlier, his battle functions like one of those regular guard scenarios on steroids; the vast arena (or several arenas) in which you fight him, providing a delightful push and pull—the knowledge that you have no idea what lies beyond the safety of the jungle brush and that you could be being watched at all times, necessitating a careful, measured approach, countered by the fact that he might not even be in the area you’re very slowly making your way through.

Of course, at least on normal difficulty, there isn’t a whole lot to be lost by simply running through an area, taking the inevitable hit and simply looking for the lens flare to give his location away, but certainly moreso than any other Cobra, every potential strategy, every piece of equipment, every trap placed to cover your tracks, every parrot captured feels warranted. It’s all valid here, because for the most part you’re operating on exactly the same stealth principles that govern your movement through the regular game world.

And while he falls foul of the same narrative shortcomings of the other Cobras, largely amounting to little more than an old dude that comes and goes, the wealth of potential easter eggs and fun methods of taking him out at least bring him somewhat more in line with the metatextual qualities that made, say, Psycho Mantis so memorable.

And it’s particularly odd in this case because the shift between the Cobra Unit and the battles that follow it is so drastic it’s downright whiplash inducing. Not only is the whole sequence with Volgin and the Shagohod appropriately bombastic and momentous for what might be the most genuinely despicable villain in the series, but that final battle represents perhaps the pinnacle of that gameplay-story synthesis that the Cobras were so lacking.

First off, Volgin. It’s cool that even all these years later I’m not sure what is generally considered the “correct” way to take Volgin down, and yet whatever way I do always feels rewarding – usually amounting to some combination of chaff grenades, CQC and shooting him while he’s down; an underhanded strategy that nonetheless feels deserved for someone who so consistently treats everyone around him with an almost cartoonish level of sociopathy; a man who cares deeply about being perceived as the strongest, and this battle, with the added touch of an increasingly jaded Ocelot levelling the playing field for you somewhat, sees you throw him around like it was nothing.

It’s basically the Liquid fight in reverse, replete with bratty petulance, just with better combat mechanics – starting off with a hand-to-hand sequence and then evolving into an absolute barnburner of a chase and eventual confrontation. Eva’s inability to move the bike particularly fast to make the most of shooting out its treads aside, this is one that leans fully into the camp – as Eva and Snake finally embrace under the fireworks provided by Volgin’s rapidly exploding body. It’s Bond bordering on Austin Powers—it is beautiful.

But nothing compares to the fight that follows with Boss; an absolutely masterful display of mechanics and narrative intertwining in a manner I’m not sure has ever been topped in the series. Everything about it is so deliberately designed – the field of lilies lilting in the gentle breeze contributing to the overwhelming melancholy of this encounter (the flower serving as symbol of fertility and rebirth) as it provides tactical advantage for your camouflaged opponent.

The fact that her combat style is one of the game’s key mechanics—a style Naked Snake developed with her and that now you must best her at; one whose seemingly effortless but nonetheless overwhelming power in using an enemy’s weight and momentum against them, is matched only by the intensity of personal connection you share with her through that very style.

The Boss is mechanical storytelling at its very best – after the unfortunate fumbling of the Cobra unit, this is Kojima proving he has still very much got it. The fact that the gameplay is matched so closely with the story being told—this representing the peak of the student surpassing the master archetype—is what elevates The Boss far above even The End in my opinion. It’s the best, most direct, most convincing attempt the series has made, up to this point, in building a battle around out-stealthing one’s opponent; around the mechanics the series built its identity on, rather than simply straightahead action. It just manages to be the most narratively resonant battle at the same time.

Hell, the fact that she’s had to do almost this exact same thing before—taking out someone she loves for the sake of the mission, for the sake of her son (who was being held captive by the Philosophers)—as hinted at earlier, retroactively renders The Sorrow, with all his paranormal tomfoolery and nightmare murder corridor puzzles, by far the most narratively compelling of The Cobras at least. The Boss and her accompanying setup is all so good she makes other aspects of the game better.

You know, I tend to think that the deliberately experimental construction of 2 cements it as one of my all-time favourite games, but this recent playthrough of 3 really highlighted just how much I truly adore this story when it really gets going—its latter half moves at a staggering clip. Which I guess makes it unfortunate that only about half its bosses actually play into said story.

And when presented with that fork in the road—between utterly transcendent battles thanks to their narrative and thematic resonance, and mechanically flexible encounters  that nonetheless sacrifice a lot of that narrative identity, that humanity, in favour of what might appear as cool concepts—it becomes interesting, if depressing, to see how Metal Gear Solid as a series decides to go all in down that latter path from this point on; something we’ll see as we move onto one of the more divisive entries in the franchise.

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METAL GEAR SOLID 4 GUNS OF THE PATRIOTS

This is one I feel I need to preface once again by saying I am absolutely a defender of Metal Gear Solid 4. It’s a decidedly daft game in a lot of ways, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like it. Quite the opposite, I made a whole video talking about how one could read its depiction of a world overcome by dystopian decay could be read the same way Sons of Liberty is viewed as an oddly prophetic examination of what the internet would become. Let me be clear – I love a lot about Guns of the Patriots.

I just don’t think I’m saying anything that’s going to shake anyone to their core in stating that its bosses are almost universally lacklustre.

The problem here is that, when it comes to the bosses specifically, it just doesn’t seem like there’s all that much to talk about – with the Beauty and Beast Unit that form its central band of ruffians sitting at that unfortunate intersection of lacking the narrative heft found in prior titles, while also falling foul of the game’s more traditionally action-centric framework, resulting in most bosses here absent both personality as well as any real ingenuity in terms of how you take them down.

It's not even like there’s much ingenuity in design either, with half the unit more or less serving as a copy and paste job from another, better game, just without the careful pacing and narrative context that leant those prior encounters any weight. Instead, the appearance of Crying Wolf, and the sniper duel that accompanies it, in the exact same snowfield as your fight with Sniper Wolf all those years ago, manages to cheapen a sequence specifically designed to play on nostalgia.

Where once occurred one of the most harrowing moments of that first game, in which Snake conveys his admiration of a warrior drowning in her own blood before putting her out of her misery – the gunshot accompanied by the pained wails of her wolves – now lies a person we don’t know, having just crawled out of a weird robot and turned to stone after the camera leered at her and we shot her some more as she walked sultrily towards us for… some reason. I guess Kojima fancied the models or something. Oh and then Drebin tells us how traumatic this stranger’s past was via codec. Cool. Let’s move on. The Cobras had a stronger identity than this.

I guess the twist of the Screaming Mantis fight, where you need to shoot the doll controlling everyone’s nanomachines or whatever, is at least something resembling a twist on the formula seen in the rest of the fights; with Vamp at least you have to figure out the need to inject him with the syringe to disable his nanomachines. That said, there’s something about the move to this more standardised third person shooter control scheme - away from having to figure out what kind of clawlike grip you’d have to inhabit in order to perform some relatively simple task, and towards endless guns with endless ammo - that renders all these fights by comparison a little safe and relatively unexciting, even outside of their lack of any real context. It all just trying to find the most efficient means of firing at someone you likely don’t care about.

It's not that Guns of the Patriots is a game where flashy, over-the-top moments don’t occur in spades – I distinctly remember watching that footage of Raiden fighting the Geckos dozens of times back in school and downright salivating at what I was seeing. This was the wildest thing ever to me back then.

It's just that, outside of the REX vs RAY fight (one of the only truly mechanically distinct boss encounters across your playtime, and one whose bombast still largely holds up, albeit in a “kid smashing action figures together” kinda way), MGS4 is a game where it often seems like the really cool stuff is happening while Snake isn’t looking, while you’re not in control.

Again, I have beaten this game several times over the years, and it’s only when I made that last video on it back in 2019, reviewing footage of my captured playthrough that I realised, I had never actually seen the fight between Raiden and Vamp on top of REX in full before – I had only ever caught glimpses, because I was always too busy focusing on slowly shooting at these daft Geckos. It’s a neat camera trick for sure, but as with a lot about MGS4, it’s more interesting when you’re not playing.

And look, I know everyone always talks up the final, climactic battle between Ocelot and Snake as this massive, multi-tiered trip down memory lane as health bars, perspectives and soundtracks shift to emphasise just how deep, how long lasting this generational rivalry has been. This is it, this is what you’ve waited four games and an entire decade to do… and to me it has mostly the same mechanical problems of the Liquid fight – the same tantalising setup, where the villain’s plan has been thwarted and all that’s left is to fistfight to the death, mostly let down by the weediest of melee systems. I guess at least there’s not a time limit to deal with this go around.

So while I definitely have a soft spot for Guns of the Patriots, in terms of its boss design, it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t represent a major step back. Where Snake Eater made up for a rather limp cast upfront with some of the series’ most meaningful encounters in the back end, Metal Gear Solid 4’s bosses never reach anything close to that mechanical engagement nor, crucially, that level of humanity that has really come to define the best battles in the series.

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METAL GEAR SOLID PEACE WALKER

With Snake Eater, a large issue with around half the bosses was that they lacked any real discernible identity beyond their immediate job—to take you out in service of The Boss. In Guns of the Patriots, Kojima and team decided to double down on this approach, rather than focus on the truly transcendent, narratively resonant battles of Snake Eater’s latter half.

And so, as the humanity of these encounters seems to dwindle with each subsequent entry, it would of course make sense for a follow up to truly turn things around by… having you fight a bunch of vehicles. Near-identical mechs that are almost exclusively controlled by AI rather than a human. Right?

This, as we’ll come to see, is the case with perhaps the series’ definitive portable entry - 2010’s Peace Walker – and upon initial glance, despite the game being a standout for many fans, its boss roster is as disappointingly mundane as it sounds.

In a way I can see what the team might have been going for. If you view the Metal Gear (or Metal Gear-adjacent mech) battles as the climactic encounters in these games—the ones where the bad guy’s plan comes to fruition and you suddenly have to dismantle a gargantuan beast before you against all odds, then a whole game of that probably sounds pretty cool.

The battles increase in enormity from a lowly armoured vehicle through to these hulking machines of death; great fortresses that need to be physically traversed in some cases—representing perhaps the greatest chasm in the franchise between their enormity and your relative insignificance.

Indeed, it can be difficult to even know where to begin with some of these machines, and ostensibly there are a bunch of different means by which you could approach them—do you attempt to weaken them by taking out some of the weapons that adorn this vast chassis, or do you aim straight at the glowing weak spot, ensuring you endure the maximum barrage, but hopefully for a shorter time if you’re smart about it.

The problems, however, largely arise from the alterations made to the game’s larger design—namely its focus on collaboration. Beyond the fact that Peace Walker’s plot is not merely a solo sneaking mission, but rather a larger attempt to build an army, a nation of some kind—with all sorts of features by which you are not the sole operator in any given scenario—this kind of camaraderie was also intended to extend to other players in the real world. That is to say, while these bosses can very well be taken down solo, it rarely feels like that was the intended experience.

The issue mainly just comes down to how spongey these enemies are—while the scale may be similar in some cases, old school Metal Gear battles in which you identify a weak spot and quickly take it out these are not. Damage numbers fly out of these enemies as rapidly as you can pile round after round into them, but rarely do you get much of a feel for how much damage you’re actually doing.

Contrary to the game design’s emphasis on compact missions well-suited to pick-up-and-play portability, as per its original PSP release, as the game progresses, so too does the time investment required for these hulking behemoths. Seriously, you can be piling rockets into the AI pods for up to fifteen minutes in later encounters, and wondering when your barrage is going to be sufficient to take even one bar off of these seemingly endless health pools. Those fifteen minutes are rarely broken up by any kind of alternate phase either, like when Grey Fox destroys the radome or Volgin takes physical control of the Shagohod.

And so, playing solo, your experience is going to alternate between near-constant fire, broken up only by the frequent need to resupply—a potentially compelling experience as you flip between ever-dwindling resources on the fly and manage the time between recharging supply drops as best you can, but it’s an experience whose ever-so-slightly sluggish controls (another remnant of its PSP origins, where camera controls were limited to face buttons) can leave Snake feeling more than a little underequipped to bob and weave through the relentless onslaught of these comparatively nimble foes. Further, the sheer drawn out nature of these battles not only contributes to a creeping sense of monotony, but you perhaps start to wonder if you’re playing the game right, if this method of play is the intended one.

Because look, back in the day I played through Peace Walker with a friend accommodated by heavily emphasised network features, and believe me when I say in that instance, all talk of tactics went out of the window. In co-op, I remember absolutely demolishing these things in record time—the potential strategy of whether to take out the weapons or the weak spot first would simply be answered with “why not both?” I could be wrong on this, but I don’t remember the boss health or damage output scaling to match an increase in player force, turning these once monotonously protracted encounters into something potentially worse—downright trivial.

But the thing is, when it comes to what little strategy does exist here, it turns out you don’t want to be doing too much damage to the weapons in the first place. To do so, is to deny yourself resources, in what ends up becoming one of the cleverer narrative tricks the game pulls.

See, at the end of every encounter with these machines, you blow the lid of the AI pod controlling them and clamber in, so that you may disrupt its programming by removing modules. Importantly, these modules are themselves collectables. The more damage you do to the weapons, the less modules you’ll have available to you to pocket, which themselves contribute to what ends up becoming your own project – Metal Gear ZEKE.

You are incentivised to fight as cleanly as possible, so that you may be rewarded with a more advanced version of the very thing that has come to define villainy throughout this series – your very own nuclear-equipped walking battle tank. You fight hard for it, you grind for it, but that in itself doesn’t represent some noble act of heroism, worthy of reward.

That building a Metal Gear turns out to be the ultimate goal is a neat bait-and-switch in itself, but its revelations go far beyond that. See, while the game nominally ends after you take down Peace Walker, the true ending is locked behind the completion of that ZEKE, and the many, many missions you have to do in order to see it finished. After slogging to find an escaped Zadornov for the zillionth time, Paz reveals herself to be a double agent, hijacking your own mech and unveiling the actual climactic boss battle of the game – ZEKE itself.

It's a fight whose sting is sharpened by the realisation that, the more extensively you built up ZEKE, the more grinding you did for those AI modules and the optional parts you were able to graft onto this beast as a result, have now created a far more difficult fight for yourself. Even at its weakest ZEKE still represents ten gruelling minutes of dodging railgun fire and hoping your supply drops contain rations, as your health is unceremoniously stomped away – the kind of slog that will make you wish you hadn’t invested in all that extra armour or jetpacks currently making your job concretely harder.

As soon as Snake Eater revealed Big Boss to be the player character, talk had always turned to how and when such a charming, likeable protagonist in Naked Snake was going to turn into the moustache-twirling villain we were initially introduced to him as – what heinous act was he going to indulge in that would cement his legacy as one of evil.

What has become clear, especially in the wake of the disappointment surrounding future games in the series, is that this one, definitive moment was never going to come, and instead this ZEKE fight serves as something of a focal point, where you’re forced to reflect on all these little moments throughout the series that see a man gradually turned against a government, a country, an ideology he had previously fought so hard for – that while Big Boss’s actions may not be definitively evil, they’re hardly those you’d associate with a decent, upstanding moral figure.

And Peace Walker, with its reward system ultimately revolving around and incentivising the development of a devastating weapon of war – one that will eventually turn against you and you will have to destroy – manages to gamify that lurching realisation about Big Boss’ character in a way that lays waste to the typical criticism Kojima endures, that he just makes movies rather than games. Nah man, this is straight up ludonarrative at its purest – subversion of the rewards systems we’ve come to expect from this medium, in order to convey a character’s subtle downfall (as well as your own complicity in that fall from grace) in a manner that goes far deeper than just words.

And sure, the actual process of retrieving the AI pods begins to represent a frustratingly protracted exercise in itself, as you find yourself unable to exit even when you’ve picked up everything you can, requiring you to awkwardly wait out the clock, but this simple mechanic also represents further opportunity for character development.

Take the last battle with Peace Walker, where after spending upwards of fifteen minutes taking this thing down, you are tasked with surgically dismantling the closest thing that remains to your mentor—The Boss, the person upon whose character, whose principles this AI was based; both as a means of deterring nuclear threats, as well as provide answers to what happened at the end of Snake Eater; a clarity, a closure that’s as tantalising to Snake as it is to the AI’s creator, Strangelove.

And before that clarity is afforded to the people seeking it out, in order to stop Peace Walker from causing a nuclear strike, Snake must destroy this AI, piece by excruciating piece. The process is as languid as it ever has been, now requiring that every single module be removed over the course of several minutes, but such protraction is imbued with a real melancholy here, distinctly absent from prior encounters.

As butterflies inexplicably swarm around you, you’re treated to minutes of this facsimile of the Boss going from a regular cadence of speech, proclaiming the grand philosophies the character is known for, to reciting basic rhymes, to simply stating plain facts (such as the exact value of pi); decaying into an approximation of pi, before slumping into pained gasps of your name as you gradually remove what humanity exists here. Just as Snake was tasked with doing back in MGS3, as the Boss chose to tarnish her own legacy for the sake of the mission—a mission which left Snake jaded and bitter enough to believably turn against the world he had fought so hard to save. 

It's a moment dense with wonderful thematic meaning, and represents Snake at maybe his most nakedly emotional in the entire series—as a mix of repressed sorrow and fury erupt in a futile outburst, with Big Boss hammering against this wall of circuitry, desperate to find the closure he’ll never get, seeking a humanity that never really existed. 

And I guess that predicament sums up my issue with Peace Walker’s boss roster as a whole. For all that its bosses end up playing into some of the best gameplay narrative of potentially the entire franchise, nothing can disguise the fact that said gameplay amounts to piling bullet after bullet, missile after missile into similar looking, similarly functioning machines—leaving you grasping for the humanity, the character that made those prior enemies so deeply memorable. At the end of the day, it’s all just hunks of metal. But, ya know, at least you could definitively call these boss battles…

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METAL GEAR SOLID V THE PHANTOM PAIN

See, to even say that the last true entry in the series, Metal Gear Solid V, has bosses to speak of, is itself a divisive statement, because many fans would argue that this simply isn’t the case. With the exception of one encounter, those definitive moments where it’s just you going head-to-head against another enemy with a giant health bar in the top left of the screen are decidedly a thing of the past here. It’s interesting that what was once a key pillar of the series’ gameplay identity has seemingly been so stripped away, in what many would still confidently say is the best a Metal Gear game has ever actually played.

Those boss battles—those missions you select where the ultimate or even primary objective is to deal with some superpowered enemy in your path—are actually fairly plentiful. It’s just that MGSV is obviously a far more open game than before, and with that comes a desire to do away with the more segmented aspects of its world and game design—to more seamlessly integrate battles like this into the grander mechanical milieu.

They surprise you—they appear out of seemingly nowhere, and when a cutscene does accompany their arrival, shaky handheld-style camera work and minimal cuts heighten that feeling of unplanned unease. Those health bars do exist, it’s just that they have to be unearthed through the same means by which you mark any other enemy. They exist as part of this world, largely within the mechanical rules of this world, just like every other inhabitant of this world, even if said inhabitants do happen to be endless variations on the same parasite-ridden super-zombies completely devoid of personality.

And it’s that last part that proves to be the actual problem with MGSV’s boss design and where the series ended up in that regard. Because there’s a reason that this piece has, against all odds, seen me going back and picking up my Steam Deck almost every day to get a quick hit of a game I exhaustedly said I was done with long ago—because, separate from that issue, separate from any need for context or personality or explanation for these fights, the moment-to-moment action of these encounters do have the potential to be downright thrilling.

Your bumping into Quiet, for example, is, mechanically, one of the better sniper battles in the series. Her appearance, communicated seamlessly via regular in-game HUD elements, jolts you to attention with a mission-within-a-mission whose scope (pardon the pun) you likely aren’t prepared for at that point in the game, capturing an appropriate level of surprise for such a duel. The mechanical possibilities are as vast as the arena it takes place in; itself delightfully vertical and littered with rubble providing as much tactical advantage to your opponent as it does you—feeling very similar to The End in that way where you start suspecting every errant rock or pebble sticking out of the ground.

I can honestly say that there are few emergent storytelling moments in games that stick out as vividly in my mind as coming up against Quiet for the first time, and lacking the tranq sniper rifle with which to non-lethally take her down. I didn’t want to simply bypass this opportunity to find out more about this character, though, so rather than escaping I found myself hunkering down, utilising my already comically underpowered tranq pistol and accounting for wild bullet drop as I no-scoped her across this entire area, in order that I could whittle her health down for far too long.

It's not a feat I’ve ever bothered to replicate, in part thanks to the realisation that, in the grand scheme of things, such effort is for naught—whether you use a tranq pistol or send a bunch of rockets her way, the outcome of the encounter is the same. It certainly takes the wind out of those player-driven narrative sails a bit, as your best-laid plans boil down to a canned “shoot her or don’t” binary choice at the end of the day. But the process of getting to that point—of testing the limits of the game’s systems, and having the game accommodate that scrutiny—for me represents the open world philosophy of the Phantom Pain at its purest, at its best.

And when it comes to what you might call boss battles in MGS V as a whole, this notion of unceremoniously dropping you into situations you aren’t prepared for (and in some cases have little to no means of effectively dealing with at the point at which you encounter them), actually ends up becoming something of a running theme. In fact I’d go as far as to say there are fewer battles where defeating enemies is an outright requirement, than there are those that encourage you to simply run away.

In a way, this approach could actually be seen as admirable—if you view boss battles as a test of the skills players will have hopefully learned by that point, a kind of concentrated, heightened blast of the key mechanics of any given game, then there is perhaps something to be said for The Phantom Pain’s encounters largely going back to the series’ stealth roots, while embracing its open world setting and design that encourages improvisation—giving you control of these ridiculously asymmetrical encounters and saying “go nuts.”

That level of control placed in your hands against what often feel like insurmountable odds at first—enemies with power and focus that far outweighs your own, as your plans are thrown into flailing disarray—is often as terrifying as it is freeing. Plus, it also has the added benefit of framing Snake as the fish out of water he decidedly is—staring these foes in the face and managing to utter nary a word, in a way that ends up becoming pretty thematically relevant given the game’s narrative manoeuvres later on.

It’s just that the game ends up leaning so heavily on this approach that it rarely feels like you’re ever actually making an impact against these enemy forces, let alone definitively overcoming them. Besides the constant reuse of the Skulls, I’m willing to bet part of the reason fan consensus is that the game’s boss roster is lacking, is down to the fact that so few of these encounters feel like those momentous, climactic one-on-one duels of prior titles. In a way they lean so hard into the supernatural and hallucinatory that it’s hard to tell if any of it is actually real—it just doesn’t feel like said supernatural alienation is anywhere near as deliberate as it is in MGS2.

Each boss presents such overwhelming odds, seemingly so easily overpowering Snake, that rather than simply saying “you overcame this enemy by besting them in combat,” the writers need to grasp more than ever towards workarounds pushing the limits of contrivance to new levels, almost every time you manage to escape. So many enemies in this world are basically unkillable, so they all just have to arbitrarily… stop at some point.

There’s not really much of a reason or justification as to why the Skulls or the Man on Fire simply stop pursuing you—they can endlessly come back, they can easily outpace you. They just… give up after a while. When you do decide to stand your ground and drain the Skulls’ health, they get up and jump away for… some reason.

Even when Vamp’s nanomachines kept him alive, you could just disable his nanomachines. Fortune’s bullet-dodging abilities stopped the moment its associated Patriot-controlled technology was disabled (well… kinda). As daft as the internal logic might have been, there was indeed an internal logic running underneath all of this. It was at least somewhat consistent in its establishment of an enemy, with a weakness that would prove key to said enemy’s narrative arc.

In Metal Gear Solid V, the enemies just sort of… exist, until they don’t anymore, and for a game whose narrative, whose very structure serves to put the player at the centre of everything, to foreground their decisions in-mission as the real story of the game, to celebrate the achievements of its audience as the true heroes all this time, it feels like you play very little role in that process.

In this sense, the bosses of The Phantom Pain act as a microcosm of the game’s general narrative failings. In a vacuum, the gameplay of these fights has never been better – Snake is more responsive, he’s snappier to control, and the potential scope of battles, the capabilities of your enemies and the vastness of the arenas on which you fight them is greatly increased to boot, bringing as much tension to proceedings as freedom. But it opens itself up to this extent at the cost of all the careful pacing and context that made those encounters feel so resonant.

When you unplugged your controller and put it in the second port in the first game, you felt like you’d really gotten one over on this once all-powerful psychic – brought low by something so functionally simple, yet so wild at that time in the context of game design. It contributed to that character’s identity, that they could only be taken down by messing with the very console itself.

The Skulls, by comparison, are just some soldiers. Quiet is just a sniper. It’s the same issue as The Cobras or the Beauty and Beast Unit, just minus the over-the-top mannerisms and designs of the former, nor at least the surface level reverence for what came before found in the latter. These bosses are just… nothing. As nondescript as any of the countless side ops you end up mindlessly trudging through.

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And I guess at the end of the day, that’s just it. With the previews for Metal Gear Delta hitting recently at the time of writing (and who knows, there’s still time for that to become an absolute mess, or the best thing ever!), there’s been some talk of how a series that for so long has been associated with a lingering dread, thanks to how it has consistently been handled by Konami for the last decade, is finally starting to give people hope again. The people working on it are able to talk about their efforts on previous games, their reverence for Kojima, etc. It feels like there are at least some strides being made to mend the issues of the past, to get these older games into the hands of those who might have missed them back in the day, and who knows—maybe even explore a potential future for a series that for so long felt like such a dead end.

Indeed, the future of Metal Gear Solid feels like a very odd thing to envision, but were it to materialise, I think it’s interesting to remember that mechanical fidelity alone does not a compelling Metal Gear make. As we’ve been able to see from analysing the boss rosters here, the most memorable games, the moments in this series that are truly etched into the hearts and minds of so many adoring fans, are the ones that can instead maintain the strongest relationship between gameplay and story—narrative giving much context to mechanics, and vice versa.

For all that Metal Gear Solid has been derided over the years, even by those who enjoy the series, as one you watch rather than play, looking at the bosses specifically provides the keenest examples of how that just isn’t true. Psycho Mantis forcing players to think outside the controller; Metal Gear RAY distorting your idea of how foes like this are meant to play out; The Boss turning one of the game’s defining mechanics into thematically dense, emotionally gut-wrenching catharsis.

It’s why I’ve actually been a little sceptical of Delta’s emphasis on transposing V’s mechanics onto Snake Eater—the fidelity of those mechanics is indeed polished to a mirror sheen, but they were also crafted for another game with its own story, and it says a lot that despite people often looking back on these games and decrying their perhaps off-standard control schemes as clunky, every one of these games has an incredibly distinct mechanical and systemic identity that I hope, in Delta’s case, is preserved.

You don’t garner the longevity that Metal Gear Solid has maintained through pretty cutscenes alone—it’s hard to think of a series that has given so much attention and care to its density of mechanics, where having your hands on a controller has been so crucial to its storytelling.

But we also need time with these characters; they need time outside of the one point where their health bars are on the screen, to form their own personalities separate from battle, that end up lending such emotional weight to that eventual confrontation—scenes that are often as bittersweet as they are cathartic.

If Metal Gear Solid was all monster-of-the-week cartoons characters for you to methodically work your way through, there is not a chance people would remember these bosses so fondly. What we see unfurl at the series’ best, then, is a cavalcade of convincingly, tragically broken individuals, all raging in their own ways against the systems of control that so thoroughly ground them down, from the moment they were born to the point at which they took up arms. As we can see, combat is often their only means of expression, of finding meaning in a world where every move they make seems to be part of some grand plan that they have no say in. In that sense, they often aren’t so different from Snake. That’s nuance. That’s villainy you can nonetheless still care about, relate to through mechanics. That’s personality.

As the series went on, and culminating with Metal Gear Solid V, the team honed in on some of the best feeling stealth action mechanics in games period, but as we can clearly see from looking at the bosses of these games throughout the decades, it ultimately means very little if the characters we go up against, for all their unhinged diatribes and ludicrous supernatural abilities, don’t read to us as emotionally complicated people; if they lack humanity.