LOOK FOR THE BOMB BLAST SUIT TO BE INTO THE BARRIER. ......OVER
MGS4 COUNTDOWN - METAL GEAR 1

In case you haven't noticed, I'm not really a plot-player. I am a gigantic characterisation whore.

There isn't a lot of either plot or characterisation for me to talk about in this game.

So I decided to take a totally different tactic in this recap.



Snake didn't talk about himself much. Neither did Otacon. That was just the way it happened. They knew everything about each other that they needed to; why should they care about what kind of a child the other was, or what happened to them five or ten years before they met? Otacon knew that his own past wasn't something he liked to go into, and Snake's had left scars. Snake's history had done its best to tear him apart, and so Otacon barely ever felt curious. After all, they had each other now. What more could they want?

But then Snake had gone into that base. He'd evaded countless guards, fought off countless more, and defeated a repentant laser-toting ex-convict, a beautiful woman who could stick to walls and cried acid, and an ex-KGB agent with the ability to turn himself partially into sand; and it turned out that the leader of the cell, a transparent-fleshed man with the ability to hypnotise people by manipulating his own heartbeat, had been manipulating everything all along for some reason Snake nor Otacon really cared about. There'd been no Metal Gear. All there had been was a tape, in a locker, in a room. Dated. Betamax. The spine had been marked OUT HVN. And Snake had took it back.

“What made you pick this up?” Otacon had said, turning it over.

Snake had closed his eyes. “Jeanna's dying will. She told me that after her father had left, she lost the ability to see the world as it really was. She said that the tape had important data on it, and that watching it would give me that ability back. Then she crawled down from the ceiling and she said she'd never burn her face when she cried again, about five seconds after her heartbeat technically stopped. Then the vases of flowers around the room that she was obsessed with all wilted in an instant. A proper soldier's death.”

“Also, you don't see Betamax around much, do you?” Otacon pointed out.

“Makes me wonder why no-one tells me any of this before I shoot them in the face about fifteen times.”

“Even ten years ago they were rare. Not like MSXes. The retro scene really grabbed onto those.”


And then Otacon had played it.

Snake had blinked and shouted and demanded Otacon turned it off.

“It's a tape,” he said, “of Outer Heaven.”

“You mean your first mission for FOX-HOUND?”

“That's right.”

“The mission which...” Otacon swallowed, “which shaped you? Which made you the way you turned out?”

Snake averted his eyes.

“I saw some terrible things in Outer Heaven,” he finally said, sharply. “Things I don't want to see again.”

His eyes said, not with you around.

Otacon opened his mouth to protest, but sighed.

“I'm sorry. If it's that personal, I won't – I won't look at it.”

With a sigh, Snake looked up.

“Never mind,” he said. “I want to know what Pulsar was trying to hide. What Jeanna was trying to tell me. What Grain was guarding so fiercely. Why that guard told me to take it away before he was tempted to watch it again.”

---

"Alright," said Otacon, arranging himself.

"Alright?"

"Alright."

"Alright?"

Otacon sighed. Snake was a great friend, but he tended to get caught in infinite loops rather often.

"I'm going to assume," he started, tactfully, "that it's a really bad camera."

Snake frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Just..." Otacon took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt, irritably, in case it would improve the image. It didn't. "Everything looks hideously ugly, Snake."

Snake dropped his head. "All warfare was like that, in the day. Best way to kill a man was to jump on his head. Or eat him alive while high on a pill."

"I understand," said Otacon, who didn't.

--



"Big Boss," repeated Snake, sadly.

"Snake?"

"Yeah?"

"What happened to your nose?"

--

"Why do your eyes twitch wildly when you talk?"

"...I was young."

"Is that why you just killed a guy by punching him three times?"

"...I killed him."

"With your fists! And you didn't even move, you just punched with one hand in a dorky kind of way and he jiggled up and down and then disappeared! That's amazing. I never knew you - you were capable of that."

"I..."

"You really need to work out harder, Snake. Get back into that kind of shape."

"Am I going to have to listen to this all the way through this video?"

--



"That first part sounds kind of painful. Your CO shouldn't be asking you to do things like that."

"Aren't you going to take this seriously?"

"Snake, did Big Boss have a speech impediment?"

"...Everyone talked like that in 1995."

"No. No, we didn't. I clearly heard him say 'destoroy'. That's not a word."

"I think he was kind of tired. Talked like that a lot."

--



"That truck's so much bigger on the inside, isn't it, Snake?"

"I heard it was the same model Big Boss took with him to South America..."

"How did you fire that?"

"Fire what?"

"That giant handgun. I'm assuming you procured it, right? Did you wrap your arms around the grip? The recoil alone would - "

Snake's eyes filled with fire, and steel, and other scary things.

"Are you starting," he began, "to understand why Outer Heaven did what it did to me?"

Otacon didn't. "What?"

"Once," Snake said, "I entered a room. Must have been a guard house...something like that. On the corner there was a desk, and on that desk, there was a Ration, wider than my shoulders. I touched it and it went into my inventory, just like that."

"Normal size?"

"The same happened with all the weapons and equipment on the base." He paused. "Well, we called it 'equipments' in those days."

"Snake..."

"I took the Ration. I went to the door. I turned round. And it was there."

"It came back?"

Snake gave Otacon a desperate, haunted look.

"Outer Heaven...wasn't like the world. It wasn't like the real world. Things happened there."

"Things happen here."

"Things." He swallowed. "I don't know if I want you to keep watching."

--

"First," Snake said, grimly, "there was Big Boss."



Otacon squinted at the bottom corner. "You're already wearing a gas mask."

"Yeah," Snake said. "That's right. He knew where I was, all the time, but yet he didn't know what I was doing."

"Why didn't you tell him?"

"I never talked to people back then."

"Not even that thing you do where you repeat what someone else is - "

Snake shook his head. "Never. Later, I found out that Big Boss had been sending me in to spark an international war. I still don't know why. Maybe, some day - " he paused - "maybe in six days, I'll find out."

"I notice the radio doesn't save numbers you call."

"I have a good memory."

"You mean you were writing all the numbers down in the real world, weren't you?"

"Shut up, Otacon."

--

"The base," Snake continued, "was like a maze. And in each room, there were things I couldn't begin to comprehend..."

"Like what?"

"Those."

Otacon watched the monitor. Every six seconds a loud clink would sound as the giant roller struck the wall. It was thicker than a man was tall, and filled the room from either end. If it wasn't for the alcoves built into it, there'd be no way across.

"It doesn't seem to be moving on any mechanism," Otacon pointed out. "It's moving completely under its own steam..."

"It never stopped," Snake said. "I waited, but it didn't."

"That's impossible."

"I know it's impossible," Snake said. "Outer Heaven was like that."

"It's like..." Otacon winced, "like Silent Hill. Only even browner."

"Colours haven't changed. They stay the same in war."

--

"I went to rescue Gray Fox," Snake said. "I was captured."

"Did they take your clothes?"

"No."

"Were you tortured?"

"No."

"Then - "

"They holed me up in a cell, and Big Boss told me to check the wall."

"And then what happened?"

The greenish mass that Otacon had learned was Solid Snake headed towards the wall, where he punched one handedly with a blurry fist. Cronk. Cronk. Croink. BOIYOIYOIYOIIIING. Unmoved, Snake punched with just the same intensity and result, until a perfectly square-edged hole split open in the wall.

"Physics didn't work," Snake said. "Nothing worked."

"Maybe," Otacon attempted to console him, "you imagined the whole thing?"

"We're watching a tape. This happened."

"I don't know. I've never heard most of this mentioned. It's like people have forgotten it, or are trying to ignore it, or something."

"I think that later reality erases the past, Otacon."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Snake sighed. "I'm starting to understand what they meant when they mentioned the tape. This is who I used to be. And yet I forgot all this. For drama. For cinema. I'll tell you one thing Outer Heaven did which nothing else ever did. When people died, that was it. They didn't stay alive to taunt you before they died. They didn't even repent. There was nothing human about it. We didn't pretend it was some gentlemanly sport. It was just killing."

"Just killing..."

"Outer Heaven ushered in a whole new way of waging war. Before this, wars were fought with bullets, and bullets alone. Outer Heaven changed everything. It invented a new genre of combat. You have to understand."

Snake had an expression like he was trying to justify the validity of any of this.

"You're starting to think this was all too...stupid to scar you," Otacon guessed.

"What makes you think that?"

"Well, it does all look kind of dorky."

--



"I don't remember Gray Fox being black."

"He was young. We hadn't come into our true selves yet."

--



"Hey! You talked!"

--



"Otacon, why are you laughing?"

"I'm trying to imagine you saying that in your voice now. I just can't."