-Part 6-Well, I ended up playing a bit more of the game than I intended to without doing any writing. After the Mantis fight, I said, “Ok, that was kind of a brief chunk of the story all things considered, so I’ll just play a little bit more.” Things ended up being quite a wild ride after that! Basically I’m saying this is gonna be a long one, folks, so I’ll just tackle one thing at a time.
MerylIt did take me some backtracking and running around, but I eventually found Meryl. Unfortunately I didn’t know it was
her I’d found, rather I thought I’d just found myself a guard that would be easy to eliminate and… yeah, well, at least you’re given a game over screen very quickly after making that mistake. The second time around, I was able to recognize the visual and audio “tells” indicating which of the guards is actually Meryl, apparently I had been too quick for any of that to even happen the first time around.
Following Meryl into the restroom (th-thanks for the hint, Otacon) triggers some rather lengthy dialog between her and Snake. I say that the dialog sequences in this game are “lengthy” because really, they
are for a video game, and there were probably a lot of people who were bored and frustrated by this stuff at the time. But y’know, I don’t mind, because it does give the game a unique feel. I’ve been skeptical for a long time about the idea of games as “cinematic experiences”, because there
are a lot of games, especially these days, that use lengthy cutscenes to compensate for barebones gameplay. This game, though, is very fleshed out in terms of both its interactive and non-interactive narrative. And really, it’s just a pleasant surprise when a game whose subtitle is “Tactical Espionage Action” puts this much effort into character development!
To speak about the character at hand, Meryl’s conflict is that she’s at a point where she’s doubting the legitimacy of her own desire to prove herself. For years she’s been eager to see real combat and validate the near-lifetime she’s spent in training. Very quickly after getting into the current situation, though, it becomes apparent that she was not psychologically prepared for the realities of battle. It’s a common enough trope, the soldier who realizes too late that war is not glorious, but it works well for her interactions with Snake because
he’s been living with that understanding for years. Snake confirms Meryl’s doubts with such utter cynicism that it practically forces her back into being the optimist of the two, ultimately redoubling her resolve to see this mission through because it’s the right thing to do, even if she is setting aside her idealistic notions about becoming a brave and noble warrior.
MantisMeryl leads the way to the commander’s office, thinking that they’ll find information on how to get to the next building. Right before we enter the office, she suddenly gets a really splittin’ headache, and passes out. When she comes to like five seconds later she moves and sounds super weird, and um, yeah it’s a little implausible to think that
anyone wouldn’t find this suspicious, especially “I don’t trust nobody” Snake. Regardless, we enter the office together, and it’s only a few too-quiet moments before Meryl truly gets weird. She tries to lower Snake’s guard with the least plausible sexual advances ever, and it thus takes all of two seconds before it’s revealed that Psycho Mantis is controlling her. Mantis then takes the more practical approach of having Meryl point her gun at Snake. This time around I succeeded in not completely murdering her, as I did remember that I had plenty of stun grenades that I hadn’t had a chance to use yet (I mean, the common guards really aren’t a problem to just avoid!).
Psycho Mantis then reveals himself, and gives, as I’d expected, the most unique bit of dialog in the game thus far. There had been a couple very minor instances of fourth-wall-breakage earlier on, but Mantis cranks that to 11. After talking for a bit about Snake himself, Mantis goes into stuff like instructing me to put the controller on the floor so he can move it with his mind (did this like, use the rumble feature or something? Did PSX controllers even have rumble at this point??), or telling me that I’d saved the game frequently (of course I did!)
Then we get to the actual fight with him. Mantis’ attacks were not hard to dodge - almost all of the objects he levitates around the room can be avoided completely just by going prone - but it was also impossible to damage him because of his “mind-reading”. This one was puzzling for sure, as I tried every single one of my items with no success. After several minutes of this and a couple of deaths and restarts, I got a call from Colonel Campbell, who told me simply “Plug your controller into port 2!” I really had mixed feelings on this. I do honestly like how casual the game is about breaking the fourth wall. It’s fun and inventive without being overly hammy, as is the entire idea of asking the player to do something really different with their game console. However, unlike other puzzles like the infrared & cigarettes, this one was not intuitive at all. There was no way I was going to think to do that until the game explicitly told me. Thus, it didn’t have a chance to be an “ah-hah!” moment of cleverness on my part, it was just “ok, got it, that is the thing that I do”. And of course, after switching the controller to make Mantis vulnerable, the fight was not at all difficult - though it didn’t really need to be, as it was more about the left-field concept.
Oh, also I had to trip Meryl a couple more times. She came out of it ok.
After defeating Mantis, he used his bleeding-out time to have a big chat with Snake and Meryl. It’s pretty classic storytelling to have at least one of the villains repent on their deathbed, and I think it worked well here. We learn about Mantis’ background, how and why mind-reading drove him insane, and what he sees ahead for Snake and Meryl. The long-term predictions are quite vague, but the short-term predictions about how they’re gonna get to the Metal Gear are helpful.
The CaveUnfortunately I did not pull off a “no dog violence” run. I definitely had to shoot some dogs. Well, maybe definitely, really “had to” is a strong term, but I made it past those dogs in the way that seemed best at the time. Sorry, dogs.
Sniper WolfWith the next building (starting to forget which building it actually is) in sight, Meryl is suddenly shot down by Sniper Wolf. She’s not dead, but will be before long if Snake can’t help her. The only way to do so is to backtrack a bit to find a sniper rifle, and by a bit I mean a looong way, all the way back to the 2nd basement of the tank hangar, i.e. one of the very first locations we ever visited. Dang, I shoulda remembered there was a level 5 security door down there! The game has felt really well-paced up to this point, but this segment kinda botches that, as not only is it just plain tedious to fetch an item from such an early area, it also feels silly from a story perspective that Meryl is left laying there with bullets in her legs for that entire time.
Once I retrieved the sniper rifle and came back, fighting Sniper Wolf was not very tough. I mean, I do have
some experience with this sorta thing, but I think she was maybe meant to be easy to beat becauuuse...
Gettin’ CapturedIt turns out Sniper Wolf was only pretending to have been defeated. I mean, that does seem a little silly considering I shot her like half a dozen times, but on the other hand I know that whatever they put in the rations around here can really keep a person going. Her and a bunch of guards ambush Snake and, a few moments of predictably suggestive dialog later, he’s knocked out and dragged inside.
So I think this is the part where the game really gets weird. Well, I may want to reserve the right to say that again later, but I mean. Snake wakes up strapped to a table, with a number of badguys present, including Liquid Snake. Though this is our first time meeting Liquid, he doesn’t share a lot of information, aside from confirming his intentions to go forward with the nuclear attack, and casually referring to Solid Snake as his brother. Did… did we know that already? I forget if we knew that already. Soon after that, we’re left alone with Ocelot, who is not at all happy with Snake after their last encounter. Ocelot indulges in a little game, where he repeatedly electro-zaps Snake in the hope of getting, well, nothing really except some acknowledgement of submission. What this means for me the player is that I get to mash a button really fast, and if I don’t do so quickly enough there are “no continues”. Does the game really, like, erase your save file or something if you lose here? If so, that is really intense, but I didn’t get the chance to find out because I guess I’m really good at games today, and this event tested
skills that Nintendo taught me long ago.
Afterward, Snake is thrown in a jail cell, and there’s not a lot to do besides talk to people on the Codec. We discuss Meryl’s status (not great, though alive) with Campbell, casually chat with Naomi about her backstory, and inquire ever-so-delicately about the lingering question of why Liquid Snake wants Big Boss’s remains, which makes both Campbell and Naomi suddenly very uncommunicative. I mean, it’s a DNA thing, right? That’s the only reason you’d want a dead body… except, uhh, we did kinda learn earlier that dead bodies can be revived in this universe, so. We’ll just cross that bridge when we come to it, though! Hey wait Roy, Naomi, you didn’t tell me how to get out of this cell...