At last! Just in time for no one caring: it's... the review!

I had originally planned a much more detailed review of this game, detailing every little problem I had with it, and then realized no one would care, least of all, me. The gist of why this game is intolerable is that it is an unabashedly self-indulgent effort from the game’s creators. No restraint was used at any point in its development. Someone needed to grab game creator, Hideo Kojima, by the shoulders, and politely yell, “Do you realize how mind-numbingly dull this game is?”

The game is fun. When you’re playing it. This is maybe about 5 hours of actual game. The rest is movie. And a lot of the movie is stupid. Some of it is cool, like some of the over-the-top action scenes. The rest is a laughable exercise in excess.

For instance, the writing. Convoluted plots, sprawling storylines, silly story and character arcs. The motives are poor and apparently boil down to bad guy loves war, good guy hates it. You can’t find this level of depth anywhere else! The use of metaphor is heavy-handed and makes little sense. A dying character likens death to petal falling from a rose (which is novel), and then we see actual footage of a rose losing a petal. I’m not sure if it’s still symbolism, if you describe something and then show it. I believe that’s just ham-handed. Another example: during the epilogue of the game, a character performs a 10 minute soliloquy on the word “zero” that only succeeded in driving away what little interest I had remaining concerning the games finale.

And let’s not forget the over-used plot device known as “nano-machines,” little man-made micro-organisms that have been put in everybody’s blood and that also enable you to write your way out of anything. Need a character to be able to switch his personality into another body? Nano-machines. How about a character dying of cancer from start to finish in 30 seconds flat? Nano-machines. And of course, the only way for a character to never die despite getting shot dead-center through the brain? I’m not going to type it again.

And then there's the humor. Look out hilarious Geico caveman commercials (and sitcom)! A new comedy sheriff is in town. The “best” jokes in the game involve a character shitting himself (admittedly always a crowd pleaser), making the controller vibrate (a trick used three games ago, with nothing added), and the funniest gag is when the game pretends that you’re going to have to switch discs half way through the game, except that you don’t have to because they fit the whole game on one Blu-Ray Disc! It’s storage medium capacity jokes, people! Does life get any better?!?

There’s so much self-referential garbage to the previous games that serves nothing else besides reminding the player that, “Oh yeah, that happened before neat.” No clever tie-ins. No satisfying answers to questions. Just old jokes and nano-machines. Thanks you, Mr. Kojima, for reminding that you made other Metal Gear Solid games. We had almost forgotten.

When you’re actually playing the game, it’s pretty fun and looks really good. No mind-blowing advancements in gameplay. It’s just a natural progression of what had come before it. And they removed stuff like having to set your own camouflage. It’s all automatic now. Like it should be. Dithering about with menus is boring.

One last note about gameplay... five of the last ten minutes of the game are spent mashing down on the PS3’s triangle button. And that’s it. Awesome. Revolutionary gameplay. Never before has a game maker made a player mash so furiously and for such a long period of time. The next generation is here.

And that’s about it. The game fails as a piece of entertainment. It does not blur the line between movie and game. It’s a handful of fun pieces of game interspersed with dozens of poorly paced cut scenes that can last as long as 45 minutes to an hour. That’s right. You stop playing for up to an hour at times. The blending of the two media, film and game, has become truly seamless.

And don’t tell me to skip the cut scenes. If they’re not meant to be watched that take them out. There have been games that have both story and game in them that don’t require such a painful amount of downtime. Bioshock, Mass Effect, and the Half-Life series to name a few. If they ever make another one of these Metal Gear Solid games, I will have finally learned my lesson and will not buy it. There are not enough hours in the day to watch god-awful movies.