-in the opening, we see running shoes and teddy bears kept alongside weapons on Snake and Otacon’s plane
-big lecture on PMCs. I think Snake speaks the truth when he says the PMCs are the same as the hired guns of yesterday. They’re more controlled and there’s more propaganda, but they’re no different to an Outer Heaven. That comparison is drawn directly later on in the same briefing
-“America has now turned war into an economic activity”
-OILIX is referenced with the “down-sloping oil economy”
-Liquid is preparing an insurrection to create a world where soldiers will always have a place. “Just stop Liquid’s insurrection.” We’re back to 10 years ago
-The world will let the world die to keep a sense of order in the economy.
-We actually get to meet Roy Campbell face to face. It puts this immediate intimacy in the work, and parallels meeting your radio crew at the start and end of MGS3. I wrote this not knowing what to write afterwards
-Snake doesn’t smoke anymore. His fire is put out. He’s literally just putting an unlit cigarette in his mouth and pretending it’s lit. “To let the world be.”
-“I’ll start my own fire”
-Snake is asked to do “one last job” for the third time, and I really have to question his motivation in this. He’s not doing this out of obligation, he has his own stake in everything, his own war he’s fighting.
-Lots of harrowing small details in the commercials. “Mexico’s new warlord elections”
-PMCs using buff guys and sexy women to advertise, and advertising at them through things like “Recruit Workout.” The advertising here is actually scarily like real life, though instead of horrifying PMCs controlling our lives, it’s McDonalds with CIA backing
-the first real shots of the game are a war torn region in an essentially unidentifiable part of the world. War has completely devastated this land and left it with nothing but war
-and the region is just labelled as the “Middle East”. Perhaps poking at people who don’t even know what nations get destabilized by our current wars, nations that are used as setdressing for war games, all boiled down to “Some region over there.”
-the iconic “War has Changed” speech is about the complete loss of identity. Your identity is your weapons, and your weapons are tied to your nanomachines. Nanomachines that control your genes, your emotions (perhaps your MEME), and keep you in your role (SCENE)
-“The age of deterrence has become the age of control.” A direct call out of the myth of nuclear deterrence / MAD. It just leads to smaller scale grudge matches until war becomes normal.
-The Gecko are these horrifying walking tanks that evoke this idea of a mixture between man and machine, with their fleshy thighs carrying a motif of REX.
-side note, the purpose of the brief gameplay segments in the proline is to get you used to the new controls. That’s why the first thing you do is crawl, followed by have a small open area to the AK, and then you get to actually do a minor bit of route planning.
-NO PLACE TO HIDE is an obvious allusion to the NO PLACE FOR HIDEO trailers. I’ll take the Gecko crushing that as the game saying there was a place for Hideo, he does cute things sometimes
-Old Snake is a fitting name, as the original Snake was a man from the 1960s, and his war continues into the new decade of the 2010s. An unending conflict
-Snake’s cigarette is lit by the conclusion of the prologue. His fire is back, but keep in mind- those things drain your health.
-The self referential imagery begins with the “Press X to Flashback”. The game wants to draw these direct comparisons, perhaps Snake has become disillusioned like Big Boss. Perhaps that’s why he wants to kill himself in the opening, he no longer has this love for life and heroism he had before
-“Liquid Sun”
-crawling under some rubble in the first gameplay section of Act 1, we seen an echo of MGSV’s hospital scene. “Please don’t shoot!” while the dying man reaches out towards you
-A little broadcast by Praying Mantis basically advertising the people living here to use their services, like it’s a cleaning service
-The MK II isn’t a weapon, it’s a support unit. Based off a machine made solely for war, Otacon creates something to help people
-Snake emulates Big Boss directly with the Solid Eye
-I’m not sure what to make of Drebin this early on. He is used to sort of tease Snake with the “Older generation” remark, and he seems to equate gun laundering to literal vending machines. Maybe I’ll have more when he gets more involved in the game
-They use suppressor nanomachines to suppress their nanomachines. Metal Gear has always been a series keen to looking at “Man and Machine” and “Man vs The Machine”, but the PMC soldiers really are “Machine Men”
-“The line between civilian and soldier gets real blurry”
-“We’re all gonna be fighting proxy wars”
-Even Otacon is defending war, as it has become integral to society to function. If war disappeared over night, what would happen to the world? No longer is war a threat to the world, but its own non existence is a threat to the world.
-Johnny appears to be getting compared to Solid Snake, with the direct comparison between his barrel and Snake’s box (never mind Meryl’s later infatuation with him)
-“First hounds, now rats.” On the world stage, militaries of governments have been forced to sleuth around in the shadows, compared to the bombastic forces of the Cobras or the Genome Army
-Meryl is like a representative of someone who misunderstands Snake’s journey. She joined the military because of him, and then wondered why he went away, like a meta commentary on people who see MGS as purely “tacticool”, or how Metal Gear itself can be seen as the same as other jingoistic “war games” by an unengaged player
-Meryl accepts constant watch by an all seeing AI in return for a “easier” life (that she shouldn’t be living) and insurance against the PMCs. It’s like a new form of deterrence, sacrifice your freedoms for a hollow safety from the thing created by the AI watching them
-Sons of the Patriots, Sons of the Boss, Sons of Big Boss. The parallels here are already cropping up.
-The Gekko have their feminine legs (don’t laugh) and the Frogs have their feet confined like they’re in high heels, in addition to the feminine screams. The obvious allusion here is the masculine (war) crushing the feminine (as Meryl surmises at the end, she just wants a big wedding)
-“Freed of the shackles of fate” Ocelot is likely implying here the incestuous nature of the series, how he won’t repeat the script that’s been laid out for him several times now
-“If you won’t be a prisoner to fate, then go, fulfill your destiny.” It’s an awkward TL, and it would be more accurately translated as “The only way to change your fate is to go forth and meet it.” Meeting your fate, like how we are forced to contrast the events of this game directly with prior ones, instead of just mere allusions that only we the audience would fully recognize.
