inching that much closer to Death Stranding in its melding form to function...that through embracing a borderline passive, often frustratingly counterintuitive role, the player is taught patience, ingenuity, and strength of will...the game's design working its way backwards from the madness of gameified endless warfare set in the ambiguously coded middle eastern terrain to linear trench campaigning to idealized cold war stealth and back to the beginning in an interrogation of iconography and nostalgia cycles...the overarching theme is essentially a necessary repetition of what the first game did to a lesser extent: proposing a radical abandonment of prior systems of thought as the only means to truly better the world, that without dismantling to zero we are doomed to repeat the same patterns until they finally kill us...that melting iceberg replaced with an equally potent double-image of sun/yolk, that with every rebirth, every new attempt to get things right there is potential to break from set outcomes, that we have within us the will to withstand anything and everything, it's only a question of direction
everything about this gets better with every minute i sit thinking on it!! i.e. as much as this mirrors MGS1 it's much more like MGS2 in its sheer thematic complexity and MGS3 fluidity of purpose, that despite a similarly self-defeating linear drive to MGS2 (bolstered by both the game's actual incentive structures and generic gamer impulses instilled within me by years of FPS internalization) there is an immediacy to the game's aesthetic joys that feels more in line with MGS3...the combination of these modes gives me such a unique, deeply melancholic feeling throughout...the futility of action meets the joy of the present-tense, i can imagine my positive-nihilist phase self enjoying this even more, a philosophy culminating perfectly in the Old Man Fist Fight anti-climax, geniusly placed after all the in-universe tension has been resolved....it's that strength in its commitment to immediacy despite more futility than ever that places this as perhaps my favorite of the series, feels like Kojima et al have finally let themselves off the hook and it hurts so good!!
everything about this gets better with every minute i sit thinking on it!! i.e. as much as this mirrors MGS1 it's much more like MGS2 in its sheer thematic complexity and MGS3 fluidity of purpose, that despite a similarly self-defeating linear drive to MGS2 (bolstered by both the game's actual incentive structures and generic gamer impulses instilled within me by years of FPS internalization) there is an immediacy to the game's aesthetic joys that feels more in line with MGS3...the combination of these modes gives me such a unique, deeply melancholic feeling throughout...the futility of action meets the joy of the present-tense, i can imagine my positive-nihilist phase self enjoying this even more, a philosophy culminating perfectly in the Old Man Fist Fight anti-climax, geniusly placed after all the in-universe tension has been resolved....it's that strength in its commitment to immediacy despite more futility than ever that places this as perhaps my favorite of the series, feels like Kojima et al have finally let themselves off the hook and it hurts so good!!