"I'm just an old killer...hired to do some wet work."

Inevitable that the game was polarising, it is divisive for the same reasons as MGS3 being a success: the games exist as reactions to one another. If MGS3 capitalises on James Bond pastiche and the thrill of the stealth, MGS4 is a tired old man existing in a world where the iconography prior is reduced to nothing. It is clearly such a late-period film the same way Scorsese operates in The Irishman or Eastwood's reflections in Unforgiven only without an absolutely condemnation of its protagonist. An immensely sad (yet ultimately hopeful) work about a bunch of old western men attempting to find a home and purpose in a world which is not only moving past them but ultimately also shedding the skin of valor and excitement of the nature of war.

Perhaps it all clicked when as opposed to do the heavy stealth and strategy required for MGS3, I enter the field regurgitating the same series of actions with ease in order to profit and buy...more bullets. There is no more libidinal quality to violence, just scrapping by to pull myself to the next day.