A mildly interesting, though, ultimately flaccid entry for the larger Metal Gear Saga envisioned by Kojima. It’s got quite a lot going for it on the conceptual level; despite being just Snake Eater But For Babies, it makes some solid compromises to be a serviceable Metal Gear game on a portable console. The leaning towards motion comic styled cutscenes never felt like an obvious limitation of the hardware but a natural step to dive into. After all, Yoji Shinkawa has taken artistic inspiration from western comic book artists like Frank Miller and Jim Lee, explaining how reminiscent Metal Gear is to a comic book in the art department. I did like the idea Kojima had for wanting this game to be centered on co-op, or “friendship”, through the way every mission op to the mother base management feeds into this mechanically. However, if you don’t really have access to most of those features to engage with properly (like me!) then you’re left with a game whose limitations are pushed all the way to the forefront. I said this plays like Snake Eater But For Babies yet it only barely feels like that. Strip mining just about every interesting stealth combat mechanic that MGS3 introduced into the series and left with essentially just a jankier MGS4 but scaled down. The level design is the most linear out of all the games, offering some branching pathways to head to your next destination, but never making them feel like environments rich with stealth combat problem solving beyond the bare basics. Evading past enemies, or confronting them, never felt like a tense challenge to overcome because of how easy it was to just tranq-headshot them and send their bodies flying Fulton Recovery style. I’ve only ever faced real difficulty when fighting the bosses who all took way too long to beat, even trying to work with the grind set of the content, giving you an increased arsenal of weapons.

What carries Peacewalker beyond these set of problems is undeniably its story, which even then my praises are mostly super faint. It serves as a small epilogue following the events of Snake Eater that meditates on the impact left by the ending, the repercussions which paved the way for the rest of the Metal Gear Saga to mold itself into. Though I still sorta question, even finishing my playthrough here, whether it was necessary because Snake Eater’s ending was powerful for visually speaking a thousand words in how things will change. I’m not sure that it needed to be set flat on a table and ironed out to make the subtext digestible as literal text. Like, oh -- did The Boss actually do what she did for the absolute sake of her country, or was it yet another government cover-up to make the truth sound easier to swallow? Does any of it really matter since either way it showed the true worth of ideals, loyalty, and identity in the face of the world wanting to take that away from you? Well, to people like Big Boss and Dr. Strangelove it certainly did. And I’ll admit, this is an interesting story thread to dissect, especially with how it reinforces the recurring themes of the other MGS games regarding the blurred lines between artificial reality and the emotions you always carry. Where this all stumbles lies in its characters. Besides Big Boss, whose arc is actually more impressive when I think back on it, the cast is just paper thin and doesn’t play enough into the theming beyond characters having names related to “peace”. This is meant to move the Metal Gear Saga into a different direction with Ground Zero and Phantom Pain attempting to develop further into what Kojima laid out here, but I hope this ambition is paid off good enough because I wasn’t hugely impressed by this. And by now, the bar I raise for Kojima is pretty high because of how I was being constantly impressed by what he and his team can cook up to shake the medium.