Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is a good game. Yes, I’m aware that this is sacrilege of the highest order to a very large, very vocal number of gamers out there, but I enjoy this game and I’m not ashamed to admit it. It’s not as good as Metal Gear Solid, but it’s a lot better than Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
In fact, I enjoy Sons of Liberty so much that I’ve completed it at least half a dozen times. I’ve found every Easter Egg; I’ve broken the Geneva Convention so many times that I collected every dogtag on every difficulty - twice. Hell, I will even go so far as to say that Raiden is a good character.
I was 14 when I got my first copy of Sons of Liberty. At that point I hadn’t played the previous games. As a result, I didn’t fully understand the backlash and hatred that was aimed at Kojima for making people play his game as someone they didn’t like. In the 11-or-so years since finishing Sons of Liberty, Raiden - and my opinion of the game - have both come a long way.
The ending is still a load of bullshit though.
For those of you unfamiliar with the franchise, Metal Gear Solid centers around a super-soldier known only by his enigmatic codename, Solid Snake. Snake infiltrates a bunker deep in the frigid wastes of Alaska, and shoots a lot of people with the aid of Otacon - a programmer whom enters the game by pissing his pants.
There are three noteworthy characters in Metal Gear Solid: Revolver Ocelot, a revolver-twirling Russian who can magically ricochet bullets off walls to kill anyone anywhere like an aged character of X-Men; Grey Fox, a cyborg ninja who starts out as Snake’s antagonist but is really just a bad-ass that everyone loves by the end of the game; and Liquid Snake. Liquid, you may or may not be shocked to know, is Snake’s brother; for the sake of brevity, he’s a psychopath who steals a bipedal tank - simply because he’s a bit of an asshole. Liquid kills Grey Fox, Ocelot does something and loses an arm, and Snake kills Liquid before saving the day and escaping the facility. It’s all rather videogame-y, but is never less than compelling throughout.
While that is an incredibly brief summary of a very good game, we need it to set up the sequel. In Sons of Liberty, Liquid’s arm has been grafted onto Ocelot’s body, which somehow allows Liquid to take over Ocelot’s mind. We now have Liquid 2.0 as the main antagonist. Even worse, he’s now leading an army of Russians [Editor’s note: those god-damned Ruskies… oh wait, sorry, I forgot - this isn’t the ’80s anymore].
The game starts with Solid Snake walking along a bridge, smoking a cigarette. Snake, a burly manly-man, finishes his cigarette and throws the hood of his invisibility cloak over his head and starts sprinting. Running through the rain, Snake dives off the bridge and lands onto a tanker passing underneath. A perfect 10 out of 10 in manliness, Snake is the epitome of cool.
The first chapter of Sons of Liberty is spent searching the tanker for evidence of nuclear weapons, bipedal tanks, and anything else particularly naughty. You fight some Russians and find what you’re looking for. If you’ve finished the game before in a satisfactory manner, on your second run through it you even get to equip a cool bandanna which grants you infinite ammo. You’re partaking in tactical espionage, and Snake is almost - but not quite - a Gary Sue. He is, at the very least, an incredibly fun character to play as.
Here’s the kicker though, and something which made a lot of gamers incredibly angry with Hideo Kojima and the franchise as a whole: We finish the tanker and start the second part of the game. However, something is different. We’re no longer Snake. Instead, we’re a lithe, effeminate, long-silver-haired young man - Raiden. Instead of Snake’s combat roll, Raiden does cartwheels. Instead of being a burly, gravelly manly-man, Raiden is softly-spoken and not much older than a boy. Instead of the infinite ammo bandanna, Raiden gets three different-colored wigs. Fans everywhere flipped their shit.
Looking back, I can see why fans were upset by being blindsided. They didn’t ask for this. The trailers didn’t show Raiden or Big Shell (the location for Raiden’s story). People wanted a game where they could play as a character they were already enamored with - I get that. If I were to pick up the next Dead Space game and couldn’t play as Isaac Clarke, I wouldn’t be impressed. I would play it, but I would prefer to play as the character I know and love.
This, however, isn’t the biggest issue that gamers had with Sons of Liberty. It isn’t so much an issue with the fact that it’s not Snake you play as, as it is an issue that it’s Raiden. As a 14 year old boy at an all boys school, the biggest issue that I recall anyone having with Raiden is that he is quite possibly gay.
Let’s make one thing immediately clear: Raiden is not gay: and even if he was, why is that a problem? Raiden has a girlfriend named Rose - the person you call to save your game - and she is a pretty big part of the story. Raiden was raised a child soldier, and has a lot of deep-seated issues. He relies on Rose for moral support throughout the game, and if you listen to their conversations, you realize that she does, too. Raiden is very much a man in love.
A few games later in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, where Raiden takes over Grey Fox’s place as the franchise’s cyborg ninja, we learn that he even has kids with Rose and is in as happy a family as you can be when you’re a traveling mercenary. Raiden is not gay, and anyone who thinks he is gay clearly hasn’t played the game.
Oh, but he looks gay. What does that even mean? He doesn’t fit the usual stereotype of gaming protagonists having necks wider than their jaw? So fucking what? Does that diminish him as a character in any way? No - he has a solid back story, his character makes sense within the game universe; and while the cartwheel is pretty lame, there is nothing wrong with him as a character. I’ll admit that the hair is a terrible choice in any combat scenario - anyone could grab that. Even Clementine gets that in The Walking Dead; but as Kojima repeatedly shows, he doesn’t care about combat-effective apparel; just look at Quiet in Metal Gear Solid 5: that outfit is designed to sell figurines, nothing else. Likewise, Raiden’s claim that his hair is naturally silver is a load of bull. If his hair is white and Raiden is an albino, that would be one thing; but he isn’t.
In the years since, Raiden has grown as a character, and after playing Revengeance, nobody can accuse him of being anything less than an absolute bad-ass. This is a man who gets his arm cut off and grunts “not again,” before lunging forward to attack with his sword in his remaining hand. This is a man who, when he has no arms, uses his feet to hold his sword so he can keep on killing things.
In the years since, the gaming community has grown too, and thankfully, the community has matured. Only slightly, yes, but it is a step in the right direction. We would not see the same level of scorn from the gaming community if a game was released this year where the main male character is gay or effeminate, though there would undoubtedly be a vocal minority who would get up on their soap box and yell about how games are being taken from the underprivileged Caucasian heterosexual male.
When I look back at Sons of Liberty, I have mixed emotions. I prefer the bit as Snake, but I enjoy playing as Raiden. I love the tanker mission, but Big Shell is a boring location for a game, even if I love the characters it contains. While the game is very good, the ending is fucking atrocious.
As much as I genuinely love Sons of Liberty, I look back at this time of my life and I am genuinely saddened that my community failed like that. It was a time when a very close family member came out as being gay, and my community was up in arms over a character who wasn’t even gay because he had qualities which made him gay in the eyes of society. I feel horrible for anyone who is gay and has to live through that, especially if they were part of our community at the time. It is good to see that our community is finally growing up.
Games are for everyone. We are a community born of geeks and nerds. If you look back to the days when the first game developers grew up, they were undoubtedly the nerds and geeks that were social outcasts. Games can be about anything or anyone, but the one thing that games should always be is for everyone. The one reason I hold my head high as a gamer is that when our community wants to do good, we are the Adonis of the human race; let’s not deny anyone over their effeminate body and ‘girly’ hair again.
Thank you, Raiden, for helping our community grow up.
Nic Bunce
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