Metal Gear Solid 3 Δ is out this week. I don’t know why they decided to name it “Triangle”, and reviews say it runs like a trash sandwich on every platform, and also I still have a pretty good HD version of MGS3 within arm’s reach. So I’m not exactly in a hurry to snap this one up.
It’s possible, though, that a new generation of Metal Gear gamers is about to hit the internet in a big, gooey ball of confusion. In anticipation of the next wave of “Top Ten Metal Gear Plot Holes” style clickbait, I thought now would be an excellent time to revive a post from my old blog. I was a much bigger nerd then, and just in case you missed it, the first part of this sentence was a bald-faced lie.
So wait, [impossible thing]!?
When I first scraped these “unanswered” questions off the grimy surface of the internet, I wanted to approach them as though they were asked in good faith. Of course, the reality of the situation is that clickbait listicles are almost never written in good faith. They’re not there to honestly wonder about a piece of media, they’re there to inflame readers by making fun of confusing narratives.
A lot of the questions ended up being stuff like, are you telling me that Bumblebee Man can really spit hornets? And Quiet has to always be naked? And trained combat veterans think it’s nighttime because they heard an owl? And a gun can have infinite ammo? And angry ghosts and 6-year-old computer programmers and voodoo dolls and diaper monkey?
And, well, yes, that’s what I’m telling you. The reason these things happened is because those things happened. When you ask, “What’s the deal with diaper monkey?” what you really mean is, “lol diaper monkey is stupid.” You’re posing an opinion as a rhetorical question.
But no, really, why does Quiet have to be naked?
She breathes through her skin, and wearing clothes or being submerged in water causes her to suffocate.
Yeah, but see, that’s stupid!
Sure, but that doesn’t make it not the answer to the question.
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: the answers aren’t going to please everyone. There comes a point where a given person will find no possible answer satisfying, because there’s a disconnect with the source material as presented.
The biggest disconnect when it comes to Metal Gear is probably this: in the Metal Gear universe, magic is real. Sometimes the only answer to a burning question is, “Magic, full stop.” Mushrooms recharge batteries because magic. Infinite ammo bandana, because magic. Kuwabara kuwabara, because magic.
Sometimes the magic hides behind SCIENCE!. Vampire man because SCIENCE!, perfect stealth camo because SCIENCE!, flying rocket arm because SCIENCE!. But when you dig down and try to explain the science, eventually you hit magic.
If “a wizard did it” doesn’t sate your curiosity as to why there are insta-death hamsters and talking ghost arms in your sci-fi tactical espionage story, maybe it’s because some part of you just doesn’t want them there. That’s perfectly fine, but it also means you’re never going to find peace with the kind of fever dream the Metal Gear timeline can become.
Are nanomachines magic?
No, but kinda.
Nanomachines (or, in The Phantom Pain parlance, parasites) are not, in the “magic is real” sense outlined above, magic. They aren’t supernatural, and there is at least one person — Naomi Hunter — who knows exactly what they can do. Shortest explanation ever: they are cell-sized machines injected into the bloodstream which re-program the human body and make it act in ways it otherwise couldn’t.
In the narrative sense they are a kind of “plot magic”. They’re a catch-all explanation for any weird or nonsensical thing characters need to be able to do, which Kojima did not want to attribute to supernatural forces.
Do we have a baseline for real questions now?
Yes. Yes we do. Let’s start with an easy one.
Which games are canon?
The Metal Gear timeline consists of nine games, in this order:
- Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (1964)
- Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (1974)
- Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (1975)
- Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (1984)
- Metal Gear (1995)
- Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1999)
- Metal Gear Solid (2005)
- Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2007/2009)
- Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2014)
The other Metal Gear games are either alternate universes, unacknowledged offshoots, or both.
Some of the side games do enjoy a sort of quasi-canon status. Stuff like VR Missions, Portable Ops, and Metal Gear Rising don’t sit in the canon proper, but also don’t contradict anything if you want to include them.
How many Snakes are there?
Six. It’s a popular code name inside of FOXHOUND and its adjacent organizations.
Snake #1 is Naked Snake, the protagonist of Snake Eater and this newfangled Δ remake. This character eventually becomes known as Big Boss. You also play as Big Boss during the events of Peace Walker and Ground Zeroes. You kill him (but not quite all the way) at the end of Metal Gear 2 for the MSX.
Snake #2 is Venom Snake (also called “Punished Snake”). He is the protagonist of The Phantom Pain. For most of the game he believes he is Big Boss, but he’s actually one of Big Boss’s grunts altered with surgery and psychoactive drugs. You kill him at the end of the original Metal Gear for the MSX.
Snake #3 is Solid Snake, the protagonist of both MSX games, as well as Metal Gear Solid and part of Sons of Liberty. He returns in Guns of the Patriots as “Old Snake”. When people refer to the character “Snake”, this is usually who they’re referring to.
Snake #4 is Liquid Snake, the antagonist of Metal Gear Solid. He’s the one who attacks in a Hind-D and keeps shrieking out how it’s not over yet. He takes over Ocelot’s mind for a while during Sons of Liberty.
Snake #5 is Solidus Snake, the antatonist of Sons of Liberty. He’s the one with the mechanical octopus arms. He’s the third secret brother, designed to be a perfect clone of Big Boss.
Snake #6 is Raiden, the protagonist of most of Sons of Liberty. He is given the designation “Snake” upon joining FOXHOUND, but the Colonel quickly changes this to avoid confusion. (Which maybe didn’t work. And also, it wasn’t really the Colonel.)
The Snake you play as in Super Smash Bros. is an amalgamation of Solid Snake and Naked Snake. A Snake for all ages, if you will. As far as we know, there is no canonical evidence that Snake has ever punched Ganondorf in the nards.
Why does Naked Snake have a Raiden mask?
He doesn’t. He has an Ivan Raidenovich Raikov mask.
In a radio conversation about the mask, SIGINT explains he developed the eerily lifelike Raikov mask for an operation to infiltrate GRU. The operation was scrapped, but SIGINT was so impressed with his own work that he squirreled it onto Snake’s person before Operation: Snake Eater. You know, just in case he needed it.
There is no in-universe reason for Raikov and Raiden’s similarities. Sometimes people — even pale prettyboy people — look like one another.
Where was Gray Fox during The Phantom Pain?
This is the most common form of “unanswered” Metal Gear question. In a franchise featuring dozens of characters and spanning six console generations, some folks are unsatisfied to leave a favorite character unaccounted for. Gray Fox is the poster boy, but there are others: Ocelot during Peace Walker? Raiden during Metal Gear Solid? Colonel Campbell during Sons of Liberty? Dr. Madnar during, well, any of it?
The answer is always the same: it doesn’t matter. Wherever those characters were, and whatever they were doing, they weren’t integral to the current installment. They weren’t in those games because they weren’t in them.
Still, we can sometimes infer what a character was doing during the gaps in their timeline. We know Gray Fox kills Naomi Hunter’s parents at some point in the late ’70s or early ’80s while Big Boss is in a coma. Over a decade later he becomes a decorated member of FOXHOUND, gets punched to death by Snake in Zanzibar Land, then is revived as the Cyborg Ninja. In the intervening time, during the late ’80s and early ’90s, he was probably working with Big Boss.
What does Code Talker mean by “Eyes on Kazuhira”?
This is a particularly frustrating loose end, because it stinks of an abandoned plot thread, and reminds us that The Phantom Pain was woefully unfinished. Lacking some definitive answer, we can infer what Code Talker probably meant in the context of the rest of his parasite-stasis word salad.
Kaz Miller is, putting it delicately, not the most well-adjusted man on the oil rig. He has been viciously tortured, mind and body. He has been cruelly and — from his perspective, unnecessarily — manipulated by Cipher. After losing everything he ever built, he finds out his idol Big Boss abandoned him and pawned him off on a secret doppelganger.
Kaz doesn’t work with Venom Snake or Big Boss at any point after The Phantom Pain, and the break-up is not amicable. He chooses to support Solid Snake instead, and as of Metal Gear 2 is actively working against Big Boss’s interests. He is a bitter man, obsessed with revenge, who spends the entirety of The Phantom Pain railing against the other Diamond Dogs high-ups. Oh, and he extorts money to secretly invest in a hamburger restaurant.
So hey, keep your eyes on that Kazuhira Miller. He’s a loose cannon set to go off.
When did Big Boss become a villain?
This is one of the hottest Metal Gear questions out there, and one of the easiest to tackle, because the answer is “…seriously?” As in, “Weren’t you paying attention?”
The marketing blitz for The Phantom Pain led a lot of players to believe we would get a definitive, clear-cut moment where Big Boss stopped being a “good guy” and started being a “bad guy”. This ended up not happening, which should be not at all surprising to anyone who played the previous games. Depending on your perspective, Big Boss was never a “good guy” in the first place.
During his denouement in Guns of the Patriots, Big Boss says, “Ever since the day I killed The Boss… with my own hands… I was already dead.” If you need a singular moment in time where Big Boss lost his path, that was probably it.
In Peace Walker Big Boss does all the things that make him the villain of the MSX games: he builds a private army, steals resources, deploys child soldiers, seizes nuclear weapons, develops Metal Gear. Of course, we-the-player don’t recognize Big Boss as a “bad guy” in that game because the story is told from his perspective. When he’s up to all those same shenanigans in Zanzibar Land, and our controller is plugged into Solid Snake instead, things look very different to us.
The broadest explanation is that Metal Gear is not a story about “good guys” and “bad guys”. It is not Star Wars. With the possible exceptions of Colonel Volgin and Psycho Mantis, most every character in the saga has sympathetic motives. Even Ocelot, in his own crazy way.
How did Big Boss go back to the US? And why?
He didn’t. Venom Snake did, posing as Big Boss.
We don’t have a lot of data on the particulars, as the games only reference this in passing. The timeline roll from The Phantom Pain simply says “1995: While commanding special forces unit FOXHOUND from a position in the US military…” and glosses over the transition. I’m betting the answer is surprisingly boring, though. The US didn’t want Big Boss to leave in the first place, so when “he” offered to come back, they welcomed “him” back with open arms. From the perspective of the US military, Venom Snake functionally is Big Boss.
At no point during Peace Walker or The Phantom Pain does Big Boss or his doppelganger actively work against US interests. He stops the maniacal plan of a rogue CIA chief, saving America from a huge headache. During that mission he speaks directly to agents at NORAD, and those Americans who know him personally have great veneration for him. Absent any evidence of MSF or Diamond Dogs openly declaring war against the US or one of its allies, it’s reasonable to conclude that Venom-as-Big-Boss just rolled up at some point in the early ’90s and said, “Hey guys, I got all that PMC stuff out of my system, I’m ready to come home and work for Uncle Sam again.”
As for why, well, one of the most useful places you can be if you’re setting up a rogue military country like Outer Heaven or Zanzibar Land would be amidst America’s top brass. Indeed, the big twist of the original Metal Gear is that “Big Boss” tried to sabotage the mission by sending an unproven soldier on what was supposed to be a suicide mission.
Unfortunately that soldier was Solid Snake and things did not end well for either Big Boss.
Where was Solid Snake raised?
The Les Enfants Terribles program was masterminded by Cipher and The Patriots, but was officially developed by the US government. Eli (Liquid Snake) was sent to the UK and eventually escaped. We’re never explicitly told what happened to David (Solid Snake), except that by 1991 he was “sent to the battlefield”. We do know that Snake was a Green Beret and later a member of FOXHOUND, both of which are American military organizations.
All signs point to Liquid’s infodump at the end of Metal Gear Solid being accurate: the US military kept a watchful eye on Solid Snake, grooming him to eventually become the next Big Boss.
What ever happened with OILIX?
Nothing. For some reason, Dr. Marv’s research was never implemented, and his work was never duplicated after he died.
There are numerous possible explanations. Maybe the data cartridge recovered at the end of Metal Gear 2 was corrupted by chocolate or hamster droppings. Maybe it was stolen by Russian double agents or supressed by The Patriots. Maybe OILIX was flawed somehow, and it was just impossible to implement. Maybe it got eaten by Y2k.
At some point in the five years between Metal Gear 2 and Metal Gear Solid the oil crisis was resolved to such satisfaction that OILIX became unnecessary.
Is Dr. Clark male or female?
Female. Dr. Clark is Para-medic.
There is a lot of in-universe misinformation surrounding Dr. Clark. There are conflicting reports as to her identity in the ’90s because she is a Patriots founding member doing cutting edge (and highly illegal) research involving cloning, cybernetics, and just a smidge of human torture. People who have not met her personally, such as Naomi Hunter, assume Dr. Clark is a man because most mad scientists turn out to be men. The people who have met her personally were probably all murdered by the Cyborg Ninja.
Which Metal Gear Solid ending is canon?
Whichever one you want. The two endings exist in a kind of continuity superposition, and the rest of the timeline works whether Snake escapes with Meryl or Otacon. Whoever he doesn’t rescue somehow miraculously survives. If there’s one thing Metal Gear is good at, it’s having characters miraculously survive offscreen.
Either way, Snake and Meryl persue a brief romantic interlude, then go their separate ways. Meryl ends up working for the Army in Rat Patrol 01, Snake ends up founding Philanthropy with Otacon, and he has both the stealth camo and infinite ammo bandana as of Sons of Liberty. Lucky bastard.
What does La-li-lu-le-lo mean?
The La-li-lu-le-lo are The Patriots. Specifically, it’s the string of syllables second-level agents of The Patriots are programmed by nanomachines to hear and say instead of “The Patriots”.
It works a bit like content filters on websites. When an agent’s nanomachines detects the phrase “The Patriots” in reference to the secret shadowy organization nobody is supposed to know about, they covertly replace the words with “La-li-lu-le-lo” in the agent’s brain. Such second-level agents include Scott Dolph, Richard Ames, and Meryl Silverburgh; basically anyone The Patriots want to make use of without revealing themselves to.
It is a mystery how the nanomachines differentiate usage of their name from, say, the sportsball team.
Why is Solidus so much older than Liquid and Solid?
Solidus is actually younger by a couple of years.
All of Big Boss’s clones were genetically modified to age faster than normal humans. This is why Snake looks like a 70-year-old math teacher in Guns of the Patriots. Solidus must have been modified to age at an even more accelerated rate.
Why would The Patriots do this? Les Enfants Terribles was the final straw for Big Boss, and the moment he decided to break away from Cipher. Once this happened, Cipher must have been more desperate than ever for a Big Boss figurehead to his organization. When the perfect clone — Solidus — was implanted, he put a rush job on things. 25 years later Solidus looks like a 50-year-old man, and is put into place as POTUS.
Why does Raiden keep leaving Rose?
Sons of Liberty and Guns of the Patriots both end with Raiden reconnecting with his lady lover Rosemary, only to be back to his old emo-ninja’ing self in time for the next title. Leaving aside the joke answer of Rose being a horrible shrew nobody would want to stay married to, it turns out it’s pretty hard for a genetically-altered and deeply-traumatized homicidal supersoldier jacked up on nanomachines to stay settled. After a short time playing house Raiden feels drawn back to the battlefield, just like the countless legendary soldiers before him.
What happened to Naomi and Mei-Ling’s accents?
Canonically, these two characters have American accents.
Around the time of Sons of Liberty, a remake of the original Metal Gear Solid came out for Nintendo Gamecube called The Twin Snakes. The game had updated graphics, re-dubbed audio, and improved gameplay, but is considered non-canonical by later sequels. Whenever flashback footage of Metal Gear Solid is shown in later games, it is consistently pulled from the PS1 original, as though the whole Metal Gear universe used to be made of low-poly models.
The one exception is the voice acting. Metal Gear Solid has legendarily poor quality voice recordings, so when it came time to put various audio clips into Guns of the Patriots cutscenes, they were pulled from The Twin Snakes instead.
As for why the accents were changed for The Twin Snakes, that’s anyone’s guess.
How have The Patriots been dead for over 100 years?
They aren’t dead, at least, not all of them. As of the end of Sons of Liberty, when this twist is revealed, Patriots founders Ocelot and EVA are still alive and working. Big Boss and Cipher are biologically alive, but no longer active because of various Patriots machinations. And none of them are 100 years old.
Guns of the Patriots reveals that the identities Snake and Raiden pulled out of GW were bogus, because part of how Cipher hides The Patriots is with layers and layers of confusing misinformation. As it turns out, the information wasn’t really bogus so much as useless. The identities revealed to Snake were probably the members of the Wisemen’s Committee, the original alliance of American, Russian and Chinese contributors which amassed the Philosopher’s Legacy. This happened just after World War I… or about a hundred years before the events of Sons of Liberty. Historically interesting information, but totally unhelpful to Snake’s situation at the time.
Who is in charge of The Patriots? Why are they so corrupt?
As of Donald Anderson’s death in Metal Gear Solid, nobody.
Dr. Strangelove began development of The Patriots AI in the 1980s, but she died before its completion. Major Zero continued development on the AI in its imperfect state, but he wasn’t able to oversee it either, since Skull Face had poisoned him and he spent the next 30-ish years slowly losing his mind.
(As a quick refresher, Major Zero and Cipher are the same character. So are Donald Anderson and SIGINT.)
In one of the Zero tapes in The Phantom Pain, Zero mentions that Donald was running a lot of day-to-day tasks for him. This was probably fine until Ocelot tortured him to death in Shadow Moses. From that point on the AI was left spinning without supervision, and over the decades, random mutations in the AI’s subroutines had a corrupting influence. The AI organized the S3 plan in Sons of Liberty and eventually invented the War Economy in Guns of the Patriots.
What is the S3 Plan? And what the hell happens at the end of Sons of Liberty?
The last hour or so of Sons of Liberty is where Kojima intentionally went full-on batsplat banana sandwich on his players. The one-line summary of this 40-minute labyrinthine infodump is, “The Patriots AI went crazy.”
The S3 Plan is the Mutant Crazy AI playing its hand at being Cipher. Solidus tells Raiden that S3 stands for “Solid Snake Simulation”, and he believes this to be true. The idea is The Patriots concocted a Shadow Moses-like live exercise to see if a green recruit with no combat experience could be turned into the next Solid Snake. It’s a 21st century twist on Les Enfants Terribles — instead of growing a new supersoldier from scratch as a clone, now we can make one with rudimentary VR training and extreme live fire.
But Solidus was fed bad information by The Patriots. The AI explains to Raiden what S3 really is: Selection for Societal Sanity. The AI has decided that there is too much raw information out there, and wants to control the flow of it to such a degree that a person’s entire life can be fabricated around him. That’s what happens to Raiden: he’s given a fake girlfriend, a fake colonel, a fake Shadow Moses playground to kick around in, a fake FOXHOUND to join, etc. Virtually nothing Raiden believes to be true actually is. His reality is invented by an insane supercomputer.
Who does Revolver Ocelot work for?
In Snake Eater Ocelot works for the CIA. After Snake Eater Ocelot works for Big Boss.
Ocelot is the first of many characters who becomes infatuated with Big Boss. Even way back as Naked Snake, Big Boss has a sort of inspiring magnetism that made people want to follow him. This magnetism is so inexplicably powerful that even people who want to kill him — Quiet, Paz, countless soon-to-be-Fultoned nameless grunts, and of course Ocelot — end up seeking his approval.
And Ocelot falls hard. He so badly wants senpai to notice him that, at one point in Snake Eater, he steals all of Snake’s food and eats it in an effort to be more like him. More tellingly, in an unguarded moment towards the end of the game, Ocelot insists he and Snake learn each other’s real names. This is perhaps the one moment in the entire saga where Ocelot is being purely genuine.
After Big Boss is burned to death in Metal Gear 2 and his biomass is swept up by The Patriots, Ocelot makes it his life’s mission to recover the remains and destroy Cipher’s stranglehold. This isn’t sentimentality; Big Boss’s remains are the literal, physical key to locating The Patriots. At this point in time the AI still sees Ocelot as an especially valuable asset, so Ocelot is very careful to position himself without blowing his cover.
At his most convoluted, Ocelot is four levels deep: Liquid doesn’t know he works for Solidus, who doesn’t know he works for The Patriots, who don’t know he works for Big Boss. The masterstroke here is that, on some level, Ocelot actually does work for FOXHOUND and Dead Cell. They both want the same thing he does. If either of these crazy terrorism plans succeeds, Ocelot can end the charade and turn his coat. If they fail, he has just enough plausible deniability to maintain the ruse and bide his time.
Who or what is Liquid Ocelot?
Ocelot, pretending to be Liquid Snake.
There was a point when Liquid’s ghost arm was actually in partial control of Ocelot’s body. During the cutscenes in Sons of Liberty where Liquid speaks through his own voice, that is really Liquid and he is really taking over. This doesn’t sit well with Ocelot, so he has the arm removed and replaces it with a synthetic one. He doesn’t reveal his new robot arm until the end of Guns of the Patriots.
According to Big Boss, Ocelot kept up the Liquid ruse by undergoing a treatment of drugs and nanomachines to trick his mind into believing he was Liquid Snake in a new body. A similar process worked once before, in The Phantom Pain, when Ocelot was made to believe Venom Snake was the real Big Boss.
Why would Ocelot do this? We’re given an explanation during Big Boss’s exposition at the end of Guns of the Patriots: “in order to fool the System”. Becoming Liquid’s mental doppelganger allows Ocelot to actively work to destroy The Patriots without The Patriots twigging to his betrayal. The AI believes he’s Liquid and acts accordingly: by tapping Solid Snake and sending him to the battlefield.
How can Snake be part Japanese if his parents are EVA and Big Boss?
In the same conversation where EVA reveals she is Snake’s mother, she explains he was conceived via in vitro fertilization. The egg donor was a lab assistant of Dr. Clark, a character who is only ever identified as “a healthy Japanese woman”. Apparently, Vulcan Raven can sense the influence of healthy Japanese women even years after they’ve been murdered by Cyborg Ninjas.
How is REX still operable, and how is it a match for RAY?
REX is the best Metal Gear ever built. It is the Cadillac of Metal Gear. It is an artisinal, home-brew Metal Gear whose secret ingredient is love.
While REX is not as big as Sahelanthropus nor as versatile as RAY, it is the only Metal Gear model that displays human characteristics. Otacon speaks of REX as a person; he specificially designed it with a weakness to give it a certain je ne sais quoi. None of the Metal Gear superscientists like to see their creations destroyed, but Otacon actually takes it personally. To him it’s not, “Liquid has a really powerful battle tank,” but rather “Liquid stole my friend, who happens to be a powerful battle tank.” He takes it personally again, nine years later, when he realizes what Liquid Ocelot wants with its railgun.
It’s this connection between a boy and his bestest battle tank buddy that accounts for REX’s superiority. Otacon is so good at designing Metal Gear that you can cover REX in chaff, pelt it with stingers, carpet bomb it, leave it to rust for ten years in a wet Alaskan bunker, and all it takes to get it back up and running is a pep talk and some Street Fighter moves.
How did the Cyborg Ninja get to Shadow Moses Island?
He got there somehow.
Solid Snake arrives by submarine, Liquid Snake arrives by Hind-D, Otacon flies there a decade later in the Nomad. The point is, people get there. The island is reachable. The actual logistics of each individual character’s journey — be they scientist, soldier, terrorist, FOXHOUND member, intruder, spaghetti western-loving quadruple agent, or Cyborg Ninja — just doesn’t matter much.
Why didn’t Solid Snake or any of the hostages recognize George Sears?
Big Boss and Solidus Snake aren’t actually identical.
During Metal Gear Solid, George Sears is president of the United States. He is forced to resign after the Shadow Moses Incident. A few years later, during Sons of Liberty, it is revealed that George Sears is really Solidus Snake — third clone of Big Boss. However, Solid Snake doesn’t seem to notice the resemblance at all. Is that weird?
Here are the best visuals we have for what Solidus and Big Boss look like when they get old:
These are the most recent graphical renders of each of these characters, at an age where Solid Snake would know them. Big Boss has more recent renders, but of a younger version of himself, which Solid Snake wouldn’t be familiar with.
The first thing to address is… ah… these men don’t look exactly alike! Despite having the same genetics, Solidus only sorta resembles Big Boss; their features are different enough that they could be different people. So the easy answer to why Snake didn’t see George Sears on CNN or whatever and be all “Hey that looks like Big Boss!” is the guy on CNN didn’t look enough like Big Boss for Snake to jump to conclusions. It’s like that time you were behind a guy who kinda looked like Joe Pesci at the gas station.
There’s also the fact that Snake spent most of George Sears’s presidency hiding off the grid in the Alaskan bush, probably not watching much CNN.
But okay, why doesn’t Solidus look like Big Boss, if they’re supposed to be a perfect genetic match? And the answer is, Solidus is not Big Boss’s perfect genetic match. Big Boss was a human man who aged naturally over many years. Solidus was genetically engineered to age rapidly. In the shot above, Solidus is only 37 years old! This, combined with any physical alterations they added to the mix, plus whatever effect you get from cleaning him up and putting him in a nice suit, produces two men who look similar but not identical.
As for why the hostages in Big Shell don’t recognize him… they’re hostages. They’re wearing blindfolds and Solidus doesn’t interact with them directly at any point. Even if one of them happened to catch a glimpse, they have Snake’s problem from the other direction; there’s no indication an average citizen in 2009, however-many years into the Patriots’ lockdown on information, knows who Big Boss is or what he looked like.
What happened to Diamond Dogs after The Phantom Pain?
They died, disbanded, and rebranded themselves, in some combination.
From our perspective, because our protagonists were the dudes in charge of Mother Base, the Diamond Dogs were a special and influential player in world events during the 1980s. In reality, Diamond Dogs was just one of many PMCs dotting the globe. They were a blip on the map.
This is the in-universe reason for The Phantom Pain‘s PvP element. When you infiltrate another player’s Mother Base, what you’re actually doing is attacking a rival PMC in order to steal their soldiers and intel, disassemble their nukes, and piss in all their flower pots. We don’t know how many such groups there are. Probably lots and lots.
We also get a very grim depiction of what life is like for the men of these PMCs from Big Boss himself during his various speeches in Peace Walker, and later firsthand with the War Economy in Guns of the Patriots. These men drift from battlefield to battlefield mostly in a haze. When one group breaks up, the component parts end up somewhere else. EVA has quite a lot to say about this during her big “war is bad” exposition during Guns.
In practice, most of the Diamond Dogs hardware and personnel probably ended up at Outer Heaven, which is where Venom Snake eventually plants his flag on soil. Outer Heaven wasn’t just another PMC, it was a new nation, which is why the US government took such an interest in it. But that’s a story for another time.
What is the VOL2 tape? Is there a VOL1 tape?
It’s an easter egg.
The tape in question is collected during a non-canon side op in Ground Zeroes called “Classified Intel Acquisition”. There’s only one track: “Data Cassette (Do not use in music players)”. Of course, inside Ground Zeroes the only thing you can do with tapes is listen to them in your music player, which results in about five seconds of static.
Now, the first couple Metal Gear games were released for an 8-bit computer called the MSX, which was able to read data from cassette tapes. Some cheaper games came on cassette, but Metal Gear and its sequel came on sturdier, more expensive cartridges. Metal Gear 2 actually uses MSX cartridges as a plot element, and some important data winds up encoded onto one. There being precident for this kind of chicanery, some enterprising hackers figured out how to boot the static from Ground Zeroes in an MSX emulator. The result is the phrase “VOL2” followed by a bunch of garbage code.
In one of The Phantom Pain‘s thirty endings we get to see what might be VOL1: the cassette Venom Snake has that’s labeled “Operation Intrude N313”. That’s the code name for sending Solid Snake into Outer Heaven. The implication here is that Venom’s tape is the mission data for the first Metal Gear game, and the tape Big Boss recovers in Ground Zeroes, VOL2, is the data for Metal Gear 2.
But it can’t possibly be, because there’s no way the planning for Zanzibar Land could end up at a Cuban black site in the 1970s, ten years before a computer that can read it even makes it to market. No, the VOL2 tape is just a macguffin. It only exists to justify your running around in that one side op. It was just a neat place for Kojima to hide a little wink for fanatical players to discover.
Reports indicate that the “VOL2” text is followed by lots of garbage data, so it could even be coincidence that the static, when converted to MSX data, just happens to output something legible for the first four characters. The whole thing might just be an urban legend. Either way, it doesn’t need an in-universe explanation.
How do we know the Ground Zeroes side ops aren’t canonical?
Big Boss only visits Camp Omega once: the Ground Zeroes main op.
In the side ops, Big Boss visits Camp Omega again and again, to accomplish various tasks. In one he sits in his helicopter and sprays the whole base with a machinegun. In another he erases a bunch of Metal Gear game logos. In another he extracts Hideo Kojima himself, who is held in the base as a prisoner. Some, like Classified Intel Acquisition, are plausible in-universe adventures; others clearly aren’t.
The crucial tell here is, at the beginning of the main op, it’s Big Boss’s first visit to Camp Omega. Kaz’s briefing as Big Boss climbs the cliffs up to the site make it pretty clear neither of them have been there before in person. So we know he didn’t complete Classified Intel Acquisition before now.
As soon as Big Boss leaves with Paz and Chico, he arrives back at Mother Base during Skull Face’s attack, where he is wounded and enters his nine-year coma. So we know he doesn’t complete Classified Intel Acquisition later, either.
The only other read, if you’re willing to really stretch, is that Big Boss went back to Camp Omega at some point in the 1980s to complete these side ops during or after the events of The Phantom Pain. This would have to be Big Boss, and not Venom Snake, since the man doing the infiltration doesn’t have any forehead shrapnel. But it can’t be Big Boss, because Kaz doesn’t work with Big Boss any more after Mother Base is destroyed. So this read doesn’t work either.
The side ops are fun little missions, and some of them even make sense as canon if you take Ground Zeroes in isolation, but they’re not a part of the series chronology.
Are all easter eggs non-canonical?
This gets real muddy real quick, but basically no.
Some easter eggs are clearly just for fun: Snake demonstrably did not run around Shadow Moses in a tuxedo. Others are fun, but also fit in-universe: EVA probably did have breast augmentation done as part of “charm school”.
Metal Gear likes to dabble in magical realism, so when Snake tells Raiden his bandana gives him infinite ammo, and then fires thirty thousand rounds at ninja attackers in the following scene, I’m willing to take his word. When something like this happens during the course of natural gameplay, or is directly called attention to by one of the characters in-universe, we can probably put it down as having happened, even if what happened was weird. On the other hand, it’s really hard to believe that Snake has a “Making of Metal Gear Solid 4” podcast on his iPod. I mean, who carried an iPod around in 2014!?
There’s this intuitive understanding of video game storytelling where it’s not necessarily true that every bit of gameplay “actually happened”. If you spend an hour punching Emma in the face, you wouldn’t consider that part of the story’s canon. It’s just a dumb thing you did. Kojima is really, really good at finding those spots and acknowledging them, though; if you do punch Emma in the face, your codec team knows you did it, and will yell at you for it. The codec team reacting makes it “more real” than if they hadn’t, and it becomes part of “your” Sons of Liberty story, but it’s still not part of the shared canon across all players. When you later boot up Guns of the Patriots, Otacon won’t be like, “Hey Raiden, remember that time you spent an hour punching my sister in the face?”
So maybe, when you point a camera at one of the Beauties and she wiggles her butt at you, it’s because the Beauties canonically wiggled their butts. Or maybe it was just Kojima winking and saying, “I knew you’d try that, you perv.”
How did the Philosopher’s Legacy end up with Ocelot?
He took it.
The Philosopher’s Legacy is a collossal amount of money in Colonel Volgin’s possession during Snake Eater. Anybody who’s anybody in Groznyj Grad is there to get their grubby mitts on the Legacy and turn it over to their respective government. Lots of stuff happens, but it all shakes out with Ocelot telling the CIA director that the Legacy is “safely with us, in America’s hands.” In that same conversation, he says only about half the Legacy made it back, and speculates that the rest must still be in the USSR, with the KGB.
Every reference to the Legacy after this point involves it coming to Major Zero, and being used to establish the Patriots. The nuts and bolts of where the money actually went requires delving into Portable Ops, which is one of those quasi-canon games outside the main timeline. In it, Ocelot explicitly recovers both the KGB and CIA halves of the Legacy, and turns it all over to Zero.
Even without Portable Ops, I think we can safely assume those particular events played out more or less as they were depicted. This sort of duplicity is exactly the kind of work Ocelot is suited for, and he was well-placed in both the KGB and CIA at the time. Betraying both for a new organization that benefits himself and Big Boss sounds right up his alley.
Do Ocelot and The Boss know they’re related?
No.
The Boss is Ocelot’s mother. In her long sad story about giving birth during the landing at Normandy, the baby she lost to the Philosophers grew up to become Ocelot. During Snake Eater neither character gives any indication they know about their connection, and while The Boss is mentioned quite a lot by other characters later in the chronology, never by Ocelot himself. So that’s the answer: no. If you need a more complete answer: no, probably not.
The more interesting aspect of this question is, to me, that neither of these characters are the type to have behaved any differently if they had known. The Boss wasn’t going to jeopardize her mission in Groznyj Grad because she happened to be reunited with dear old Sonny Boy, and Ocelot just flat out doesn’t respect authority. Most likely there’s no family reunion scene because neither of them knew, but it’s possible one or both of them knew, and didn’t act.
Where was EVA between Snake Eater and Guns of the Patriots?
Wherever she was.
No, come on, this one is actually important!
Okay, fair enough. We actually know quite a lot about EVA’s timeline between the two games she appears in, but we have to put it together from several different sources. The only direct evidence we get about her fate following Snake Eater is from the ending crawl. In 1968, she “disappeared without a trace in Hanoi”. A few lines later, in 1972, “the sons of Big Boss are born.”
At the time Snake Eater came out these looked like two disconnected events, but as of Guns of the Patriots we know that EVA is the mother of Big Boss’s sons. So it follows: she disappeared from Hanoi into Patriots custody for use in Les Enfants Terribles. This project caused a schism in the Patriots; it was the event that forced Big Boss to break away. EVA was conflicted; she didn’t want to work against Big Boss, but she also cared about her sons. She tells Snake, “Your father never wanted you… but I wanted you.”
From here the games lose track of EVA until she turns up again in Guns, as the leader of the Paradise Lost Army, working against the Patriots.
EVA never worked directly with Big Boss during his PMC years. There was some contact — she sends him a bunch of tapes about The Boss in Peace Walker — but as far as we can tell they never met again face to face. However, Ocelot also wasn’t working directly with Big Boss during this time; he was still ostensibly a loyal Patriots agent. It’s not until Skull Face blows up Mother Base and draws Cipher out of hiding that there’s any indication these characters still share a personal connection.
One more important clue: when EVA is dying on the Volta, she makes one final emotional appeal to Liquid Ocelot by using the first code name she knew him by: ADAM. She even gives him an apple, just to drive home the ham-handed imagery. This is the only time during Guns when a character addresses Liquid Ocelot as Ocelot instead of Liquid. She’s asking, is the Ocelot I knew still in there? And she dies before she gets an answer.
Remember, the man Ocelot is masquereding as is EVA’s other son, who she wanted. That she’d try to appeal to Ocelot, rather than her own son, is very telling. She had a connection with Ocelot, before he disappeared into Liquid.
From all of this we can extrapolate EVA’s timeline. She was working closely with Ocelot for many years, though covertly. Ocelot was still inside the Patriots; EVA at some point breaks away. They kept working together to get hold of Big Boss’s remains and bring down Cipher. You can picture EVA receiving a secret tape (well, probably a CD or a thumb drive by this point) of Ocelot saying, “Hey, this Big Shell nonsense is going to be a real cluster. Don’t get close, I got this.”
At some point, she forms Paradise Lost. I don’t think it’s really important to pin down when this happens. A secret covert organization devoted to fighting another secret covert organization nobody knows exists? Makes sense there are no breadcrumbs. While Ocelot worked the direct military conflicts — the sort of thing Solid Snake and therefore the player would be involved in — Paradise Lost was more behind the scenes. They rescued VIPs, shuffled or hid finances, planted and acquired secret intel, maybe kept tabs on Huey Emmerich’s kids.
Eventually Ocelot is “lost” from EVA’s perspective, and at that point she’s the last one left still fighting the Patriots. It’s not until now, maybe 2010 or so, she needs to become more involved militarily. She recruits Raiden, then finally makes contact with Solid Snake.
So, where was she between Snake Eater and Guns of the Patriots? She was wherever she was, doing whatever she could.
Why was Shadow Moses left unattended for so long?
This is a very, very interesting question that gets right to the heart of a lot of the themes of information control the series likes to drone on about. I’m actually impressed this one was featured in someone’s clickbait video.
After the events of Metal Gear Solid, Nastasha Romanenko published a tell-all book entitled In the Darkness of Shadow Moses: The Unofficial Truth. This is an accurate recounting of the Shadow Moses Incident. You can read the full text off the main menu in Sons of Liberty, where it serves as a story recap.
One important distinction between the Metal Gear universe and our own is that they really do have a shadowy illuminati organization controlling everything. And when events are too big to cover up, you have to spin them instead — and nobody is better at doing that than Cipher. Remember: the Patriots’ goal isn’t to suppress information, but rather to control it. They don’t need to erase Shadow Moses, they just need the citizenry to dismiss it. As long as they paint Romanenko’s tell-all as sensationalist conspiracy claptrap, well, job done. Shadow Moses was left unattended because the only public account of what happened there wasn’t credible.
And besides, we don’t actually know it was left unattended. Maybe Cipher had a dude out there in a yurt whose job it was to catalog all the comings and goings. Maybe black helicopters showed up in 2013 to disappear the film crew of the In the Darkness Netflix documentary series.
How did the Patriots AI give orders to people?
Agents. Until nanomachines were invented, anyway. Then, nanomachines. Except those people that don’t have nanomachines. For those, the AI uses agents.
How do nanomachines get installed?
A needle goes into your skin, and the nanomachines are injected, and now you have nanomachines.
These two questions, taken together, fall into the category of “So wait,” for me. “So wait, the Patriots really have basically infinite resources?” Yeah, that’s really what’s up. If the Patriots want you to do a thing, you’ll get your orders somehow. If they want you to have nanos, you’ll get nanos.
There are numerous examples of the Patriots AI establishing control over people without them ever knowing it. Meryl Silverburgh spends an entire game doing their bidding, and she doesn’t even know they exist. Raiden goes into live fire on an anti-terrorist infiltration op because a voice in his head tells him to. Solid Snake lets a doctor give him an injection of what he thinks is an anti-freezing agent, but is actually a revenge-fueled nanovirus.
The Patriots AI is an infinite computer brain that lives in space, has been in constant development for 40 years, and is backed by an all-powerful world-spanning organization with unlimited funds whose very mission statement is to control everything. Eventually it’s not even possible to fire a gun unless the AI says it’s okay. The logistics of these day-to-day tasks are just trifling details. The AI is imperfect, and by Sons of Liberty it has also gone crazy, but it’s still functionally omnipotent.
Why does the Patriots AI allow Liquid Ocelot to rise to power in the first place?
Because it can’t not. Imagine coming home to find your kitchen burned down, and asking your goldfish why it didn’t put the fire out even though it had all that water right there.
The Patriots AI is infinite in resources and global reach, but it is stupid. At the end of Guns Big Boss describes the AI as being an “oppressively uniform system”. It’s capable of doing only what it was designed to do: control information. That’s a powerful tool, but as of SIGINT’s death in Metal Gear Solid, nobody is wielding it anymore. The AI is left unsupervised, and its code eventually mutates into what we see in Sons of Liberty and Guns of the Patriots.
Liquid Ocelot takes advantage of the situation, but he didn’t create the War Economy. The War Economy is an abberation, a mutation in the Patriots AI that allows it to propogate itself and bring people under its control faster and more efficiently than the older methods of information control.
The AI is in a situation where it can’t — literally is unable to — take action that would damage its own plots and systems. It needs the War Economy even though Liquid Ocelot is using the War Economy against it. So it’s stuck.
However, buried somewhere deep in the AI is a vestigial line of code left over from Shadow Moses, that looks something like:
if Liquid.uppity
deploy(solidSnake);This is exactly what happens. The AI turns a wheel somewhere, and before you know it Roy Campbell is touching down in a helicopter with an assassination job on offer. And that wheel touches another wheel which touches another wheel which ensures Drebin and Meryl just happen to be in the area to offer valuable support.
The AI can’t prevent Liquid’s rise to power because last time Liquid rose to power, nobody prevented it. It has no frame of reference. But someone did stop Liquid once he attained power, and so the AI just does the same thing that worked last time: it sends in Solid Snake.
How is the Arsenal Gear crash covered up?
To my knowledge this doesn’t actually happen. The cover-up, I mean. The crash definitely happens. I mean, everyone saw it.
It’s true we don’t know what the public’s reaction to the Arsenal crash is. But then, we generally don’t know a lot about what the public is up to in the Metal Gear universe at all. We are told repeatedly that the events of the games — even the big, flashy public ones — get swept away by some “official story” that everybody buys, and that’s really enough of an explanation. The public believed whatever the Patriots AI wanted them to believe re: Arsenal, because that’s something the Patriots AI is able to do.
In Sons of Liberty, Otacon explains that Ocelot sold the technical specs for REX on the black market, and now every “state, group and dotcom” has their own Metal Gear. In such a climate, it would be shockingly easy for the US government to sell its citizens on the idea that, yes, we really do need something like Arsenal to protect us, and yes, terrorists stole it and crashed it into New York, so yes, now we need even bigger and badder Metal Gears to combat this new threat. This is, in fact, almost exactly how the War Economy ends up operating in Guns of the Patriots
Didn’t you do a bizarre and hilarious rap song about Ocelot?
Yes. Yes I did.
And nobody ever asked a question about Metal Gear ever again.
And thank goodness for that!
rjscibbe.com 