Far ahead of its time, Metal Gear Solid’s Sons of Liberty is passionately weird and existential.
Almost twenty years later, Sons of Liberty is the one Metal Gear Solid entry on which I remain undecided is taking the piss. You might consider it the video game equivalent of Inception. Simultaneously maddening and ingenious, the sheer scope of social and political commentary that Hideo Kojima attempted to create at the turn of the early millennium is impressive if nothing else. Sons of Liberty was memetic in ways before memes escalated into the pantheon of pop culture like Vines and TikTok. It’s a game with idiosyncrasies that gradually make more sense in retrospect.
In the aftermath of the events of Shadow Moses, with the world now aware of the sordid momentum of nuclear technology, Sons of Liberty’s premise was promising. We reunite with Snake as he infiltrates a tanker that’s hosting a new model of Metal Gear — turns out he and Otacon are now agents of exposing the existence of nuclear threats. Snake’s even swapped out his SOCOM for a tranquiliser gun and a digital camera. Before you can consider Snake’s transition into a humanitarian truth seeker and investigative journalist, things go typically (and royally) tits up. We run into old Foxhound alum Revolver Ocelot, who stages a siege and ultimately steals Metal Gear while sinking the whole damn tanker. But not before betraying his Russian comrades and, for reasons that suggest a writer regretting killing him off in the previous game, gets possessed by the persona of Liquid Snake through a surgically attached arm.
Hope I didn’t stutter through any of this.
Anyway, this scenario on the tanker is breathtakingly tense. Lasting just a mere hour or two, it’s also unfortunate that it’s the best part of the entire game. For Sons of Liberty then leaps two years into the future; the focus shifts onto a similarly Shadow Moses-themed hostage crisis on an offshore clean-up rig (Big Shell) and we become the beneficiaries of a whole new lead character. Yes, with Snake relegated to a supporting act the momentum just never quite returns. More an androgynously pretty cipher than a gripping protagonist, the initially reviled Raiden isn’t actually all that bad; he’s just really underwritten. Snake was the grizzled and soulful poet laureate of veteran warfare; Raiden has a ghastly taste in women and a traumatic childhood that is barely touched upon. It’s like comparing Leonard Cohen to any member of the Backstreet Boys.
Raiden’s section on Big Shell is chock full of stiff interactions that doesn’t spark any sense of chemistry or drama; which can be gradually interpreted as a deliberate tonal choice, but it eschews the cinematic sheen of the set pieces which made Shadow Moses feel so engrossing. On one hand the superlatives with which the plot persistently lays red herrings is profoundly prophetic of the disinformation in the predominant digital age. On the other, the series’ brand of comic strip and melodrama is offset against this overarching narrative — simply put, it’s sometimes too convoluted to be funny and too inaccessible to engage emotionally. But then again, responding to Sons of Liberty’s narrative hysteria with a sense of indifference could actually be the point: in many ways, the theme of answering questions with more questions reflects the story being treated as a simulation in and of itself. And it’s fully committed to pulling the rug out from under your feet at any moment when you think that you might be getting an inkling as to what’s going on.
There are also glimpses of the bizarre sense of humour strewn in subsequent games. Strategic camera pans of a fully naked Raiden running around the underbelly of a nuclear bunker while trying to preserve his modesty is amusing, but other campy moments don’t come off as well. There’s a laughably lore breaking plot device which renders one villain impervious to bullets and another who’s basically an overweight bomber clad in roller blades. Because of the game’s generally unreadable tone, these lighthearted elements never feel as playful as they should. Which feeds into another glaring issue: the cast of supporting characters in Sons of Liberty are generally bland. Then there’s the toxic relationship troubles between Raiden and his gaslighting girlfriend, whose interactions are so untimely placed you’ll probably find yourself skipping through their Codec sessions.
Beneath all of the intellectual artifice, though, is the real enduring quality of Sons of Liberty: its combat and stealth mechanics are timeless. As are the impressively immersive environments. If you crank up the difficulty setting, Big Shell elongates playtime with a minefield of meticulous strategy and punishing enemy A.I if you fail to rely on infiltration. By adding a simple yet effective first person feature, Metal Gear refined the action to match its stealth values. It also helps that the game, still, is such a genuine visual landmark within the medium; the vaunting attention to detail and emotive animations upgrade the cinematic edge for which the series was already known. Frankly it’s all the more astonishing when you remember that Sons of Liberty was one of the earliest releases on the nascent PS2 era.
Ultimately, however, the total uniqueness of Sons of Liberty makes for an essential experience. It’s a game where you can sneak by sentries using porn magazines as a distraction, literally meet your demise by slipping on seagull shit or accidentally acrobat off the infrastructure while trying to avoid a dodgy floor panel or someone urinating from a ledge above you. As the game begins to unravel all coherent sense in its last quarter to final act, and characters get whittled down in short order, you’re thrust into a series of visually spectacular fights: Raiden single handedly taking on an army of Metal Gears, then shortly after it’s a final sword duel with the US President on the broken streets of Manhattan. Yes, you read that correctly.
By the time it’s all over, you’re not sure what the hell has transpired, what the looming presence of the Patriots suggests, or what it was all supposed to mean — Sons of Liberty is a video game that goes through its own existential crisis. Too silly to take too seriously and yet too clever to dismiss, another twenty years from now and we’ll still be be wondering if Sons of Liberty really was taking the piss all along.
