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  • Metal Gear Solid Has Always Been About The Busywork of War
    https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/qvmk7b/metal-gear-solid-v-war-busywork

    The Metal Gear Solid franchise has always played with repetition and recreation in weird ways. Whether it’s the VR missions simulating the Shadow Moses events of Metal Gear Solid, the real-life simulation that is Metal Gear Solid 2, and the repeated character types and individual characters who just keep managing to show up. All of this is couched in pseudo-philosophical debates about what it means to repeat the past. Is it in our genes? Can we truly swerve from the past to create something new? What is handed down to us? What do we make ourselves?

    I’ve been replaying Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain very slowly over the past several weeks. It is a game that is strangely positioned in this cycle of repetition. It is the bridge point between the postwar story about Big Boss that began with Metal Gear Solid III: Snake Eater and the contemporary, Solid Snake-centered, Metal Gear Solid. From the perspective of the series, this is the point where time becomes cyclical, establishing Revolver Ocelot, Big Boss, and his clone children as the figures that this entire universe pivots around.

    The world of Metal Gear repeats, over and over again, with minimal differences, and Metal Gear Solid V is the first game in the series that delivers on the promise of repetition as a way of interacting with the world. To put it bluntly, Metal Gear Solid V understands that repetition is drudgery, that it is soul-sucking, that it saps you of energy and enthusiasm, and then it demands that you dig down into that muck and live there.