Did we really need to know the identity of the Patriots?

Jimnymebob said:

That was the Wiseman's Committee/the Philosophers, wasn't it?
That was kept relatively secretive in the sequels. They didn't go into every minute detail like they did with the Patriots.

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Yeah, if memory serves, the Philosophers were presumed to be behind the events of MGS2, but the post-credits scene revealed that they had all been dead for over a century, so it was either a different secret society, or some sentient AI fuckery. It actually tuned out to be both...

As people have already said, neither the Patriots nor any of the other dangling threads in MGS2 were ever intended to be explained. The whole game is about the manipulation of information, and rejecting hollow fantasies/fictions to look deeper into yourself to find something "solid" to believe in and pass on to future generations. Explaining everything would undermine that entire point.

Also, your obligatory reminders:

• Kojima intended MGS2 to be the end of MG, but he was forced back into the MG series with each new entry due to project concerns:

• Konami made it impossible for Kojima to seriously work on non-MG projects as they would only grant him appropriate funding if he was working on an MG title:

Yeah. I love MGS4 and like the reveal. It shows how no one escaped the rabbit hole that was the events of MGS3. It also makes Ocelot's, Eva's, and especially Solids story more tragic. He was a product of it and his whole life was never not wrapped up in it. Then in the end everything they fought for was an ideology squabble between a bunch of old fools. It could be reflective of the real world in some ways.

Would have been cool if the patriots controlling everything behind the scenes was some meta-shit fourth wall breaking where it was implied it was the game designers or consumers not an in game character

No. The creepy mystery and seemingly limitless power surrounding them was undermined by their reveal. Almost like the space jockey in Alien which didn't need any explanation at all.

Kenzodielocke said:

No, Kojima betrayed his own point he made in two by making that post-credit scene in 4.

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It's been a long time since I played them... would you elaborate on that?

ThereAreFourNaan said:

The Patriots were bad; explaining the patriots as your MGS3 support crew was abysmal. This goes for something like half of the ideas presented in MGS2. A vampire in your technothriller is bad, explaining it away with nanomachines in MGS4 just makes it worse. Liquid snake possessing the body of Revolver Ocelot is very, very dumb, and explaining it as a patriot deception scheme hatched by ocelot and implemented using hypnosis amplifies this stupidity.

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The stuff in MGS2 was totally fun. It was comic book GI Joe zaniness. The problem was trying to ground that zaniness with explanations in 4.

thetrin said:

The stuff in MGS2 was totally fun. It was comic book GI Joe zaniness. The problem was trying to ground that zaniness with explanations in 4.

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Ironically, Ocelot having inherited his father's genes for communicating with the dead which gave Liquid a chance to possess Ocelot felt more believable to me than Ocelot brainwashing himself into being someone else.

I don't believe Kojima when he says he only came aboard MGS3 after the fact.

The real patriots are the friends we made along the way.

ThorHammerstein said:

It's been a long time since I played them... would you elaborate on that?

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thetrin said:

The stuff in MGS2 was totally fun. It was comic book GI Joe zaniness. The problem was trying to ground that zaniness with explanations in 4.

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Exactly how I feel about 4. It's one of these cases where you're better off leaving things unexplained.

The worst part remains resurrecting Big Boss for that one awful scene with Zero.

I love all 5 for different reasons and I'll take 5 more please (but only from Kojima). Finding out Sigint was the DARPA chief was a great moment. I love all that shit that ties the games together, sorry.

The La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo?

Yeah, I think too he wrote himself in a corner after the ending of MGS2. It's my favorite game of all time, and MGS is my favorite series, but Sons of Liberty clearly took things to a way that Kojima and probably the team didn't expect to come back later or adress it on a next game.

I like to think that the series has two endings: the first one is with Sons of Liberty, the second, with MGS4 (and later V). I'm glad with both endings by the way, and I think I can appreciate both, even if Guns of the Patriots makes a complete mess with the Patriots and the Solid Snake we had at the end of SoL.

I think it showed a lack of restraint, and made the MGS universe feel smaller in scope. I know many folks like it when things are cleanly wrapped up and everything is connected and everything happens for a dramatic reason, but it's not for me. I don't know if Tomokazu Fukushima's departure was the reason why MGS games took such a creative nose-dive, but I couldn't help but notice that his last game was also the last main MGS game I liked. The only exception was Rising, but that had its own writer too.

Palette Swap said:

Exactly how I feel about 4. It's one of these cases where you're better off leaving things unexplained.

The worst part remains resurrecting Big Boss for that one awful scene with Zero.

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God, I hate that scene. "Hello, I came back to life to talk to you for 15 min before dying again. Also, I brought a dying Zero, who I'm going to kill in front of you for no real reason but for metaphorical impact."

It's the very example of bad storytelling. The scene only exists to talk to the viewer. If the audience isn't there, the scene makes next to no sense.

Kuma Bear said:

Ironically, Ocelot having inherited his father's genes for communicating with the dead which gave Liquid a chance to possess Ocelot felt more believable to me than Ocelot brainwashing himself into being someone else.

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I was ready to believe he was actually possessed via the arm. It's the kind of comic book insanity the series was known for. The brainwashing part just makes everything make no sense, and is a totally underwhelming answer.

We didn't need to know a lot of things honestly, but over explaning things isn't that uncommon. Especially with origin stories, we don't need the orgin how someone got the eyepatch or leather jacket.

I think they definitely could have left it at 3. I liked 4, but it did try to tie up everything in a bow, for better or worse.

Honestly, I would've even been fine with a Zero reveal as the originator of the Patriots had it not made literally everyone from Snake Eater part of it, too.

The team from MGS3 turning into the Patriots never really made sense to me. If it had been just Zero I'd maybe buy it but the rest didn't show a glimpse of dubious morals

I dont understand where "Series should have ended with 2" comments are comming wrong. MGS2 has far more questions and unresolved plot threads than actual answers.

MGS2 was such a disaster, that I'm happy MGS4 came along to save it. MGS3 still the best in the series though.

The Patriots in the present being a creepy AI mindlessly perpetuating a system they didn't understand after their original creators had been long gone was fine. But that should have been all the detail we got.

It was everything else about the Patriots being MGS3's cast that was stupid, especially since it wasn't until a single unlockable post game tape in V that we got to hear Zero even talk about this stuff.



(Side note: before MGS4 came out I had this weird theory that the Patriots would basically be a combination of a GW like AI and existing characters, but in a different way: namely that the AI designated the most "memetically" important individuals in the world as The Patriots and tried to make things play out to simultaneously advance each of their wills, so like, Snake would unknowingly be a "Patriot" and his luck would have been the result of the AI always manipulating things so he had a chance)

Anyway it's too bad MGS4 came along and ruined MGS2's perfection.

JK-Money said:

MGS2 created this sense of mystery that there was a group behind the scenes that controlled everything, especially the floa of information. Due to the endig of the game this left fans spiraling out of control asking questions on who this mystery group is. Kojima was done with the franchise after 2 howvere was forced into 3,4 and V by fan backlash. In the eventual end I feel as if he wrote himself into a corner and just threw out an answer to the fans as if to say "ok here fine these are the patriots. The cast of Snake Eater are the characters that shaped their world and how it went into chaos. Did we need this answer, or are some questions like these better left unanswered?

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I mean, he most likely got paid a bunch of money too. Let's not pretend he was some great martyr by making more of a massive franchise.

Re: Patriots? No. How much of Metal Gear's story really needed to be told, ha?

Seeing a lot of MGS4 hate. I just wanted to say that MGS IV is still amazing.

That was literally the more important thing I wanted to know from 4. If it didn't say, I'd be sood disappointed!
It's like TV shows, the revelation can never live up to the hype.

I think everything makes sense when the philosophy and themes behind the series ends with 2. Everything that comes after 3 is just bonus content that hardly has anything to do with the series' original direction. The patriots is totally part of that.

I know people are saying things "but they didn't explain who they were it's a cliffhanger" but the patriots weren't the focus of MGS2. MGS2 is the thematic end of Solid Snake's saga, and it highlighted the different ways individuals can pass on their legacy that weren't only through procreation. On that front MGS2 had said everything that needed to be said, and more.

I like Kojima, but I think he should take a page from Miyazaki and just leave the breadcrumbs for the fans. The explicitness of his explanations and asspulls kind of waters down the narrative.

Although watching some of those crazy vids trying to sell me on DS being another Metal Gear does show dude leaves some crazy details that never get explained properly through the games.

Overexplaining things that were never meant to be explained is, among others (see retroactively criticising characters/stories that never needed criticising) is one of the many things that can ruin sequels in my eyes 'The Patriots' being what they are made MGS2's story, they were clearly never meant to be a group of people but an entity that grew from society's need/desire for control.

The explanation sucked but, then again, any explanation that involved the Patriots being people would have sucked. Since MGS doesn't exactly have a massive cast of viable characters to be 'The Patriots' (i.e. somewhat-powerful adults living during the 60s/70s who weren't already accounted for) the options were to either go with the current explanation or to go for characters we hadn't seen before. It was really just better off being left 'unexplained' (it was already explained...)

Dranakin said:

MGS2 was such a disaster, that I'm happy MGS4 came along to save it. MGS3 still the best in the series though.

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Metal Gear Solid 2 is a work of art the likes of which hasn't been surpassed to this day.

I was okay with the support team from MGS3 being the Patriots. What I wasn't cool with was the team turning into evil individuals for silly reasons. It would have been cool if they had said, "Yeah we started the Patriots, with good intentions of preventing what happened with The Boss. But then... we lost control of it."

No. The reveal of them was incredibly anticlimactic.

We wanted to know.

JK-Money said:

Kojima was done with the franchise after 2 howvere was forced into 3,4 and V by fan backlash. In the eventual end I feel as if he wrote himself into a corner and just threw out an answer to the fans as if to say "ok here fine these are the patriots.

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Hahaha. Do you truly believe what you write ?
Poor Kojigod, so unfairly forced to make games.
The apologetic nature of MGS fans is truly mindblowing.

You could ask this question about like every reveal in MGS4. It fucked up so much of what the previous games had established.

To answer your question though, no. We didn't need to know, and it certainly didn't have to be all the characters you liked from 3 turning into nutcases.

MGS4 story is trash. Also so is MGS2 in retrospect of MGS4 reveals.

Dranakin said:

MGS2 was such a disaster, that I'm happy MGS4 came along to save it. MGS3 still the best in the series though.

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I can't recall reading a more wrong statement. MGS2 had a great story that was retrospectively ruined by MGS4 trying to explain things that were never meant to be explained.

No and while I don't hate playing MGS4 it's a shame that all of the concepts MGS2 introduced just fell flat on its face in MGS4.

LALILULELO LALILULELO LALILULELO LALILULELO LALILULELO

LOL, I think we all got the answers needed!

Crayon said:

We wanted to know.

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Want and need are entirely different things, especially in a case like MGS2 where finding out who runs/started the patriots was not important in any way outside of being a plot device.

Crazy Izanagi said:

You're all wrong. The series needed to continue.

Know why? Because then we wouldn't have this.

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But then THAT games existence didn't thrill me because it basically robbed Raiden of his happy ending in MGS4. Even if it was a good action game.

I do think they needed to be revealed, I just would have preferred them to be some other group. Like, these oddballs telling me about Godzilla and shit are secretly guiding the world now?

I mean it makes sense but most of their character does a 180 there, completely unexplained.

I probably would have even preferred them to be a mysterious Chinese band of businessmen or something to the explaination I got.

We didn't need to know exactly who or what they were, but leaving it on a cliffhanger would have been a bummer. MGS3 was a worthy addition and added to the lore regarding the Wiseman's Committee, but MGS4 just runs with the MGS3 codec team as The Patriots and you're left scratching your head along with an unsatisfying feeling in your stomach over what just transpired.

I understand the people who say that the series should have ended with 2, but wouldn't ending it with 3 be better off?

I always liked the fan theory that Metal Gear Solid 4 deliberately gave the least satisfying answer to every question to make us regret asking.

Snake Eater is the last MGS game.

The right question to ask is "Did we really need for MGS4 to exist?"

The answer is NO.

Dalek said:

Classic MGS4 meme.jpg

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Came for this, and no, we didin't need to know all that, series should have ended with MGS3

MGS2 already explained what The Patriots were though. They're an omniscient, godlike consciousness formed by American citizens' need to be controlled and to have meaning in their lives informed by a sense of patriotism. Metaphorically, The Patriots are like the narrative framework of a video game that gives context to a player's actions by informing them of their character's backstory (like Raiden's false one) and providing directives for each level. And at that point in MGS2's story the pretense of realism has been completely shattered as everything degrades into metaphor so that explanation works.

Raiden doesn't beat them in MGS2 because they can't be beaten, so instead Snake just tells him (and the player) to escape their control by resolving to live life as himself, building on the message of the first game.

Yes.

When a question is created.. there beter be an answer.