| brendude13 said: It would be good if somebody extracted the good points out of his video and explained them a little more. I'm interested to find out why Kojima switched Raiden in as the playable character and made him intentionally unlikable. The last 3 hours of the game still make absolutely no sense to me either. |
Because Raiden reflects the player in the sense that Raiden has been on VR Missions and us, the player, have played as a hero (Solid Snake).
But we are not Snake, we're just bystanders/rookies/raiden ourselves.
Raiden has been trained to kill as a child and so have we in that most of us have played a lot of games as a kid where we take lives. Atleast played MGS1.
We are playing the game on MGS2 just because we want to see what happens next and a lot of it, is really MGS1 copy pasted in some regards.
Infact, the whole game is meant to be unlikable. The beginning of the tanker with Solid Snake like the video says is the ideal sequel. Everything works amazingly. You have a lot of choice, Snake is there, the tech is amazing, gameplay is solid, they have adressed the issue of too many interupptions during gameplay etc. Then the game does a 180 turn and starts to deliberately go back to MGS1. Raiden enters just like Snake does in MGS1. We always see Snake a bit ahead of us and "better" then us.
The thematic of MGS2 is confirmed to be MEME also. Described as =>
"deals with how identity can be affected by the philosophies of one's society (a 'meme') and the effects of censorship on society""
We were censored in that regard that we didn't even know who Raiden was before playing the game ourselves. It was false marketing to show Snake instead. And ours and Raidens identity is brought into question during the game as a result. Kojima really broke the fourth wall with this one.
Raiden has a dog tag on him that you write the name of yourself. Say I named mine "Aldro". At the end, Raiden tosses it which shows that he "walks away" from us. Raiden is no longer us and we are no longer him. We take what we learned and grow from it.
Snake puts it best at the end of MGS2 =>
"Listen dont obsess over words so much. Find the meaning over the words and then decide, you can find your own name, and your own future. And whatever you choose will be you. I know you didn't have much in terms of choices this time around but everything you felt and thought about is yours and what you decide to do with them is your choice."
It's like a way to criticize sequels in general and games in general. Hell anything post modern really. When you play the game, you play the role of someone. The colonel also says it when he's tripping balls because of GW going berserk after Emma uploads the virus.
"This is a roleplaying game."
Theres MUCH more to it and a lot of better explanations in the video(s). Im just trying to make sense of it all myself. But I can see the "meaning" of it and I really really love it :P.
