Two Japanese bestseller novelists discuss Metal Gear Solid V
In a discussion published on website Webnewtype, Japanese bestseller novelists Manabu Makime and Hitori Nojima (who wrote the recently published novels of MGS1, 2, and V) talk about the story of MGSV. It’s a pretty insightful discussion that is worth a read. One interesting part is where Makime mentions Huey and his role in the story.
Big Boss’ organization in V is absolutely a band of criminals in the eyes of the world order. They can be viewed as a kind of war mafia, interfering in world conflicts to make money. But it’s hard to see things that way when you’re actually playing the game. Viewed from the outside, everything they do is unacceptably wrong, but playing as them makes you see them as good people. That’s why I really like Huey’s (Emmerich’s) character in V. He always says the perfect thing to make you hate him at just the right time (laughs). He seems like the worst bad guy in the game, but viewed objectively that’s not the case. As a civilian, he’s actually closer to the player than any of the other characters. The things he says actually always make sense, but that just makes you hate him more.
People who’ve played through the game will probably remember the scene in which Huey is exiled from Mother Base, arguably one of the most memorable scenes in the game.
Nojima also cites an email sent to him by Kojima in which he explains some of his intentions with the story of MGSV and the way it ends.
Early video games never had much of a story. Metal Gear was among the first to add story to its gameplay. The player controls Snake, and together we’ve told this story over the years. As the series went on, the player jumped between multiple characters like Solid Snake and Naked Snake, and the story evolved into the legend that is the Metal Gear saga. In this final Metal Gear, it was only right to return the role of Snake, the main character, to the player. It’s saying that from now on, you make the story. It’s saying this is what it means to come full circle and complete a story. If this were a one-way medium like a movie, V’s ending wouldn’t have been possible, but this was a game. This made it possible. Taking a story we’ve told together over the years, and placing it in the hands of the player. That was the real intention behind V.
If the player wasn’t a doppelganger to Big Boss in V, that would have meant Big Boss himself dying later on. And long before V, back in the original Metal Gear, the player (acting as Solid Snake) had in fact killed Big Boss. That made it important for this final instalment that the player once again enters into the story and brings things full circle in their own way. I think it’s only at that point that the story truly belongs to the player. This is “creating the story together with the player,” something that can’t be done in traditional media like movies and books. This can only be done in a video game. That’s what makes V the culmination of everything we’ve always done since the original Metal Gear.
The rest of the discussion, where they talk about other story elements and various characters, is worth reading through as well (follow the link in the source section below).
Source: Webnewtype