It’s not ending the actual plot – lord knows how anyone would actually go about doing that – it’s ending the game, and the series as well. It’s what makes the true ending actually satisfying, in a classically Metal Gear sort of way. The player is the center of the story in a fictional, meta, and actual sense.
His farewell video showed a remarkable tenderness in his relationship with the players, and that shines through here. That’s the medic, and that’s why the tape playing at the end addresses the character as “you.” Kojiima is usually pretty brazen about the way he breaks the fourth wall – e.g., Psycho Mantis – but there’s some uncharacteristic restraint going on here. From that perspective, it makes sense why this new game focuses so much more on gameplay and less on half hour long cutscenes: the real story is about the player becoming Big Boss. We don’t need Raiden anymore, because we’re doing that job ourselves. The true ending of Metal Gear Solid 5 takes it one step further. Everything falls apart just as it looks like you’re nearing some kind of traditional success, and a series of weird meta-screens and absurd situations more or less shatter any notion that we know what’s going on. It’s most prominent in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, where Raiden becomes a proxy character for the player: young, inexperienced, trained off of VR and existing in the shadow of Solid Snake. And the series has always been very interested in its own status as a game. That’s why it’s not really important when things make no sense or plotlines go unresolved – each game’s own identity as a game takes center stage, and we’re willing to suspend as much disbelief as necessary to allow that to happen. Metal Gear Solid has always been something of a meta-narrative first and a literal narrative second. With some instruction, a whole lot of practice and a total immersion into someone else’s shoes, the medic assumes the mantle of a legendary soldier. The “medic” is outside the main action, a somewhat unremarkable character who assumes the mantle of someone much grander than they were before. But it’s only one side of it, and it’s not the most important side. That may be the literal explanation of what’s happening in the endlessly complicated world of Metal Gear Solid, and it does help to fill in at least some of the plot holes we’ve accumulated over the years. The medic was told he was Big Boss, and came to assume that identity.īut of course the actual identity of the medic is just happenstance. He wanted someone else to serve as his “phantom,” so that he could escape. The guy with the bandages over his face in the beginning is actually Big Boss. The character you play in the game isn’t Big Boss, he’s the medic from the helicopter who’s had his face altered to look like Big Boss. In a simple sense, here’s what seems to have happened.