What if Your Favorite Video Game is Bad? A Review of Metal Gear Solid from Boss Fight Books

I like books. I like video games. I like mashing them together like potatoes….potatoes against the bottom of a bowl. You can’t just mash two potatoes together to get mashed potatoes. That’s cumbersome, messy, and questionably effective. The bowl is necessary. Otherwise, you’re probably just puppeteering a violent potato orgy.

The latest potato-on-bowl experience I’ve had is this, Metal Gear Solid from Boss Fight Books, written by Ashly Burch and Anthony Burch.

It’s funny. It’s insightful. It’s just what you would expect from a book by these two personalities. I stress “you” because surely you are familiar with these two people, but somehow I was not familiar with Burch and Burch despite them having a very popular YouTube series Hey Ash Whatcha Playin’?, and having other impressive writing credits to their names, including Borderlands 2 and an Emmy award winning episode of Adventure Time. Ashly Burch is also the voice of Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn. They are the perfect pair to write a book like this, a book that takes a game they loved as children, that they say contributed substantially to the people they are today, and tear it apart. What I learned reading this book is that Metal Gear Solid doesn’t really hold up as a game experience.

The authors use their own personal histories and current career roles in video games to add to the larger conversation of Metal Gear Solid, and to the even larger conversation of representation in video games and to the even more larger conversation of just how weird is Hideo Kojima, really? All signs point to very. A running joke in the book is pointing out ways Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima is crazy and seemingly has no filter when it comes to what he wants his game to do. For example, the authors explore the game mechanic that lets enemy soldiers track protagonist Solid Snake in the snow, a mechanic that seems innocuous until you realize that it’s only used once and at the very beginning of the game before the player really even understands how to play the game. That’s hours and hours of development time to for a single use, albeit cool, feature. Not weird enough for you? Kojima also includes assworship as a gameplay mechanic. See also hiding in boxes.

For those with a nostalgic connection to the game, the book forces a hard-look retrospection. What you may remember as a brilliantly sophisticated game that invented the stealth mechanics we know and sometimes love today, may still be that, but decimated are the adjective tagalongs implied by such a description. Perfect game? No. Serious game? Not really. Beautiful game? Perhaps in the way we all thought polygons were beautiful before we had full CG capabilities. Important game? Yes, still very much so.

What makes this book really work–if I didn’t say it enough already–are the personalities of the authors. Siblings Ashly Burch and Anthony Burch take the straight-man and banana man format they’ve developed over the years in their Hey, Ash Whatcha Playin’? YouTube series and convert that quite well to the long-form paper medium. And they understand the demands of the book format, and realize that simply carrying on the Double Act comic format of their video series would get quite boring for 200 pages. So, they wisely show off their critical thinking skills while reserving most of the funny stuff asides for the footnotes. And if you like footnote humor, I highly recommend Robert Hamburger’s Real Ultimate Power: The Official Ninja Book.

Though Burch and Burch pull no punches when criticizing Metal Gear Solid, they truly love the game and credit it for parts of their professional success. It’s good to know that it’s okay to recognize when what you love might be flawed and that even if what you love is a sexist, racist, and overall absurd video game, it doesn’t mean you are sexist, racist, absurd, or a video game. And as long as we gamers can keep that in mind when challenging a person’s affinity for a video game that we may not like, we’ll all be better people. Basically, don’t be a jerk to fellow gamers, okay. Because the games you love are probably garbage, too.