And it turned out Solid, Liquid, and another Snake bro called Solidus were all clones of the original Big Boss. Yeah.īig Boss went on through the proceeding Metal Gear Solid games as a corpse everyone wanted for cloning reasons, because he was apparently the greatest soldier ever (although, of course, he wasn’t actually dead).
And then in Metal Gear 2 you do it again, only this time you fight cyborg Big Boss who apparently wasn’t dead, and this time Big Boss tells Solid Snake that he’s Snake’s father. You kill Big Boss in Metal Gear and stop Metal Gear and everything’s good. He sent you in thinking you’d fail, because plot twists. Then you discover the truth: the guy in charge of Outer Heaven, and the nuke, is Big Boss himself. There, you discover Metal Gear, a walking tank that can cross basically any terrain, making the entire world a viable target for a clandestine nuclear strike. In Metal Gear, Big Boss sends you into Outer Heaven, a sort of soldier-nation that apparently has nuclear capability and is holding the world hostage. Big Boss is the evil bad guy of Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, and he’s the most obvious and perfunctory video game villain of possibly all time. The Big Boss ProblemĪt some point during the course of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, it seems, creator Hideo Kojima decided to pivot the story back toward being about the series’ first antagonist: Big Boss, the one-time leader of protagonist Solid Snake’s American special operations unit, Foxhound, in 1987’s Metal Gear.
#METAL GEAR PLAYER CHARACTERS SERIES#
The Metal Gear Solid series has been reframing the past events in its lore since Metal Gear Solid 3, but far more than the post-credits cutscene of Metal Gear Solid 4, MGS V looks to change everything: especially the plot of the original Metal Gear.Įxcept it doesn’t, because MGS V’s story, unfortunately, doesn’t make a ton of sense. The 1987 original set up the story for the entire franchise, but MGS V doesn’t just lead up to it-in many ways, it effectively rewrites it. It’s a direct prequel to the very first game in the franchise: Metal Gear.
That’s because MGS V is mired in some of the deepest and densest lore in the entire series. Nobody would accuse the Metal Gear Solid games of having stories that are easy to follow, but Metal Gear Solid V takes “dense” to a new, decades-spanning high.