Metal Gear Solid:
Digital Graphic Novel
Art by Ashley Wood, story by Hideo Kojima. Published by Konami for the PSP; rated Mature, ages 17 and up.
What is this thing?
It comes on a universal media disc for the Sony PlayStation Portable, and its documentation calls it a digital graphic novel. When you slide the UMD in, an animated movie starts up and runs for almost two hours. I'll call it animation because it looks like something Norman McLaren might have cooked up in the 1950s at the National Film Board, mixing static panels from a comic book with rudimentary character movement and sound effects.
It still could be a graphic novel; I won't rule that out. All the dialogue is contained in speech bubbles and the art is by Ashley Wood, an Australian who produced a series of paper comics based on Metal Gear Solid, the 1998 PlayStation 2 game directed by Hideo Kojima. The drawings are mostly grey, with splashes of red, and their style moves from charcoal smudges to fully rendered human figures. The panels sometimes take up the whole screen but they can also be broken up into connected sections that fade and dissolve into each other.
Then there are the interactive parts. As the movie plays -- or the digital pages turn -- you can press a button to put a cursor on the screen. This can be used to zoom into each panel, moving through the layers of artwork. If there is a character partially hidden by a wall, the magnification will take you past the barrier, then past the character to see what is behind him or her -- right up to 300 per cent larger than the original. If you find something interesting, the circular cursor will rotate faster and the object's name will appear. Press another button and this "memory" can be saved.
Once enough of these memories have been collected, there is something called a "memory building simulation mode." This is a three-dimensional space with the story's main character, Solid Snake, at the centre. The memories float around him and the idea, I think, is to connect them in the proper order, which will open up more story segments. But after several hours of searching panels and testing links, I couldn't figure it out -- and I even read the manual, which I never do.
So this may be a game, too, but I would never call it a good one. Maybe Konami thought Metal Gear fans needed something to do beyond simply reading, or watching, or whatever one does when presented with a $30 digital graphic novel. Personally, the art and its unique presentation would have been enough to interest me if the story had been new, but the whole thing is a direct reproduction of the game. I played it eight long years ago and the dialogue is the same -- you don't forget lines like: "Drop the sword and back away from the nerd, slowly."
It is Kojima storytelling at its best, full of U.S. military research gone horribly wrong and genetically altered soldiers with silly animal codenames -- Revolver Ocelot, Sniper Wolf and the Snake brothers, Liquid and Solid -- trading bullets and life stories. But it's too bad this narrative didn't break new ground along with the format because, whatever it is, it's fresh and full of promise.
