Metal Gear Solid: Digital Graphic Novel

 

 

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1998's Metal Gear Solid on the PlayStation is widely regarded as a classic action adventure title, one that firmly established Solid Snake as a gaming legend. Players had to eliminate the rogue members of the FOXHOUND squad, rescue hostages and defeat Metal Gear Rex. The story was retold in 2004 with Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes for the Gamecube, with new cutscenes, replay options and game mechanics. Now, Hideo Kojima and Konami are graphically re-examining the Shadow Moses incident for a third time with the Metal Gear Solid Digital Graphic Novel.

Unlike the previous two installments, the Digital Graphic Novel really isn't a game; it's more like a visual interactive experience that depicts the incidents of Shadow Moses in a graphic novel format. The entire disc is broken down into three modes: the VR Simulation mode, the Mental Search mode and the Memory Building Simulation mode. The VR Simulation mode is the primary thrust of the title, and starts up almost immediately once the disc has been loaded. Running about two hours long, The VR Simulation mode is comprised solely from images by Ashley Wood, an Australian artist who is rather familiar with the Metal Gear Solid universe (he's drawn the official comic book for years).

Wood's Expressionistic images are presented in two separate ways: normal pages are somewhat akin to those you might find in a comic book or graphic novel. For the most part, these pages are used to explore story and transitional elements between areas. The other way is by movie sequences that often roll through multiple frames and break out of the standard "comic" convention to bring action sequences or dramatic moments to life. It's fascinating to note how Wood's visual style changes from page to page -- some of the normal pages are roughly drawn, while others are more photorealistic or visually evocative. Some of the action movies eschew detail in favor of faster moving animation and the emphasis words to point out what's going on: the "Bang" of a pistol or the rapid "Budda-Budda" flashing words of machine gun fire comes to mind. Although there are sound effects and a soundtrack to match up with the images onscreen, there is practically no dialogue: in fact, you'll only hear some laughter or grunts for the most part.

While viewers of the Simulation mode can choose to have the sequence automatically run from start to finish, there's a specific reason to manually turn each page. Scattered throughout the VR Simulation are a number of icons, items and objects known as Memory Elements that pertain to Snake's mission and the Shadow Moses incident itself. By hitting the Square Button at any point, you enter the Mental Search mode, where you'll be able to zoom in and out of the current scene (from 100% to 300% of the normal magnification) to find and collect these items. This mode gives you two separate tools to help you track down these hidden elements. The first one is the zooming cursor itself. The closer you get to an item (or group of items), the faster the cursor will rotate. The other way is a graph known as the sync rate. The more peaks you happen to see on the graph and where they happen to be located on the chart lets you know if there's something on a page you've already passed, hidden on the current page you're on or if there's something coming up in the next few pages.

Searching for all of these Memory Elements can be a meticulous process: I once spent about six hours in the Mental Search mode analyzing just about every pixel in the various scenes to collect as many elements as I could. I discovered that there are some scenes, particularly with close up shots, where the analog nub on the PSP wasn't as precise as I would've liked it to be -- the cursor will sometimes slide all over the place depending on how close you zoom in, which can frustrate you in your acquisition of these items.
You'll also discover that no matter how closely you analyze the video, you can't discover every single element with only one viewing of the novel. Many of these items remain locked or hidden until you release them via the Memory Building Simulation mode, which lets you connect seemingly disparate memories and items together to gain a full sense of what happened on Snake's mission. The Memory Building mode is a matrix that starts with Solid Snake as a central point, and branches out from there based on the elements you've collected. Every item has its own briefing which will help you connect them to other elements, forming entire memory groups that can unlock flashbacks or hidden items in the VR simulation, as well as open new branches on the matrix itself.

There is a bit of detective work to accurately complete each section, and you can accidentally connect elements that aren't related to each other. This will prematurely close off the matrix and restrict you from discovering everything. The mode will alert you to an improper connection so you have an idea to break and reconnect the right items together, but this can be somewhat tricky -- when you're starting out with 20 or 30 elements, it's somewhat easier to figure out what's wrong and fix it. When you have 80 to 100 or more on the matrix, finding which connection is wrong becomes increasingly harder to do, especially because the previously tied together items don't get cleared off of the screen. Once you've spent a lot of time, you may find that the wrong one is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Searching for an obscure or missing item for the matrix after a long period of connecting items may start to feel a bit tedious as well. To a degree, you can attempt to bookmark certain areas of the novel to return to, which would make leaping back and forth a bit easier. However, I found that the disc didn't necessarily retain bookmarks every time I used the disc. I also found that it was sometimes easier and quicker to use the page index to leap to any particular section of the novel instead of relying on the bookmarks, rendering that feature useless.

Closing Comments
Visually striking, the Metal Gear Solid Digital Graphic Novel is an excellent way to tell the story of the Shadow Moses Incident, and hopefully the other stories of the series will see this kind of translation. While it isn't exactly a game, it's not exactly a movie either thanks to the interactive elements and the memory matrix. It's probably not for everyone either; if you're a hardcore fan, you'll really like this experience, but otherwise, you may only casually watch the disc once or twice before you put it down.

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