Game Anatomy: Fulton Extractions

Oh God, I hope this one makes sense.

All right, so, it’s no surprise that Metal Gear Solid 5: the Phantom Pain has been one of my favorite games in years.  Dark Souls III might actually begin to overtake that, or at least get close to it, but I do know that both are going to wind up in my top 10 games of all time, because they’re both rad as shit.  However, I think one thing that I feel like doesn’t get discussed enough about MGS 5 is the fulton extractions.

Image copyright Gamepressure and Konami. This article may, or may not, have been written simply to post an image that looks like this

So, a lot of MGS 5 is based on kidnapping people, doing something to them, and then making them a part of your mercenary army.  Then, the more you have, and the better they are, the better your army is.  The better your army is, the better Snake is at his job.  It’s possible to play the game without ever upgrading your weapons, but you’re going to be at a severe disadvantage, among other things, but even having access to the cooler weapons and multiple ways of approaching the game requires a better support team.  This is completely ignoring that it costs money to even play the game (in game money) and without a successful mercenary company raking in the dough, it’s hard to actually get involved, and the best way to get the best soldiers is to kidnap them.

One of the things that MGS has always tried to do was encourage a nonlethal playthrough.  Partially, this is done to subvert player expectations and genre conventions, which actually does a good job of making a deeper story.  Snake, whether we’re talking Big Boss, Solid or Raiden (he briefly had the codename), are not traditional action heroes.  They don’t quip, they don’t really like killing (except Raiden, and, well, he doesn’t like that part of himself) and they have more in common with Sam Vimes than they do with James Bond, ironically.  It’s also to tie in to the thematics, which are about how soldiers, despite ostinsibly being trained to be killers, are still people, even if the world uses them up and tries to make them into something else.  This is part of the reason people don’t actually like the story of Metal Gear Rising.  The idea here is to create an action hero who is genuinely heroic and moral, even if they’re not exactly good people.  Big Boss wants to create a horrible hellscape, but he himself has a sense of honor, Raiden wishes to overcome his darker urges and Snake, well, Solid Snake is just a genuinely good guy.  This is why Big Boss is convinced that Snake wouldn’t have made the same choices he had.  Big Boss is right, by the way, but that’s not the scope of this article.

Since the second Metal Gear Solid, the game has attempted to incentivize  pacifist runs through various means, whether an unlock, different cutscenes or changes to dialogue (which even appears in the first game).  MGS 5 manages to get it right.  Technically, this first appeared in Peace Walker, but Peace Walker’s Militaries San Frontiers lacks a lot of the technical depth of Diamond Dogs, and that’s why the fulton recovery is so central to the game, and to the themes of the series.  Snake is trying to help people.  It’s a broken and twisted way of doing it, but Outer Heaven, and the Mother Bases that precede, are supposed to be havens for soldiers who have nowhere else to go.  It’s sort of an after school activity for wayward soldiers.  Whatever it is to say about Diamond Dogs, they’re at least more heroic than Rogue Coyote (murder children) and the Soviet Army (read history), and it manages to give the soldiers you take at least something positive for them to work for.  Snake is legitimately trying to make the world a better place, he’s just kind of doing it in a ass backwards kind of way.

Legitimately trying to make the world a better place.  Image copyright IGN and Konami

In order to ensure you actually do this, though, the game does a really good job of making the players actually want to kidnap people.  First, this means equipping nonlethal weapons.  This means that the player is somewhat limited in their approaches, since explosives are right out (for the most part…), and it also means that the games will be a lot harder, especially if you get caught by the Long Range Recon Patrol dudes, who were my bane in Afghanistan.  However, by doing this, and making a point of using nonlethal or CQC attacks, the player is rewarded by increasing the power of their armies.  Powering up the army leads to new weapons, like the rocket arm and the nonlethal rocket storm, new weapons for buddies, like a silent tranquilizer rifle for Quiet, and new abilities and approaches, like the ability to alter the goddamn weather.

Sure, killing all the bad guys might be easier, and a lot of them probably deserve it, but there is a better way.  It’s not perfect, but it is for the themes of the game, and what the series is trying to say about people and soldiers.