This is what I get for not taking notes properly or not rewatching cutscenes before I write my squeeful gaming posts: I forget approximately half of what I wanted to say. <.< Here's the rest of it, before I pounce on the second act and forget my points altogether.

In which Otacon overanalyses Snake's motives so that I don't have to.


- Pressing the select button no longer brings up the codec screen. (It’s now part of the main menu you get when you press Start.) That’s the one button change that really makes me go :( because I liked that Select was always, always, always the Codec button – always expect once, when the support team could do nothing to help and when pressing select would set you on the Bad Ending path of the first game. (Hello euphemism!) The same button you usually use to call for help. I loved that symbolism and now it’s gone. Bawww.

- I’m… also not terribly happy with the whole Liquid thing. It was amusing enough in MS2 because damn, he’s really harder to kill than a cockroach, but couldn’t he have taken over someone who isn’t Ocelot? Sorry Liquid, but kitten is a far more effective villain than you ever were. (I will happily shut up if the game actually manages to do something interesting with Liquid, but for now I’m hoping that my intuition from MGS3 (i.e. kitten being the final boss of this game one way or another) is right and that we haven’t seen the last of Ocelot.
But honestly? I’m completely certain that we’ll see more of Ocelot too, even if he isn’t the final boss. You don’t create a character like that and bother giving him so much backstory/screentime in the prequel if you don’t intend to do anything else with him. That, and all his fancy plotting has to lead somewhere.

(And while we’re on the topic of Liquid and Ocelot, I have to admit that I never quite got why Snake is so obsessed with catching Liquid anyway. Catching Ocelot, now that would make sense, but Liquid? Oh well. As it is now, it’ll be two birds with one stone anyway.)

- Snake is now using CQC. (Which stands simply for close quarter combat but apparently stands for the specific kind of close quarter combat that is generally associated with Big Boss and which we’ve seen him use in MGS3.) I wondered briefly why he’d start now when he hadn’t used any in the previous games (Yeah, I know, he didn’t because it wasn’t programmed in. I mean from a character standpoint.) but forgot about it again until Otacon brought it up in the only Codec conversation so far where they don’t focus exclusively on Plot or the battle system. Otacon remarks that by now, everyone is using CQC, and for half a sentence I saw myself writing a paragraph about it in my next MGS post, overanalysing that line and stating that I believe that the reason why Snake does it now of all times is because now it’s no longer just Big Boss’s signature but as it turns out, I don’t have to: Otacon comes up with the same explanation.

“Because it’s no longer just his.” Because it’s no longer something that Snake associates exclusively with his mentor. Because it no longer just means using an ability taught to him by a mentor who betrayed him. Snake doesn’t quite deny that but has his own explanation too: Everyone is using it, but they’re not as good at it than he himself is because they learned it by reading about it while he learned it by doing, from Big Boss himself. Hello, seemingly ongoing motif of the game! (see also: soldiers with experience and soldiers with nanomachines)

- Damnit, I knew I should’ve paid more attention to Meryl in the first game. Why is she “still wearing the Foxhound logo?” Why would she wear it in the first place, considering that’s where the first game’s villains, and Big Boss himself, came from? Because it was also her uncle’s father’s unit? Because it was also Snake’s?

- Somewhere in their Plot-related conversation, Drebin teases Snake, “Scared of needles?” I actually told my TV “Yeah, we’re a leetle bit apprehensive about them.” out loud. XD (Well, I’m not, but of course Snake would be. Hello Naomi and FoxDie, how are you today?)

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