Part 12: Metal Gear Part Twelve: End of the Line

Metal Gear Part Twelve: End of the Line


If you'll recall, Snake is currently hanging around the elevator in building 3.


The one that goes down 100 floors to the basement where Metal Gear is supposed to be. I hope this elevator is faster than the one in my building, or else Snake would be on it for hours.


Now we're back in the basement. You can probably see the cameras here, and you're probably saying "but Cool Ghost, you said you were done with sneaking, so what the fuck is up with that?"


Well, instead of calling guards, these cameras just shoot goddamned lasers at Snake. You have to go in front of them to progress, so just be on the other side of the room, because lasers take off about a third of your health at class 4.


This is the last POW of the game, and he has some important news for us:


Wow, thanks man. "The Boss is the commander-in chief". I'm just gonna go over here and think about that for a second.

Just joking, he has more to say.



This is it. This is the big plot twist in Metal Gear. Big Boss is the traitor. I'm sure this was really surprising and pretty groundbreaking (as far as plot goes) in 1987. 25 years later, though? 25 years later, it falls kind of flat. Big Boss was pretty useless and disconnected during this whole mission, so I don't feel too betrayed, and Snake is the next best thing to a silent protagonist in this game, so he seems pretty chill with it.

We still have work to do, though, so let's go do it.


This is the room on the other side of the basement. There's no way around it, you're getting hit by both of those cameras. Snake doesn't have enough room to move past the lasers. Of course, if you didn't stock up on rations before going to fight the final bosses, what the hell is wrong with you?



Big Boss also decides to give Snake a call in this room, trying to get him to give up the ghost. Probably would have worked better if Snake didn't know he was a no-good dirty traitor.

A lot of you probably recognise this order from Metal Gear Solid 2, where the Colonel tells you to do the same thing after he starts going crazy. About half of his lines in that part of the game come from earlier games in the series (he reprises the intro of this game, too, for example) and the other half are nonsense.


Laser cameras aren't fooled by Snake's shenanigans.


You can see here how much damage laser cameras do. I was just short of full health when I headed to the basement. You can also see me use card 8 here. Every item in the game is needed to finish it, except for the binoculars, cardboard box, body armour, and mine detector. I'd say it's pretty good design, overall.


The next room is full of gas, because Big Boss decided that it was too hard to have actual people guard the way to Metal Gear. There's only one door out of here, so let's check it out.


It's a dead end (with a pit trap that you should never, ever trigger), but there's a passage down to the left. How do you get there?


Use the Solid Snake special and just blow up the wall, is how. Metal Gear doesn't really feature a wide variety of techniques for progression.


There's a pit trap in the middle of the room here, but there's plenty of room on either side to get past it. The early parts of this game can get pretty difficult because your items are limited and you don't have a lot of health, but the endgame is pretty .


This next room just looks empty, right?


You should know better than that by now. It's actually a minefield! Filled with poison gas! When you have the mine detector equipped, you don't have the gas mask equipped, so you take damage.


Your best bet is going along the west wall most of the way, then avoiding the one mine on that path. Or just eating a ration and sucking up the damage. You can carry 12 rations, and the only way you'll need all of them is if you really shit the bed at some point.


Alright, next room has an electric floor. Outer Heaven is really pulling out all the stops except for just putting fifteen guys with guns between Snake and Metal Gear. It's almost like Big Boss wants Snake to get there and destroy his nuke mech.

Anyhow, this electric floor presents a problem: it doesn't have a control panel, so Snake can't shut it down. Thankfully, Jennifer calls:


Unlike later games, the electric floor doesn't just damage Snake and push him back, so you can chow down on a ration and then run across. You should have just enough health to make it, unless you get careless. There have been much harder parts in this game.


Past the electric floor, you find the titular Metal Gear.


This is Metal Gear's music.

The manual has a bunch of stuff on Metal Gear:


So yeah, if you read the manual, it kind of spoils the plot point of what Metal Gear is. The general design for Metal Gear has changed from 1987, where it looks kind of slapdash, as opposed to REX or RAY, which looked more imposing and solid. Poor TX-55 was also made a lot less threatening by retcons. I think the Shagohod in MGS3 had better specs than it.

With that said, let's blow this thing up! (Boss Video)

Metal Gear, as a boss, is less of a boss and more of a puzzle. Its only defence is the pair of laser cameras mounted on the wall behind it. Laser cameras hit hard, but should only hit you at close range (and you should be carrying half a dozen rations besides). The hard part is simply remembering the sequence you need to place the explosives on its feet in. You need to place 16 and Pettrovich told you 15 of them earlier, so you're gonna need to guess on that last one, or just use a guide. The sequence is:


Right.


Right.


Left.


Right.


Left.


Left.


Right.


Left.


Left.


Right.


Right.


Left.


Right.


Left.


Right.


Right.

And I did the whole thing without even getting hit.

(I fucked this up so many times that by the end, I'd actually memorised the order of the bombs.)




After you plant the bombs, Metal Gear blows up and alarms start going off all over the place. Looks like it's time to get the hell out of dodge!


First, though, you'll want to equip your rocket launcher.



Because in the next room is Big Boss!


So, Big Boss's plan with this whole mission was to give Snake false information to take back with him, and then he would (presumably) blow up everybody else with Metal Gear. (Remember, this is pre-MGS3 Big Boss, he's not supposed to be sympathetic.)

You know what would have made this plan go a lot smoother? Actually providing Snake with some false information. The only people who gave Snake anything that wasn't 100% true were two POWs while he was looking for Pettrovich. Even the fake Pettrovich pointed Snake right to the genuine article. Maybe instead of telling Snake where Metal Gear was, you should have told him where fifty of your men were, Big Boss? Or maybe just had him killed back when you captured him in building one, back when the guy was looking for Grey Fox? Was Grey Fox working for you this whole time? Because if he had been, maybe he could have come with Snake and just offed him when he got too far.

There are a couple holes in Big Boss's master plan, is what I'm saying here.


Big Boss is pretty cool about the whole issue, though, and just decides to kill Snake and then die himself, even though he probably has time to escape. You gotta prioritise, man!

Big Boss chose...poorly. (Boss Video)


You can call Jennifer at this point. Using the cigarettes like the rations adds 2,000 units to the timer. I'm a dangerous person who lives on the edge, so I don't do this. There's plenty of time to kill the old man.


Calling Diane gives you this, but that's not the interesting part of the call.  You kill Big Boss by shooting him in the face with a rocket launcher. 


This is the interesting part. I looked at a script dump, and this can also be translated as Diane straight-up telling Snake she's in love with him. I guess Steve's suspicions weren't as crazy as I thought, even though Snake's only said seven words to her the entire time and they've never seen each other. Dude just has a really sexy voice, I guess.


Shoot Big Boss with the rocket launcher enough times and he dies, opening the door at the back of the room. What's back there?


Once Big Boss dies, this plays.


Ladders. Only one of these goes to the surface. We were told which one it was by Jennifer's brother, after we rescued him from Coward Duck. Can you remember which one it was?

 The left ladder is the correct ladder. 


The middle ladder is the first to end, one screen up.


The right is next. You might have enough time to fuck this up, then go back and choose the right ladder, but I've never checked.

By the way, Metal Gear was 100 floors underground. This means that Snake has to climb somewhere between 800 and 1,500 feet (probably). This really seems like a bad way to make your emergency exit, but I'd say that Big Boss wasn't much for planning ahead.


This is the endgame music, which plays as the game winds down.


Once you reach the surface, Snake runs away. Outer Heaven turned out to actually be in the void of space, though, so he dies instantly and you get a game over.


That's not really true. I guess the MSX just couldn't render a full graphic of the area and the animation of Outer Heaven exploding. Once Snake runs a bit and the timer runs out, the fortress is engulfed in a nuclear explosion.


Snake turns to look back at his handiwork. Snake, don't you know that cool guys never look back?


Snake doesn't give a shit about what cool guys do, though, and Outer Heaven explodes again.



His work done, Solid Snake calls command. But who is he calling? Is he just sort of hoping that someone else picks up the radio and sends out a transport for him?

WHATEVER, MISSION COMPLETE.



The radio then automatically switches over to another frequency, where they tell us that there was a big earthquake near Garzburg. I guess that's where Outer Heaven was meant to be. Did nobody see the two nuclear explosions, though? I don't think nuclear explosions are just an everyday thing in South Africa.

Then it plays the credits, but I couldn't get the credits to capture without making the game absolutely shit its pants and crash, so you'll have to deal with a text form.


That's it for the game. It just cuts to black after the credits.

Thanks for reading and come back in a little bit, when I start into Snake's Revenge.