Part 42: Metal Gear 2 Part Twenty-Three: Shut Up, Old Man

Metal Gear 2 Part Twenty-Three: Shut Up, Old Man


Well, here we are. We've killed Grey Fox and there's the cartridge. All Snake has to do now is get out of Zanzibar Land and he can go home to his crippling PTSD.



Once he grabs the cartridge, though, a ghost starts yelling at him.


The ghost also opens a door. If it hadn't, I guess the rest of this game would just be Snake standing around until he died of starvation.



Through the door is a hallway and the ghost yelling again. Calm down, ghost, nobody likes a pushy spectre.

The geometry here is Euclidean, at least, even if this isn't quite what a hallway is used for.


Through the hallway, we find Green Beret Man's brother, the sinister Red Beret Man.


And he sees us, too. What's worse, he has a gun. All Snake has right now are burns and injuries.


Oh, I guess it's Big Boss.


Sean Connery IS Big Boss.

He was less "stopped" by Snake than he was "shot in the face with an RPG a dozen times and left to die in Outer Heaven's double explosion self-destruct" but shit, I don't know. Big Boss has no reason to be in this game and it's dumb that he's here.

: Snake...welcome to Zanzibar Land.

Big Boss, you are incredibly late with that. Pretty much the latest that any person has ever been.

: You've come back to me, just as I thought you would...

What? What are you talking about? Please explain in the form of a speech.


Snake, this doesn't make sense either. You came to Zanzibar Land for OILIX. You had no reason to believe Big Boss was here, and even after Schneider told you, you had no reason to believe Big Boss was here, and every reason to believe Schneider was full of shit.

Oh, Snake has pretty bad PTSD from Outer Heaven, just throwin' that out there.

: They have haunted me the last 3 years...

Constant nightmares, intense guilt, that kind of thing. The kind of issues that can shape a character, especially a battle-hardened professional killer like Snake. Good thing the game never brought this up until right before the very end.

: Nightmares? No way to exorcise, Snake...he who experiences the joy and tension of battle... ..will place himself battlefields for the rest of his life.

Engrish aside, Big Boss is just getting back to the theme that soldiers can't ever leave the battlefield behind. This is the first time it's been extended beyond the East-West division of the Cold War, though. This would tie it in to Snake's PTSD really nicely if a)we knew Snake was born in '72 (putting him at 18 in 1990, just in time for the Cold War to end) and b)Snake's PTSD was mentioned before this conversation.

: Once the battle instinct surfaces it never sleeps again.

Thanks for explaining that some more, Big Boss. I wasn't really sure what you meant at first.

: What solely can fill your desire is not power, money nor sex. There's only one thing...war!

Yeah, I get it. You have strong feelings about war, man. Why aren't you telling Snake about how you're not pushing up daisies or something?

: And I am providing it. Giving you a means to live.
: A pseudo-virtue man?

Snake calls Big Boss out here. Big Boss is full of shit and any reasonable person knows it.

: You've seen those children? Victims of war, from many nations...and budding soldiers for the next war.

Instead of rehabilitation and reintegration, Big Boss is obsessed with the idea of always having a war to fight.

: Ploy, assist, make victims...nurse and train...and back to the battlefield again...conflicts will never die in this world. Our goal...and also a way of living.

Also, this. This soldier husbandry thing. He's taking the war orphans, raising them and training them as an army so that he can do the whole thing over again. Or, well, so they can do the who thing again. Big Boss is, like, 80 years old. Odds are he won't even see the Zanzibar kids get their driver's licences.

: Without war, you'd be out of your job. Is that what you are saying?!

For Big Boss, it goes a little deeper than that. He's singularly dedicated to war. He defines himself by war. He's a war fanatic. I guess this is what you get when you build your entire worldview around having PTSD.

: You and me, though rare value in the battlefield.. ...are just useless dummies back home.

Big Boss, you're a useless dummy here. You are a crazy old man who can't let go of his glory days.

: We belong in the battlefield. We'll stay there until we die miserably.
: I have only one battle. To be free from you, to rid myself of the nightmares...Big Boss, I will defeat you!

Snake still doesn't buy into Big Boss's horseshit.

: Whoever wins, the battle will not end. The loser shall be freed from the battlefield...but the winner stays. He'll be a warrior until his death.

Big Boss, shut the fuck up.

: There are exceptions. I...love life.

Even though they're tortured, Snake takes the opposite side from Big Boss. He's determined that he can be freed from war if he just finishes up in Zanzibar Land. Even if Big Boss is right and they're cut from the same cloth, Snake still won't just give up.

: Snake...I shall free you from your agony. My gratefulness as your former supervisor...
: I don't need your help!

Snake and I want the same thing here. This is a long speech and Big Boss's ideals are dumb as hell. He's just another crazy bad guy who thinks he's good. He's not deep or ambiguous, he's just long-winded.

: In such a situation, without a single weapon...against me? You dare say you have a chance?!

He's old and delusional and unstable. No comment is ever made on how he manages to run Zanzibar Land, but I don't think he really does. I think that Grey Fox is the de facto leader of the country. He might not be the president in title, but he seemed much more together than Big Boss does.

Of course, Grey Fox did some things so stupendously stupid that they got him killed from a position of basically unassailable power over Solid Snake, so there's that.

: Never give up until the end...in any cornered situation, imagine success.

Snake, Miller's going to be mad that you're stealing his line.

: You've said that yourself...
: Even I sometimes make mistakes...

Big Boss, you've just been making one mistake over and over for the last 30 years.


This is finally the end of the man's speech and the technical beginning of the fight against him.

Big Boss's theme:



By the way, "Homestuck" is a genre on tindeck all to itself. I think that's kind of dumb. Has nothing to do with the matter at hand, but there you go.

Next time on Metal Gear 2, the actual Big Boss fight.