Finishing the Fight: The Greatest Final Battle

A lot of games have some pretty heated and legendary rivalries. Mario vs. Bowser, Link vs. Ganon, Cloud vs. Sephiroth, etc. But there is not a single final battle that is as amazing and brilliant as Solid Snake and Revolver/Liquid Ocelot. Final battles are meant to develop over entire games, sometimes an entire series of games, but when they finish off, they might not be as amazing as you’d hoped. Sometimes the final boss isn’t REALLY the final boss, and there’s actually ANOTHER one waiting to take you down. Sometimes the final boss morphs into something unfamiliar. What is truly rare is going one on one against your equal.

In Metal Gear Solid, Snake first faces Revolver Ocelot on Shadow Moses. They engage in an epic gunfight, like the old west, and the battle ends with Ocelot losing his hand at the hands of a cyborg ninja.

In Metal Gear Solid 2, Ocelot is back, having Solid Snake’s clone, Liquid Snake’s, arm grafted onto his own as a replacement. Under the split personality of himself and Liquid, Ocelot destroys a ship that Snake is on, leaving him to die. The two clash several times for the rest of the game, with Ocelot behind the events of many other events. It was getting heated.

He is one bad dude.

In Metal Gear Solid 3, we go back in time and see that Ocelot, as a teenager, clashed several times with Snake’s father, Big Boss. This was now going back generations.

Once Metal Gear Solid 4 hit, the very end of the series, Ocelot had gone crazy. Having his personality completely taken over by his arm, he is on a massive quest to basically control the world’s army. He practically kills Snake, kills those close to him, and destroys a lot of lives and places in the world.

Then it all comes to a close.

Snake vs. Liquid

The two soldiers, on top of a ship, finally meet, one on one. Snake has ruined Ocelot’s plans, destroyed the evil takeover, and lived to tell the tale. Ocelot, with nothing left to lose, takes on Snake in a fight to the death.

What takes place is nothing short of magical. A one on one fist fight, nothing else. No guns, no shooting, no cover, no stealth. For a game known for sneaking around and heavy firefights, the final battle is a very close, very personal fight. Starting off as Liquid, you slowly beat the Liquid out of him until he is just Ocelot. Fists flying, takedowns, a little bit of wrestling, and music from throughout the series playing as the fight goes on, this is an amazing and perfect culmination of everything the series has done.

No games do this. The final battle is always some giant monster or something infinitely more powerful than you. But nothing makes a battle more intense than going up against your perfect equal. One man vs. one man, a rivalry built up literally over years (Revolver Ocelot was introduced to the series in 1998, and the series finished in 2008), one last fight to the finish.

Any other game would have had Ocelot turn into some kind of monster at the end, or had something to stack the odds up against Snake. But Hideo Kojima’s masterpiece, Metal Gear Solid 4, made the final boss fight as personal and emotional as you could ever imagine, and as a result it was easily the greatest final boss fight of all time.

If you have never played the series, do it. Start with Metal Gear Solid on the PSOne, then Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 on the PS2, and finish off with Metal Gear Solid 4 on the PS3. It is some of the best in-game storytelling ever created, mixed with incredible gameplay, mind-blowing visuals (even the original game’s visuals hold up pretty well), and some very inventive and clever mechanics. And the stories all connect so well, and have so many running themes about life itself, that you would be hard pressed to find another series that is so solid (no pun intended) as a whole.

So yeah. Take 80 hours of your life and play through the entire series. It’s one game that proves that video games can be an infinitely more rewarding medium than anything else.

1 comment August 7th, 2009