Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots/YMMV


 * Author's Saving Throw: Two. The main one was Kojima's attempt to turn the much-ridiculed "magic hand" plotline into something remotely sensible (which more or less worked), but a lesser one was a bone of contention from MGS1: it was belived by MGS2's non-direct mention of Meryl that Snake had cracked under Ocelot's torture, the "Otacon" ending was canon and Meryl was dead, which fans thought hugely out of character for Snake.
 * That said, some fans felt that  greatly cheapened the character.
 * Best Level Ever: Twin Suns..
 * That's pretty good, but that gets a lot of points for nostalgia and fan service. How about the fact that the first two acts are literally convincing versions of sneaking through a war zone? The last act also features a deck of a ship filled with the most intelligent and powerful enemies in the game, a Gekko that practically has to be destroyed in order to progress, and Drebbin's shop is always 50% off at that part of the game? That not only makes it one of the single hardest parts of the entire series to get through without being seen at all (and boy is it satisfying when you pull that off,) but it's also incentive to just load up on bullets and go apeshit.
 * Big Lipped Alligator Moment:
 * It appears on-screen for all of three seconds, after which it is never seen or mentioned again.
 * In the final act,
 * Chewing the Scenery: Jennifer Hale as Naomi Hunter during Naomi's.
 * Liquid Ocelot constantly hams it up throughout the game. Especially during act 3.
 * Continuity Lock Out: Anyone jumping right to this game without playing the previous ones will have absolutely no idea what's going on, with the game constantly introducing characters and concepts whose true signifigance won't be clear at all without prior knowledge of the series, right from the get-go. This is presumably why the MGS4 Database was released, so that series newcomers could consult the database to catch up on the previous titles.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: See here.
 * 8.8:
 * Combined with Critical Dissonance. The game received high, but not spectacular scores; however, almost every reviewer mentioned they would have given MGS4 a perfect score if not for those long cutscenes. Of course, for most fans who have grown emotionally attached to the characters and followed the storyline throughout the series, long cutscenes aren't necessarily a bad thing.
 * In retrospect, the Critical Dissonance now works in reverse - the game has received considerable Hype Backlash in the years following its release and now has a sizable hatedom, in contrast with its generally positive critical impressions.
 * Even Better Sequel: The graphics are flashier, the cast of characters is bigger, the boring codec sequences have been replaced with cool cinematic sequences, and the gameplay is much more varied than in previous games. But what really secures Metal Gear Solid 4 Guns of the Patriots's Even Better Sequel status is the scale. For emphasis, each of the previous Metal Gear games took place over the course of a single mission, with The Hero progressing through a series of areas in the mission site. This one takes place over the course of four missions, which are in four different continents. And the standard Stealth Based Game formula has been greatly shaken up, with the gameplay featuring everything from gun battles in war-torn cities to smackdowns between Humongous Mechas.
 * Fan Nickname: "Movie Gear Solid", for its high Story to Gameplay Ratio.
 * Game Breaker:
 * In the third stage, you're supposed to be disguised as Young Snake and sneak past the guards while tailing your mark. If you switch your face camo to anyone else, though, everyone in the entire level ignores you.
 * Stay close to the Resistance Fighter when he's disguised as a PMC soldier. Not only does he ignore you, but the mercs in the area do, too - especially since there's a humvee in the area that makes rounds every so often. It also depends on whether or not you've got a gun equipped.
 * When fighting Crying Wolf,
 * A major oversight occurred when prize matches for Automatching first came out in Metal Gear Online. It made Automatching much more attractive, with the potential to receive up to 400 reward points (points which you can spend on in-game gear for your character) for winning a Deathmatch game. However, in the case of a tie, both players will win the points. Players quickly realized that if everyone agreed to not do anything for the whole five minute match, everyone would get 400 points. Players farmed for thousands of points for a week until the next update, which lowered the amount of points earned to 200 points and awarded no points for ties.
 * One gun towers over all others: The M 14 BER. Breaking tradition, not every gun in the game insta-kills with a headshot, but this one still does. It has a very large magazine, uses common ammo, and can be silenced. It also feautres full-auto as well as single-shots modes, so you can still use it in close combat, with about as much power as the M4. The scope means that those half-screen headshots you used to be so proud of with the pistol in MGS 2 and MGS 3 are now ridiculously easy, so you can pop off a few headshots and immediately remove whatever "sneaking" you might've had to do. The real kicker though? It's a Disc One Nuke. It's so early that you can often buy it immediately after meeting Drebin with the points you earn retroactively from everything before meeting him because it's so damn cheap.
 * Goddamn Bats: Goddamn Scarabs! Imagine a tiny, three-armed robot (often holding a gun in one hand) capable of rolling around, hanging onto a wall to act like a security camera, and grabbing onto you to deliver an electric shock. Now imagine dozens of these little bastards climbing all over you because you triggered an alert. For bonus irritation points, they're small enough that it's easy to not notice them the same way you'd notice a tall human, and you could wind up wandering right into their path. Chaff grenades, the one thing that can stun machines in this franchise, are also extremely rare in this game.
 * I Knew It!:
 * Magnificent Bastard: Do you even need to ask? Ocelot was already a Magnificent Bastard in Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater but with this game, he became one of the most magnificent bastards in all of fiction.
 * Memetic Mutation:
 * "MGS 4 is the best movie I've ever seen!"
 * "Wow, I bet you could make a cool videogame out of this cutscene!"
 * The tagline "War has changed" being directly contentious to Fallout's famous tagline, "War never changes".
 * "NINE AND A HALF HOURS OF CUTSCENES"
 * "NANOMACHINES!"
 * Narm: See Metal Gear.
 * Nightmare Fuel:
 * The Patriots' use of
 * Laughing Octopus. Everything she does is disturbing as hell. Laughing uncontrollably while killing people is bad enough, but some stuff is just wrong, like imitating Old Snake's face (while still using her own voice) during a session of killing a bunch of prisoners. Her boss fight makes full use of her ability to imitate nearly anything with her octopus-like mimicry, also leading into Paranoia Fuel as you try to hunt her down. The music that accompanies her is also appropriately disturbing.
 * ...unless you use night vision during the battle. Not only does she show up on your radar, but she also glows just like regular, non-camouflaged enemies. To be fair, this does make the fight considerably less fun and not a whole lot easier.
 * Vamp's overall appearance is much more unsettling now than when we last saw him; an unhealthy skin color, nasty-looking veins in his face, red eyes, and the scar from the gunshot wound he received to the head in Sons of Liberty, before his healing was nano-enhanced to fix such wounds instantly and without reminders. He's also got a necklace of dogtags which appears to be his current method of counting kills, although these could be Dead Cell's tags; the number is right if you count Fortune's husband, Chinaman and Old Boy.
 * One True Pairing: The ending
 * Protection From Editors: Kojima rather obviously had this during the production of the game. Whether it made the final product better or worse is something of an open question.
 * Rescued From the Scrappy Heap: In many people's minds, Raiden after he Took a Level In Badass.
 * Scrappy Level: Third Sun doesn't get very much love, thanks to its very high Story to Gameplay Ratio, starting out with a long, slow trailing sequence which leads into a series of long, exposition-heavy, retcon-laden cutscenes. Many players felt that the action sequence after said cutscenes, along with the following boss fight, redeemed it a little bit.
 * Shocking Swerve:.
 * Tear Jerker:
 * So many, but the biggest have to be  and of course, the microwave hallway.
 * ALL of "Naked Sin". All of it.
 * So in other words, the tears will start at the microwave hallway and go all the way to end of a two-hour long ending. Meaning you'll be shedding tears for around 3 hours.
 * That One Boss:
 * Vamp. If you go into the battle without knowing how to properly execute a CQC hold then you can be totally screwed, as failing to execute the hold exactly right at a critical moment of the battle will result in Vamp just knocking you flying, regenerating all his health and continuing the battle. Ditto if you don't realise that the syringe is an equippable combat item.
 * The Suicide Gekkos. How can you even pay attention to them when there's a ninja knife fight taking up the right half of the screen?
 * They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Some fans claimed the improved shooting mechanics and the ability to buy limitless amounts of ammo from Drebin at any time turned MGS4 from stealth game to a third-person shooter with stealth elements. Of course, you can still be shot to pieces easily if you don't watch yourself, even on normal difficulty, so stealth is still required, especially if you're in a heavy combat zone between two different groups, both of which will shoot you.
 * Voodoo Shark: Let's just say Your Mileage May Vary - significantly - as to whether the explanation offered for Ocelot's "ghost arm" makes that particular plot point better or exponentially more ridiculous.
 * Wangst:
 * One of Raiden's lines in particular.
 * Not to mention the backstories of the B&B Corps, which Chip Cheezum summed up as being like a series of Aristocrats jokes without the punchlines.
 * Wham! Line: Famous Last Words: ""
 * The Woobie: Many.
 * B&B Corps: It varies whether you find their backstories woobify them or cross into outright silliness. Drebin's apparent omniscience certainly doesn't help with the latter.
 * Old Snake: Aging at an accelerated rate thanks to, Old Snake also has to cope with his growing irrelevance and the fact that he
 * And then...there's the microwave hallway.
 * Otacon: In particular,.
 * Raiden: In addition to all the stuff he had to deal within in the second game, Raiden now has to deal with having been tortured beyond human capacity, turned into a cyborg killing machine (ala Grey Fox), seeing his girlfriend go off and marry the much older Colonel, and coping with the fact that their unborn child died in a miscarriage..