Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops

Gameplay

Unlike the previous titles on PSP, Metal Gear Acid and Metal Gear Acid 2, which were turn-based tactical games with stealth elements, MPO retains the action-based gameplay from the console iterations, drawing heavily from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and utilizing the camera system from the Subsistence edition of the game.

The main addition to MPO is the Comrade System. Instead of the solo missions of previous MGS games, MPO goes for a squad-based approach, with Snake having to recruit allies and form a team of trained specialists. Before each mission, the player must compose a four-man squad. The squad is then sent into battle. Each member of Snake's squad has his or her own strengths and weaknesses. While some units are best utilized on the battlefield, others may specialize in producing items, healing allies, or providing intel for each of the game's maps.

During missions, the player controls only one squad member at a time. Squad members not in use will hide themselves inside a cardboard box, and can be swapped into play when the player-controlled character finds a hiding spot, where he or she will hide in a cardboard box.

A variety of methods can be employed to expand one's squad. If an enemy character is tranquilized or stunned, they can be dragged to a waiting vehicle and captured. After a few in-game days, the captured soldier will become a member of Snake's team. The player can also drag enemy characters to any ally waiting in a cardboard box, where, through the use of a transceiver frequency, or by giving the cardboard box a "nudge", the ally will transport the enemy for the player, saving stamina. Alternatively, by accessing the PSP in certain hotspots using the system's Wi-Fi feature, soldiers and even special bonus characters can be recruited. The PSP GPS Receiver can also be used to similar effect. Since the player's team consists primarily of former enemy soldiers and personnel, generic characters can walk among their own kind undetected as long as the player avoids suspicious actions such as pointing a gun or being spotted by an enemy of another type. Characters that can be recruited by the player include Soviet soldiers, FOX unit members, high-ranking officers, scientists, engineers and government officials. In addition to the standard male characters, the player can recruit and control women scientists and officers as well. The player can also recruit the GRU, KGB and Ocelot unit soldiers from MGS3, but these are only attainable by AP Scan.

Characters who are killed in combat are eliminated from the player's squad permanently. "Unique characters" (i.e. characters important to the game's story, who can only be added into the player's squad by fulfilling certain tasks) are exempt from this rule. If a unique character is wounded in combat, they are sent to an infirmary to recover, making them unusable for a few in-game days. The player can also restart or abort a mission at any moment.

Another new feature is the surround indicator added to the game's HUD. Similar to the radar in previous titles, the surround indicator allows players to determine the relative proximity of enemy soldiers by the noises they make. The surround indicator is composed of two circles; the outer circle displays the noises made by enemies and inner circle displays noises made by the player's character.

The game contains a Wi-Fi-enabled multiplayer mode, which is an expansion of the "Metal Gear Online" mode previously featured in Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence. The player's performance in the Online Mode may affect his or her performance in the single player campaign; the player can recruit and trade soldiers from beaten opponents, or vice versa. Additionally, certain multiplayer options result in recruits being removed from the one's single player roster permanently.

In contrast to the console games in the series, the cutscenes that drive the story are not rendered using the usual real time engine. Instead, they are presented using an animated comic style consisting of hand-drawn artwork by artist Ashley Wood. This style was previously utilized in Metal Gear Solid: Digital Graphic Novel. The game also features voice acting, consisting of returning cast members from Snake Eater and new actors. However, the number of cutscenes and voiced sections are minimal, due to the PSP's UMD storage capacity constraints.

Setting

Portable Ops takes place in 1970, six years after Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. It follows the soldier Naked Snake (David Hayter/Akio Ōtsuka) who is forced to fight off his former unit, FOX, after they instigate a revolt in a South American base. In his fight he meets Roy Campbell (David Agranov/Toshio Furukawa), a surviving member of the Green Berets team that was sent to investigate the affair. Snake's former teammates including his commanding officer Major Zero (Jim Piddock/Banjō Ginga), Para-Medic (Heather Halley/Houko Kuwashima) and Sigint (James C. Mathis III/Keiji Fujiwara) return as the support crew as they are suspected for treason alongside Snake.

The main antagonist is Gene (Steven Blum/Norio Wakamoto), the current commander of the FOX unit who seeks to establish his own military nation. He is a product of the Successor Project that aimed to artificially create the perfect commander, patterned after The Boss. He is assisted by Lt. Cunningham (Noah Nelson/Daisuke Gōri), an expert in interrogation techniques. (who is later revealed to be a double agent of the Pentagon sent to tarnish the CIA's reputation) Gene also has a protégé named Elisa (Tara Strong/Saori Goto) who is gifted with extraordinary psychic abilities, implied to be the result of exposure to nuclear fallout during the Kyshtym disaster. Elisa suffers from dissociative identity disorder and has a developed a second personality called "Ursula", whose psychic abilities are stronger than her "Elisa" personality. As "Ursula", she works as a member of FOX, while her "Elisa" personality is a medic who takes care of Null and an informant for Snake. Snake meets Elisa, who initially tells Snake that she and Ursula are twin sisters, only to later learn the truth. Two FOX members previously associated with Snake include Null (Larc Spies/Jun Fukuyama), a teenage assassin trained to be the perfect soldier. and Python (Dwight Schultz/Yusaku Yara), a former war buddy of Snake who was previously presumed dead during the Vietnam War.

Other characters include Ghost (Brian Cummings/Naoki Tatsuta), an informant who comes into contact with Snake, revealing the existence of ICBMG, the new Metal Gear prototype, Ocelot (Josh Keaton/Takumi Yamazaki), a former Spetsnaz Major who assists Gene from behind-the-scenes, EVA (Vanessa Marshall/Misa Watanabe), a spy for the PLA who assisted Snake in Snake Eater and Raikov (Charlie Schlatter/Kenyu Horiuchi), a GRU Major. Teliko Friedman (Kari Wahlgren/Yūko Nagashima) and Venus (Kathryn Fiore/Rika Komatsu), the heroines from Metal Gear Acid and Metal Gear Acid 2 respectively, can both be added to the player's squad by either: completing certain side-missions or by starting the second playthrough with save data from their respective games.

Story

In 1970, six years after the events of Snake Eater, Naked Snake's former team, FOX unit, has broken their allegiance with the CIA and gone rogue. Snake is also targeted by the FOX unit, which has sent renegade FOX unit soldiers to capture him. The game begins with the torture and interrogation of Snake by one of the FOX members, Lieutenant Cunningham. Lt. Cunningham is trying to locate the missing half of the Philosopher's Legacy, with the United States Government having already acquired the other half of the Legacy from the Soviet Union at the conclusion of Snake Eater. Snake is imprisoned in a cell next to Roy Campbell, the sole survivor of an American Green Beret team sent in to investigate the base. Snake learns through Roy that they are on the San Hieronymo Peninsula (a Russian transliteration of "San Jerónimo Peninsula") or "La Península de los Muertos", the site of an abandoned Soviet missile silo in Colombia.

The two escape and Snake makes his way to a communications base, where he attempts to contact his old CO, Major Zero. Instead, he is greeted by his old FOX comrades Para-Medic and Sigint, who reveal that Snake and Zero are being charged for treason and that the only way for Snake to be exonerated from the charges is to find and apprehend the leader of the rebellion, Gene. To complicate matters, Gene has also convinced most of the Soviet soldiers stationed at the base to join their side by simply taking over the chain of command belonging to a Soviet unit which was secretly stationed inside the Colombian territory. In order to complete his mission, Snake must persuade enemy soldiers to join his ranks due to the scale of his mission.

Snake and his squad defeat the top members of the FOX unit and eventually they make their way into Gene's guesthouse. Snake learns many things on his way. Cunningham was working for the Pentagon and wanted Snake to push Gene into launching a nuke at the Soviet Union to tarnish the CIA's reputation and to prolong the Cold War. Gene was actually aware of this plan from the beginning due to information from Ocelot. Gene really wanted to launch a nuke at America to destroy the Philosophers and to make his nation of soldiers, "Army's Heaven". Snake destroys an experimental model of the ICBMG (the Metal Gear model) codenamed RAXA and eventually defeats Gene, destroying the finished ICBMG model afterward. After Gene is defeated he gives Snake the funds, equipment, personnel, and all other information regarding "Army's Heaven". On his return home, Snake is awarded for his actions, he then establishes FOXHOUND afterwards. Elsewhere, Ocelot kills the DCI (Director of Central Intelligence) and takes documents containing the identities of the Philosophers in an effort to "end them".

In the post-credits epilogue, Ocelot speaks with an unknown man on the phone, they are plotting to use the Legacy to fulfill their own agenda. Ocelot actually wanted the trajectory data of the nuke to point to the DCI, in order to black mail the DCI into giving Ocelot the documents containing the true identities of the Philosophers. Ocelot agrees to join his new employer's project under the condition that Snake/Big Boss participates as well.

Development

The game was conceptualized when the Kojima Productions staff decided to make the first Metal Gear Solid chapter rather than another spin-off for the PlayStation Portable. Hideo Kojima had the idea of the player being able to recruit comrades with the Wi-Fi play. As a result, the game was specifically designed for a portable platform, rather than a home console. Most of the staff had previously worked in the spin-off Metal Gear Acid 2 making Portable Ops their first time doing a main installment. Their biggest challenge was adapting the play mechanics from Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence (the latest console installment at the time) to Portable Ops as the PlayStation Portable lacked a right analog. Since players cannot spin the camera with the PlayStation Portable the game was added a sound indicator system that helps them to see where there are enemies. Impressed with Ashley Wood's work in Metal Gear Solid: Digital Graphic Novel the studio asked his collaboration to illustrate the events accompanied with voice-overs from the story replacing the typical use of real time graphics previously used for cutscenes.

Placement in the series' canon

MPO is notably the first Metal Gear game for a portable platform that was written to be part of the series' main continuity. However, the game was not directed nor written by Hideo Kojima (who at the time was leading the development of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots on PlayStation 3), but by a separate team led by Masahiro Yamamoto and written by Japanese language novelist Gakuto Mikumo. The marketing for MPO attempted to distance the game from prior Metal Gear entries on portable platforms, particularly the 2D action game Metal Gear: Ghost Babel for the Game Boy Color and the turn-based Metal Gear Acid series also on PSP (both which were set in their own alternate continuity), with one promotional video on the official English website (narrated by Ryan Payton, Kojima Productions' international coordinator at the time) referring to MPO as "a true action-based chapter in the Metal Gear Saga." This would carry over with the promotion of the series' 20th Anniversary campaign, in which MPO was packaged alongside the three mainline MGS games at the time as part of a box set released in Japan, and later on with the release of MGS4, in which the Metal Gear Solid 4: Database (a downloadable encyclopedia for the PS3 covering the lore of the Metal Gear series up to that point) include entries for characters, items and events depicted in MPO.

This would change when Kojima started the development of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (or MGSPW), a later action-based entry also released on the PSP. Unlike MPO, MGSPW was directed and written by Kojima, much like the numbered console entries of the series. While set four years after the events of MPO, MGSPW is written as a direct sequel to MGS3 and the events of MPO are only acknowledged by a certain character once. Kojima describes MGSPW as a true mainline installment in the series, contrasting it with MPO and the Acid series (which he regards as spinoffs or side-stories). The official timelines and retrospectives published by Kojima Productions since then tend to omit MPO as a canonical entry, with the 25th Anniversary page going as far as to describe MGSPW as the "first game in the canonical Metal Gear Saga released for the PlayStation Portable platform", while the summary of MGSPW on the main page describing Metal Gear ZEKE as the "world's first Metal Gear." Kojima would later clarify his stance on MPO, saying that he views the series' canon from an authoritative status, setting apart the Metal Gear games that he personally worked on (which carry the "A Hideo Kojima Game" byline) from the games that he only worked on as a producer or didn't have a direct involvement in its development.

Release

The game was first released in North America on December 5, 2006. In Japan, it was released two weeks later, on December 21, in two limited edition packages, with both of them sharing most of its unique bonus content, such as a special camouflage for the PlayStation Portable, as well as a set of three original lapel pins.

In Europe, the game was set to be released in April, yet it was delayed for a month. In the United Kingdom, the game could only be released on May 25, 2007, after it was revealed that the required BBFC rating was missing, forcing retailers to send back their stocks. The added features for the European release included new maps for the single-player campaign and multiplayer mode, characters, missions, player careers, as well as a new "Boss Rush" mode.

On November 1, 2009, the game was released on the PlayStation Network for download on the PSP in all three regions.

Soundtrack

The musical score of Portable Ops was composed by Norihiko Hibino, Takahiro Izutani, Yoshitaka Suzuki, Kazuma Jinnouchi, Nobuko Toda and Akihiro Honda. The ending theme ("Calling To The Night") was composed by Akihiro Honda and arranged by Norihiko Hibino and Akihiro Honda, with vocals by Natasha Farrow and lyrics by Nobuko Toda. "Calling to the Night" was later featured in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots as an iPod track, and Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. Brawl as one of the songs played on the Shadow Moses Island stage. Recently the song was adopted in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker as a playable in-game track via the Walkman tool. The soundtrack was first released in Japan on December 20, 2006.

Reception

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops received positive reviews. The game scored an average of 86.95% based on 43 reviews on GameRankings and an 87/100 based on 54 reviews on Metacritic. IGN and GameSpot in particular both awarded the game 9 out of 10.

The game sold 230,321 copies after two weeks on sale in Japan.

Portable Ops Plus

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops Plus (officially abbreviated MPO+) is a stand-alone expansion of the original MPO, focused primarily on online play. It was first announced on July 17, 2007 and was released in Japan on September 20, 2007, in North America on November 13, 2007 and in Europe on March 28, 2008. A digital version was released on the PlayStation Store in 2009.

MPO+ include new general and unique character types from other MGS titles, as well as new items and weapons, new multiplayer maps, and new game modes. While MPO+ does not require the original MPO, players who have save data from the original game can transfer their squad to the expansion and any unique character that the players recruit in the original MPO since their initial save file was created will be added automatically in MPO+ if detected. The following changes have been made to the game.