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Review - Metal Gear Solid: The Novel

posted by nikki at 11:23 am.

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Yes, I know this is a gaming blog, but I’m writing a book report anyway. So…. you remember that Metal Gear Solid book that came out awhile back?

Let me tell you, it was pretty corny. Granted, I wasn’t really expecting much from something that tries to condense a 40 hour video game into a scant 336 pages. Unfortunately, it was a lot worse that I’d thought it would be… not only because it reads like a transcript of the game (right down to the phrase “his trademark punch-punch-kick combo” being used more times than I cared to count), but also because it really didn’t give much life to any of the characters.

I guess if you just wanted to brush up on the story, it’s fine… although some of the additions the author makes are entirely unnecessary… like the gratuitous mention of the 9/11 attacks, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the dialog on that page, or the cheesy jokes that were thrown in at random.

The novel seems to be written very much for readers who are too lazy to play the game all the way through. The author might just as well have written a walkthrough for the game and posted it to gameFAQs.com. You can literally tell where every cutscene, every boss battle, and every shift in gameplay occurs… mostly because there is no smooth transition between any of them. One moment Snake is sneaking around, the next, a boss is challenging him, and then they fight.

It also suffers from one of my biggest pet peeves in literature. “Intelligent”-sounding words that aren’t especially common in everyday language (or even in popular literature, for that matter), thrown in, seemingly at random… usually during an inner monolog or description of action being taken or planned. A couple times I actually had to go back and reread a sentence because the use of language was just so odd and out of place for the tone of the story at that point.

In the end, I made it through the book (which wasn’t really that much of an effort… 336 pages is short to begin with, and it has large print) before I made it through the game (I’d started MGS about a week before the book arrived). The book could have been halfway decent, if the author hadn’t written it from the game almost directly. I do realize there’s a significant level of difficultly involved in novelizing something that is primarily visual, like a movie or a video game, but this one was just poorly done in so many respects that it’s hardly worth the effort unless you don’t plan on ever playing MGS but need to know the plot for some reason.

Nikki Blight: is still trying to find that damn princess... when she's not writing fresh code for the217.com.