Returning to MGS4 in 2025: A Retrospective

[Dirty Duck]

They should have gone with the original ending. I’ll die on this hill

Why do you think it’s better than what we got? It feels a bit bleak and needlessly harsh to me.

In a story about soldiers being disposable tools of war, it feels right that the ultimate soldier meets a soldier's fate.

But it’s a story that opposes that. The player and Snake spend the length of the game fighting against this system that gets to decide whether soldiers, and the rest of society too, live or die. To then submit to a fate decided by a similar, albeit smaller scale, structure of power would feel wrong. Snake’s character arc has always been about the pain of surviving on after doing terrible things, and the call to do what’s right. He is the true inheritor of The Boss’ will without ever trying to be but unlike her he doesn’t just accept dying because a government says he has to. He chooses to live the short amount of time he has left his own man, deciding his own fate at the end of a life dictated by the actions of others.