Returning to MGS4 in 2025: A Retrospective

[NateDog]

I assume the version of "Here's to You" they recorded was meant for the original ending?  Snake and Otacon being executed ties in to the lyrics well enough.  If there's one word I wouldn't associate with Zero and Big Boss, it would be 'innocent'. 

Not that they could have afforded it, but I think the perfect end song would have been The Beatles' Let it Be.  Connects perfectly with the 'let the world be as it is' mantra, as well as the notion of a departed mother (The Boss) giving some much needed guidance.

As far as I know, yes. Knowing Kojima it was a creative decision that he decided upon early and didn't want to let it go. I suppose you could argue it still has some significance, not the same as it would have had had the original ending stuck of course especially as Otacon can live his life now, but given what Otacon and Snake had had to endure over the years together (whether it be from the very beginning of their relationship at Shadow Moses or the eventual creation of Philanthropy and their being villainised) and the impact it had on their lives, they still had to face years of punishment.

[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.