Describing 999's Best Ending - Part 1

999:  Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors was a weird one for me, all told.  I played it.  I enjoyed it.  I got the True Ending and suddenly I didn't really care for it, despite liking it while I played it.  This has happened before and it's a weird feeling, a feeling that I do not understand the source, nor the reason for it.  If anything, I imagine I was left wanting a little more, perhaps, or I felt a little jilted with what's there.  Also the True Ending has....a bit to it that kind of wrecks the mood.  However, soured a little by that, I proceeded to talk to Haplo about it in a non-spoilery way for a while and then he told me, "Look, I'm probably not going to play the game, so go ahead and spoil it".  And I said, "Well, to understand the True Ending, you have to get another ending first."  It's a weird concept to be sure, but it's there for reasons I will not divulge right yet.  A strange thing happened when I started telling Haplo of this first ending.

I really got into it.  An excitement for the game I didn't know existed started welling up in me, burned at me as I explained subtle nuances of the game, things it made sure you knew at this point and that.  I fell in love with the game for the first time because I found an intense verve with which I began telling the story of this ending.  Rather, this playthrough the leads to the ending since the ending doesn't make sense, or an impact on its own merits.  The story took a good few hours at least to tell, which is rather astounding (even with a bit of audience participation, as it were) and before I knew it, it was a wee hour in the morning and I hadn't written a blog post here.  (Of course, the previous lack was because I was entranced with the game, steeped in finding the final ending)  So I was thinking about it today, a way to make it up, and I realized "Well, I really enjoyed telling that....so I'll tell it again!" except I'll tell it here and tell it better since I admittedly did a poor job at times with Haplo.  To save myself some trouble, I'm going to be doing it in a few parts.

I believe it goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway.  Beyond the Page Break (which is right after this blurb) are MASSIVE 999 Spoilers!  If only for this ending, I recommend that you play the game yourself rather than take my account as your exposure.  Because it is rather fantastic.  I will, however be explaining it rather thoroughly (hopefully) so if you must read this rather than play the game yourself, I do hope you'll be able to appreciate it.  Still, a spoiler warning is a spoiler warning and thus you have been warned.

At Ease, Soldier - Metal Gear Online is Retiring

As is always the case with online offerings for video games, they go up and eventually are taken down when the playerbase is small enough that they can't really justify keeping the servers up any longer.  The period of time between release and ending is always different, and for Metal Gear Online, the multiplayer experience that came packaged with Metal Gear Solid 4:  Guns of the Patriots, that end date is July 12th, 2012, exactly four years to the day that it first came out.  Or....July 21st, 2012 if you'd rather believe Joystiq over Siliconera.  (Protip:  Joystiq is sourcing from Kotaku, thus, don't believe Joystiq.)  Although, perhaps it's something different between the Japanese and North American versions of the game or some such shennanigans.  Whatever, I'm going with the 12th because that's much more thematic, okay?

This is a shame, in all reality, since Metal Gear Online had the potential to be really, really really fun, provided the perfect storm of things happened.  Either you played a game with all your friends (and indeed, managed to get in the same game with them) so you could just dick around, or you could find the one game out of dozens that wasn't hard-trenched into styles of play that you would never know exist unless you frequented Message Boards where these types gathered and launched into games from.  At least, that's what I'm assuming why there was a particular dearth of information on this 'Prison Escape" game type that I found myself playing on one of the few occasions that I actually loaded up MGO.  It was apparently more of an Role-Playing focused gametype in which you had a certain amount of the people be 'guards' who were allowed to use guns and stuff, and the rest were 'prisoners' who were relegated to being in a particular location and only allowed to use CQC.

All of the above was inter-personally mandated, of course, and as such was completely unenforceable, so you had to demand compliance to these rules or kick the people who didn't want to indulge from the game which, of course, required a vote.  It was a really, really simple matter to just really inconvenience these games and while I never did that myself, it happened in the game I was in, further confusing me as to what in the world was going on.  I left, obviously, to find a game that played Metal Gear Online as if it were Metal Gear Online, and while I'm not adverse to trying different types of things in MP games, really playing with the limitations put in place or the lack there of, I wasn't really too fussed to get shot to death yet again by a 'guard' after very nearly escaping the arbitrary building we were relegated to.

Regardless, there was some real fun to be found when you actually played Metal Gear Online as intended, and I do have quite a few fond memories of playing it.  No real stand-out times, really, just generally all the times I didn't suck at the game which were few and far between because, as I quickly learned, the people that played MGO played it because they were good at it.  While I'm not going to say it was prohibitive, it wasn't the easiest community to jump in and play with either and, being rather new to the online scene as I was (and still kind of am), it made it that much more difficult.  Though I suppose in retrospect, it makes my victories that much grander now, since not only was I overcoming the newness of it, but I was overcoming people who weren't as green as I was.  Though I guess the majority of it could be contributed to luck, namely of the beginner's variety, but still.

Regardless, there is apparently going to be some incentive to play up until you can't if you go by Siliconera's information.  According to them, the expansion packs and such that have been released for cost will be unlocked for free on April 24th, allowing for about a full month and a half of playing with these free toys before they're locked to you forever.  I'm not really clear on exactly what Expansion packs will be unlocked, but I would suspect all of them, unless some of them are simply taken down, rather than being sold or handed out for free which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.  So perhaps playing as Raiden, Vamp, Ocelot or the other premium characters will be possible, or perhaps not, I guess we'll just see.  I'll probably keep an eye out for it, but likely won't join in the festivities myself; the community update downloads will likely be far too much for me.  Still, I hope everyone that wants to has a good ol' time with Metal Gear Online 2.0 while it lasts and we eagerly wait for Metal Gear Online 3.0, whenever that comes out.