The Greatest Twist In Video Game History Is A Lie

Such a great video essay, Ms gamechamp ❤ I just come back to it every time you release a new video 😂

First Appearance: Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty.
First Referenced/Mentioned: Metal Gear Ghost Babel.

I think I finally understand the deal with Kojima.(never played any of his games, just heard they're really weird)

I fixed the wiki page 😂

Wow...I've healed person beef with Raiden for YEARS. I can now forgive him and Hideo Kajima

Gosh dangit this video has melted my brain

this whole vid kinda felt like a cool lore tidbit about ghost babel (Raiden sort of being name dropped at the end of it) turned into a whole lot of nothing. Sometime after the 1/3rd or 1/2 mark of the video this just devolves into nonsense that i had to rewatch just to make sure if i had really gotten nothing out of it or not. Yes, its cool that Raiden is name dropped in GB, and that GB came out before mgs2, but if you just played that one cutscene of Snake saying Raiden's identity isn't important it would have saved me 10-12 minutes of my life.

Constantly feeding us half truths and then 5 minutes later revealing it was a lie and there's more to the story, reminds me of MGS 2.

Play Ghost Babel first in the series… got it.

Got an idea from that "only play games in order" thing

Lobotomy Corp
But only 1 employee per department

But big boss is named John but referred to as jack by the boss in mgs3 snake eater cause another name for John is jack just like another name for william is bill or for richard is dick so it could have been big boss of another timeline and if you think about the fact that it is in the style of metal Gear and metal Gear 2 solid snake it's possible that it's big boss of another timeline but thanks to Konami spiting in the face of the goose that lays the golden eggs we may never know

It would be really funny if the entire Ghost Babel was one big VR simulation for Raiden and was technically sort of canon.

chills twice and i'm not even halfway through the video

Man, I love this series so much

wth the hell

bro is losing his mind and i love it

wouldn’t that just make it his first reference not appearance? I feel like u made the difference in this diction way more complicated than it had to be. We play those extra missions from the perspective as if we were Jack but are only referred to as that character. Since he doesn’t actually appear and it’s only meant to foreshadow/ build up his actual appearance… it’s just a reference!??!?

I played the entire MGS series when I was younger, minus the NES games. I was an expert on Metal Gear lore and all the plot twists, or so I thought. I don't think I even knew Ghost Babbel existed. Crazy because I owned a Game Boy (still do!) and could have definitely played the game.

Eventually when we got to MGS4 the plot twists just got infinitely more ridiculous. Like Big Boss survived until the end? Really? Still haven't played MGS5, I can only imagine what ridiculousness they managed to do with that. But I digress.

Gamechamp is hilarious. I could listen to him talk about anything.

mgs2 was my first metal gear game and poor little 7 year old me didn't understand shit and stopped playing after about 4 hours 😂

now I'm wishing i kept playing it

The second half of this video was a joy.
Witnessing MGS twist peoples brain into a pretzel never gets old 😂

My head hurts

Is it bad I completely understood the Link segment?

Little me: wtf... where is bandana dude from pizza hut demo...

I'm gonna be honest, I was half expecting at the very end for it to be revealed that Ghost Babel wasnt even a real game. Now that would've been a twist.

dead pool talking 😂

This reminds me of how nearly nobody counts Portable Ops, because of that one time Kojima said that the canon games were the ones directed, written and produced by him, even though he said it was complicated. And there's multiple references to it in later games. And PO even states "this is an official mission ... for now".
Kojima also said "do as me, betray your audience"
Take everything he says with a grain of salt, as this is a series about lies, betrayal and conspiracies

I know nearly nothing about MGS other than Ocelot is incredibly gay and some plot points my friend rambled at me for hours
I tried watching this video but I'm about halfway through and this is getting too meta, my brain is frying xD

Subscribed and then unsubscribed in the span of one video. Get help dude.

I'd say it's just an easter egg. The same way there is an easter egg for ghost babel in mgs2 via the poster in one of the shells.

You know, I've never played Metal Gear before, but I get the distinct impression that playing it would feel distinctly similar to watching this video.
'Behold, the narrative'
'Oh, did you trust the narrative? You were mistaken.'
'Oh, did you trust the twist we just hit you with? Just because we acted like we had secret information?'
'Oh, but-
And on it goes.

This video reminds me of the old old school BDG Unraveled videos.
A good time all round.

Wow this is more complex and more of a "fuck you you didn't play the supplementary material" than KH with Chain of Memories being in between KH and KHII

Since we're being nuanced and speculative, lets dig deeper.
Raiden was not in Ghost Babel. Jack was in Ghost Babel.

He received the codename Raiden at the start of the Big Shell mission, removing his previous codename of Snake. Which was probably a moniker he took on after completing "300 VR Missions" as Snake. Making Raiden the person who is now taking on the Big Shell mission with the VR training under his belt.

Who is Jack? We don't know. Even Jack is a new name given to him after he was trained as a child soldier and went to war. Ostensibly, whoever and whatever he was before being Jack is an allegory for us. It is who we were before we played the games, and through those experiences became changed. To what extent...everyone is different.

Every time the person currently known at Raiden takes on new formative experiences he's given a new name. The end scene you chose perfectly illustrates that, "The memories you have and the role you were assigned are burdens you had to carry." Does Jack's V/R training qualify as real memories or real experience? Does the experience we had playing the games qualify as real?

Does it matter? Those are experiences and memories that shape us to this day. But they don't define us. We can still choose what forward looks like.

And to add pedantics to nuance. Is Ghost Babel Canon? In what context? Does it have bearing on snake and the main plot of the MGS series? Seemingly not, so it's non-canoncial as far as the core MGS storyline is concerned. But it could be canon as far as the story of the protagonist that came to be known as Raiden. I'm playing devil's advocate here, but if Kojima felt like playing games then lets play games too.

Does that make Raiden actually Jack junior?🤔

🤯🤯🤯

By that logic, Bigboss is a baby daddy.BECAUSE OF THE FLINGWITHEVAIN1964PAZQUIETANDJACKANDDAVIDANDELIARESIBLINGS
ANDMGSVITPPISSABOUT QUIETAND BIGBOSSHAVINGDADDDYDAUGHTERQUALITYTIMEWHICHMEANSRAIDEN/SOLID SNAKEMAYMAYNOTHAVEATWINSISTERWHOMAYHAVEBECOMESNIPERWOLF
I rest my case.
I believe you.
And I didn’t even play ghost babel.
ROFLMAO😂😂😂😂

I love the you have surpassed that of solid snake and the rank was terrible lol

Oh, you want the extra cherry on top? play the Japanese version. it's not Jack in the VR mission dialogue.

I don't think it counts as an appearance. You play the missions he played and someone speaks to him, but he didn't appear. He had no corporeal form, no tangible or intangible presence. He was not there. If Jack was in Ghost Babel, then Miller was in MGS1.

Yea this was super disappointing and i was annoyed and hated raiden and didnt want to play as him and kept hoping snake would take over, couldnt stand raiden until metal gear revengeance and that totally flipped and love him now

It's understandable most people wouldn't know or even remember a single throwaway line in a GBC release's post-game side-mode.

Congratulations. You have stumbled into Hideo Kojima's greatest Story telling tool the get around Konami's expectations maneuver! I'd write out a whole essay of my own in a comment to describe this literary device but needless to say is that the whole Secret Protagonist thing was likely something he hid from Konami execs at the time and could get away with by saying, "The Main character of MGS2 is a recuring character from the franchise." and since there's really only three characters that could be up till that point in the main series games, well execs probably didn't think anything of it. He probably did this as one of his mini rebellions against the overbearing control and demands of Konami that he just produce another Metal Gear game when Kojima by that point was already starting to feel a bit of Burnout on the series.

I want to talk about how some of the games psycho mantis could talk about while he read your memory card where not even planned to be released before mgs1 and that it was done as a way to let the Kojima team feel like they where including some of their fellow Konami developers in their work and how most of those games have features that Kojima wanted to at least work with in his own games but that opens up room for meta debates in a game that's already a meta debate about identity and the ability for others to tell you who you are so much that you lose sight of who you want to be.

Hey so it looks like the Toxic work culture of Konami actually did push their staff to find ways to open up about it without making it obvious.

How many ways can you say Raiden first appeared in Ghost Babel?

This video could be summed up in 5 minutes

In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the malfunctioning Colonel AI will call Raiden and give him a mission briefing for infiltrating the fortress Galuade.

Fun fact. Metal Gear Wiki mentions this on the page for Ghost Babel and links the name Jack to the Raiden page.

I'm sure this got mentioned somewhere else in the comment section, but Ghost Babel is actively referenced in MGS2 as well. When the Colonel AI goes haywire, one of the calls you can get is THAT version of the Colonel explaining Snake's mission to "Infiltrate the Fortress Galuade". This only brings up to question if it was another simulation that the Colonel had planned, or if it's referencing a previous moment in Jack's history and training, or if it's just spouting absolute nonsense. I mean, it also pretends to be Big Boss for Operation Intrude N313, and THAT was real ... right???

I don't think anybody was playing Ghost Babel so when the game came out people only really knew MGS1. BUT that's the point. People were still going to be cheated by the information they see. If they remove them selves from the pre existing narrative they hear they too can find the truth.

I thought MGS2 Raiden was cool when I was a kid because I liked swords and I really liked his battle with solidus. When I got to the end I saw him as his own character and a bad ass in his own right unconnected from Solid Snake. But I think a lot of people don't think that way. They believe their own narrative about the character and that he was always a loser but he got cool after MGS2 but if you stop believing their narrative you can realize your own opinion.