>>202
Kojima just likes recycling scenes. Now that I think of it a lot of games from that era were the same. The first three Resident Evil games share virtually identical sequences too. Like the way all Star Wars movies have signiature set pieces. The real problem is how messy and convoluted the plot becomes. I took it as the Rashomon effect and postmodern hyperreality. Since the story is always revealed through different characters explanations and monologues, they are all just explaining their own subjective point of view and interpretation of what they think is really happening instead of objective reality. They are all more or less unreliable narrators.

But MGS4 is where things go wrong because it contradicts all the previous games on factual grounds. Solid Snake was killed off at the end of the tanker scenario in MGS2 and all the characters Raiden meets are revealed to be a simulation. But suddenly in MGS4 they're all back again and all of them are real and they're all related to people from MGS3. That one game just screws up the entire lore of the series.

I always thought the Patriots were basically a placeholder for the US shadow empire (the way Godzilla was used to represent nukes) and its schemes to manipulate and control the world rather than a Godlike entity that controls everything. Its more like samurai movies where there's this overarching idea of fate and humans (even powerful groups like the Patriots) are all foolish creatures playing games of power with each other that are doomed to fail while Heaven or Buddha silently watch. The only good guys are noble samurai regardless of whose side they are on.