What is Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots?

Released worldwide in June 2008 as a PlayStation 3 exclusive, Guns of the Patriots was billed as the conclusion of Solid Snake's story, and it behaves like one: nearly every surviving character and loose thread from three games returns, from Meryl and Raiden to Eva and Big Boss himself, in a plot about who controls the battlefield when war itself has become a business system, the war economy.

The play spaces widened into open battlefields in the Middle East and South America where Snake threads between warring factions, aided by the OctoCamo suit that copies surfaces, the Solid Eye device and a weapons market run by the arms dealer Drebin. The famous set pieces escalate to a return to Shadow Moses, rendered as nostalgia inside the fiction, and a final duel staged as a history of the series' own controls and music.

The game was a technical flagship, sold with PlayStation 3 bundles including a gunmetal console in Japan and a limited hardware bundle in the West, and it won major awards while dividing opinion over its very long cutscenes, one of which approaches feature film length on its own. It also shipped with Metal Gear Online, later shut down, leaving the single player as the preserved core.

Uniquely in the modern series, Metal Gear Solid 4 has never been ported: it remains a PlayStation 3 only game, absent from the first Master Collection and the subject of constant re-release speculation. That exclusivity shapes its market: the PlayStation 3 disc, in standard, limited and bundle forms across regions, is the only physical way to own it, and the limited edition's extra disc and figure goods make it the PS3 era's Metal Gear centerpiece.

Guides were commensurate with the finale: large official guides in Japan and the West, plus a limited edition guide in the West, documenting a game full of one time events and hidden items. Pair the guide to the disc and the pair documents the end of an era, because nothing after it plays its role.