7. Metal Gear Solid 4
All throughout the game, Solid Snake is slowly dying. Nobody truly knows why, the cloners botched the job, and nobody can reverse it. Rapid aging. Snake is doomed, and takes on one last mission to take on mad man Liquid Ocelot, possessed by Snake’s brothers… Severed arm. Yeah that makes not too much sense. Video games! And then at the very end of the game, Snake goes away to kill himself because he doesn’t die fast enough for his taste.
And then he doesn’t die, but Big Boss comes along and talks him out of it. Nice job daddy. Too bad the final exposition dump turns half of the game’s events upside down, and robs us of the telegraphed death of Snake, taking away so much of the game’s built up pathos around the hero we were all sure would die at the end. He would have deserved this. Now he’s doomed to linger on. And that’s the actual tragedy.
