Update: You can watch SNEAKING now! We share the music video and the original article below.
Konami has come up with an interesting new way to promote the pending release of Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1.
Vtuber Mori Calliope has revealed on Twitter that she has a collaboration song to commemorate the anthology’s launch, fittingly titled SNEAKING.
Mori Calliope is one of the older Vtubers to go around, having launched as part of hololive English -Myth- in 2020. This generation of virtual idols are essentially mythological creatures. Her biography describes her as the 1st apprentice of the Grim Reaper.
The funny premise here is, the Grim Reaper actually doesn’t do as business as he used to, because of the advancements of modern medicine. Calliope chose to become a Vtuber to be able to harvest souls that way.
It’s all very strange backstory, and part of that idiosyncratic lore that pervades fandom culture. But the funny part to that is, that makes Mori Calliope the perfect figure to do this exact kind of collaboration with Metal Gear Solid.
In a twisted way, the Metal Gear Solid series is itself all about death. Not only do the lives of private military contractors and soldiers like the Boss, Big Boss, Solid Snake, and Liquid Snake, all revolve around risking their own lives, and killing. There’s also the matter that death is itself a major theme in the Metal Gear Solid series, and arguably one of its great motifs.
The Boss’ death herself is a precipitating factor that leads to the creation of Outer Heaven, and is central to the sequence of events that runs through all the Metal Gear games. Subsequently, many of the other individual games have plots that go along because one of the other characters is trying to avoid death. And perhaps the most pernicious trope used in this series is that of the characters who seemingly come back from the dead, or perhaps to be more accurate, fake their own deaths.
Mori Calliope’s single SNEAKING isn’t actually live yet, but it will be on October 20, 2023, on 2 AM PT. For now, you can watch a little snippet of the music video, which uses a lot of imagery from the Metal Gear games, and starts off with Mori glibly singing the lines “Kept you waiting, huh?” It certainly sounds like this will be both the funniest and most annoying collab Metal Gear has had since Rumble Roses’ Reiko Hinomoto appeared as a playable CO in Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence’s online mode.
Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 is releasing on October 24, 2023, to PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows via Steam.
