Despite rave reviews across the board, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain has ended up one of the most divisive entries in the franchise, if not the most divisive. This is a game that puts both Metal Gear Solid 2 and 4 to shame when it comes to fan backlash. That said, time was kind to those games (the former more so,) so time may be kind to Metal Gear Solid 5 as well.
If nothing else, fans seem to be coming around to Venom Snake, Big Boss’ literal body double, and the game’s actual protagonist. While Venom is yet another clone of Big Boss, (in more of a mental sense than a physical one) the fact that he had an entire life before becoming a clone makes him a far more interesting character as a result. In many respects, he’s The Phantom Pain’s silver lining.
Updated on July 19, 2023 by Jake Fillery: Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain was filled with answers surrounding the Metal Gear series, but also a fairly considerable amount of new questions to sprout up. Now that Hideo Kojima seems done with the franchise due to his treatment at Konami, it’s fair to say that perhaps fans of the Metal Gear series will never know the true intention behind Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, and its most integral character, Venom Snake. With the announcement of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, many fans are adamant that the series will further tie itself together in a neat bow, allowing new fans to better understand the story. Perhaps there will even be ties to Venom Snake, a character that fans might not know everything about.
14 The Snake That Fell In Love
Love stories are integral to the Metal Gear series. The first Metal Gear Solid game asks the question “Do you think love can bloom even on a battlefield?” This question is answered in Metal Gear Solid 5 with the blossoming romance that grows in the bond between Quiet and Venom Snake. Big Boss would never allow himself to be compromised for the sake of emotion. Ever since Eva, it seems that Big Boss has kept himself quiet on the romantic front.
However, Venom Snake doesn’t know Eva, and his lack of memories makes it a fresh start for Big Boss to find what every heart craves. The relationship between Quiet and Venom Snake is short-lived, beautiful, and equal parts tragic. It’s a shame the characters never got to be happy together, but that’s war, and these two are entwined within that eternal combat.
13 Killed By Solid Snake
One of the loose ends that Hideo Kojima masterfully ties up in Metal Gear Solid 5 comes from the original Metal Gear game, in which the protagonist, Solid Snake, kills Big Boss. For years, players just assumed that Big Boss faked his death, but the game made it pretty clear that he was dead. However, players get to find out that this Big Boss was indeed Venom Snake, a hand-crafted, manipulated Big Boss who died for the cause, and for his true leader without Solid Snake ever knowing the truth.
Solid Snake has been involved in the death of the entire bloodline of Snakes. Whether it’s his brothers, Liquid Snake or Solidus Snake, or even the approaching of his true father, Big Boss. Solid Snake was involved, directly or otherwise, in the death of each Snake, until he alone remained.
12 Morality System
Unique to the other Snakes in many ways, Venom Snake is the only one of them to have a morality system. This hidden morality system is known as acquiring Demon Points, and it will visually change how Venom Snake looks, or perhaps, how he sees himself. This will change Venom, caking him with thick blood that is not his own, whilst also making the shrapnel in his head grow like a horned demon.
Players can grow Venom’s demon through many means. Killing innocent soldiers, their own men, or even creating a nuke for their base. The sense of morality in Venom Snake is a unique trait that the true clones of Big Boss lack, either due to their programming, upbringing or the fact that they are their father’s children, whereas Venom is his own person.
11 Venom Snake Is The Player
One of the many mysterious and well-played meta-narratives of Metal Gear Solid 5 involves how Hideo Kojima presents Venom Snake. Venom is not just a backup of Big Boss or a “fake”. Venom is very much the real thing, crafted into the perfect image of what Big Boss should be, and what Venom thinks he should do as the leader. However, it is crafted in such a way that the player guides the actions of Venom, and thus, Kojima allows the player to become Big Boss themselves.
This is shown through Venom Snake having the birthday that the player wants, or creating the Venom Snake that players want him to look like. Even morality is integral to the player’s version of Big Boss. Kojima’s goodbye to the series is poetic, as he leaves by telling players that they are Big Boss, and he leaves them with this version of the character, Venom Snake, who is rightfully theirs.
10 The Many Codenames Of Venom Snake
Venom Snake is not the only moniker worn by the villain protagonist of Metal Gear Solid 5 thanks to the abundant symbolism and double meanings provided by Kojima's typical naming conventions. Where codenames like "Solid" and "Naked" depicted personality, so too does "Venom" due to the character being deemed hazardous and snake-like as his peaceful aspirations turn to obsession and war. The additional nickname "V" provides a more meta explanation for the name choice too, as Venom is the fifth character to bear the codename across the franchise, plus a continuation of the mantra V for Victory, which appeared in Peace Walker.
Focusing on the game's story, players likely caught the overt references to Moby Dick with the codename "Ahab," echoing the story's self-destructive protagonist bent on revenge at any cost and the tragic outcome that befalls all characters involved. "Punished Snake" also appeared frequently in the trailers and promotional material about living through MSF's destruction witnessed at the climax of Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes. The constant callbacks and literature parallels enforce the powerful emotive drive used to paint Venom Snake's character arc across The Phantom Pain's story.
9 Venom Is The First Snake To Die
With that in mind, it’s worth noting that Venom is the first Snake to chronologically die in the series. Worse yet, he’s the only Snake to be killed by another Snake, as old age or final battles to death end up claiming the lives of other Snake soldiers. This tragedy has been honored with video re-creations depicting Venom's last day in Outer Heaven, proving that Kojima's lore-altering decision was met well by fans after the initial controversy.
The only Snake who was straight up forced against his nature to be a clone of Big Boss, it’s quite tragic how Venom meets his end. He lives as he died: in Big Boss’ shadow. No one ever learns who Venom was or that Big Boss had a double all along. Snake simply believes that Big Boss somehow survived.
8 The Big Boss To Surpass Big Boss
Venom Snake isn’t just a Big Boss clone, in many respects, he’s the better Big Boss. He’s the one who builds up Diamond Dogs, he’s the one who ultimately builds Outer Heaven, and he’s the one who faces off against Solid Snake at the end of the first game. Venom makes Big Boss’ legacy tricky to pinpoint.
It seems that while Venom was setting up the events that would kick off the entire series, Big Boss was just getting Zanzibar Land ready for Metal Gear 2 and little else. It’s not even clear if the real Big Boss trained Snake or not. It’s entirely possible that the Big Boss Snake trained under was Venom all along.
7 The Kinder Big Boss
While Venom Snake has a literal Demon Point system that shows players how terrible he is, he’s significantly kinder and more composed than Big Boss. If nothing else, he isn’t nearly as jaded as Big Boss seems to become. Venom dearly cares for his soldiers, to the point where they seem to be the only thing he cares about.
He also has severe PTSD over what happened with Paz, not because he’s Big Boss, but because he was the medic who watched her die. It’s a subtle detail that serves as a reminder that Venom Snake is not entirely Big Boss. He has his personality, his demons, and his morals.
6 Venom Snake's Shared Voices
The short-lived controversy surrounding David Hayter's voice replacement with Kiefer Sutherland is likely what helped keep Venom Snake's identity well-hidden due to being Big Boss's body double. However, astute players were able to find a subtle hint at Venom's true identity thanks to a cutscene in Ground Zeroes featuring the main cast plus an MSF medic surgically removing a bomb. All the shocking visuals can easily distract players from the Medic's dialogue, which is also voiced by Kiefer Sutherland (albeit disguised).
It’s important to remember that Ground Zeroes immediately follows Peace Walker, which allowed players to play as captured soldiers instead of Big Boss if they wished, adding to the franchise theme that "Anyone can be Big Boss." While he’s technically a medic, Big Boss cared about him enough to bring him along to save Paz, so there’s nothing that indicates he wasn’t a trusted MSF soldier. Since all present MSF soldiers are carried over into the first part of Metal Gear Solid 5, the medic's status and eventual fate add even more caliber to the lore surrounding Venom Snake as a powerful icon more than a lone soldier.
5 Venom’s Been Around Since Day 1
Metal Gear is no stranger when it comes to retcons, each game altering the last to produce a heavily convoluted storyline. By the first Metal Gear Solid, friendly villain Gray Fox had been unabashedly returned to the series twice just to battle Solid Snake again. Most interestingly, the biggest retcon in the series comes from The Phantom Pain, and it’s two retcons at that!
Since the chronological release of Metal Gear in 1987, Solid Snake killed Big Boss at Outer Heaven, but it was retconned that he survived to become the main villain again for Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Come to The Phantom Pain, however, and it turns out that Snake killed the Venom body double instead of Big Boss. With that in mind, this means that Venom Snake has had a presence in the franchise since its very first installment.
4 "Phantom" Foreshadowing Of Venom Snake's Fate
Despite some fan backlash, Venom's fate and identity are concealed from the player in creative story beats which show the ending was intentionally designed to correct the retcon from the first Metal Gear game mentioned above. Venom Snake's presence as a body double can be found through specific player actions that foreshadow not only his true identity but his eventual demise at the hand of Solid Snake, such as the iconic cigar often wielded by Big Boss. Talk of e-cigars appeared in a Peace Walker audio tape, which Big Boss declines due to "not being a fan of imitations" when compared to the real thing.
This serves as an allegory to Venom Snake's imitator identity for the real Big Boss, who would never be seen smoking the e-cigar wielded by Venom throughout Metal Gear Solid 5. Furthermore, the mission control helicopter used by the player bears a reflection of the medic's original face when zoomed in on the opposite window, and characters like Huey do not initially recognize Venom despite having worked together for years. These subtle details foreshadow Venom never truly forgot who he was, plus the potential ironic death Big Boss is fated to suffer from being burned alive by Solid Snake's cigarette lighter.
3 Venom Snake VS Raiden
Having Venom Snake being analogous to the player may not be wholly uplifting, as the Metal Gear series is often quite critical of the war and mindless soldiers as a whole. None of Venom’s or Big Boss’ atrocities would have been committed had players simply not picked up the controller, a concept which is discussed close to the end of Metal Gear Solid 2. In this respect, Venom becomes Raiden’s foil thanks to the latter's contrasting presence symbolizing player control.
Where Venom Snake embraces the fact that he’s being controlled, Raiden rips away the player’s control at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2 by rejecting the player's name etched on dog tags, choosing to embrace his own identity instead. He forges his path no matter the cost while Venom is content just being another player in Metal Gear’s story.
2 Venom Doesn’t Care Who He Was
Another way in which Venom Snake directly parallels Raiden is the fact that Venom does not care about his past whatsoever. Where Raiden assumes his Jack the Ripper persona, even heavily relapsing into it, Venom Snake barely acknowledges the fact that he was the medic all along. Right now, he’s Big Boss and that’s all that matters.
He isn’t even the least bit upset when he finds out that he’s not Big Boss. If anything, he seems happy to know that there’s another Big Boss he can count on. After all, they’re the only two men who truly understand one another. In Venom’s eyes, he always was and always will be Big Boss.
1 Kojima's Love Letter To The Fans
Above all else, Venom Snake is Hideo Kojima’s way of celebrating the fans who have stuck with the series since its emergence in 1987. “I’m Big Boss… and you are too” isn’t Big Boss talking directly to Venom, it’s Hideo Kojima speaking directly to the player. After years of following Big Boss’ story, Kojima takes Metal Gear one step further by creating Big Boss in the hands of the player however the individual decides to shape the fate of the character and themselves.
Venom Snake becomes Kojima’s love letter to the fans, one that embraces the idea of controlling another being — something exclusive to the video game medium. No matter what Metal Gear Solid 5's review scores may be, Venom Snake is a celebration of all things Metal Gear with an unforgettable legacy behind it.
Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is currently available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.