Review: Metal Wolf Chaos XD Plays Like a Vicious Indictment of Our Present

Up until the release of this remaster, the 2004 video game Metal Wolf Chaos was a bizarre curio: not just for being a rare Japan-only exclusive for the Xbox (a console that’s decidedly unpopular in the country), but for having a concept that howls for an overseas release. After all, you play Michael Wilson, the 47th president of the United States, who pilots his personal presidential mech against the treacherous vice president and his military forces. As satire goes, the game’s concept is heightened to astronomical levels, so ludicrously broad that it cannot possibly land with any real impact. And yet over a decade later, as the game’s president engages in that distinctly American method of problem solving by shooting the absolute fuck out of everything, it lands with a sickening thud.

Though various cutscenes and in-mission dialogue allude to things like a propaganda news network and fossil fuel exhaustion, it’s difficult to call any specific part of the game an incisive critique of the United States, because there are no real specifics. Japanese developer From Software operates in a strictly cartoonish mode throughout. At one point, a journalist from news network DNN reports that “not even the Constitution” is a match for the evil of the terrorist president and his mech, Metal Wolf. No person in the game presents a coherent ideology, to the point where that’s the joke; there are no beliefs in the America of Metal Wolf Chaos so much as a collection of nebulous buzzwords, where Wilson bloviates about “following [his] own justice” and “the America that lives on in [his] heart.” Even the CNN-like logo for DNN sits in front of two rotating circles that simply repeat the words “freedom” and “justice.” These are politics as conceptualized by a fourth grader dozing off in social studies.

In an era where the country is ruled by a rambling, incoherent cretin, however, it’s this exact vagueness that’s so cutting about the game’s satire. Each day provides further proof that specifics don’t really matter to many of our politicians, who do little more than invoke the siren call of uncritical patriotism to win over people who want only to be assured that everything is all right. To debate means to parrot rehearsed talking points, to discuss mass shooting is to pivot to video game violence, and to address human rights violations is to get bogged down in the pure semantics of what to call a concentration camp. Metal Wolf Chaos isn’t really supposed to be about anything, yet in that ambiguity it captures the specific madness of our present, the vacuous anti-intellectualism that cultivates an atmosphere of complacency and inaction where nothing may be done except to offer thoughts and prayers.

The game’s surrealism is enhanced by its stilted presentation, with strangely phrased lines delivered by robotic voice actors. Prisoners of war, who are housed in cages scattered throughout each level, are broken up into the inexplicable categories of CITIZEN, SCIENTIST, and MUSICIAN. After-mission epilogues display text over an image of the Lincoln Memorial, their dramatic prose constantly threatening to turn purple: Resistance fighters have “alabaster souls,” and one character laments how “all of America and its freedoms were paved over by the thick, oppressive asphalt of tyranny.” From the dialogue’s constant stream of terrible jokes—“I’ll smash them faster than a Florida recount”—to the way the menu music’s repetitive guitar rock slowly devolves into an unlistenable squeal, Metal Wolf Chaos is often an absurdist masterstroke, a work that might fit neatly into a Tim and Eric sketch or a game by SWERY. It’s at once the clear result of an outsider’s teasing perception of American culture and some collective hallucination manifested by the country’s rotting, idiot soul.

Yet couched as it is in gun violence, there’s little thrill of having one’s views validated when playing Metal Wolf Chaos in the wake of multiple mass shootings. By dropping the president into a mech, the game reveals itself as a statement on the country’s worship of guns and violent intervention writ large, where the ultimate “good guy with a gun” rampages through the streets, unloading on everything that moves or seems likely to explode. It’s satire by way of total mortification, the kind that doesn’t make you pat yourself on the back so much as squirm when you recognize the seed from which its concept grew.

That Metal Wolf Chaos still plays well only adds to the discomfort. Weapon selection is cumbersome since the gun portraits all look too similar and you must unintuitively mash triggers to scroll between them, but on the whole, your Metal Wolf moves smoothly through the game’s environments, boosting through obstacles with ease. The arcade-y, mission-based structure provides environment variety while generous auto-targeting mostly leaves you to dodge and hit the buttons that fire missiles and bullets. It all feels satisfying, but it’s also sickening that the basic pleasure center of the brain is so readily activated even in this context, where the game’s satire is tightly wrapped around such a grave truth. Metal Wolf Chaos is near-unspeakably absurd, and that something so outlandish hits its mark 15 years later feels less like good-natured ribbing than a vicious, necessary indictment of the fact that, in those intervening years, we haven’t changed much as a country.

The game was reviewed using a download code provided by Tinsley PR.