Gameplay And Story Segregation / Metal Gear

Examples of Gameplay and Story Segregation found in the Metal Gear franchise:

General

• Just about every enemy in the games can be defeated non-lethally, either with your fists or a tranquilizer gun, and yet the bosses will all die in the following cutscene regardless. Similarly, if they're supposed to escape and appear again later, the player can pump dozens of bullets into the boss' head, and they will still not be dead in the next cutscene. When they introduced a character who is actually immortal in Metal Gear Solid 2, they had to give him some pretty explicitly overkill deaths for him to walk off ten minutes later to properly demonstrate that this was in any way different from the rest of the bosses in the terrorist group, of who only one is killed through a single boss fight.

Metal Gear Solid

• In Metal Gear Solid, towards the end of the game, Liquid Snake accuses Solid Snake of enjoying all the killing he has been doing throughout his mission, which Solid Snake greatly denies. The original game got away with it since at the time, there was no way to dispatch bosses non-lethally. The Twin Snakes remake gives you a pistol and a sniper rifle that can fire tranquilizer rounds, allowing you to complete the whole game without killing a single person. Because the script wasn't changed, Liquid will still call out Snake for his murder spree, even if you haven't killed anyone. Likewise, Psycho Mantis will claim that Solid Snake is a worse person than Liquid Snake, even if you haven't done anything to make that statement true.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

• Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid 3 is a normal boss in his boss fight, able to take multiple bullets to the head (though he can't quite be killed). But during the earlier Virtuous Mission, Snake knocks him out in a cutscene. Afterward, it is perfectly possible to kill him while he's lying there, at which point you get a Non-Standard Game Over with Col. Campbell berating the player for causing a time paradox.
• Even if you try to kill any boss who has Plot Immunity, they will just somehow survive the wounds until the game gives them permission to die. The game even acknowledges this by not counting it as a "kill" on your stats, even if you used lethal force in the fight (though you don't get their camo). Meanwhile, the one boss you have to kill, will be fatally injured at the end of the fight even if you only used your fists against them.
• The CURE mechanic is this trope in a nutshell. Snake can be injured numerous times over the course of the game, with some being story-related. Yet, besides one story-mandated instance where Snake breaks his arm (during the Virtuous Mission), there is no justification given otherwise, as the player can stop the action at any time to use medicine, reset bones or repair other injuries on-the-fly.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

• After defeating Laughing Octopus in Metal Gear Solid 4, Snake snatches her Face Camo for later use. Snake mentions it isn't his size nor shape, making you think the item will be unusable until Otacon can tailor it for him at the end of the act, but you can wear it as soon as the cutscene ends without issue, with nothing more than a vague Hand Wave of Drebin noting that Snake knows "someone" (Otacon) who could do it - unless he somehow does it during the cutscene via Metal Gear Mk II.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

• Throughout the main Ground Zeroes mission and the side ops, enemy planes are shown to be very tough to take down, and require sustained fire for a solid 30-45 seconds or three shots from a rocket launcher to take out. During the ending cutscene, Snake takes out an encroaching enemy chopper with a short burst of gunfire, which causes it to immediately explode and fall to the ground.
• During cutscenes, Snake will always be equipped with a standard handgun and assault rifle despite what weapons the player equips him with at the time. Noticeably, in the mission 18, Snake is tasked in killing 5 prisoners, who turned out to be child soldiers. The cutscene will change whatever automatic rifle weapon he has into an assault rifle in the cutscene, even if the gun he's carrying by the player is non-lethal.
• In "Cloaked in Silence", Quiet is shown to take out an encroaching enemy jet fighter with a single, well-timed shot into the cockpit with her sniper rifle. In gameplay (and likely in an attempt to curb her near Game-Breaker status), Quiet will always brazenly attempt to shoot an aircraft in the side of its armor instead of the cockpit, leading to their attention being drawn to her and forcing her to find another position.
• Canonically, Quiet's superhuman abilities come as the direct result of a parasite that was implanted into her to save her life, due to injuries inflicted by Ishmael in the prologue, at the cost of not being able to wear most clothing. Essentially, wearing a shirt could suffocate her. Yet, towards the end of the game, you can equip Quiet with a pair of outfits (either her Gray XOF fatigues or a Sniper Wolf outfit) that are much more conservative and cover her, yet it has no detrimental gameplay effects. More notably, Quiet even starts out in the Sniper Wolf outfit during Mission 40 (Cloaked in Silence [Extreme]).
• Obtaining the Wormhole Fulton (a Side-Op reward that only appears after completion of Mission 31) causes strange oddities with the plot, especially when replaying previous missions. While there are a wide assortment of optional and different codec conversations for doing things in unintended ways, Kaz will still tell you that the Man on Fire "broke free" if you Fulton him during the boss fight in "Voices", even if you use the Wormhole. Likewise, Snake attempts to Fulton the Man on Fire with a standard balloon in the Side-Op where you retrieve his corpse from Yakho Oboo Outpost, even if you have the Wormhole equipped.
• An example caused by the game's tumultuous production happens when you beat the game. After you view the "Truth" cutscene, a number of cassette tapes are deposited in the player's (Venom Snake's) inventory called "Truth Records", which have conversations and admissions that the character had no way of knowing and have nothing to do with Mother Base. Additionally, despite the revelation that Venom Snake is not the real Big Boss, which only occurs just before Solid Snake attacks Outer Heaven in the original Metal Gear, all of your soldiers already know this for a fact and seemingly have no problem with it whatsoever. It's unclear if Miller already knew about the real Big Boss' deception and already told everyone on the base, or if they just found out through other means.

Metal Gear Acid

• In Metal Gear Ac!d 2, Venus is revealed to have luck-based powers. These only affect her in the storyline, where she uses them to dowse and repeatedly make a coin come up heads. They also affect her in her boss battle, where she gets a significant bonus to her accuracy compared to Snake. However, when she's a playable character, they don't affect her at all. The cutscenes also show her killing soldiers with shurikens stored in her suit, but in-game she's limited to using cards as weapons just like Snake, even in her boss battle.