Series sequels are the vehicle through which these tropes find new life, and the need to justify sequels via the Saga's story gives rise to the trope that justifies all iterations: the Hollow Victory. In order to establish new contexts for conflict, each sequel must nullify the preceding game's victory in order to return characters and events to the cycle of iteration.

The trope of the Hollow Victory undermines an important aspect of each Saga game's theme. Each game establishes its theme as a context that conditions an individual's identity, and then it insists that personal fulfillment can only occur by overcoming that context. Characters could not reprise their roles were they allowed to live the freedom achieved by overcoming genes, memes, or historical circumstances. Therefore, Solid Snake's victory at Shadow Moses fails to free him from the burden of his “warrior genes,” Raiden's victory fails to free him from reliving the violence of his childhood, and Naked Snake cannot truly leave behind the circumstances of his past.

The Hollow Victory becomes the glue that binds each item in the Saga's set together. Form circumscribes identity as (in Ocelot's words) “a system… Insurance that future generations never prosper.” MGS4's monsters are a fallout of this trope. Characters do not improve from one game to the next; they merely lose some aspects of their former identities in order to accept grafts of other identities as substitutes.(See Liquid's arm on Ocelot in MGS2 as a literal example of this.)

Johnny Sasaki's development in MGS4 might be the most sensational example of such grafting. Earlier in the Saga, he had only been relevant as the butt of passing scat jokes. By the time he's cycled into MGS4's form, however, he fills trope slots previously occupied by three of the Saga's key characters. He reprises Otacon's role as a tech geek (even gaining the nerdy nickname “Akiba,” a nod to Tokyo's high-tech district), serves in Gray Fox's place as the “unknown quantity,” and becomes Meryl's ideal love interest as Solid Snake had been at the end of MGS1.

SOP, the Sons of the Patriots nanomachine network that connects each PMC grunt to his unit, reflects MGS4's form in the narrative itself. Meryl praises SOP because it “lets us [the members of her unit] share each other's senses. They can see what I see.” SOP is the plot's vehicle for monstrous recombination, the assembly of fragmented identities into a confused whole.

It's no coincidence, then, that the references intertwined in MGS4 separate when SOP finally goes offline.

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