Character Design: Venom Snake

The Metal Gear Solid series has a colourful cast of characters to say the least, but in my opinion no design comes close to Venom Snake. MGSV's Venom Snake is a reconstructed battlefield medic, moulded and manipulated to be the doppelgänger of series hero/antagonist, the legendary mercenary/ war criminal Big Boss. The series deals with a lot of heavy themes regarding the ethics of war, the nature of self and characters grappling with internal conflicts, leaving a lot which can be communicated visually.

Venom's design is a great example of visual storytelling through the design of a character.  Concept Artist Yoji Shinkawa has a real knack for tying the aesthetic of a character to their inner struggles and the overarching themes of the story they inhabit. Venom's horn, a piece of shrapnel wedged in the forehead of the character, serves a dual purpose. It is placed there to symbolise the character's fractured psyche and transformation into a 'demon' as they become more and more morally corrupted in the pursuit of revenge, as well as to symbolise the burden the character carries of his dead comrades. In fact it is stated in the game that the shrapnel is made up of hundreds of individual bone fragments, most likely from the character of Paz from Phantom Pain, whom Venom, as the Medic in Ground Zeroes, failed to save and is haunted by throughout the game.

Concepts such as anger and revenge are further highlighted in the colours incorporated into Venom's design thorough the colour red, which is prominent in the colour of his prosthetic arm and the blood which is splattered on him throughout the game.

Venom's status as a doppelgänger of Big Boss, while not explicitly stated until the end of the game, is hinted at several times, though there are clues in his design, such as the scars down the side of the characters' face which suggest facial reconstruction. Props are also used to hint towards this revelation ahead of time, for example the character's E-cigarette, an impersonation which, as the real Big Boss in the game states 'is not as good as the real thing'. This is a subtle and neat little way of conveying the true nature of the character discreetly without explicitly stating it to audience, allowing them to speculate and figure it out for themselves.