The Best And Worst Parts Of Every Metal Gear Game

The Best And Worst Parts Of Every Metal Gear Game

Metal Gear is a wonderful mess. Hideo Kojima’s sweeping spy-thriller series has sometimes been the sword tip of innovation for action games. Throughout the years, it’s been packed with new approaches to narrative and amazing innovations in what the hell a boss fight can be. It’s also sometimes full of stuff that simply doesn’t work. There’s big gameplay ideas that can actually break games or make them unwinnable, messy character writing with gross implications, and games that flat out aren’t finished. Also: Johnny Sasaki is here.

Metal Gear

Best: It Set The Standard For Everything.

That sounds like an obvious thing to say when talking about the first game in a series, but Metal Gear in particular creates a template that the rest of the games follow. All the way through Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, every new game is refining moments introduced here. For example, the first boss battle here is a fight against four mercenaries in a room. Metal Gear Solid will turn this into an ambush by invisible troopers on an elevator. Sons of Liberty turns the idea into a hallway shootout at the end of the Tanker chapter. The core idea starts here.

Time and time again, something in this game is repeated elsewhere. A puzzle requiring the brief use a guard’s uniform here is later expanded to an entire undercover section for Raiden in Sons of Liberty. That then becomes an entire camouflage and disguise system in Snake Eater. All those ideas are here now in Metal Gear, even if there’s only 8 bits to work with! It’s very cool.

Worst: You Can Make It Unwinnable.

Metal Gear has a sort of RPG-lite progression system in which defeating bosses expands your health and inventory. Some later games will continue this idea to some extent; Metal Gear Solid increases your life bar upon defeating a boss, for instance. But Metal Gear also makes it possible to “demote” and lose your bonuses. This mostly happens if you accidentally shoot a hostage. This makes sense on paper! Don’t shoot innocent people, Snake! Watch out!

But in practice, you NEED the increased ammo to win some fights. Famously, if your rank is low enough when you head into the final boss fight, it can become impossible to finish the game. You might simply not have enough explosives to kill the boss. I can’t imagine how many players, even now, stumble a little and reach that last screen only to find out they can beat the game.

Turns out it takes a very specific number of explosives to blow up a Metal Gear.

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake

Best: The Final Boss.

It’s a little anti-climactic from a lore perspective for me to say “Big Boss, the greatest soldier in the world, was killed by a zippo lighter and a spray can,” but that’s what happens! The thing is? When you play the section, it’s pretty cool. You’re trapped in a small warehouse with Big Boss and no obvious way to fight him. What follows almost feels like an adventure game.

You dart around, finding key cards to open special rooms and slip through vent spaces. Each new item leads to the next until you can scrounge the lighter and spray can. Then you can finally cut loose and fight back. In some ways, this feels like the earliest possible version of an idea that games would deliver on much better later. If you like the Mister Freeze fight from Batman Arkham City or think the tense confrontation with David in The Last of Us is cool…this is maybe the earlier version of that idea. And even in 1990, it led to a tense and exciting finale.

Worst: The Swamp Sequence.

Metal Gear 2 adds a lot of improvements that help make things feel a bit more like the series we all know. Longer codec calls, a basic (if unrefined) radar for tracking enemy positions.

But it also has some bullshit. There’s a guard-tailing sequence in the jungle that’s pretty finicky, but there’s also the swamp maze. This only takes up four screens of the game but it’s pretty strict. Snake needs to walk on a very small, not well-indicated path through a bubbly swamp in order to reach an arsenal warehouse. Step off the path even a little? You’ll slowly sink and die.

This isn’t a game with entirely refined controls! Walking a basically invisible line that you need to trace out on a map or try to commit to memory, even if it’s only for a few screens, completely slams the pace to a halt. Woe unto anyone who just can’t get this shit done right.

Metal Gear Solid

Best: Early Infiltration.

It’s tempting to pick one of Metal Gear Solid’s famous boss fights and call it a day. The memory card reading and control fuckery of Psycho Mantis is incredibly famous. The duel against Sniper Wolf in the snow field is great, and leads into one of the most well-known villain death scenes in the medium. Those are great, but they’re not what Metal Gear Solid is. Not entirely.

When I think of Metal Gear Solid, it’s hard not to think of the first thirty minutes or so. Snake’s sneaky underwater insertion into the cold docks on Shadow Moses Island, the elevator ride upward, the searchlights on the helipad, your footsteps leaving imprints in the snow. There’s an incredibly tight stretch of stealth action that is SO DAMN GOOD and iconic. That’s Metal Gear Solid.

Worst: The Car Chase.

The ending of Metal Gear Solid is a gauntlet of boss battles and sacrifices. There’s a giant robot, Grey Fox saves you but gets squished, more robot fighting, the reveal that Solid and Liquid Snake are clones, and a tense fistfight on top of the ruins of Metal Gear Rex.

And then there’s the jeep sequence. Snake escapes in a jeep alongside either Meryl or Otacon and it leads to a series of explosions and machine-gun turret-shooting segments. This gets crazier when Liquid gives chase as well. The controls are odd, the sequence lasts too long, and as a gameplay experience it’s a rare dud in a game that’s otherwise basically perfect.

Liquid’s death is good though! FOX… Die…

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

Best: Raiden.

I have just written one word but somewhere many cranky forty-year-olds have activated. They will soon be here to tell me how much of a little bitch Raiden is. Those people are wrong. Raiden, the bait-and-switch protagonist that you play most of the game as, is so important to this story and so crucial to what makes Sons of Liberty special. He’s an extraordinary character.

Sons of Liberty is a game about identity. It is a game about whether someone else could ever become like Solid Snake. It’s a story about games, it’s a story about Metal Gear itself, and it is a story about the player. The conclusion is simple: no one should want to be Solid Snake. Snake is great but being an action hero kind of sucks. And Raiden, tricked and shaped into an obedient soldier through VR training (kinda like video games!) and a secret tragic background, gives us a rich, complicated, and often really messy look at the damage war and manipulation does to a person.

He needs to be the person at the center of this story. It can’t be Snake.

Worst: All Of Big Shell After The Harrier Fight.

Whoa, that’s highly specific! It’s not just the awkward swimming section or the clumsy escort mission? No, it’s the whole damn thing! Raiden’s first half exploring the Big Shell facility is pretty fun! It’s a large circular loop, but there are ways to get items early, travel through a few alternate routes, and unlock hidden conversations. The bomb disposal sequence really forces you to learn the lay of the land, and an undercover section among enemy soldiers can feel quite tense.

Then you fight a harrier jet and get cut off from the first half of the Big Shell. The game, still good, becomes very linear, and is touched with some awkward sections including a baffling underwater swimming section. You can get through it quickly once you know the path through the murky brine, but first-time players might struggle. Toss in a clumsy escort section with Emma, along with some baffling plot revelations about Otacon, and you get the game’s worst stretch.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

Best: The Drama Of It All!