Revisiting Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes

With the impending release of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, I decided to replay through the entirety of the numbered MGS series leading up to it, Peace Walker as well if I have to the time. Finally having enough foresight to give myself a decent amount of time to do what I set out to do, I spent most of last week completing the Gamecube remake of Metal Gear Solid, subtitled The Twin Snakes.

It should be mentioned that I am a huge fan of the series, warts and all, and find it one of the last bastions in artistically-driven AAA video game production, even if that dream is dead now. And let’s just get this out of the way now, but yes, the game is horribly over-written and its cutscenes are far too long and self-indulgent for a rather simple anti-war message. Hideo Kojima’s humor can be quite juvenile and I can totally understand why someone can’t stand this series. It’s overwrought, preachy, and so hilariously over-the-top its difficult to take the series seriously. But through the grimy surface, there is a sea’s worth of gold, both in through the use of game mechanics and ludic presentation.

As an aside, I myself have never played the PlayStation original of Metal Gear Solid. My introduction to the series began with playing the Tanker section of MGS 2 repeatedly which convinced me to pick up the Gamecube remake. So the game is a bit simpler given the added first person mode and even goofier given the dated Matrix-esque cutscenes.

But before the over-emphasis on nanomachines, indestructible vampires, ninja Raiden, and La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo, there was just a little event called Shadow Moses and man named Solid Snake, heir to the greatest soldier who ever lived, who needed to stop a bipedal tank from launching a nuclear missile. Given what this series would eventually become, it is fitting that this be a more straightforward game, but even that feels wrong. This is the game with a gas-masked wearing psychic who reads your memory card and can’t be hit by bullets without changing the port your controller is plugged into. Even then, this game is tame by Metal Gear standards, probably one of the reasons why it is still held in such high regard, along with just how groundbreaking this game must have felt all those years ago on the PlayStation.

The problem is, the game just doesn’t hold up. My defense of this series has always relied on its game mechanics and their presentation, but as with most early 3D games the game is just completely rough around the edges, especially coming off of the wonderful control scheme provided in Ground Zeroes. Movement is laughable in multiple senses. For starters, Snake gets caught up easy on any uneven piece of level geometry, awkwardly flattening his back against invisible walls when he should be running for cover.

That is if the need ever arises. For a stealth game, its mechanics have aged incredibly poorly compared to contemporaries like Thief. The vision cones provided by Soliton Radar almost completely encompass what an enemy is capable of sensing in the game, disregarding certain sounds. Footsteps only create noise on certain terrain or floors, making running at full speed almost everywhere completely viable. I was only playing on normal for time’s sake, so its possible on higher difficulties that the stealth elements are a bit more involved, but the controls are far too finicky to want that. Worst comes to worst, Snake can always run in and out of a location, thereby loading a new area and resetting the Alert status.

It’s also a far shorter game than I remember, or at least I got smarter playing it. The game plays less like a stealth title and more like a “run past the enemies” simulator. Most of my time was spent weaving through enemy patterns, only getting caught up in very specific rooms. And even though I didn’t want to harp on it, the writing is also worse than i remember it, allowing for reiteration that if you are the kind of person who cannot get past bad writing these games are not for you and I don’t blame you for it. A shitty movie’s worth of cutscenes should not come required, though all the cutscenes are entirely able to be skipped.

But for all its shortcomings and inability to stand up to seventeen years of advancement and refinement in the gaming, Metal Gear Solid still seems like an important footnote, one worthy of greater consideration than its ludicrous premise would presume. As far as the 3D games are concerned, this is the baby of the series. Kojima’s trademarks are being explored now, not established. Looking back at it now, knowing just how much further the series will come, Metal Gear Solid feels like a series in infancy, despite being the third in the series. We are impressed by things its accomplished because of its age, not because it particularly works well. It got first place, but at a T-ball tournament. What now exists is only potential and the twinkle in parent Hideo Kojima’s eye of just what this series is capable of. Soon, it will graduate to baseball.

The most mad and ingenious game of baseball ever played.

Lost Kingdoms

I tried to like Lost Kingdoms, I really did. The idea of an RPG on the Gamecube that wasn’t Skies of Arcadia, Tales of Symphonia, or Paper Mario was incredibly appealing. On top of that, it was a card game to boot, something I am quite a fan of in the real world. But all it’s positives couldn’t hold up in the case of going from boring to worse.

Released early on in the Gamecube’s life, Lost Kingdoms follows Princess Katia, a girl who through circumstance has been charged with the task of ridding the world of a fog that has encroached to the furthest regions of the kingdom. She must unite 5 runestones to harness the power of cards that contain powerfull spells and monsters to defeat the person responsible. It’s a really bad episode Yu-Gi-Oh crossed over with some generic fantasy tripe.

But that’s not what I was there for. I wanted some strategic card combat. I wanted to build unique decks and strategies to overcome the challenges the game presented me.

I kind of got that. Kind of.

Combat in Lost Kingdoms is actually a real-time affair. While exploring a level, a random battle will start in which you maintain full control. When entering combat, you bring with you your deck of 30 cards. That’s where the card gimmick pretty much dies. Lost Kingdoms could be accurately billed as a precursor to Folklore, a much better game Each face button on the Gamecube controller represent a card in your hand. Pressing a button will activate the corresponding ability of that card which plays out in real time. Cards have a limited number of uses, many of them generally can only be used once. Once a card has been used up, it is discarded and replaced with the top card of the deck. The fact that they are cards very rarely comes into play.

There are 3 types of available cards to equip. Summon monsters appear and perform an attack before disappearing. Weapon type monsters can be used multiple times and perform a quick attack designated by their weapon. Independent monsters run amok on their own until they suffer enough damage or the time runs out. Playing the cards isn’t free and every activation requires the use of gems. Katia can only hold up to a certain number of gems but can refill as they drop of the monsters she attacks. If you try to use a card without the appropriate number of gems, you lose 10 health for every gem you are short.

The biggest problem with Lost Kingdom is just how small of a game it is. The game took me fifteen hours but half of that was pretty much dedicated to the final level, but more on that in a second. It’s age shows, as the game could have been right at home as a PlayStation One title and the environments are small and cramped. It was obviously a lower budget game on release and it shows. The “overworld” is a map screen leading to the 15 or so levels, each of which take about twenty minutes to beat. There are exactly five sidequests and 106 cards to collect. That is everything in the game. Oh wait, I guess it has a multiplayer mode. I didn’t play it.

Lost Kingdoms is also way too easy. Once you realize that losing all the cards in your deck is the easiest way to die, you stack your deck full of the guys who heal you and replenish discarded cards and you really cannot die. The game does reward you for doing levels more efficiently, but nothing drastic or game changing. Even with over 100 cards available, you will soon find that the weapon variety monsters are just better than the others, as it most accurately replaces a generic attack. The other cards take too much effort to set up or cost too much for their weak effects.

Lost Kingdoms is less an action game or a card game and more of a strategy game, waiting for the appropriate times to attack. Katia moves sluggishly in combat but is invincible while summoning monsters making most combat incredibly simple. There are four elements for rock/paper/scissors level of strategy, but most of the time you just grab your heaviest hitters and go to town.

The RPG elements are threadbare as well. Katia improves, not by leveling up but through story progression. The cards do gain experience but it acts as a currency which can be used to duplicate cards or transform them into different cards. The cards themselves do not change in any way.

The only time the game ever changes pace is during the boss fights, all of which are tedious. They generally just spam summon monster cards, pausing the game for 5-6 seconds while the animation plays out. None are difficult, save for the boss at the end. The final boss of the game is such a drastic change in difficulty you’ll wonder if the director realized there was no reason to grind for most cards so they invented one. It is one of the few fights in the game where direct hits do not provide nearly enough gems for using cards and it is at the tail end of a long level. The kicker? If you die during the fight, you have to play the whole level over again. Purists might say that is how real games work, but I have shit to do. My eventual conquest over the final boss provided no relief beyond not having to play the game anymore, never a good sign.

I wanted to like Lost Kingdoms, but I just can’t. From the final level taking up near 50% of my play time to the turgid and repetitive level design, its exactly the kind of RPG to fit the Gamecube, a console so anemic toward the genre that they have to stretch the definition so thin as to accommodate this game. It’s a boring RPG, a boring game, and certainly not a hidden gem in the Gamecube’s library. If you think the game sounds interesting, play Folklore instead.