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.
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