Metal Gear Solid is a stealth game created by Hideo Kojima which follows the MSX2 video games Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Despite a transition to 3D, Metal Gear Solid's gameplay remains similar to his predecessors. The game utilizes a traditional top-down view and the player must navigate the protagonist Solid Snake through the game's areas without being detected. Detection will set off an alarm which draws armed enemies to his location. Conversations with Snake's allies and cutscenes are used extensively to advance the plot and gain more insight into it. Metal Gear Solid is regarded as one of the greatest and most important video games of all time, and helped popularize the stealth genre and in-engine cinematic cutscenes.
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But the crown jewel is the codec. Metal gear 2 made the codec but solid perfected it. It's insane the amount of minute stupid stuff you do that you wouldn't think about the codec characters comment on. They will comment on everything and even just the advice they give always have character traits sprinkled into them. The codec hijacks a lot of story cutscenes and some of the most insane twists happens in it. You will abuse this poor device but even then YOU WILL NOT get all the dialogue. This is how deep it goes.
PEAK.
I also feel this and the first two act like a trilogy. They feel different from the games that come next. And most of the stuff that happens here are results of what happened in the previous games.
In terms of the characters and story, both are absurdly campy at times. However, it's important to remember that 1998 was a point in time where complex storytelling -- especially cinematic-esque storytelling -- was a very new concept in video games. Both Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII truly paved the way in proving that video games could be taken seriously as a legitimate medium for artistic storytelling; and for that, some of the corniness simply has to be forgiven. Besides, there is a lot of charm to the campiness anyway. Even though I found myself cracking up at some of the dialogue, I still enjoyed the hell out of it, and I fell in love all over again with the cast of wacky characters. Moreover, Snake still comes off as one of the coolest damn protagonists in any video game, just as he did a quarter of a century ago.
While I wouldn't call Metal Gear Solid a timeless masterpiece due to the gameplay not having aged particularly well, it's still such a profoundly trailblazing title, which will always secure it as an all-time classic.