TWO MGS GAMES IN ONE MONTH??!!! Perhaps a third??? nay... .lest?
yeah this game fucks so hard and has no problems at all except i find solidus not very compelling but who tf cares its president snake in power armour
my god this game held me hostage for a week but it felt like years, in a good way. i will think back on this time when i reflect on my mgs era, i will think about the ending til i am dead, i will think about the 'TURN THE GAME CONSOLE OFF' moment and how much it made me shit myself every day til im infodumping on the poor ppl in the nursing home about it and they strangle me to shut me up and collect the insurance payout
just as campy, exciting and compelling as its predecessor with infinitely improved gameplay, flawless soundtrack, amazing and extensive voice acting. i dont quite know what else to say about it, except what i keep saying to my very patient friends; this game feels complete. it feels like they did absolutely everything they could to finish this game to the highest quality and fit everything they wanted to in it. no part feels unfinished or neglected, everything you interact with and engage with is rewarded. i would kill someone, like a nice old lady or a toddler, to be able to wipe my memory and play this again from scratch

This was my first MGS game and I didn't entirely know what I was getting into, nor what happened in the game. I haven't played it since I was 14 and ooooooh I have some thoughts now.

As of writing this section I haven't given this game a rating yet because I'm really not sure how I feel about it. Overall I really appreciate what this game is going for; it's incredibly ambitious ideas and approach to storytelling is mind-blowing and a kind of creativity we don't see often in any form of art, games included. However, I think said ambitious, post-modern and exciting ideas distract the majority of players from some fatal errors made in execution.

Passed on from the first game-the boss fights are still awful. I'm not a huge fan of boss fights generally unless they're in a game by fromsoft but they are especially atrocious in these two games. The controls meant for tactical stealth don't transfer to boss fights which just makes them awkward, unengaging and frustrating (Besides fat man which I weirdly enjoyed and couldn't tell you why).

Gameplay is mostly an improvement over the first game. The addition of first person makes me feel so much cooler and able to tackle stealth missions, making the core gameplay generally more fun. I found myself not using many tools outside of my guns though but that may just be because of my playstyle and how much fun I was having telling enemies to "FREEZE!"

Despite my love of the gameplay, I was given much less of it in this game which leads into some of my thoughts on the story.

Unlike its predecessor, the pacing is very off in this one. The game begins throwing you into its most complex, difficult levels and then pulls back when you start playing as Raiden as it goes back over an unskippable tutorial that players of the first game know already and new players were just forced to figure out in the tanker chapter. What follows is a few bite-sized fragments of gameplay consistently being interrupted by an absurd amount of CODEC calls, making the early section of the big shell chapter almost like a parody of a MGS game.

Now I've heard some people say that this is part of the story. The opening Raiden section is annoying to make us kind of hate him at the beginning so we can slowly build that relationship up. But I think this kind of illustrates my issue with this game and its response. Kojima and the team came up with a cool idea, it feels shit in the moment of playing but in understanding that decision, people just accept this flaw. And for some people things like these aren't flaws which is great and I'm not telling you that my opinion is correct. But I do genuinely believe this game is given a lot of slack because of its ambition.

This problem extends to the characters for me as well; most of the cast feel like archetypes with traits I'm being told and not shown about. I think the poor character work is my overall problem with this game. While the first game presented mostly interesting characters with engaging archs, this game's eye roll worthy emotional scenes and poor voice acting from some important characters (Raiden and Rose) feel completely looked over by most people because of the admittedly cool ideas Kojima and his team tackle.

Even then, these ideas that is most of what I believe distracts people and admit are interesting aren't as fleshed out as they could be. The calls with GW at the end are cool but they stop way too quickly and I don't feel sufficiently mind-fucked given their reputation. Also, the exposition dump of and ending doesn't organically present these ideas; it kind of feels like Kojima came up with the twist and just decided not to write the 3rd act and share the bullet points with us.

I know this review has focused on the negative but I do like this game. Not as much as the emotionally engaging stories of 1st and 3rd games but I really appreciate the experiment this game is, even if not everything works. For me, the game still hits the fundamentals, leaving it as an incredible idea that resulted in a fine -bordering on really good- final draft that I understand the acclaim for, even if I think a lot of missteps are overlooked.