“Life isn’t just about passing on your genes. We can leave behind much more than just DNA. Through speech, music, literature, and movies… what we’ve seen, heard, felt… anger, joy, and sorrow… these are the things I will pass on. That’s what I live for.”
It was throughout a majority for my playthrough of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty that my stance remained on it being quite good, some interesting things going on, but just couldn’t quite live up to what made me love the first Metal Gear Solid for what it accomplished for the medium. It felt more of the same, really. The gameplay is exactly the same, there’s definitely some obvious smoothing the edges technical improvements one would expect when seeing this jump into the PS2. It may not bring too much that’s substantially new to the stealth combat mix but it definitely doubles down on what made the gameplay already tick very hard. The first game now feels more like a breeze to stealth your way around in a cardboard box because this gave me more trouble with the aggressive alert patrols and trying to avoid-direct combat while making my way around the map. The bosses are still fun, besides two saved near the end, I was a bit disappointed there wasn't really a Psycho Mantis or Cyborg Ninja (except for the Cyborg Ninja that does show) boss to fight. The plot, if you were to oversimplify it, is kind of a retread, with certain moments and bosses directly paralleling what you already saw back in MGS1. There’s one obvious difference through all of this, of course, which is made apparent through the tanker level level prologue. We start off immediately playing as the Solid Snake we all love from the days of the PS1, everything gameplay-wise feeling right at home like nothing’s really changed other than graphics having more polygon counts, and being what we expect from a sequel to the first Metal Gear Solid…until a bait-and-switch happens. We don’t play as Solid Snake, at least for not too long. This character we’re likely excited to get back into the shoes of while card-boarding around is sidelined completely in favor of this new rando protagonist who just…isn’t Solid Snake. Raiden isn’t really “cool”, in the traditional sense, he’s just a goofy inexperienced dork. There’s more bits of substance to him you get to find out later through the codecs and how he responds to things that endears him pretty easily but he didn’t click with me all the way until the last stretch where Kojima’s vision behind this game has finally been understood.
The best way to approach a game like Metal Gear Solid, to understand the choices made with it as a sequel, is to put it like this: Metal Gear Solid is tight, introspective, humanely sincere yet straightforwardly mature and serious to the end --- like Solid Snake. Metal Gear Solid 2 is bombastic, expressionist, serious underpinnings yet there’s light in the end -- just like Raiden.
Solid Snake has taken a total backseat here but it makes sense. He’s already learned to grow beyond just a military grunt serving higher powers at play by gaining a new reason to live. What we’re seeing now is him doing that, operating independently as this legend helping to stop a global conspiracy endangering the future he wants to preserve. He’s leaving the charge to the next generation stealth action hero, Raiden, who is part of this future. The next Solid Snake, for the next generation console -- the PS2. It’s not Solid Snake’s game, it’s Raiden’s game. This meta gets completely unleashed in the endgame. Where the intentional parallels and retreading starts building this entire meta-narrative about sequels around an emotionally engaging story about what freedom, liberty, and legacy means in the 21st century where conspiracy runs wildly and digital communication has a hold on the masses. The lines between what’s fiction or what’s reality is blurred for the individual, and might as well be what dooms humanity if we don’t read what’s between the lines. This is especially prophetic in the current year of 2023 where social media has grown to make people terminally online and how AI is unfortunately becoming more prevalent with its dire implications for human expression and art.
I debated quite a bit with myself about which of the first two MGS games I’ve played now that I like more. I think they’re both super creative games with ambitions that stem from the console generations they’re made in. I prefer the tight pace of MGS1, especially how it balances out story and gameplay, but that’s because it had a more simpler narrative to tell while MGS2 is an unconventional sequel using the foundation laid before it to become more ambitious with so much more to say. Without a doubt, this now has my favorite video game ending for how much Raiden will try to change, tying into the meaning behind Snake’s ending monologue, while making me kick back and reflect on the rhetorical questions I was being asked about the world I live in. That’s a unique quality I don’t believe I can get too much from revisiting MGS1 any time in the future. I guess that’s why this spoke to me as being more “DeadCore”and now stands as being one of my absolute favorite video games of all time unless Metal Gear Solid 3 proves to be competing for that too.
It was throughout a majority for my playthrough of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty that my stance remained on it being quite good, some interesting things going on, but just couldn’t quite live up to what made me love the first Metal Gear Solid for what it accomplished for the medium. It felt more of the same, really. The gameplay is exactly the same, there’s definitely some obvious smoothing the edges technical improvements one would expect when seeing this jump into the PS2. It may not bring too much that’s substantially new to the stealth combat mix but it definitely doubles down on what made the gameplay already tick very hard. The first game now feels more like a breeze to stealth your way around in a cardboard box because this gave me more trouble with the aggressive alert patrols and trying to avoid-direct combat while making my way around the map. The bosses are still fun, besides two saved near the end, I was a bit disappointed there wasn't really a Psycho Mantis or Cyborg Ninja (except for the Cyborg Ninja that does show) boss to fight. The plot, if you were to oversimplify it, is kind of a retread, with certain moments and bosses directly paralleling what you already saw back in MGS1. There’s one obvious difference through all of this, of course, which is made apparent through the tanker level level prologue. We start off immediately playing as the Solid Snake we all love from the days of the PS1, everything gameplay-wise feeling right at home like nothing’s really changed other than graphics having more polygon counts, and being what we expect from a sequel to the first Metal Gear Solid…until a bait-and-switch happens. We don’t play as Solid Snake, at least for not too long. This character we’re likely excited to get back into the shoes of while card-boarding around is sidelined completely in favor of this new rando protagonist who just…isn’t Solid Snake. Raiden isn’t really “cool”, in the traditional sense, he’s just a goofy inexperienced dork. There’s more bits of substance to him you get to find out later through the codecs and how he responds to things that endears him pretty easily but he didn’t click with me all the way until the last stretch where Kojima’s vision behind this game has finally been understood.
The best way to approach a game like Metal Gear Solid, to understand the choices made with it as a sequel, is to put it like this: Metal Gear Solid is tight, introspective, humanely sincere yet straightforwardly mature and serious to the end --- like Solid Snake. Metal Gear Solid 2 is bombastic, expressionist, serious underpinnings yet there’s light in the end -- just like Raiden.
Solid Snake has taken a total backseat here but it makes sense. He’s already learned to grow beyond just a military grunt serving higher powers at play by gaining a new reason to live. What we’re seeing now is him doing that, operating independently as this legend helping to stop a global conspiracy endangering the future he wants to preserve. He’s leaving the charge to the next generation stealth action hero, Raiden, who is part of this future. The next Solid Snake, for the next generation console -- the PS2. It’s not Solid Snake’s game, it’s Raiden’s game. This meta gets completely unleashed in the endgame. Where the intentional parallels and retreading starts building this entire meta-narrative about sequels around an emotionally engaging story about what freedom, liberty, and legacy means in the 21st century where conspiracy runs wildly and digital communication has a hold on the masses. The lines between what’s fiction or what’s reality is blurred for the individual, and might as well be what dooms humanity if we don’t read what’s between the lines. This is especially prophetic in the current year of 2023 where social media has grown to make people terminally online and how AI is unfortunately becoming more prevalent with its dire implications for human expression and art.
I debated quite a bit with myself about which of the first two MGS games I’ve played now that I like more. I think they’re both super creative games with ambitions that stem from the console generations they’re made in. I prefer the tight pace of MGS1, especially how it balances out story and gameplay, but that’s because it had a more simpler narrative to tell while MGS2 is an unconventional sequel using the foundation laid before it to become more ambitious with so much more to say. Without a doubt, this now has my favorite video game ending for how much Raiden will try to change, tying into the meaning behind Snake’s ending monologue, while making me kick back and reflect on the rhetorical questions I was being asked about the world I live in. That’s a unique quality I don’t believe I can get too much from revisiting MGS1 any time in the future. I guess that’s why this spoke to me as being more “DeadCore”and now stands as being one of my absolute favorite video games of all time unless Metal Gear Solid 3 proves to be competing for that too.