The level design straight up sucks. Like shockingly bad. It's got a serviceable start that feels like it COULD go somewhere...But as soon as the Psycho Mantis fight ends, the rest is 100% padding with some of the laziest level design physically possible. Almost immediately after that fight, another boss starts. Except you don't have the sniper rifle required to fight it. To get this weapon you backtrack pretty much to the start of the game on the complete opposite side of the map, then run all the way back to do the fight. Half a movies worth of cutscenes (And standing in an empty room for over a full real time minute) later, the next gameplay segment starts near the room where you picked up the sniper rifle...You are then supposed to run all the way back to the boss room they already made you backtrack to fight.
It's nothing but repetitive, empty game design that has you backtrack through already mediocre level chunks. The next part of the game has you climb 50 flights of stairs, then climb down only to see the last few stairs are broken, so you climb all the way back up, do a boss, and climb back down. Then they have you re-fight the sniper boss again. 2 hours of actual gameplay in the entire game and they had to resort to reusing bosses. The last hour of the game is spent climbing the metal gear, with key in hand to deactivate it. Except oh no, snake dropped the key, climb back down to pick it back up, climb back up to use it...Find out you need to backtrack to an earlier icy section to get another key...You get there and realize you have to stand in the ice for like a full minute to get the key. Then climb up the metal gear to use it...Then backtrack to a section even farther behind the ice room, with TWO elevators you have to wait in on the way, stand in the room for a minute, then go all the way back to the metal gear, climb it AGAIN, final boss time. (Climbing up or down the Metal gear takes nearly a full minute every time) This is the game's finale. For as much talk of this game being a masterpiece that was ahead of its time... I WAS expecting the horrible 80% cutscene to 20% gameplay ratio because I know MGS is just like that. But I wasn't ready for 80% cutscene-5% gameplay, and 15% of the most blatant and obnoxious padding the industry has ever seen.
I already didn't think the first chunk of the game was that great, featuring mediocre, easily ignorable stealth, and slowly crawling through vents. But then the last 2/3rds of the game hits and its as though they realized they spent all their time and money on (terrible) cutscenes and have nothing to tie them together. This barely even qualifies as a video game. Besides the padding I went over, there's only a few small, square rooms with a couple easily avoidable enemies roaming them. This game is tiny, giving you a game-space to exist in was a complete afterthought. It's astonishing they managed to make such a short game with such a tiny world take 2 discs, likely just because of how bloated the story is. Though I will say they crammed a lot of cool visual details in here at least. Watch an hour of cutscenes, walk to the other side of an empty base, watch an hour of cutscenes, fight a boss, 20 minutes of cutscenes, fight a boss, 20 minutes of cutscenes, fight a boss, 40 minutes of cutscenes. The game structure is maddening, the only thing of substance you ever do is fight some random boss fight, most of which really aren't great either. Your kit is clearly intended to be somewhat unwieldy and awkward, you're meant to be sneaking around not gunning people down. Why then is a majority of what little gameplay there is--forced action set pieces or boss fights? Nothing about this game even feels like a stealth game, moments where you need to sneak around enemies are few and far between and even fewer are moments where doing so is even a challenge.
If this game was judged on its gameplay, it would get middling reviews at best I feel like. The story is make or break, it's the ENTIRE game. 6 hour game and 4 of those hours are cutscenes. And idk man, I get that it presents itself as way more cinematic and ahead of its time than you'd expect out of a PS1...But that almost feels kind of reductive to me. Like "aw how cute the ps1's trying to be cool". The only thing that's actually ahead of its time is the excessive amount of dialogue recorded. And yeah there is a lot of extra dialogue if you call certain characters at certain times. But you can't just record a lot of dialogue and suddenly you're a masterpiece. Kojima wants so hard to be a movie director and that's apparently super cool for a video game especially one this old. But if you treat this game like a movie...it's the most boring movie possible. Flat cinematography, hammy as hecc writing, abysmal pacing, messy and uneventful. I'm down for some ham but this game REALLY thinks it's saying something. Dying characters just run down their Wikipedia article telling you all about their backstory in an attempt to get you to care about them last minute. All character growth or relationship advancements feel rushed and unearned, which is shocking given the runtime of the cinematics and dialogue. I'd say only Otakon feels like a real person who builds any kind of legitimate relationship with Snake. It's just so boring, 4 hours of someone info dumping either about themselves or about worldwide politics.
Bigger picture if a competent director took this story, it could be great. There's a lot of mystery and intrigue set up even early on. But, it's just like the game itself, repetitive and exhausting. Every scene is just people babbling to Snake for a painfully long time with snake just repeating what they said back at them but with a question mark, spurring them on to keep overexplaining it. Like bro the premise is just that the world was careless about disposing nukes and terrorists are exploiting that fact. Spend the game telling a story about that! I haven't played a lot of Kojima games but this feels consistent with what I've noticed so far, in that he mistakes the premise for the story itself. If Kojima wrote the movie "Cars" it would be a 3 hour film about the history of travel and how advancements in that industry can be misused by criminals. I'm on your side bro you don't gotta sell me on "war bad" just DO something with it! The execution comes off so hamfisted and preachy, resorting to live action footage to try and drive the point of how real it all is. Resident Evil is also about corruption and terrorists, but those games (And just about every other game ever) have you live out the consequences of the premise. MGS on the other hand plays out like random characters reading Kojima's high school social studies report. Only for the last page to be some pretentious think-piece about biology.
"Ahead of its time" doesn't equate to good. And I don't even think I agree this even IS ahead of its time. The graphics are beautiful and the voice acting is a lot of fun. Otherwise, games with better storytelling existed before and after this. Games with better gameplay and more coherent game structure had existed for nearly 20 years before this. 1998 saw Half-Life, Grim Fandango, Ocarina of time, Resident Evil 2, Baldur's Gate 1, Sonic Adventure 1, all games that pushed the boundaries of video game storytelling and gameplay, all in completely different and exciting ways. Banjo-Kazooie, Spyro, Mario party, MediEvil, gex enter the h*eckin' gecko also came out in the same year. Metal gear might be the only game of its time that DOESN'T go hard. In that sense it IS ahead of its time. Kojima introduced the idea of a "bad game" to the world.
I'm being a tad facetious at this point of course but I actually have no respect whatsoever for this game. I'm just saying a Kojima directed movie would be unwatchable.
It's nothing but repetitive, empty game design that has you backtrack through already mediocre level chunks. The next part of the game has you climb 50 flights of stairs, then climb down only to see the last few stairs are broken, so you climb all the way back up, do a boss, and climb back down. Then they have you re-fight the sniper boss again. 2 hours of actual gameplay in the entire game and they had to resort to reusing bosses. The last hour of the game is spent climbing the metal gear, with key in hand to deactivate it. Except oh no, snake dropped the key, climb back down to pick it back up, climb back up to use it...Find out you need to backtrack to an earlier icy section to get another key...You get there and realize you have to stand in the ice for like a full minute to get the key. Then climb up the metal gear to use it...Then backtrack to a section even farther behind the ice room, with TWO elevators you have to wait in on the way, stand in the room for a minute, then go all the way back to the metal gear, climb it AGAIN, final boss time. (Climbing up or down the Metal gear takes nearly a full minute every time) This is the game's finale. For as much talk of this game being a masterpiece that was ahead of its time... I WAS expecting the horrible 80% cutscene to 20% gameplay ratio because I know MGS is just like that. But I wasn't ready for 80% cutscene-5% gameplay, and 15% of the most blatant and obnoxious padding the industry has ever seen.
I already didn't think the first chunk of the game was that great, featuring mediocre, easily ignorable stealth, and slowly crawling through vents. But then the last 2/3rds of the game hits and its as though they realized they spent all their time and money on (terrible) cutscenes and have nothing to tie them together. This barely even qualifies as a video game. Besides the padding I went over, there's only a few small, square rooms with a couple easily avoidable enemies roaming them. This game is tiny, giving you a game-space to exist in was a complete afterthought. It's astonishing they managed to make such a short game with such a tiny world take 2 discs, likely just because of how bloated the story is. Though I will say they crammed a lot of cool visual details in here at least. Watch an hour of cutscenes, walk to the other side of an empty base, watch an hour of cutscenes, fight a boss, 20 minutes of cutscenes, fight a boss, 20 minutes of cutscenes, fight a boss, 40 minutes of cutscenes. The game structure is maddening, the only thing of substance you ever do is fight some random boss fight, most of which really aren't great either. Your kit is clearly intended to be somewhat unwieldy and awkward, you're meant to be sneaking around not gunning people down. Why then is a majority of what little gameplay there is--forced action set pieces or boss fights? Nothing about this game even feels like a stealth game, moments where you need to sneak around enemies are few and far between and even fewer are moments where doing so is even a challenge.
If this game was judged on its gameplay, it would get middling reviews at best I feel like. The story is make or break, it's the ENTIRE game. 6 hour game and 4 of those hours are cutscenes. And idk man, I get that it presents itself as way more cinematic and ahead of its time than you'd expect out of a PS1...But that almost feels kind of reductive to me. Like "aw how cute the ps1's trying to be cool". The only thing that's actually ahead of its time is the excessive amount of dialogue recorded. And yeah there is a lot of extra dialogue if you call certain characters at certain times. But you can't just record a lot of dialogue and suddenly you're a masterpiece. Kojima wants so hard to be a movie director and that's apparently super cool for a video game especially one this old. But if you treat this game like a movie...it's the most boring movie possible. Flat cinematography, hammy as hecc writing, abysmal pacing, messy and uneventful. I'm down for some ham but this game REALLY thinks it's saying something. Dying characters just run down their Wikipedia article telling you all about their backstory in an attempt to get you to care about them last minute. All character growth or relationship advancements feel rushed and unearned, which is shocking given the runtime of the cinematics and dialogue. I'd say only Otakon feels like a real person who builds any kind of legitimate relationship with Snake. It's just so boring, 4 hours of someone info dumping either about themselves or about worldwide politics.
Bigger picture if a competent director took this story, it could be great. There's a lot of mystery and intrigue set up even early on. But, it's just like the game itself, repetitive and exhausting. Every scene is just people babbling to Snake for a painfully long time with snake just repeating what they said back at them but with a question mark, spurring them on to keep overexplaining it. Like bro the premise is just that the world was careless about disposing nukes and terrorists are exploiting that fact. Spend the game telling a story about that! I haven't played a lot of Kojima games but this feels consistent with what I've noticed so far, in that he mistakes the premise for the story itself. If Kojima wrote the movie "Cars" it would be a 3 hour film about the history of travel and how advancements in that industry can be misused by criminals. I'm on your side bro you don't gotta sell me on "war bad" just DO something with it! The execution comes off so hamfisted and preachy, resorting to live action footage to try and drive the point of how real it all is. Resident Evil is also about corruption and terrorists, but those games (And just about every other game ever) have you live out the consequences of the premise. MGS on the other hand plays out like random characters reading Kojima's high school social studies report. Only for the last page to be some pretentious think-piece about biology.
"Ahead of its time" doesn't equate to good. And I don't even think I agree this even IS ahead of its time. The graphics are beautiful and the voice acting is a lot of fun. Otherwise, games with better storytelling existed before and after this. Games with better gameplay and more coherent game structure had existed for nearly 20 years before this. 1998 saw Half-Life, Grim Fandango, Ocarina of time, Resident Evil 2, Baldur's Gate 1, Sonic Adventure 1, all games that pushed the boundaries of video game storytelling and gameplay, all in completely different and exciting ways. Banjo-Kazooie, Spyro, Mario party, MediEvil, gex enter the h*eckin' gecko also came out in the same year. Metal gear might be the only game of its time that DOESN'T go hard. In that sense it IS ahead of its time. Kojima introduced the idea of a "bad game" to the world.
I'm being a tad facetious at this point of course but I actually have no respect whatsoever for this game. I'm just saying a Kojima directed movie would be unwatchable.
4 Comments
If you're enamored enough with the story and boss fights, a lot of the backtracking is a pretty small hurdle, I can understand that much. I'm no stranger to putting up with some less than decent game design in favor of enjoying a game that's otherwise worth enjoying. Makes me think back to Paper Mario TTYD, backtrack city yet still among my favorites largely for its storytelling and worldbuilding. Though Metal Gear is a bit egregious given how little gameplay there truly is. If there were 8 hours of gameplay and 1-2 hours of that had some padding and/or backtracking that's nothing. But the gameplay side here is only give or take 2 hours. For 1/3rd of the game to be gameplay, and for 2/3rds of said gameplay to be aggressively lazy in its design, I can't say there's much I can honestly really dig into with this game. The scale is incredibly small even for its time and it's just ultimately not remotely impressive.
Though like I said if the story's enough for someone, I totally get why that leaves them with a better impression considering that's a majority of the game. But personally even in Kojima games I'm actually a big fan of, I still find him to be the worst writer, scene director, and overall storyteller in the entire industry, talking both video games and movies.
Though like I said if the story's enough for someone, I totally get why that leaves them with a better impression considering that's a majority of the game. But personally even in Kojima games I'm actually a big fan of, I still find him to be the worst writer, scene director, and overall storyteller in the entire industry, talking both video games and movies.
Preach, brother. Wait'll you get to the second one; it's even worse.
My experience with 2 so far was about 8 years ago, I was losing my mind at how many of the same mission it kept having me do, then the game softlocked on an elevator and corrupted my save file. Based series I suppose lool
Riggz
2 months ago