MGS2 is a technical marvel of an improvement over MGS1, that is undeniable. I imagine that if we had gotten the perfect sequel to MGS1, it would still play exactly like this.
HOWEVER, MGS2 fails to surpass or even measure up to MGS1 by simply not making use of all of its improvements. The tanker chapter is a great tutorial and introduction to the new elements, but unfortunately, the big shell never quite reaches the same highs the tanker does. And this is all on top of the fact that MGS2 is just REALLY easy. First person aiming is a head and shoulders improvement over MGS1, but the guards weren't exactly made good enough to compensate for that, still having the limited range of the first game despite the fact that Raiden can snipe them with a pistol from across the entire room.
Of course the story also isn't as good as MGS1's, but that would require a much more in-depth analysis of the worth of meta commentary in place of a good plot and how that meta is implemented, which I would LOVE to do, just not on my backloggd reviews. Maybe I'll make an MGS2-specific video on my channel one day, but don't bet on it.

What the fuck was Kojima on. What an amazing over the top bonkers crazy ass plot.

Really great game. Improves on a lot from the first game. I think it goes a little too hard on the amount of cut scenes. Many times I sat down to play some games before bed and just watched a bunch of cut scenes instead.

Super solid gameplay, great score and good boss fights.

I think I enjoyed the first game more but only slightly. I think the gameplay is better in this but the atmosphere, setting, plot and characters are much better in Metal Gear Solid 1

So I gotta be honest, this game was super weird to play. For one, the story of it how so many twists and turns, its completely wild and by the end of it can blow your mind. For another, the gameplay is great, it builds on what MGS did and made it more epic. Its a fantastic gaming experience that just has some small hinderances on it.

First let me say that I did enjoy that Solid Snake was used as a tutorial chapter to get you ready for the rest of the game. In fact, gameplay wise, it might be my favorite part of the game. The ship was fun to traverse and had a cool way of using the camera. After that and the explosion that occurs, you skipped a couple years later and control Raiden. He is mostly the same as Snake, with maybe how he does certain things. He is a bit different than Snake with his personality and its pretty fun to see how he reacts to certain events. All the gadgets from the first game are all here and are very fun to play around with, and even adds some new gadgets to play around with. The boss fights were also pretty cool here, though not as memorable as the first one. Fat Man was cool since it was really a hide and seek to freeze over his bombs and the final boss fights were pretty tense.

If i had a complaint about anything in this game its the setting. Its at a tanker in the middle of the ocean and its all gray and red for almost the entire time you're there with very little that makes any area stand out. It all kinda blends in with each other with the only thing helping me find my way through the game is the map itself. The other small gripe is it feels like it takes way to long for the guard to go away if you're caught, they really make feel like a punishment.

It still a great game with one of the craziest endings I have ever seen in a game, and it made the whole experiance worth its time.

Hideo Kojima's career is fascinating, and it's not something you can hope to find out about from "The Official Version". You kind of have to dig into old interviews, and have first-hand memories of long-delisted websites and discarded promotional material. GW has erased the ugly details, but I can't say goodbye to yesterday, my friend. Kojima thrived on the sidelines. He was originally hired as a project planner on Konami's MSX team, in the offices that the management didn't pay much attention to. The high-stakes positions were all working on Famicom and arcade games, and Kojima spent the first decade of his career in the shadows, catering to a small, enthusiast market with Japanese home computer releases and text-heavy adventure games. It's easy to over-romanticise this era. It wasn't easy. There was a lot of mismanagement and the expectation for relentless crunch, with many members of staff spending days on end in the office without leaving, but the games that came from those teams were pretty special. They were purposefully constructed, delivering a clear worldview and commenting on the ethical dangers of scientific developments in a politically unstable world. Then MGS1 was a huge international success, and all eyes were on Kojima.

From the early days, it was clear that Kojima had a unique confidence and self-belief. Some may call it ego or even narcissism, but it's what gave him the drive and ambition to attempt blending dense, socially relevant stories with traditional videogame action. When the bulk of the Japanese games industry was still hiding behind publisher-insisted pen names, Kojima opened Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake with an introductory credits sequence, naming each member of staff, saving himself for the biggest credit. It made sense. MSX2 owners who'd played Metal Gear and Snatcher knew that there was a rare quality to Hideo Kojima's games, and Metal Gear 2 was the promise of the Kojimiest game yet. Policenauts would similarly promote itself on the name of its director, delving into the production process with behind the scenes books and bonus discs that were fairly uncommon forms of game merchandise in the mid-90s. Before MGS1 had made the west aware of him, Kojima was putting his face on soundtrack CDs. He wanted the spotlight, but he didn't know how demanding it would be of him.

Metal Gear Solid 2 was announced, and was propped up as the game for the new millennium. The one thing that would chrysalise the medium into a new form. In tandem with the growing interest in the internet, the significance of home computer ownership was really taking hold. DVD players and digital TV services were selling themselves on "Interactive" features, reportedly blurring the line between audience and participant (we didn't know at the time that the peak of this technology would be Beehive Bedlam). Sony were convinced that Windows PCs were too technical and business-focused for mainstream adoption. There would be no overlap between the computer and the living room. The word at the time was that the PlayStation 2 was going to be the thing to take people into this new, interconnected era, and traditional forms of entertainment would become a memory of the 20th Century. The promise of the "interactive movie" that had been dangled towards early adopters of CD-ROM, finally coming to fruition. From Final Fantasy X to Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, and perhaps most ridiculously of all, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, many new titles were selling themselves on the promise to bridge the gap between these mediums, but for many, MGS2 seemed like the best bet to accomplish it. That's a lot of pressure for a game where you navigate boxy rooms, avoiding blue vision cones.

Metal Gear Solid 2 trailers were bold. Not only were they promising a game with unforeseen levels of interactivity, but wild narrative swings. We were told Solid Snake was dead. We were told he was the leader of the terrorist organisation putting the world at ransom. We'd anticipated a game that would radically shift our perception of the prior one. When we eventually bought the game, we swallowed the bitter truth when a mysterious Navy SEAL popped up with David Hayter's voice, taking fire at a horny vampire.

Reading pre-release interviews with Kojima, it's clear that he was as convinced by the potential as anyone else. He talks about character movement being impacted by changing wind direction, the integration of voice-recognition and online support. The end results are so compromised that you might not even notice them in the game. The network support got nipped and tucked at so much that in the end, it became an online competition for the opportunity to have your name appear on an in-game dog tag, and a browser-only leaderboard system where you could post your completion stats after you finished. The voice support, adding user-expression to the long, dense CODEC calls? That's the ability to press R2 to have your character audibly think a weird retort. "WHATEVER!" These are the limitations of not only the PlayStation 2 in 2001, but the ability of a Japanese development studio to deliver an action game on new hardware in a three-year project.

MGS2 couldn't live up to those initial ambitions. It didn't fully satisfy those dreaming of something new and transcendent. It was MGS1 again with extra buttons. But oh, what buttons!

MGS2 has so many cool little stealth moves to play around with. You get a real sense of your own ingenuity as you figure your way through each section. VR Missions was everything that MGS1 gameplay could offer. The developers knocked their heads against the walls, spinning its systems off down every conceivable avenue. The frustration of these limitations directly inspired the techniques players could make use of in Sons of Liberty. Players would be able to interact with guards much more intricately, threatening them at gunpoint, disabling walkie-talkies, injuring specific limbs, and shaking them down for extra supplies. Snake and Raiden could roll (or cartwheel), hang from railings, and pop out of cover, ready to fire. Most crucially, you could now aim from a first-person perspective, allowing for much more deliberate action in shoot-outs, or just fuck about with the set dressing to see how many clips KCEJ recorded for the sound of shooting a frying pan with different guns. Shenmue had set a new precedent for how interactive a 3D world could be in a game, and MGS2 picked up the baton to explore how that degree of tangibility could benefit Metal Gear. Hardcore fans who had bought Zone of the Enders solely for the opportunity to play a small section of this game would become intimately familiar with all the quirks and potential of its gameplay, hungry to see how they would be explored in the full campaign. I'm not convinced the Big Shell was the best possible pay-off for these hopes.

It isn't just the fact that players got to spend more time with their favourite muscle man that makes the Tanker section so beloved. It's very purposefully designed to explore MGS2's mechanics, and refreshingly, it borrows little from the structure of the MSX games. Metal Gear had already spent multiple generations reworking and refining the same, familiar setup, and it was exciting to see the series do something different. There's no hostages, no NIKITA puzzle, no underwater facility entrance. It was doing new things, taking out security cameras, shaking down guards for supplies, and sneaking past an audience of a hundred soldiers during a speech. It was exciting. But those old tropes were waiting for us, just around the corner. Justifying themselves via a metatextual reflection upon the previous game.

MGS2 is discussed in hushed, reverential tones these days. If something seemed weird or stupid, you obviously didn't get it. It had been relatively easy to understand a story about genetic inheritance, but memetic inheritance seemed far more abstract. Snake was a son of genetic inheritance, being a clone of the world's most prized soldier, and Raiden, the son of ideological inheritance, with Solidus killing his parents and fostering him as his own brainwashed soldier. Every action he takes is accompanied by a question of how he's being manipulated, and by whom. There's an awkward balance in the game being both radically incisive and incredibly schlocky videogame trash. Whenever it did something too absurd or outright crap, we took faith in the notion that nothing was quite what it seemed. Like there was a hidden truth that would make it all cohesive and brilliant. It was up to us to find it, and if we couldn't figure it out, we could always just pester Kojima and Konami to produce a much more pandering sequel. Full of retcons, underwhelming reveals, and relentless goalpost shifting. Was there ever value in MGS2's outlandish paranormal activity? Did Kojima ever have an answer before his arm was twisted enough to yell "nanomachines" in response to every question? Are we ashamed of our words and deeds for ever thinking the whole of Shell 2 was agonisingly tedious?

Discussing MGS2's story is a sticking your hand in a can of worms and finding a worm-filled rabbit hole at the bottom. A dense, purposefully confusing, and often prescient script. It also has roots in Kojima's 80s action game design, where storybeats are mainly included to intrigue its audience enough to continue playing. Kojima's handwritten script is filled with footnotes, explicitly referencing the Hollywood blockbusters he ripped each idea from. MGS2 was the point where much of Kojima's games became dictated by the promises he'd made in press interviews and pre-release trailers. MGS4 staff have talked about spending months solely working on moments to include in trailers, and then retroactively having to build the game around those moments. That approach started here. Shallow instances of mindblowing spectacle, engineered to shift product with little concern for the long-term impact. Ocelot's arm, Vamp's superhuman abilities, basically everything to do with Dead Cell - they're weird twists, and typically just for the sake of having a weird twist. Vamp's gay relationship with US Marine Corp commander, Scott Dolph, appears to be entirely a sophomoric in-joke targetted at Kojima's then-personal interpreter. MGS2 is simultaneously an earnest musing on the nature of propaganda in the digital age, and a very stupid videogame with absurd arcade game bosses. I don't want to make out like all the silliness is purely problematic or mishandled. There's moments of fun and whimsy I enjoy. Slipping on birdshit and the guard taking a leak off the side of the Strut L. Fatman. It's not the focus, but the old frivolous MSX personality is still here. Just muffled by all the pretension surrounding it. On your first playthrough, you don't know whether you can just enjoy something as a daft joke, or if it's hiding some deeper layer of significance. MGS1 had one foot in gaming's history and another in its future, and MGS2 attempts the same, with messier results in either respect.

The game's English writer, Agness Kaku, has discussed the thankless job of attempting to make MGS2's weird, convoluted script sound engaging through its translation. A lack of reference material, character limits, and heavy rewrites from Konami resulted in the game we have today. It's also clear that she doesn't have much regard for Kojima's script, and attempted to inject it with a richer sense of character and more entertaining dialogue. Many gamers would feel take strong objection to someone, particularly a woman, tinkering with the script from a visionary of Kojima's status, but the bulk of MGS2's most beloved English lines are embellishments on Kaku's part, and her political and literary knowledge lined her up well for the subject matter. However, Konami's insistence on literal translations of certain lines, paired with her personal distaste for Kojima's writing, made the final script fairly patchy and inconsistent. As talented a voice director as Kris Zimmerman is, there are lines of dialogue that are delivered in very odd ways, suggesting the cast didn't really understand the intention behind them. By contrast, Kaku's work on Katamari Damacy presents quite an interesting dynamic. That was a similarly text-rich game, but one with a much more playful tone, and a less demanding writer. She was allowed to completely rewrite the game with very little direction, and the final result was a delight. Katamari writer/director, Keita Takahashi has gone on to learn English at a high level and now lives in San Francisco, where he's expected to speak it as his main language. I wonder if he's ever gone back to look at the English version of his PS2 game.

Metatextually, MGS2 benefits from a constant feeling of distrust. To know whether or not you're seeing the real version. There's an additional distrust of censorship thanks to the game's Q4 2001 release date, the story of terrorists causing destruction and political instability off the coast of New York City, and public sensitivity to the subject matter at the time. Following September 2001, there had been late-stage edits to the game, and as an audience, we can't be sure how compromised the final release is, but even without the real-world parallels, the game is filled with themes of how lies spread and ideas take hold. From the once-tortured child soldier, Raiden, to Peter Stillman's faked disability, to Otacon's disturbing family history, every character in the game has an uneasy relationship with the truth, denying their personal trauma to the world. By the Big Shell portion of the game, there's a question over whether they're real at all, or merely a projection of an elaborate AI construct. Sections of the game that are teased - boss fights with Fortune and Ocelot, as well as the bulk of Shell 2 - go unfulfilled. Raiden breaks through enemy security by lying about his identity, pretending to be one of them, adopting their uniform, and manipulating their body to trick a retinal scanner. Raiden's first quest in the game - disabling a series of explosives - turns out to be an elaborate decoy, while Snake discovers the real bomb off-screen. Snake is playing the real game, and Raiden is still in the VR replica. The Solid Snake game that had been heavily promoted at trade shows and plastered on magazine covers for years beforehand didn't exist. It was all just part of the simulation. This is the dynamic of MGS1 and 2.

The truth of the situation only comes through in the ending.
"It doesn't matter if they were real or not, that's never the point."
"Don't obsess over words so much."
"Everything you felt, thought about during this mission is yours. And what you decide to do with them is your choice..."
Kojima couldn't make something that transcended the medium of videogames. The Emotion Engine was merely a new CPU, comprised of silicon soldered to a circuit board, and shipped to millions of homes within SCE's new electronic toy. When the PS2 became something people could touch and own, the best it could do was play rushed versions of TimeSplitters and SSX that would soon be rendered obsolete by their immediate sequels. The dream was over. The boundaries were brought into stark focus. Metal Gear Solid 2 would be little more than The New Metal Gear Solid, despite the discussion, obsession, interpretation and reinterpretation it would provoke. With the constant focus from fans, it became more than it was. Value was seen in it, and thus, it was there.

Metal Gear Solid 2 changed my relationship with videogames, and not in ways that either its developers, or I, may have hoped. It made me aware of the inherent limitations. Before it, the future of videogames seemed like a boundless, infinite expanse. They could be anything. They could transcend physical limits. They were another dimension. A world of pure imagination. Afterwards, I became aware of just how tethered they were to reality. They were the result of project plans, processing speeds, staff sizes, managerial oversight, limited talent and budgets. They became infinitely smaller. Less significant. Cute. They didn't reflect the limitations of their creators' imaginations, but their ability to deliver a project with realistic expectations. It levelled the playing field. Now, MMOs, which promised entirely new worlds for players to live in, were dragged back to the same context as Pong. It made me realise what a game was. I came to the other side of that, and still loved it. To call it a disappointment is denying the growth that we needed to take. As fans, creators, and an industry. We're currently living through the investor class catching up with PS2 gamers, getting hyped for Final Fantasy XI, kidding on like we're going to spend all our free time in the fucking Metaverse. We all need to accept reality, and learn how to live in it. To appraise videogames with maturity. Let's all calm down and see how big a score we can get on Dig Dug today.

Yeah. Might add more to this later but it's that good. I already thought Metal Gear Solid 1 was amazing, but 2 just knocks it out of the park and is easily one of the best games I have ever played. Fun gameplay that involves strategy in order to not get caught, new first-person mechanics (although I will say the controls for these have not aged the best), and an absolutely amazing story with many twists and turns, and the introduction of a new playable character, who I may honestly like more than Solid Snake himself. There's a lot more I could say, but just play it for yourself. It's genuinely fantastic.

Kojima é gênio dms, não tem como.

A história desse jogo é tão boa quanto qualquer coisa que Kojima já tenha colocado as mãos, e tão confusa quanto também.
Admito ter ficado um pouco aéreo principalmente no fim do jogo, depois de tantos plot twists que bugaram minha mente, precisei zerá-lo de novo no Youtube, mas apesar de tudo, é excepcional agora que entendi.

Apesar de tudo, acho que esse jogo não brilha tanto quanto MGS1 na maioria dos aspectos, apesar da história tão boa quanto, acho que aqui falta alguns personagens mais impactantes, tantos os companheiros via CODEC quanto aos bosses, especialmente as boss fights não chegam nem perto do que tivemos com um Psyco Mantis ou o próprio Liquid Snake, mas felizmente muitos dos personagens anteriores estão presentes aqui.

À respeito do próprio protagonista, Raiden, eu curti bastante ele, fico imaginando o que acontecerá com ele daqui para frente.

Quanto à gameplay, é tão datada quanto do jogo anterior, o que afeta muito na diversão do game e traz um sistema de stealth um tanto quanto falho, uma vez que a própria mecânica de câmeras não te deixam ver onde exatamente está cada inimigo, falhei muitas vezes para conseguir chegar onde precisava, fora que o gameplay em loop na big shell, onde é a maior parte do jogo fica também um pouco maçante.
Houve poucas evoluções em questões de gameplay, só ficou um pouco menos travado no geral e teve um grande salto gráfico, fora isso é quase tudo igual, inclusive até os comandos.

Dito tudo isso, Metal Gear Solid 2 ainda é uma masterpiece que apesar de tudo envelheceu muito bem e que principalmente merece um remake.

Metal Gear Solid 2 is the type of experience that is simply unmatched, you won't find anything like it.

The gameplay is a pretty logical upgrade to MGS1, a lot smoother and improved exactly where it has to be, creating a very responsive and pleasant experience which, while it doesn't measure up to MGS3 (no shit) still feels very good, at least in my opinion. I've had other people tell me that it didn't age well but honestly i'd say it did. MGS1 is really the only MGS that has suffered hard the passage of time in regards to gameplay. I feel like it's thanks to the Master Collection giving me a consistent 60 FPS with no emulator slowdowns and the ability to comfortably use any of my controllers that I had such a good time on the gameplay side of things, because I definitely recall having a harder time all of my previous playthroughs on emulators or native hardware (i hate the dualshock).

The graphics are a step down? I mean, not really... You still get a really good looking game for it's time, very well shot with awesome cinematics and generally good ambience, but you also can't help but feel that something is missing. The gripping atmosphere of the original game is kinda lost here and replaced with another, "good but not quite" one. Given that MGS2 is a game with a good atmosphere sandwitched between two games with sublime atmospheres, it really seems like MGS2 suffered the fate of being the "we're still figuring out how to properly develop for the hardware" game out of the 3. Still, while the atmosphere might not be there, i really dig the general aesthetics. Besides, some of the details are pretty insane for a 2001 game, though i'd rather not talk about them because you've probably already seen a million top 10 videogame easter eggs highlighting the exact same few details over and over because that's how you feed the machine and make the money

And the story, here's where the game really gets meaty. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty has arguably the best story of any game i've ever played. It's probably not an exageration to say that it's one of the best videogame narratives of all time. It's an incredibly subversive, deeply touching, borderline lifechanging and scarily premonitorial plot, written and presented in incredibly smart ways and threaded together incredibly tightly. No game will ever pierce through your chest, plunge out your heart, and then put it back in with a fierce desire to live on like this one. It's very, very hard to believe that this game was written in 2001. Everytime I tell people around that this game predicted modern society I kinda feel like a cornball, but it's really funny how it's just, true. Bar for bar Hideo Kojima just pondered his orb and saw what was coming and he just wrote that shit without missing a beat. I'm running out of positive adjetives

It's the best game of all time go play it

Positives:
-If you have any intrusive thoughts of doing something stupid just do it probably most of them will work. This is how crazy the amount of stupid little things you can do.

-The plot and cutscenes are somehow even more crazy the main villain is super over the top in the best way.

-the game just feels smoother and better. And adds insane details. This is the best enemy AI in the series. Not just intelligence they're just funny and react to a lot of things.

Negatives:

-I know I said the game felt smoother and it also has the best AI. But for my first playthrough it's a negative. The game is waay too hard and I'm bad at stealth. I switched to easy mode but the things those enemies did to me.

-sadly the codec took a nosedive here. It's still unique for spoilery reasons. But for most of the game it's just them telling you what to do without any added personality. Rose just sucks.

TURN OFF THE CONSOLE

yes sorry. I originally played this a couple years ago and didn't finish it, said it was mgs1 but worse, didn't care. played it again on easy mode and any moment snake showed up I was hyped and loving it. I found the middle of the game fine? But when the rails start coming off I think I sat and played this for a few hours straight and I loved it, it was glorious. and I have thought about it a lot since playing it! Some of the stuff that happens towards the end is absolutely incredible and very relevant now and I just bloody love it mat.e.

Just like the first Metal Gear Solid, this game was a very profound experience, and whilst it can get very confusing at times, the overall story is always engaging and I loved seeing all the new ways the game managed to completely change the way I looked at the events of the game, with the ending cutscenes being a lot to take in at once, especially since they go on for like half an hour, but still make me satisfied with what I played.

Gameplay is also a massive improvement with pretty much anything that made the first game feel outdated being gone, so the game as a whole feels as good as any modern game to play, and older features like the fixed-camera aren't even noticeable due to how well it controls.

Whilst I would've preferred to play as Solid Snake for longer than the prologue, I actually really enjoyed playing as Raiden, he feels like his own character and the more the story progressed the more he fit into this bizarre world of Snake-clones and vampires, and I look forward to seeing him again in MGS4.

Overall, Metal Gear Solid 2 is a really great game which has aged amazingly, and whilst the games are getting progressively more confusing with their stories and long cutscenes, I still really love playing them, and I look forward to making my way through the rest of the Metal Gear games.

When I beat Metal Gear Solid 2, I was left in absolute awe. It felt like I was left speechless, though there was so much I wanted to talk about at the same time. It’s been about a year at this point since I played the first Metal Gear Solid, and I adored it, though of course some of its moments I feel are heavily flawed. My memory is a little rusty on the first game due to the gap of time, but it sort of came flooding back as I played through MGS2. And I still can’t believe just how much of a masterpiece this game really is.

I was a bit scared when first starting up MGS2. Particularly it was because the game went over almost every single mechanic that you can do. At first it felt like I was being overwhelmed by loads of information, however I didn’t have as much of a problem as I thought I would. The game and its level layouts really helped teach me everything I would need to know, to the point where I was able to naturally understand what to do. Though of course it felt wrong seeing the switch buttons be shown on screen.

A small note more than anything but I do wonder why you’re able to select one of the episodes before doing the full main story. For a first time run of the game, you should only be able to do Tanker-Plant, so I just wonder why the game allows you to choose either Tanker or Plant before beating the game for the first time.

Raiden as a character is one of the aspects of MGS2 I don’t want to go into full detail about. I often repeat this, and I wont stop repeating this, but I like to leave my reviews as spoiler-free as possible. Raiden is such an important character to the game’s story that so much of him is intrinsically tied to spoilers, leading me to be careful in what I say. But what I can say is that he’s an amazing character. The more I learned of him, and the further I came to understand him, I grew to love him as a character. I love how complex he is, though of course I can’t really explain here why that is the case, sorry about that. It does make me wonder why people back in like, late 2000s-early 2010s internet hated him. Did they not give Raiden a chance? It feels so clear and obvious to me how amazing Raiden is as a character that it makes me confused how people missed it and hated him instead.

There’s a lot of first person mode use in this game, far more than in MGS1 from what I remember. And I do think it’s better, and a lot more polished. It still has that little bit of an issue with aiming on a controller never feeling fully accurate, but I think that’s more the nature of aiming with a controller in general. It isn’t necessarily only an issue that MGS2 has. Yet again keep in mind, I did play the Switch version, so that could also have some involvement and explain why there may have been some issues. There’s never anything as bad as the first Sniper Wolf fight in MGS1, so thank god for that. There was a little bit of a learning curve for me particularly with first person aiming, since I’m not fully accustomed to it. Though when I was able to fully figure it out, it felt pretty good. One of my favorite guns in games is Sniper Rifles, I love being able to stealthily shoot from a far distance, not being noticed by enemies. In MGS2, because of first person aiming, even the regular SOCOM pistol has that effect that I love with Sniper Rifles, and it’s amazing because of it.

The bosses of MGS2 are also pretty good I’ll say. At worst, they’re just a tad bit annoying, but once you get the flow of those they’re pretty manageable and kind of fun because of it. Yet again it’s another showcase of how well written the character in this series are. The members of Dead Cell are expertly written, even though they get so little screentime compared to the likes of Raiden. They’re so memorable, and very few games are really able to do that.

And I do admit there are parts of the game that frustrated me. Certain sections were a bit difficult, oftentimes it was because there were a lot of insta-death moments. As I said before, the first person mode controls are a little finnicky as someone who usually plays first person games with Mouse and Keyboard. Some bosses can be a little annoying if not in the proper flow. I don’t know if the game intended for my interpretation of it, but it feels like all of these annoyances or frustrations are purposeful. There is meaning behind getting upset, there is meaning by struggling through it, to see it to its end, and it was absolutely worth it.

Much like Raiden himself, I’m not going to talk too much about the story here for the sake of avoiding spoiling anything. For one, I definitely still am unraveling the story in my head as I type this, and it’ll be a while before I fully grasp everything. There’s so many interconnecting webs and ideas that I haven’t fully comprehended, but I so want to. Even so, I absolutely adore this game’s story. It’s so masterfully crafted and every single moment it blew me away. It’s crazy to realize just how correct Kojima was in predicting certain aspects of the internet age and political ideology, though I won’t go too in-depth in what I mean by that here. And all of the story lead to an absolute masterpiece of an ending, one that I think will stick in my head for years to come.

I should’ve played this game such a long time ago. I had no idea that game was as perfect as it was, and it left me awestruck. Metal Gear Solid 2 is an absolute masterpiece by all degrees. Even though there are some parts that I admit are frustrating, the game feels like it’s able to turn that around and make it purposeful, and make that frustrations mean something more. I’ll be honest there’s a lot more I could say about Metal Gear Solid 2. There’s so much of the game’s story I want to discuss so much, but this isn’t the place for that, and I’m not the one that should tell you it. Of course, play the original Metal Gear Solid first, but please, please play Metal Gear Solid 2.