This review contains spoilers
Ah, Metal Gear Solid. I've heard so many legends about you from friends and the overarching video game community, but I never got around to playing until this week. So after playing through Kojima's earlier works Snatcher and Policenauts last year and loving those separate narratives, I decided to finally get past my hesitation and tackle the big one.
What surprised me perhaps the most is that despite its age, it has held up magnificently well. The stealth is relatively simple: you just gotta stay out of sight against these so called super soldiers with enhanced sight and hearing (as enhanced as it can be in 1998, anyways) and getting caught will suck because then come the endless waves of gunfire. Admittingly I'm not sure how well the idea of stealth is supposed to hold up when you can use your Stinger to blow up cameras or use an unsilenced sniper rifle to take out patrolling soldiers halfway across the room, but you know, it's that era of gaming so I'll willingly suspend my disbelief. I'll also choose to suspend my disbelief that you make tons of noise sneaking around in a cardboard box because you can't tip top/crawl while inside the box so it's actually super dangerous at times to use the box as compared to crawling out in the open. (Don't think I'll ever say that sentence again.) That said, you will be forced into combat at multiple points in the game (both boss fights and some forced fights vs super soldiers) and this is where the game really shows its age. Aiming is unfortunately kind of janky because you need to aim from a top down perspective with the joystick with no aim assist whatsoever on a controller. It doesn't sound that bad, until you're being swarmed by multiple super soldiers constantly moving and shooting you (so you're in hitstun as well) and then it becomes a bit more annoying. Also, some of the weapons will instantly switch to 3D mode (notably the sniper rifle and the Stinger) and that's also a wrench in the machine for aiming; you better hope you were looking in the right direction when you switched to those weapons, because otherwise it's going to take you an eternity to turn/parse over to your actual targets while you're being attacked. As I said earlier, most of this is not too big of a deal, but there are times where getting swarmed by soldiers (ex: the communication towers ascension) can make combat feel a bit clumsy at times, and a very specific instance during Sniper Wolf's first fight where getting shot would cause my current aim to wildly fly out of control so getting clear shots myself was a bit of a nightmare and really caused me to seethe during the whole sequence. But otherwise, I adapted and mostly got by; besides some instances where my Nikita missile got clipped by walls or where during the final fight vs Metal Gear I couldn't quite aim high enough at times to hit the cockpit, everything worked out okay.
I suppose the other major complaint I had was the occasional need for major backtracking; you'll need to backtrack twice, once for the sniper rifle and then again to transform your PAL key in the warehouse AND the furnace. This did unfortunately create a bit of a lull in the 2nd half of the game that had plenty of boss fights and batshit crazy exposition and cutscenes, and I would have just preferred if the game proceeded organically to new sections without this need to force me to go back entire sections. It also doesn't really help that the backtracking does involve you running through previous obstacles, so it's not just simple trekking through previous rooms, but rather involves a need to disable cameras, dodge claymores and soldiers that weren't there before, etc.
Now despite my major criticisms (mainly due to this game showing its age), I still ended up giving it a 4/5. Why? Because despite its flaws of the time, it is an extraordinary combination of narrative and gameplay that's practically unmatched for anything in its time and incredibly influential on expanding creativity of meshing these two together in future games. I love the batshit crazy narrative of nanomachines + nuclear weapons + government conspiracies and how all these bosses and heroes have these wild backstories and colorful personalities. I love how after several hours of sneaking around soldiers in a cardboard box and blowing up tanks with rocket launchers and grenades, you get this out of the blue yarn about how "love can bloom on the battlefield" by this weeb that's being forced to develop stealth suits and a giant transformer that fires nukes without fuel so they can't even be classified as missiles or be detected by radar, all while a Kurdish sniper breathes her last breath in the painted snow. And of course, I love everything about the Psycho Mantis fight and how I was terrified that switching ports might be too much for my Duckstation emulator to properly defeat Psycho Mantis, and how I told my uninformed friend who was watching "we interrupt our regularly televised content to bring you an impromptu break of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night" because I really, really, hoped that he'd bring that up as soon as I came back after finding the first save point. (Psycho Mantis did not bring that up unfortunately; might have just been an issue with how Duckstation handles the virtual memory card or maybe it was too soon, who knows.) Either way, what I'm trying to say is, Metal Gear Solid is a fucking ride despite all the jank from its era, and I love how it tried to do so many different things, with many of those things outright succeeding and even more influencing game development as we know it.
So yeah, I think Metal Gear Solid is a pretty alright game. Maybe it's a product of its time due to its technical limitations at times, but it's also an extraordinary step forward in terms of visuals, scope of storytelling, excellently voice acted cutscenes with great banter and non sequiturs, and plenty of gameplay sequences that really impressed me due to how they forced me to think outside of the box. I'm glad I finally got through the original, and here's looking forward to traversing the upcoming installments within the next 10 years.
What surprised me perhaps the most is that despite its age, it has held up magnificently well. The stealth is relatively simple: you just gotta stay out of sight against these so called super soldiers with enhanced sight and hearing (as enhanced as it can be in 1998, anyways) and getting caught will suck because then come the endless waves of gunfire. Admittingly I'm not sure how well the idea of stealth is supposed to hold up when you can use your Stinger to blow up cameras or use an unsilenced sniper rifle to take out patrolling soldiers halfway across the room, but you know, it's that era of gaming so I'll willingly suspend my disbelief. I'll also choose to suspend my disbelief that you make tons of noise sneaking around in a cardboard box because you can't tip top/crawl while inside the box so it's actually super dangerous at times to use the box as compared to crawling out in the open. (Don't think I'll ever say that sentence again.) That said, you will be forced into combat at multiple points in the game (both boss fights and some forced fights vs super soldiers) and this is where the game really shows its age. Aiming is unfortunately kind of janky because you need to aim from a top down perspective with the joystick with no aim assist whatsoever on a controller. It doesn't sound that bad, until you're being swarmed by multiple super soldiers constantly moving and shooting you (so you're in hitstun as well) and then it becomes a bit more annoying. Also, some of the weapons will instantly switch to 3D mode (notably the sniper rifle and the Stinger) and that's also a wrench in the machine for aiming; you better hope you were looking in the right direction when you switched to those weapons, because otherwise it's going to take you an eternity to turn/parse over to your actual targets while you're being attacked. As I said earlier, most of this is not too big of a deal, but there are times where getting swarmed by soldiers (ex: the communication towers ascension) can make combat feel a bit clumsy at times, and a very specific instance during Sniper Wolf's first fight where getting shot would cause my current aim to wildly fly out of control so getting clear shots myself was a bit of a nightmare and really caused me to seethe during the whole sequence. But otherwise, I adapted and mostly got by; besides some instances where my Nikita missile got clipped by walls or where during the final fight vs Metal Gear I couldn't quite aim high enough at times to hit the cockpit, everything worked out okay.
I suppose the other major complaint I had was the occasional need for major backtracking; you'll need to backtrack twice, once for the sniper rifle and then again to transform your PAL key in the warehouse AND the furnace. This did unfortunately create a bit of a lull in the 2nd half of the game that had plenty of boss fights and batshit crazy exposition and cutscenes, and I would have just preferred if the game proceeded organically to new sections without this need to force me to go back entire sections. It also doesn't really help that the backtracking does involve you running through previous obstacles, so it's not just simple trekking through previous rooms, but rather involves a need to disable cameras, dodge claymores and soldiers that weren't there before, etc.
Now despite my major criticisms (mainly due to this game showing its age), I still ended up giving it a 4/5. Why? Because despite its flaws of the time, it is an extraordinary combination of narrative and gameplay that's practically unmatched for anything in its time and incredibly influential on expanding creativity of meshing these two together in future games. I love the batshit crazy narrative of nanomachines + nuclear weapons + government conspiracies and how all these bosses and heroes have these wild backstories and colorful personalities. I love how after several hours of sneaking around soldiers in a cardboard box and blowing up tanks with rocket launchers and grenades, you get this out of the blue yarn about how "love can bloom on the battlefield" by this weeb that's being forced to develop stealth suits and a giant transformer that fires nukes without fuel so they can't even be classified as missiles or be detected by radar, all while a Kurdish sniper breathes her last breath in the painted snow. And of course, I love everything about the Psycho Mantis fight and how I was terrified that switching ports might be too much for my Duckstation emulator to properly defeat Psycho Mantis, and how I told my uninformed friend who was watching "we interrupt our regularly televised content to bring you an impromptu break of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night" because I really, really, hoped that he'd bring that up as soon as I came back after finding the first save point. (Psycho Mantis did not bring that up unfortunately; might have just been an issue with how Duckstation handles the virtual memory card or maybe it was too soon, who knows.) Either way, what I'm trying to say is, Metal Gear Solid is a fucking ride despite all the jank from its era, and I love how it tried to do so many different things, with many of those things outright succeeding and even more influencing game development as we know it.
So yeah, I think Metal Gear Solid is a pretty alright game. Maybe it's a product of its time due to its technical limitations at times, but it's also an extraordinary step forward in terms of visuals, scope of storytelling, excellently voice acted cutscenes with great banter and non sequiturs, and plenty of gameplay sequences that really impressed me due to how they forced me to think outside of the box. I'm glad I finally got through the original, and here's looking forward to traversing the upcoming installments within the next 10 years.