Harol Halibut is an absolute pleasure to play through. It's cozy, optimistic, and beautiful in both visuals and soul. It doesn't have many "game" elements but it brings a strong purposeful narrative, and every conversation makes you smile.

It does have some visual issues that appear mostly across the second half of the game, and while the distances are never long, it can get tedious walking in this game - there are often a lot of back-and-forth quests. It somewhat makes me wish this experience was just a movie instead, but I don't think it went too far. This game will really reward you with pleasant bits of narrative for seeking out new conversations every day though, and it ends having delivered a really heartfelt message about finding home and happiness and the meaning of life.

Yet another banger in this series. Snake Eater greatly modernizes tons of gameplay mechanics and delivers a more polished and satisfying game than the previous titles. The story is more focused on global politics and espionage than MGS2, which leaned on the philosophical side, but Snake Eater ultimately still digs into its roots.

The difficulty of rating this game comes with comparing it to its predecessors. To nitpick, I feel that this one overreached on some new mechanics - the survival food/cure mechanics felt more obtrusive than interesting, Snake can be a bullet sponge on most difficulties and enemy AI can be oblivious, so it's feasible in this game to go full lethal and just drain all the reinforcements sent at you to clear an area, and the bosses in this one nearly all felt more trivial and gimmicky than those of any previous games. There are a lot of extra nice details here though, so while I might lean towards preferring MGS 2, I do recognize that Snake Eater is a clear evolution.