There's a scene in this game where Snake infiltrates a weapons lab and stumbles into a Soviet Weapons Scientist. You're thinking, this man's the enemy! He's gonna rat us out! But no. Instead, like a drunk uncle on Christmas day, this bloke waffles on for about five minutes about all the weapons he's ever worked on and how he would never defect from his country, then makes an analogy where he gestures to his legs. Snake doesn't understand this analogy, and so responds: "nice shoes." The Soviet Scientist then decides to actively betray his allies and help Snake, and when asked why, he tells him it's because Snake was so nice about his shoes.

This exquisite scene is a great encapsulation of why Metal Gear Solid is the weirdest "must-play" franchise. You can never tell whether it's video games at the very highest form of artistic brilliance or the ramblings of a man who has no idea what the fuck is going on. And for so long, I fully believed the answer lay in camp B. I'll say it. I was a Hideo Kojima detractor. And in a lot of ways, I still think the dude isn't this angelic beacon of artistic hope sent down from the heavens to eradicate darkness and bless babies so they can grow up into eye-patch-wearing, bandana-clad angels. From my perspective, he's slowly realising he wants to make movies; every game he makes he's like, right, I'll do the innovative, boundary-breaking video game half for you if you let me make the other half a bunch of long-winded, nuance-devoid exposition dumps.

But goddamn it, when you play Snake Eater, you realise this man's vision is undeniable. No matter which way you slice it, Metal Gear Solid 3 is a masterpiece. It's just Hideo Kojima at the perfect level of reined-in, where his eccentric ideas are allowed to flourish into some of the coolest video game moments of all time and his storytelling is just ludicrous enough without pushing it to tell a dope-ass story that's distinctly his. This game just goes hard as shit. There's no two ways about it.

And that's because Kojima is constantly pushing the envelope of what the medium is capable of. Despite Snake Eater's 20th birthday looming on the horizon, there are so many systems and ideas in here that would be heralded if they came out today. Destroying enemy ration supplies makes soldiers weaker, allowing you to take them down faster. Knocking out enemies creates opportunities to devise genius traps, as you lure in foes trying to wake them up. Hell, every boss fight has like ninety different ways you can exploit your opponent, one of which being a section in the mid-game where you can headshot one of the bosses directly after a cutscene and kill him before you ever meet him in combat.

Over 11 hours, this is just non-stop creative genius at its finest. The story pivots casually from Kojima-branded melodrama and silliness to emotional, cinematic showdowns like it's nothing. One minute, people are doing backflips on motorcycles and shooting electricity out of their hands despite the source of their powers literally never being explained, then the next a character is talking about the nature of honour and the frivolous purpose of war. The final boss fight is godlike video game storytelling; a thematic masterclass where two soldiers put everything on the line in a thematic clash of ideals and fists, then right after, there's a revolver spinning style-off, where two dudes just flex on each other for like five minutes. And somehow, some way, it all just kinda works.

And I'd be remiss without talking about how The End boss fight is an absolute all-timer. For everything this game just knocks out of the park, the coup de grace is this long bout of mental warfare, where Snake goes toe-to-toe with a dying sniper who wants one last hunt. I've never experienced a single boss fight with so many layers, as you fight a half-hour battle of endurance, slowly concocting strategies to outplay this carcass of an old man and deliver him a warrior's death while he absolutely fries your ass and roasts you.

The whole game is Kojima cooking on another level. And it genuinely confuses me how it winds up hooking you so effectively, because there are so many creative choices here that, in the moment, are frustrating. The movement is mega clunky, the first-person camera is a nightmare and, my god, some of the dialogue sections are infinitely long while saying absolutely nothing at all. Every time you save, you have to ring the most talkative woman on the planet, who just reads her laundry list of Letterbox reviews to you. Like, my dude, I'm going downstairs to eat dinner. I don't want your intricate take on From Russia with Love.

But the whole thing somehow coalesces into one of the coolest examples of what this medium can do. I think the original Metal Gear Solid is still the current height of Kojima's creative juices flowing; in my eyes, it's tighter, leaner and overall a better game. But this is Kojima's best story for sure and a game that belongs in the history books. Mainly because Snake's god-awful romance with Eva is truly legendary. Nothing in this world will ever top Eva hitting on Snake and him responding by offering her some of the disgusting burnt python he's been messily chowing down on for like three minutes.