from metal gear 2, kojima really had two paths he could take: either he reins in his ambitions a little and goes for something more minimal, or he loosens all fetters and tries to take his storytelling further with more dialogue, more twists, more cutscenes, etc. kojima evidently goes for the latter and thats why we love him i suppose. this is still an insane, no-holds-barred experience in 2023 and it‘s both admirable and a little exhausting; there are very large stretches of this devoted solely to cutscenes and dialogue – frankly by the end it feels like the split between that and gameplay is 50/50 – and how much that works for you is gonna depend on how much tolerance you have for narrative in this medium. this certainly is not a game for hardline “ludologists”. however, speaking personally anyway, i can’t say that kojima’s intense emphasis on narrative doesn‘t pay off in many ways. kojima‘s character work is much improved, and the plot and themes which are largely recycled (for the second time now) are also executed considerably better than before. it‘s obviously not perfect – the dialogue can get a little dire at times and kojima still hasn‘t completely gotten a handle on convincingly weaving drama into his narrative – but there‘s still campy fun to be had and, yes, some big brain moments as well. for better or worse there is simply no one else doing it like kojima, certainly not at the time but not really these days either. and while the drama and ultimate narrative thrust is pretty simple and even juvenile, there’s a lot of granular, nerdy detail that you could dismiss as fluff but i find pretty charming and enriching. i appreciate kojima’s hyper-skeptical and conspiratorial approach to geopolitics as well, it's absolutely the right approach to take, both for a twisty espionage thriller like this but also probably just in general. the localization is pretty decent (albeit with some notable lows like „japanese animes“ or „horry“, but again ymmv with how charming or not you find these perceived failures) and the dub performances impressively manage to wring some emotion and chemistry out of kojima‘s dialogue, which is easier said than done. the presentation here is also arguably the best it’s ever been – mg2 is one of the best looking 8-bit games ever, but the early 3d aesthetic with its simple, blurry, ambiguous models is very charming here and a great fit for the suspenseful, conspiratorial narrative, the fmv documentary footage interjections feel like you’re being shown stuff you're not meant to be seeing, and shadow moses island provides some incredibly atmospheric scenery, with snow falling as the gloomy night hangs above. sound design and music here is also just on another level – practically every track and alert is instantly memorable and iconic.

stealth combat is interesting in this game because it‘s both better and worse than in 2. enemy ai is fairly impressive for its time and will react dynamically to things like footsteps in snow or noises you make which helps ground them as real entities you‘re interacting with. you also have more moves at your disposal and taking enemies down is slower and more involved - on the whole it‘s a more white knuckle affair which is definitely a positive for this "tactical espionage action" series, and i‘d be lying if i said i didn‘t enjoy the simple act of play here more than in 2. however, the solodon radar - the strongest innovation of mg2 which returns in this game - is a mixed bag. you now get a clear sense for the enemy‘s field of view, which is a very good addition, but in pretty much every other respect it is a less brilliant mechanic here. this is because of changes that the move from 2d to 3d brought with it - no longer are you exploring square tiles on a map, but instead a cohesive 3d space from a top down camera angle. and simply put, your view is a lot more restricted as the camera is quite zoomed in – you don´t see very far ahead which greatly limits how far you can plan ahead traversal through the level. this is where the radar comes in; no longer is it a tool for viewing the level at large, but is instead essentially a crutch to help short-term navigation by presenting you with a viewpoint of a similar scale to the one you were granted in the previous titles by default. the consequence of this is not ideal – you spend much of the time staring at an abstracted representation of the space you‘re exploring rather than the actual environments themselves. and, of course, you lose the main innovation that mg2 brought to the table, that is level-wide coordination of enemy movement patterns as you traverse. the game attempts to counterbalance this with some changes to the level design – there are far fewer enemies in this game overall than in either of the previous games, and encounters with enemies are back to being a more moment-to-moment affair like in the first.

this game is structured pretty weirdly, at least in comparison to previous games. it’s still set in a large military base that you explore and progressively gain more access to with keycards, but it’s also mostly shed any ambition of being military zelda, with progression even more linear than before and almost entirely consisting of following strict directions. i actually didn’t really mind this at all, as “exploration” in the previous games was mostly a veil for obtuse game design and intense padding. progression in this game feels more like going through a linear set of levels and i like that more than being given a large sprawling space that you then have to navigate in an extremely specific and repetitive way – in this one it feels like you’re getting into interesting situations with much higher frequency. the game world here is very small and contained, so backtracking doesn’t feel as much like a pain in the ass either. that said, because of how much this game does away with anything that could be conflated with exploration, it exposes just how much it’s wasting your time when it pointlessly forces you to backtrack across the entire map (this gets really egregious near the end). another interesting thing about the game’s structure – for a stealth game, there really aren’t a lot of stealth sections here. if anything, the bulk of the gameplay consists of boss fights. most of them are pretty fun, so honestly, fine by me. still, i think the game really could’ve used some more elaborate and difficult stealth sections instead of the mandatory backtracking bits or spectacle sequences like the stairway chase – most of the stealth is in the first half so what you end up with is a game where the core mechanics are barely elaborated on or put to the test. that's definitely unfortunate, but there's also a surprising amount of little details, secrets to find and cool strategies to work out, most of which you're not gonna see on a first playthrough, so there's still replayability (especially since skipping cutscenes cuts the game's length by like half).