I was playing Metal Gear Solid this weekend in a fit of procrastination from my schoolwork. MGS is one of the few games from the original playstation that have stuck with me as anything other than unplayable garbage, so I thought I'd tear it down to see if I could figure out what I liked about it.
The amazing thing about a game like MGS is that, in many respects, it's just not that good of a game. Many of the traditional concepts of what goes into a good game -- good controls, story, writing, graphics, pacing -- just aren't present.
I start with the controls because, in my mind, they are the most unforgivable sin that Hideo Kojima and his cohorts committed in the construction of the game. They are, in a word, frustrating, and if I could use two words the other would be an expletive. The game seems to expect you to shoot your enemies with the various firearms you discover along the way, but the camera is almost perpetually stuck in an overhead position, and this means aiming usually involved steering the main character in the direction of an enemy and tapping the shoot button in the hopes that some of my bullets might be headed in the right direction. If a full-on firefight isn't ideal, you can also enjoy some hand to hand fisticuffs reminiscent of Streets of Rage. There is almost no benefit to this, however, so it mostly serves as a means of distracting the enemy while you run away and hide after attempting to stealthily garrote them, a mechanic that would be much more useful if it weren't so unreliable. I played the first few hours using the old-school controls with the d-pad and switched halfway through to using the analog sticks once i figured out that I could enable them. The analog sticks are a large improvement over the d-pad, and, while they allow you to aim more precisely, they still suck. For the most part, I spent the game sneaking around in a cardboard box hoping that enemies wouldn't notice me. I get that Stealth is both part of the title of the game as well as its genre, but the cardboard box approach to problem solving greatly diminishes the sense that I'm controlling one of the greatest warriors ever, a living legend in his own self-titled game.
If you're at all familiar with the Metal Gear world, you've probably heard phrases like "interactive movie" bandied about a lot. It may surprise you that I don't mind this particular aspect of the game. There are problems of game design involved in not letting the gamer actually play the game, but I'm of the view that most games would do well to have more and better stories and characterization. Although there's no doubt a great rush to be had from beating a really tough boss or solving a mindbending puzzle, immersion and emotional attachment are a feature of many great games. The problem with Metal Gear Solid is that the writing and cut scenes are badly in need of an editor. Rather than talking about THE story, the multiple allies you deal with will spend literally hours of your life talking your ear off about growing up and life the universe and everything -- all this while you're on a heavily time-sensitive mission with global consequences. In games where "the rules of reality" don't matter like Killer7 this might work, but here it is downright distracting and annoying. By the end of the game, I stopped caring about who lived, died, or betrayed me because I had started skipping dialogue as often as possible. They'll just have to forgive me for being eager to save the world.
And yet I come back to the conclusion that I do enjoy the game and would recommend it. By far the most memorable parts of the game are the numerous boss fights, and it wouldn't be hard to say that they are easily Metal Gear Solid's high points. Depending on how many times you count the last boss and whether you count the two fights against sniper wolf as one fight cut into two halves, there are 6 main fights. Pleasingly, only one requires you to use the main gun combat mechanic, which might be why they turn out to be so much fun. You and the baddie de jour will be in an arena, and you'll need to figure out a strategy for dealing with them. Without question, the boss fights are one of the few times in the game where you get a chance to feel fairly badass because once you develop a good strategy for dealing with a boss, you can often get fairly aggressive with them. It's also not as immersion-breaking when a boss beats the snot out of you because they're generally pretty impressive and intimidating themselves, usually requiring an indirect method of attack rather than going toe to toe with them which will in most cases get you smeared on the wall.
I also don't mean to totally dismiss the story around yourself and your allies as totally worthless. There is one specific area of dialogue that I thought worked well, despite needing an editor as much as everything else in the game. Snake's relationship with his boss, Colonel Campbell, has just the tone of compassion, desperation, and distrust to make you feel the urgency and unpredictability of your mission. If there's one thing that defines Metal Gear solid as far as tone, it's desperation. The story of one man, alone and unarmed against an army of genetic supersoldiers with the fate of the world in balance, grabs you from the first minute through to the conclusion. As preposterous and annoying as all the little plot twists, attempts at philosophy and unnecessary characters are, that initial urgency instilled in me a will to survive and keep fighting my little one man fight against all odds, as frequently obnoxious and unfair as they sometimes were. It brought home to me the emotional weight that kept me coming back to play it over again almost 12 years after it came out.
And so what have I learned? Are a few highly memorable moments that defy or redefine genre expectations and an emotional hook enough to make a good game out of what would otherwise be bargain bin material? Maybe so, as Shadow of the Colossus and Silent Hill 2 have shown us. Perhaps the better lesson to be learned is not what a game needs but what a game doesn't need and what metal gear solid could have done without. It doesn't need an excessively complex storyline filled with plot twists. It doesn't need a huge arsenal of weapons. And it doesn't need to try being something that it isn't just for formality's sake. (By this, I refer to Metal Gear Solid's insufferable gun combat against ordinary soldiers) Metal Gear Solid arrived at a time before developers had worked out all the kinks of working in 3d and doing aiming and first person work on consoles, and for this reason the developers can perhaps be forgiven some of its quirks. It is the rarest bird, a playstation 1 game still worth playing, and for that alone it deserves respect and a place in history.
