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Why Was Metal Gear Solid So Good?

For others like me who haven't played the series at all yet, I just picked up the two-disc Legacy Collection for PS3. Still available brand new from the usual places apparently and a much better value than buying them on PSN.

Not sure how I'm going to find the time, but Gaf has more than convinced me that I need to check out Kojima's work. Death Stranding is in the backlog too, of course.
 

The Shepard

Member
Story, Music, atmosphere, characters and hideo at the top of he's game. One of the greatest games of all time.



I'm planning on replaying 1-4 soon after silent hill 1-3.
 
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Kokoloko85

Member
MGS 1 is my favourite

MGS 2 would of been the best if you carried on playing as Solid Snake

MGS 3 was the best overall

MGS 4 was made for fans, a nostaglic tribute to the series. Least gameplay

MGS 5 is the best gameplay wise and have played it well over 300 hours. Amazing open world.

If you don’t like MGS....Ill say your favourite game series sucks too
 
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Old Retro

Member
Simply put, seeing Solid Snake in 3D and hearing him speak was a milestone. A true quantum leap in any video game series.
 

Fuz

Banned
Because you never tried a proper stealth game before.

It was a good game, but not the masterpiece that many people say.
 

Sub_Level

wants to fuck an Asian grill.
Outside of Olga, MGS2 has no fun bosses.

Fatman, Harrier, and RAY on Extreme are all somethin special. 1 and 3 definitely have the better boss lineup either in story or gameplay, but 2 is fairly underrated in that department.

On Extreme you can't even shoot out the light in the Olga fight or remove the tarp, to give you an idea of how 2's difficulty changes things dramatically.

Because you never tried a proper stealth game before.

It was a good game, but not the masterpiece that many people say.

Chaos Theory is certainly the gold standard. MGS gameplay is different, but still legit. The VR missions in 1 and 2, the dog tag collecting, the kerotans, all the crazy shit you can do with the bosses, the big boss/foxhound rankings. There's a lot to love about the gameplay.
 

bender

What time is it?
Fatman, Harrier, and RAY on Extreme are all somethin special. 1 and 3 definitely have the better boss lineup either in story or gameplay, but 2 is fairly underrated in that department.

giphy.gif


Two of those are recycled concepts from MGS that are far inferior, the other is a fat man on roller blades planting bombs.
 

Sub_Level

wants to fuck an Asian grill.
One thing a lot of MGS1 fans don't know is how much of the game is recycled concepts from MG2: Solid Snake.



MGS1 even reuses the temperature gimmick haha. Essentially you had three games in a row MG2-MGS1-MGS2 that all followed a core formula.
 

DogofWar

Member
Metal Gear Solid is indeed a real masterpiece that is still unmatched to this date.
I can recite the entire scene where Grey Fox dies in my head as well as 80% of the game probably. I have played it so many times. Yet still everytime I play it I still find new and impressive details and can do things differently.

MGS 2 and 3 are also masterpieces.

My MGS top list would be:

MGS
MGS 2
MGS 3
Peace Walker/Ground Zeroes
MGS 5



















MGS 4 - Raiden as a ninja vomiting "white blood" is the single cringiest scene I have ever witnessed. The whole fucking nanomachines explaining everything is also a complete mess not to mention the retconning of details in MGS 1. Act 1 and 2 and for nostalgic reasons 4 are good but even then the rest of the game lacks in the gameplay department. I am surprised to see people on here praise this game. But at least it is better than The Twin Snakes.

Haven't played the ninja "Metal Gears". Feel no need for it either.
 
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HotPocket69

Banned
Having replayed recently the game is way more Metroidy than I remembered. Still fucking amazing.

This was the game that made me buy a PS1 in high school soon after it released. Many days of me and my friends getting stoned and playing it at each others houses. Eventually I was able to personally rip through it in a few hours. Scored the tux, headband and Grey Fox camo. Felt goodman.
 
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NeoIkaruGAF

Gold Member
Because people always like a conjuror with new tricks up his sleeve. Or they just like being trolled :messenger_winking:

Most of the things we still remember MGS for were just bells and whistles with zero impact on gameplay, such as... anything Psycho Mantis did apart from waiting for you to get (unlikely) / be told (much more likely) what to do to actually hit him. The actual game was good, but not as much as a lot of people always liked to pretend. Some situations must be brute forced no matter what, and while the small sandboxes allowed for experimentation, few people actually explored the possibilities offered by the game simply because the game doesn’t require you to.

The real legacy of MGS is monochrome corridors with a gruff military guy running towards the cutscene ‘round the next corner, i.e. what western games all through the 7th gen were mostly about and known for.

Of course MGS2 doubled down (nah, much more than doubled) on the conjuror tricks, the shock factor and the tripey dialogue for one of the most pretentious, most insufferable games I’ve been foolish enough to trudge through in my life (FOMO is a bitch). At least MGS1 was an enjoyable, if cheesy, movie.
 
D

Deleted member 17706

Unconfirmed Member
It felt completely ahead of its time and like it shouldn't have been possible on the PlayStation hardware.

I remember playing the demo disk over it so many times in anticipation of the main game's release.
 

reptilex

Banned
The fuck is that stupid question? I don't understand how could you ask such a fucking stupid question? "Why was Queen so good"? "Why was Apple so good"? "Why was Bocuse so good"? etc...
 

Kerotan

Member
MGS3/2/1 were my fav games on the PS2. Truly epic. Top class graphics, crazy story, amazing boss fights and so much unique and cool things you could do in gameplay.
 

J-Roderton

Member
Idk. The bonkers story, cool bosses, sneakin’, and being able to select cigarettes as an item and smoke em. Just a crazy-fun game.

Still don’t get why MGS1 wasn’t on the collection on 360.
 

EruditeHobo

Member
Epic espionage thriller with unexpected sci-fi elements, wrapped up in a brilliantly-designed package which includes fun stealth mechanics & great boss battles... what's not to love?
 
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AJUMP23

Member
MGS also did something that I had never seen before. The phycho mantis fight was a mind blowing moment for my brother and I. I remember feeling this is different when we figured it out.

metal gear ranking
MGS
MGS3
MGS5
MGS2
MGS4
 

begotten

Member
Pre-Alzcheimers' Kojima era of Metal Gear was good. So everything before 4. Ground Zeroes was the best thing since Snake Eater actually, but The Phantom Pain having some horrendous isolated narrative that even if completed, still would have been garbage, solidified how far Kojima has fallen off the cliff as a writer.
 
MGS1 was revolutionary at the time of its release in countless ways. And it was just fun to experience.

Twin Snakes always gets a lot of crap, and it's absolutely a mixed bag. But it got some fixes right, too, that aren't in the original or didn't make sense before (ex.: keycard works automatically with your body's electricity, but you need to manually equip it for doors to open? Mei Ling was born and raised in America, but has a stereotypical Chinese accent?). For sure some of the cutscenes are a little too wacky (Snake flipping sideways over the door was a bit uncalled-for), but driving a motorcycle straight up the front of a standing human being (as done by Eva in MGS3, as I recall) is pretty ridiculous too.

The Twin Snakes certainly has its share of problems, but I feel most of them are just shades of what I came to dislike about MGS' Big Boss Worship Era. (Bring back the likely-plagiarized MGS1 theme song already!!)
 

Men_in_Boxes

Snake Oil Salesman
Because it ignored old formulas and forged a new (better) path.

Which highlights why single player has been in such an extended drought.
 

Shane89

Member
Gameplay, Story, Characters, Soundtrack and Graphics. Almost MGS game is triple A game under every aspect.

That's why
 

hard_boiled

Neophyte
It isn't and never was. I played it at the time and even as a teenager I thought it was unimpressive. I have never cared for stealth in games that are that linear. The boss battles are more annoying than inventive. The plot is like some kind of weird mish-mash between something more serious and American and Japanese anime eccentricities. The first time I played a metal gear solid with truly good gameplay was V because it dropped the overly scripted nature of the franchise. Kojima clearly wants to make movies but the young gamer audience was exactly the right target if you wanted people who wouldn't scrutinise the level of exposition in a game that still doesn't make sense. People who would celebrate an 18-hour game being 9 hours of cutscene. People who didn't know what a proper tone for a game was to have a problem with awkward tonal shifts.

Part of me envies people who were the right age or right mindset to enjoy this kind of thing, that might sound condescending but I really do think you have to be in a certain mindset to enjoy these games and the best evidence of that I seen is that the fans of this franchise think part 5 is the worst one which to me is so weird. I'm sitting here like finally a reason to use all these silly options finally a game that actually gives me a sandbox to play in where these things are actually useful. I'm playing metal gear solid 3 words giving me all these dumb camouflage options to get through 2 minutes of gameplay. all these silly tutorials that gave me none of them really mattered because the game played like a Michael Bay movie with small gameplay arenas sprinkled throughout that anyone could brute force their way through with enough patience or tenacity.

I feel like I'm on the outside looking in like the people who hate Half-Life 2, the difference between me and them being that one episode two went more open for the finale I thought it was amazing and was totally welcoming a more open world half life or even if it meant spacing out the cinematic nature of the game more. But the reception 5 receipt proved to me that the average metal gear solid fan was more interested in the absurd incomprehensible stories than the interesting game play systems and how they interact with the world. which again I don't totally get to me stealth just doesn't work if there's not enough different paths stealth is trial and error and there's only one way to do it it annoys me and bores me.

Triggered epic style.
 

gypsygib

Member
For me: story, characters, gameplay, and graphics. MGS5 drastically improved on graphics and gameplay but failed the story department miserably.
 
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