Then, of course, there’s REX. My personal favourite Metal Gear – I couldn’t abide by the awful Peace Walker, and the giant amphibious ballerina RAY just didn’t do anything for me. It’s probably because it looked the most like a dinosaur, in my younger, addled mind. It was really built up through the game, with those admittedly boring missions when you had to heat the PAL key to the different temperatures making sure that you ran around the thing about a million times, to fully absorb its size. Sure, the battle was a bit of a letdown, and way too easy, but all the Metal Gear games are easy.
In essence, that is probably the game’s biggest flaw. Metal Gear Solid‘s average completion time is around eight hours, which is a good day’s play. There’s so much story to pack in that it is impressive that they do it in such a short amount of time, but a little bit longer would have been nice. As the series carried on, the games got longer – Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots takes around twenty hours, but six hours(!) of that is cutscenes. So not much longer, but possibly a more immersive game experience.
So why is this game so important? Well, it reinvented the stealth adventure genre. It’s the reason why Tomb Raider III featured stealthier moments, changing that series forever. It gave us the rather excellent Mission Impossible, a much-maligned gem in the Playstation’s crown, and it’s safe to say that without the series’ roaring success, we wouldn’t have Assassin’s Creed, or Deus Ex. Truly horrifying.
We also would have been deprived of the other excellent installments in the Metal Gear series – Sons of Liberty; Snake Eater; Guns of the Patriots; Peace Walker; and Revengeance – as well as the more tangential games in the series, like turn-based strategy game Ac!d, and Portable Ops. And who could forget the upcoming The Phantom Pain? It looks incredible. The Legacy Collection came out in the US on the 9th July, and is released in the EU on September 13th, which might be an idea if you want to wallow in the series until The Phantom Pain comes out. I know I will.
I know there’s so much I haven’t talked about, and this entire article is self-indulgent, and that you could write a book on the Metal Gear series, but I just wanted to express my love for this game in an honest way. You see, I love this game. It’s given me fifteen years of entertainment, and I hope it gives me fifteen more. When I’m 42 years old, playing Metal Gear Solid, and people are busy pitying me for being pathetic and living in the past, I can turn to them and spit in their face. To fifteen more years! Thirty! Forty five!
Thanks Hideo Kojima, Kojima Productions, and Konami. You guys are the best, but promise to never call yourselves the KKK. OK?
