If you’re uninitiated, Metal Gear Scanlon is the Giant Bomb premium video series in which Dan guides Drew through the MGS games. Drew is unutterably abominable at them, so the videos are oft painful to watch, but they have provided me with a special opportunity to develop unwarranted opinions about games I have never played.

Somehow, I’ve managed to figure out why the series has achieved critical acclaim whilst simultaneously nurturing a deep-seated, personal loathing of it. It seems, for instance, that all of the MGS games have solid core stealth gameplay. Watching Drew blunder through it gives me an itch to seize the controller from him and demonstrate How It Is Done, so certainly they get a pass on that front. Everywhere else, though, they seem to completely go off the rails.

All of the MGS games to date have featured naught but horrific gunplay, evolving from hip-shooting weirdness to a bizarre configuration requiring pressing a three button sequence to fire a weapon. I get that there’s an argument here for incentivizing careful stealth by making open warfare difficult, but I keep thinking about how one could easily achieve the exact same ends by making the guns spray inaccurately, or by nerfing the damage, or by limiting player health – without making the basic operation of weaponry a complete chore.

For “core” mechanics, the stealth and gunplay seem to make up a relatively small fraction of total play time, which is also largely budgeted into boss fights and scripted sequences. It’s at this point just an accepted reality, for whatever reason, that MGS games are at least 50% cutscenes and non-interactive dialogue. Call me a formalist, but I appreciate when games use mechanics to convey their stories, instead of just periodically not being games.

The Boss Battles confuse the hell out of me, too, because for some reason they are lauded for permitting a variety of tactics and strategies, but that’s something I categorize under “basic expectations” rather than “impressive achievements”. Frankly, with a few exceptions (e.g. Vulcan Raven, The End), I’m bothered by just how gimmicky many of the boss fights are, and how little they seem to care that the rest of the gameplay is about stealth, not combat. I guess it’s all for variety and pacing’s sake?

Finally, while I’ve managed to reach a point where the absurdity of MGS’s narrative has become endearing in a can’t-look-away-from-the-car-crash sort of way, I still resent the regular fourth wall breaks. They never seem to cohere into valuable point or a funny joke, so they only serve to shatter any suspension of disbelief I’ve generously adopted. I’ve seen many games fail at immersion, but MGS is the first to actively fight against it.