Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

(Second time in Japanese on Vita, actually. 12 hours and 17 minutes to have a save file in red letters on Normal. “Elephant” rank. Guess I am the Zo Ninja there…)

Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty is among the first bones twenty-first century threw at the crowd calling themselves “video game critics”. Even after this end all be all piece came out in 2007, an amateur wannabe like yours truly can still find things to say about the game. As a meat eater, I would go as far as to call MGS2 a “vegetable game”, especially for people who want to get into video game criticism.

This piece aims to warn people “off” this game. In the years between yours truly hearing about this game and actually playing this game, only glowing pieces were available to read. So maybe there is a void to fill there. Though this humble piece cannot fill the whole thing on its own. While I wholeheartedly agree with Greg Kasavin’s statement of “You need to play Metal Gear Solid 2”, but my reasons are different from his.

The interactive Gundam show. Kinda, sorta, not really.

First thing one should ask themselves is whether this game is closer to cartoon or to Hollywood action flicks? Take a look at MGS2’s Japanese cast jam packed with anime usual suspects of that time, instead of dubbing actors, and one would know that the game is a cartoon, no matter how much it has to say. So, if you have zero space for anime in your heart, this game just might not be for you.

Kojima and company gathered cast members from almost every Gundam show in that franchise’ experimenting 1990s, and let them go nuts in an interactive military science fiction anime. Except for Kenyu Horiuchi, the voice of player character Raiden, he was in 1987’s Double Zeta Gundam playing a doomed comic relief named Mashuma.

The double casting of Akio Otsuka as the mostly unplayable Solid Snake and the final boss Solidus Snake is the highlight here. The former feels more like one of them action movie cool guy the less time you spend with him. The latter would sound identical to the former except a sense of mustache twirling when telling lies or being antagonistic, just like Akio’s character named Kato in Gundam 0083. The whole “Is he? Isn’t he?” thing simply does not work in English once you heard Solidus and he was not voiced by David Hayter.

There are Hideyuki Tanaka returning as Hal “Otacon” Emmerich and Kikuko Inoue, who was in Kojima’s Policenauts, making her MGS debut as Rosemary. New to the series voices also include Yumi Touma as Fortune and Ryotaro Okiayu as Vamp, the 2 actors played people who dream of global police state on opposite sides in Wing Gundam, their playing people on the same side to get rid of a global police state in MGS 2 is certainly a nice twist.

Personally, I think calling MGS2’s presentation “cinematic” is not entirely current. The frequency of fade to black and fade back during cut scenes is more in line with TV shows and their commercial breaks than “Gold Age” epics. Another being the sense of visual novels.

The example I would take is Otacon’s departing monologue before he left the Big Shell Plant. It was set against a rather beautiful montage of sunset. It’s rather typical pov character doing some self-reflection in a visual novel, without the voice acting, one would just scan it, think “Oh, they are sad” and move on to the next potentially more interesting plot point. Here with the so-called cinematic presentation, it’s a piece to take up the screen time after so many pieces already took up screen time.

MGS 2 is probably the grandpa of “cut scene game”, especially during the end game. There is a about a 45 minutes long cut scene (The more action-packed ones of which are called “Demo” by the game,) before a piss easy final boss fight, and that was the result of something got to be cut due to what happened on September, the eleventh, 2001. Playing the game’s home stretch on the train, the boss fight took up time for 2 stations while the final cut scene would tool up time for about 5. Granted this game does have something interesting to say, but one needs to ask themselves how much time do they want to be idle in a game.

I have to be care where I shoot at?

One big difference between MGS2 and the Hollywood flicks it immediate is that player character in the game is probably the least effective one with fire arms there while Hollywood gunslingers are unnaturally effective with guns. Players cannot move while shoot or even with the weapon ready to fire. The time it takes for player to switch to point-of-view or first-person camera, aim and shoot is too long, any enemy combatant can take out a big chunk of player’s hit points during that time.

Check those corners and have a window to dodge into them is way to play this game. The ninja commando power fantasy in Phantom Pain cannot be found here. Instead, Death Stranding’s some asshole just wants to hustle through a dangerous place type experience is present. All above is about the tolerable part of an old game, I would move on to the part that pissed me off during this playthrough.

In the bit where the fact about 2 Snakes on the Plant was revealed, player first has to clear a way out of an explosive trap. Firing on the bombs would lead to Mission Fail because the Plant got blown to pieces. One switch between pistol and rifle, carefully aim at the switches and shoot. Then in the cut scenes and boss fight against a Harrier jet fighter, the 2 Snakes shoot at bombs freely yet the Plant stands. Sons of Liberty is a story where robbing players of their agency is the point, but doing so by breaking the rules hey set for the game is a step too far.

Departing words

This game review is actually the byproduct of a book report. The report is about a novel (Not yet a book back then ironically enough) I read alongside with my first playthroughs of MGS2. Kinda just want to get back in time mentally for the book and try out the game again. Surprisingly, after 17 years, what I like and dislike stand the same despite everything. The game sure is better at generating sympathy for the larger-than-life things than telling “normal” stories. Guess at a time where people are waiting for another “Hideo Kojima Game” with the number 2 in the title, remembering how the last one turned out is nice practice. So, if you decide that MGS 2 would be the only MGS game you play, read this book and dive in, maybe you can have better time with it than I had knowing what I did not know back then.