Holy crap this game was incredible! I set out in 2009 after I beat MGS 1 to play the entire series. I just beat MGS 4 and I couldn't be happier it was a near perfect game for me.

For those that played it awhile ago, what were your thoughts?!

Time to listen to the snake spoilercast I've always wanted to listen to !

Yeah do. And you should watch MGScanlon 4 too at some point.

I loved the game. There are some uneven parts gameplay wise, the bosses are lackluster (story, design, etc wise more than gameplay), and some story moments are real groan worthy (Everything with Otacon in the whole game basically). The ending also gets really lame in some areas. But the big moments are HUGE and so fantastic. For me it's a flawed but still classic game but I really love it as a series fan because it's kind of the culmination of all that MGS before. PW and then V became something different (which is cool with me, this was a great send off).

@sagesebas: How good was that last fistfight duel?!

One of my favorite gaming experiences, havent been that hype fir something since and it did not disappoint.

It was good, wasn't it?

@sagesebas: I thought it was a real cinematic tour de force and a decent game second. Really enjoyed how much the story escalates towards the finish - especially the entire bit in Shadow Moses was a beautifully done nostalgic throwback (I assume it must have been even better for you since MGS1 must have been fresher in your mind).

The microwave tunnel was literal hell on my hands but I can appreciate the symbolism of it's annoying nature.

It's a flawed game, but that last fight is so goddamn good.

I really enjoyed the game, the only two parts I didn't like were when you have to tail some guy through a town at night, just felt it went on too long. And when you were on the boat towards the end and you had to go through a door where you had to repeatedly press triangle to open it and you have a load of the bipedal metal gears around you (can't remember their proper names) and they could easily attack you.

@artisanbreads: I would switch La La Land and Arrival.

There are a lot of good moments and the production values are through the roof. Specially noticeable when considering there was nothing on the PS3 of that caliber, and it became the fist "must-buy" for the console.

Other than that, it has issues. Personally, I thought the ending was very, very bad (before the whole debate on ME3, MGS4 was my go to example of a good game being grounded because of a bad ending). Everything that happens after Snake fails to shoot himself is too saccharine for my taste. Listening to some interviews, I got the impression that Kojima copped out of killing Snake due to his coworkers and rewrote a happier ending, and it makes sense, because the ending is both far more nonsensical and too neatly closed up.

You're...Pretty good...

Takes Kojima's flaws as a writer and turns them up to 11, some absolutely embarrassing dialogue.

Still a great, weird, creative game though.

It's definitely one of many moments where Kojima should've stopped. There was a kitchen sink attitude to that game that can't be followed up.

I played that game for the first time relatively recently, when Drew and Dan were doing their let's plays of the whole series. I jumped in during 3 and finished that, and then went on to play MGS4.

There are things I don't like in it. The graphics are all monochrome and full of bloom, which has aged it quite a bit now that games have largely stopped doing it. The game looks great other than that though, Bioware still hasn't made one face that's better than the faces in MGS4. I felt lost and confused at the beginning, which is appropriate, but not a very welcome feeling. The new enemy team is just duuulll. I'm not offended or anything, but while the robot fights are really cool, the crazy women inside of them is a pretty boring type of crazy repeated four times. I found myself thinking Vamp was one of the good villains in this, and I don't like Vamp at all! The whole retconning of MGS3 support characters into the Patriots, with two of them having been killed already? That was an asspull I didn't enjoy. Raiden is turned into a cyborg, and I haven't got a freaking clue how you're supposed to know how it happened. I have vaguely understood from internet osmosis that he tried to save Sunny from the Patriots and got turned into one in the process, but none of that appeared in the game itself for me. And after the first two stages, the rest are sort of small and short, which means you do a lot of gameplay at the beginning and a lot of cutscenes at the end. Trying to process which side Ocelot is on and why is completely hopeless until the end, and same for EVA. Drebin drags on and on. Some characters, like Rose, would have been improved with a stray bullet inbetween games. They made the best out of Raiden, though.

But the parts I enjoy are bigger than that. I love how Kojima used his retconning skills for good and tied everything up and together, uniting characters from all of the games and paying homage to every memorable moment of that great series. It's a story that was obviously made up on the spot, but still felt satisfying to me in how it finished things. I especially appreciated how he turned every chapter into reference to a game in the series in chronological order(Including Twin Snakes), using characters, locations(Damn, isn't Shadow Moses revisited great?) and concepts from those games. The gameplay was better than ever, with interesting stuff like sleep mines, running while squatting and using the octocamo. The turret sections were fun, as were the special combat bits with Ocelot/Ray. I like the near-future military aspect of it, with the robots and nanobots. As much as they drag ooon and ooon, I enjoyed most of the cutscenes a lot, and I for one am happy it didn't end with Snake blowing his brains out. Although I didn't need to see Big Boss again. Poor Solidus, as boring as that guy was I felt for him. I love how rough Snake has it during this whole game, it made him very easy to sympathize with and I had a hard time not rooting for him at every turn even as he's a bitter old chainsmoker.

MGS4 also made me retroactively uncertain about Metal Gear Rising Revengance, which I played before MGS3 and 4. It's an awesome little game, but it makes no sense coming straight after Raiden's ending, as anything other than a bummer.

@redhotchilimist: Before the game came out there was a wiki app made for the PS3 that explained some of what went on with Raiden, i don't think it was ever in the game unless i don't remember a codec call or something.

Raiden could've lived his life out as an armless samurai but Kojima had to bottle that as well.

I'm playing through each MG game in chronological order. Only up to Peacewalker. Good to know there's some good stuff ahead. Portable Ops was a bit of a roughie.

Didn't enjoy it much first time I played it, because I'd only ever watched someone else play MGS1 at that point. Came back to it later after I found 2 and 3 online for cheap and it's probably my favourite in the series. It revels in its story and goes to great lengths to make all the big twists and exciting moments feel good. Obviously there's the thing with the gameplay taking a backseat for most of the 2nd half of the game, but I couldn't care less about that when the cutscenes are best-in-the-business. I don't think any game series has ever had as strong of a "final" entry before or since.

As someone who did get to MGS4 before Rising, this was always my problem with it too. It's too much of a split from the happy ending Raiden got, and the way they just throw around new Metal Gears and junk makes all of Snake's work in 4 feel worthless. It's dumb fun when you can separate it from the rest of the series, but it's also a different kind of fun that I don't enjoy as much as Kojima fuckery.

Oh, and all of the characters suck. All of them.

Hell of a movie.

This is one of the best games of last generation. The game grabs you from the moment you see the main menu (which i still remember its soundtrack) until the last boss fight.

Story/direction + music + voice acting + gameplay = have all gained my thumbs up = amazingly made package

@lanechanger: holy shit when I noticed what they were doing in the music during that such I good fight

You're pretty good.

I was a series fan since 1 and I thought Rising was awful story wise when it came out, in how it related and everything down the list. I think the game is pretty fun to play but otherwise I don't get it. It's not good dumb.

Microwave corridor.

While I think MGR is a bad followup storywise to MGS4, I won't hear a bad word about the story on its own. It's got the best team of bosses since MGS3, possibly even better considering even most of those guys never said very much. Armstrong in particular is a treasure, but the rest of them aren't bad either, and they're certainly a step above MGS4 and MGSV's mindless/controlled villains. Your support team is largely stuck in bland land, though.

I, much like Dan, thought Kojima was a god tier writer and story teller when I first played that game (was probably 16 or 17). But he older I get the farther I drift away from that opinion. It's probably why MGS V's more scaled back narrative worked for me more so than it did for other fans. Kojima presents really interesting ideas but bogs them down in a mire of nonsensical dialogue and exposition dumps. At this point I'm more interested in the subtext of the games and the meta narrative than what actually happens in them.

Still, MGS 4 is a great game and in the top 3 MGS games for me (behind 3 and 5). It creates a variety of really emotional moments such as returning to Shadow Moses, crawling through the microwave hallway, and fist fighting through the history of the series.

The ending to the story is a pile of garbage for me though. I wish Kojima stuck with his gut and killed off Snake in the grave yard. It would have been an emotional and fitting end for that character to go out on his terms, instead of going off to the wilderness and exploding or whatever.

Granted, I haven't played it since 2008, but I thought it was dreadfully boring up until Vamp showed up, but throughout the whole game after that, I thought it was kinda 'meh'. I've always thought the MGS series was 'fine' but I've never really got into it. Still would like to play 5 if I could find it for like $5

It was a truly amazing experience, a once in a lifetime type thing.

Just curious here, but why did everybody like that fist fight ending? For me, and even all of my friends, it was one of the most mind numbing loads of tedious and unnecessary bullcrap I've ever played. And just to be clear, I like the game. I've played through it many times on all difficulties except the last one. I even did a "shoot everything because fuck stealth" run and just killed everybody and got through the game in less than two hours, skipping cutscenes of course. So it's not like I hate the game, but that last part though. It seemed like every playthrough of the game was mildly ruined by having to muddle through that last fight.

@tyrrael: I didn't have a lot of issues with the fight. I might have died once, and that's it. For me it was a mix of the callbacks to not only the fistfights throughout the series(complete with music), but also to the versions of Liquid and Ocelot you fought in those games. It felt great to punch out Ocelot once and for all, and at the same time, feel a companionship with him because of the events in MGS3 just before this game. The moment where they try to use nanomachines suppressants and decide to fuck it, I'll just stab him in the neck and I know he'll do the same for me was the highlight for me. The moves they use, especially in the cutscenes, also just looked downright fierce. It's a step above realistic, but not exactly crazy anime either. So it felt cathartic to wrap everything up in such a powerful way, with a fight that doesn't need to happen, because everyone pretty much got what they wanted already. But Snake and Ocelot, the characters, they needed it. And I needed that closure with him, too. Snake didn't want to leave before he had dealt with his responsibilities, and neither did I. It was also nice to see Ocelot gradually lose the weird brainwashing he'd done on himself and come out of it as his old self. It was pretty good.

@redhotchilimist: To each their own, but as with everything in that game the idea itself is funny (crazy senator boss who just fist fights you) but the dialogue sucks and there are no actual funny jokes or lines to keep it entertaining moment to moment (and in fact it goes on way too long). How you can be so blown away by the bosses in that game is really beyond me. Like to me so much of that game is almost a parody of Metal Gear but then wait there is not much actual humor here so what is this? Yeah there are a few moments (like the football hike thing) but we are talking long sequences played straight in that game. And then who gives a shit about that character actually at all? He isn't built up in any cool way really before that, the story has been a mess really. At least when Liquid/Ocelot goes on his rants he has earned a position to do that and for you to care.

I think it's just bad whacky Japanese action game story. Bits of it sound great on paper but the moments are remotely near anything else this series has done.

The MGS3 bosses aren't special because of their cutscene dialogue they are special because they are mostly fantastic fights on their own, far above anything in MGR. The End is probably my favorite boss ever.

I'm not someone who cares insofar as I am fine with the Metal Gear I loved being stuff I loved and it isn't an insult to have Rising out there. I just don't really see the quality a lot of people attribute to that game much at all (again besides pretty good gameplay).

@artisanbreads: It's not a comedy game. I'm not expecting, nor would I want, constant annoying Borderlands 2 or Deadpool oneliners or whatever, and several bits like the child soldiers and Raiden's past haunting him is played relatively straight(Although I could see another person laughing heartily at "JACK IS BACK"). But it's still great fun. There's a huge glee in jumping on missiles, splitting a robot dinosaur down the middle, fighting talking robot dogs, cutting cats that dodge every move, splitting men into thousands of pieces and breaking off one of a giant robot's sword arm to have a giant swordfight with it. There are straight up jokes if you want them as well. Some are in the codecs, which are more fleshed out than any codec calls since 3. Some are scenes in the story, like Raiden failing miserably to blend in with the locals in Mexico with a mariachi outfit, infiltrating some rooms as a dwarf gecko or The guard at Sunny's place reading moeee anime magazines. Armstrong works precisely because he wasn't shown much beforehand. He just looked like a suit, so when I got to Pakistan, I had no idea what could happen. At first I figured the giant metal gear was the final boss. Then he gets out, pissed that the metal gear has failed him, absorbs the energy of the machine and fights me on his own, like he's fucking Lordgenome. He's stronger than his own mecha. That's unexpected, amazing and hilarious even before he starts being a bizarre right-wing caricature who secretly just wants the strongest to thrive.

Some of the bosses' abilities are straight out of One Piece, with characters like Buggy the Clown being Monsoon and Armstrong having armament haki. They do have lots of funny and memorable dialogue too, like "All I'm saying is, give war a chance" or "Nanomachines, son!". And the bosses are all refreshingly human, who have their own quirks and hangups and have a chat with you. That's something Kojima forgot how to do over the years(Or stopped doing for themes about war turning people into monsters and dissociative disorder rather), and something that's largely lacking in the brawler/beat 'em up/spectacle fighter/character action game genre because they normally go for clear good vs evil demons. I didn't need them to be particularly deep. It's a brawler, after all. I needed them to all have shit-eating grins, interesting abilities, silly oneliners and powermetal themes where the vocals kick in as their health gets low. I did not need them to be traumatized, hysterical models or mindless, mind-controlled silent men with rock armor or fire all over their body. Platinum Games are silly in a different way from Kojima, but I personally like both a lot. I hope this helps you see what I like about it besides just the gameplay(which isn't as good as Bayonetta, but still pretty great and in an unusual setting for the genre). Even if you don't appreciate what it's got going on, there's a tone to the game that I love.