I'm not much of a fan of stealth games, I usually like to rush in guns blazing. I also don't play many cinematic games and I'm strongly against auteur idolization, so while I appreciate Hideo Kojima in a lot of ways, I'm not some die hard either. So while I respect and enjoy the Metal Gear Solid games well enough, I can't really say they've always been for me. However, even I can't deny the sheer quality of Metal Gear Solid 2. Over time, more and more people have started to hold this one up as the best in the franchise, and yeah, I can see why. Metal Gear Solid 2 has some of the best gameplay in the franchise, boasts one of the most interesting stories Hideo Kojima has ever told, and its Substance version is one of the most content-rich packages in the entire medium.
Metal Gear Solid 2 is a fascinating entry in the series. It had a massive hype cycle behind it, with a demo so impressive that people went and bought Zone Of The Enders solely to experience it. It's still the most critically-praised game in the series, but when it came out, it turned out to not be at all what the fans were expecting it to be. Sandwiched between the influential first game and the crowd-pleasing third game, MGS2 ended up becoming the black sheep of the franchise... but over time, people came around on it hard. Nowadays, it's often held up with Snake Eater as the best game in the series, so let's talk about why.
Before I get into the game's story, the deconstructionist elements, and the stuff in Metal Gear Solid 2 that's purposefully meant to be underwhelming, I do want to get one major thing out of the way. In terms of pure moment-to-moment gameplay, this is not just a massive refinement over the original, but it's also just my favorite game in this aspect. MGS3 onwards would introduce survival mechanics which really aren't my speed, so 2 really stands out as the best iteration of the more arcade-y stealth gameplay that the earlier games had. Everything just feels more polished in 2, shooting is more accurate, you can aim in first person, the cover mechanics are more fleshed-out, enemies are smarter, you can use pretty much everything in the environment to your advantage and disadvantage, and it all runs at a silky smooth 60fps. The level design is more open, the bosses are more fun, the gameplay is just borderline perfect. On top of that, MGS2 was an absolute technological powerhouse, cramming in all kinds of different effects, destructible objects, water physics, and it still feels really impressive playing it today.
Like many of Kojima's games, Metal Gear Solid 2's story is... dense, to say the least. One might even argue that it's the densest and most incomprehensible of the franchise, to the point that even after consuming countless analyses of it, I still can't say I understand the full scope of what happened on a plot level. It's less of a direct follow-up to the first game and more of a response to its success, in the same way that Chrono Cross felt like a direct response to Trigger. It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that both games had similar receptions then. The first hour of the so of the game has you play as Snake going on a mission on a tanker, and it's great. With an impeccably designed nonlinear map, tons of opportunities to use the game's new mechanics, and Snake being as badass as ever, it feels like the perfect representation of what an ideal Metal Gear Solid sequel should be... and then Snake dies, and the game starts anew.
The tanker sequence was just a prologue, the vast majority of Metal Gear Solid 2 has you play as a new rookie named Raiden who's infiltrating a facility called the Big Shell. Sudden protagonist shifts like this never go well in a fandom like this, and it almost feels like MGS2 is doing everything in its power to make the shift feel as uncomfortable and jarring as possible. The snowy atmosphere of Shadow Moses has been replaced with a garishly orange oil rig, you get the basic tutorials forced onto you again despite having played the game for over an hour, and Raiden himself seems far wimpier than the grizzled action hero Snake was. As someone who got into the series post-Revengeance, I never hated Raiden even in his first appearance, but I could definitely imagine how people would absolutely despise him at first.
Of course, that's the point. As the game goes on, you start to notice that Big Shell has a lot of similarities to the design and events of the first game, to an uncanny degree. Despite his seeming death, this idealized version of Snake also keeps showing up, at one point even using a cheat that gives him infinite ammo. Eventually, it's revealed that Raiden is basically being put through a simulation to recreate the magic of the Shadow Moses Island to appease and control society. This is the most iconic cutscene in the game and it's the one that really makes the game and reveals all of its themes. Metal Gear Solid 2 is a commentary on fandom culture and the spread of information. Despite being made in 2001, Kojima managed to do a shockingly good job at predicting the current state of the internet, from the abundance of echo chambers to the sheer quantity of false or manufactured news. Hell, even the game's infamous advertising campaign and first hour meant to trick people into thinking Snake would be the protagonist just proves it point, showing how easy misinformation is and how the way you wield information can be used to provoke or control fans. The first game was elevated as a gaming action classic and Snake was idealized as a perfect action hero, so Kojima went ahead and recontextualized it into what is essentially a nightmare scenario for Raiden, an analog for a Metal Gear Solid fan. He is pointing a mirror at the people who played and loved his game, and they do not like what they saw.
Of course, a game being postmodern and having interesting themes doesn't make it good, but I think Kojima's attempt at subverting expectations and deconstructing the medium improves the experience in this case. For starters, as I've hinted at before, MGS2 has aged remarkably well. Nowadays we have plenty of postmodern video games like Spec Ops: The Line or The Stanley Parable, but in 2001, there was nothing quite like this. And yet, most of what Metal Gear Solid 2 has to say still holds true, to the point of continuing to shock people by its prescience to this day. The internet has only gotten more segmented and hard to trust over time, and fandoms have only grown increasingly more volatile yet predictable. The twist also makes Raiden a more interesting character by introducing themes of free will as he tries to break free from the aforementioned simulation and make his own life, culminating in him tossing away the dog tag with the player's name on it. And on top of that, it also works as a commentary on being a special agent and having to ditch ones identities for an assigned codename, so even outside of the meta context, the themes of Raiden's arc still apply. And most of all, despite how surreal, loaded, and meta this game gets, it never conflicts with the gameplay. From start to finish, Metal Gear Solid 2 is a better-playing game than its predecessor, that doesn't change. While the first and third games have generally better-crafted stories that are easier to follow, Metal Gear Solid 2's story is more interesting and generally has more to say.
And back to the gameplay, Metal Gear Solid 2 eventually got a special edition called Substance, and it's absolutely massive. The main campaign itself is already quite beefy whether you're tackling the different difficulty levels, finding all the dog tags, shooting for the best ranks, or finding all the various weapons or power-ups, but Substance adds so many extra modes that really make for the definitive Metal Gear experience for me. VR Missions was always one of my favorite things in the series and Substance adds over 500 of them, there's an entirely new campaign set in the Big Shell where you can play as Snake, there's a theater mode that lets you change up in the character models in all the cutscenes, and there's even a hilarious skateboarding mode where you can grind across the Big Shell as Snake or Raiden, and I still don't think I fully scratched the surface. Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance honestly has some of the most robust side content out of any game I've ever played, it's just plain staggering.
And that's really it, Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance just feels definitive for me. It has everything I've come to expect from a Metal Gear game and then some, it's the most Metal Gear game, and probably even the most Kojima game. It's both a wonderful evolution of the formula that perfected the series' stealth gameplay, and Kojima's densest yet most prescient story, while also packing in hours upon hours upon hours worth of Metal Gear Solid goodness. It's equal parts gutsy and incredibly well-executed.
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