Board 8 > Anagram ranks anything Metal Gear-related, with writeups (spoilers)

(+) Yeah! (+)

Metal Gear: Ghost Babel

I wasn't talking about a video let's play, it was a screenshot one. Maybe I was thinking of the wrong person? it's been ages since it was made.

mostly I remember it harping over how ridiculous the owl puzzle was.

edit ok someone knew what I was talking about.

My text message alert is the Codec sound effect and it's great

Nominate Liquid living on through this arm

Mr Crispy posted...

I wasn't talking about a video let's play, it was a screenshot one. Maybe I was thinking of the wrong person? it's been ages since it was made.

mostly I remember it harping over how ridiculous the owl puzzle was.

edit ok someone knew what I was talking about.

That playthrough is literally why I know about poisonous zanzibar hamsters lol

So I guess Paz is less than the sum of her parts, so to speak.

Nominate:
Hunger system from MGS3

Oh man I remember that playthrough. Good stuff

MGS3 Secret Theater

tc, were you a huge fan of V? prob my favorite in the series

Shadow Moses dream in MGS4

The original main theme:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9WX7FP-6lY

Nanomachines, son!

Crab Battle

Paratroopa1 posted...

Slowbeef's Metal Gear 2 playthrough isn't a video, it's all text and screenshots - it's actually so old that it's both pre-youtube and pre-the idea of people doing playthroughs of games. It's considered to be one of the first let's plays. I haven't read it in a while so I don't know if it's still funny but it's one of the classics of old internet humor:

http://effinslowbeef.com/MG2/

Didn't know this, thanks.

KazGT6 posted...

tc, were you a huge fan of V? prob my favorite in the series

Nope! But I'm sure we'll get to that.

You're Pretty Good
Metal Gear Solid (PS1)
MGS Dialogue
Codec Sound Effect

The Lightning in the Rain
Snake in Smash
Original Main Theme: The best theme in the series, which makes sense, since it was stolen from a Russian composer and they had to stop using it as a result.
The Ladder
Senator Armstrong
Big Boss
Cardboard Boxes
Shadow Moses Dream (MGS4): I remember being surprised when his face turns into the PS3 Snake face. Very well handled, I especially like how the controls and pause screen are preserved.

What a Thrill
Jetstream Sam
MGS3 Secret Theater: Best one is Payback, where the CIA Director forces Snake to shake his hand.
Raiden
Butts: In the grand debate of boobs vs butts, put me down on the side of boobs. That said, butts have their charm, and MGS is the only series I know of where the main character perving on a woman's ass is a plot point. God, can you imagine if that game came out today? And people had webms and memes of the player examining guards' asses? 1998 was a different time, I guess.
Liquid Snake Explains Big Chungus
Memes

You're All Diamonds
MGS3 Survival System: Vastly superior to its equivalents in other games. It really pushes the survivalism angle, which is weird, since the game isn't really specifically about survival? But in any case, I always just end up with a million captured animals I tranqed, then eat them one at a time later on.
Bladewolf
Codecs in Smash
Fission Mailed
Quiet's Theme
Liquid's Arm: Danganronpa 2 spoilers: The most bizarre thing ever to me is that both of these series, which have nothing in common at all, involve the second game's secondary antagonist sawing off the first game's antagonist's arm and attaching it to themselves. It's the most bizarrely specific plot point ever to come up twice. I like the idea of Liquid's ghost possessing Ocelot through the arm, but the later development that Ocelot replaced the arm and then hypnotized himself into just believing he was possessed... not so much. Or did he even replace the arm? It's been literal decades and I still don't know. No other series has ever so meticulously explained its plot only to leave so much unclear.

At Least I Always Fought For What I Believed In
The Best is Yet To Come
Nanomachines: I hate it when series use technology to explain why what was obviously intended to be magic in earlier installments is actually not magic after all. It doesn't happen often, but when it does happen, it's never done well. Vamp in particular should have just been a vampire with no explanation. With that said, at least nanomachines are the appropriate type of sci-fi concept for the series, as opposed to vocal cord parasites. I have things to say about vocal cord parasites.
Ninja Cat
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (MSX)
TNT
Crab Battle: This feels very 2006-y to me. The humor is much less refined than our modern fart jokes. When the guy starts screaming OLOLOLOLO, I just cringed.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Tanker (MGS2): It's fine, I guess. MGS is a series about technology and military stuff run amok, so it needs to be set in locations that emphasize that -- specifically, either military bases and evil laboratories, or very untamed nature-y places where the technology stands out. Having the opening of MGS2 take place on just a normal navy ship gets the job done, I guess, but it's the bare minimum. It's serviceable, but I never think of the tanker when I think of MGS locations.
Metal Gear (MSX)
Rules of Nature
1997 Tokyo Game Show Ad for Metal Gear Solid
MGS4 TV Spots
Johnny Sasaki: I'm fine with the idea of a random guy whose path just happens to cross Snake's during every spy adventure, that's fine. Turning him into a major character and giving him the romance arc is a bizarre decision, though. He should've just kept being a random guy who just keeps accidentally running into the heroes.
Metal Gear: Ghost Babel: I cannot believe this game came out in 2000. It's so strange to me that we were using GBAs the same year as the PS2. We were using the Gameboy Color until 2001! Anyway, I've never played this and I never will.

They Played Us Like a Damn Fiddle
Paz Ortega Andrade
Metal Gear Solid
Rathalos
Poisonous Zanzibar Hamsters
Hideo Kojima
Gurlugon

More Than Enough to Kill Anything that Moves
Keifer Sutherland as Snake
Metal Gear Survive
MGS Snake Eater Pachinko

!

Metal Gear Solid Theme in Evolution Skateboarding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY7K73JHwvI

The fact that Ghost Babel somehow has an E rating

Yummy. I loved having Snake try the different "foods".

Snake vs. Monkey

Big Boss overtaking Snake as protagonist

Vocal chord parasites

Liquid Ocelot boss fight in MGS4.

Metal Gear Solid 2

The Pooyan Mission

MGS5's gameplay

! (the sound effect)

Calling to the Night

You're Pretty Good
Metal Gear Solid (PS1)
MGS Dialogue
Codec Sound Effect

The Lightning in the Rain
Liquid Ocelot (Boss): I'm not sure what I consider the best finale boss fight in the series to be, but this is one of the three contenders. It's not very difficult or anything, and it doesn't really use the game's mechanics to its advantages, and the fighting game section just comes out of nowhere (it's equivalent in my mind to the rail shooter segment of the Mundus fight in DMC1, where it comes out of nowhere and makes no sense). But it does have something no other fight has: a sense of finality. If you asked me to point to the Platonic ideal of final boss fights, this is it. This is what I would choose. This fight is the end of Metal Gear Solid, the culmination of Solid Snake, Liquid Snake, and Revolver Ocelot as characters. There might be things afterwards, but this is the end.
!: It's just so perfectly-designed. The sound effect gets into your spine and freaks you out. I don't know the name for this concept, but it's when a video game shows something that's not literally true, like an aura around a character who gives bonuses to others. The MGS exclamation mark is the perfect manifestation of that concept.
Snake in Smash
Original Main Theme
The Ladder
Senator Armstrong
Big Boss
Cardboard Boxes
Calling to the Night: Probably the best thing to come out of Portable Ops, honestly. It's so much better than the rest of the game, it's hard to even tell how this happened.
Shadow Moses Dream (MGS4)

What a Thrill
Metal Gear Solid 2: I played this game in 2008, and I was very impressed. At the time, I was super into surreal, abstract stuff. When I played it again after MGSV came out, I realized that it's the weakest of the first three. Gameplay-wise, it's a massive improvement over MGS1, of course. This is the first game in the series that really captures the feeling of a stealth game. And while I appreciate the idea of MGS2 being a lesser knockoff of MGS1 in-universe, at the end of the day, it's still a lesser knockoff. Until you get to Arsenal Gear, the characters are less fun, the location is less lived-in and interesting, the Codecs are weaker, and the story is more meandering. Then you get to Arsenal Gear, and... Well, I liked it the first time, but I'd say MGS2 is sort of damaged by the context (lol) provided by MGS3 and 4. Once you learn who the Patriots are and what's really going on, the abstract surreal elements to the game are no longer mindbreaking and are instead just kind of there. Solidus is also by far the weakest final boss and main villain besides Skull Face, I'd put him almost as low as Paz. Who are even the Codec advisors in this game? Rose? Fake Campbell? The one black guy? All are completely boring (until Fake Campbell and Fake Rose turn crazy at the end). It also hurts the game that although the fourth wall-breaking mindbreak elements were cutting edge in 2002, by modern standards they're really weak. Compare this to something like, I don't know, Undertale, and it just no longer measures up, whereas MGS1 and MGS3 remain solid. Basically, what I'm saying is that I recognize that MGS2 was designed in such a way as to emphasize the weakest points of the game on purpose, but at the end of the day, it's still emphasizing its own weakest points. Dead Cell in particular is really, really bad, and it's funny once you learn that they were selected because they were less interesting Foxhound knockoffs, but they're still less interesting Foxhound knockoffs.
Ghost Babel's E-rating: Yeah, yeah. Star Wars has a PG rating, this sort of thing just sort of happens occasionally.
Jetstream Sam
MGS3 Secret Theater
Raiden
Butts
Liquid Snake Explains Big Chungus
Memes

You're All Diamonds
MGS5's Gameplay: Yes, okay. MGS5 has the best skeleton of gameplay in the series. The actual gameplay of "run around where enemies can't see you" is at its best here. And you get a million weapons to choose from so you can approach things however you want. But literally every other aspect of the gameplay is worse. There are no bosses anymore, except Volgin (lol), Quiet (lol), and whatever the metal gear was called this time. The world is sprawling and gigantic, but most of it is a literal empty desert. You can approach things however you want, but the best way is to get on your horse and ride in plain view of the enemies because nothing matters except reaching your destination. And there are so many just inexplicable things in this game, like how you have multiple options for landing zones, but one is always closer to the target than the others, so why would you ever choose a different zone? Many people have said that Ground Zeroes is better than Phantom Pain because the Cuban base is at least better-designed, and they're right. If the whole game was like that one section, maybe MGSV would be remembered a little more fondly. The game makes a huge deal out of being able to play as characters besides Snake, but Snake has the highest stats anyway and you have to play him most of the time. So much of this game is clearly incomplete, too.
MGS3 Survival System
Bladewolf
Codecs in Smash
Fission Mailed
Quiet's Theme
Liquid's Arm

At Least I Always Fought For What I Believed In
The Best is Yet To Come
Nanomachines
Ninja Cat
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (MSX)
TNT
Crab Battle
Vocal Cord Parasites: Despite its low ranking, I don't hate them. I actually think that, thematically, this is genius, and it's one of the very few strengths MGSV has. The idea of communication being this super important element to society, so a weapon that disables your ability to communicate, especially targeting the world's most common language, is a super weird and very MGS-y idea. This absolutely fits into the game's obvious theme of language, and in a game that was finished and not trash, it could have been incredible. Like, this is genuinely a really clever idea! ... but then it's also used to explain away every supernatural event in the series, because Kojima decided afterwards that he wanted everything to be based in science... EXCEPT the ghost. And if someone tells me that you could possibly explain the Sorrow using vocal cord parasites or nanomachines, you're getting tossed out a window. It also doesn't help that all of the exposition about these things is delivered by Code Talker, who's the most longwinded character ever.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Tanker (MGS2)
Big Boss as the Protagonist: Again, I think that Hideo Kojima just didn't understand the appeal of his own series. MGS3 was the exact amount of Big Boss we needed. It was like scientifically measured in a laboratory to be the exact right amount, and anything more damages the character. But even more than that, Snake is better as the series protagonist than Big Boss. I acknowledge that Big Boss is the more complex character, but there's more to being the main character than just that. The normal guy who's burdened by his father's evil deeds having to right them is inherently a better perspective for the hero to have than Big Boss', which is compounded by the fact that every game Big Boss stars in besides MGS3 is just kind of bad, whereas all of Snake's games are still, shall we say, solid.
Metal Gear (MSX)
Snake vs. Monkey: Does anyone really like Ape Escape? It seems like one of those series that just sort of exists, but that no one is really fond of in particular. Getting a crossover promotion with MGS to me feels like the Dragon Ball Z x One Piece x Toriko crossover.
Rules of Nature
1997 Tokyo Game Show Ad for Metal Gear Solid
MGS4 TV Spots
Johnny Sasaki
Metal Gear: Ghost Babel
Pooyan Mission: I like weird little bonus content as much as the next guy, but who cares?

They Played Us Like a Damn Fiddle
MGS Theme (Evolution Skateboarding): I accept that this is the best job that could have been done, but I think MGS' somber-yet-wacky tone just doesn't fit with extreme sports. This is true for spy things in general; as someone with the shameful title of 'person who's seen all the James Bond movies,' I can tell you that one of the few things in Die Another Day anyone remembers is the surfboarding scene.
Paz Ortega Andrade
Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops
Rathalos
Poisonous Zanzibar Hamsters
Hideo Kojima
Gurlugon

More Than Enough to Kill Anything that Moves
Keifer Sutherland as Snake
Metal Gear Survive
MGS Snake Eater Pachinko

Para-Medic movie conversations

Metal Gear Solid 3

Psycho Mantis

Post-credits conversations

Love Deterrence

Metal Gears

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C9IMHmZXUAE-aw2.jpg

I love Ape Escape 3 and wish they'd revive the series.

Metal Gear Solid 4

MGS1's torture sequence

Naomi Hunter

Raka_Putra posted...

I love Ape Escape 3 and wish they'd revive the series.

Sony planned it, but then decided not to as they were evicerating the Japan Studios. It was to be announced a few years ago for the big Anniversary of the series, but poof! it was canned.

Also, now that ApeEscape is officially mentioned: MESAL GEAR SOLID(it's Metal Gear-adjacent, it counts!)

You're Pretty Good
Metal Gear Solid 3: I changed my mind; this is the best one. I think the deciding factor is the gameplay; it's not the best gameplay in the series, but it definitely beats MGS1, and it trounces MGS4 and MGSV in every way besides gameplay, so it wins this title. This game just does everything perfectly, both as a prequel and as a standalone game. The story is tight and compelling, Snakes' fall from grace is executed flawlessly, the supporting cast does everything right, there are just the right number of plot twists, the boss fights are (mostly) really good, and it's the exact right length. The games after this drag on forever if you're not speedrunning, while this one ends just when it needs to. The Cold War setting of "neither side trusts each other, but they still have to trust each other in this specific instance to take down Volgin" is utilized super well, too, even if the game predicates itself on the existence of tropical Russian rainforests. And don't talk to me about that one "rainforest" in Siberia; I know about it, but it looks nothing like the obviously South American rainforest the game takes place in. I would call this a nearly flawless video game. One other thing I want to bring up: I appreciate that this game still has sci-fi elements, but keeps them in the realm of believable compared to the chronologically later games, as opposed to PW and especially MGSV having tech that's more advanced than anything we see "later" on. They really put a lot of effort into this game, and it shows.
Metal Gear Solid (PS1)
MGS Dialogue
Codec Sound Effect

The Lightning in the Rain
Liquid Ocelot (Boss)
!
Snake in Smash
Metal Gears: Metal Gear as a series is all about technology and weapons going out of control, and Metal Gears are the face of that. I think that's partly to the series' detriment, though, because 'weapons' today lean toward information and espionage, and not so much the Cold War-era LITERAL weapons. But hey, I'll admit that MGS4 got it right in that the metal gears are basically just fancy drones, and aside from MGR, metal gears always do feature prominently in the games' storylines, so alright. And don't say that Raiden beats up a metal gear at the start of the game, that scene is basically just to establish that Raiden is at a point where metal gears are no longer relevant threats.
Original Main Theme
The Ladder
Senator Armstrong
Big Boss
Cardboard Boxes
Calling to the Night
Shadow Moses Dream (MGS4)

What a Thrill
Metal Gear Solid 2
Ghost Babel's E-rating
Para-Medic Movie Conversations: I've said this before, but a good 25% of the series' appeal is having random dumb conversations about philosophy, military stuff, or just plain old nonsense with the supporting cast. This is absolutely critical; I would call it a non-negotiable part of the series... and only MGS1, MGS3, and MGR actually do it correctly. Having dumb conversations with Para-Medic about movies, having Major Zero bust in to talk about how awesome James Bond is, it all lends the game a ton of personality you don't get from gameplay, setting, and cutscenes alone. Too bad about what becomes of Para-Medic, though.
Jetstream Sam
MGS3 Secret Theater
Mesal Gear Solid: You couldn't get the actual voice actors for Campbell and Snake? Are Paul Eiding and David Hayter really in that high demand? This Snake VA is about the quality I could do. And "Mesal" means "toward the middle point," what does that have to do with anything? That said, this is a pretty faithful recreation of Metal Gear with Ape Escape mechanics, so I have to give it some credit on that front. It even has a final boss fight on a metal gear and really long cutscenes. Does this Monkey Snake count as one of the official Snakes of Metal Gear? And no post-credits dialogue... I have to give this to Ape Escape; this is a much better crossover than MGS' attempt.
Raiden
Psycho Mantis: I like Psycho Mantis and everything, but if we're being really honest, he's another example of MGS2-syndrome, where something that's mind-blowing in 1998 (reading your memory card) has been done so much better in the time since that he's no longer all that. The idea of beating him using fourth wall-breaking tricks like using another controller is amazing in 1998, but now it's... pretty clever. That's about it, though; just "pretty clever." It's also worth noting how important he is to the series given how little he shows up. He dies early on in MGS1, but thanks to VOCAL CORD PARASITES, his shadow looms heavily over the rest of the series in a way that doesn't make much sense. If he repents during MGS1, why is he an evil ghost in MGS4? Blegh, whatever. Let's not even get started on kid Psycho Mantis in MGSV.
Butts
Liquid Snake Explains Big Chungus
Memes
Post-Credits Conversations: Good way to set up later games. Were these the original Marvel credits scenes? I guess this is post-Mario Bros movie, so they're not. I remember playing MGS1 for the first time, and just knowing in my bones that Ocelot was going to end things with "Thank you, Mr. President," and being right.

You're All Diamonds
Metal Gear Solid 4: Yeesh, this is where things go a little downhill for the series. I'm just going to call this the RotJ of Metal Gear -- a step down from the previous games, but not ruinous. Not yet. It establishes trends that later games will make worse, until the series just becomes untenable. It's still a good game, and a worthy sendoff to the series, but of the real games, this has both the highest highs and the lowest lows. Shadow Moses, the Liquid Ocelot fight, REX vs RAY? All genius. Eastern Europe, the B&B Corps' outrageously tragic backstories, and some of the retcons? Not so much. It's made worse by how everything is mired in so many cutscenes. People make jokes about this game being more than half cutscene, but the thing is that they're not jokes. They are not jokes. I'm pretty sure that when I last played the game, it was legitimately more than half cutscene. So, while I appreciate that the game has really solid gameplay for the 45% of the time it matters, and that it perfectly ends Snake's storyline, and that it wraps up the themes the series really grappled with... everything has an asterisk. For every good thing in the game, something about it is slightly wrong.
Cartoon Foxhound Logo: Perfectly suitable.
MGS5's Gameplay
MGS3 Survival System
Naomi Hunter: Among the worst people in the series, morally. She does so much evil stuff that she never gets called on. I guess her fate was to become the fourth tragically dead character in Otacon's story, after Strangelove, Huey, and Emma. But yeah, do you mind if I complain about MGS retconning her and Mei Ling's accents? I acknowledge that it makes no sense for Naomi's accent to be British, but it still made sense for Mei Ling. Anyway, I just wanted to say that in Twin Snakes, they rerecord all of the dialogue, and every single person besides Snake and Ocelot sounds much worse, especially Naomi. I don't know what it is, and she sounds fine in MGS4, but in TTS, she legit sounds like she's reading lines directly off of the script.
Bladewolf
Codecs in Smash
Fission Mailed
Quiet's Theme
Liquid's Arm

At Least I Always Fought For What I Believed In
MGS1 Torture Sequence: I'm really bad at button mashing minigames like this. The first time I played, it legit took me like half an hour to do this.
The Best is Yet To Come
Nanomachines
Ninja Cat
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (MSX)
TNT
Crab Battle
Vocal Cord Parasites

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Tanker (MGS2)
Big Boss as the Protagonist
Metal Gear (MSX)
Snake vs. Monkey
Rules of Nature
1997 Tokyo Game Show Ad for Metal Gear Solid
MGS4 TV Spots
Johnny Sasaki
Metal Gear: Ghost Babel
Pooyan Mission

They Played Us Like a Damn Fiddle
MGS Theme (Evolution Skateboarding)
Paz Ortega Andrade
Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops
Rathalos
Poisonous Zanzibar Hamsters
Love Deterrence: I mean, ignoring that this is competely at odds with the 1970s setting, while the other games' big themes fit their timelinese, I just don't like J-pop. It's not even really that fitting for Paz as a character, either. Her (fake) personality is upbeat, but not nearly this energetic, and she has nothing to do with Japan. Her theme should've either been American or Latin-inspired, or just a somber spy-ish theme, but not J-pop. Just a complete miscalculation, I think.
Hideo Kojima
Gurlugon

More Than Enough to Kill Anything that Moves
Keifer Sutherland as Snake
Metal Gear Survive
MGS Snake Eater Pachinko

I'm curious why you think Psycho Mantis is just "pretty clever" nowadays. Besides some recent advents in VR, I feel like games actually having you interact with the hardware has always been extremely rare. Eternal Darkness and Boktai are two other examples I can think of. I rather think it's still an untapped potential that could pretty damn cool in certain games.

Next nomination:
iPod

The Metal Gear Acid games

War has changed monologue in MGS4

The Ocelot Hand Gesture

This Mega64 video

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k-i9unRCvsA

The pun in Mesal Gear Solid is that Saru means monkey in Japanese so they turned Metaru into Mesaru and just didnt bother trying to translate the name for English in any way that would be understandable

The name "Metal Gear"

WazzupGenius00 posted...

The pun in Mesal Gear Solid is that Saru means monkey in Japanese so they turned Metaru into Mesaru and just didnt bother trying to translate the name for English in any way that would be understandable

Oh wow okay

Well, thanks for the explanation, at least!

Vulcan Raven

The End