We review the saga created by Hideo Kojima and we trace again what have been the 10 best works that the franchise has had.
Although the saga is not experiencing its best moments, to such an extent that during the 30th anniversary of it in 2017 it did not have a celebration at the height of what it deserves, Metal Gear Solid still gives what to talk about day after day.
Snake’s productions have a huge mass of fans behind him, more than enough reason for him not to be forgotten. Today we bring you those 10 Metal Gear games that you must play yes or yes, whether you are someone new to the franchise or someone who still needs one to enjoy.
10 Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
“This is not canon.” “This is canon.” “This is not …”, and so on until the infinite time loop so as not to focus on what is really important: what a great game Platinum Games gave us. The series completely abandoned the essence that characterized it to deliver a hack & slash starring Raiden. Katanas, cyber ninjas, giant Metal Gear and an explosive cocktail that knew how to take advantage of the Bayonetta team perfectly.
The Rising story is the story of near failure. The game was announced at E3 2009 in Los Angeles with great anticipation, and then in 2010 we saw it in a gameplay that brought the exclamation of “Oh” to everyone present, which left us wanting to know more. However, months passed – and even years – and we had no news of the title. Kojima himself went on to confirm to Kotaku that “at the end of 2010 he had already decided to cancel the game”, but considered that there were ideas “that could go somewhere”, although “the design of the game was not”. “I realized that this was a sword ninja action game; a Japanese study would be the best decision ”, he pointed out at the time.
This is how the game ended up in the hands of Platinun Games, who gave us a work that to this day is still a playable delight and for which it seems that time does not pass.
9 Metal Gear: Ghost Babel
One of those games reviled within the Metal Gear saga, more for prejudice than for weighty reasons. Metal Gear: Ghost Babel was a real surprise in Game Boy Color. The production collected the best of the MSX2 titles and combined it with everything Kojima had learned during Metal Gear Solid.
The Japanese creative itself confirmed that this installment, developed by the prestigious studio TOSE, was an express request from Konami Europe seeing how the PlayStation game had permeated. The Japanese made the script for this game, which started from the premise of narrating an alternative universe to what was seen in Outer Heaven. However, the final surprise was one of those that highlight the virtues of Kojima. When we all thought we were controlling Solid Snake in a “parallel universe”, the game revealed, in one last conversation, the following phrase: “Jack, rest a little now.” At all times we had been playing with Raiden in training, even though we didn’t know it. In fact, no one knew who Jack (or Raiden) was until a year later. A marvel.
8 Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker
A few months after Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker was announced, Hideo Kojima said that this installment should have really been the fifth part of the saga, that is, it should have been Metal Gear Solid 5. However, the study opted for the laptop from Sony (PSP) to tackle this plot that was inserted between the timeline of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and the MSX2 games (and then GZ and TPP when they were announced, of course).
Peace Walker pushed the technical capabilities of the PlayStation Portable to the limit. In addition, it was a Metal Gear Solid at its best that was powered with some extra features, see the Fulton system (which drinks from Portable Ops) and that multiplayer to face the different missions with some companions with you.
Evil tongues say that if it came out on a laptop first it was because of Kojima’s envy of Portable Ops, which we’ll talk about now…
7 Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops
What direction Masahiro Yamamoto was marked with Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops. It is sacrilege that we have not had this game later in some HD version (as it did with Peace Walker, both being from the same console) and that its legacy has been almost lost, never better said.
Hideo Kojima announced this game in late 2005 through a terse voice memo on his personal Konami blog. It is done. He was not going to be involved beyond a few brushstrokes in the story – so that he respected what he had already created – and the role of producer so that everything went well. And what happened? Well, Portable Ops broke all the molds: the Yamamoto team developed a sublime Metal Gear Solid, with enough hallmarks in the saga along with new ones such as being able to recruit soldiers by putting it in a truck and then taking them to a base. The idea permeated so much that it was later reused in Peace Walker and The Phantom Pain through the Fulton to streamline the process.
The game was a leap in quality within the Sony notebook, since it had nothing to envy its older brothers: the technical limitations were solved with sound design decisions, a history of MGS dyes and overwhelming gameplay. Portable Ops started out as a canon within the saga – in fact, it explained many important loose ends – but with the arrival of Peace Walker later, it disappeared in many aspects of the canon of the series in a mysterious way (Kojima himself gave a very ambiguous answer that was “yes but no”).
6 Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
It’s been five years since Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain went on sale and it’s still talked about. For many, the best Metal Gear Solid ever released, for others, the worst of all; in the medium term, like almost everything in life, virtue and understanding.
The Phantom Pain dispensed with many of the hallmarks of the Metal Gear Solid franchise. The problem did not lie so much here, but rather an open world was created that felt empty and repetitive, with a story that was wasted to unsuspected limits – the cassettes of Venom Snake had more plot than the title itself, something inconceivable if one saw that the umpteenth “highly-trained soldier” was rescued – and the game’s design, forcing certain fill-in missions to advance the story, weary many fans. All this, as one could imagine while playing the title and noticing it in his hands, had consequences: Kojima ended up leaving Konami almost three decades after entering, he took half a team with him (to form Kojima Productions and what has been Death Stranding) and a chapter 3 was left undone that would expand the plot aspect of the game through a DLC (since there had been no time to put it in the title, some half-done cinematics were introduced in the extra disc of collector’s edition).
All this cannot exempt the good things that production has. As of today, the control of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is not only the best of the entire saga – the dream of anyone who started with this in the 80s or 90s -, but very few games can cough up in this sense -and that we are already at the end of generation-. Handling Venom Snake was a joy and the gameplay of the product was a standard to be followed by all the competition (as many designers have said after 2015 in different interviews), not to mention the excellent match that was made to the Fox Engine at the level graphic and technical.
5 Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
A phrase has always been said regarding Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots that is perfect to define it: “It is a video game for the Metal Gear Solid fan.” As soon as one entered the saga with the first PlayStation title or before with the MSX2, this fourth part comes to satisfy all those people.
Released in 2008, it closed the entire Metal Gear plot after more than twenty years. Kojima shelved each and every one of the loose ends in a video game made up of numerous cinematics and information, something that the staunch fan could thank (because it was a perfect complement; especially Metal Gear Solid 2, which seemed like its other half) , but that occasionally it could tire him (and with reason). If no other game in the saga had come out after this, nothing would have happened, because the sound of a pistol and the cut to black at the end still echoes in our ears while we drop a tear (and it does not matter that they have already passed 12 years).
4 Metal Gear / Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
The magic. What it all started with. We have decided to put the first two titles in the series in an indivisible pack, since we never saw the second one outside of Japan until the Subsistence edition of Metal Gear Solid 3 appeared.
Hideo Kojima rose to fame, especially in Japan, thanks to the launch of these two installments for MSX2. The idea on which the whole playable approach was based was as simple as that if the usual thing of his contemporaries was that he first shot and then thought, here it was done the other way around (first escape and, if this could not be done, then shoot ). He laid the foundations of the saga to unsuspected limits, so much so that the rest of the installments, especially the PlayStation 1, drink from their paradigms at the level of playable design.
3 Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
Until The Phantom Pain was released, the one with the dubious honor of being on everyone’s lips was Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. Many of us still keep that VHS as if it were gold, not to mention the demo with which we played a little with Solid Snake. The graphic leap over the PSX title showed the benefits of PS2, but the game was highly vaunted by the appearance of Raiden, something that was never reported and caused stupor. Kojima himself confirmed in Metal Gear Saga VOL 1 that this character (and his appearance) was created to try to attract the female audience to the saga, but in the end an opposite effect was achieved (even the Japanese creator, in an interview with the Magazine Xbox Official No. 54, commented that “I may not consider it a failure, but I could say that Raiden from MGS2 should not have existed”). As a result of this “mistake”, the team redesigned the character for MGS4 (and then this aesthetic was continued in MGRising).
Beyond the character and personal opinions of each player, this second numerical part was one of the most mature and adult in the entire career of the Japanese creative. Not so much because of the Metal Gear plot, on which MGS4 depended a lot to tie the dots, but because of the powerful message that it carried, where it was about information control, manipulation, how we are slaves and they tell us what we have to do. think or do through the study of the environment and, of course, the individual. One can link all of this now with social media, messaging services, fake news and today’s digital age, but this game was written two decades ago. In fact, Raiden was nothing more than a representation of that pawn who, deep down, is only the player himself. Like wine: the more years go by, the better it ages.
2 Metal Gear Solid
It was the title that catapulted Hideo Kojima to international fame and with which millions of people entered the saga: Metal Gear Solid. Many of us can still hum the memory soundtrack, in addition to reciting many sentences from the game as if we were writing an exam.
Metal Gear Solid took at the design level everything that worked in the MSX2 deliveries and now took it to a 3D environment on PlayStation. A perfect gameplay combined with a cinematic look that put the essence of the saga from that moment. We have the dubbing in the ears hammered (“Snake speaking. Colonel, can you hear me?”), Even the most useless of characters left a mark and we still see as something from the future that Psycho Mantis could read a Memory Card or move the command through vibration. It would be the first game in this ranking for many -among which I include myself, especially out of nostalgia- if it were not for the fact that there is a neater one in what it shows on the screen.
1 Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
Kojima unleashed. His roundest work. It is no longer that Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater was the culmination at the graphic and technical level of PlayStation 2, but rather that it had taken the best of Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2, it had been shaken in a cocktail shaker -together with a touch additional design- and had launched it to the player as a probe balloon. To top it off, the “bugs” that the game had were corrected in the later Subsistence version, where we were awarded a new “free” camera and an endless amount of additional content.
Konami’s team gave birth to a perfect play at the playable and plot level. Going to the past was a more than right decision, since the temporary “limitations” were supplied with an astonishing creativity (with contributions such as camouflage, surviving in the jungle and not starving, healing in the face of adversity, etc.). Likewise, if MGS2 put his finger on the sore, with MGS3 Kojima it was no less: he got into geopolitical conflicts, sailed in the tumultuous waters of ideology, the purchase of information by countries, the power hidden in the shadows, the list of spies in the Cold War (with its James Bond touch) and much more. As soon as it was released, MGS3 supposed to square the circle for Kojima himself and all his subsequent works.
