Day 8
I admit that I actually started this late on Day 7 to see the opening. Anyway, onward.
The only reason I know what’s going on is because I read the manual. I would have figured they would have put it in the game, but they really assume you know the setup and dive right in.
Snake flirts with the new tech Mei Ling immediately and I guess this is just going to be the price of admission for these things. Also, Dr. Naomi offers to let Snake strip-search her. This stuff is excruciating.
The first thing I learn is that the detection radius for a spotlight is bigger than the actual graphic for the spotlight so that’s cool.
The second thing I learn is that you can’t just punch dudes from behind without alerting them – as soon as they get hit the alarms go off, which is bogus. I went back to the manual, it looks like I need to strangle them now instead. This seems really hard because Snake always throws the enemy first, which alerts them, THEN he strangles. I’m not sure these should have been the same button. Apparently it’s because of a directional input which seems really fiddly when you’re trying to get close fast before somebody turns around.
I get caught and killed once because Snake stops to comment on a camera which is facing away from him, and the camera moves and looks at him mid-cutscene. Cool.
Once inside Snake gets a call from his old.. kung-fu master, or something. He offers to be our flora and fauna consultant. Is this a recurring series element?
I literally cannot figure out how to escape this vent. I have to look it up. The guide says the vent should be open. It is not. I’m lost.
Oh wait there’s another turn here. The graphics are so dark it literally was indistinguishable from the wall. I wish I could turn up the brightness or something. I wish I could post a picture of how muddy it is, but the way this game is structured makes it much harder to find exact screenshots of what I’m looking for without taking them myself, which is a hassle on the Vita. Suffice it to say that it’s very hard to tell what I’m looking at in a vent.
The DARPA chief I’m here rescue has been moved to the first floor basement. Also, there’s somebody else doing spy stuff. Supposedly the vents should be open now since they’re going to spray for rats. I drop down, take the elevator to B1 and find the chief, but he’s in a room that’s locked, so back into a vent I go.
In this vent the Colonel tells me to look around in first person mode, but you can’t not be in first person in a vent as far as I can tell so it’s a weird ask. One of the locked rooms has a woman doing crunches in it. The other has the chief.
I like how the game credits the voice actor on a character introduction. The DARPA chief, Donald Anderson, tells me that the government is building a Metal Gear and expects Snake to be shocked and Snake’s like “nah brah I’ve taken out at least two of those.” The woman next door is listening in. Turns out the Metal Gear project has only grown in partnership with a company called ArmsTech, instead of being scrapped. This makes me really wonder what happened to Madnar since he said they rejected his research as the inventor of Metal Gear. Anyway the new Metal Gear is named Rex and he’s probably already armed. There are two passwords needed to launch the nukes, and the terrorists already know one because Psycho Mantis is a mind-reader. Snake can stop the launch with three override card keys, held by Baker, President of ArmsTech, who is being held on B2. Anderson gives me his card ID which unlocks a bunch of rooms all over the facility. I do not know why he has this access. Then he dies dramatically. Mission failed.
There’s nothing to be done, so the new objective is to find President Baker. I walk out of the cell and there’s a nude dude with his butt all censored out. The lady from the next cell has stolen his clothes and holds Snake at gunpoint. Then real guards bust in and murder me. That’s cool. It takes a few tries before I figure out how to open the menus and navigate the way to equip a weapon, use ration, and so forth, but at least you auto-aim.
A floating dude in a gas mask appears and makes off with the woman, maybe? Apparently that’s Psycho Mantis.
Anyway down to floor B2 in the next session.
Day 9
And after mainlining Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2 back to back I needed a break to avoid burn-out, and took a break. Day 8 was December 29, 2022. Now we are back, it is Day 9, and it is August 2, 2023. One advantage of keeping a play log is that it lets me pick up exactly where I left off instead of looking at the nameless facility room I was in and going “what was going on?”
There’s a trapdoor in B2 that I accidentally trigger but don’t fall into, thankfully. Using the keycard I can grab some C4 which leads to a puzzle I can’t remember being told about, where in this room some walls are a slightly different color and that means they can be bombed, Zelda style. I have no clue how I would’ve figured this out as a returning player even if I had been told since I didn’t write it down above but thankfully the internet had me here. Confusingly, they’re NOT the walls that have cracks on them, they’re just a slightly different tint of grey. Once you realize they match the layout of the room you can get them all but the initial one… is not intuitive.
I bomb my way through some hallways and find another hostage: Kenneth Baker (Bert Stewart), president of ArmsTech.
A beautiful face.
He’s tied to wires that will blow him up if they’re touched, and a new villain emerges: Revolver Ocelot (Patric Laine). He shows me the greatest handgun in the world and challenges me to a boss fight.
Now we’ll see if the man can live up to the legend!
I gotta admit I have no combat skills in this game. I think this might be marginally easier on a dualshock instead of the Vita, because of having real L2/R2 buttons. His bullets somehow can bounce off the walls to hit me behind cover, and aiming is super slow and tedious. This is not good. Eventually I give up on aiming and use C4 as he runs around. The annoying bit is that it’s easy to accidentally blow up Baker (you idiot! the game over screen yells). Even with C4 it takes me a bunch of tries until I figure out that C4 has dropoff damage and where best to place it to maximize the effect. Who needs guns?
After I beat him he taunts me before having his arm sliced off by a stealthy ninja, who also kills frees Baker. The ninja is my friend and says he likes me. Baker recognizes the ninja’s exoskeleton suit. I recognize the ninja’s exoskeleton suit from a trophy in Super Smash Bros. as Gray Fox, who I took out in Metal Gear 2, so I guess Smash has spoiled the reveal that Somehow, Gray Fox Returned.
Snake gets shouty at Baker and learns that the terrorists have both codes since Baker cracked, but Baker does explain that all code-holders have implants that make them immune to Psycho Mantis’ mind-reading. Wait a minute, the DARPA Chief said that Mantis got the code by reading his mind! Truly a top 10 anime betrayal.
Baker gave the override cards to stop the nukes to Meryl but forgot her codec code.
…I forgot.
Then he remembers: the code is on the back of the game’s CD case (useful with a digital copy). Baker says my best bet to stopping the terrorists from launching a nuke and thwarting the Metal Gear is his associate Hal Emmerich. Baker then dumps a lot of lore about why nukes are still a problem and how the ninja is an experimental genome soldier. He refers me to Naomi for more information. He gives me a data disc and level 2 security clearance and is really worried about his company’s stock prices before dying of a “heart attack” that he blames the pentagon for. I guess he was about to say something he’s not supposed to. Oops.
Colonel, Naomi and Mei Ling purport to be baffled at what just happened, and Naomi has no idea who the ninja is. Oh well, time to go back to the other rooms and open more doors. Next time, because I spent a long time fighting Revolver Ocelot, which led to this session not progressing as much as I had hoped for.
Revolver Ocelot.
Day 10
On the first floor I choke a guy out but he gets back up. I dunno how to make them stay down forever, there was even a splash of blood when his neck broke but he got up a few seconds later like some sort of monster. He was guarding the SOCOM Suppressor which lets me take dudes out silently from a distance. Useful.
I remember that I’m meant to call Meryl, who says she’s not who I think she is, but actually she is and admits it. Snake hits on Meryl because he’s a creep and this is the perfect place to do that. Meryl loredumps about where we are and what she knows. She says Emmerich is in the 2nd floor basement of the nuclear building. Meryl has a Level 5 security card and Snake dumps on her for being green since she couldn’t shoot a person. Snake tells her to stay out of his way. She’ll check back in when she opens the cargo door.
The reality is no match for the legend, I’m afraid.
I have to say I’m not really a fan of cutscenes and lore being presented by talking heads in the CODEC. It feels really clumsy and I presume was a budget thing. I don’t know why it doesn’t appeal to me, given how many visual novels I have read. Maybe it’s because they’re cutting into the play instead of being the play? I don’t know.
Meryl calls back like ten seconds later to tell me she opened the door. Okay. Now I have to get through the hangar without setting off the infrared sensors. I guess it’s time for a smoke.
Okay smoking doesn’t help. I guess I’ll explore upstairs and come back later. I find a cardboard box and some grenades in one room and a mine detector and a ration in the other. That mine detector seems important.
I try to take a shot at the hangar door with the cigarettes and they do let me see the beams but I have to get way too close so I just die. I need some goggles. After a few tries with the smokes the Colonel calls and gives me Nastasha’s codec for some reason, but she doesn’t have anything helpful to say until I call her back where she tells me to use smokes. Thanks!
A few more tries and I think I finally understand how the lasers work – they move, but they also turn on and off? I thought them flickering out was just me getting too far away from them with the smoke, since that also makes them disappear. This isn’t very well signaled to the player.
Nope it turns out that the perspective on this room is terrible and what I thought were lasers moving forward and back were in fact moving up and down. Did this not get playtested or… something? Apparently this is a common problem with this room. It’s clear in first-person view. I can’t find a screenshot of this anywhere except from the Twin Snakes re-release but trust me it’s baffling.
Once out of the hangar I’m outside in the snow again. I get a call from “Deepthroat” telling me to use a mine detector because there are mines everywhere and also that a tank is ahead of me looking to ambush. Deepthroat says he’s one of my fans. This game seems to really be a straight remake of Metal Gear 2. Anyway it turns out that I was literally standing on a mine so I blow up as soon as this conversation ends. Good job game, putting that call trigger there. A tank rolls up and uh, I guess it’s time for a tank fight against Vulcan Raven.
This is Raven’s territory… Snakes don’t belong in Alaska…
I have to take the gunner out, but I die immediately on leaving cover. Oops. I would expect that what I need to do is get him to drive over the mines but it seems things are different in this game. Pro tip: getting run over by a tank hurts. I think I don’t have the right mentality for these fights without looking things up because I just would not have thought to use the chaff grenade to jam the tank’s gun (why does that work? is the gun electronic??) and all these things in my inventory feel like dead weight until they’re suddenly not. Metal Gear 2 felt better in this regard, maybe it’s the UI? Oh, once I reload from dying a few times Nastasha calls and explains the gun is electronic because of the lock-on homing system. I dunno now, did the game want me to be psychic if I wanted to win on the first try?
Eventually I get in close enough to take out the gunners with grenades but it takes a lot of tries. I eventually did make the realization that once I’m in close I don’t need to keep jamming the gun because the gun is too big to hit me up close. I loot the body and get a keycard. A mysterious voice is observing me. It seems Raven didn’t die because he speaks with the mysterious voice. Also the mysterious voice is Liquid Snake, as I can recognize from having Big Chungus explained to me. Vulcan Raven seems like one heck of a stereotype.
I get a free heal when I enter the Nuke Building 1 which is nice. That’s where I’m stopping for now. These boss fights take so many tries because of a combination of my badness and the very clunky controls. It’s not great.
Day 11
As I enter the nuclear warhead storage area, I get call from the Colonel saying I can’t use weapons in this area. The warheads are all inactive but they might leak plutonium if damaged which would be a problem. Or an opportunity, I say!
An elevator down to B2 leads to a room that fills up with poison gas AND there’s an electrified floor. Remote missiles to the rescue, just like in Metal Gear! Except I absolutely do not have any. so time to go looking. Time to go hunting. Turns out that it’s in the armory that unlocked once I blew up the tank, which, okay. That means going back through the dumb laser gas room, yuck. I need a gas mask but who knows if this game has one. So I go back to the first building and down to a different B2, open the previously-locked Level 3 door, get the missiles and launcher, and return to the B2 in the nuke building. Sigh. By the time I head back I can get through the laser room without needing smokes at least.
It takes me quite a while to figure out what the thing I’m supposed to hit with the missile is because there are so many terminals on the walls that all look identical. I guess the cutscene showed me the electrical wire leading to the thing but by the time I backtracked I had already forgotten it. And hey, a gasmask! Ask and I shall receive.
I get into the next room and from the next room a voice yells FREEZE! followed by the sounds of gunfire and screaming. Wonder what happened in there.
Inside it’s a massacre. Dead bodies and bloodstains everywhere. “It looks like they were cut by some kind of blade,” Snake observes. A dying man claims it was a ghost. As I follow the sound of fighting I see that it is in fact not a ghost but Gray Fox who we may recall has cloaking gear. I follow him into the next room where a scientist (looks like Hal) pees his pants while being interrogated by Fox. Gray Fox says he’s been waiting for me and tells me he’s not an enemy or a friend, but is Cyborg Ninja (George Byrd). Now he and I will battle to the death, as he has waited a long time for this day and wants to enjoy the moment. Hal says “it’s like one of my Japanese animes” in a classic quote. What a dork. Time for a boss fight.
The ten million dollar man
Fox plays Slappers Only like a true man, guns are useless here which is great because I suck at aiming. The fight is cooler in concept than in practice though because punch damage is really low and the fight is a lot of hanging back until he does a move, running in with a punch, then ducking out. A little under half health he goes invisible. I still don’t have thermal or night vision or whatever, clearly I missed it, but I don’t think it’s important here because like the lasers you can see the shimmer of his cloak as he moves and hear him coming. “I’ve been waiting for this pain!” he shouts, which causes me to suspect he has some lingering psychological issues. He confirms this by shouting “hurt me more!” Once I reduce his health to zero I get blown away by a high damage electrical blast that I am thankful didn’t kill me but almost did as his armor malfunctions. I guess now I can use my guns since he can’t cloak or teleport anymore. Luckily he doesn’t move while discharging, and three bullets ends the fight.
Fox reveals his true identity, and Snake says that’s impossible. Fox’s cyborg body freaks out he flees. Naomi says Gray Fox was resurrected with an experimental gene therapy and served as the prototype for the modern genome soldiers, kept alive in a tortured state for four years. I pull Hal Emmerich (Christopher Fritz) out of the locker he was hiding in.
He asks if I am also an otaku, so I hate him.
Hal has no idea that the Metal Gear was going to be used for launching a nuke, he thought it was purely going to be an anti-missile defense system. Metal Gear has a Vulcan cannon, a laser and a railgun. Hal breaks down in guilt over having built something so horrible. His grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project and his father was born on the day of the Hiroshima bombing so now he’s inadvertently continued his family’s legacy of nuclear war. He gives me the location of Metal Gear REX so I can take it out. I have to go to the maintenance bay control room north of the control tower. I can’t get out of this scene without some sexist remarks about Meryl though, thanks Kojima!
Hal gives me a Level 4 keycard and tells me to call him Otacon, short for Otaku Convention, because he loves “Japanimation.” This is the worst character in a video game. “I became a scientist because I wanted to make robots like the ones in the Japanese animes,” he claims. I’m barfing. He’s on frequency 141.12. I’m out of here. This is the end for today, I can only take so much.
I really wish this game lent itself to screenshots as well as the 2D games do. By becoming more cinematic, the games actually seem to have turned away from compelling still images for these posts.
Day 12
Now that Fox is cooked, it’s time to explore the other side of the gas hallway. There’s a lot of ammo refills and a door I still can’t open, so let’s note that for later. This floor is done for now, so up to B1.
There are a lot of guards in this area but somehow I don’t trip any alarms. One saw me? but didn’t pursue and no alarm triggered. I got Night Vision Goggles and a Cardboard Box B, not sure what the difference is between Box A and B but more boxen more fun I guess. Oh, I got caught exiting the bathroom after all, nevermind.
Oh okay I see, the one who “saw” me was Meryl Silverburgh (Mae Zadler) and I have to follow her into the bathroom because if Metal Gear 2 did it this game has to do it too. She tells Snake to stop hitting on her because she’s been psychologically conditioned to have no interest in men. I cannot cringe harder. She gives me a Level 5 ID. Snake aggressively hits on her anyway. Meryl talks about not wearing makeup. Snake tells her that her gun is too big for a woman and she says she’s better with the gun than with a bra. Kojima has never interacted with a human woman. This scene sucks so badly. I cannot emphasize how poor the writing here is on several levels. We’ve hit rock bottom for this franchise (so far, anyway).
You hate to see it.
Meryl goes ahead to scout. All the guards are gone and the music has stopped, which is suspicious. Meryl says “make sure you’re ready” so I guess something is about to go down. We head north to the commander’s room, but as we go north Meryl has a crippling headache while brainwashing type images flash. She tells Snake to go away… before being fine but with a very obvious filter on her voice so she’s now compromised but Snake is too dumb to realize.
In the office I learn you can punch Meryl and she turns on me (unrelated). She suddenly starts acting horny and aiming a gun at Snake. Colonel calls and says it’s Psycho Mantis and that I should knock her out, don’t use weapons. You can see Mantis cloaked behind her now. After a few punches she goes down and Psycho Mantis (Doug Stone) reveals himself.
Sadly on Vita my memory is clean and I haven’t saved often but I know what is meant to happen here. Likewise, he can’t move my “controller” because the Vita doesn’t have a vibrate feature. This would have been really cool if it weren’t just common knowledge by now.
Sadly he did not say this for me but it’s okay.
This boss fight isn’t hard but it sure is long because Mantis has so, so much health. I did it in a few tries. The combat twist is that halfway through he wakes Meryl up and you have to knock her out again, at which point he tries to make her commit suicide and you have to take her out immediately or it’s an automatic game over. The mechanical twist is that you have to put the controller in Port 2 to prevent him from reading your mind, which you can emulate doing in the Vita’s system options for the game.
As Mantis dies he tells me there’s a hidden door behind the bookcase to get to Metal Gear, and that I should use the Communication Tower’s walkway in order to avoid getting blocked since glaciers have closed the overland route. He also tells Snake that he’s genetically engineered but it doesn’t sink in. We get Mantis’ whole sad backstory that I cannot care about whatever. He says I have a large place in Meryl’s heart. Ok. Snake talks about how he doesn’t care about anybody or anything in the whole world. “You’re a sad, lonely man,” Meryl replies. Yep.
PLUG CONTROLLER INTO CONTROLLER PORT 1.
Going through the bookcase passage leads to a cave filled with “wolf-dogs” which we know because apparently Snake is a tobogganist. “I’m a musher.” Weird. Anyway this cave is where we end for now. Next up: dogcave.
Day 13
It’s time to brave the cave. It’s dark but I have Night Vision Goggles. There are dogs about and they jump faster than I can aim because dpad aiming is absolutely atrocious. Finding the way through is really annoying but I eventually catch up with Meryl. Apparently there’s a secret where you can get a dog to pee on a crate and it prevents you from being attacked, which is not a great thing. Also I’m pretty sure the wolves are unkillable, after ten bullets even the baby one was fine.
The next room is apparently mined but because the radar is jammed Snake can’t see them. Meryl walks a path to show where they are, which is reminiscent of the swamp path nonsense in Metal Gear 2. As soon as we cross the room then a sniper plugs Meryl. The sniper wants to use her injured body to lure out Snake, the true target. Meryl tells Snake to save himself but Colonel calls. We learn this is Sniper Wolf, FOXHOUND’s greatest sniper. She’s the best. She’s on the second floor of the communications tower. The only way I can take her out at that distance is with a sniper rifle of my own. Naomi is surprised Snake is willing to save Meryl. This is a dead end for now, so back to the nuclear storage building I go in search of a sniper. The armory on B2 is a likely spot because it still had doors my keycard couldn’t unlock.
The snow field where I fought the tank is now absolutely riddled with mines and somebody set up turrets. When did they have the time to set all this up? They turned the annoying invisible lasers that fill the room before the snowfield with gas off though, which is great.
The sniper is in the armory, which is also a great opportunity to restock every other weapon. I wish it also had ration restocks. Back to Meryl I run.
Turns out Meryl is gone, but so are the mines. Sniper Wolf is still here though.
Get used to seeing this immediately before a quarter of your life vanishes.
This fight should rule, because on paper it sounds great. You’re in a sniper fight where you wait for the other guy to stop aiming for a second and then pop out and shoot. In reality it’s a nightmare because the clumsy menus and animation times hamstring you. Any time Sniper Wolf stops aiming you need to walk out of cover, hit the button to take the sniper out (mandatory animation while you crouch) and then you need to pop a diazepam pill so your aim isn’t shaky, and slowly move the very clumsy aiming sights to Wolf before she starts shooting again. If she aims she immediately fires and you take two hits, because you can’t back out of the sniping interface fast enough not to take two shots. Also, the diazepam only lasts a few seconds so it’s very easy to run out. All in all it’s really poorly realized. I wonder if Twin Snakes on GameCube alleviates some of this.
As soon as Snake approaches the tower entrance an alarm triggers and Snake gets captured in a cutscene. Sniper Wolf (Julie Monroe) isn’t dead and tells me that two-thirds of the world’s greatest assassins are women.
She says some threatening sexy femme fatale stuff and Snake is knocked out.
We wake up to some bright lights and Liquid ranting about how Snake stole everything from him but now it’s the time for his revenge. He can use Snake’s DNA to fix the genome soldiers along with Big Boss’ DNA. Sniper Wolf and Liquid argue about whether their plan will work until Ocelot points out that Snake is awake. This is the official introduction to Liquid Snakes (James Flinders).
Liquid bounces to deal with some problem and leaves Ocelot to torture… er, “interrogate” Snake. Sniper Wolf tells Snake Meryl is still alive and leaves to feed her family (the wolves).
Surviving the torture is just mashing O. I know from an old Nintendo Power that this determines which ending I get. I think the reward for giving up and letting Meryl die is actually better but that’s not how the story is supposed to go, so oh well. After four rounds of torture Snake gets thrown in a cell with the dead DARPA chief’s corpse. Colonel calls and Snake reams him out for not informing him about Metal Gear REX’s ability to launch a new kind of nuke. There’s some political mumbo-jumbo and then Snake agrees to bust out of prison, destroy REX, and save Meryl. I took too long breaking out and got called back in for more torture. Colonel calls back and has Naomi give me a massage using the controller’s rumble feature, which the Vita lacks. Oh well. A long backstory for Naomi here. After this I call Otacon to break me out. I thought about hiding under the bed (this was very well clued as a solution) but Otacon seemed safer given my lack of gear. He doesn’t have a key but he does have some ketchup and a Level 6 clearance key. He also has a handkerchief that belonged to Sniper Wolf for some reason. Otacon says Sniper Wolf is a good person so I shouldn’t hurt her and Snake says that’s not gonna happen. I use the ketchup to fake my own death which gets the guard to come in. I guess I gotta beat him up either way, but hey: free catsup. Fake Edit: apparently eventually Gray Fox will come and bust you out if you can’t figure this stuff out, which is cool.
I grab all Snake’s stuff in the next room. Hilariously there’s an active bomb hidden in the inventory so that gets tossed. It’s just like having your inventory on fire in Metal Gear 2, because this game can’t not reuse an idea from that game. Now that I’ve got the ID 6, the world is my oyster and I can head to the Communication Tower for real… next time.
Day 14
I took another very long break between Day 13 and Day 14 – Day 14 is June 29, 2024. It’s taken me a year and a half to play through this game, which might indicate my feelings about it – but I’ll save that for the wrap-up.
Anyway, as I said last time, the ID 6 opens every door so I do a sweep of rooms I couldn’t open before. Notable loot is are the thermal goggles and some medicine, which I guess is different from rations, because medicine doesn’t heal you and rations do. Makes sense? Anyway, time to head back to the place where Sniper Wolf and I had our snipe-measuring contest and this time, not getting captured. At least this time all the wolves are friendly!
When I get there, Snake flashes back to seeing Meryl shot like ten seconds ago, just in case the player forgot. I guess maybe they anticipated me taking a ten-month break here (for those of you reading this in the future on my blog where I’m not posting sequentially, I took a ten-month break between finishing the torture session and getting back here). Colonel calls to tell Snake that it’s okay she died and he shouldn’t feel bad but Snake feels bad anyway. There’s sad music. Kaz and Mei Ling were eavesdropping and tell Snake to suck it up. Naomi acts all jealous of Meryl for having Snake’s attention despite being dead (or “dead”), and maybe Naomi is evil because she reveals some family stuff about her grandfather when she supposedly doesn’t have any family. Everybody brushes it off.
So, inside the comms tower a camera spots Snake in a cutscene and this institutes a chase sequence with infinitely respawning dudes. This is straight out of Metal Gear 2, just like everything in this game. I wish I had some sort of armor or something but you just have to book it and maybe use stun grenades. There’s a rope right at the start of the chase which you need at the end. This tower is REALLY tall, comically tall, and takes quite a while to climb. I used 14 of my 18 stun grenades to reach the top, but thankfully they provide several rations along the way to mitigate the damage from a dozen dudes shooting at you.
Er wait, that’s not right. Hold on…
There we go.
At the top, a bunch of missiles hit the satellite dish that’s on the roof, and it crumbles. Liquid Snake shows up in a Hind-D and says DIE! but that seems like a poor life decision. There’s a second or two to equip the rope and jump off the roof. Colonel calls to explain how to play the rappelling minigame. You have to get down the side of the building while dodging the shots from the Hind (trivial) and the random steam vents that are placed all over for some reason (hard). Thankfully the steam doesn’t hurt very much. This sequence is incredibly short, and I don’t think the building’s exterior is represented proportionally to the interior given how many stairs there were. My immersion is broken. Worst case of this since Dark Souls II. At the bottom the door is frozen or locked or something, but there’s C4 right next to it. This kind of “puzzle” always baffled me – why bother when the key is right next to the door? This leads back into Comms Tower A again, in case I want more pickups I guess.
The bridge to Comms Tower B is right here but there are dudes with guns off-screen and as soon as you try and cross they obliterate you in a classic “gotcha” moment. With guided missiles you can take them out in a pretty comical way. I have no idea what you’re meant to do if you don’t have missiles. Maybe there are some in Tower A to pick up? Liquid shows up at the end of the bridge to shoot you, but the door to Tower B is right there. Inside is the Stinger missile launcher, which I presumably will need to take out the Hind D.
Tower B is another tower to climb, as the elevator seems to be busted. You can’t climb up because there are boxes in the way and manual labor is below Snake’s dignity. Heading down the tower reveals that the staircase is broken. When you climb back up to the entrance, Otacon is there. Turns out he came up on the elevator and is now going to work to fix it. How convenient! Snake is depressed about Meryl again. Otacon says he’s come to ask Snake a question: has he ever loved someone? Do even soldiers fall in love? Can love bloom on a battlefield? He said the line. The meme is real. Also, Otacon moved the boxes I guess, because now they’re clear. There are no soldiers to chase Snake up this tower, but there are gun turret cameras to disable with chaff grenades. At the top there’s a lot of ammo so it’s clear this is time for a boss.
I have to say as an aside that I am getting increasingly weary of Mei Ling’s “there’s a Chinese proverb” bit every time I save the game.
On the roof is the Hind D. boss and it’s fought basically the same way as in Metal Gear 2. Get in cover until it stops firing, lock on with the stinger, repeat. This boss fight is mostly easy, and largely spectacle. Eventually Liquid starts changing his altitude so you can’t hit him, and in a cutscene fires missiles that destroy parts of the stage (they can probably kill you if you’re standing where they land). I was afraid that a first-person boss fight would be awful after Sniper Wolf but this is pretty good. My only gripe is how long the fight is – it’s just a very slow game of whack-a-mole whenever he pops up because the Hind has a huge health bar.
After the fight is over, Otocon says the elevator is fixed but he didn’t do anything. It just started working by itself. Now it’s time to head to where Metal Gear is being stored, beneath the snowfield. This means walking all the way back down to the elevator, passed the gun turrets. Too many stairs in this game! On the way down to the first floor, Otacon calls to tell you that there are stealthed dudes on the elevator here to kill you. Another MG2 moment…. Thermal goggles makes them visible and they are very weak. Out into the snowfield. There is a lot of ammo here, again… because it’s another boss fight with Sniper Wolf.
This is basically the same fight as last time, as far as I can tell, except with new terrain. The new terrain means you can just use the Nikita guided missiles to take her out from safe cover and skip the whole sniper duel nonsense, thank goodness. She has a very prolonged death cutscene where she narrates her life story and how she became a sniper, and why she is here today. Sad music plays. I do not care. I have no sympathy for this character, and I don’t know why the game wants me to. Just a real fart when it comes to nailing an emotional moment. Snake sure cares though. Also, we learn that Meryl is still alive, so that’s cool I guess. Otacon is sad because he loved Sniper Wolf(??? why). Heading into the next zone concludes Disc 1.
Day 15
DISK 2 INSERTED
Down some stairs into the Blast Furnace area. There’s a narrow pathway over some lava that you have to walk while pushed against the wall, but a crane is in the way. It takes two missiles to knock it into the lava and allow further progress. This area has some good loot to help restock, including body armor (thank goodness). North of this room is a cargo elevator, which has another ambush fight. I took way more damage than in the one with the cloaked dudes but I don’t think it was any harder, I’m just bad. A second elevator has many crows come to rest on the elevator, and Master Miller calls to tell me about Naomi. He wants to tell me she’s suspicious, and fabricated her entire background. Miller says she may be a spy or a traitor, and he’ll let me know if he learns anything. Getting off this elevator and heading north leads to another boss fight. This is Vulcan Raven.
Vulcan Raven is apparently the guy inside the M1 Tank boss ages ago. The ravens say I am a true warrior.
This is a rerun (rerunning?) of the Running Man fight from Metal Gear 2. Early on the Nikita missiles let you blast him from around corners, and he gets faster as his health drops at which time you swap to C4. Or just stay with the Nikita at close range, the fight is easier that way IMO. Very much a nothing fight. I can’t tell if his indigenous Alaskan stuff is vaguely racist or not. With his dying breath, he gives Snake the Level 7 security card because Snake is “not of this world.” He also tells me that the DARPA Chief wasn’t the real DARPA Chief, it was Decoy Octopus, a member of FOXHOUND, in disguise. His Ravens eat him. Tasty!
Miller calls back and Colonel is with him. He tells us that Naomi isn’t Naomi. The real one vanished in the Middle East, and our Naomi is a spy. I think that Miller might be a spy though, he’s really really insistent that we have her arrested. Colonel just goes with it though.
Next room is Warehouse Nth and it’s got ten BILLION gun turrets in it, presumably as a joke because a single chaff grenade still shuts them down. Past the warehouse is the Underground Base, and we finally get a glimpse of…. METAL GEAR?!?
Otacon calls again and says Metal Gear is ready to go. I only have one of the three PAL codes, so now I need to go get the other two. Otacon is a super hacka and is trying to get into Baker’s files while Snake hunts down the codes. He calls back seven seconds layer to say he’s getting through security (why was this two calls??) and Snake says good job, keep working on it. Okay. A third call five more seconds later and Otacon says he did it. I guess this is meant to be funny. He found the secret behind the nuclear weapon: it’s fired like a railgun and doesn’t use fuel, so it’s not a missile and gets around nuclear treaties. Also it’s a stealth weapon so it can’t be seen on radar. If this leaks, the USA is in big trouble! Anyway, time to save the USA… but not before Otacon calls again and talks about Baker’s motivations which seem entirely irrelevant this late in the game.
Up some stairs, Liquid Snake and Revolver Ocelot are hanging out discussing their plans. The new plan is to nuke a Chinese nuclear site, which will give plausible deniability about the cause. Then Liquid can… I dunno, get rich by selling this new weapon for a billion dollars to other nations, and he can use that money to research a cure for his genetic disease. This seems like an incredibly convoluted way to get medical help but that’s the American healthcare system for ya, am I right folks??
Anyway, Otacon calls again and explains that the key I have is actually all three keys and the key changes shape depending on the temperature, just like in Metal Gear 2, again, again, again. Unfortunately, Ocelot shoots the key out of Snake’s hand so now I have to go back and get it. Climbing allllll the way back down a series of ladders and jumping into the poo water is what’s happening. Key in hand, it’s now time to climb allllllllllll the way back up. What a great time we are having. In the control room, the first key is inserted, then I need to climb alllllllllllllllllllllll the way back down to the freezer room where Vulcan Raven was to freeze the key. One round trip later and the second key is applied. Now I need to heat the key up, which means running alllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll the way back to the blast furnace.
Miller calls back on the way to the furnace with more info about Naomi and a weapon called FoxDie. It’s a virus that targets certain kinds of people. It simulates a heart attack, and Snake might be infected. Colonel has had Naomi arrested after being caught sending messages to the Alaskan base. Oh well! I need a vaccine at some point but Snake says that’s not important right now.
On the way BACK from the blast furnace, Naomi calls and confesses everything, saying she has no identity but really cares about genetic research, that’s what matters to her. She says that Frank Jaeger is her older adoptive brother. Gray Fox just keeps coming back I guess, to a point that strains credulity. Big Boss brought the both of them to America, and she joined FOX-HOUND to get revenge on Snake. A sort of Snake’s revenge. She’s got some minor regrets now but oh well! Also, she says that it wasn’t her call to infect Snake with FoxDie, but the comm is cut off before she can say who made the call. Colonel cuts in and accuses Colonel of double crossing him. Being betrayed by your CO? Such a thing is unheard of in this franchise!
This part of the game absolutely sucks, and I cannot believe they’d put such a pace-killing errand nonsense right before the big climax. Amateur hour stuff. Apparently they twist the knife even more on this last shuttle because the key can cool down if you don’t make it fast enough. I have serious questions about what happened in development that led to this entire thing. I suspect they wanted to give the player something to do to justify pacing out all of these codec calls, but it’s a real mess. Otacon calling every five seconds feels like it’s meant to be comedic, but then the other characters start jumping in so I don’t know if that was the intent in the end. The result is a super overstuffed expository cavalcade of text which should’ve been parceled out over a longer period. There was plenty of time earlier where there were no calls for ages, so I dunno how they decided this was the time to dump it all.
When the final key is inserted, the computer reveals that this has all been an elaborate ruse: the missile was never armed at all, and by entering the codes, we’ve armed the missile! Miller calls back and says thanks for being a dupe. He also apologizes for the temperature key puzzle. APOLOGY NOT ACCEPTED. He was working behind the scenes to arm Metal Gear all along. He says everybody knew Snake was being duped all along. Colonel breaks in to say that this isn’t Miller, and that Miller has been dead for three days. It was Liquid the whole time. Liquid fills the command room with gas. Luckily, a call to Otacon saves the day – he says if I can survive for one minute, he can get the door open, which means breaking out the gas mask and waiting. One minute is actually ten seconds though so I don’t think the mask mattered. Leaving the command room leads to a boss fight against the now-active Metal Gear REX.
Liquid reveals that Snake was actually sent in as a viral vector to carry FoxDie and infect everybody on Shadow Moses so that the Pentagon could get Metal Gear back easily. The entire operation was just a ruse. FoxDie was altered somehow though, and it’s not clear how. He also reveals that both Snakes are clones of Big Boss. Liquid hates this. Liquid is mad at Snake for killing Big Boss before he could and wants his own Snake’s Revenge. Anyway, on with the fight.
This fight is another one that really lays bare the absolute inadequacy of the weapon-swapping system in this game. You spend so much time in menus changing between chaff grenades to disable REX’s homing missiles and the stinger missile launcher to damage it that the fight feels like an endless roulette scroll. If you get hit good luck, you’ll be knocked over and probably need to start over. A real mess.
After taking down REX’s arm, Gray Fox appears and begins attacking Metal Gear. He confesses that he was the one who killed Naomi’s parents. A great time to have a dialogue drop but at this point I’ve given up on this game knowing what good story pacing is. Also, Gray Fox has his arm blown off and then crushed by Metal Gear. Fox exposes Liquid in the cockpit and wants Snake to shoot Liquid while he has the chance, but Snake won’t take the shot because he doesn’t want to kill Gray Fox with the blast. So Liquid kills Fox by having Metal Gear step on him. Okay.
This leads to Phase 2 of the fight, which is the same as Phase 1 except now Liquid Snake is exposed so you’re aiming at him instead of the weird gun arm drum thing that was the target of Phase 1. You can just run between his legs until he loses sight of you and then fire a homing missile. This fight sucks but maybe not as bad as Sniper Wolf’s.
When Metal Gear blows up, Snake gets knocked out. When he comes to, Liquid has him on top of REX’s corpse and monologues about how the two of you were born, just in case you missed it the last time he explained it. Meryl is here too, but unconscious. There’s some FMV here which is funny to me in how out-of-place it is. I’ll take this opportunity to link an amazing video of Liquid Snake explaining Big Chungus, which is much better than what’s actually going on here in the game.
The Secretary of Defense relieves Campbell of command and will be nuking Shadow Moses imminently. The clock is ticking, and so we need to get out fast. Unfortunately, there’s still Liquid standing here, listening to the whole thing, and to get out we have to go through him. You do yet another fight that’s ripped straight from Metal Gear a one-on-one punch fight. Last time it was against Gray Fox, now it’s against Liquid Snake, the man who killed Gray Fox.
This fight is also bad, but not because of its design. You have a small arena and three minutes to win, and if you fall off you can pull yourself up. The problem is that Liquid’s hitbox is very, very unclear. Not only does he have a wider range than you, he can seemingly arbitrarily decide to not take a hit and he can easily get behind you while you’re locked into an animation. There’s no real nuance to the fight because it’s slappers only – just a beatdown which could use another tuning pass. It feels very not playtested. It’s not really hard but it feels very heavily luck-based. Does he bullrush you at close range too much? Try again! Does he repeatedly bullrush you from far away? Free win.
After throwing Liquid off of REX, Meryl wakes up and she shares a lovey moment with Snake. Otacon calls and you give him the bad news. He tells you that there is a way out: the loading tunnel nearby goes right to the surface. Otacon will shut down security along the way, and he’s going to stay behind and sacrifice himself so Snake and Meryl can escape. He will die with no ragrets. Or not, because he says he’s found a reason to live. He’ll get himself out somehow I guess. Meryl pronounces Otacon “oh-ta-con” for some reason instead of “Ah-ta-con” the way Snake does.
TIME BOMB SET – GET OUT FAST! There’s now a ten minute timer to escape. Meryl commandeers a jeep with a machine gun turret on it and we book it outta here. Halfway down the tunnel, Liquid shows up in another jeep to harry us. This is the only time that playing in first person is good, because the game is a rail shooter. At the end of the tunnel, the two cars crash into one another. Liquid emerges to kill Snake and Meryl but suddenly suffers a heart attack, because FoxDie suddenly kicked in. It’s like that sequence in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the animator dies suddenly, ending the threat. Colonel calls to tell Snake that the strike on Shadow Moses has been called off because the Secretary of Defense has been arrested for going rogue. Colonel says that officially, Snake and Meryl are dead so they can escape into hiding, ending Snake’s employment. Snake tells Naomi some nonsense to hide from her the fact that he killed her parents. Naomi tells Snake to use whatever time he has left to live his life to the fullest, because I guess FoxDie will come for him some day. Snake and Meryl hop on a snowmobile and ride off into the sunset. A happy ending for everybody; all’s well that ends well.
Hey, what happened to Holly? I thought she was going to be Snake’s girlfriend but now it’s Meryl I guess. I liked Holly more.
Come on, let’s enjoy life.
The FMV of a polar bear over the ending is hilarious. After the credits roll, Revolver Ocelot is heard talking to the US President about the results of the operation. He was working for the President the whole time as a deep cover agent. He calls the President Solidus, and reveals that it was Liquid Snake, not Solid Snake, that inherited Big Boss’ dominant genes, and that the President is also a Big Boss clone.
Final Thoughts
This game’s bad, man. No amount of high-quality cinematic story presentation can save the gameplay of this nonsense. It feels like a massive step backwards from Metal Gear 2 – a game which, as I wrote, I didn’t enjoy very much, but I had a great deal of respect for. It clearly improved the original in every way, and had some really interesting ideas and moments. So much of this game was a straight rehash of Metal Gear 2 but with significantly poorer story pacing and incredibly janky controls. There’s at least a light in the darkness, though: Solid Snake’s not a bad protagonist. At least now, after three games, he’s an established character who has undergone some growth. I am definitely excited to continue playing as him in Metal Gear Solid 2
Final Rating: 5/10 – LordHuffnPuff says “Aged poorly, a historical curiosity that represents a step forward in the series’ presentation but a massive decline in its playability – check it out!”
Statistics
Game Level / Normal
Play Time / 12:26:51
Save / 6 times
Continue / 105 times
Being Found / 64 times
Enemies / 48 killed
Rations / 112 used
Code Name: Bat
Special Items: “Bandana”
Next Time: Metal Gear Solid 2: Guns of the Patriots
Justin Bortnick 