Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

Do you want to play a game that has actually good gameplay with clever and flexible level design? Then don't play MGS2.

Do you want to play a game that has stellar writing with a firm grasp on pacing and subtlety? Then don't play MGS2.

Do you want to play a game that you can go online and tell everyone how smart it is, and by proxy, how smart you are for "getting" it? Then, by all means, play MGS2.

Are you a teenager or young adult who thinks themes are the only thing that matter? That the quality of the writing is somehow dependent on them. Then, by all means, play MGS2.

Do you want to play a masterpiece? Something that has deep gameplay, best-in-class boss fights and a story that is immaculately paced and presented. Then, for God's sake, play MGS3.

Metal Gear Solid 2 is a great game undoubtedly. Gameplay wise, it did everything it was supposed to as a sequel. Sneaking around felt cooler and easier than the last game, the guard AI was improved, the game runs at a smoother frame rate, and the story is a good Tom Clancy-esque thriller that sometimes misses the mark but overall ups the ante well.

The gameplay is the element of this package that has been improved the most. Guards can spot you in various ways now. They can detect footprints from rain, hear at greater distances, they will go to call for backup when they spot you, and they can now clear rooms when you are hiding which is in my opinion the best part of the game. The tension can really be felt when you are in Evasion mode and are stuck in your hiding place as 4 guards enter the tiny room you're in, trying to find you. There's also more tools that the player has at their disposal too, such as being able to peek around corners or stand on their toes, shooting objects to get the attention of guards, rolling/cartwheeling to get past enemies quickly, hanging mode, the ability to walk, the ability to hold up guards. There's just so much to do as a player in this world. For the arcade-leaning Metal Gear games, this one easily stands heads and shoulders above the rest.

The environments are arguably not as improved, but still very well-designed. Often there's great use of verticality where guards walking on catwalks will spot you from above or below. The hanging mode gets a real workout in the Plant chapter as a result of this verticality and there's some really clever ways you can get past guards as a result. The textures in these environments are clean and lend just the right amount of detail to make them really believable (if you can stand lots of grey and orange that is), and the water effects like the rain in the Tanker or the underwater sections in the Plant chapter are well done too. I do have a bit of an issue, however, with the latter half of the Plant chapter due to how linear the stealth can get and how easy some sections are compared to the earlier half of the game, but overall the levels are designed intelligently.

Recently in the past decade or so, there has been a sort of reappraisal for this game because of its themes. Like everyone decided now that technology could be bad and is ruining our lives. Kojima didn't predict anything. What's depicted in MGS2 through the Patriots is lampshading internet culture of the time that was beginning to develop in the late 90s and early 2000's when this game's script was written. Indeed, much of the discourse you see back then about Metal Gear Solid 2 isn't even close to the quality of conversation that you can get on a place like Reddit, and even that site has major quality issues. There are elements well done, though. Most of the strength of the story comes from how it remixes the original Metal Gear Solid to make its point on gaming culture. MGS2 loves to laugh in the face of players who want to be badasses, and sometimes it can be quite funny such as during Raiden's introduction where he claims that he has essentially played a lot of video games so he knows what he is doing. Solid Snake is also a genuinely badass character despite never having to play as him. His accomplishments definitely seem more impressive looking from the outside in, contrasting with the player's actions of cartwheeling around to avoid damage and screwing up stealth segments every now and then. In these aspects, the story works. It only really trips up in my opinion with the Otacon subplot which I still don't see much of a point in other than just making him lose someone again for the sake of it. At least he gets some character development out of it.

The extra features are quite strong too in the Subsistence and HD Edition versions. You have a bunch of challenging VR Missions to tackle and some new "Snake Tales" missions, both modes which you can play as Snake in various outfits and even Raiden with his HF Blade which is a great treat considering how short that section of the game was. These extra modes are a fair bit more challenging in my opinion than the main game except on Extreme of course, and will really let you play with the whole sandbox that the game will let you leave on the table if you so choose to in the main game for that sweet 0 kills stat at the end.

Metal Gear Solid 2 is a great video game, despite what people have said and continue to say about it. I wouldn't say that these days it subverts any kind of expectations, but it does offer a massive improvement over the original game in terms of gameplay and a new story to get immersed in with the Metal Gear universe.

When I first played this game years ago, I never truly understood the level of depth that was inside of this game. The nuances that were written and drawn that allow for this story to be so ahead of its time that it gives me palpitations when I play because I fully expect the game to stumble over its own feet, to shoot too far or to go too wild. Somehow, this game never does that, blending the line between fiction and reality in such a way that this game could be considered a horror game at some points. Its not the best gameplay wise in the series, not by a long shot, but the story, the nuance, that's where this game is at its apex. This game is so head and shoulders above the rest in how forward thinking it is, I wonder if Hideo and CO. really thought that this was going to become even closely resembling real life. Maybe they thought this was a far flung fiction, who knows. All i know is that THE SPEECH (if you've played or even if you haven't, you know exactly what I'm talking about) is one of the most hauntingly accurate predictions of the future I have ever seen. Might I add as well, The villains are so interesting, the fact that in the larger scheme of things, they represent not the true villains but those who are striking out at the true villains really fantastically muddies the water in the story as to who is really on who's side. One of my favorite moments in the game would have to be the mg battle royale. Good god, what a moment, what a game. Please. If you have any inkling to play this series, play it for this game.

This game started off pretty slow, I'll admit that it didn't manage to hook me until the late game. The start of the game is filled with lots of long cutscenes which interrupt the flow and I felt like I would rather be watching these cutscenes than actually playing it, which wasn't a good sign. It doesn't truly become fun until half-way through the Raiden section, when you finally get enough decent weapons, more bossfights and less long cutscenes.

The stealth gameplay was pretty annoying in this one. It really doesn't take much to get spotted in this game, sometimes I'd get spotted when I thought I was far enough away, and there are lots of tricky rooms where there aren't many good places to hide or sneak past. Trying to sneak past enemies with no ammo was painful, especially before you unlock the radar for that area. And even if you did have ammo, most of the time when I tried to take an enemy out, they'd start talking on the radio before I could finish them off, leading to more enemies arriving who discover the dead body, replacing the dead enemy and forcing you to hide. When you do get spotted, you can't just run and gun like in the first game as you'll definitely die. Instead you have no option but to hide if you want to live, which takes forever in this game due to the really long caution periods and makes it less fun. In fact, sometimes I would just let myself be killed instead of hiding so I could go back to playing the game quicker. It also didn't help that items are sparse in this game and don't respawn often, meaning that if you used up all your items you are basically screwed as the game is now much harder without them.

In terms of bossfights, this was a massive improvement over the first game and a lot more fun than the stealth sections. The highlights for me were the metal gear army fight which was epic and vamp's fight which was a fun challenge. However, there's not many bossfights at the start of the game, with only 1 in the snake mission, contributing to the slow start.

For the ending, I was expecting a big twist to come, but I did not think it would be as crazy as it was. In the last part of the game, the game constantly tells you again and again that what you've been told was a lie and that the real truth is something insane, or that a character has been betraying another character all along. It got to the point where I was completely overwhelmed and lost track of what side all of the characters were on. Truly mindblowing stuff. Also the ideas were interesting, with most characters having completely reasonable motivations and some good predictions for how the internet age will ruin us.

But with that being said, I don't think the story was a masterpiece. I feel like this got a lot of leeway because its a video game and one of the first games to try and tell a proper story. To be brutally honest, at times the story was cheesy, completely over the top and a convoluted mess. But I guess those are also the reasons why people love it so much. Not to mention, the whole Otacon's sister part was pure cringe and really out of place. The dialogue between Raiden and E.E. was offputting and I found myself laughing at her 'sad' death cutscene because of how bad it was, especially with Otacon admitting to incest and crying.

Overall, it is a great game, especially for being made in 2001, but not a masterpiece. I didn't like the original MGS game much so I was unsure of this at first but it won me over by the end!

In my view, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is a good, but definitely not great, game. It's clearly historically important to the development of the video game medium. And, obviously, there's a lot to praise and unpack. But, playing it for the first time in 2023 as a player with no prior connections to the series, I didn't think it held up terribly well by modern standards, nor is it something I'd strongly recommend to anyone like myself seeking to play an adult game fresh for the first time.

With a game as beloved and widely discussed as this, most of the positive things one could reasonably say about it have already been said many times already. As such, I won't list all the things I thought were commendable and stimulating about it, such as its experimental and visionary postmodern use of game design. Instead, I'll just try to explain why I, as a modern player, didn't think it was deserving of the level of greatness that's often attributed to it.

Essentially, my major issue with MGS2 boils down to a belief that, as much as it clearly has considerable intelligence behind it, it still isn't nearly as clever as it thinks it is, nor are its fundamentals as a work of fiction nearly as strong as they should be.

Firstly, I think there are problems with the basic technical design. MGS2 is effectively as much a work of film-making as it is a game, and it deserves to be judged as both, but in neither respect does in fully succeed, in my view. As a work of film-making, there's just too little aesthetic sophistication and far too much of characters standing about in nondescript settings or radio menus explaining the plot to one-another through stilted dialogue, which just doesn't constitute great cinema, in my view. And, as a work of game design, however much you try to defend the clumsiness with postmodern meta-readings, its still frequently horrendous to play by modern standards. The boss fights, for example, are some of the most uninspired and tedious I've encountered in any game bar none.

There are also problems with the fundamentals of narrative I think. Compared to great narrative works of the modern era, like Red Dead Redemption 2 or The Last of Us, the performances and writing on offer here are only really quite good at best, and there's a cartoony shallowness to everything from the setting to the characterisation and plotting that Kojima's kooky maximalism and cleverness can only partially make up for. At times, I felt like I was watching/playing a convoluted teen anime, and, for me, that's a problem.

The above point leads into my final key criticism, which is that, as high-brow as this game wants to be in ideas and references, its treatment of serious ideas just isn't, in my view, nearly as deep as it's often made out to be.

There're interesting stuff to unpack here; that I would never deny. The focus in Raiden's character arc on how new technologies of the information era - synthetic media, AI, trans-human technologies, bioengineering - may work to destabilise our understanding of reality and self-identity, and make it easier for deception to spread unnoticed and unchecked, is interesting. It's also just unquestionably true, in principle, that the more technology becomes dominant in our lives, the more power this gives those who design and operate said technologies to shape our view of the world, and that's something we need to be critical of. But, overall, there just isn't enough focus, subtlety, or analytical clarity on display here for anything to really hit home very deeply. Just referencing lots of interesting themes isn't the same thing as deeply exploring them, and I honestly don't think, on first play-through, that MGS2 really gets to heart of anything it mentions, whether it be the metaphysics of reality or the implications of information technology. Certainly, it doesn't do so nearly as profoundly as, say, The Last of Us did with the paradoxes that underlie the human propensity for violence. The final conversations between Rose, The Colonel and Raiden are arguably the most egregious example of this failing. Yes, they reference a lot of tendencies that would later become topical in the 2010s, such as echo chambers and the centring of our most toxic human tendencies. But, overall, the conversations don't strike me as having a very clear through argument; instead, they just feel like a hodgepodge of vague proclamations, non-sequiturs, tangents, and in some cases, just nonsensical edgy waffle that sounds like something from a bad sociology essay. That might partly just be translation, but I suspect not. And this vagueness then creates a problematic possibility: that people will just read whatever more specific argument they expect to find into the work, and proclaim it prescient and genius. Ultimately, I didn't feel that there was really anything in there that got to heart of why we feel so discontented with social media in the present day, which, in my view, is much more specific and contingent to our current moment than any work published in 2001 could ever deal with. Specifically, issues of market failure, a legislative view of tech platforms as products rather than social institutions, and the commercial way technologies have been developed from the mid '00s onwards are the big issues, not inherent problems with information and communications technologies in themselves, or fundamental tensions between freedom and order. And then there's just all the hokey stuff about illuminati-esque government conspiracies and AI master races that, fun as it is, isn't what I'd call serious scholarship.

Interestingly, I think Kojima's later work with Death Stranding actually deals with quite similar concerns to MGS2 regarding the effects of technology on meaningful human connection, but does so in a far more mature and balanced way. For this reason amongst many others, I would greatly favour it over MGS2.

supremely frigid take but MGS2 has one of the smartest, most forward thinking narratives in anything ever. it's uncompromising, surprising, stylish, and scarily predictive.