Everything Wrong With Metal Gear Solid - Negatives - Rerez

Metal Gear Solid is a classic video game. As far as video games stories go this one felt like a movie which was kind of odd for the time when it came out. In fact this game did so well that pretty much everyone on every website I've ever been to has considered this game to be one of the best video games ever made. So today we're going to be taking a look at Metal Gear Solid on the PlayStation. Let's find the negatives.

In 1998 Metal Gear Solid was released for the PlayStation and it was one of the most defining experiences I ever had when I was playing video games on this console. If you think about the time in 1998 a lot of the video games that were coming out that featured weapons were usually all about killing people. But Metal Gear Solid really wasn't focused on that. It was more focused on sneaking around and avoiding fights whenever possible. It's really all about stealth which made it a very interesting experience and to top it off it had cut scenes and cinematics that were equal to movies that were coming out at the time. And it had a powerful story that was very complex. A narrative that involved governments, espionage and just so much more. This is one of the best games ever made and on the Sony PlayStation it is quite possibly my favorite game ever released on the platform. So as you can see Metal Gear Solid is a pretty fantastic game and it's got a lot going for it. But let's take a look at my first problem.

First off Solid Snake acts like he's in an episode of Jeopardy. Every single line, every single thing he says pretty much throughout the entire game is in the form of a question. Solid Snake acts like he's completely lost every step of the way and although I can understand why they did that for a video game it is still pretty annoying. So the first negative is Solid Snake asks way too many questions. Metal Gear Solid has an amazing selection of weapons. There are just so many items you can pick up and use in this game and it's really fun to play but that doesn't mean that they're fun to use. See every weapon in this game is incredibly difficult to aim with because you don't aim in a first-person mode. It kind of aims in an overhead way so when you go to aim the gun you kind of have to shoot and pray which I was never a big fan of. See in other games that use the top-down perspective they use some kind of method to extend the camera back so you can actually see farther out and basically aim at enemies easily. But Metal Gear Solid didn't do that so most of the game when you go to fire at someone well it just doesn't work that well. And it's still a problem to this day playing the game so the second negative is it's incredibly difficult to aim your weapons.

Metal Gear Solid feels like a really cinematic experience. Pretty much every sequence in the game is set up in a way that has some kind of relevance to the story. So of course every sequence in the game where you're playing the game has a very static camera position that sometimes doesn't work when you're playing. For a majority of the game you're kind of avoiding other soldiers while you're walking around and this is kind of the point of Metal Gear Solid. It's a sneaking game. You're not supposed to go in guns blazing but because of the way that a lot of the camera angles are set up you usually can't see characters that are right in front of you which really sucks. The creator of the game, Hideo Kojima, is a huge fan of cinema so he used a lot of those cinematic techniques for camera positions within the game itself but that didn't always work and in fact it kind of hurt it in some instances. Metal Gear Solid has some pretty strange camera angles used throughout the game and it wouldn't be a big deal if these were cinematics but because these are points in the game where you’re actually playing it kind of works against you. For instance when you go to face Sniper Wolf for the first time well the camera angle they choose for that is just insane you can't see down the hallway so you really can't see Sniper Wolf. When you're moving around they've got this top-down perspective so you're just kind of looking at the floor instead of looking down the hall. Now I know it doesn't matter too much in that sequence because you spend the majority of your time looking through a sniper scope but a lot of the parts of the game that I played always featured very strange and sometimes awkward camera angles that made it a little bit more difficult to move around. In Metal Gear Solid 3 they used a third-person camera angle and that was the first time they ever did that in the series. Now I'm not saying that because they did it in a later part of the franchise that they should have done it in the first game but it feels like it was something that they could have fixed. Plus there were a lot of third person games back then like Tomb Raider so it really wasn't that strange to use a third-person camera angle back in those days. So the third negative is that Metal Gear Solid has a lot of really awkward camera angles.

Alright don't be upset when I say this but Metal Gear Solid kind of has too much dialogue. Look don't be upset about this I'm just saying it's kind of a little bit excessive. The game is filled with dialogue like every two seconds. There's just so much speech everywhere. You make a phone call just to save the game and the lady's talking to you for like five hours. Now I get it there's a lot of story building here and that's great but this game is filled with so much dialogue that by the end of the day when you've heard everything you've probably spent like 24 hours listening to speech and dialogue that probably doesn't mean that much to the whole story overall. Now I'm not kidding this game is loaded with extra long codec conversations. While I personally listened to every single one which was pretty time-consuming I know that a lot of people out there just kind of avoided picking up the codec altogether because they just wanted to avoid those lengthy conversations. And realistically if you were to actually sit down and time all the conversations had in this game you'd probably be listening to more conversations than actually playing the game itself which is kind of nuts. So I really don't blame people for not picking up the codec when you got the ring. So the fourth and final negative is that this game has way too much dialogue.

The whole reason we care about the Metal Gear series is because of this game. Look Metal Gear 1 and Metal Gear 2 sure they were fine games on the NES and MSX. But Metal Gear Solid was the defining entry in this franchise. It's the one that pretty much got everybody's attention. It's the reason we care about this game franchise nearly as much as we do and it's one of the best games ever made. Yeah it's got a couple of flaws but you know what it's still really good. It's a game you can go back to and play again and again and the story feels just as fresh today as it was yesterday. It's a game that I don't think ages that much which is pretty funny considering how old the game is. Now if you've got some time and you want to try something that's really out of this world Metal Gear Solid is the game to play. And personally it's going to remain one of my favorites.

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