A Tribute to The Metal Gear Franchise that changed gaming forever - Over 30 hours of video content included
Hideo Kojima is my favorite game creator. Metal Gear is his most well known and beloved creation and I'm going to show you why. First of all I must say that when I measure the worth of a work of art or entertainment what counts the most is the impact it delivers. Saving Private Ryan is a cinematic masterpiece. But I think Green Zone and Stalingrad worth way more. You can read my Stalingrad review here. As for Green Zone, it's the single most ballsy and bravest movie release/production in the history of military/war cinema and Saving Private Ryan isn't even a faint flicker in comparison. Roger Ebert gave it a 4 out of 4 stars and Michael Moore said: "I can't believe this film got made. It's been stupidly marketed as an action film. It is the most HONEST film about the Iraq War made by Hollywood." and above all the movie came in 2010 at the height of the war an many years before WMDs were proven to be false intelligence. Imagine Platoon (1986) getting released during the height of the Vietnam war.
There are things that matter more than just fun or gameplay or some mechanics. The impact an interactive medium can have on a person's life is eternal and that's where Kojima's focus is at. After some very positive reviews I got into Metal Gear Solid and I didn't even liked the gameplay. Stealth games really isn't my thing. But Metal Gear is one of my favorite gaming franchises ever. I think it's probably my "The Favorite" and Yes, Konami ( TYO: 9766) should crash, burn and be bankrupt and forced to sell their IPs because; REASONS!
This is a game that was released in 1998 and that briefing is what I first got into because I check every single part of the menu before I press new game and I must say that I was hooked. Then the new game started and after drooling myself like a fountain I figured out that I'm not much of a fan of the gameplay. So I decided to watch other people play the game on YouTube. That's how I came to Love Metal Gear and here is the most important part:
All of this was happened almost 15 years after the release of the game and a little before I got into playing Need for Speed Most Wanted 2012 and I was hooked a little more by one of these 2 games
If you still have doubts about what really got me drooling like a fountain transfixed on a computer screen, referer to the movie analogy above.
Kojima-san's games are very polarizing like most great things. If its liked by everybody it's a riskless endeavour of immense quality like CoD or Saving Private Ryan or an utter mediocrity like the MCU or most popular television shows. But when Hideo Kojima's name got removed from a simple cover art, the internet went nuts and people began publishing stories about their encounters with the series and about how infatuated they had become. Most ideas in modern 3rd person shooters actually came straight out of Kojima's work and some were overused and misused to the point of perversion. Kojima brought depth and sensibility to video games. Take a look at the following two Ancient Metal Gear games.
These games were released at a time where games were for kids and at a time where games were about fun. The first game came in 1987 along with the first Street Fighter and Contra. The second one came in 1990 where most movies weren't as half as deep or though provoking. Nobody would even look at video games as a story telling medium if it wasn't for Kojima. As a person who care more about narrative and themes more than anything, such groundbreaking work matters a lot to me.
Sons of Liberty: The Absolute Masterpiece
To me its simply the greatest game ever made and I haven't even played it. It's the ultimate and most profound narrative troll. It's easily the most polarizing game and also the most meta. I mean this game is so meta that Deadpool is superficial and I'm not exaggerating a bit and unlike the cheap thrills and comedy of Deadpool, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is a carbon copy of the syntax of the first game in the "Solid" series that involves the player into the narrative so much and so well that it's a 20 hour 4th wall break and an entire year of PhD level philosophy crammed into a convoluted web of a story that involve decades of real world incidents/elements and it shoves the story in the players face while being a technical quantum leap with excessive attention to detail that at times eclipse the level of care given to a modern open world world game like Watch Dogs (it's pure obsessive) and it's just good. It's soooo good I get my dopamine receptors lighten up every time I remember it.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is the single deepest, complex and most profound video game narrative ever. Period. No competition (Except for Death Stranding which is going to be like Kojima's Atlas Shrugged for the time being)
2nd weakest story and 2nd strongest gameplay
Remember the obsessive details I mentioned before. We it goes up few notches higher. Except for the breast enhancement stuff you can do things like tranquilizing poisonous snakes and putting them on soldiers. There are 2 boss battles with 2 characters named The Sorrow and The End which are just pure unparalleled genius. Some tricks at times actually eclipse the awesomeness of Deus Ex without even trying. It doesn't happen all the time and the cutscene movies may not include all the content. The game never shy away from getting in touch with the real world including making important characters just die off if you stopped playing the game for a long enough time. But the story is nowhere up to the level of previous games. Chronologically speaking this is the first game in the series. You could start with MGS 3: Snake Eater and contemplate on what would make it one of the 2 disappointing narratives in the series.
I Don't even know what to say. It has an epilogue that is over an hour long cutscene.
This behemoth costed 60 million dollars to make in 2008 it is the most loaded narrative in the franchise. People swear in the name of MGS 4: Guns of Patriots when it comes to emotionally powerful endings and the message is very powerful. It's going to be one of the best spent 9.5 hours in you life. The main negative about this installment is that its just too much. The setting of the 1st MGS game is just one of the 5 chapters. The narrative shoehorns so much that the gameplay becomes just narrative fodder much like Ghost in the shell which is something I love as I've expressed here: https://steemit.com/philosophy/@vimukthi/a-gateway-to-my-mind-3-hours-of-me-trying-to-convey-the-stuff-going-in-my-mind-to-the-world
Since I played the first MGS game on PlayStation which for me was only 4 years ago I was hooked onto the series. Everything did slowly go downhill from number 2. I loved 3, 4 tried to ruin the story of 1 and 2 and the rest were meh.
Love the overview/review. Resteeming it!
The codec conversations from Peace Walker was beyond the level of Oscar worthy. It was so damn good. MGS 5 seemed to be gameplay overkill and from the reviews it seemed Deus Ex: Mankind Divided had the same issue. 2 is my favorite and 4 is odd. I really really really love that game but not really because the game was good. It's just everything about the game was so amazing. Probably that's how Ulysses (novel) gets so much love.
BTW I made another post on MGS focusing on some of things that I love the most about the franchise: https://steemit.com/gaming/@vimukthi/the-genius-and-the-prophecies-of-hideo-kojima-and-metal-gear-the-works-of-project-itoh-must-see-video-collection
Magnificent article. You, as always wrote a lot of text. But, for me, games are like another reality. I have not really figured it out yet:)
I've never played it but it looks like fun, I usually skip through most animated backstory sequences though.
If you do that with Metal Gear, it would be like skipping all the explosions of a Michael Bay movie or censoring Deadpool to make it PG-13. One does not simply skip a MGS cutscene. Especially when there are enough cutscenes in a game to make a movie trilogy.
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GOOD POST BRO
@miti downvote
why?