In my opinion, the years haven’t been kind to Metal Gear Solid 2. Visually, all three games in the collection look excellent (especially Metal Gear Solid 3) but mechanically MGS2 reminds me of how painful Metal Gear’s transition was into the game it is today.
It’s almost as if Bluepoint and the other developers all along have handpicked PS2 games that still play and look somewhat like the games we’re playing today. For instance, Shadow of the Colossus was a perfect candidate because the original version was just too much for the PS2 to handle.
On the contrary, I felt really rusty getting back into MGS2 – at 10 years old it is one of the oldest games to receive an HD remaster. Somewhere around the Olga fight I remembered that I needed to treat the earlier MGS games like a top-down action game, and suddenly it started to make sense again.
To be honest I never liked MGS2’s gameplay a whole lot – I only really appreciated it for the meta storyline. At least the original Metal Gear Solid was consistent in how it basically played the same as its 8-bit predecessor Metal Gear 2 (also on this collection and highly recommended). MGS2’s shiny new graphics forced Kojima to employ cinematic camera angles to show them off which really messes with me in the context of a stealth game.
I understand the game shows you exactly what you need to see (and adding new controls and a new camera would break it) but getting myself back into the proper mindset of MGS2 might just prove too hard. It’s not even about going back in time for me though when it concerns Metal Gear. The problem is that MGS2 reminds me of that phase when Japanese designers were still trying to figure out how to make a good third person action game on a console. The closest things to a textbook (Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War) were four and five years away respectively, so I can’t really hold it against them. MGS2 is just representative of a painful middle period in the history of Japanese console action games.
Maybe big MGS2 fans will still be able to play it fine. I can still deal with the older Resident Evil games because I played them for years, but I haven’t been playing Metal Gear for as long as most fans.
I think I’ll be able to get back into MGS3 if only because of the Subsistence camera – which was when the franchise started to feel like an actual three-dimensional game. The abundance of cut scenes kind of kicked me in the face too, but man MGS3 has never looked so clean. There are actually details in the art assets that I couldn’t notice on the PS2. The fact that it’s running at 60 frames per second for the first time isn’t hurting either. I really don’t know which game received the better HD treatment, this or Ico.
If there’s one reason people should buy this collection though, it’s Peace Walker. Only having come out in the last few years, the only thing that really held PW’s gameplay back was Konami’s choice of platform. Here, it feels like a regular, modern game in absolutely every aspect save the PSP graphics, and it’s definitely a game that Metal Gear fans shouldn’t miss.
I personally think that PW is easily the most content-rich Metal Gear game ever. After transferring my save file over, looking at my stats reminded me that even after 55 hours I still have a ways to go before I’ve seen everything this game has to offer. Playing it with two analog sticks now, it feels like a revelation, playing a Metal Gear game where the controls actually make sense. I hope this attracts other people to the game.
The one thing that probably keeps astounding me through all the games in this collection is that I forgot how much charm Kojima put into his games.
Starting up MGS2 and hearing Otacon give Snake a full tutorial and gameplay hints mixed right in there with the mission briefing felt so much more cohesive than having to read those things on a loading screen. Taking care to put all that stuff in-universe surprisingly helps Metal Gear’s suspension of disbelief instead of hurting it. You know it’s a video game, but it becomes a very engrossing one. The games in this collection probably have five times as much personality as most of what I’ve been playing this year.
I guess one great reason to do these HD collections is as a reminder. On one end this one feels like a reminder of how different and dated Metal Gear was not too long ago. On the other hand it also reminds us of what a lot of games have lost in the years since.
