Metal Gear Solid - tacticool espionage action

Pictured: Solid Snake and Meryl. All credit to Yoji Shinkawa and Konami.

MGS was another series I never quite gave a shot. I’d played MGS5 when it came out, roughly 2/3 through, and never returned to it. My original feelings on it hold still, but that’ll be its own discussion.

The MGS series is well known, well loved, and well discussed, but I’d never really gotten gripped by it.

I decided after a long while to give the series a shot, but I started it chronologically rather than by release date.

Metal Gear Solid is an enjoyable game. Its story is goofy, yet serious when it needs to be, and I respect it for a lot of reasons. Stealth games became a bigger thing, others tried their own ideas too, and it made for a better medium as a whole.

But MGS is also an old game, and it shows that. The graphics don’t bother me personally, but the jank from combat, bosses, and certain sequences makes for some frustrating moments (I’m looking at you top-down Nikita-through-the-needle section).

The story, following operative Solid Snake as he works solo to stop a military group gone terror cell from releasing a nuclear bomb of sorts, is as wacky as you’d expect it to be. Said terror cell is demanding one thing: the remains of the legendary Big Boss.

As for the game overall? It’s good if you can look past the dated encounters. One thing about it that I kind of loved was the end credit sequence. It plays old stock footage of Alaska’s wilderness (Alaska is where the game itself takes place) and plays a quite beautiful song to go along with it. Is it random? Absolutely. Is it charming? Definitely. Does it encapsulate the series? Not even close.