So I was playing through the MGS HD collection the other day and started thinking about Sons of Liberty. I've heard a lot of people hate on this game because of... well, you all know. What I'm wondering is, today, looking back, do people still really dislike it? It was my first MGS and I loved it, Raiden and all. Also, knowing how his life turns out in the later games, I find that I can sympathise with him more.
While certainly not my faveorite MGS, I still really like MGS2. Your thoughts? Has it aged well or gotten worse with time?
The transition from MGS1 to MGS2 introduced a ton of new gameplay elements that greatly enhanced the existing gameplay formula really well. The gameplay enhancements worked perfectly.
Seriously, I used to spend hours sadistically/psychologically torturing guards everywhere.
Holding them up, and then leaving them there forever. (I used to bait half a dozen guards into rooms together and hold them up, leaving them standing there ad infinatum)
Punching them in the balls.
Shooting their radios out, then standing in front of them.
Using my disguise to behave suspiciously. Guard approaches me to see what my deal is. Wait for them to walk up to me and look at my face. Then smack them in the head once with my AK, instant knockout.
Set off an alert, draw an enemy clearance, don my disguise and help the enemy strike team look for me.
Set up claymores by every single door entrance. Set off alerts. Hilarity ensues.
Knock out Emma and drag her into cockroaches.
There was so much to do in this game, and so much potential for stupid fun and enemy griefing, I must've played through the game like 8 to 10 times when I got it.
That being said..... Pretty much everything else was handled very badly.
The introduction of Raiden was a blindside. I don't think anyone in the world knew that this game would not be about Snake, and to make things worse: We start off playing as Snake only to be saddled with someone else immediately afterwards.
As if that's not bad enough, Raiden's character could've been handled a lot better. He spends a majority of the game being bossed around by everyone, being utterly clueless, and talking to his girlfriend. And then the game taunts you by throwing Snake back into the mix as an NPC. Sure you can talk to him whenever you want, but even he like everyone else manipulates Raiden to get things done.
Yes, Raiden does approach Snake-levels of badass too with his super agility and the fact that he solos like over a dozen RAYs at the end of the game. But he spends too much time in the dark, and being bossed around to come off as a good character. And he does have an interesting backstory (One I wish we could've seen more of) But if the game was more focused on Raiden, and less on it's batshit insane storyline, it could've been a lot better.
Speaking of the story, I think this is when the game really dropped the ball.
MGS1, despite the fact that it involves a giant robot, had a story that was fairly grounded in reality. It was about preventing global nuclear catastrophe, widespread abuse of super weapons, human cloning, super-soldier experiments, veteran soldiers haunted by their pasts.
MGS2 however.... Anything it tried to bring to the table was buried under it's thick, convoluted, and just utterly confusing storyline. The entire incident was instead some excersise to recreate the Shadow Moses Incident in hopes of creating a replacement Snake as led to believe by Ocelot who is possessed by Liquid Snake's ghost, a super soldier program but was instead an excersise in controlling the world through the manipulation of information thought up by The Fucking Patriots utilizing Arsenal Gear utilizing sentient AI manifesting itself as hallucinations brought on by Raiden's own psyche meaning that Raiden was hallucinating the entire time and also hallucinating his girlfriend who may or may not have been a real person and then has to complete his task of being manipulated by the AI and kill Solidus in order for Olga's daughter to not-be-killed who somehow was kidnapped by The Fucking Patriots and....
The story was just a complete fucking mess. I said earlier I played through the game almost a dozen times and STILL don't comprehend nor remember half the things that went on in this game. People can rag on and on about Kojima being far too ranty, but he turns lengthy nonsense windbag ranting into a shitty artform with MGS2.
By the end of the game, the barrage of 10-minute cutscenes and 20-minute codec conversations was relentless and pretty terrible. And just not as interesting as anything that went on in MGS1. I really don't know where he was going with this game, but the result was not as satisfying as what MGS1 accomplished.
I'm a huge fan of the first game, it's one of my favorite games of all time, and yes; MGS2 was disappointing to me. But I place the disappointment entirely on it's story, and hardly any on Raiden.
For what it's worth, the gameplay improvements and innovations it brought were incredible though. The boss fights were awesome as always. The Big Shell was an interesting setting. And the final guantlet race through Arsenal Gear with Snake was good stuff.
So I was playing through the MGS HD collection the other day and started thinking about Sons of Liberty. I've heard a lot of people hate on this game because of... well, you all know. What I'm wondering is, today, looking back, do people still really dislike it? It was my first MGS and I loved it, Raiden and all. Also, knowing how his life turns out in the later games, I find that I can sympathise with him more.
While certainly not my faveorite MGS, I still really like MGS2. Your thoughts? Has it aged well or gotten worse with time?
I'm in the minority who also loved MGS2 and had no problems with Raiden. Some way he was a whiny little ***** or something but I didn't see him that way. I found him to be a dynamic character and seeing his transformation from an unseasoned rookie to what he becomes in future games was awesome. I'm considering playing through the entire series again as well. I have all the original games, but I might get the HD collection anyway to replay them as well as Peace Walker.
My main problem with MGS2 is not (only) the character; but the fact the story took a left turn and went from a spy adventure with colorful characters to a conspiracy theory that involved centuries old, global conspiracies, supernatural being, artificial intelligence, nanomachines, individually aimed viruses, among other things. All that made the story of MGS2 the lowest point in the series (luckily MGS3 ditched most of those and was truer to its spy adventure origins)
Honestly, I believe MGS would be a lot better without the philosophers and the patriots.
Loved the tanker level. Where you actually control snake himself. But what really killed the game for me was raiden i liked the setting it was in just not the goon i was controling. Also couldn't make much sense of the patriots and all that. I was alot younger back then....also again let me stress I WANTED TO PLAY AS SNAKE!!!!!!!!
MGS1 was so much simpler. Terrorists want to use a big super weapon to kick the world in the balls. YOU MUST STOP THEM! yeah sounds cliched when i say it like that but the way they execute it is what made it special for me. None of that conspiracy stuff.
I liked everything but the story and Raiden. I've learned to deal with Raiden since the game came out on PS2, but the storyline makes absolutely zero sense. They try to explain a whole bunch of confusing shit in the last hour of the entire game, and you only get to play for maybe 15 minutes during that whole time.
Can't forget the soundtrack either. I get spotted on purpose every once in a while in the tanker section just to hear that alert theme.
I love MGS2. It has my favorite story of all the MGS games. Social control via control of digital information... that's so.... cyberpunk? Yeah... awesome. It also had phenomenal graphics for the time (it still looks pretty to my eyes). It had great atmosphere, great music, great boss fights. What's not to like?
There's a method to Kojima's madness. Seriously, 20 years down the line, this will probably be remembered as Kojima's best, or at least most important game.
I couldn't stand MGS 2... I hated Raiden, the bomb finding, the obnoxious fixed cameras, the lack of "Snake? Snake?! SNAKE!!!", the overall stupidity of all of it...
Pretty much sums up my opinion here. It was a really good game, but I do prefer the rest of the series (excluding the portable ops games) over MSG2. Though by the end of it Raiden was really grating on me.
Metal Gear Solid 2 was the first PS2 MGS, and when the first trailers were revealed everyone - including me - lost their shit over how fucking awesome it looked. So the hype was grand to say the least.
Then a few weeks before release it's releaved that this bleach blond fem-dude called Raiden has replaced Snake as the protagonist. And apparently this was done only because most women didn't like MGS because it was filled with old grisly men, so Konami/Kojima wanted to appeal to the female demographic. I heard that even the illustrator, Yoji Shinkawa thought Kojima was joking when he asked him to design a feminine male character to replace Snake. And thus what should've been the first masterfull MGS entry for the PS2 got fucked.
The Tanker level is still really good though. I recently played it again after nearly a decade (that's how fucking pissed I was at it) on the MGS HD Collection, and I was reminded how great it felt to gun down enemy soldiers with the USP. Without the suppressor it's seriously the best sounding gun in the whole series.
Personally I think MGS2 goes down as one of the single greatest achievements in videogaming. Easily one of my top games of all time.
Casual Shinji said:
And apparently this was done only because most women didn't like MGS because it was filled with old grisly men, so Konami/Kojima wanted to appeal to the female demographic.
I was blinded by the graphics and the awesome demo level. After finishing it (i had to force myself) there`s only one word for my thoughts, "crap" (excluding the sword fighting at the end, i really liked that part).
I really like MGS2 including most of the story actually, probably because I like conspiracy thrillers. I liked how raiden was kind of intended as a deconstruction of the audience of the games, I like how at first it seems like they're just copying a bunch of stuff from the first game story wise but then it turns out that there's actually a reason for all that. I REALLY like when thins start to get rally trippy near the end, and I feel that the gameplay is the most satisfying in the series.
The only problems I have with it really are that it lays on the melodrama too thick when it comes to jack and rose's relationship, the fact that the fatman section and the revelation of the
purified hydrogen bomb
really have very little impact on the overall plot, and that vamp running on water and then 50 feet straight up a vertical pillar was too ridiculous to take seriously.
Perfectly good MGS game, I was a little confused at the introduction of Radien but there is nothing wrong with adding a new guy to the mix.
"He is a whiny *****" and why does every person in every game have to be the most super awesome badass. Not that I even agree that he is a whiny *****. There is always this thing about "how come all guys are Marcus Phoenix?", then when somebody comes along with a sob story you all turn around and say he is whiny.
I like the story, gameplay, people, music and everything else. It's not my fav MGS game but it's not nearly as bad as people make out.
It was my first MGS game a few years ago, and I still do not understand the story.
I still enjoyed it though, I mean I kind of liked Raiden, though I always shat my pants when I got seen and alerted. The part when Stillman's body came out floating through the door made me jump.
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