So Metal Gear Solid 2 was a lot of fun, and I only have brief memories of playing the original Metal Gear Solid on PS1… And I never played Metal Gear Solid 4. So that must mean we are limited to one other Metal Gear Solid game. One that has, not Snake, but someone else. That’s right, it’s Metal Gear Solid V: Phan- Okay, even I can’t run that joke into the ground. No, seriously, though, it’s Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
Metal Gear Solid 3 takes place in the 1960s, the Cold War is just heating up, and the American hero known as The Boss has betrayed the American people and joined sides with the Russians. You play has The Boss’ apprentice and father to Solid Snake, Naked Snake, later to be known as Big Boss, as you travel through the jungles of Russia, with the help of a mysterious woman named Eve, and see to it that Snake takes care of the high ranked soldiers of The Boss and to stop her from igniting a nuclear war. Also something about the Philosopher's Legacy which is a cluster fuck of it’s own right there. Unlike other Metal Gear Solid games, since you are in the jungles with no way of having any means of survival aside from your basic skills, you get a few new features. First off, the camo feature. Snake is equipped with a ton of camo that allows him to blend into his environment, and hide in plain sight from enemies. Dark green works best on grass, and browns and greys work best on dirt. Another feature in this game is healing. You can use items to heal yourself, which is pretty good, but Metal Gear Solid 3 also allows you to perform surgery on yourself. Depending on the situation, Snake will need to do some basic surgery to keep from dying. He’s gotta treat broken bones, open wounds, burns, sicknesses, and even pull leeches off of his body. And the last feature, the most interesting, is hunger. Snake loves to eat. But all he can eat is what is available to him, that being the wildlife of the jungle. All you gotta do is kill what you can find, eat it, and keep your hunger up. Failure to do so will cause his stomach to growl and alert enemies to your location, as well as eventually depleting health. I love the new mechanics that allow you to really put your survival skills to the test, and it makes it feel like you are truly fighting in a foreign land against all odds to stay alive. It also gives you all that good Kojima humor and secret stuff to find in each playthrough. You can shoot a beehive to scare off soldiers, put on an alligator mask and talk to your comrades, kill The End, the best boss fight in the game, before you fight him and even change the settings of your console by two weeks and let him die of old age, and my personal favorite, if you shoot a specific character in the balls, you can see his ghost covering his crotch. It’s these little details that I love in Metal Gear games that make it so charming and makes you want to experiment with them more and find all kinds of secrets. And the boss fights in this game are some of my favorites in the franchise. Aside from The End being a quiet hunt for a professional hunter and sniper by a hundred different means, there’s The Sorrow, which is less of a fight and more of you trekking through the lake of the dead, The Fury which is an insane fight with an astronaut that uses a flamethrower which I swear was referenced by Captain Vladimir in No More Heroes 2, and the fight with The Boss is one of the best final bosses in video games for it’s combat style, music choice, and the fact that the area will be carpet bombed in a few minutes if you take too long. It’s really a step up from the bosses in the last game, not that they were bad, just not as many as I would’ve liked.
Metal Gear Solid 3 was a game I immediately fell in love with for it’s setting, it’s stealth gameplay, and it’s unique story that really kept me invested from start to end, even if I had no damn clue what was going on. Many people consider Metal Gear Solid 3 to be the best in the franchise, and I am definitely one of those people. It’s a ton of fun and is totally worth your time, whether you get the game on the original PS2 or play it on the Metal Gear Solid HD collection. It is truly an experience you should see for yourself. Oh, and that theme song. I'M STILL IN A DREAM! SNAKE EATER!