Just a little retrospective I wrote.
It is super interesting to me that there was a time when you could have a giant twist like this: a hugely successful prior game setting the stage for Solid Snake being a main character, then the ‘rug pull’ of making the following sequel feature someone else.
As I’ve read elsewhere in some comments, this kind of twist couldn’t really work today, with the immediacy of social media covering every facet of everything.
From the typical action star Snake to the over-confident Raiden, the shift was a big one for Metal Gear Solid 2.
But good lord was that leap in graphics a giant one for just a few short years!
I just wrote up a little look back at how/why it was done, and since I’ve got a terrible cold/sore throat, it was an effort. If you’ve got some nostalgia for MGS2, you might enjoy this one. And my question to you here, is were you there for this? Playing the intro on the tanker as Snake, settling in to what you thought would be a Snake-filled game, then finding out Raiden was the focus? Was it a shock?
Anyway, as ever:
Just to add some context here:
This rug pull was practically universally disliked by almost everyone that played MGS2 when it released. People that played MGS2 and liked that this happened are like, a super turbo minority of the people that played the game at the time. Only in recent years have people said they liked it.
The negative reception was so strong that Hideo Kojima himself in interviews would go on to say that the rug pull of Raiden was his biggest mistake with MGS2, and that he would never do something like that again.
But then kinda does it again in MGSV.
Sort of, I’d argue it’s better accomplished. I don’t hate venom, he’s basically the same character. In mgs2 people signed up for more solid snake, which was even blatantly communicated as what you were getting in the demo of the game and all marketing materials. It’s a question of expectation. Even aside from the character, the tanker chapter is leagues in quality above the rest of the game.
It’s not the I hate mgs2, I think it’s actually really neat and interesting, but when you’re doing a rug pull off that nature it’s easy for people to be disappointed.
But you still play as Snake. Sure, Venom Snake, not Solid Snake. But Raiden isnt Snake, hes just Raiden.
Perhaps Raiden is the reason that the MGSV protagonist is called Venom Snake and not something else.
There were a few MGS games that released between MGS2 and MGSV, and all of them IIRC had Snake as the protagonist.
Yeah, I mean MGS3 technically isn’t “Solid Snake”.
Cloning aside I’d like for major series like that to be okay with having more protagonists. It’s been one of Ace Attorney’s major issues; even when a new kid came around, he got show-stolen so much by Phoenix.
I’m trying to force myself to forget about this game.
For me MGS ended with number 4. The prologue from MGSV was good but the rest of the game is just bad, without any deep and interesting story…
The ultimate crime of MGSV is that they cut the ending mission that directly tied it to Metal Gear Solid. Without it the game’s more a prequel to Metal Gear than the Solid series.
That and cutting Ground Zeroes out into its own game when it was originally supposed to be a chapter in V. It should have been retroactively included.
How the hell would it have connected to MGS and not just Metal Gear? 🤨
And Ground Zeroes was always planned as a separate game to MGS5. They were supposed to release at the same time, but 5’s development got delayed.
The ending shows that the whole game exists to explain a “plot hole” that literally nobody cared about (how Big Boss survived his “death” in Metal Gear). The scrapped final mission, Mission 51, would have come before that and finished Eli’s plotline, setting him on the path to becoming Liquid Snake by the time of Metal Gear Solid.
I’m going off of what people said around the time of Kojima’s exit, which is that Konami were unhappy with how long V was taking and forced Kojima to release Ground Zeroes as a standalone. It seems I misinterpreted what that meant!
I liked it, but this was also the first Metal Gear game in ever played so I wasn’t as invested in Snake.
I played through the mgs2 demo like 20 times, I knew every detail of that boat. The swap to Raiden was jarring and he just generally wasn’t quite as likeable or cool as snake. Game was still cool as heck and fun though.
Very on brand