Metal Gear Solid 2 Review

Comments · 1K

• SA

  @SamsarasArt · 6 years ago (edited)

  The voice actor for Campbell did a phenomenal job. He walked a fine line where it isn't obvious for people playing for the first time but recognize that he sounds more robotic upon subsequent playthroughs. That task required an amazingly talented VA and Paul Eiding nailed it.

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• AR

  @archentity · 12 years ago

  &lt;Cigarette drops out of Solid Snake&apos;s mouth as he&apos;s watching tv.&gt;<br><br>&quot;Big Boss is the president!!?!??! O_O&quot;

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• RY

  @ryebred6470 · 12 years ago

  Sorry, what? Snake dies on the tanker. Iroquis Pliskin is the guy you meet

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• TY

  @TypeVertigo · 10 years ago

  MGS2&apos;s plot makes so much more sense fifteen years later when the Internet is more pervasive than ever before and misinformation is a daily occurrence. In my country (not the US), we just elected a new president and most of the campaign materials used were circulated via social media, where fact-checking is increasingly becoming passé and people are incredibly gullible. Playing MGS2 shortly after just proved to me how far ahead of its time this game was - it predicted this would happen!

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• MO

  @MoriyaMug · 12 years ago

  If you look at the Document of MGS2, it reveals that the reflection of Snake in the floor isn&apos;t actually a reflection, but a dupe of his model, rendered upside down and made visible through a semi-transparent floor. Neat trick.

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• MY

  @MyMrFuckoff · 12 years ago

  It is funny how prescient the &quot;censoring the internet&quot; plot turned out to be. I remember laughing at it when the game came out and I had shitty dial up internet I&apos;d occasionally use to post on a forum about anime or videogames, maybe &quot;alta-vista&quot; some facts for a school project. These days it doesn&apos;t at all seem like a ridiculous goal for an evil shadow government.

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• FO

  @ForeverMasterless · 11 years ago

  I think MGS2 is the best video game story ever, but if you take the plot literally, you&apos;ll get nothing out of it. It is so unique in that it&apos;s story is literally 100% defined by its subtext. Not a single plot element is supposed to make literal sense. It doesn&apos;t matter who does what, when, why, or how. Worrying about why Solidus does what he does, why nobody recognizes him as the president, who is in allegiance with who, etc. is actually missing the point ENTIRELY. Nobody&apos;s motivations matter a single bit. Logic doesn&apos;t matter a single bit. If you take anything in MGS2 literally, you&apos;re already fucking it up. It doesn&apos;t matter what parts of the game are &quot;real,&quot; or not, or if you&apos;re maybe inside a VR sim the whole time or not. Trying to figure the game out that way is futile. Everything is real, and nothing is. The game itself, the plot itself, isn&apos;t important. The subtext that those elements serve is ALL that matters. You got part of the way there, but you didn&apos;t seem to understand this aspect of it. <br><br>Let&apos;s help you go from where you are to true understanding of the narrative. MGS2 is a very bitter game. Kojima didn&apos;t make plans on how to follow up MGS1, because he never wanted to make a follow-up. MGS2&apos;s design isn&apos;t the result of confusion about how to continue the series, as you seem to suggest, but an entirely different game about how the series shouldn&apos;t have been continued in the first place. It&apos;s a meta commentary on MGS1, the fans, Kojima himself, and (as you said) game sequels in general. His crazy mind spiraled out of control and he put tons of effort into making a game about how he didn&apos;t want to make a game. Only Kojima, lol. People have said the MGS2 is the most expensive &quot;art&quot; game ever made, and they&apos;re 100% right. That&apos;s exactly what it is. It&apos;s personal as fuck, and representative of one man&apos;s struggle as an artist and his relationship with his fans.<br><br>Raiden doesn&apos;t just represent &quot;the player,&quot; but a specific kind of player--fans of the first game. Kojima considered them whiny, entitled, and short-sighted. Kojima thought of MGS1 as a silly homage to action movies that didn&apos;t have any more room to grow, and was annoyed that people liked it so damn much (especially compared to his other games) that a sequel was supposedly &quot;necessary&quot; and forced on him by his bosses. He had suddenly attained celebrity status because of MGS1&apos;s success, and was for the first time forced to make something for the money rather than for the art. He wanted to make something new, and he wasn&apos;t allowed to.<br><br>Every single element of the game serves this purpose, and the purpose of cheapening and redefining the experience of MGS1. Liquid comes back to make the player feel like their accomplishments in the first game are for nothing. Fortune makes you feel powerless against a boss in a way you never did in MGS1. Vamp comes back to life because no boss in MGS1 comes back to life. You have to get nodes to display the map because you didn&apos;t in MGS1. Every single element of the game is a hidden cipher and commentary on the first game.<br><br>Raiden is whiny because the fans are whiny. Raiden idolizes and wants to be Snake because the fans idolize and want to play as Snake. Raiden&apos;s only experience are VR missions of Shadow Moses, because his VR missions and the fans experience of the first game are one and the same.<br><br>Kojima is straight up criticizing his own fans and refusing to give them what he knows they want. Video games would be far more interesting if more people did the same. He even went so far as to trick people into thinking they would get to play as Snake until the last possible moment. He WANTED to piss people off, to shake them up, to get them to rethink their experience with the first game and what they want out of a sequel, and if there should even BE sequels to games. You view his decisions as a risk that paid off. I view them as a man who WANTED this game to either fail spectacularly, or open people&apos;s minds. He wanted to throw off the shackles of the series, but he&apos;s Kojima, so he couldn&apos;t just do that by making a crappy half-assed game. He had to do it by making an amazing game that he put a ton of effort into that was just different, and defied everyone&apos;s expectations, and tried so hard to change people&apos;s minds but instead flew over everyone&apos;s head. People didn&apos;t get it, but they bought it the fuck up anyway and just wrote off the brilliant narrative as meaningless weird shit, and he was still chained to the series because of its success. Kojima failed both ways. Or, rather, WE failed HIM.<br><br>Isn&apos;t it telling that MGS4 would come out and attempt to answer all of MGS2&apos;s questions that were never meant to have answers? MGS4 gave us dumb and weird for the sake of dumb and weird, because that&apos;s all MGS was in the first place, right guys? And people wonder why we can&apos;t have nice things...<br><br>MGS2 may have a lot of flaws as an enjoyable gaming experience, but it&apos;s undeniably an incredibly important work of art. If any game belongs in a museum, MGS2 does.

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• BU

  @bulma12345678910 · 12 years ago

  Damn, just noticed look at the codec sound-waves during the Tanker <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8AVbjd94vc&amp;t=94">1:34</a> and then compare it to how they look during the Plant <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8AVbjd94vc&amp;t=646">10:46</a>. Raiden has a gun pointed at his head the whole time

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• AR

  @ARX78 · 12 years ago

  &quot;Honestly though, you&apos;ve played this game for a long time. Don&apos;t you have anything else to do with your time?&quot; (Campbell 2001)

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• SH

  @shukterhousejive · 11 years ago

  Some Final Notes:<br>1) MGS2 was straight-up unfinished. 2 dead-cell members were cut and absorbed into vamp, Shell 2 was trimmed all the way back, and some other things had to be tweaked to accommodate the sudden lack of budget<br>2) The terminals are used to &quot;link&quot; the player to the game, asking for their important details much like the MOTHER series. This culminates in Raiden holding his dogtag with the player&apos;s name on it, which I&apos;m surprised wasn&apos;t mentioned in the review<br>3) The best easter egg is the ice cube bucket in the tanker. Shoot it and ice cubes will fall out, and will melt proportionately to their proximity to other cubes<br>4) Zone of the Enders definitely deserves a look, it plays out as a giant piss-take on Evangelion and it&apos;s structured similarly to this game (normal gameplay for the first half, setpieces for the second)

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• DR

  @Drforrester31 · 5 years ago

  I&apos;ll never forget the sheer panic I felt when the Colonel calls and says to shut off the game. It was late and everything too and seriously felt like the game was talking to me personally

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• OD

  @odyseeisbetterthanyoutube6819 · 10 years ago

  I think Kojima&apos;s message was pretty straight forward, in time we all fade from history. Up to this point, the only ones that were exceptions to that were political, cultural, religious, science, and military leaders (i.e Julius Caesar, Leonardo Da Vinci, Shakesphere,Adolph Hitler, etc). However even the true images of these people become distorted and become more legend than fact as time moves forward. It becomes a false history and the original people are lost in the process.<br><br>But now, for the first time in history, all of us can preserve our true selves digitally and share our experiences with the future generations. For example, I can make a video describing how I feel about current world events, describe my family and friends, or generally discuss any aspect of my life. That makes me appear as a person to my ancestors 200 years from now, rather than just some name on a family tree. They&apos;ll see my face, hear my voice, and feel my emotions as if they were talking to someone in their time.<br><br>I have often thought of this before while working on my family tree. When I look at it, I see names (at least as far back as I can find), photos (if I&apos;m lucky), and other documents, but other than that I have very little information on them as people and what their struggles were. Maybe it is my love for history, but I would be really interested to know who they were and maybe learn some life lessons while I&apos;m at it. I know some of my ancestors would be interested too.

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