Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater – Master Collection Version
Metal Gear has always made me feel like I’m going a little insane. Not because of its notoriously eccentric plot, but because of the gaming media that treats the series like a work of infallible brilliance. I’ve always respected the previous games for their unique identities and groundbreaking mechanics, but I wouldn’t claim to like them, because those identities and mechanics are often boring, frustrating, or downright silly. With Metal Gear Solid 3, I feel like I’ve been pranked and everyone else played a different game than I did. Its reputation is as the most beloved entry in the franchise, with a supposedly more grounded and emotionally affecting narrative and, as of the Subsistence re-release, an improved control scheme. After playing it myself, that reputation seems half true at best.
The narrative is only grounded in the sense that the main plot features a sensible number of twists and isn’t informed by some fantastical science fiction. There’s a genuinely haunting sequence with animations that I suspect were borrowed directly from Silent Hill, and there are multiple surprisingly gruesome torture scenes. There’s also a character that’s half-plant who keeps himself alive via photosynthesis and another who can control lightning for no reason. The ostensibly tragic finale begins with a character revealing what is supposed to be a C-section scar that spans her entire torso, and then she leaves her chest exposed while she fights her surrogate son to the death. And of course, all of this is accompanied by Hideo Kojima’s trademark exasperatingly redundant dialogue that lectures the audience on incongruous themes of loyalty and sacrifice with the subtlety of a neon sign.
As for the controls, Snake Eater in its original form has possibly the worst controls of any non-shovelware game I’ve ever played. As the product of three games’ worth of feature creep, they’re unbelievably convoluted. They’re inconsistent and unintuitive to a degree and frequency that is actively destructive to both the stealth and action gameplay. And they’re technically spotty for good measure, with inaccurate context sensitivity and hit detection. The sadly humorous part is that these issues are all present in Subsistence too. The re-release’s major gameplay contribution was a fully 3D camera, which did in fact fix the franchise’s longstanding issue with cover controls. Unfortunately, it also introduced its own difficulties when switching to and from first-person view, and it’s debatable whether it’s an improvement over the fixed camera for general purposes.
The nail in the coffin for MGS3 was that it aimed for more organic (and arguably more realistic) gameplay. As a result, enemies have less rigid awareness of their surroundings, and the player can’t rely on the hyper-useful “Soliton Radar” of the previous titles. Instead, they have more limited-use tools like a motion detector and the new camouflage system. The latter is an interesting idea, but not only is its effectiveness highly suspect, the need to go in and out of a menu and swap it around every time you encounter a different terrain becomes tiresome immediately. It all combines to create a stealth game that’s largely unsatisfying to play stealthily, as you’re constantly being spotted by guards from off-screen or through suddenly-inadequate camouflage. In an inversion of Metal Gear standards, I actually enjoyed the boss fights more than the standard gameplay, because they felt relatively fairly designed.
MGS3 breeds a special kind of betrayed disdain for me, because it’s a game that I so badly want to like. It and the rest of its series are rare auteur-driven projects within the AAA games industry. It’s got great music, and the cutting-edge-for-2004 graphics hold up surprisingly well. It’s overflowing with ideas – reading about the multitude of extremely-specific interactions available in any given situation is fascinating. But it neglects the basics so thoroughly that actually playing it is a struggle more often than not. To top it all off, this is one of those annoying titles with no definitive “best” version. The HD/Master Collection versions feature upgraded visuals and the 3D camera, but they exclude some bonus content and the entire online component of Subsistence. Not that I’d ever want to touch a competitive multiplayer version of a game that controls like this.