izigame.me

I haven't played any of the other Metal Gear Solid games except 5 and that was a long ass time ago and I basically remember nothing about it, so essentially I played these games blind. And for how old they are, I was genuinely surprised at how good they are (or more accurately, how good *one of them* is).

Metal Gear feels like a very standard NES era title. It's got a gameplay loop that it creates a scenario around with characters and places that feel made up just to fill out the game. The gameplay is pretty neat, standard stealth gameplay as you would expect, but feels more like a prototype of something better. Controls are meh, the actual stealth gameplay feels all but forgotten by the 3rd hour of the game, and even then it's pretty barebones gameplay all around. You walk around, get item, open a door and get another item. After a while you just run past every enemy you see after getting damn near infinite health items. Gunplay, if you can even call it that, feels like piss because aiming just does not exist. The "story" is very very light, although I'll give it props for being at least somewhat interesting by the end if you payed attention, but otherwise it's just people yelling orders at you until the last 20 minutes where there's supposed to be a plot twist. The remainder of the game is "puzzle solving", meaning you punch walls for 10 minutes and call every transmitter number you can think of when you're stuck, and some things are so cryptic that you might as well just look up a guide. And oh my god the backtracking. You are running back and forth down hallways full of enemies, shuffling through your inventory trying to find that one keycard for like 75% of the game. Especially towards the end it is so damn tiring. This game is not the most enjoyable by todays standards and is mostly a novelty thing if you're really into Metal Gear.

Metal Gear 2, on the other hand, is shockingly good. Basically everything from the first game is better. The graphics are better, as in more detailed pixel art with a genuine sense of style within the world. The music is much more varied and, although the first game had some good tunes, this one has quite a few bangers (for an 8-bit chiptune). The stealth gameplay is much more fleshed out, with the guards now having a field of view instead of laser sight, you make sound on certain tiles, you can crawl and hide in objects, and overall just more ways to be stealthy. Unfortunately it has the same issue as before where towards the end of the game you just naturally stop stealthing around and run towards the objective when you have the tools to take care of enemies but it's a much less pronounced issue here. The puzzles are much better, now feeling like actual real scenarios in this spy plot instead of random Legend of Zelda bomb walls. And everything is just more... creative? like the way you approach the obstacles is more interesting, and you're guided there more intuitively. Still some random BS in the game, the backtracking is still obnoxious and the controls are still not the best but they are better. And some puzzles are just genuinely unsolvable without the manual (which, while included, is not readily accessible while playing. The manual integration is probably a whole other can of worms). But what I liked the most was the story. This game has a genuine, real plot. It continues from the last game, with much more involved plot moments like dedicated conversation sections, and some actually great dialogue moments and interesting plot revelations. It has a cheesy edge around every line but it fits the game perfectly. I was impressed that I was this interested about characters that originally seemed like randomly generated characters, with generic names and designs. So where Metal Gear fails near the end by having its gameplay loop become uninteresting and start to crack, Metal Gear 2 doesn't need to worry about it because by the end of the game you are more concerned with the story. It's really impressive for such an old title.

Overall, buy these games if you're a big fan of the Metal Gear series or really interested in starting the series. I'm not sure if you really NEED to play these games for any plot related things later in the series, maybe a youtube video will suffice, but in terms of the series history and a piece of Video Game lore, I think Metal Gear 2 especially warrants a playthrough. And with a guide, both games will probably take 6 hours combined, if less. In terms of the port job, not the greatest tbh. The initial game select screen where the manual is and such is very nice but separate from the games so again you can't see the menu while playing, and while the games run fine without audio or graphical issues and controller settings are good enough, there's nothing else to support it. I needed save states, ESPECIALLY with MG1. The save feature is just awful and doesn't work half of the time. So I guess, play the games if you have them with the rest of the collection but do not buy them separate