My rationale for Metal Gear Solid 2 being the place to go if you know or suspect you’ll only have the patience for a series to have one shot at really impressing you, is because Metal Gear Solid 2 is just so fucking Metal Gear Solid about everything. Like, MGS2 is what to point to if you want to have a video essay’s worth of things to say about Kojima being a deranged auteur who might only be accidentally brilliant, but it would be impossible to say he’s not got something fucking cooking.
Metal Gear Solid 2 I think does fun things with the mythos of Metal Gear Solid too. It’s already too late to be floored by “The Twist,” it was already too late as of like, midday on November 13th, 2001. So unfortunately you will never be able to totally experience every single aspect of what made Metal Gear Solid 2 so weird and creatively bold.
However, honestly I think what makes Metal Gear Solid 2 so Metal Gear Solid-y is really so much more than that. The cinematic nature, the bizarre, tangent obsessed, and player hostile in density and subject matter narrative, all the just totally strange and idiosyncratic gameplay contours, weird yet still compelling character relationships, the humour… Metal Gear Solid 2 really exemplifies all of that.
Although to be totally fair I’m totally biased from my own personal experience as someone who more or less went back to Metal Gear Solid after using Metal Gear Solid 2 as my entry point. But frankly I don’t know if you really need to know much about Metal Gear Solid to appreciate Metal Gear Solid 2 beyond understanding it as a sort of nigh-mythical event within the fiction, and also that it would be a big deal if you could launch a nuke from a thing that could traverse any kind of terrain. Metal Gear Solid isn’t pulpy in comparison to something like a Pierce Brosnan era James Bond movie but it is pulpy put next to Metal Gear Solid 2, where a remove if not even ignorance about the intimate details events and fiction of the first game is actually something practically incorporated into the plot of MGS2 itself and a narrative device deliberately explored. And then it goes off into weird ass avant-garde territory pretty much straight away after acknowledging the events of Metal Gear Solid did happen.
Like, okay. Metal Gear Solid is a great game, fun, innovative, ahead of its time, weird and idiosyncratic too. I personally also think Metal Gear Solid 3 is, like, overall the best game and strikes an interesting balance between pulp thrill ride and more conventional narrative devices in that way, but still with unforgettable imagery and characters that ooze charisma and panache and weird funny shit that had become a series trademark by then.
However, even as it is not the straightforwardly best game in the series with regards to overall execution and, like, entertainment value, I’d say if you by the time you’re 25 and you feel that you’ll probably keep playing videogames for the remainder of your adult life, you must at some point take the time to play Metal Gear Solid 2, and I envy anyone who gets to experience it for the first time.
Also as much as I think it would be hilarious to make someone play 4 as their first Metal Gear Solid game, let not these trolls lead you down this path. This is the videogame equivalent of intentionally raising a child feral as a social experiment. The ethics of such a thing are… well they just aren’t proper.
The experience of Metal Gear Solid 4 is something that should be thought of as more like a holy vision, beautiful and terrible (double entendre intended). You need faith to be able to appreciate being able to experience the transcendental mystery of the voice of God speaking to you through a burning bush, lest you mistake its bizarre form of presentation for devilry, or mere mundane human trickery. Faith which can only blossom into sacred understanding from knowing the liturgy.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was a burger from a place called The Burger’s Priest before it was purchased by a semi-transnational conglomerate in 2017 (one notorious for buying chains and making them shitter of course). This formerly Toronto local microchain was founded by an actual seminary dropout who weaved wry, almost tongue-in-cheek, and just-subtle-enough references to Christianity and scripture into the branding and ethos of the restaurant. It was kind of at the point where, there was no real suggestion that you were eating the burgers because you liked religion or Christianity. It was really just, like, the guy who made the restaurant was a seminary school dropout but just found his stride in a weird other kind of world, so, you can see some scripture or scripture-like ramblings on the wall when you went to order.
Anyway, before The Burger’s Priest was purchased, they had a semi-secret menu. Really as far as it was a secret, it amounted to going on the website instead of just reading the menu in-store, and seeing some of the dumb shit they’d make for you if you knew what it was called. This was back when that sort of thing was still cool and certainly firmly before the ubiquity of online ordering platforms. Anyway, one such secret menu item was called The Vatican. And what The Vatican consisted of was that instead of the burger being served between one bun, it was instead served between two grilled cheese sandwiches made with the already delicious burger buns.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is kind of like The Vatican of videogames, but specifically, on a cheat day after you were forced to skip your last cheat day, and though you also have to be someone who already knows that they want that kind of decadence, you just want a sort of child’s caricature of a platonic ideal of a goddamn fucking burger, even more so one that you know in your heart would be absolutely repulsive to anyone who does not want anything remotely like it. You already need to be the sort of person who is going to hear from a friend that The Burger’s Priest has a secret menu item and you are then going to be instantly whipped into a starved frenzy upon hearing that you can get a burger between two grilled cheese sandwiches instead of normal buns. And, as transcendent as your first The Vatican will be, you also have to understand that you’ll never be able to eat your first The Vatican ever again.
