METAL GEAR SOLID 2 - SONS OF LIBERTY

WARNING: All my writings contain spoilers!

The first Metal Gear Solid for Playstation was a great game, highly praised by critics and gamers. Metal Gear Solid 2 - Sons of Liberty is also a great game. Or more like half game half movie. There's a LOT of cut-scenes that carry the plot forward. I beat the game in about 15 hours and maybe as much as half of that are cut-scenes. They are well done, but sadly much of the story is told in the familiar CODEC mode and it's not too fun to read text when there's nothing but green heads on black background opening their mouths. The plot is very complex and I myself didn't know what the hell is going on midway to the game. The plot twists are great though, but some of the twists and turns aren't that good. The voice-acting is well done, but the dialogue is more than often very cheesy, especially when it comes to the back stories of the characters. The story involving the Metal Gear itself is great. There are however quite a big amount of stuff about things like the essence of humanity and why we make some of the decisions that we do. This philosophical element grows towards the end of the game and it doesn't sit that well for a Metal Gear game. Also the ending is very unsatisfying and didn't really make sense and didn't wrap up the story too nicely.

This game has been criticized as playing itself and I agree. There are many moments in the game that are done via the cut-scenes when you'd want to play the scene yourself. The game is 10-15 hours long (which is a big improvement to MGS that was like five hours long) but there's not nearly as much of actual play time. The time you do get to play is superb though. Many of the items from before make their appearance like rations, boxes and claymores and there is a good selection of new weapons and items to use. The controls are good and this time the character has a few new moves that come in handy along the way. 


Another complaint I have is that majority of the game is played with a new character called "Raiden". You do get to play with "Snake" for the first hour or two but from there on it's Raiden only. I have nothing against new characters but Raiden is just very irritating. He's very green, doesn't know what the hell is going on and whines a lot. A thing he does a lot is that he repeats sentences said by someone else and makes it a guestion. You also get a lot of lines like "what?!", "huh?" and "...". Snake is in the picture and helps you along the way and gives a lot of information about things but it's not the same. Raiden is just too irritating to really care about.


There are some cool stuff in here, like when you input the virus in the GW, The Colonel who is a part of Metal Gear Arsenal's AI starts to malfunction and among other things tells you to turn off the console and just quit. And at one point the Mission Failed window appears but it says Fission Mailed so you know you didn't really fail your mission and you should just continue shooting the bad guys. Reminiscent to the 'change your controller to port 2' thing from Metal Gear Solid that totally confused me over 10 years ago.

Still a great game inspite of it's flaws and I can't wait to play Metal Gear Solid 3 - Snake Eater in the near future.