For more than 25 years, the Metal Gear series has been surprising gamers, redefining staid gaming clichés, and popularizing the stealth genre that now includes popular titles such as Assassin's Creed III (PS3) and Batman: Arkham City. Now, Konami has gathered up the core games of the series, releasing all eight games for the PlayStation 3 under one title, Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection. Whether you're a Metal Gear veteran or just coming to the series for the first time, this collection of critically acclaimed fan favorites is highly recommended.
Sneaking Through History
I first played Metal Gear when I was 6 or 7, playing on an NES at a friend's house. I still remember it as a frustrating experience—the NES version was a poorly ported version of the original MSX release, making a challenging game even harder—but it marked my first brush with the game. I gave up on the insanely hard game, but remembered it for years. When Metal Gear Solid debuted on the original PlayStation in 1998, I was hooked.
As I eagerly await the release of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain sometime in the next year or so, I jumped at the chance to revisit the gaming franchise that has captured my imagination and kept me sneaking, crawling, and shooting for more than two decades. So when Konami announced the release of Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection, I eagerly purchased it, even though I already own five of the eight included games.
For the sake of brevity, this review will only briefly summarize the storyline of each game, staying spoiler-free for any newcomers. Instead, the main focus will deal with the technical aspects of each game: the quality of the port from one system to another, the differences in control schemes and gameplay from one game to the next, and any notable changes or bugs encountered along the way.
Anyone wanting further details on any of the eight included titles will need to look elsewhere, but information shouldn't be too hard to find—these are all top-rated, best-selling games, and a lot of ink has been spilled dissecting the plots, characters, and twists of each.
Series Snapshot
The Metal Gear Solid series may be infamous for its convoluted plots, over the top characters, and unique blend of military action with sci-fi and fantasy elements, but at its heart, it's a simple series. Each game centers around a single special ops commando (Snake, though this name refers to more than one character), sent to infiltrate an enemy stronghold. Facing overwhelming numbers and starting out armed with only a pair of binoculars (and maybe a knife), Snake's only hope of completing his mission is to use stealth, skillfully and patiently sneaking past enemies, and procuring equipment as needed along the way. Most of the time (though not always) the ultimate goal of his mission is to stop the titular Metal Gear, any of a line of high-tech, nuclear-equipped walking tanks—along with whatever terrorist cell or rogue military unit happens to have captured it. Sneak in, find stuff along the way, stop the bad guys, destroy Metal Gear. It's a simple enough premise, but over the course of 25 years, the surrounding storylines have gotten very complex.
For example, Solid Snake, the protagonist in several of the Metal Gear games, is actually one of several clones of Big Boss, who is both his unit commander and ultimately his enemy. And Big Boss was originally also codenamed Snake. On top of all of the classified missions and top-secret technology, there is at least one shadowy conspiracy group manipulating events from behind the scenes, and one or more characters working for this group as a double (or triple) agent.
The cast of characters has also grown from a handful to dozens, each with detailed backstories, ulterior motives, and secret agendas. The end result is so labyrinthine in its plot turns and twists that prior to the release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Konami actually created a wiki dedicated entirely to explaining the plots and characters of the previous stories.
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