“The coming flood of information” – Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

**Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty** (Konami, PlayStation 2, 2001/2002)

Metal Gear Solid included some famous meta moments, moments I absolutely loved, where its packaging and your controller setup became part of the game. That’s a trick that can only have its full surprise impact once. So with Metal Gear Solid 2, Konami, Kojima, Fukushima et al set their sights bigger still. Not just the box but the entire pre-release promotional campaign for the game became a meta element. It’s a conceptually brilliant idea which the game more than followed through on.

Metal Gear Solid 2’s themes include the unreliability of perceived reality and of the control and manipulation of information. It’s also a game which generated a phenomenal level of pre-release hype based in part on early trailers which turned out to be actively misleading its players as to who its main character was going to be, a manipulation of information which extended to including footage which doesn’t exist in the game. When, in the game’s later stages, it starts rolling out disorienting revelations about its main character’s identity, there’s a very good chance that early players knew just how he felt.

The change from controlling Snake to Raiden, if not the bait and switch, came partly out of wanting to solve an age old problem for sequels. How do you reset, how do you teach newcomers what to do, while not having it sit uneasily with established players and characters? A new character makes a lot of sense as an answer. Snake can continue to be cool and reticent, and Raiden can be the new guy who needs everything explained to him, with the added bonus that Snake can look even cooler and more ambiguous, and the game can say more about him from the outside than it ever could from the inside.

Metal Gear Solid 2 was not the first game to find this role for its predecessor’s main character. It wasn’t long since Pokémon Gold did something similar, if on a smaller scale. The concept of switching to centring new or minor characters to provide a new perspective on the major ones is also quite familiar from episodes of several long-running TV series. Specifically, it made me think of the Doctor Who episode “Love & Monsters”, which spent its length focused on a dork who was in awe of the established main character, showing the Doctor only in the margins and doing important things off screen. Likewise the sometimes pathetic Raiden, who spends much of Metal Gear Solid 2 hearing about all the cool things Snake is doing elsewhere. “Love & Monsters” was one of the modern Doctor Who’s worst-received episodes ever, which gives a bit of a hint that some in the audience may just resent this approach. And that was just one episode of a series, not an entire, long-awaited sequel which sprang it as more of a surprise.

There are sequels which straightforwardly triumph, and those which are a triumph in a tricksy way that dares to put off a lot of people to succeed for others more thoroughly. Metal Gear Solid 2 is very much the latter. I was prepared for that, knowing of its reputation and its switch, which in its own way means I didn’t have the full experience. Since by the time the UK got Metal Gear Solid 2 it had already been out in the US and talked about for four months (we got a bonus DVD making of doc included as an apology – thanks Konami), maybe going in already knowing is an appropriate way to approach it, though. The situation clearly didn’t dent anticipation much, as it sold more copies in its first week (120,000) than any other game before.

Among the narrative tricksiness, there is a game which expands on many of the thrills of its predecessor. It looks great, with some spectacular visuals like a sequence sniping into the sunset. It has some thoughtful new moves, and the collective intelligence of enemies makes its world feel more interconnected and makes sneaking your way to safety much better. Evading support squads called in with a modicum of intelligence feels both more realistic and more of an achievement. It uses the option of switching to first person view for some clever puzzles and alternative combat approaches. And it has its own set of wonderfully daft set pieces, demanding of ridicule and respect. It’s still the kind of game to include a boss fight against a guy called Fatman who rollerskates around a Bomberman layout planting bombs for you to freeze.

Not everything is great. Some puzzles feel a little too vaguely presented, and there are moments in its long cutscenes and calls when less might just have been more. The animation and voice acting is generally superb, but some bits of melodrama prove too much and there is the occasional off-puttingly unnatural line reading, probably as a result of the sheer number of lines needed. The game’s setting can feel a little dull at points, endlessly cycling round the same identikit parts of the facility. That one feels designed to induce a further sense of being rooted in place to make the later uprooting of reality feel even more shocking though, the same kind of game-specific trick pulled off so well in Final Fantasy VII. Which sums up the approach of Metal Gear Solid 2 as a whole, that every other element of game within is subservient to its ultimate narrative one.

As a result of getting the game later than the US, British players got some changes, and those included the fully developed final form of the trick the game played on fans. When you first start a new game, it doesn’t go straight to a simple difficulty selection, but instead asks you both how you feel about action and if you completed Metal Gear Solid. It’s only if you answer yes to the second question that it bothers with the deception. New players just completely skip the prologue, with Solid Snake on a tanker in the rain, and instead go straight to Raiden’s mission, catching up later on anything important they missed, second hand.

Experienced players, on the other hand, get a taste of the game they expected to be playing, the better to make it sting more when it gets ripped away. Far from avoiding the awkwardness of tutorials for established fans, Metal Gear Solid 2 leans into it and provides tutorial as psychic torture. Raiden is a deliberate contrast to Snake, and an annoying one: by turns overconfident and full of doubt, confused and whiny. Every time some rhythm and momentum starts building, the game grinds to a halt so he can have something else unnecessarily explained. And it slowly becomes clear that you’re stuck with him for the rest of the game, even as Snake is right there on the same offshore facility, barely disguised. Though disguised enough to fool Raiden.

The constant twists in the plot, which more than live up to the ludicrous turns of the first game, mean that the player is often a couple of steps behind what is happening, but Raiden is inevitably even further behind. When Snake pointedly says to him ‘unlike you, I’ve been briefed’, it’s a brutally accurate summary of the differential. To a point this inadequacy makes Raiden more relatable, despite physical skills as incredible as Snake’s, but it’s a tough slog. Later on, even when his sympathetic and unlikely backstory emerges, it’s closely accompanied by an implication that he’s physically abusive to his girlfriend, which pushes him further into repulsiveness than probably intended.

Speaking of his girlfriend, her presence as one of the people talking to Raiden throughout is an interesting illustration of one difference from Metal Gear Solid. The first game ran on constant tonal clashes, with the ground constantly shifting amidst its dissonance. Metal Gear Solid 2 still gets bonkers, still often runs on military grade technical bullshit, but is mostly comparatively calm in delineating its moods. However, it whacks in some even more crashing gear shifts, and the romance and strained relationship conversations account for many of them. Raiden complains himself about his mission being interrupted by requests to talk about said relationship. They call each other Jack and Rose, the Titanic reference emphasising the entirely different genre of epic that part of the story exists in.

When Raiden’s mission hits a metaphorical iceberg, though, everything on board goes down with it. Tactical espionage action; romance; conspiracy thriller in which the President announces himself as willing front for a deep state conspiracy. Every part of Metal Gear Solid 2 gets wrapped together into the same sinking of assumed reality towards the game’s end. Which is why it works so well. Even when the conspiracy’s grand plan turns out to amount to a pre-emptive strike against shitposting.

It’s not a difficult thing for a game to turn meta and break the fourth wall. It happens all the time. Even Max Payne realised that his life was a video game. But that didn’t come across as anything more than a cynical shock tactic. When Metal Gear Solid 2 refers back to a scenario from the first game in a way that makes no internal sense, it feels genuinely creepy, because it has earned its significance.

The deep unsettling feeling reminded me of my favourite parts of Monkey Island 2, and the two games share many of the same narrative strengths. The malleability of their respective realities are set up from the beginning and threaded throughout, a constant underlying feeling of things being slightly off. Metal Gear Solid 2 talks about simulations, about ‘war as a video game’ from the start. And both games use the way they tear into their realities to interrogate and tear apart the stories of their predecessors in effective ways. Snake gets to deliver the key message: ‘legends are usually bad news’. It left me with a lot to think about. And that’s it’s Metal Gear Solid 2‘s biggest success. It’s imperfect, sometimes clumsy, and it relies on the player being invested enough to enjoy being tricked, but it has a level of ambition and imagination that allows it to pull it off.