With the Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain around the corner, the community as a whole has become especially nostalgic. This is looking like the end of an era, and the finale of a series of games made famous by the sheer mastery of the moment to moment drama and action. There are so many particular sequences of noticeable brilliance in the decades long series that its almost difficult to rank them. We’ll give it a try, though.
10. Return to Shadow Moses
Guns of the Patriots is a game that lives almost solely in its moments, using every second of screen time to work in some bit of lore clean up or nostalgia. Maybe one of the most subtle and effective of these moments is when, after 20 years, long time series devotees step back onto the snowy Shadow Moses once again. Walking through the ruins triggers audio flashbacks from the original game, and more than once does the game provide you with visual callbacks to the original 3D adventure via familiar camera angles or, more conspicuously, turning Old Snake back into the polygonal Solid Snake, complete with empty, featureless face and drawn-on bandanna
9. The Death of Gray Fox
Through the hints the cyborg ninja incessantly provided throughout your fight with him, you discover that this mysterious foe is actually one of Snake’s old comrades, Frank Jaeger. After his disappearance, he had become an integral part of many of the side characters personal misfortunes, and his fight with Snake had motivated him to find redemption before a death that he felt was inevitable. Attempting to help Snake take down the Metal Gear REX, he is killed by the device, and empties his conscience on Snake, revealing to him all the secrets of the events so far.
8. Naked Raiden
A testament to Kojima’s strange and wonderful sense of humor, Raiden spends a good portion of the game completely without gear – or clothes. After being kidnapped by Olga he’s immediately freed, the entire thing being a ruse (and a clever call back to Snake’s torture scene in the previous game). The operation was a distraction in order to create a space where Snake could infiltrate Arsenal Gear. Raiden would have to rendezvous with Snake, but do so completely naked. Thusly, naked cartwheels were born.
7. Big Boss’s Death
The very end of Guns of the Patriots finds Old Snake coming to a rough realization of his current situation. The world has been put on a course that is impossible to change, and he is a relic of a time that is long gone. Everything he knew was either wrong or twisted, and he had grown to resent his legacy. He resolved to take his own life at the grave of Big Boss, his father. He’s interrupted by, well, Big Boss. The war hero begins to tell Snake everything there is to know about his role in the Philosopher’s Legacy, before the virus in his body is activated and he dies. Not before making one final salute to The Boss, who is buried next to his own grave.
6. Snake’s Torture
A significant scene in Twin Snakes, Ocelot’s torture of Solid Snake is a pivotal moment in the game, mostly because it display’s the game’s love for breaking the fourth wall with such grisly flair. Mashing buttons is how you survive this scene, as Ocelot blatantly tells you in a bizarre out of character moment. Addressing the player directly becomes a very interesting motivational tool, though, and this its really the first (and best) time it happens.
5. Raiden vs Vamp
Raiden and Vamp have an understandable amount of beef between them by the time Sons of Liberty ends. Guns of the Patriots becomes a sufficient venue for them to settle the score. The first time they meet, after a re-imagined Cyborg Ninja Raiden lays waste to a squad of gekkos, a melee ensues that becomes the visual thesis statement for the pair’s attitude towards combat, death, and each other. They realize that they are more a like than maybe they even want to be. By they’re final encounter, where they fight atop a wrecked Metal Gear REX while Snake blows oncoming gekkos to bits, they’re ready to be rid of each other by any means necessary.
4. The Naked Snake Heel Turn
A lot happens to Naked Snake by the end of Snake Eater, and most of it isn’t exactly clear to him until the very end. Up until his last encounter with EVA, he is under the impression that his mission to kill The Boss is because she turned traitor, and was helping the Soviet Union build a nuclear weapon unlike the world had ever seen. Turns out, she was a double agent, working for the US government to get close to the Philosopher’s Legacy, a cache of funds and knowledge tucked away that could be used with great effect by whomever possessed it. Upon stealing its location, The Boss was to give it to Snake, and then be killed by him, to keep up appearances and prevent all out war between the super powers. Too bad the woman deemed completely expendable by the government was Snake’s greatest mentor and friend. After earning the title of Big Boss, his ideals skewed, and his slow decent into darkness began.
3. Man in the Microwave
So a giant mechanized island with enough firepower to wipe out whole nations is plotting a course to the capital, and after fighting your way to the heart of it, you realize that the only thing separating you from you goal is a very long hallway that is radiating microwaves. A demoralized Old Snake encounters this in the final act of Guns of the Patriots, and with really no other option, he begins the trek. The real power in the moment comes from the split screen view of his comrades struggling in battle. It helps reinforce the idea that a lot of people are counting on Snake, and that time is rapidly running out. It’s a brutal scene, mashing buttons wildly while you watch Snake kill himself in the worst way possible
2. Psycho Mantis’ Display of Power
The boss battle between Snake and Mantis is one of legend, but what is often understated is the series of events leading up to it. Strange paranormal phenomena begin happening in the rooms surrounding the office you meet the killer in. Pictures on the walls begin to change, items and furniture are in different spots every time you enter and exit rooms. Then Meryl’s possession becomes a capstone to the eerie happenings, before finally the psychic reveals himself, rumbling your controller and reading your memory cards thoughts. It’s one of the most surreal moments in video games, for sure.
1. Fission Mailed
Sons of Liberty’s plot is a dense and confounding mystery the first time you take it all in. It’s contextual beats are vague and obtuse, and you never really have a complete handle on the story. By the end of the game, you understand why: the whole thing has been one elaborate lie.
At the same point in which you make your naked sprint to through Arsenal Gear to find Snake, the verisimilitude of the game’s world begins to crumble. Your commanding officer, Roy Campbell, is exposed as an AI. Your presence on the oil rig is proven to be an elaborate test by shady powers looking to prove that they can control every aspect of war and conflict. Your enemies were really no different than you, pawns in a game. Hell, you the player were no different than Raiden or Solidus, all actors taken along for the most surreal ride ever. The game begins to rebel against you, telling you to do things that would compromise your progress, like turning the game off or giving you a game over screen and pretending that you died. As the Philosophers were losing control over Raiden and acting desperately to regain dominance, so too was the game attempting to recapture you.
Raiden literally liberates himself from everything, including you, by the end of the game, evidenced by him throwing away his dog tags that read whatever name you input in the beginning of the game after slaying Solidus. There are few games that have been able to deliver a bigger, more existential twist since, and there is no better example of Hideo Kojima’s ultimate dominance of the video game as an art form than this pivotal ending act.
What’s your favorite Metal Gear moment? Tweet them @CurseGamepedia, or leave them in the comments below.