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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
The year is 2003. We've all thoroughly enjoyed Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, even if we have no idea what the heck was going on by the end of it. We didn't like Raiden very much, but the next generation gameplay more than made up for that.
How do you build on the success of the sequel? Where does the story go from there? The answers came at E3 that year, as the trailer for the next title was shown to an excited audience: Obviously, you take it right back to the Cold War in the 1960s, replacing the entire cast of characters in the process, and jazz it up with lots of spy film inspired cinematic camp. Kojima, you genius...
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is a strange one, and it's often hailed as one of the best titles in the series. Does it still hold up a decade and a half later?
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
Fun Times
I was definitely interested in finding out what MGS3 would be like after a year of promises regarding the new and improved gameplay. Snake - the 'father' of the Snake we know - isn't sneaking through boxy corridors anymore, but through the lush vegetation of a Russian forest, in an era that doesn't have all the fancy soliton radar systems players might be used to.
You'd have to slow the pace down, stalking your prey, adapting your camouflage to your surroundings, and utilising the plant and animal life around you to survive. Food and stamina would be as much of an issue as being spotted by an enemy patrol, and you bet they've learned some new tricks since MGS2 as well.
This game was set to push the PlayStation 2 as far as it would go, and I was on board with it all.
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
Like previous Metal Gear titles, I've played through this game multiple times, across a couple of releases. While I apparently have trophies for the HD Collection's remastering of Snake Eater, I really can't remember playing it. I've also played both the original PS2 game and its own mini-remaster in the form of MGS3: Subsistence, so I've got a grip on what the game offers. I've not touched the Nintendo 3DS port though. I still can't quite fathom why that was a thing.
Anyway, I've not done anything but watch MGS3 in several years, perhaps as many as ten, and so, once more, I've got a little challenge for myself: Can I rescue Sokolov and complete the Virtuous Mission?
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
I'm playing the HD Collection once more, and it looks great. Again, thanks to that bloody short controller cable, I'm only a few feet away from the TV, on a cushion on the floor, cursing my ageing body for not being as fit as I'd like. The only positives I've got is that there are a lot of cutscenes, so I can at least put the controller down and sit back comfortably.
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| Source // Konami |
Frustrations
I've no way of getting screenshots, and the Internet - be it official sources or the fans - seems fascinated with only grabbing stills of the cutscenes. I'll try my best.
It is the middle of the 1960s, and the long story short is that our target, Russian scientist/engineer Nikolai Sokolov is building the next great threat to world peace. Only he doesn't want to. He successfully fled to the US but was traded back on the condition that Russia leaves Cuba. You know, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hideo Kojima has always been a fan of interweaving reality in with his fiction, but MGS3 starts off just a little wackier than the others.
In fact, it starts off with an almost ridiculous but now somewhat iconic theme song, sung over an animated title sequence full of snake skeletons and camo patterns. It - visually and audibly - is an evolution on James Bond films. We're not quite in the same territory as 007 is, but it's the era of wise-talking, good looking action heroes that will no doubt end up with the girl.
Eventually, we get to our mission. We're going to perform the worlds first HALO jump (someone has to, why not the legendary Naked Snake?), infiltrate the factory deep in the middle of the jungle where Sokolov is being held, and grab him from under Russian noses in the space of a few hours.
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
Sadly, we're told of aaaaaalll this backstory on the way down, through archival footage and hand-drawn cutscenes within cutscenes. Just as we jump out of a plane. Instead of bursting into the jungle and finding ourselves neck-deep in trouble, a briefing saps the energy out of the room. By the time it's over, I almost forgot I was still parachuting.
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| Source // Konami |
As soon as we land, we're on the radio, the 60s version of the Codec, chatting with our support crew as though this is the first mission we've ever been on. It has to be like for the purposes of new players, of course, but it's so out of place with the story that I'm getting distracted already.
We're introduced to the Boss, our mentor, who will play a pivotal role in the game, and indeed the larger Metal Gear story as a whole. She suggests we try to remember the basics of Close Quarters Combat, which she taught us, and which Snake is apparently rusty in, having been with the Green Berets for a few years. What? Couldn't keep practising CQC on the side, Snake?
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
CQC is one of many new additions to MGS3, and it's one that to this day I still can't quite get the hang of. In the first game, you could punch, kick, throw and choke guards out. In MGS2 you could hold them up by pointing a gun at them, and use them as human shields. Here, you can do all of that, and more.
You can interrogate them for intel, you can move around and fire your weapon at other guards, or you can savagely slice their throat out, all based on which combination of buttons you press. Press and hold the circle button to grab a guard. Press and hold it too hard and you slice his throat open. Want to know how many guards died to that on this run? Nearly everyone I grabbed...
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
But CQC doesn't need to be used at all if you're good enough at sneaking around the guards in the first place. The d-pad is used to move so slowly that twigs fear to make sounds when you step on them, but fast enough to move around without guards noticing, and the analogue stick is sensitive to how hard you push it, allowing you to walk and run with ease.
You're almost as mobile on your stomach, which you may be doing a lot of as you hide amongst the tall grass, your eyes continually flickering up to the camo index to see what you need to adjust. It displays how visible you are in your current predicament. Lie on the floor, motionless, with facepaint and leaf camo, and you're practically invisible. Run around wearing the American Flag on your face, and you're very much not.
Standing, crouching, moving, making noise all contribute to this index, and with no radar or vision cones to be able to see what a guard is looking at, that number is all you've got to go on. Is 40% high enough? Can I do this at 65%? Mixing and matching to suit your surroundings is one of the many highlights of the game.
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| Source // Konami |
But it also highlights one of the worst parts of the game. The menus. Nearly everything you do, including all the new mechanics introduced in Snake Eater, will require you to trawl through the menus.
Want to change your camo? Hit Start, select Camouflage, choose Face or Uniform, choose a design, back out of the menus, back into the game. Thankfully, it'll update the index number in the menu, so you know what'll work when you're finally free to play again.
Picked up a new weapon but can't find it? Try looking in your backpack. To reduce the amount of equipment on the L2 and R2 menus, things you don't want to carry can be put in the backpack, so that your in-game equipment menus scroll by much faster. Can anyone remember what happens when I press and hold R2 to change weapons? The game auto-pauses, that's what. I have all the time in the world to find any piece of equipment I want before getting back to the game. Why do I need a backpack?
Animals can be killed or captured to provide Snake with a food source. The hungrier he gets, the worse he'll be to control. His aim will be shaky, his wounds will heal slower. You need to feed, but that's all buried in a menu too.
Finally, there is a cure system. An entire system dedicated to patching up your wounds. Cuts and scrapes require disinfecting, stitching and bandaging. Broken bones require splints. You might even have to dig foreign objects out of your flesh with a knife, but all of this is done with a fancy X-ray view pointing to an injury, and a checklist of things to apply to it. Scroll through the menus, use the required items in any order you wish, and that's it. Healing time: Now. It's done. Congrats.
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| Source // Konami |
Further Fun Times
When you look at how MGS3 does things, it is, to put it kindly, a product of its time. It still uses the control scheme that only makes sense to Metal Gear fans, though thankfully today's versions of the game come with almost full camera control - try playing the original fixed view if you don't believe how much that addition can help you out.
To put it in less than stellar words, it's bonkers how it does things, and yet it's the very fact that it is bonkers that makes it some kind of incredible.
Take that cure menu, for example. It sucks, but you can spin Snake around so fast that when you get back into the game itself, he throws up. Which cures his poisoning, too, if you happened to have been bitten.
The food menu is sparse, but it allows you to capture a snake and then when the time is right, hurl it at an enemy guard and watch him panic. It makes for a much more useful distraction than knocking on a wall.
The first few sections of the game are wibbly-wobbly corridors and halls with an awful lot of plant life trying to disguise that fact, but they're also playgrounds to experimenting with all these systems. There is a cutscene that outright tells you to shoot bees' nests out of trees so that they fall onto guards.
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| Source // Konami |
A single nest took three guards out of the map, allowing me to cross a rope bridge in peace -which I didn't fall off, like most of us did back in the day. I got to the other side, put another guard to sleep, hid him in the tall grass and saw three blips on my motion detector - the guards who fled just a minute or two ago. I hid from them around a rock and watch them walk within inches of their sleeping buddy, oblivious because they couldn't see his camouflaged body amongst the grass.
The next area was a ruined factory, surrounded by guards, containing our friend Sokolov.
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
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| Source // Konami |
Now I absolutely ballsed this section up. Instead of going in quietly, I went in so loud and bloody that I think my kill count is close to twenty. I frankly didn't remember this many guards being here. Naturally, once they radio in for support, they come in groups of four to hunt you down. You can hide, you can run, you can shoot their radios out and put them to sleep. It's a sandbox of sorts.
I took the violent approach - I was spotted, I might as well - gunning my way through guards with a machine gun and shotgun I'd found on my travels. The controls in the heat of the moment are awful. I watched a YouTube video of people playing MGS3 for the first time and thinking that it couldn't be that bad, but no, it can. Hold R1 to enter first-person, push Square to raise your gun and fire... L1 aims, somehow. Still yet to work out how that works...
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
After another round of cutscenes, where we're introduced to and immediately school a young Revolver Ocelot, we're ready to escort Sokolov back out the way we came, all the way to the United States.
Until yet more cutscenes, obviously.
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
Further Frustrations
We happen to catch Sokolov during the end of Phase 1 of the Shagohod operations, the Shagohod being a nuclear-equipped battle tank that looks set to replace rockets as the primary method of launching nukes. We catch a glimpse of it, perched on a hill, giant screw wheels clawing into the clifftop below it, huge barrel pointing at its target.
It is the goofiest looking thing in Metal Gear, and it is going to destroy the world if we don't do something about it. That'll be for another mission, however. We need to get Sokolov to safety.
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| Source // Konami |
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| Source // Konami |
Luckily, this escort mission takes place entirely in cutscenes, and if you weren't put off by Kojima trying to wrangle the Cold War into the Metal Gear story, you might just be by the introduction of the Cobra Unit.
Headed up by the Boss herself, who now appears to have defected to the Soviet Union, the Cobras comprise of a moody astronaut, a hundred-year-old sniper, an eccentric man-spider and a guy who shoots bees out of his mouth.
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| Source // PlayStation |
I wish I was making some of this up, but you all know I'm not. You can write this stuff, but you sure can't say it... The Fury, the End, the Fear and the Pain will poke their heads into the story and will disappear just as quickly. They are, with one exception, utterly pointless. I don't know why they're even here.
The idea is that they each carry an emotion into battle and that a soldier isn't complete until they've found their emotion to take with them. Most of these names aren't emotions, of course, but that's as irrelevant as they are.
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| Source // PlayStation |
Further Fun Times
With that one exception, however; the End. I'm skipping ahead a bit here, we'll get back to the Virtuous Mission shortly, but it's with good reason.
For everything ridiculous about Snake Eater, there is something so golden to offset it. Most of the boss fights against the Cobra Unit are laughable, but to compensate for them is perhaps the greatest boss fight in gaming.
Spread across multiple vast jungle stages is a sniper duel between you and the End, the grandfather of Sniping. If you thought the battle with Sniper Wolf in MGS1 was tense, you're in for a treat as you have to use all your wits to not only survive the fight but to track down your prey before he finds you.
His scope will catch the sunlight, and his footprints will highlight his tracks, but he could be anywhere. The fight can literally go on for a while - so long, perhaps, that the End can even die of old age during the process, and that's not even the only unusual way this boss fight can end.
But to not spoil that for anyone who hasn't played, back to our mission.
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
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| Source // Metal Gear Wiki |
As we taught Revolver Ocelot a cutscene lesson, so the Boss teaches us. We're battered, bruised, and bones are broken as she and the Cobra Unit fly away with the big bad Volgin and his new toys - some nuclear warheads.
We're not ready for this, the Boss says. We're still a child, she declares, as she throws us off the bridge, plunging into the river below. We heal our wounds and await recovery, only to see that Volgin has already launched one of the nuclear weapons, and the Cold War has just gotten rather hot.
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| Source // Konami |
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| Source // PlayStation |
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| Source // PlayStation |
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| Source // PlayStation |
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| Source // PlayStation |
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| Source // PlayStation |
Thus begins Operation Snake Eater, a mission to eradicate the Shagohod and eliminate Colonel Volgin, portrayed through a tale of espionage, double agents, and lots of action.
It isn't an open-world jungle to get lost in, sadly, but a funnelled playground of opportunities, and an awful lot of cutscenes linking it all together. As far as the story goes, some of it is alright. Some of it you could get behind and would like to see fleshed out a little more. Some of it should have been cut.
Some of the most memorable characters of the series can be found in Snake Eater, and perhaps the most tragic story of them all is that of the Boss. It's not until you've played through this game and experienced that story - as weird as it may be in places - that you start to see the frustration fans had with Metal Gear Solid 3 being turned into a pachinko machine.
Final Word
I've played through Snake Eater many times, and while the ending can only really be powerful once, it still lives long in the memory as a highlight in video gaming, despite all its flaws.
The controls are uncomfortable until you get to grips with them. The story is baffling, and once again seems a little lost in translation. The cutscenes are as long as ever but are for the most part something worth watching. The new mechanics are insane, in all senses of the word. It is a game that is far from perfect when you pick it apart, but somehow still works.
I think my time with the game has long gone. When I played it, I enjoyed my time with it, and I played it multiple times over the years, so it must have something going for it. But now, I think it's showing its age, or I am. Nowadays, it has lost a little something. "It's phenomenal, but...", and the list of 'but's' is getting bigger.
But... it really is a game you must play. If only one Metal Gear game were on the list, I'd be seriously umming and ahhing over whether it was MGS3 or MGS1. For ambition, it has to go to Snake Eater. For a cohesive story, I'd go with Metal Gear Solid. For an emotional one, well, back to Snake Eater.
If you haven't yet played it, grab the HD Collection and get going. Persist through the control issues you may have. Fight the flaws. Put yourself in front of the TV until it's finished.
And then watch this maniac.
Fun Facts
Originally planned as a PlayStation 3 release, the game was instead crammed onto the PlayStation 2 because the new console was too far away from being produced at the time.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, developed by Konami Computer Entertainment Japan, first released in 2004.
Versions played: Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, PlayStation 2, 2005, via teenage memory
Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, PlayStation 2, 2006, via teenage memory.
Metal Gear Solid: HD Collection, PlayStation 3, 2012.