Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater—One of the Greatest Games of All Time
Let's talk about a masterpiece...
Yes, I know, I made quite the bold statement in the headline there, but in today’s edition of Good Game?, I’m going to talk about exactly why I (alongside many others) truly believe that Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is one of the greatest video games ever made, and still sits at a level that few releases since 2004 have been able to reach. Now, I won’t be going around calling MGS3 underrated—it got rave critical reviews, and just about everyone who played the game absolutely loves it. It did, however, sell considerably less than its predecessor Metal Gear Solid 2.
So, let’s talk about it. What exactly is it that makes MGS3 such a hallmark in video game design, both in terms of being fun to play, as well as an excellent example of video games being a true form of art.
The setup
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater takes place in the tropical rainforests of Soviet Russia during the height of the Cold War. Its story revolves around an extraction of a defecting scientist going horribly wrong, and the protagonist, codenamed Naked Snake, having to take down the main villain’s nuclear arsenal and destroy his former mentor’s elite crew of super soldiers before the Cold War goes really hot, really fast.
Despite Metal Gear Solid 3 being, at the time of publishing, almost two decades old, I’m going to do my best to avoid as many spoilers as I can. Metal Gear as a franchise has always been filled to the brim with insane plot twists and character moments, after all, but I do want to focus on two distinct characters: the protagonist Naked Snake, and his former mentor, The Boss.
Snake, The Boss, and Dramatic Irony
Since MGS3 is a prequel, being the chronological game in the entire franchise, we know exactly which characters are going to make it, how these characters will evolve in the story’s future, and most importantly, who’s going to die.
Owing to Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2, we know that Naked Snake, at some point, takes on the title of Big Boss. We also know that there are going to be events that play out at some point that turn him from a goofy, generally nice person to a villain with his own nuclear arsenal, private army, and even child soldiers.
Metal Gear Solid 3 plays brilliantly into this idea by pitting Snake—an in-universe example of one of the best soldiers to ever go out on a mission—against The Boss who, alongside being a mentor that played a huge part in training Snake, is also ostensibly a mother figure to him.
Ultimately, this makes MGS3 the story, or at least the first chapter of the story about Naked Snake’s descent into villainy. What kind of well-adjusted person goes around amassing nuclear weaponry and child soldiers, after all?
This is a brilliant example of the concept of dramatic irony. Dramatic irony comes from Greek tragedies. The audience of these tragedies know exactly what's going to happen. The audience understands a character's words or actions will impact the story down the line. The characters themselves, however, have no idea about the significance of their words or actions.
We know exactly how Snake’s mind will get warped. We know that he has to kill The Boss and become Big Boss. And most importantly, we know that something in the events of Metal Gear Solid 3 will give rise to the entire franchise’s main antagonists—The Patriots. And this paves the way to our next point of discussion: the build up to, and the final fight between Naked Snake and The Boss. A literal Boss fight, if you will.
How storytelling and gameplay can feed into each other
During the game’s opening Virtuous Mission and the titular Operation Snake Eater, Naked Snake and The Boss cross paths several times, with the first time (Virtuous Mission) and last times (Operation Snake Eater) being the most important ones. The first couple of times, The Boss is able to outclass Naked Snake in hand-to-hand combat ridiculously easily. The end of the Virtuous Mission involves Snake sustaining several injuries, including broken bones, and then being thrown off a bridge. Their second meeting at the beginning of Operation Snake Eater also shows The Boss being a level beyond Snake in terms of physical and mental conditioning when she’s able to effortlessly take him down and dismantle his pistol in the span of a few seconds.
Throughout rest of Operation Snake Eater, Snake has to contend against The Boss’ own group of super soldiers, dubbed the Cobra Unit, and has to overcome the challenges they present. Each member of the Cobra Unit has special powers: The Pain can control hornets, The Fear can go invisible, The End can use photosynthesis to lie motionless for extended periods of time as he waits for his sniper target, The Fury is an insane astronaut with a flame thrower, and The Sorrow is a god damned ghost. Each member of the Cobra Unit—named after the emotion they feel during battle—puts Snake to the test (as an aside, the boss fight against The End is definitely one of, if not THE greatest boss fight in the entire history of video games), and he eventually has to surpass them.
Ultimately, Snake faces off against The Boss—formerly known as The Joy in the Cobra Unit’s naming convention—in a classic duel. This final boss fight is what is usually referred to in gaming circles as a mirror boss. Both the protagonist and antagonist share a similar moveset and capabilities, and these bosses end up being the ultimate test and expression of a player’s mastery over the game. Popular examples of mirror bosses are Vergil from Devil May Cry 3 (a game I’ll talk about down the line), and Jeanne from Bayonetta (another game I’ll talk about down the line).
There are few words that can adequately describe the final showdown between Snake and The Boss. The entire game, both in its storytelling as well as through gameplay, leads up to this moment. Both Snake as well as the player have undoubtedly approached some level of mastery with Metal Gear Solid 3’s deep and complex CQC (close quarters combat) melee combat system, and the boss fight goes how you would expect, culminating in the player’s, and Snake’s, ultimate test.
In a wonderful example of the integration between gameplay and storytelling, the difficulty of the final fight really comes down to the player’s mastery over the CQC system. Most of The Boss’s offence revolves around rushing in for a quick melee tackle and unloading her gun. Once the player figures out the timing, the player can counter the tackle into a throw of their own, giving them an opening to take down the boss with some bullets of their own. There’s no automatic “I win” button for players who may not have the practice with CQC that they might need, and in fact, the final boss even has a time limit that results in instant death by airstrike if the boss fight doesn’t end in time.
I hope you remember the basics of CQC
Speaking of CQC, I think this is a good point to talk about MGS3’s gameplay. Following series tradition (at the time), Metal Gear Solid 3 is a linear stealth-oriented action game. Sure, it has boss fights and you have several guns and other armaments to play with, but the control scheme and general game design has been geared towards MGS3 playing out like, as the game itself likes to say, a sneaking mission.
Modern games with a third-person perspective all tend to use the same control scheme. Left stick moves the character, right stick moves the camera, left trigger aims a gun, right trigger shoots a gun, clicking the left stick makes the character sprint, clicking the right stick pulls off a melee attack, you get the picture. Metal Gear Solid 3’s control scheme, when seen from a modern perspective, looks absolutely insane. Left and right triggers are used for inventory management, and Square/X (depending on your controller) is how you fire a gun.
The idiosyncrasies of Metal Gear Solid 3’s control scheme allow for a surprising level of control over your character, however. How many games let you stand on your tip toes to take a look at enemy patrols over a fence you’re hiding behind? How many other games let you pull off complex melee combos despite having a gun equipped? MGS3’s control system allows for a level of mastery that few games can really hope to offer. It’s one of those games where, while most players will get by learning the basics, it becomes really obvious to see when a true master of the game is playing.
I should learn how to end my ramblings better
Despite the rather large wall of text I wrote about the beauty of the final boss fight, Metal Gear Solid 3 is filled with smaller moments exactly like the 3-act structure between Snake and The Boss. Every single time you encounter Ocelot, for instance, is yet another example of dramatic irony considering how Ocelot would evolve as a character in the rest of the series. Your encounter with The Sorrow is going to lead to you questioning just how many lives you took to get to this point. And even smaller details like Snake’s lack of depth perception after a certain, pivotal story beat in the game. All of this comes together to make up one of the greatest games of all time—Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.