Metal Gear Solid 2 - The Hideo Kojima Experience

so any codec moments from you snake the first image is i don't think we can use this when it comes to the most divisive entries in video game series well good luck finding one bigger than metal gear solid 2. and usually seems whenever you try to talk to people about this thing they either seem to love it or hate it i'm someone who falls into the former category though and from the first time i played it way back in 2001 to even now we're playing it again in 2002. i still think it's one of the best games for not only the playstation 2 but just in general kept you waiting huh hideo kojima i think is kind of like the quentin tarantino of video game directors and i feel like the guy's often frequently imitated but barely replicated and there's always just something incredibly unique about everything he's worked on we are the sons of the boss medical solo 2 might not have the emotional lows and highs of metal gear solid 3 or the more polished and refined stealth mechanics of the fourth game but it's kind of hard to deny the impact that this thing had and there's a reason why so many people look back on it fondly metal gear only has room for one i still remember the side of my parents coming home that day and seeing my dad carrying a playstation 2 under his arm and knowing that i'd finally got my hands on it i mean i think by that point i played that original demo so many times it started to damage the disc you have to remember too that this was back in the early 2000s before internet culture was even a thing so there were no mainstream review sites like ign or gamespot not to mention there were no youtubers with a bazillion subs to tell you how to think back then we didn't really try to deconstruct games or analyze every single aspect you'd just buy a game and kind of hope for the best and in the case of metal gear silver 2 well it's one of those times that i think that risk paid off i almost kind of feel sorry for people who missed out on that era of gaming do you know what i mean like we just had titles back then coming out constantly which were really just industry defining experiences no that's not what happened i mean [ __ ] man let's consider that in 2001 alone we had grand theft auto 3 devil may cry silent hill 2 halo and max payne so for medigal the two to stand out amongst these titans and also arguably come out near the top well damn that's saying something what's also funny too is that it comes from an era where you'd get a trailer for an upcoming game and not only will the game often look as good as that initial footage but in some cases it actually looked better freeze now this is also a sequel that i think has had the biggest upgrade not only visually but also in terms of the gameplay and i think that jump from the playstation 1 version to the playstation 2 probably has to be one of the biggest graphical leaps of all time i mean go compare how snake looks in the first game for instance to how he now looks in metal gear solo 2. i mean you can almost see the individual hairs on the guys chin now again how about that next generation mullet it's glorious a mullet that in my head cannon is really a reference to jack burton's mullet from big trouble in little china who jack burke me codec calls it back and they're now also fully animated with the characters actually moving their mouse during these instead of them just being these 2d static images no i'm serious and someone at konami also realized that it wasn't really that much fun mashing the x button to get through these things so now you can press the triangle button to blitz through entire conversations in seconds no i'm serious later in the game the scale for some of these set pieces during these incredible cinematics all of which are motion captured now and backed by a score by harry grigson williams are just leaps and bounds more detailed than anything we'd seen prior that's metal gear it's already active the whole thing starts off on the outside of this giant tanker with the scrolling new york city skyline in the background and this rain effect that still looks impressive even by today's standards you know what i'd even go so far as to say that no other game since has ever captured that feeling of being cold and wet to the bone in the middle of this thundering rainstorm i mean look if you can name a game that you think beats it well then go ahead by all means when you go into first person mode you can even see the range droplets hitting the screen as if it's you know bouncing off your own face and in third person mode you'll also see the rain hitting the characters i remember in a behind the scenes video they said that it was easier just actually animating this on the character model specifically as opposed to calculating every single raindrop which is also just one of the many little technical feats of wizardry that the game manages to pull off so yeah safe to say it didn't take too long playing this thing for the big bucks spent on that new playstation 2 to start paying for themselves i know i might seem a bit dumb with me saying how good the game looks when most of my footage is from this hd collection that they brought out for the playstation 3 but even looking back to the original ps2 hardware in all that 480i glory it's still one of the best looking games for the platform plus there's just not really any other game that looks like metal gear solo 2. it's got this really unique art style and aesthetic that's just never really been replicated in fact i'd argue that in some ways it even looks better than the third game there's like a more simplistic and clear look to the image here on the other hand though that unmisplaylist thing that came as a result of trying to recreate these dense forests kind of makes the third game a bit harder on the eyes well you know in some ways the forest environments as good as they look are really just the same as you know any other generic looking forest you'd see in a video game the big shell and the tank are stood out amongst anything else you'd see in gaming at the time back then and i think even now if you look at a screenshot of other environments you're going to instantly know where it is and if you want to see a prime example of game dev squeezing as much as possible out of limited technology well [ __ ] man this is it right here excellent speech my friend i mean instead of just one location to explore now you've got two you've got the tanker and then the oil rig for the second chapter and even the oil rig alone is way more detailed than shadow moses more than that though are the awesome little incidental details someone which you might not even notice but your brain did for instance once you get inside that tanker and out of the rain you'll even notice your vision is slightly foggy for a few seconds to simulate basic condensation and in an even cooler attention to detail if you spent too long outside to begin with snake ends up catching a cold and start sneezing attracting nearby guards that's part of what i've always loved about metagela 2 was stuff that they've added into the game but stuff that never really needed to be and it's just added in there on the off chance that someone goes off and starts experimenting with all these mechanics like there's a bar area in the tanker and you can go behind there and just start shooting up bottles in fact you'll even notice you can shoot the individual ice cubes inside this bucket if you plant c4 bombs on the swarms of sea lice and then detonate them in first person mode for some reason a bunch of these things will then fly towards the screen and splat onto it like their roadkill the [ __ ] is that it's just a bit of an insane level of environmental detail to really make the player feel like they were gaming in next-gen and honestly i don't think we saw environmental interaction like this on the pc until the release of half-life 2 you know like three years later not to mention next-gen bird [ __ ] yeah run too quickly over bird [ __ ] and this came and you're gonna end up tits up and yeah how could i forget that it still might be the first if not the only game i've ever played that had someone piss on me and yeah man i'm talking full on fire hose piss string but i think hands down the element which has had the biggest upgrade is how the cinematics are handled that's what you think now that's not to make fun of the cinematics in the first game and there were still some badass moments which were captured pretty well considering the basic limitations of the playstation 1. i think that shootout with meryl and snake is still pretty awesome and watching snakes somersault to avoid an incoming tank shell is pretty damn cool send him a message but there was a distinct lack of detail in some pretty key areas you know like the facial animation really where the modeling was really just these basic looking polygons with barely distinguishable facial features you're strange well all of that shit's now been improved and you can look at a character now and get a better idea of what's going on inside their head how's that possible the first in kiana that snake has with olga you can see the arrogance and confidence on her face as she just thinks that snake's another bozo trying to hold her up at gunpoint i mean if only she knew that she was dealing with a guy who's turned hiding into a cardboard box into an art form it really does feel like you're watching a movie at times because some of these cinematics really do just seem to go on and on which is always something that's been a point of contention for a lot of people that opening scene on the tanga has snake watching while these russian special forces sneak on board and methodically execute all of these marines and the camera angles the choreography and the music kind of make it feel like you're watching a tom clancy film [Music] and then one of the most fun things to do is to go back in later into the theater mode and swap out all of these npcs around to different models [Music] plus it also helps to re-establish these old characters and make them seem more capable identify yourself like take ocelot for instance and now consider that the last time we saw this guy in action was when he got his ass handed to him by a snake and then shortly after that when he had his hand yeted off by the ninja you were lucky we'll meet again ocelot again returns as one of the main antagonists really setting him up i think to become the foil for almost the entire series from this point on i mean he's kind of like the biff tannen of the metal gear solid series what are you looking at butthead i mean the dude even travels back in time essentially in the third game and is still a major dick that's major ocelot to you during this whole prologue sequence set on the tanker he's shown to be an absolute badass rocking that revolver a duster and spurs and showing again that he's a completely unpredictable wild card this time instead of being told he's a badass we actually get to see it [Music] it also works to set up the boss encounters like seeing vamp for the first time obliterate an entire seal team really helps set the guy up as this unstoppable force of nature for the inevitable fight [Music] and watching fortune deflect incoming bullets and grenades you know again like it's nothing helps establish your abilities as well but more than that seeing snake throughout the entire game from a second character's perspective just ups that guy's cool factor by about a thousand percent snake been waiting long yeah i guess i should probably talk about the biggest shock of all time when this game came out was that you actually spent maybe 80 of the game playing as someone else entirely so that's why you changed my code name and after playing through that tanker section for a good three or four hours suddenly snake is gone and instead you're now playing as a pretty boy named ryden a dude with bright blonde hair a baby face and a purposefully androgynous body shape it's like someone took the lead singer from hansen and made them a video game protagonist and the fact they managed to hide this from pretty much everyone until the game launched is [ __ ] astounding is this some kind of sick joke his appearance is so ambiguous that even the president has to go in for the old crotch grab to double check because i guess simply asking was too much of a hassle you're a man yeah no [ __ ] long before this guy was a walking meme that went around killing gorilla robots with a sword he was little more than just a deer in the headlights sent into an environment where he was arguably unprepared to deal with a threat that he barely understood it's actually probably a good thing that internet gaming culture and sites like twitter weren't as big back then because people bitched about riding back then enough as it was let alone if we had to listen to fairweather fans throw their hat into the ring as well what makes you so sure but was it a letdown not being able to play a snake from that point well yeah maybe but it's actually a pretty ballsy move from kojima to do something like that plus i remember he said that one of his main reasons for doing it was that he thought it would make snake look even more impressive you know when you saw him from someone else's perspective which i think it really did snake i can't handle this alone okay i'll take care of it i'm going to show you how sniping should be handled take a good look and anyway controlling ryden was exactly the same as controlling snake only some of the animations were a little bit different so it's not like you were playing as some kind of inferior character not at all that whole weird subplot of snake being in disguise too calling himself pliskin again another john carpenter reference going over the head of no one else but ryden was also a fun way of handling things are you a navy seal actually i think part of what makes ryden's story so interesting is that we know right from the get-go that he's either being lied to or just blatantly missing the facts who is this ryden's been told that he's being sent into the big shell because the president's been captured by a terrorist group called dead cell kind of similar to the members of foxhound in the first game with their leader apparently being solid snake yeah that solid snake but i mean from the get-go we as players all know that that's completely horseshit and that's the idea we're supposed to not a chance and then it's about watching ryden figure these details out himself and how he chooses to handle it what's your name ryden that's an odd name instead of solid snake though it actually turns out to be an all-new antagonist solidus snake which is the second long lost and most evilest brother of snake yet apparently this guy was even the president at one point and how no one ever noticed that he looks exactly the same as solid snake is anyone's guess i mean at no point if campbell may ling otacon merrell or even snake turn on the tv there's also a lot of similarities here between what's happening to what happened back on the shadow moses base which of course we later learn is all intentional and part of the plan this situation i find it very nostalgic so this means ryden again spends a lot of his time talking to his commanding officer again roy campbell apparently along with the data analyst who can save his game in metal gear solid one it was mei ling but now it's ryden's girlfriend named rose a woman who has the personality of a [ __ ] ironing board i know that and i know i need to stay stronger but it even goes further than that you start off infiltrating the base fire a large freight elevator you encounter like a weird cyborg ninja who warned you about claymore mines be careful that our claymore mines are out there snake be careful their claymore mines around there just call me deep throat just call me deep throat deep throat and there's even a fun little fake out with ocelot where the guy's smart enough to make sure history doesn't repeat itself my hand you've got a sequence guiding a nikita missile you've got a sequence involving torch up and then a fight against a bunch of metal gear variants towards the end of the game only it's the anomalies that make things seem a bit interesting like that sudden appearance of this mysterious seal team member who seems to be very level headed and know a lot about what's going on are you two with still team 10 i didn't see you at the mission briefing oh we're with another squad [ __ ] and yeah if you thought the first game had a lot of weird fourth wall breaking moments well wait until you get to arsenal gear ryden turn the game console off right now what did you say the mission is a failure cut the power right now what's wrong with you don't worry it's a game i still think that snake just flat out referencing his infinite ammo bandana is about the funnest thing of all time if you run out of ammo you can have mine you got enough absolutely infinite ammo and that's really what sons of liberty is all about it's metal gear solid 2.0 cool now one of the main new mechanics they've added was the first person aiming mode which worked hand in hand with that new tranquilizer pistol this not only added in a useful new mechanic you know been able to shoot and target enemies much more accurately but it also kind of worked from a story sense first off i mean it's simply because snakes on this tank are under the impression that he's only going up against marines you know upstanding innocent soldiers who are just doing their job they're not terrorists or mercenaries and i'm sure they'd rather be doing anything other than slowly escorting a giant weapon of mass destruction up the middle of the hudson river on a cold ass nine but more than that i think it's also trying to tie into snake's character progression from the first game see at the end of the first game snake had to deal with the fact that he'd spent a lot of his career as a soldier pretty much killing most people he came across and if you played mgs1 the same way that i played mgs1 well then you probably killed a whole bunch of people there too so now in metal gear solar 2 it's like he's got more of an altruistic look on life and he's not so keen on just murdering everyone he comes across i mean you can still kill people if you really want to but i feel the game really makes a point now of making you feel bad for doing this death animations are incredibly gruesome with enemies screaming and taking much longer to slump to the ground and if you shoot someone at point blank range well that blood even essentially gets in your own eyes shoot someone with that m9 pistol though and they simply get knocked out and instead take a nice long nap the skill comes from making sure you're accurate enough to hit those vital body parts like the heart or other parts because if you shoot them in the hand or the foot well you may as well go make a cup of tea because that's about how long it's going to take for them to then pass out really at the end of the day i think the most skillful way to play stealth games you know short of just avoiding everyone entirely is going non-lethal unless it's a game where you've got no other option leaving a sea of unconscious bodies behind in your wake is better than a sea of corpses yeah these bodies don't magically vanish any more either so you might even have to pick them up and drag them into nearby lockers or out of sight it is kind of funny though because you've got all these cool looking weapons that are very much lethal in nature but something about playing the game that way just feels less satisfying to me on this though there really is no debate i think if you play a stealth game and kill everyone well you're an actual scrub and your family should just be embarrassed to even share blood with you metal gear solid one might have introduced the concept of non-lethal play-throughs but metal gear solid 2 really established it and you can now get through the entire game without killing a single person if you know how to and that of course goes for bosses too plus it also worked in tandem with my favorite new mechanic in the game where you can sneak up behind people and hold them up at gunpoint causing them to drop their dog tags freeze this became really important because collecting enough dog tags is going to unlock those very important new game plus items like the bandana and the stealth suit and honestly there's few things as fun in gaming as it is messing around with the enemy soldiers while you're still suits equipped anyway that holding up mechanic is just so fun and trying to find a way to get behind every single guard without them seeing you is what kind of made every area into almost like a mini puzzle as guards would often have these really erratic patrol routes there might even be guards who'd be reporting their status back to hq all the time and if these guys were unconscious for too long they'd even send in reinforcements to investigate so you'd have to make sure that these guys went down last it was nothing all clear once you got someone at gunpoint it's pretty much as easy as aiming it at a vital body part you know take your pick and then they do the shimmy shimmy shake and drop their dog tags these guys won't wait around forever though and if you just stand there for too long without doing anything you can even see that they're gonna slowly lower their arms back down to grab their weapon freeze but i think even more cooler than that was those [ __ ] who talk back to you are you going to shoot me kind of makes sense that not everyone would be enamored by the legendary solid snake which kind of meant that they'd be less likely to cooperate what are you so what do you do with these guys well you fire off a warning shot right near their stupid heads to let them know you mean business i actually found out years later that you could shoot near them to achieve this effect the first few times i played through this game i thought you had to wing them or kneecap them which i always kind of thought was really cruel watching these poor guys hobble on one leg or try to hold up their now wounded and quivering arm but hey nothing shuts someone up quicker than catching a bullet to the kneecap let me tell you don't kill me it just adds much more of a skill based element to the stealth here considering otherwise that whole mechanic is pretty bare-bones stuff i know that a lot of the stuff that made its way into this game were ideas that random employees at konami would apparently come up with and again going back to that behind the scenes doco they said that people who worked at konami at the time would often submit these random ideas to kojima some of which would be added into the game and i'd like to think that someone at konami here came up with this holding up mechanic during their lunch break which you know went on to become one of the game's most unique features just try to pull the trigger and there's a reason i think why people have made these hour long videos and all of the stuff that you can do here you know from sending otakon photos of all the pinup models and hearing his reactions ah this is uh what nothing it's nothing to wanking off inside a locker because yeah that's a thing in this game no that's not what happened now when it comes to the stealth system it's again by and large the same as the first game enemies patrol the area in a preset path and have a giant field of vision cone that you need to stay out of that much is unchanged when playing as ryden you need to log in each time you went to a new area for the first time which is kind of a weird addition but after that it's essentially the same system what happens when you're seeing though is quite a lot different now compared to metal gear solid one where every enemy seem to be part of a hive mind and would all suddenly know your exact location in metagaster 2 that enemy has to first radio for reinforcements if you're a good enough shot you can just outright shoot their radio preventing them from making that call and for maximum gamer points you can even do it as they're about to make the call it's the enemy [Music] if reinforcements are called in though this is where it starts to get a bit more intense because instead of it just being the same generic soldiers with the mass rifles now it's these heavily armoured guys with riot shields and shotguns that are going to make your life a living hell forcing you to retreat into a nearby room or vent to get away and if they know you're hiding in a specific spot then they'll go into like a breach in clear mode like they're a bunch of rainbow six siege sweat lords pushing in and checking all of the hiding spots to try to find you most often successfully but even if you manage to still stay hidden everyone in the air is going to go into a caution state for the next few minutes with a heightened awareness and a dope soundtrack to boot making it much trickier to stay hidden [Music] there's even a couple of times where i've noticed there's gonna be a guy guiding the exit to the area to make it even more harder to slip by i noticed and i kind of get it i mean it makes sense right if you saw a guy running around with a bandana and a super high-tech sneaking suit well you'd kind of want the boys to hang around for a bit of backup right this i think has always been one of the best new advancements that this entry added in and the way these guys methodically check a room is realistic and impressive stuff i know they had a military advisor helping out on this thing and you can really see where the money got spent there when you watch these guys close range you can see their tactics in play [Music] now you can fight back against them i mean it ain't impossible to kill them but like metal gear solid one before it it's still a game that's about sub diffuse over outright combat at least most of the time anyway so at some point you're gonna fire off your last ak bullet or use your last ration and have to hightail it out of there with your bandana between your legs so what's kind of something i missed about the sequels 2 was where it just kind of seemed to go back to a more simplistic approach with enemy reinforcements where that just kind of materialized out of nowhere during combat either way though it means you want to remain out of sight and out of mind most of the time and that's not too hard to do considering how basic the stealth really is i think outside of a couple of loud surfaces you can pretty much run right up behind everyone without them being none the wiser with them being none the wiser [ __ ] freeze when medical solo 2 came out it got a lot of comparisons to splinter cell which is kind of fair but also unfair in a lot of ways simply because they're really taking completely different approaches to the genre i mean it's like comparing quake to rainbow six or gran turismo to mario kart on the one hand splinter cell is a stealth game with a story attached to it but metal gear solar 2 is a story with a stealth game attached to it that makes sense yes there are stealth mechanics and it labels itself as tactical espionage action but they're really just the means of letting you get to that next set piece that next cinematic scripted event or boss fight and when i think back to playing this game i always think back to those key moments stupid machines less than i do think about the specifics of trying to get from point a to point b i mean i think back to sneaking around the outside of the tanker is snake immersed in that atmosphere as i'm drenched in rain i think i fight naga in the top of the ship but think of fighting back against the russians in that narrow corridor and then sneaking past those clueless marines as they're engrossed in that speech getting absolute freedom in autonomy though and how to get to that next key point is what makes the game so fun but it's still the cinematics that garner the most criticism because love it or hate it you're still going to be watching most of the game unfold in these unskippable cutscenes you know as much as you are controlling them during gameplay we have a little time so i'll be brief even though funnily enough i think metal gear solo 2 has the second shortest total cinematic time out of all these four original games and it wouldn't be a metal gear solid game if you didn't have to sit through a bunch of cinematics along with beating some outlandish bosses in these quarterback areas oh yeah man we're going there the boss fights this should be fun now compared to foxhound and metal gear solid 1 the main enemy faction this time is called dead cell and there are less of them this time i think medical solid one had around 10 boss fights whereas medical solar 2 has eight and i think the fights in this one sit somewhere between the third and the first game you know with the third game obviously being the best in the series of course the first one is playing a snake against olga and initially it seems pretty simple but it can play out in some neat ways for instance you've got a spotlight which can be redirected into your eyes at any time then there's also a flowing tarp which can make spotting olga a lot more difficult the entire fight is about line of sight and the idea being that when olga's in cover you can swap positions to get a better angle so she can't see you plus it pretty much forces you to come to grips with the new first person aiming mechanic you know hammering that feature into new players it's kind of like the ocelot fight in the first game only this time the player has more control and awareness over where the boss is and how visible they are the next boss and i say that in quotations ain't until later in the game when you're up against fortune the badass railgun wielding bullet deflecting femme fatale and for this entire fight you can't even put a dent knife that's because apparently she's the embodiment of lady luck and she can't be touched yeah i wonder how she goes when she tries to take a shower it's actually kind of brilliant though because for this entire fight you're just running around trying to not get vaporized and if you're anything like i was well you're probably [ __ ] your pants the entire time as the room crumbles around you but it also kind of teaches you how to dodge and that's a skill you're going to have to use later on when you have to fight a factory line's worth of metal rays the next fight though is a lot more dynamic taking place on a helipad against the bombs expert fat man as the guy moves around on roller skates and plants explosives you're gonna need to defuse with a coolant spray this guy's heavily armoured so you're gonna need to knock him on his ass and then plant a few rounds in his dome when it's exposed again something that the first person aiming is pretty much essential for the ensuing harrier fight is kind of like the hyundai fight in the first game only dialed up to 11. now taking place during the days so you can actually see what the [ __ ] you're looking at the harrier also moves much faster than the hyundai does and the arena is also split over two levels giving you much more hiding spots all up i think it's one of the coolest fights in the entire game and i never get sick of hearing solidus praising ryden here for landing a hit you're tougher than i thought vamps fight easily the one that's been hyped up the most is also i think the most complex this guy jumps around like a flamenco dancer leaping underwater and jumping out to throw knives at ryden if you stand still for too long and if you don't manage to shoot out the lights around the area he's somehow able to pin your shadow to the ground here paralyzing you and again in a bit of a testament to how much stuff they've crammed into this game i only found out years later once walkthroughs became commonplace that you could shoot stinger missiles into the water to draw him out quicker but all of this pales in comparison to the fight against the metal gear rays [ __ ] the fight against the middle heroes now look there's a handful of things i've done throughout the decades that i've been into gaming things that i hope to never have to do again one of them was shooting all 200 pigeons in grand theft auto 4 and another was getting through this metal gear ray fight on european extreme the fight itself is pretty simple to explain it's ryden in a stinger missile launcher against a bunch of metally rays these things don't wait their turn though and even when they're not on that center platform they'll still be launching missiles at you from a distance and take cheap shots [Music] so it's a combination of thrown out chaff grenades to offset their lock-on abilities but also just having awareness of where the other ones are at all times and the whole fight doesn't end until you've defeated a certain amount the thing is though compared to the other boss fights which just increase the damage you take this fight on the highest difficulty mode increases the number you have to get through so on normal difficulty you might have to beat like maybe half a dozen or so of these things whereas on european extreme you've got to beat upwards of two dozen and if you make a single mistake the entire time then you're gonna die then you'll have to go all the way back to the beginning and i think this along with that motorbike chase in metal gear solid 4 are the single hardest sections to get through in the entire series if you're going for that european extreme run and to try to get that illustrious big boss rank it really makes that final fight against solidus kind of seem anti-climactic in comparison not to mention almost like something out of an entirely different game then again maybe going from fighting giant robots with a missile launcher to a showdown with samurai swords against a dude in mech armor ain't all that far fetched now the main complaints i have for this game definitely have to do with its pacing i think the tanker chapter is about as close to perfection as the game can ever get you're constantly moving on to the next thing and it never feels like it stops being interesting the only downside is that the whole thing has to come to an end looks like you were long overdue for retirement once you reach the big shell though it does kind of start to lose its way for a bit the first hour is this gauntlet of mostly cinematics and codec calls that you can't really afford to skip unless you want to be completely in the dark as to what the hell is going on ryden watch out there are sentries posted on the connecting bridge they will spot you if you continue on course you get your basic objectives you have to sneak past a few enemies before then seeing vamp and fortune in action though the cinematic with fortune is pretty awesome and it does give us one of the best lines of dialogue in the entire series a dirt but then it has this whole sequence where you're working with the seal team bomb disposal expert my name is peter peter stillman going through every single structure on the base to find and disarm all these bombs with that coolant spray now check the floor ceiling walls under a table everywhere try to imagine the locations the bomber would choose yeah and get used to that coolant spray man because it becomes a pretty frequently used item throughout the rest of the game from being able to use it to put out fires and waking up sleeping guards this can be incredibly tedious though the first time you experience it as you've only got items to give you an indication of their general area but not their specific location and then after almost every single one of them you've got to listen to a codec conversation between ryden and stillman ryden here i took care of the c4 in strut c this is ryden the c4 found in strut a has been frozen and disposed of i have the last c4 frozen there's nothing showing up on the sensor now it's kind of like ryden is constantly seeking validation or something i mean dude just just get on with it good work then after that you finally got that showdown against fat man which yet again reuses the whole coolant spray mechanic good work for the next few hours after this it does become pretty fun again you've got to infiltrate the main strut by disguising yourself as an enemy soldier and then sneak around a room full of hostages to find an undercover agent and this is when i think the game is pretty much at its peak because wearing that enemy uniform pretty much makes you invisible and you can get away with murder literally at this point all roads from this point on then lead to finding and rescuing otakon's sister emma you're lying and after that harrier fight getting there involves what i always thought was one of the most confusing sequences where you have to swim through a bunch of these flooded corridors which seems way more complex than it actually is i figured out that the trick here is to look at the map not what's on the screen and also trying to avoid swimming into all those floating mines obviously but i think the only other time that i've found swimming as nerve-wracking in a video game is all the underwater sections in the sonic the hedgehog games [Music] apparently too kojima even wanted to have sharks in this area that you'd have to outmaneuver and get past and let's all just count our lucky stars that someone at konami put a [ __ ] pin in that idea you're lying along the way you'll also contend with vamp and meet the dick grabbing president who i didn't mention happens to be named johnson by the way and then after finally reaching emma you realize you now have to go all the way back to where you started also dealing with an influx of new enemy patrols and it's not that it's hard but it is just very slow and tedious and you can't really afford to rush through this stuff because of how fragile emma is and this weird allergy she has to being shot at yeah imagine that then it's all finished with what is easily i think the worst section in the entire game having to watch emma from afar as she slowly walks across this floating walkway while you take care of flying drones clay more mines and yes more patrolling enemies [Music] so essentially what you've got here is what's more or less a two to three hour long escort quest is this some kind of sick joke and then what ultimately happens to emma which is horrible by the way is also amplified by the frustration of just having done your best to kept her alive for the last couple of hours you know only for the whole thing to be in vain i gotta give it to kojima though this does all end with what is possibly one of the saddest moments in the entire series but the thing that gets me here it ain't emma dying man it's seeing otakon's reaction to it you can actually pinpoint the moment that his heart breaks in half emma emma answer me you can actually pinpoint the second when his heart rips in half and now i mean the poor guy gets to reconcile with his sister for a matter of minutes before she's taken away from him you know what i think otakon is the real victim of the metagear solid series never mind snake they're strange then the last few hours of the game are just really non-stop action from that awesome shootout alongside snake inside arsenal gear what are you thinking and then ryden's final battle against solidus yeah let's consider to it's a game that ends with a funky jazz track which only minutes earlier had a dude getting chopped in half with a katana yeah that right there that's the metal gear solder 2 experience [Music] the one main takeaway that i always get from playing this game is that i'm playing something that's really one man's singular thought process turned into an interactive medium i mean metage solo 2 is obviously still a collaborative effort the tireless work of countless konami employees but it's still kojima's vision at the end of the day and regardless of where he went after this or how the series might have ended up there is like an essence of finality and refinement to this game that just makes it feel so perfect it's before he had all these other storylines and factions from the other games or before he had to go into damage control in the fourth game and bring everything back together again to make an iota of sense snake eater might still be my favorite game in the series but sons of liberty is the one that added the most to the formula and while the difference between two and three is incremental i think the changes from one to two are fundamental if you're going to do it then do it it really helped to usher in a new generation and stand it for cinematic games especially for the playstation 2 and the xbox era and the fact that a lot of these sequences still stand up is a bit of a testament to how ahead of its time they were so whether you choose to play it on the playstation 2 the playstation 3 or somehow get a copy of the pc port it's still a really unique gaming experience it's about as tight as the duck's [ __ ] you don't get to fight battle scarred lingerie models are a guy shooting wasps but it still has the moniker of being one of the few games that lets you get pissed on and that my friends is worth the price of admission alone what's going on snake snake [Music] [Music] you

Channel: GmanLives

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Keywords: metal gear solid 2 review, metal gear, hideo kojima, metal gear solid, metal gear solid 2 sons of liberty, metal gear solid 2, metal gear solid 2 analysis, metal gear solid 2 gameplay, digital foundry, hd collection, metal gear solid 2 theme, metal gear solid 2 raiden, metal gear solid 2 walkthrough, solid snake, sons of liberty, metal gear solid 5, metal gear solid 4, metal gear solid 1, hideo kojima silent hill, hideo kojima games, gmanlives, gggmanlives

Id: qMx2U2Sv7p4

Length: 39min 27sec (2367 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2022