Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (Playstation 2, 2001)

 

With an MGS3 remake coming up and me having done posts for MGS1/4/5 in the past, it seemed like an appopriate time to fill in the other missing one. This game was pretty divisive in its day, but it holds a lot of nostalgia for folks who grew up with it. I always liked this one, and thought it was WAY ahead of its time.

As for why it was divisive... having Raiden take over as the main character was a terrible idea, like selling drugs in the hood without the CIA's permission.

Always really liked the title screen of this game, with the hexagons and the particularly creepy music. This came out during the post-9/11 cultural malaise, where everything felt way off.

Game starts off on a tanker boat in the harbor of New York City during a particularly heavy rainstorm.

This is an iconic intro, and iconic setting for the game to start on.

KEPT YA WAITING, HUH?

Via the codec, Otacon fills us in on what's been happening since the first MGS. That came out 3 years before this (the turnaround time on games back then was nuts), and four years went by in-universe (the first game takes place in 2005, this takes place in the distant techno-future of 2009)

Here's a timeline to help us keep all this straight.

As of 2009, despite Solid Snake ending the threat of Metal Gear in the past, now everybody is making their own replica version of it, and Metal Gear proliferation is getting to be a problem. If you're unfamiliar with the series, MGs are basically standing-tank type mechs that can launch missiles, including nuclear. It's pretty much WarMECH from Final Fantasy 1.

Solid Snake: "Hey kids. Know what's even more dangerous than Metal Gear? Smoking. Tobacco is whacko!"

Fun Fact: At one time cigarette companies were allowed to run ads on TV. Eventually that privilege was revoked. The companies survived regardless and TV commercials were way less annoying. Can we do that to Big Pharma too?

This is the HD version of MGS2, but it isn't that huge of a visual improvement over the PS2 original. The main difference is that it's widescreen instead of 4:3. The controls are VERY dated to say the least, and while you can go to first-person mode to help aim, you can't walk around while in that mode.

Most of the game is played in third-person, and the controls are much more stiff and unwieldy than I remember. We've been spoiled by modern controls more than we know.

The lockers here infamously have pictures of women on the inside, and here's my favorite. Anyone who grew up with this game knows, and probably has fond memories of this.

Before long, I face the first boss: OLGA. She's a pregnant Russian lady with a Highlander: The Raven haircut.

You can choose whether to go for lethal force or use tranquilizers on bosses, with two different meters representing both. I'm not sure if it has much effect on how the game plays out, though. In any case, I go for tranqs here because I don't want to be charged with a double murder, and the fight is basically a back-and-forth cover-shooting battle.

Easiest way to deal with this is switch to first-person and blast her when she leans out. Since this is very much the "Ground Zeroes" portion of the game, she doesn't even have the normal boss theme yet.

I remembered the Tanker chapter ending with the Olga fight, but nope, she's just the midway boss. The Tanker chapter is roughly the first 20% of the game (at the most) and things open up a lot in the second (last) chapter.

Snake infiltrates the lower levels of the Tanker, where he gets attacked by a mass of tentacles that try to kidnap Celes!

Look at how close I was to getting spotted here. Got the box on just in time.

I don't know about that, Otacon. It was true in 2002 but I don't think it's true now, everybody's ready to come to blows over the stupidest shit.

Yeah, nah.

The tanker is full of US military troops who don't realize that terrorists have infiltrated it.

They've got Metal Gear Ray stored down here. A top-secret project that nobody can know about. Well, the terrorists do, and they're on their way.

I get some photographs for Otacon, and we see METAL GEAR in all of its glory. This is the new breed of Metal Gear, which is both amphibious and land-based (unlike the old one, Metal Gear Rex, which was just land-based, and was also slow and old).

Revolver Ocelot shows up to steal Metal Gear. This guy gets put over so much by this series, it's kind of nuts. He was the first boss in MGS1, but Hideo Kojima liked him so much that he kept bringing him back and making him a key fixture of the later games. You don't even fight him in this game, and he gets put over all of the other villains. This was setup for him to be the final boss in MGS4.

Ocelot proceeds to single-handedly take out an entire battalion of U.S. marines. Also he has Liquid Snake's hand attached to his arm for some reason, and it sometimes causes him to take on Liquid's persona.

Liquid Snake was criminally underutilized in this series. Great villain, only appears in one game. (This Liquid-Ocelot fusion doesn't count)

Metal Gear Ray is unleashed, piloted by Ocelot. And then it just sorta scampers off to parts unknown.

Ocelot radioes in to his boss... THE PRESIDENT.

DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!

The tanker sinks, and that's it for Chapter 1 (of 2). Should I call it here and do a Part 2? This would be a good stopping point.

....NAAAH, we're going long today!

Fast-forward a couple of years, an oil tanker has been seized by terrorists.

Wonder how Ocelot hid his GIANT NUCLEAR MECH for the last few years.

This is one of the most interesting and iconic locations in gaming from the 2000s. It was an inspired choice to have the majority of the game transpire here instead of just a standard base. Now if only you actually continued playing as Solid Snake!

The president has been kidnapped, and only YOU are a bad enough dude to rescue the... wait a minute, isn't the president Ocelot's nefarious boss? Well, Ocelot's boss is the previous president and this is the current one. They take their sweet time differentiating this.

We're introduced to the new hero, Raiden. He's all like "myehhh I've done missions in VR myehhh" and "I don't need REAL combat training VR is just as good so nyehhhhh!"

Prepare yourself, because we'll be looking at Raiden's skin-tight outfit for the rest of the game. How's he supposed to be stealthy with that package going on?

Aside from Raiden being a hoity-toity prancing prissy-pants, he also has this overbearing girlfriend who patches in all the time to talk about feelings and emotions and shit.

Have FOND memories of going into first-person and looking around at the Big Shell as a kid. The sound of wind and seagulls is amazing here, and it looks incredible for 2001. NOTHING up to this point on home consoles was this immersive.

Raiden slips in some seagull droppings! Even the seagull is like "wow, what a prissy fancy lad, how is HE the main character"

Get ready for MGS6: Starring Lester the Unlikely

This first outdoor area is confusing, because it seems like there's no way forward. You're surrounded by fences and locked gates. Here's the solution:

There's a small hole in the fence here that you can crawl through. It's basically invisible unless you look around in first-person and see it.

I have gotten confused here and had to look up how to move forward every time I ever play this game. Always forget how to get out of that room. Maybe they could have made the first room of Big Shell less obtuse?

Rose calls to tell Raiden that tomorrow is a special day, but won't tell him why. She'd rather he figure it out.

HE'S ON A MISSION

WHY ARE YOU CALLING HIM WITH RIDDLES

It's the latest issue of Japan's most popular magazine, "Aerith Monthly"

My God, Japan! Why are you so horny?

Continuing on, it's the big moment, as Raiden meets Soli....Iroquois Pliskin? Well, it's Solid Snake, let's not beat around the bush here.

He's unimpressed by Raiden's VR training and VR air-drops and VR boning.

Raiden: "Myyyehh! I'm a sex expert! I've pleasured women dozens of times in VR! Myehhh! It's just like the real thing!"

Snake gives up his codec info.

He would quickly regret doing this, as Raiden would call him with random "myehhh! I was top of my class in sharpshooting!" claims. He'd also keep getting patched into Raiden's calls with Rose and have to listen to Rose say something about not feeling seen.

Snake gives our hero the rundown on Dead Cell, the group of uber-terrorists who seized control of Big Shell. And their leader... is the former president... George Sears.

Having the president (even a former one) be a villain circa 2001 was a pretty cutting-edge move. Before that, the president being a murderous villain in any kind of popular media would either be frowned-upon or a joke.

Nowadays, everyone and their mother in the scriptwriting sphere is writing fanfiction about how Orange Man and Space Man are coming to get us. There's nothing cutting-edge about it anymore.

It's like everyone just recently noticed the insane amount of power that we've consolidated in the executive branch (and the government in general). Yeah, that's what's been going on for a while now.

Hideo Kojima over here was questioning the unchecked power of the unitary executive before it was socially acceptable, and actually required some courage. Especially post-9/11.

"You gotta keep a little spark of madness." -Robin Williams

Next we get the debut of Fortune, a member of Dead Cell who has incredible luck (or is it nanomachines)? She can decimate entire legions of enemy troops with her electric rail gun, and all their bullets miss her.

Meanwhile, Dead Cell escapes with the comatose current president. Are you a bad enough dude to defeat Fortune? I don't know, so far these Dead Cell guys seem more like supervillains.

Case in point, Fortune completely wipes out SEAL Team 10.

My God.

This just got real. Like when Tom Hanks got COVID, and everyone said it just got real.

We find out about the next Dead Cell boss that Snake will have to deal with: Fatman, the bomb expert.

Is he the "Fott Mon" that all the Jamaican reggae songs are always referring to?

Snake talks to bomb expert Steve Harvey about the best way to take down Fott Mon. Meanwhile, Raiden is hovering around in the background pretending to be the main character. It's hilarious how everyone besides Raiden seems like the adult in the room.

The key to stopping Fott Mon: Coolant Spray. This spray can freeze bombs, effectively de-activating them.

The fight with Fott Mon is over pretty quick. Freeze the bombs he plants everywhere, then blast him right out of his roller skates.

Yeah, bosses in this series are weird

"WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THE BOMB" screeches Raiden.

Well, this game was developed just a year too early to really lean into 24 references that would explode (hyooo) in popularity soon after.

Most of the remainder of the game consists of a lot of sneaking around this oil rig, sniping folks in first-person and trying to keep a low-profile (though if you get spotted, you can shake all aggro by just running through the nearest door).

You have to run back and forth across the oil rig a few times, and it's pretty tiresome in 2025. Playing it in-era, it all felt pretty cutting-edge in the early 2000's, and this setting had a certain kind of unique magic to it, believe it or not. No other game was like this before this point.

Interspersed with all the backtracking and forwardtracking, Rose and Raiden talk about love and their dates and stuff.

"Remember our date at the Empire State Building?"

Meanwhile Solid Snake is off somewhere, NOT ON CAMERA, doing actual cool shit and probably subduing a guy with a jiu-jitsu knee-bar or something.

I never got too good at the combat in this game, and mostly just get blasted once I inevitably lose the element of stealth.

An appearance by Grey Fox, aka The Ninja! He doesn't do much in this game...but he does give Raiden a hell of an idea. Yeah, this is the genesis of Raiden becoming a cyborg himself in that one really good action game where they totally rehabbed his character.

Also in the game: Sniper missions where you have to carefully shoot control panels or else the whole place blows up, and Raiden's aim is swinging wildly all over the place. Who hired this guy?

The villain of the game, and leader of the Dead Cell group, is Solidus Snake. The secret third brother of the Snakes, who combines the best of the genetics of both Solid Snake and Liquid Snake to form the ultimate bad-ass.

One cool and mostly un-sung boss fight has you taking down an actual harrier using stinger missiles.

Fun Fact: These stinger missiles were sold to the Taliban in the 1980's by the CIA, to help them kill Russians (with the aid of John Rambo)...then fast-forward to the 2000's and the same stinger missiles were being used against American troops in Afghanistan...then fast-forward to the 2020's and NEW stinger missiles have now been left to the Taliban due to the horrifically botched exit from the country.

It's 40 years of the circle of life. Next stop: The Taliban uses them against the Russians again?

Raiden rescues the (current) president, Not Bill Pullman, from the terrorists. However, he's got a stunning revelation for viewers...

It turns out that the marching orders given to the US government don't actually come from the president at all, they come from a shadowy group called The Patriots. Every four years they choose who the president is (generally whoever will do the best job doing what they're told), and all the major decisions on the direction of foreign policy or the economy go through their group.

These guys have been running everything for so long that it wouldn't surprise me if they're all just computer programs by this point in the series, continuing to churn out directives in response to a world that they have long-since lost touch with.

Solidus Snake was a maverick who didn't do what he was told, and shut down a lot of the control The Patriots had over the country, so they did everything possible to get rid of him.

So...The Patriots are the good guys in this situation? Well, no.

Yeah, he makes a good point, without the New England Patriots, NFL ratings would dip, several states wouldn't have a team...

Oh, the other ones. Well, they have to continue to exist or else society will fall apart. Order amidst disorder, etc.

The President reveals that Solidus Snake is actually the previous president, George Sears, which was unbeknownst to Raiden but knownst to us.

He kidnapped the current president in his continued efforts to usurp The Patriots.

He's the third Snake produced by the Les Enfants Terribles project, which means "the terrible children". Basically a project to create super-soldiers from genetic modification.

No relation to Les Miserables, which means "the miserable lesbians"

After they got President Sears out of the way (for his continued resistance), they installed Bill Pullman here as the new puppet. Media coverage drastically swung to "positive" across the board and everyone was supposed to like this guy more. If it were the 2020's it would have had the exact opposite effect lol

Most of Congress was taking money from The Patriots, and a lot of them had Patriots jerseys hanging on the doors of their offices at the Capitol just to let everyone know where their allegiances lie.

"Tom Brady is America's greatest ally!"

The new master plan of The Patriots is to take full control of the internet, using a massive machine called Arsenal Gear, that will monitor and manage everything. This is so they can...

...shape narratives in real time. Game is so far ahead of its time, that this would actually work even better as a plotline in 2025.

Nobody listens to the news media anymore after catching them in their 74th lie by omission, so the way forward now is to use the internet to spread propaganda. De-push things people aren't supposed to know about, astroturf things that you want people to think.

200k bot upvotes on an opinion and you'd start to feel like you're supposed to believe the same thing. It would work.

Anyway, President Bill Pullman dies. He was a good man, I guess.

So...The Patriots are the bad guys? They're the ones who want to censor everything. But Solidus is against them and he's doing terrorism, making him the bad guy. Man, this game is such a great big grey area. It's actually pretty good in that regard, because it echoes real life.

The next phase of the game involves lots of swimming, and rescuing Otakon's sister Emma while he says "EE!" a lot. I don't wanna talk about it.

Vamp is the next member of Dead Cell. He's...a vampire, and he shrugs off bullets much like Fortune.

Vamp is a slightly-interesting fight because it takes place around this pool, which can be used to "hide" from him. He also hides. The grenade launcher roots him out quickly, though.

The bosses in this game totally pale in comparison to MGS3 and MGS4's boss fights.

Soon after, the game's most tedious scene transpires, as you have to use a sniper rifle to cover "EE!" as she walks across a bunch of connecting beams. If she gets taken out by a drone, it's over. I don't wanna talk about it.

The endgame starts with a torture minigame (most MGSes have one) where Solidus beats up Raiden.

...is Solidus turning into Doctor Octopus?

In any case, the bad guys brought Raiden down to Arsenal Gear, which is basically the inner workings of the Big Shell (so it isn't a traditional Metal Gear, it's just a big tech-base that the Big Shell is cover for).

Raiden escapes and has to run around naked. All of the Arsenal Gear sections are named after various parts of the intestines.

Time for things to get WEIRD.

Campbell starts issuing orders directly from The Patriots, telling Raiden to recapture Arsenal Gear and kill Solidus. Meanwhile, creepy music plays over all of it.

The codec starts glitching and turning Campbell into a skull, while he says increasingly bizarre things.

As a kid, this whole part of the game freaked me the F out, because it takes characters you've been trusting / following the orders of for the whole game and turns them into glitchy, evil menaces who are definitely not on your side.

Eventually Raiden finds Solid Snake, who tells him there are no less than 25 Metal Gear Rays (I guess the bad guys have been using the original as a blueprint to build new ones for the past few years).

Also, Snake gives him a rad katana:

This is the genesis of Raiden actually being kind of a badass in future games, and you get to swing the katana for the remainder of the game.

This section with the two heroes fighting off scores of enemy troops is pretty awesome, probably the high point of the game. I actually love the fourth quarter of this game because it goes so far off the reservation.

Die here, and the fission gets mailed.

The penultimate fight has Raiden single-handedly taking down a squadron of Metal Gear Rays with only a bazooka. They really jobbed out the Metal Gears here, that's for sure.

Ya know, it kinda feels like this whole final act was just a bad dream that Raiden had after he slipped on that seagull turd earlier and hit his head.

Oh yeah, I forgot about Fortune. You never actually get to defeat her in a fight since every weapon on Earth misses her (due to her good luck). However, at the end she turns on the bad guys Darth Vader style, and...

...Ocelot takes her out with one shot. I guess he was luckier. Man, Kojima can't stop putting this guy over, he's like Vince with Brock Lesnar.

Next, Kojima waxes philosophical again about how the flow of information can be curated to split people into "sides", where each side has legitimate beliefs and concerns, but also neither can see the other side's legitimate beliefs and concerns, so everyone just ends up retreating to their echo chambers.

I mean, Kojima was way, way ahead of his time.

This leads to Arsenal Gear running aground, and Raiden fighting Solidus with swords on top of Federal Hall in New York City.

Les Enfants Terribles EXPLODE.

It's a great final battle. This series knows how to do final battles, and they're all incredibly memorable.

Game concludes with Raiden deciding he's going to start a family and make his own way in life, rather than continue to be the super-soldier pawn of the system that he's been up to this point.

...that's what he thinks. He'll be a cyborg ninja and LIKE IT.

Good game, well ahead of its time...and also well-deserving of the backlash it got for de-emphasizing Solid Snake and making people play as someone they didn't like (see also Last of Us 2 killing off the fan favorite character and then making you play as the killer for most of the game - TLOU2 is a game I like a lot in spite of this, but mistakes were made).

The big end-of-game revelation is that The Patriots died out around 100 years ago and are no longer an entity.

...OR ARE THEY?

Next up: MGS3 would take us back to the Vietnam era to tell the origin story of Big Boss, the original series villain, and MGS2 would remain the final chapter of this saga for nearly a decade. MGS4 eventually came along and added an epitaph that people were a bit happier with.

Music time: "Yell Dead Cell", the boss theme, is a track that instantaneously transports me back to 2002 or so.

Other MGS posts, all of which are from a decade+ ago and haven't ever been rewritten, so I can't vouch for them. They might be good, or they might be really bad. Who knows:

Metal Gear Solid

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain