Here we are, Metal Gear Solid 3, the best game in the series. Going to do the usual MGS-series thing here and give it a fairly light rundown while trying not to go too overboard with spoilers - though I'll talk about the interesting elements of the story regardless.
Playing the PS5 version, but I'll be talking about the PS2 version just as much. This is another excellent Bluepoint remaster, much like Demon Souls Remake a few years ago. However, I'd say this doesn't go nearly as far as that game did in terms of remaking the game itself. This is still pretty much 1:1 with the PS2 version, only with far-superior field graphics and light effects.
First off, I load up Snake vs Monkey, since it's right there on the file select. Snake has no interest in farming monkeys, unless there's a hot damsel in distress involved. Perhaps we could introduce him to Candy Kong.
Snake vs Monkey is basically a scavenger hunt where you look for monkeys in the jungle and capture them.
TAG 'EM AND BAG 'EM, BOYS! TAG 'EM AND BAG 'EM!
"AIYEEEEE"
The last monkey is really well hidden, perched on top of a tree.
That's just one of the six or so stages of SNAKE VS MONKEY. It's worth the $70 on its own.
"I ain't paying $70 for a remaster of a 20 year old game" say grumpy folk on GameFAQs. Well, you haven't experienced the wonder of SNAKE VS MONKEY.
But seriously, I probably wouldn't pay more than $40 for this game, even as a series fan. It's still very, very short, 8-9 hours. Skip the cutscenes and snipe The End, and it's over in 2 hours.
Anyway, onto, meh, the actual game. Best MGS game in the series, meh. It's no SNAKE VS MONKEY.
In this remaster there are two ways to play the game, and they're almost two different games entirely:
-Legacy Style is basically just the original PS3 game remastered. You've got the overhead camera, a green filter over everything, and the controls are the same.
-New Style is more like Resident Evil 2 Remake (and 3/4) in that it puts the camera right behind your character and gives you better over-the-shoulder aiming controls. This mode also lets you move while aiming. While the aiming is better, there are still a lot of issues with the rest of the controls, and I still frequently get stuck laying on the ground or punching the air during fights.
1964 Russia! Solid Snake's Dad (or rather, the guy who's DNA spawned him) is who you play as in this one. He's the guy who will become Big Boss, the villain of the early Metal Gear games.
He's no villain yet, though, just a loyal soldier for the U.S. government. I like this dude a lot, and he's got more personality than Solid Snake does. At this point he's had three main series games, the same as Solid. It's a bit like Luke Skywalker and Anakin Skywalker.
Big Boss' mentor is the aptly named... The Boss, this woman who trained him. She's the best of the best in the U.S. military, and used for the most important missions. Also Big Boss might be sort of in love with her, not sure. He knows how many hours it's been since they last saw each other.
Given how important both of these characters are (the two of them are the central crux of this story) I wish the game spent more time on their relationship. You barely see the two of them interact while they're, spoiler alert, on the same side.
Most of this game involves sneaking around through tall grass and forests, ambushing Soviet troops on patrol, as you make your way towards various objectives. It's a very distinct game from the rest of the series and far more in-tune with nature.
NOTE: For simplicity's sake I'm just gonna call Big Boss "Snake" from here on, since that's what the game calls him, and he hasn't become Big Boss yet (and won't for years).
The main stealth mechanic here is unleashing CQC (Close-Quarters Combat), where you quickly subdue an opponent with a surprise attack. The various CQC moves are awesome to behold. In the original there was just one main sweep attack that Snake always did, but here in the remake he has a variety of CQC attacks he can administer. They all look awesome in motion, too.
I find a shotgun! It's loud, it's potent, and it's pretty bad for a stealth mission.
Dammit! I said this is a stealth mission!
The sub-villain of the game is Colonel Volgin, a big Russian beast who can fire lightning from his hands like the guy from Big Trouble in Little China. He's the head of an elite squad who all have superpowers (yeah, like every MGS game, this one has a really cool lineup of bosses to fight). This elite squad is called Cobra Unit and consists of four members.
Most of the enemies you fight in this game use AK-47s, which any Russian worth their salt will erroneously tell you is better than the AR-15 platform used by the West.
Speaking of weapons, there's a whole arc in this game where every time Ocelot shows up, he has a new weapon. First he has a pistol, and keeps missing with it because he naturally holds it a little wrong.
Snake takes him down with a very cool CQC maneuver where he uses knife pressure to the throat to push his foe backwards while tripping him.
However, Ocelot gets spared, and Snake tells him to try a revolver instead of a pistol since it'd fit his natural wielding style.
The Boss shows up...and defects to the Soviet Union, joining Colonel Volgin and his group. My God. This is like when Hulk Hogan joined the NWO!
This would hit harder if we'd gotten like, any real time with these two to see their relationship before this. The story here goes heavy on telling rather than showing, unfortunately. It TELLS us that they're close but we don't get the chance to see it.
The Boss then proceeds to CQC Snake into oblivion, throwing him off a bridge.
I think she intentionally did this in such a way that it wouldn't kill him (aimed for a deeper part of the river, or something). It did, however, still severely mangle him.
This game has a medic system where you use various consumables to patch up Snake's injuries. If he accumulates too many injuries, his maximum health bar will decrease further and further until it's fixed.
This is cool and immersive, but it can get tiresome after a while since injuries are frequent. At some point in the game it was easier to just let the injuries pile up and fix them all at once when I started losing too much health bar.
The health bar itself regenerates on its own (think it might be faster if you lay down) so healing is never an issue, making management of that maximum health bar level the main thing to worry about.
That does it for Virtuous Mission, basically the Tanker Chapter of this one. AKA the first mission that accounts for like a fifth of the overall game. The rest of the game is Operation Snake Eater.
While the Tanker Chapter was easily the best part of MGS2, things are flipped around in this one and Virtuous Mission is easily the worst part of MGS3. Operation Snake Eater is where all the good stuff is. If anything, starting with Virtuous Mission seems like a good way to turn off a fair amount of players before the game really gets going. Not a lot happens in it until the end.
Not too far into Operation Snake Eater (everything happens way quicker than you remember it being like 20 years ago) and I'm fighting The Boss again...and getting crushed via cutscene.
Similar to how Snake continuously bests Ocelot in all of their encounters while Ocelot refines his moveset to no avail, The Boss continually bests Snake in all of their encounters for the whole game while Snake improves his own CQC in response. However, the difference is that Snake catches up to The Boss in skill level, and by the end they're on even footing.
Soon after, Snake encounters his secret agent contact, and it's...a girl??
Here's Eva, a secret agent who has a mutual thing with Snake. She's right out of a James Bond movie.
She uses an automatic pistol that's quite powerful for 1964. Speaking of guns, she gives Snake a new 1911 pistol that is a vast upgrade to the puny Mk22 he starts the game with:
I mean look at this, it isn't even a comparison. The Mk22 is better for non-lethal takedowns, but it has such a delay on putting foes to sleep (at least on Normal mode) that the 1911 is a revelation on actually stopping anything.
We get some Gun Porn as Snake lovingly inspects the 1911 and talks about its features.
Eva really knows how to get on a guy's good side.
Snake wakes up later to find Eva prancing about. Well, she's the one sight for sore eyes in this bleak war.
Nothing, just this impossibly-fit goddess prancing around in front of Snake while he's trying to save the world from a nuclear threat!
Wonder how she got the scar.
What follows is an attack on their hut by Ocelot Unit, the special forces team led by Ocelot.
This part is awesome, because all nine of them are really strong foes and stealth / CQC are heavily rewarded. THIS is the sort of thing the game should have led off with.
Ocelot returns, and now he's got a revolver! The nicest one he could find, with engravings on it. However, Snake isn't impressed with the engravings, and manages to subdue Ocelot again after Ocelot runs out of bullets (thinking he has 8 shots like his old pistol, when he now only has six).
The Ocelot weapon saga continues! You know, this guy is finally growing on me now, after all these games.
Finding the AK-47 is a huge upgrade. I really needed something besides the 1911 at this point to fend off enemy troops. It's easy to miss, too, and missing it will make the next couple of bosses way harder than they need to be.
It's in a storage shed near this helicopter:
Which is also noteworthy because if you shoot it up here and render it inoperable, it won't show up in a later scene of the game to blast you (making that part much easier).
Swamps are particularly tedious (and abundant), slowing down Snake's movement speed heavily and inflicting him with lots of leeches (basically a status effect, which must be burned off).
Also, the swamps are brimming with what look like like caimans. "Fear me" they silently roar. Yeah, I'll just go around, I don't want any trouble here.
Finally, we get an actual boss fight with Ocelot, and now he's got TWO revolvers. So that's 12 shots before he has to reload. I see he also did away with the very nice engravings, going with function over style. It's like he's growing up before our eyes.
This is the first real major boss fight in the game (ironic since Ocelot is, himself, Major Ocelot). It's a duel where you exchange fire from across a ravine, with various rocks as shields. 1911 ammo spawns all over the place and I use it to fire away every time Ocelot is out in the open. There are also beehives that can be knocked down that'll cause him to get swarmed by bees, chasing him out into the open and exposing him to a bunch of shots.
We go basically RIGHT into the next boss fight. Again, things are happening way faster than I remember it being like 20 years ago. This game is actually super short. They likely could have spaced out the boss fights a bit better, too (for example, moving the Ocelot boss fight to the end of Virtuous Mission).
The Pain is one of the four henchmen of Volgin, and probably the lamest fight of the four. His power is that he commands BEES. You have to fight him from this small platform, and he frequently knocks you off of it with bee attacks, so it gets tedious. Bullets bounce off of him most of the time due to the bees, so I chucked grenades to knock them off of him before lighting him up with the AK-47. Though caution is advised because sometimes his bee army will catch your grenades and fly them back over.
This is followed by an eerie trudge down a river under a canopy of trees.
Next up is the infamous scene where you can potentially snipe The End (another of the henchmen) while he sits on a dock, therefore skipping the boss fight with him later on. Considering that boss fight can go on for literal hours, I tended to always take this guy out here on replays. This time around, I let him scurry away while I had him in my sights.
I find some era-accurate (...for 2004) video game magazines laying around. And they have THIS game on their covers! It's like when Darth Helmet watched Spaceballs on his VCR in Spaceballs.
The next boss is Cobra Unit's predator cosplayer, The Fear. This is a pretty awesome boss fight.
He stalks around on the treetops and can cloak himself before swinging from one tree to the next. You can still see the shimmering transparent image of his cloaked form, as well as the disturbances of the branches he lands on. From there it's just a matter of tracking him and opening fire every chance you get.
Defeating him gets you a Predator reference of a trophy. Which figures because the fight is basically with The Predator, the way he swings through the trees and cloaks himself.
Really good boss battle here, and the music for it is perfect.
We're going right into the next member of Cobra Unit: The End. He's the one I could have sniped earlier and didn't. Well, now I get to pay for that, because the actual boss fight with him is a PITA that can take an hour. A lot of people swear by this being one of the best boss fights of the entire PS2 generation.
It's basically a sniping duel that takes place across a number of field areas, where The End sneaks around and tries to snipe you. Winning is a matter of sniping him back many, many times. Most of the problem here is that once you spot him and do some damage, he zips off and you have to find him again over a huge land area.
The trick here is to use the Thermal Goggles, which will make him stand out from the surrounding terrain. Even then, he's STILL hard to find, and I spend most of the "fight" roaming around.
I used to sneak around for this entire fight, but in retrospect that just makes it take longer. It's better to run out in the open so he's lured out of cover, then once he fires, look in the direction of the shots with the Thermal / Sniper Rifle and take some shots at him.
Eventually I accidentally sneak up on him at a sniper perch, and win the fight.
He was 138.
This is followed almost immediately by the longest ladder in video game history, the infamous "Snake Eater" ladder.
By the time Snake reaches the top, he has evolved into a cat.
Cool miniboss fight atop this mountain, as you commandeer AA guns to fire at attack helicopters.
Dammit, is Eva ever NOT changing clothes when Snake walks in?
Snake is concerned at all of the scars on Eva's body.
One of the reasons their relationship works so well is that they've both been through a lot of the same very uncommon things.
Eva brags about her riding skills. Snake continues to no-sell her, because...
...he lived with The Boss for ten years, and he's kinda still in love with her, so after her betrayal it isn't easy for him to let someone else in. Especially a shrewd secret agent like Eva, when who knows what she's really up to.
Most of the remainder takes place in Groznyj Grad, the military base of Colonel Volgin. He's got something here called the Shagohad, and it's a Proto Metal Gear that has to be stopped.
Pretty much going to go into super sum-up mode from here on out while I wrap the game up.
Eva really is a vision, with her glistening skin. And she's right, Snake is more reliant on her emotional support than he realizes. That and she's the one real thing of beauty he can tangibly reach in this terrible situation. If I were them I'd get this mission over with so we can get out of here.
Eva goes and plays a double agent to infiltrate Groznyj Grad, barely fending off suspicion from Ocelot in the process.
Dammit, she's even cuter with glasses on!
Next boss: The Fury. This is probably my favorite fight in the game. He's a Russian cosmonaut who went into space and came back...wrong, so now he's a flamethrower-wielding maniac with a jetpack.
The fight with him looks seriously impressive, especially on an OLED. I wasn't as visually impressed with it now as I remember being on the PS2 though. This fight looked incredible for that era.
Good ending to the fight, as The Fury had Snake knocked down and was rapidly closing in when I managed to peel off enough rounds to drop him.
Another really good boss fight with excellent music. This game has some of the best boss fights of the entire series (...and some of my least-favorite as well)
Back to the infiltration and search for Shagohad, this next part is super weird. You have to steal the uniform off this officer who looks like Raiden. And in case anyone thinks this apparent mockery of Raiden is coincidental...
...Snake stuffs him into a locker with a poster of Raiden on it, just to really hammer it home.
Here's the Shagohod, the Proto Metal Gear. It's basically a mobile SCUD launcher except it can fire ICBMs, it can drive at 300 MPH (therefore giving the missiles 2-3x more range once fired, like the booster stage of a rocket), and it's so heavily-armored that it could withstand a direct airstrike with minimal damage.
My attempt to run around with a rubber Raiden mask on doesn't work out, and The Boss AGAIN beats the hell out of Snake in CQC. I can't get a break!
This leads to the mandatory torture minigame, where Snake gets brutalized and eventually loses an eye. At least Volgin's electric powers are pretty awesome.
The Sorrow is the fourth and final member of Cobra Unit, and it's another boss fight I really don't like. You follow him down a river very slowly while trying to avoid the angry ghosts of everyone you've killed all game (so the fight can be either very short or very long). While I understand what they're doing here, it just isn't an interesting fight to have to replay, much like The End.
At the end of the "fight", Snake dies, and you have to revive with a revival pill. This is also how Snake escaped from prison after the torture minigame.
"There's a cave nearby behind a waterfall. Seems like a great place to change clothes in front of you some more!"
..........yep.
This is Snake offering Eva some burnt snake, not Eva offering Snake her gams.
Eva really is one of the best things about this game, and the sexual tension between her and Snake might be the most potent thing of this nature in any video game I've ever seen.
WHOAAAA we're on a mission here lady!
Yeah, lots of tension. By the end most players are probably clamoring for them to get it on already.
Back to the MANLY SHIT, Volgin is basically a fusion of Zangief and Rayden.
This is a great brawl, with great music. Guns seemed useless against him due to his electromagnetic field, so most of the fight was hand-to-hand.
This leads to Snake and Eva teaming up to take on the Shagohad, piloted by Volgin. It's a huge boss fight with a bunch of phases.
The only weak point is the metal treads, which I can RPG to slow it down a bit. Not for long though. Also scores of enemy troops drive out to try and intercept our heroes. This whole section is pretty awesome.
It's kinda too bad the first couple hours of this game are so cutscene-heavy, because the rest of the game is much better-balanced, and there's a ton of action once it gets going. However, some players got warded off by the early parts.
For the final phase, Volgin takes direct control of the Shagohad's wiring and tries to run our heroes down!
This fight is a matter of shooting the treads to stall him long enough to get a shot at the weak point on the back of the Shagohad (then repeating a bunch of times).
It goes well, except for one time when EVA ran me over right when I was about to score the last hit.
Shagohad is destroyed, and our heroes rejoice. Civilization is saved!
No, seriously, Volgin was gonna mass-produce that thing and sell it to everybody, and the world would have been at perpetual war.
So the story is over, right?
Not quite, there's still the matter of Snake's mentor, The Boss. What follows is a gorgeous final battle that has been mimiced in quite a few other games since, like Bloodborne.
This game sure likes the open-shirt Tasteful Midboob look.
At this point in the game, Snake and The Boss are supposed to be even on CQC. I couldn't seem to counter her moves, though. So I did whatever I had to do, up to and including firing a bazooka at her.
The ending has Snake and Eva actually hooking up.
Thank GOD. FINALLY.
After they make love (that's what it was called in 1964) on a bearskin rug in front of a fireplace, Snake wakes up to find that Eva's gone.
...and she took the priceless secret files with her. Dammit! The one time Snake trusts anybody, and she double-crosses him.
Wait a minute...does this mean Eva is the titular "snake eater"? Because she sure did get one over on Snake here.
Either way, the files she took back to China (yeah, she was working for CHINA this whole time!) were a dud, so the joke is on her.
A now-maidenless Snake meets Lyndon Johnson and gets the medal of honor for saving the world.
He's pretty disgusted with the president, and the entire power structure, for using him and The Boss as their pawns in this whole thing. Which cost The Boss her life. This begins his slow turn to the dark side (or maybe not, who knows, MGS5 retcons stuff).
So, thoughts on MGS3, and this MGSD remaster? Is it worth it? Well, let's see.
MGS3 - Still the best game in the series, and as good as I remember...but also much shorter than it seemed like it was 20 years ago. I burned through this in under ten hours, and it only took about half of the long weekend. This is the best Hideo Kojima's storytelling ever got in this series, and the story of Big Boss is a seriously poignant one. Also love the setting, the bosses, and the general mood of the game. If someone only plays one game in this series, it should be this one.
MGSD - Looks as good as you remember the PS2 original looking in your mind. Plays much better, with massive control improvements. Seems like the definitive version now. Is it worth $70 though? Only if someone is a huge MGS3 fan and wants to experience it all again. Other than that, it is a VERY short game when it comes down to it, without a huge amount of replay value unless you get heavily invested. $70 seems steep for a remaster of a game that can be finished in one work day worth of time. So I'm gonna say it isn't really worth the price for anyone except fanatics. If one is just curious about the series, better off waiting for it to be on sale for $30 in a year and picking it up then.
More boss fight videos:
SHAGOHAD + VOLGIN (note how Eva runs me over at the end)
THE BOSS (never figured out how to counter her CQC, meh)
Other MGS posts, most 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 bad:
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes
Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain
Question - think you'll go back to Dragon Quest ever? I found your blog through your DQ runs and would love to see you do VII!
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