Metal Gear ³
NEW DOCTOR IS ANNOUNCED TOMORROW SKJDFSLKJFDSKJDFSKLSDFJLDSFJDSFJDSKFJ AAAAGAH


Also, I'm sort of kind of replaying MGS1. It's very interesting to play now I know and loved MG2. It's fun switching off my later-canon brain and seeing the game for the first time as 'Metal Gear 3' rather than as 'Metal Gear Solid 1'.

The thing about MGS (game, not the series) in the terms of its canon position is that it can go either way, really. You can group it with the early canon (Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2, Metal Gear Solid) or you can group it with the later canon (Metal Gear Solid, Sons of Liberty, Snake Eater, Guns of the Patriots), even though it's difficult to have a group containing, for instance, both Metal Gear and Sons of Liberty. It flip-flops. It belongs to whatever era you come at it from. MGS was, of course, originally intended to be the last Metal Gear (like every other Metal Gear game ever), and so it basically ends the whole 'Solid Snake' arc - basically, MGS is to Metal Gear what MGS4 was to Metal Gear Solid.

It's very fun ignoring my own personal nostalgia goggles and canon suppositions and playing it while trying to imagine what it was like playing this after Metal Gear 2, seeing Snake again for the first time in nearly a decade, and I think I'm getting a better sense of what it's trying to do. It's not trying to be intellectual about it - what it's trying to do is the dangerous task of fleshing Snake out into a more rounded character. Snake's role in MG2 was mostly that of a player avatar, to allow other characters to exposit without sounding awkward - not that he didn't have a personality, but it was never particularly at odds with yours. Your goal was to complete the game, and Snake didn't protest. Here, however, Snake's goals are more important than your own. I'm just watching the Briefing scenes and it's wonderful how they shot this set of three barely-animated sprites to immediately set Snake up as this mysterious, powerful character, who doesn't just parrot what they player is supposed to be thinking. MG2 Snake never got this treatment. This is the game where the bitchy young man who completely failed to get laid at the end of MG2 manages to overcome his own personal neuroses and fall in love. It's sort of like the end of his coming-of-age. MGS1 on its own really is a love story, and I think it's tremendously brave of 2 and 4 to undo that but leave Snake with the good parts of the character development the love story gave him.

When discussing with musexmorai about canon and non-canon and headcanon in the series, I told her that, regardless of MGS2's existence and crushing amazing awesomeness, I can't help a part of me feeling that the ending of the series is when Snake rides off into the sunrise.

Much as I love Meryl, I'm going to get the Otacon ending. I got the Meryl ending last time, and I really don't want to hear Snake compare women to reindeer again for a while.

It's really doing Metal Gear 2 justice, I can say. It's actually a lot more fun to look at it as 'a sequel to Metal Gear 2' rather than as 'a prequel to Metal Gear Solid 2' like I tend to do. It's fun listening to the voice actors and thinking 'oh, hey, Snake has a voice now. He sounds hot and a bit run-down, it suits him'.


EDIT: NAOMI: "...and, at the same time, splice in genes with beneficial effects, such as resistance to cancer, for example."

Maybe I was lying about not looking at this game through later canon goggles. But ow.

EDIT 2: When Campbell tells Snake about Liquid, his right eye twitches. Repeatedly. Snake must have known.