Directed, produced, and designed by Hideo Kojima
Written by Hideo Kojima and Tomokazu Fukushima
Music by Norihiko Hibino and Harry Gregson-Williams
Art by Yoji Shinkawa
After updating and expanding on the ideas of his ’80s Metal Gear games with Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima felt like he’d said what he had to say and was ready to do something different. Unfortunately and fortunately for him, the game ended up being hugely successful, and so there was demand for a sequel. In 1999, he finished a design document for a sequel on the new Playstation 2 platform. He worked on realizing it with a budget of $10 million dollars and a 100-person team. The events of 9/11 almost prevented it from being released, as there were scenes of New York being destroyed near the end. Kojima was ready to take responsibility and resign, but lawyers were consulted and 300 changes were made right at the last minute to make it more palatable, allowing the game to make it out the door after all.
The resulting game has a deeply engrossing atmosphere, with moody music and a unique visual aesthetic. It’s a very different atmosphere than the icy claustrophobic cold of the original title — it feels more futuristic, shiny, and… orange. The gameplay builds off the previous title, introducing new elements like first person aiming (though the camera still has a fixed perspective), closets to hide in, and the ability to hold up enemies. The level design feels a bit tighter, as the core of it is based around a hub which opens up as the game goes on.
As with the original game, at least a third of the time playing it is spent in cutscenes or codec calls — possibly even a bit more this time around (the man’s twitter tagline is ‘70% of my body is made of movies’, after all). I’d almost say that it’s more of an interactive movie with some excellent gameplay segments than a proper game, but that sells the gameplay short. Regardless, I will mostly focus on the plot here, as that’s what differs most from the first title.
Metal Gear Solid 2 is famous for its bait-and-switch. Kojima didn’t feel like it would make sense for a veteran like Solid Snake to go through gameplay tutorials, plus he wanted a character that would appeal more to women, and so a new lead character was designed. However, this was kept a secret — the trailers for the game only featured Snake as a playable character. The game was divided into two episodes — an intro segment on a Tanker, and the bulk of the game, the Plant. The tanker section gave fans exactly what they wanted — a next-generation sequel where they got to play as the beloved Snake (accompanied by Otacon, who humorously tries to deliver quotes like Mei Ling but always gets them wrong) with updated gameplay mechanics.
The Plant segment starts just like the first game, as the briefing makes clear — a group of superpowered terrorists (who of course later serve as bosses) have taken over a facility (this time it’s Big Shell, an environmental cleanup facility off the coast of New York City). Colonel Roy Campbell tells you it’s your job to stop them before they do something horrible. And so ‘Snake’ infiltrates big shell in a diving suit — only his voice doesn’t sound quite right.
The rug was then pulled out from under fans’ feet. When ‘Snake’ gets inside the facility and takes off his mask, players were introduced to the skinny, effeminate, bumbling, and inept Raiden, who sounds like an angsty teenager and falls over when he runs into things. The fans were largely enraged. After a while, Snake reappears, calling himself ‘Plissken’ (a blatant admission that he was copied from Kurt Russell’s character in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, in case anyone wasn’t totally convinced), and the player is forced to watch Snake be badass from the sidelines while they ineptly bumble around as Raiden.
As is the perpetual curse of parodies of toxic masculinity, many fans missed that Metal Gear Solid didn’t want you to like Snake — he was a trope exaggerated to absurdity. What better way to drive the point home than to shift the perspective and make them play the sideshow rather than the main event? Fans were left frustrated that they didn’t get to play out their power fantasy, but Kojima wanted to show them how that fantasy is absurd, and how characters like this should not be glorified. Alas, many fans missed the point the second time around, as well.
Metal Gear Solid was a parody and critcism of action movies, and so its sequel is a parody of action sequels — ok, you wanted more? Here’s the same thing, but bigger, shinier, and also worse! It reminds me of The Matrix: Resurrections in that regard, as that title explicitly called out Warner Brothers for demanding another sequel. However, the game slowly takes on its own identity over its duration, and ultimately becomes far more complex and meaningful than the original title. The first deviation from action sequel parody territory comes halfway through the game, when the plot suddenly delves into the personal stories of these characters and their traumas.
This begins with the introduction of Otacon’s sister, a computer programmer named Emma Emmerich. The plot explores their family story, which enters some surprisingly taboo and moving territory. This lens later extends to Raiden, who was hiding some very serious childhood trauma from his girlfriend, who had been roped into helping him on his mission. These revelations are shocking, and the way the plot takes a detour into this territory in the midst of an ongoing terrorist situation is destabilizing. It’s clear that these characters feel powerless under the weight of the baggage they’re carrying — and yet they’re expected to save the world. The lack of player agency in the game is reflected by the lack of character agency in the story — just as Kojima only gives you a single linear path through the levels and plot, Raiden has no ability to create his own life path.
The design document reveals that Kojima wanted to explore ‘a series of betrayals and sudden reversals, to the point where the player is unable to tell fact from fiction’, where ‘every character lies to someone once’, to blur the line between ‘what is real and what is fantasy’, and to explore ‘digital simulations, digitization of the military, operational planning, everyday life, and the effects of digitization on personality.’ It does all of this and more, escalating from the personal to the political. To quote Wikipedia:
‘Metal Gear Solid 2 is often considered the first example of a postmodern video game... The storyline explored many social, philosophical and cyberpunk themes in significant detail, including meme theory, social engineering, sociology, artificial intelligence, information control, fifth-generation warfare, conspiracy theories, political and military maneuvering, evolution, existentialism, censorship, the nature of reality, the Information Age, virtual reality, child exploitation, taboos such as incest, sexual orientation, and the moral dilemma between security and personal liberty… The game is often considered ahead of its time for dealing with themes and concepts, such as post-truth politics, fake news, alternative facts, synthetic media, and echo chambers, that became culturally relevant in the mid-to-late 2010s.’
The plot then escalates further from the political into the transpersonal. As described above, the climax of the story features a seemingly endless string of recontextualizations and reversals. This eventually reaches a point where a new big piece of information recontextualizes all of the preceding plot every five minutes, for what feels like a couple hours, until the whole thing becomes so absurd that it intentionally undermines its own relevance. Bits of fanservice (like a recreation of the first title’s torture scene, or the return of a beloved character) ultimately become part of a meta-narrative. The plot becomes unreliable, irrelevant noise, making everything feel increasingly surreal.
This destabilization is more than just a commentary on the post-truth age. It gets at something much deeper, as it’s an excellent illustration of the process of personal deconstruction. At the start of the story, Raiden doesn’t know who he is — he’s an inferior replacement for someone else, following orders, running from his past and watching who he wants to become from a distance. In essence, he is a stand-in for the player, who is imagined here as an un-self-actualized person playing a game to escape themselves and their problems. His commanding officers are manipulating him in the same way that the game is manipulating the player. He’s then forced to confront his personal trauma instead of escaping into a mission that isn’t about him at all.
This is the point where I remember that psilocybin-containing mushrooms were legal in Japan until 2002. The way the plot escalates from here imitates the personal deconstruction that happens in a deep trip, as your whole worldview and sense of self is shredded to pieces. The meta aspects, reversals, and revelations escalate into chaos and confusion, with constant zooming out via new perspectives from multiple parties, until finally all the illusions and boxes collapse. Raiden is left with the capacity to shape himself and his life on his own terms, without being held back by unresolved trauma, and without letting others dictate his experience for him. The stage has been set for him to self-actualize.
The game seemingly ends on a cliffhanger ending, which left fans clamoring for another sequel. It introduces an inhuman force that controls the world known as ‘The Patriots’ — a sort of illuminati stand-in — and leaves a lot of questions about them unanswered. My interpretation is that they aren’t meant to be taken literally — they represent the final boss of what is internally controlling you, something which feels so far beyond you that it’s incomprehensible. These are the toxic social ideas that everyone internalizes, and that allow each individual to be controlled. Raiden overcame their hold over him by escaping their constructed reality, and so the story the game was telling was complete. Fans who took it literally were of course demanding answers, but I don’t think anything here was meant to be taken literally.
After doing the kind of deconstruction process this game illustrates so well, you always have to return to your everyday life. The game takes away any reason to continue being invested in its plot by removing your ability to make sense of it or hold onto anything, but then the process ends and you return to earth. What is real? What really happened? It doesn’t matter anymore because all you’re left with is the present, and the moment-to-moment decisions. You’re left with the things you can control, and are no longer wasting energy on the things that are far too big for you as an individual to impact, like the invisible forces which covertly control the world.
In the first game, Kojima was telling players to quit escaping into games, go outside, and connect with other humans. That message is reiterated here — ‘You don’t need another action sequel — you need to stop running’- but it’s also taken a step further, encouraging players to do the hard work of dealing with their issues and discovering who they really are. Raiden’s arc demonstrates what is necessary to achieve self-actualization: opening up, becoming vulnerable, accepting help, facing down your shadow, letting yourself feel as if you’re momentarily going insane, and getting to the other side of the storm, stronger and more self-aware.
All of this reminds me an awful lot of Hideaki Anno’s Evangelion series, which may have been a big influence here. Anno also created deeply psychological work in the mech kaiju genre, often giving fans the finger and telling them to stop escaping, deal with their issues, and go outside. The ‘End of Evangelion’ film in particular has a lot in common with Metal Gear Solid 2, and the Evangelion series in general is about the Shinji’s personal process and self-actualization, much like Raiden’s arc here.
Once again, all of this is delivered with the tone of a goofy action movie, so it’s easy to miss what it’s all about if you haven’t already initiated the process I’m describing in yourself. I think it’s a bit of a shame that most people experienced this game in their teen years — they likely missed the entire point, hence all the outcry about Raiden. I’m quite glad I wasn’t able to experience it until adulthood. It’s equal parts brilliant and ridiculous, and has quickly become one of my favorite games of all time — it may have the most fascinating game plot I’ve ever experienced.
Metal Gear Solid 2 is such a huge statement that it left me wondering where the series’ plot could possibly go from here. I didn’t expect that anything could continue these themes in a satisfying way, and indeed — none of the subsequent games really tried. Kojima bypassed the problem entirely with Metal Gear Solid 3, making a prequel which didn’t have any of the meta or ludonarrative engagement of the Solid Snake titles and instead focused on actually being a video game. With Metal Gear Solid 4, Kojima tried to give the fans what they wanted — which unfortunately meant he had to take the intentionally convoluted mess he’d created here entirely literally. But we’ll get there later…
The ‘Substance’ reissue of the game included many bonus modes. There’s another round of 350 VR missions which can be played as either character, again doubling the length of the game. There’s also a series of missions called ‘Snake Tales’ which take place in the Plant. These are basically non-canon fan fiction without any voice acting — the plot is all conveyed via text. The PS2 version of the game also included a skateboarding mode which takes place in the Plant, using the Evolution Skateboarding engine. As HD edition of the game did not include that mode, I haven’t been able to try it. I’ve barely explored either of the other bonus modes, but I’ll get around to updating this review if I do.
