This is a big deal because I remember how much of an impact this game had on me when I first played it. Seeing how my life was mostly me playing video games and watching movies, you might even say this was one of the best moments of my life. But it wouldn't be the first of its kind. I've learned to accept disappointment as a normal part of maturing. It simply means that my taste has become more sophisticated (as arrogant as that sounds), and that I'm now able to enjoy other works of fiction and interaction that used to be impenetrable for me.

This must've been the fourth time I've played through this game. I had never noticed how clunky the controls are, how rigid Snake’s movements are, how limiting the camera is, and how cheap and unfair a lot of the challenges are.

Every action seems to be separated from the other, which is very counter to how people move in real life. In MGS there is no flow to movement, it's a bunch of starts and stops. The stealth system works when the game gives you open locations with a lot of alternative ways to hide from the enemies or dispose of them. But at least one third of the game is forced combat sections or tiny corridors where your stealth options are limited to one or two.

From about the Raven fight onwards, the game starts getting increasingly worse. The Raven fight itself is pretty terrible, utilizing none of the stealth mechanics you've been taught up to that point, but around the same time (I forget whether before or after) you get introduced to these landmines which, even when you use your heat vision, you still can't tell the hitbox area. It's made worse by the camera, which sometimes zooms in so close, you can't tell what's a meter away from you. I literally had a situation where I walked into a room with several landmines and got hit by each one of them. It would've been fine if they were limited to specific areas where you know to use the heat vision, but you just keep running into them randomly throughout the rest of the game.

Then of course the Gray Fox fight is a brawling contest. The Psycho Mantis fight is pretty cool conceptually (and visually), but how are you supposed to learn to plug your controller into the second slot without the Colonel telling you? IIRC somebody said the code was on the box of the game, but obviously that doesn't age well because most of us play this game digitally.

Then there's the wolf cave, where you're forced to fight wolves with a shoddy auto-aim. Half the time you don't even see them until they attack you because they're fast and come from outside your field of vision. The radar can help you spot them, but to aim at them while they're off-screen is near-impossible. And then you gotta look through same-looking texture to find your way out of there.

Then the game forces you to backtrack almost all the way to the beginning of the game. In some games backtracking is fun because you return to the locations that have changed since you last visited them and they themselves become the destination or a new path opens within them, but here you're supposed to progress forward, but are forced to go back only to return forward again. The locations are the same, there are hardly any changes (except some new items). This just breaks the flow of the game and doesn't make much sense story-wise. Oh, Meryl's bleeding? Let me leave her to bleed in the line of fire while I go rummage through the old locations to find a sniper rifle. There isn't even a time limit, you can spend hours there, there's no urgency.

Then you return to the place to fight Sniper Wolf, and it's a horrendous fight because all you do is aim in first person, controlling your reticle with your d-pad, and shoot. You can't shoot her more than once at a time, and you can't shoot her arms while they're poking out from behind the cover. It doesn't feel real, it's almost like a bad mini-game. And then later you have to do the same thing AGAIN.

Then of course there's the torture room, which I never liked. In fact I've never gotten the true ending of the game (I watched it on YouTube) because I could never mash the button fast enough. I hate this bullshit in any game. It's an exercise in breaking your own controller (or an entire PS Vita in my case).

Then there's the Communication Towers: run through endless floors and shoot enemies that come from upstairs and downstairs simultaneously, with your shitty auto-aim failing to lock onto them half the time. After the first tower there's a moment where the game literally misleads you by placing you near a frozen door and placing a C4 next to it, indicating that the door should be blown up. Except you don't need to go there in the first place. I must've wasted like 20 minutes just running upstairs and downstairs that first tower again only to realize I wasn't supposed to be there.

The first Liquid fight is almost as bad as the Sniper Wolf fight, except your character doesn't need to lie down every time you pull the weapon out. But there are more obstacles in the way, and the lock on did fail me a couple times.

Before and after that there are THREE (!!!) elevator fights, which are again forced combat sequences in a stealth game with bad combat.

Then a second Raven fight, which is similar to the Ocelot fight, except more difficult. It's alright overall, but because of how fast Raven is, your own slowness and clunkiness are felt stronger. It's all about quickly pulling out a weapon, shooting, and retreating, which the transitions between these actions are very rigid and grating. On top of that your rations can randomly freeze up in the middle of the fight, which took me by surprise and caused a death.

Then MORE BACKTRACKING... Ugggghhh......................

Finally, the final battle with Liquid, and it's another brawling contest.

MGS is not only classified as a stealth game, but it's often considered one of the greatest stealth games of all time. Having come out the same year as Tenchu and Thief, it is hailed as one of the big three games that have revolutionized the genre. But is it really a stealth game? I think at least 40% of it is not, and that's not counting all the cutscenes. I think MGS above all is an interactive movie with some various types of gameplay sprinkled throughout. This is probably why I fell in love with it initially, and why the first game was always my favorite. I've never been much of a stealth-head, and I remember enjoying how simple the stealth mechanics in this first game were. But idk how I never noticed before how bad everything else is in the game, and even stealth is often very limited. And the backtracking feels like an attempt to pad out the game by making the player literally replay the levels he's already beaten.

I guess I was too enamored with the story to notice the gameplay flaws. After all, this is one of the greatest stories in the video game medium... Which isn't a very high bar to reach. It was undoubtedly one of a kind for 1998, which is why I'm giving it an extra half a star, and it certainly blew my mind when I first played it. I had never seen a game that touched on so many mature themes and have characters with fleshed out worldviews and grey morality, at least not one where this was all delivered with good voice-acting and cinematic cutscenes. For the time, writing like this felt supernatural to me, but in the years since I played it I've grown as a writer and as a human being. Now I can see the seams, and the clunkiness of the narrative is more apparent. Everything I said before is still true, but the way it's written and delivered no longer impresses me.

To begin with, most of the story is essentially conveyed through exposition dumps. It's always a character getting on his/her soapbox and explaining everything to the player/Snake in a long-winded monologue. A lot of the times the transition to that monologue is really inorganic and out of place. The character might be talking about something mission-related and then suddenly veer off into something really personal, completely unprovoked. There is no flow to dialogues, their only function is to convey information. In addition, Snake is almost a non-character. His behavior is really inconsistent. One minute he's acting like a battle-hardened veteran that's not in touch with his emotions, next minute he literally begs Naomi to talk to him because he "needs it". By the end of the game he becomes absolutely sentimental and starts rambling about his feelings left and right.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying a battle-hardened veteran wouldn't have these feelings. What I'm saying is people like that usually suppress them. It's a real problem in a lot of men, because we live in a patriarchal system where we're supposed to conform to stereotypes about masculinity which ironically objectify us as much as feminine stereotypes objectify women. A man is supposed to be tough and quiet and in control of his emotions. This type of worldview by a certain age becomes so ingrained in a man's psyche that it would take years of therapy to fix it. A character like Snake who starts off as a tough guy who mistrusts anyone and in a few hours becomes introspective and open to fall in love with a complete stranger is just unrealistic, almost cartoony.

And this is really what can be said about any significant character in the game. Meryl is a very stereotypical and antiquated image of a woman. Despite her being a soldier, she appears weak and becomes a damsel in distress and a love interest for the protagonist. Liquid is a cartoon supervillain with a ridiculous "evil" plan that makes no sense. So, you were expecting Solid (I'm sorry, you both are snakes, so I'mma call you by first names) to activate the nuclear device the entire time? Excuse me, then why the hell were you sending your crew members to fight him and even attacked him yourself on a helicopter and blew up the entire roof with rockets? Are you retarded? Seriously, is Liquid retarded because he was made out of recessive genes? Anyway, it was really hard to take anything he says seriously because he speaks with such theatricality that he comes off as a caricature.

A lot of the story was just yapfest. Unnecessarily overcomplicated, going into weirdly obsessive details about things that don't matter (e.g. why do we need to know how exactly FoxDie attacks human heart? The important thing is that it does, we don't need a scientific explanation of how). As a result it's pretty hard to digest and probably what contributes to the illusion that makes it appear deeper than it really is. Once you really break it down to its themes and what they say, there's nothing extraordinary about it. The overcomplicated plot is also not a good thing. Those numerous plot twists delivered in a rapid succession make it resemble a soap opera.

In conclusion, I found MGS to be a mixed bag. It has plenty of great ideas both story-wise and gameplay-wise, but it also has a fair share of terrible ideas and terribly-executed ideas. I hate to say it, but upon revisiting this game, it was a huge disappointment for me, and I have no desire to play it again.