4/5 ★ – isaiahbot's review of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.

***Minor Spoilers*** This is a near quintessential sequel to the already revolutionary MGS, not just pushing standards but creating new ones in its intricate and reactive environments and gameplay nuances when one goes looking for them. The narrative, presented by the (mostly) iconically endearing characters the series has become known for, and campy, brain meltingly meta, and occasionally exhausting writing if I’m being honest, is definitely something special, especially for its time. The creation of the first atomic bomb coinciding with the creation of the computer is an established motif at the beginning. Both can be and are used as weapons. One by global superpowers, and the other by global superpowers and the individual with “too much power for an immature species”. The way it explores computers and, more specifically, the internet is tightly composed, meaningful, and to put it bluntly, prophetic. It puts it in a way that makes one wrestle with both sides of the arguments presented, as both have fallacies and unavoidable truths. It seemingly explores this predominantly through cutscenes and dialogue, but remembering back will show that gameplay played a decently important role in drilling this home as well. I think MGS bosses showcase my favorite aspect of these games; combating an enemy with a presented weakness and vague solutions that leave room for improvisation and reward those for using your own strategies. Bosses are what made me realize how surprisingly stale I found the core gameplay to be throughout a few chunks of the rest of the game. Mark Brown put it best in regards to MGS5 on the subject of systemic design, and I think this carries over to MGS2; “I finished a lot of missions abusing the silenced tranquilizer gun. Why risk some ridiculous plan if there’s a much more reliable solution to the game’s challenges?” Basically, you’re given all these crazy tools and weapons but rarely ever need them or are pushed to use them. In fact, it sometimes feels like you go way out of your way to use other methods and over complicate things when doing so. It’s really up to the player here to take the leap of making moments more interesting to change things up rather than the game incentivizing or requiring the player to take stealth in a different direction. But these problems are, for the most part, the exception and not the rule. Puzzles are fun and, much like any Kojima game, force the player to think outside the box. There are good “gimmicky” sections that force the player to take stealth in other directions, which is always welcome, and codec convos are also impressively reactive to actions in game. I really like the majority of performances and writing but, I’m sorry, the voice acting and writing for dialogue between Raiden and Rose is some of the most hilariously horrendous stuff I’ve seen in a while. I think the reason it stands out is because pretty much everyone else has an iconically good and charismatic performance that matches Kojima’s writing. Idk it just made me laugh every time they were on screen together. Even if there’s some really goofy stuff here and some instances of redundant game design and narrative moments, this is still a wildly impressive and deep piece, both for its time and today and is actually inspiring in a lot of ways.