Metal Gear Solid for the PS1 was an incredibly influential game and turned Hideo Kojima into a household name for U.S. gamers. Its direction, gameplay, and cinematic presentation was unlike anything anyone had seen. The technology was something Kojima himself had always wanted, and when you sample games like Policenauts and Snatcher, you can see parallels that have run through his works for decades.

Now I never have been the biggest fan of his works, they come off as overly pretentious and incredibly self-indulgent when he's left too much to his own devices. He really knows game programming, and his stuff is without comparison, I can respect that. Which makes Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty one of the more contentious games I've played. It's seldom when I never again want to play a game that's technically very good. 

Developed and published by Konami, Sons of Liberty was released in 2001 much to great fanfare from many awaiting the follow-up to Solid. I'm not even going to try and abridge a plot synopsis for this game. Attempts to do so will cause me to bleed from every orifice on my head and I'll end up dead in a bathtub. Snake is trying to destroy Metal Gear RAY at the beginning of the game by boarding a tanker in, and I'll call a spade a spade, one of the coolest cold openings in video games. It really shows off the leap in visuals (for the time) from the generations, and Kojima no doubt had fun adding so many intricate details to this scenario.

After a portion of the game that would have been the halfway point in any other venture around the time, the game skips two years later and you then take control of Raiden, Sons of Liberty's ACTUAL protagonist. This was widely controversial at the time, gamers and editors at publications flipped their shit that they couldn't play as Snake for the majority of the game, who was pretty much iconic by this point. Reaction to Raiden can only be described as nuclear, players found him whiny, despite essentially being Snake Eyes from G.I. Joe. It probably didn't help that his voice was considered shrill and whiny. While I was on this bandwagon when I was younger, I did like that Quinton Flynn's performance was a stark contrast to the smokey, grizzled snarl David Hayter provided for Snake. I've always had an appreciation for yin and yang dynamics in entertainment.

The game plays very well, there's technically nothing wrong with the controls. It plays very similar to its predecessor, with some new tricks. Hideo Kojima was one of the first game directors to make adamant use of Dualshock technology. I spoke about it a little in my review of Metal Gear Solid, it's speculated that Kojima played a big influence in Dualshock's inception. In Sons of Liberty, light, rapid action button presses during chokeholds determine if you want to kill or merely detain the mercenaries in a sleeper hold, and it feels a little more refined. 

I still make an argument that the Metal Gear series is more stealth optional than a true means of which to play it. In many instances, I can sound an alarm or alert a handful of soldiers to me and pick them off by exploiting enemy patterns. Like the previous game, it utilizes a zillion cut scenes, and holy hell does it go into overdrive. This is my major problem with the game, and what video games were starting to become. Talkies. Video games with narratives so heavy, they become allergic to shutting the hell up. Whether or not you want to consider Metal Gear Solid trend-setting (I frankly blame Final Fantasy VII for at least ruining the JRPG genre) is up to the player, I really just want to play my game and enjoy it on that basis.

Sons of Liberty is packed with tons of Kojima weirdness that other head writer Tomokazu Fukushima tries to keep reeled in by keeping the westernized geopolitical intrigue separated from the overly silly sci-fi madness. Fukushima tapped out by Snake Eater, and you can tell his influence is gone by the time you play Guns of the Patriots. I'm all for someone creating the game that best suits their vision with as few liberties taken away, but that doesn't always mean that anyone left to their own devices means that whatever they create is guaranteed to be good.

That is my problem with this game, I felt like someone is constantly speaking a foreign language to me, never informing me as to what's being conveyed, and then proceeds to make fun of me for failing to be in on the joke(s). As you approach the final act, so something resembling it, each exposition dump gets even more surreal to the point that I just wanted it to end. I consider myself a very jocular person, but I stopped laughing at the silliness after a while and my impatience turned into frustration. That frustration then just became emptiness by the time the end credits rolled. You could say I'm not "with it" and just don't understand the meta that is Hideo Kojima's vision with this franchise. I've heard it before. I don't think I'm cool because I'm a contrarian, it's just a silly video game. But for a game that boasts a lot of nifty controls, great musical and vocal performances, game direction that was certainly ahead of its time, I never want to revisit Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty again. This is probably a lengthy manner of saying this series was never for me and I kinda regret investing energy into it. I wanted was more Zone of the Enders...