★★★
How could any game that has you playing as a practically invincible, walking armory be considered a stealth game? You play as Solid Snake, and although you begin the game breaking into the military base Outer Heaven carrying only a pack of cigarettes, it isn’t long before you find a handgun among a choice set of rooms containing an infinitely respawning supply of rations and ammunition. As you press further into the base, you’ll continue to pick up an overwhelming abundance of plastic explosives, mines, remote-controlled rockets, grenade launchers, sub-machine guns, and rocket launchers, with more than enough ammunition to spare. Now does that sound like an appropriate loadout for a secret operative that must avoid the enemy at all costs? Or doesn’t this rather sound like what you’d expect the Terminator to be packing?
And as soon as you find the room with the suppressor in it, the game’s stealth mechanics become even less relevant than ever. The suppressor silences your handgun and SMG, allowing you to fire them to your heart’s content without ever again drawing the enemy’s attention. But what kind of behavior does this then encourage? You can now easily pop into a room and go full-on Rambo on everyone in there, slaughtering everybody, without ever alerting even a single guard or ever again having to carefully sneak right up next to someone to punch their lights out. So instead of a game that gets progressively more and more difficult, ideally by demanding you to be ever more clever and bold in order to stay undetected, the game simply throws up its hands early on and says, “To hell with it. I guess you can use your guns now.”
At first glance, the inclusion of a suppressor seems like an excellent addition to any stealth game. After all, what secret operative’s arsenal would be complete without one? However, silently eliminating enemies at a distance is far too powerful a mechanic in Metal Gear. In order for ranged attacks to work well in a stealth game, they need to be paired alongside another mechanic to ensure their inclusion does not devolve the game back into an arcade action game. There are many ways to achieve this, and in fact it’s even been achieved prior to Metal Gear’s release in the Castle Wolfenstein games. As an example of how to do this well, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein severely limits your ammunition, features extremely lethal gunfights, never powers up your gun with a silencer, and doesn’t magically remove enemy corpses after you’ve shot them down, sometimes requiring you to move them so they’re not discovered. All of these things work together to ensure you’re not leaning too heavily on your gun in a game that purportedly offers an experience that you can’t get anywhere else, and it worked marvelously here. Metal Gear, to return to the game at hand, doesn’t do anything of the sort, making it a poor successor to Castle Wolfenstein due to its failure to take any of this into account.
That being said, some of the weapons actually are a lot of fun to use. The SMG in particular is always a delight, in that it shoots a spray of bullets off in an erratic pattern at whatever you’re aiming at, excellently simulating the poor accuracy and short range you’d expect from such a gun. You will love every moment shooting that thing. It eats up bullets fast though, so don’t go overboard with it, otherwise you’ll end up making more tedious detours to the nearest ammo room than you otherwise would have.
It’s a shame then that your vast collection of weapons is so highly effective at wiping out all trace of the enemy, resulting in hardly any challenge to the game at all. The greatest challenges you will ever face is finding the hidden Bomb Blast Suit and remembering to write down Metal Gear’s destruction sequence. Enemies die quickly, not even bothering to leave incriminating corpses behind, and those that can’t be killed as easily, such as the jetpack soldiers, carry all the menace of a buzzing gnat. Bosses also fail to put up much of a fight. And even if you did manage to take a few too many bullets to the face, you can instantly heal all your wounds via one of your ration items, which you can eventually store up to 12 of and can be used automatically if you’re ever about to die. And it’s not as if you’ll ever be further than a few rations away from the nearest supply room, practically ensuring your invulnerability to bullets throughout the entire game, ultimately reducing every single enemy encounter to an exercise in fly-swatting.
This is a problem. Metal Gear can’t compete with the combat found in similar action games like Zelda no Densetsu, and it’s not just because of the invulnerability issue. Rather than having a wide variety of enemies that can be overcome by mastering their patterns and counterattacking appropriately, Metal Gear features only a handful of enemy types (soldiers, dogs, soldiers with jetpacks, and scorpions) that all share the same modus operandi upon detecting the player — freak out and go nuts! There’s nothing deliberate about such an encounter, and the whole thing ends up feeling very chaotic in much the same way that perhaps a real gunfight might, with people just wildly running around, shooting every which way in hopes of somehow hitting their target. Now if this was intentional, I must commend Konami for making an attempt at portraying a realistic gunfight between startled combatants, but the technology just isn’t there at this point to make it look very convincing. In many cases, it actually looks quite ridiculous.
In short, the combat isn’t all that great. You’ll want to avoid it. And this is where Metal Gear finally begins to come into its own. You’re given the means to avoid all tiresome combat by simply remaining undetected. This then serves as your greatest motivation for playing the game stealthily — to ensure your time spent exploring Outer Heaven isn’t interrupted with too many annoying gunfights. This is the best way in which the game resists your progress through it. Granted it isn’t much of a resistance, but it does nonetheless manage to be just enough to get you to start sneaking like you should, even if this is a very roundabout way of achieving that. So even though you’ll rarely ever need to use stealth, you’ll still be motivated to employ it in order to explore the game on your own terms.
You can see an excellent modern example of this in Konami’s grand return to form Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, which had many sections that allowed you to slip through areas completely undetected by enemies. It’s not as if you weren’t fully capable of taking those guys down, and even utterly destroying them if you wanted. Enemies took time and concentration to fight properly, to prevent them from tearing you to shreds. What you really wanted to do is quickly get to the next area or boss fight without making too many mistakes and with enough energy left over to take on whatever unknown was waiting for you around the corner. And Metal Gear is very similar (perhaps the two games are not as unrelated as once was thought). Say you’ve finally made your way across the scorpion desert and found the keycard that opens up the next important area in the previous building, and now all you want to do is make your way back there without too much of a fuss. Preferably, without ever being seen. After all, if you’re spotted it’s uncertain if you’ll just have to clear the one room, or if it’s going to be a major alert that sends in reinforcements. You just don’t know, and so you avoid enemies as best you can, because they slow you down. Even though, in all actuality, you could easily kill everything without too much effort and still end up with max health and ammo with no problem. All you were doing was saving on time and annoyance.
So now rather than entering an area and playing the game like you might a round of Berzerk, you’ll begin giving more thought to your movements throughout Outer Heaven, picking off soldiers with care, avoiding them altogether if at all possible, and only engaging in the fiercely uninspiring gunfights mentioned above if you make a foolish move and get yourself caught. Now instead of playing like an arcade game from 1980, we have a game that much more closely resembles the classic Castle Wolfenstein games, in that your every move from here on will be predicated on avoiding the enemy whenever possible. But even though you’re sneaking past soldiers in both Castle Wolfenstein and Metal Gear, there is still a great deal of difference between the two.
Say a soldier just spotted you in Metal Gear. An alarm is raised in that every soldier in the room now knows where you are and enter full on seek and destroy mode. Now you gotta kill everyone in sight if you don’t want this alarm to follow you to the next area. If you’re especially unlucky, the guards will have been doubly alerted, which leads to reinforcements pouring in from off-screen to take you out. After you kill enough of them, the reinforcements stop. As to why they’d ever stop sending in troops, I have no idea. Perhaps the Outer Heaven commander realizes the futility in sending any more troops into the blender. More likely, the tender-hearted designers must have figured that the player’s surely learned his lesson at this point and probably won’t do it again, and so they lift their hands after a point. Of course, they couldn’t be more wrong as evidenced by the hilarious total number of alerts raised by an average player on completing the game.
Once you’ve killed everything that moves, and the reinforcements cease, you can proceed along as if the bloody encounter never happened. The rest of the base is completely oblivious to any battle that might have gone down. Contrast this with Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, a game that sends you off on a similar infiltration mission. When a Nazi triggers an alarm in that game, it is a devastating blow. Every room you enter from that point on will have all enemies bearing down on you, guns blazing. No room is safe anymore. Even if you cleared a room, a Nazi may still suddenly run in from out of nowhere with gun drawn and blood in his eyes. All the more terrifying since not only was there no longer ANY safe place in the bunker, but now you actually had to start using your pistol to defend yourself, which wasn’t easy. On top of that, you could only hold a single clip at a time in the Wolfenstein games. You never had more than 10 bullets. Ever. And replacement clips certainly weren’t guaranteed to be found on a Nazi corpse, or even most lockers for that matter. Metal Gear rather allows you a maximum of 50 missiles, 100 explosives, and 500 bullets to carry around on you at any given time. Overkill much?
Not only that, but you are extremely vulnerable in Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. It takes only a single shot to kill you, but if you’re lucky you might only suffer a non-lethal gunshot wound instead. A wound which leaves you limping the rest of the game until you can find a first aid kit to heal it. Ah, now here’s a great idea! A damage system that’s more sophisticated than just a number representing how close you are to death. Why don’t we see more of this kind of thing? If it can be done in 1984, what excuse has there been for the past 30 years?
Even more interesting, when you are killed or captured in the Wolfenstein games, the game simply ends. There are no retries or continues here. You have one life, and you must start over completely from the beginning if killed. You could restart in the same bunker again, or if you wanted something new, you could generate a new bunker to play in next time. This made the devastating consequences for failure tolerable, since at the very least, you could always try a new bunker that you hadn’t experienced before, or you could try the same one again but try a different route this time. Essentially, it wasn’t easy to run out of new things to do or see, which is hardly the case for Metal Gear. Even if you did somehow manage to get yourself killed in Metal Gear, the consequences for such a failure are terribly minor — restarting at the nearest elevator. Shouldn’t a stealth-heavy action game be more severe than this? After all, shouldn’t Metal Gear have been a refinement of all the great ideas that were already being developed in the Castle Wolfenstein games? The reason, of course, is that the strict, limited scenario that Hideo Kojima designed for Metal Gear is incompatible with such a harsh design.
But at least the scenario is an interesting one. You play as special forces operative Solid Snake on a mission to infiltrate Outer Heaven, rescue High-Tech Special Forces Unit FOXHOUND’s top agent, Gray Fox, and find and destroy the base’s secret weapon — a gigantic nuclear-armed, walking battletank known only as Metal Gear. A simple enough mission description, but it’s enough to get the blood going with its promise of excitement in a modern setting full of doomsday technology, war heroes, and intrigue. Metal Gear is to be commended in every way for having such a cool setting as this, and an enjoyable time is in store for anyone who braves an attempt at unravelling the secret of Outer Heaven and extinguishing the evil within.
Just compare this with the likes of Zelda no Densetsu, and you’ll see immediately what I’m talking about. In Zelda, you have to rescue the princess by collecting eight pieces of the Triforce scattered throughout the fantasy land of Hyrule. Already I can feel myself wearing thin with that description. Eight pieces, you say? You’ve got to be kidding me. The game sounds like a massive chore, the likes of which I have a hard time seeing myself playing past collecting the first four pieces or so.
That’s not to say that there isn’t any merit to the open-ended, treasure hunt design of Zelda. It drops you into the world of Hyrule, tells you to find the Triforce pieces, and expects you to figure out what you need to do from there, and that’s a very cool idea, and well worth exploring further even today. But this just wouldn’t work for a game like Metal Gear, since you are given such a specific mission, and there’s no time to waste here. The aesthetics won’t allow it. What kind of special agent shows up to his mission without the slightest clue about what to do or where to go? Or even has the time or the luxury to deviate from his mission in the first place? Not Solid Snake, that’s for sure.
Though Metal Gear is lacking when it comes to the great sense of slow discovery found in Zelda, it makes up for it in spades with the tremendous amount of surprises Konami was able to pack into the game. Delightful surprises, which are oftentimes very startling, come one after another within the level design, the narrative, and a variety of excellent scripted sequences. Patrol routes are often unpredictable. More than in almost any other game I’ve played featuring such patrols, I’ve had guards suddenly turn around on me and spot me, resulting in a highly startling sound effect that has since become iconic for the series. Hidden trapdoors open up unexpectedly all around the base. Mines are buried deviously in strategic places outside. Hopping into the back of certain trucks suddenly takes you off on a one-way journey all the way back to the beginning area of the game. Everything here seems to excellently work together toward surprising you in much the same way you do its guards. There are many great moments in the game that will have you yelling at the screen in sudden alarm, and any game that can evoke such a response is well worth experiencing. For it’s in those moments, when you enter a room, and you start surveying the new situation to the best of your ability, noting patrol routes, plotting out a plan in your head to reach the other side without getting spotted, that you become in sync with the game, and it’s at that moment that you effectively become Solid Snake. Which is why it’s so jarring to get spotted, because you’re then violently ripped out of that perfect state to play a tedious combat mini-game. Yet, in those moments prior, there is a greatness that exemplifies everything about what makes videogames so excellent.
Not to mention that the game looks and sounds great. Since it was developed for the MSX2 home computer, it has a significant edge over similar titles released at the time on home consoles. The art style for the characters is reminiscent of Akumajou Dracula, giving it a more realistic aesthetic that fits the game perfectly. Its soundtrack also definitely puts Zelda’s to shame in that it won’t drive you insane over the course of playing the game. Even better, the music switches to a more energetic track whenever you get spotted, increasing the suspense at such an event. This alert music is extremely well done, and fits what’s happening on the screen very well — a frantic, action piece that seems to embody the spirit of our hero. When you finish dealing with the situation, the regular music kicks back in, and sounds almost like the very beating heart of Outer Heaven itself, restored back to a normal pace.
It all adds up to a decent action game with a compelling scenario filled with great surprises and a small subset of the mechanics from the Castle Wolfenstein games. There is definitely a great deal of potential here, but as of this implementation, the stealth mechanics were simply choked out, withering alongside everything else that was growing with it. If more care had been spent ensuring the proper balance among all the major features, this could have really made for an amazing game. As it is though, it’s simply an entertaining way to spend eight hours, experiencing how the Metal Gear series began.