Every Metal Gear Solid Game Ranked

What happens when your vision is limited by the technology available at the time? Well if you’re Hideo Kojima, you end up creating a whole new genre of games. Unable to fulfill his dreams of making a big budget blockbuster in video game form (seriously just look at the box art for the game, it’s literally just Michael Beihn from Terminator) you need to scale back those ambitions and work with what you have available. With the MSX2 able to render no more than a couple enemies on screen at once, Kojima turned his vision into a game of cat and mouse in which if Snake was discovered, he would need to escape and hide from the guards instead of engaging in a head on assault. The title became an almost overnight success as gamers embraced this unconventional gameplay design and launched a successful series that spanned decades.

The only entry on this list not written or directed by Hideo Kojima himself, Portable Ops takes place a few years after the events of Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater and follows Naked Snake’s attempts to recruit new soldiers to his unit to complete missions. While this entry was held back by the PSP hardware, specifically the lack of a second analog stick, the team at Kojima Productions still did an admirable job adjusting the gameplay elements from Snake Eater to Sony’s first portable console. The game also used the PSP’s built in Wi-Fi play in which players could recruit or trade soldiers from other players after defeating them in combat and then use those newly acquired assets in the game’s single player campaign.

While Konami would release a sequel to Metal Gear only in North America titled “Snake’s Revenge” without Kojima’s involvement, Japan would get the true sequel to Metal Gear the same year with Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Metal Gear 2 expanded on the concept of the first game but also began to introduce many of the things that made the a standout including its repertoire of strangely named bosses that Snake must defeat in order to rescue the kidnapped scientist and destroy a new version of Metal Gear. The second entry suffered from the same limitations as the first game but a newly confident Hideo Kojima had begun to lay the groundwork for what made the series so iconic for many generations to come.

Once again Kojima’s vision was limited by the hardware. This time however, it was because of the disappointing commercial success of the PSP rather than the limitations of the technology available. This time Kojima took up writing and directing duties for the direct sequel to Portable Ops that continued the rise of Big Boss and his “Soldiers Without Borders”. The game expanded on Portable Ops multiplayer aspects by adding in a cooperative mode keeping with the game’s overall theme of peace. Peace Walker also introduced players to Mother Base, a headquarters where players maintain the day to day operations of their soldiers between missions. Kojima considered this the biggest game he’d worked on up to that point and many of the ideas in this portable title would be expanded upon in MGS5.

While MGS4 could have easily been the series’ swan song, Kojima seemingly couldn’t help himself from tying up one of the loose plot threads left dangling by that entry’s ending. However, instead of just focusing on telling a captivating story of stealth and espionage, Kojima set out to create the biggest entry in the entire franchise and give players more freedom to complete their missions than ever before. While MGS5 did seem to become overloaded with menus within sub-menus, as well as building and maintaining Mother Base, there was no denying the overall gameplay and technology behind it was revolutionary for not only the series but the industry as well. Had it not been for Konami’s interference, like forcing Kojima to release Ground Zeroes as a prologue chapter due to the extreme development time; MGS5 could have been the greatest game Kojima and his team had ever created.

In the early days of the internet, this was a switcheroo that no one saw coming. Gamers only got to play as Solid Snake for the opening tanker level which amounted to roughly 2 hours if you took your time, and the introduction of Raiden definitely rubbed many gamers the wrong way for those expecting Solid Snake’s next mission. However even despite the subterfuge, no one could deny the gameplay and story were still top notch. Full of plot twists, character reveals and betrayals and some of the best 4th wall breaks in the series, MGS2’s story is still surprisingly relevant even today. Kojima didn’t want to repeat the success of Metal Gear Solid and set out to deconstruct the nature of video game sequels and gamers’ expectations of them and that it’s something that is still being discussed to this day 20 years later, we’d say Mission Accomplished.

The entry that put the series on the mainstream map and made fans out of millions of PlayStation gamers in the process. Metal Gear Solid changed the way that stories in video games were told with its cinematic presentation, brilliant voice acting and story that maintained all of the Kojima weirdness and charm but also streamlined the convoluted plot for newcomers and fans alike. Metal Gear Solid pushed Sony’s first console further than it had been up to that point and all of the new technology gave Kojima even more chances to mess with players in the real world. This entry established Kojima’s unique approach to 4th wall breaks with Psycho Mantis reading the player’s memory card and telling players to find Meryl’s Codec number “on the back of the box”. How long did it take any of us to figure out what that meant pre-internet?

Wrapping up a beloved series that has been going strong for over 2 decades is no easy feat for any form of entertainment, as is evident by the many failures who have attempted to do so over the years. Yet that’s exactly what Hideo Kojima set out to do with MGS4. While some of the cutscenes were longer than some movies, the gameplay was as solid as ever and full of nods and callbacks for longtime fans of the series, and the whole game was just overflowing with Kojima-isms that make his games so unique. Looking at you chain smoking diaper monkey. MGS4 managed to bring closure to many of the main series, redeem some, and leave just enough lingering questions for fans to theorize over for many years to come. The story of Solid Snake may be over, but he got one hell of a send off.

After the rug pull that was MGS2, gamers were anxiously waiting for the next entry in which they could play as Solid Snake once again. And while this wasn’t the Snake they were expecting, at least there wasn’t any protagonist switch part way through the game this time. Set at the earliest point in the Metal Gear universe, the game followed Naked Snake in the days before he became Big Boss. Kojima compared this title to a Bond film and given the game’s aesthetics and characters constantly changing allegiances it’s hard not to see the similarities. MGS3 continued the series tradition of over-the-top bosses with some of the best in the entire series and an emotional story that didn’t get too convoluted in its own politics and backstories. MGS3 tells the heartbreaking journey of a soldier betrayed and is undeniably the best game in the long running series.