Metal Gear Solid 1 lived on the Playstation and died on the Gamecube.
In many “Top 100 Games Ever” lists Metal Gear Solid (PS1, 1999) pops up. During the description, to my horror, there is always something akin to “the 2004 gamecube remake by Silicon Knights is the superior version so go get that”. This infuriates me as I felt this just wasn’t the case! I sat down to play the remake and found myself wondering how they could get it so wrong when there was already a finished version to learn from. And I will go on to explain why the game design document managed to be misinterpreted in the absence of the (heavily disputed but ultimately) ingenious Hideo Kojima.
My theory is that the reason Silicon Knights was given the opportunity to remake the classic game was due to their title “Eternal Darkness”, which used a lot of fourth-wall breaking gimmicks inspired by the much greater realised fourth-wall breaking of Metal Gear Solid a few years prior. Seeing this, Konami thought they were the team for the job. Eternal Darkness speaks to a lot of people but I just found it determined to not engage me, and their later efforts with “Too Human” lead me to think they are good-hearted people that just seem to miss the mark like so many do in the ridiculously hard feat that is game development.
So lets start with what makes Metal Gear Solid so important in gaming history. It was loved and loathed for bringing games closer to cinema than ever before. It had a shed load of cut-scenes, something that is hated now but was almost seen as a prize for getting through each level in the old days. Kojima made these forward the plot in an ongoing and cohesive fashion that really did bleed into the gameplay rather than staying detached from it. The voice acting was above par for the industry and the naff writing was enough to make players feel like they were engaged in a mature soap opera. The environment wasn’t built like levels, but like a living breathing world. You would go back and forth between environments and small details would change as the story unfolded through cut-scenes and codec conversations. It felt like the people you talked to over codec were genuinely grounded in a place that you could visit and find them where they would address you as they had just got off the phone with you in striking continuity. It was a level of polish and tightly woven story I’m not sure I have ever seen since. The icing on the cake was wonderful music that for a game felt electrifyingly cinematic (it gave you the same feeling back then that Hans Zimmer does for this generation in The Dark Knight and Inception). Each area had a musical theme, which upon hearing brings back memories of your time in each environment (it will even be used to conjure memories of the first game at points in later metal gear titles), and this was also used as part of the game mechanics at times.
So upon playing the remake, the first thing I noticed was that the music was bland in comparison. It had no iconic flavour and no reflection of the emotions felt through gameplay nor any formation of them. Could my preference of the music be nostalgia taking over? Possibly, but I doubt it. Good music stays with you on one playthrough, and I cannot remember a single note from the remake’s score. In fact the most powerful occasions were those where it took music from the original game, which just confirms my point. There are some moments in the original version, like the first time the player finds the metal gear they’ve been raving about all game, when the music really captures the significance of the moment. In the remake, however, it seems like it was just one of 30 random music compositions that were handed to the audio team to put in where they pleased.
The next sin committed in the remake was inferior voice acting. Please can someone tell me how with the same script, and the same voice actors, you can manage to make something so inferior in quality to the original five years previously? The blame can only be with the voice direction. There are moments in the game where a performance is so off the mark that it seems like no one has a clue where in the story the line occurs, who they are supposed to care about and whether their limbs are still intact or not. To be fair, the voice acting is on the mark for most of the remake. However, it still escapes me why the cast may not have thought it was worth visiting their performance from five years prior, or the voice director playing the game to understand how the story is paced and to learn about how convincing the conversations were in the original.
Speaking of direction, lets look at Mr Kojima’s replacement for directing cut-scenes. It seems like this is a case that is quite common in the early noughties - the cut-scene director suffers from post-Matrix syndrome. Where as Kojima was concerned about telling the story with his calmly considered shot composition, his replacement seems more concerned with filming the life of a bullet or flying the camera through ears and out of noses in case the audience gets tired. Something I find quite funny about post-Matrix syndrome is that the whole point of “bullet time” in The Matrix (1999) was that it was in a context of a digital world where rules could be bent and perspectives can be altered. (Bullet Time itself seems a little inspired by video games themselves and how they are not limited to a physical camera setup. But game cameras were usually exploited for navigational purposes and not this kind of wankery). The fancy shots and action helped to reinforce that theme in The Matrix, but kids got too excited and started imitating this concept where it doesn’t serve as anything other than style over substance. (other examples of original concepts being lost in shallow contexts can be heard in the music of the TV series LOST that used instruments that sounded similar to planes diving and crashing to reinforce the narrative, and Inception's trademark brass horn sound that played in the music as a reference to the classic italian music that wakes up the dreamers. Both of these sounds are immitated in modern TV, film, and games for no more reason than it sounding cool and little thought as to how they affected the audience when originally used.) I couldn’t take the gamecube remake seriously with this childish direction. Sure kids just want to be spoon fed but even Kojima’s later Metal Gear games manage to stay rational when an action-packed cut-scene fires up and these are much more effective.
This may not seem important, but this is a game that is married to its story. Your objectives and hints are communicated entirely through that story and so to ignore it is pointless. But lets get on to the actual gameplay mechanics. The game world is 100% faithful, as it should be, so how could anything be different right? Well, some genius thought it would be great to take the game design of the more recent Metal Gear Solid 2 for the PS2 and shotgun marry it with the level design of Metal Gear Solid 1. And here is where you have your disaster folks.
Consider even the most basic of changes like how fast the character will run through the environment. Levels are designed with things like this in mind and so the experience of simple things like this are muddled. Levels weren’t designed with the ability to do a roll attack in mind, nor being able to hang from ledges to avoid detection. This sacrifices the design of guard patrols and navigating paths amongst other things. Another example to think about is that on the PS1 version, only 4 guards could be on screen at any one time, and so the levels were designed with this in mind. I cannot confirm whether the Gamecube Version kept this rule or not, but it’s worth considering how a detail like this could spoil the pacing if ignored for the remake.
The most regretful change of all is the introduction of the first person aim view from MGS2, which has been forced into the remake. At this point you can throw the original challenge of the game right out of the window. It makes most of the skill redundant when you no longer need to worry about actually manoeuvring through a level and getting up close to guards for attack or sneaking around them for stealth. You can even use the first person view to headshot some enemies in a boss fight and end it in a tenth of the time it used to last.
The original MGS was the Godfather of stealth-em-ups and this mentality was encoded into the games design right up to the point of gunfire alerting guards of your presence unless you found the suppresser. None of that matters when you have MGS2’s silent tranquilizer gun from the start of the game, which means you can take people out cowardly from afar and even get away with limited casualties on your stats at the end of the game, falsely earning you some accolades that were an achievement to earn in the original.
Where the MGS2 mechanic of having to hide dead bodies was not a feature in the original, hiding places have been awkwardly forced into environments with no design thought as to enemy patrols or primary objectives like they are in MGS2. The decision to stitch two different games together is one big mess that tarnishes the whole experience that was originally a masterpiece.
You have to play the two games throughout to feel just how much weaker the whole experience is on the gamecube. There were countless wonderful touches made in the original that remain missing from the remake and this lack of charm is something that makes the remake feel cold, and lacking the touch of an auteur the original has the blessing of having. Even when considering the time of their individual releases, the original had a phenomenal impact and had so many revolutionary attributes for the time of release. With all the changes in the remake we can’t even hope of anything as impressive for 2004. MGS3 came out the same year as the remake and puts into perspective how weak Silicon Knights’ attempt was even when having to just copy and paste. Maybe I am being unfairly harsh on the developer who from a technical standpoint presented a game that at least maintained the feeling of control from MGS2 with the authentic landscape (but not atmosphere) of MGS1. And I’m not suggesting another developer could do better, except Kojima and his team. But please, if you need to play this game, play it how it was meant to be played.
