I like Sons of Liberty but I feel like I've been hit with a Mandela Effect with everyone now kissing it's ass for being a huge bait and switch that lazily remade the previous game and made you play as a fuckboi twink, when back in the day everyone recognized it for what it was. Also, Otacon's dad killing himself because his son cucked him is hilariously retarded.
Jack!
YOU DIDN'T HAVE ANY FURNITURE!!!!!!
I loved it from when I first played it in 2001, it got good reviews by a lot of outlets.
It was controversial, but it's not like it didn't also have it's fans.
It just took a long time for most everyone to come around to it and a big part of that is how downright spookily prophetic it is in light of today's world.
I think that's a big exaggeration. It's heavily tied to MGS1 in many ways, but the game isn't much like it. Yeah, the general idea is the same (intentionally), but in action it feels and plays much differently.
That is the irony is how different it is despite the plotline of a "recreation of Shadow Moses"
There's a few reused beats but it doesn't follow MGS1 as closely as MGS1 followed MG2.
I think it's mainly the broad strokes of "infiltrating a base full of bad guys with a Metal Gear and taking on a series of bosses with specialized skills" that, since this was the 4th time a game was using that set up, made Kojima decide to get meta with it.
I never understood the hate for Raiden though. Yeah, Snake is cooler, but so what? Raiden was fine as a character.
OPM said it best by comparing Raiden to Luke Skywalker and Snake to Han Solo.
I don't know how someone couldn't feel for Raiden after his dark backstory is revealed, that shit freaked me out good as a kid.
You have to take into account that the marketing didn't show Raiden at all. It was a bait and switch that pissed a lot of people off at a time when MGS was very much a "new" franchise in the west. People actually theorized at the time that Big Boss would make some sort of flashback appearance based on the line "This is my son...I taught him everything." that appeared in the trailer.
Even the credit cinematic at the start of the original MGS2 didn't show Raiden until the very end of it, to the point that you could have just assumed he was a support character on your very first playthrough.
And of course, a lot of people don't realize just how different the MGS fanbase was in the beginning. It had a lot of more of your typical shooter/action game fans than the current majority of weaboos. There was actually a major portion of the "original" fanbase that never returned after MGS2.
There weren't many military games at the time of MGS1, I can imagine the kind of gamer for whom later became Call of Duty's audience are probably among the "original" fans that never returned, as well as in Japan certain "military otaku" types.
What's sad is Kojima still tried to please those people as far back as 3, too much so in my opinion, especially with 4, which was him saying "fuck it" and just giving what the naysayers of 2 wanted.
Many accuse Kojima of pretentiousness but he listens too much to his haters imo, like Death Stranding being chock full of gameplay, to the point where it ruins the cinematic pacing that used to be the appeal of his games in the first place, I don't want long hours of trudging over mountains and hills, I want the tight pacing of MGS1 that you can experience over and over again like one would.... watch a movie.
Although don't get me wrong, as much as I love the metaness and "mess with your head" factor of MGS2, there is a special magic to MGS1 that you wonder what it might have been like had the series continued in that vein instead of going meta.
But that's part of the brilliance of MGS2, instead of just trying to capture lightning in a bottle twice, he did something very different which makes 2 just as brilliant in it's own way, MGS3, 4 and 5 were arguably all attempts at going back to the MGS1 well, with diminishing returns each time.
