I played the playstation 1 version of the game, with duckstation to make it 1080p and widescreen. Played weeknights over the course of about a week from Jan 20 and finished on Jan 27 2025.
I was really impressed by this game overall. For a 1998 game it feels really good to play, the voice acting and cutscenes are really on-point, and I really liked the characters and story. This was my first game in the series and my first ever experience with something made by Hideo Kojima, and I can really see why people view him as some kind of gaming auteur.
One thing I want to start with is, I didn't realize at the start was that playing on hard mode disables the radar and the mine detector. Throughout the game I had a minor complaint which I chalked up to somewhat dated game design, being that I couldn't figure out how to spot mines without the detector (I assumed there was some subtle difference in what the ground looks like when there is a mine, but for the life of me I couldn't figure it out). This kinda went double once I got the mine detector item and saw that it tells you it doesn't work on hard mode, I just couldn't imagine that there was otherwise no way to detect mines. Then at one point I accidentally crawled over a mine and recovered it, this was some time before the second Vulkan Raven fight, so quite far into the game before I found this out. Back in this era a lot of info about the gameplay was found in the instruction book for the game, which I didn't have, so it's possible that's the reason I didn't know about these things. I would have played on normal had I known!
Speaking of the second Vulkan Raven fight, that's also the point that I discovered there's a radar that I didn't have. On hard mode without the radar, this fight was brutally difficult as he doesn't move with a fixed pattern. I started the fight off with Nikita Missiles until he started running fast, then I just tried to bait him into running past my C4 and some of those recovered mines to finish him off. After I beat him, I looked it up to see if there was some better method that I missed, and all the comments kept talking about a radar, which was the point I discovered that choosing hard mode was a huge mistake. Still, I think that fight was one of the highlights as it was a fight that actually utilized all of the sneaking mechanics and some of the more unique weapons from the game, setting it far apart from other games I've played.
I had a couple moments of frustration with the camera and controls. One example was right at the start of the game, I kept getting caught on a ledge in the first area inside the base because the camera would display 45 degree angle view but the controls were still fixed to the previous 90 degree view (this part was in that first room, upstairs on the upper-left side; I'd get caught on the railing because I adjusted my inputs to the camera when I should not have, and then I'd get caught by the camera there). Similarly, when you press up against a wall, the camera moves to give you a better view; often this is at a different angle than previously. I always wanted to move the stick to adjust to the new angle, but this would usually result in me sliding off the wall and getting caught. That said, I accept that the game is from 1998, so there weren't second joysticks for camera controls and there weren't enough buttons to have a dedicated "press up against the wall" button. The camera and controls were otherwise pretty brilliant once I got used to some of these idiosyncracies. There's been 25+ years of game dev since then to develop conventions, so it's certainly to be expected that the controls don't match my modern expectations.
The story was a trip, tons of twists and turns and I was super engaged with it the whole time. I'm not gonna just write a synopsis here, but I wanna highlight how the writing set up numerous mysteries that were revealed over time, often in complementary ways. Like the question of who is the Cyborg Ninja, who is Deepthroat, and what the deal with Naomi being a double-crosser was, how they were all finally revealed together during the fight with Metal Gear REX. You can definitely see how Kojima takes a lot of influence from film as well with regards to how to presented the story. It's grounded, but still has all these supernatural (and 4th wall breaking) aspects that make it particularly interesting. The post credits scene was also super hype and I'm really looking forward to playing MGS2 to see how the story continues.
Every boss was memorable and unique. Standouts to me were Revolver Ocelot (very fun character), Cyborg Ninja (took me 3 tries before I figured out you're supposed to fight him unarmed, and then at the end when he goes into his explosion mode he killed me with that on my 4th attempt because I wasn't expecting it), the second Vulkan Raven fight (as previously discussed; the first fight with him was a bit boring to me), and the final fistfight with Liquid Snake. The Psycho Mantis fight was cool conceptually, the 4th wall breaks were cool (even if they don't fit playing on a computer monitor in 2025) and I loved the character, but the gimmick of the fight, while cool, wasn't possible to work out organically and I found that a bit disappointing. Sniper Wolf was a great character because of her role in the story, but the fights with her were very simple and so I didn't care for them that much. The helicopter fight was also a bit boring to me. Metal Gear REX would have been one of the best fights in the game but that laser when you get close and the fact that REX can block the camera unfortunately knocked it down a few pegs to me, both deeply not fun to play against. Lastly, the car escape scene at the end was just miserable - took me 5 tries to win. Minimizing damage taken from the first few regular guards was horrible enough, but what really got me was when Liquid shows up. I was aiming pretty good but it seemed that we always traded 1 hit each until the last attempt I made where I figured out that slightly sweeping the control stick back and forth lets me do damage to him first (for some reason??).
From a game design perspective, I really appreciate the non-formulaic nature of the game. It's easy to imagine a world where the game consists of X number of rooms where you have to sneak from an entrance to an exit, followed by a boss fight, repeat Y times until the end. But actually, there was a surprising amount of variation in the gameplay loop: things like crawling through air vents at the start, searching for Meryl while she's disguised, various bits of backtracking, the elevator fights, the mission with the keycards at the end. Not all these variations are super fun (like climbing the tower), but they're at least not just reskins of otherwise static mechanics.
Other bits and pieces: