Just a little retrospective I wrote.
It is super interesting to me that there was a time when you could have a giant twist like this: a hugely successful prior game setting the stage for Solid Snake being a main character, then the ‘rug pull’ of making the following sequel feature someone else.
As I’ve read elsewhere in some comments, this kind of twist couldn’t really work today, with the immediacy of social media covering every facet of everything.
From the typical action star Snake to the over-confident Raiden, the shift was a big one for Metal Gear Solid 2.
But good lord was that leap in graphics a giant one for just a few short years!
I just wrote up a little look back at how/why it was done, and since I’ve got a terrible cold/sore throat, it was an effort. If you’ve got some nostalgia for MGS2, you might enjoy this one. And my question to you here, is were you there for this? Playing the intro on the tanker as Snake, settling in to what you thought would be a Snake-filled game, then finding out Raiden was the focus? Was it a shock?
Anyway, as ever:
I’m more impressed by his ability to get players to like Raiden later on. He’s still a massive cringy dork in MGS4, but now he’s an edgy Gray Fox expy and that was apparently enough to change player’s minds about him. He’s gone from the most hated to one of the most popular characters in the entire series.
Kpjima later did something similar with Otacon using a completely different approach. Otacon was introduced as a coward and a naïve fool, and though he improved with every game, many players didn’t like him due to that poor first impression.
The prequels featured Otacon’s father, who all we knew about beforehand was that he committed suicide years before MGS1 because he found out Otacon was sleeping with his stepmother, and managed to make him a more hateable character than most of the actual villains. He has the exact same voice and appearance along with all the same personality flaws as his son, but those flaws were all turned up to eleven and he lacked any of Otacon’s virtues to counter them.
And his character spiraled downwards from there - it was basically Kojima rubbing into your face how much worse Otacon could have been and shining a spotlight on the importance of character development.
It’s weird seeing a breakdown of the character that I got my username from.
He really came into his own. I feel like it’s a shame people slept on Revengence, where he really shines. (And it’s fun!)
I would do terrible things for a remaster of Revengeance that adds in all the features they had to cut during development to get it to run on only 256 MB each of RAM and VRAM. The sword slicing in the released version is impressive, but the original prototype was nuts.