Metal Gear Solid 3 is the best one in the franchise apparently, but why is it? Well, I took it upon myself to go on eBay and buy a copy of it for the Nintendo 3DS because they were the only ones I could find for under $100. So I dusted off my 3DS and put in a few days later and played it again to see why it is viewed as a masterpiece. I’ll be grading this game on a couple of categories such as gameplay, story, replayability, characters and the such.

THE GAMEPLAY (KIND OF)
As soon as the game starts it looks like what it would look like if arthritis could code because of the 3DS, but does not look as bad as projectile vomit, kinda like when no man’s sky released so that’s a plus I guess. The main protagonist or antagonist depending on what game you’re playing is Naked Snake, and you are jumping out of a plane and crashing into the jungle and somehow not shattering all the bones in your body. As soon as the gameplay started I noticed that the game on DS was motion controlled so every time I needed to shoot I had to stay absolutely still or else I would give myself away and worse of all, I couldn’t turn it off. Look Nintendo, I love you but god you make the stupidest decisions sometimes. I haven’t seen Nintendo mess up this hard since Mario tennis ultra smash, anyways the first few hours of the tutorial were a nightmare because you have to do what the system tells you to do and I still had to figure out to control my hands from not moving but unfortunately I couldn’t stop my hands from working, so I decided to duck tape my 3DS down to my desk just to even attempt but with doing that I couldn’t see the bottom of the screen, that includes my health, ammo, mini-map, and stamina. So I gave myself a disability from the start and my god this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, no exaggerations, this is extremely difficult. Now not much stuff happened after the tutorial gameplay-wise, (Not saying that the rest of the game sucks, it’s just stuff that if I talked about it I would make this longer than it already is) it’s more of the same stuff but there is one part that I did have to talk about is the tunnel part of the game where for some ungodly reason, Nintendo decided it was a good idea to put the gameplay on the bottom screen, like ok I get it he’s underground but my god I had to untape it so I could see it, now if you remember that the whole reason I taped it down was too prevent it from being a nuisance but then it happened, the infamous ladder scene. Ok so for those who don’t know there is a section in the game that you climb up a ladder for 3 and a half minutes and it’s just the main theme playing in the background, but on the 3DS version like I said earlier it has motion controls so if I move the 3DS just a millimeter than Snake will literally just fall off the ladder and DIES. I mean even if Snake is a foot off the ground he falls, lands, and dies. I died so many times I actually threw my 3DS across the room and laughed when I realized that I broke my DS over one of my favorite games of all time, I sighed heavily because I didn’t finish it so I searched for a console version and found out that my uncle has one for the Xbox so I played it all over again and finished it 2x faster than I did on the DS and did not regret it. Overall the Gameplay was horrible because of the DS but when I rented it from my uncle for the Xbox and it was really good even would hold up today I would give the gameplay an OVERALL 10/10.

STORY (THE START OF A LEGEND)
The Metal Gear story is a long and confusing one that you should only get into if you’re going to get into the games, it’s very confusing but worth your time if you decide to.
Metal Gear Solid 3 is a prequel to all of the previous games that came out before it and in terms of the story, it comes first in the timeline. You play as the antagonist in the original games known then as “Big Boss” and now you’re playing his story and how he got to how he is. Big Boss or Naked Snake whoever you decide to call him is infiltrating the jungle where a group of bad guys is, Snake’s job is to get into the building, find out what they are doing, destroy what they are doing, and exfil. Of course, everything goes wrong and Snake’s Big Boss (Not the actual one yet) turns on Snake and throws him off a rope bridge while breaking his arm. Snake falls into the river below, washes up on a shore, and somehow still doesn’t die. He meets a girl named Eve and they team up. They go after the Russian terrorist group and Snake gets caught and Eve turns out to be a double agent and sells Snake out. Alright so this is when the story gets stupid crazy and genius, pretty much only people with an IQ over 100 can follow, so what happens next is Snake gets his eye shot out he escapes with the help of Eve because she loves him now even though she just set him up and they escape together after they find out that they are building a mobile nuclear launcher called a Metal Gear. Snake and Eve regroup and go back to stop them before they get it operating, along the way they defeat some of their terrorist group which includes a gunslinger, a guy the size of a small apartment building, a 200-year-old sniper, a literal ghost, etc. you eventually get to the main base and stop the main bad guy by blowing up him with an RPG and blow up the Metal Gear. Eve is injured and he leaves Eve in an abandoned house while he goes to confront Big Boss and him and Big Boss fight ending in Snake winning and it turns out that Big Boss was actually a triple agent and turned to the terrorists’ side to give info to the Americans and after that, she was supposed to kill herself to tie up loose ends but she let Snake do it and Snake became the new “Big Boss” and he and Eve eventually get pregnant at some point and Snake hates the US government for betraying his Boss and their corruption.

That was the Story of Metal Gear Solid 3, Kojima left a lot of the story to our hands and this is where it shines. There are multiple theories about the game like how it’s all a vr training for Snake like how you have to train for a job. All in all the story is one of Kojima’s best if not the best, seriously you have to play the game to understand how special it is. It gets an OVERALL 9/10.

REPLAYABILITY (FIRST GAME THAT I ACTUALLY HAD TO THINK ABOUT THIS BUT ALSO THE SHORTEST ONE)

This part’s going to be a short one. I don’t know what to give this part of the game because this just doesn’t make much sense to my mortal mind because it’s an open world, but it’s also not at the same time. I don’t know how to explain it but I think it has some replayability and I don’t know how to explain it other than you have to play it to understand what i’m saying so ill just give it an OVERALL 7/10.

GRAPHICS (NOT THE BEST; NOT GONNA LIE)

In terms of the graphics it’s nothing special in fact I really dislike it. The picture provided shows all different looks of it, and do not believe the one that says 3DS on it, it’s lying, under the picture is another picture that shows what it really looks like. It’s really not anything special and I hope no one plays this with an intention to be blown away by graphics because there isn’t much to go off of here, the metal gear solid franchise has problems with graphics all around for example in the first game where no one had any eyes. It is an upgrade from previous installments but it still doesn’t hold up to today’s standards. Although it seems that Kojima and his team upgraded from a waffle iron coder to a competent dumpster fire. In later games it looks way better, the best one being Phantom Pain but that game still doesn’t look as good as games did back when it released to me, it looks like it was being developed in a different gen rather than the one they used that year. With that wrapped up, I give the graphics an Overall 4/10

CHARACTERS (THIS IS WHERE THE GAME GETS KINDA GOOD AGAIN)

All the characters in this one are just amazing there’s The Pain the one that can send these locus things after you, The Fear who scares you just like Scarecrow from Batman, The Fury who shoots a flamethrower at you while he screams at you, The Sorrow who makes you go through a swamp that takes you through all the deaths that you have caused which i’ll talk about later, The End who is the hardest boss fight who actually is also the easiest and i’ll also talk about that later, Volgin who is the main antagonist of this game, Revolver Ocelot is an amazing character that I couldn’t do justice with words in this review but that isn’t gonna stop me. So he is a young cadet in the terrorist group who was a talent for gunslinging but his comedic relief and immature nature makes him a joy to watch, Eve who is the love interest for Snake who is also a complete unit who isn’t the typical feminest character that Hollywood shoves into your face, it makes since how she does what she does, and the final character I have to talk about is The Boss who is your commander who turns on you and then fights you at the end then lets you beat her so when she dies because she needed to tie up loose ends and dies the hero who nobody knows. The characters in this game are all unique although some are vastly better than others but not every character can be a Revolver Ocelot or Big Boss but none of them are soulless. After looking into the characters i’ve decided to give this part of the game an Overall 8/10

THE SMALL THINGS (WHERE THE GAME GETS THE BEST AT)

This will also be a short one since while i’m writing this it’s the 7th hour doing so if you’re not including how I spent several days wasting my life away playing this game non-stop almost twice i’m kinda tired so i’ll try to get this over quickly even though it will be probably longer than I anticipated. The small things in this game are the most memorable such as how you can beat the end by going to the home screen and changing the date to a week in the future and you automatically beat him, when you walk through The Sorrow’s mist you can hear the sounds of all the people you killed up to that point and makes them feel like humans, and if you know anything about story writing or character developing, then when you make a character feel like a real person than you did your character right. The smallest things will add up to the biggest. In this department this game hits it out of the park, it gets an Overall 10/10.

CONCLUSION (MY THOUGHTS)

Out of the 6 elements that I rated for this game it gets an Overall 48/60 which means that this gets an 80% out of 100% which is a very solid score. Now for the question that this all has builded up to, is it the best Metal Gear game? Yes it is, might not be by a long shot but yes it is the best, but is it my favorite, no it is not my favorite one is 4 because it is the one that I played first and it’s the end of Solid Snake’s story and is probably the 2nd best in the series. Join me next time when I Review the original Mario Galaxy, but until then I hope you guys enjoyed and liked this because this took me a while and is definitely my favorite review i’ve done.

A special thanks to my uncle who let me borrow his game, photoshop and photo capture on my Xbox and DS for the pictures and my friend who helped me get the resources for this, and my DS who took a hit for the team. Well after that hopefully I get enough christmas money to buy a new 3DS because there’s no fixing this.