Gary A Swaby of TheKoalition.com writes: Here it is, the final part of my editorial which I hope explains why Metal Gear Solid is the greatest video game story ever told. In the previous part I touched on the emotional impact, and the character development in the games. In the final edition I would like to compare the story to other video games and show just how generic the stories are in some of your favorite video games compared to Metal Gear Solid.
Many of the top selling games out there are very americanized, and thus the story is far from complex. Games like Gears Of War, contain the generic format that there are a team of hero's who kick ass and everybody else but the hero's are wrong. Americanized stories are full of the ignorance that the hero of the story can do no wrong, and the so called bad guys must be eliminated. Which brings me to focus on the diversity of the Metal Gear Story, and the emphasis on the fact that nobody is right and nobody is wrong.
The Opening Levels that hooked gamers from the outset.
These groundbreaking video games changed gaming forever and drew in scores of fans in the process.
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I’d have taken a few of those out. Prefer Sonic over Sonic 2. Outrun should be in there. Maybe even Pong as millions of people had fun with that even if it was repetitive. Final Fight pipped any Streets of Rage game, although Streets of Rage had the better soundtrack. Too many to list l guess. To me, retro gaming is the 1980s, maybe going into early 1990s.
Agree that the generational gap is too broad to really make a strong list. Need to tighten the years a bit. Hard to compare Pac Man with N64 games.
Oh boy..... give me a break
Japanese developers have also had a rich history of coming up with some pretty off the wall and flat out regurgitated stories. Final Fantasy or Katamari, anyone?
Furthermore, American developers (most notably those with Microsoft and Bethesda) have been at the forefront of not just telling engaging stories but allowing the players to determine the flow of the story for themselves.
Nevertheless, to be perfectly fair, your in depth analysis of Metal Gear lore is impressive.
Yeah, sounds about right.
I guess I could chime in here, lol. I've been so deep into this game now since a few months after MGS came out. The story is epic and so captivating. Though complex, you have so much time to put it all together that you do see how it all came to be. With Kojima's brilliant writing and directing. The mood, the music, the scene's all made you get in touch with Snake and what he was dealing with. The game is very addicting and you want it to keep going. The series broke so many barriers that other games had not even begun to touch. Like MGS breaking that 4th wall, like MGS3 being so detailed for the PS2's time. That if you really paid attention to everything in that game. You'd see things like water due drops in the rain forest dropping off tree limbs on to electrified fences and you'd see the flash and hear the zap popping sounds. Clouds moving, butterflies flying by randomly, etc. The game made you think all the time of what to do next. Always cautious of not sounding off the alert, lol.
But with the coming of MGS4. Man, that game had a lot of feeling in it. You really felt for those that were loosing their lives in the game. Like this is it, the closing of their chapter/part in snakes life forever. Then having followed those same people from games before. You felt connected as well. Because years before in your own life. You were seeing those same people in the game. Only younger, like yourself. The game will live on forever, I just really hope they bring back Snake again. I would like to see another Big Boss game as MGS3 is my personal favorite.
You can't just tell other people that it's the best story ever told. Lots of people have different opinions, and MGS isn't an easy series to get right away.
With that said, I agree with the article wholeheartedly. Not only do I firmly believe that the Metal Gear series has the best storyline of any series ever, but it's the best series ever. Now that's just my opinion, but many people I know agree with me. That might not make it concrete, but that's enough for me to believe that it's the best series to date.
/salute Hideo Kojima