When I think back on Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, I remember how much I loved the gameplay innovations—like first-person aiming, non-lethal weapons allowing you to complete the game without killing anyone, realistic light and shadows, plus environments that generally felt more intentionally designed for 3D interaction—but I’ve always felt that it didn’t live up to MGS1. Much of my disappointment stems from the fact that the story of MGS2 simply wasn’t as compelling as MGS1, even though it included several elements which make Sons of Liberty look like a work of prophecy. Like sure, MGS2 is where Metal Gear gets truly outlandish, which the series remains known for today. But if we’re being honest, its story just isn’t as good as its predecessor.

The most divisive thing about MGS2 was of course the bait-and-switch Kojima pulled with the game’s protagonist, making us play as Raiden when we were expecting Solid Snake. (Oh, uh, Spoiler Alert…I guess.) But personally, I’ve always been more annoyed with how many elements from MGS1 get rehashed again, making the experience feel like a pale imitation of the original. To be upfront with my critique here, I feel like most of the artistic elements of MGS2 are not as good as MGS1. The story is worse, the characters are worse, the setting is worse, the bossfights are worse, even the music is worse. (Thanks Harry Gregson-Williams!)

Now that I’ve complained about MGS2 recycling elements from MGS1, I must admit that I had forgotten how many original gameplay elements MGS2 introduced. Holding up guards and shaking them down to collect their dogtags and/or get supplies was a really cool addition. However, in order to successfully hold up an enemy, you had to make use of the PS2 controller’s pressure-sensitive buttons—carefully lifting your thumb off the Square button to stop aiming the guard without firing at them, so that you could move around to the front of them and point your gun in their face. Since no video game consoles have included pressure-sensitive buttons since the PS2, new versions of MGS2 have to account for this. In the Master Collection, you click in the Left stick (L3) to drop your aiming.

Using 3D models for the Codec call screens is a big letdown. It doesn’t look nearly as good as the anime-esque sprites from MGS1 and frankly loses almost all of the charm. I forgot that MGS2’s Codec calls look this way, because at least with Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes (on the GameCube), they retained the look of MGS1’s Codec.

The general sneaking gameplay is really fun here. It’s genuinely more fun tranquilizing guards with first-person aiming than the more straightforward topdown sneaking from MGS1. However, especially when compared with its predecessor, the boss fights here are severely lacking. The showdown with Fortune, for example, isn’t even a fight at all. You just hide behind cover and run out the clock. The fight with Vamp seems to be going for something like the Revolver Ocelot fight from MGS1 but with first-person aiming, but it’s just really bland and uninteresting. The Harrier fight is clearly just the battle with Hind D all over again, and it’s fine I guess. Honestly the best boss fight is probably against Fat Man, and half of that one is spent freezing bombs before time runs out. At least that one feels fresh and original, but it’s not exactly a showdown for the ages.

There are some environmental areas to navigate which, due to your capacity to fall off and die, would almost qualify as platforming segments. These are certainly novel additions, but they’re not particularly fun. There are also flooded areas that require swimming, which I think is a genuinely cool development. However, the swimming controls do not invert the Y-axis (Up/Down), making the actual swimming gameplay feel super unwieldy and frustrating. Perhaps this was intentional though, as every time Raiden gets in the water you feel a new wave of panic. It’s always hard to tell how much a terrible control scheme is malice and how much is incompetence.

Let me go on record saying that I like Raiden (aka Jack) as a character. Particularly in a post-FFVII world, this platinum blonde skinny boy had plenty of potential to be a cool leading man. Especially when you give him a sword! The real problem with Raiden is that he is replacing Solid Snake—a legendarily cool dude—as the main playable character for this game. The way the Konami pulled a protagonist switcheroo with MGS2, making us all think we’d be playing as Snake but then making Raiden the main hero, left a bad taste in our mouths. To make matters worse, while you can’t play as Snake after the initial Tanker mission, he remains present in the game the whole time. So you get to see how badass Solid Snake is from a third person perspective, while you’re stuck with the comparatively wimpy Jack. And while one was likely to come into MGS2 being very familiar with Snake, you don’t know Jack.

Also, most of the dialogue between Jack (Raiden) and his girlfriend Rose—hey, Jack and Rose, it’s a Titanic reference, get it?—is just genuinely terrible. I think the writers of this script (two men) really should have hired a female editor to do a revision of the dialogue at some point, because this is dreadful. Every time Rose tried to get Jack to open up about himself, or make him guess the importance of a specific date, I rolled my eyes so hard it probably did permanent vision damage. Most of their conversations are pretty insufferable, and you encounter them whenever you want to save your progress.

Here’s a weird plot development: Liquid Snake (who is dead) can apparently take control of Revolver Ocelot’s body now. Why? Because Ocelot had Liquid’s hand surgically grafted onto his body. You know, that old chestnut: demonic possession via manual transplantation. Seriously, this is pretty dumb on its face, but it also raises more questions. Like why would Ocelot attach Liquid’s hand to his body in the first place? Were there no other possible donors? I mean, Liquid was killed by a genetically-targeted virus, so you probably don’t want to incorporate his dead tissue into your body. Was Ocelot not worried about possible complications?

When “La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo” is first mentioned, it comes off like the single dumbest name for a secret society that we’ve ever heard. Of course, this is supposed to sound like nonsense. See, whoever utters this phrase is actually trying to say “The Patriots” but the nanomachines in their body are censoring their speech in real time. While that actually makes some sense, it is never once explained in the actual game, so a lot of us were left scratching our heads about it back in 2001. Apparently this was eventually explained supplemental materials included in other MGS HD re-releases.

The section where Raiden is trying escape Arsenal Gear while bucknaked is the most memorable part of this game.

Also, despite what internet forums have been claiming for years, you absolutely can say “La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo” in Japanese. In fact, that is exactly what those syllables sound like when said by a native Japanese speaker. It is definitely not the case that the Japanese language has R-sounds but no L-sounds; it’s that the language has something phonetically in between R and L. Just listen to someone reading the Japanese syllabary and you will 100% hear “La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo”.

Ok, can someone tell me how exactly is the Codec supposed to work? Like, I understand that nanomachines stimulate the user’s ear to produce sound that only they can hear. But isn’t the Codec user still talking during “nanocommunications”? You’re shown a visual representation of the Codec call where the speaker’s mouth is moving…is that, like, just in their mind? The game frequently has two people—who are face-to-face in the same room—switch over to nanocommunications to avoid eavesdroppers listening in and that makes absolutely no sense to me. Don’t they still have to speak words out loud for the person on the other end of the line to hear them anyway? Or are they just mouthing the words with no sound coming out? What is this nonsense?

Oh boy…Everything with Otacon’s step-sister Emma (aka E.E.) is weird and offputting. Gameplay-wise it appears that Kojima was cribbing off of Ico, introducing a Yorda-like female character that Raiden needs to lead around by holding her hand. Granted, the sniping segment where Raiden covers Emma’s escape using the PSG-1 is much more fun than a showdown with Sniper Wolf, I’ll give them that. But the way Kojima infused the Hal/Emma story with incestuous elements was super weird and wholly unnecessary.

The writing for Emma’s dialogue is still not great, but thankfully it’s much better than Rose’s drivel. Like her brother Otacon/Hal, Emma has a genius intellect, so she at least gets to sound like a human person when she’s explaining something technical. Otherwise she’s kind of written like a 12-year-old. Then the backstory of Hal having an affair with his stepmother—Emma’s mother—and this prompting his father to commit suicide is just…I mean…what in the actual %#^& is that about?? It’s particularly strange how the game delivers these scandalous bombshell moments, cutting to an external view of the Big Shell at sunset while Otacon delivers an expository monologue, and they make this odd directorial move multiple times in a row.

All the bizarre family drama ultimately feels unnecessary, considering that Emma is killed off very soon after being introduced. (Oh right, Spoiler Alert again, I guess.) The only ramification for MGS2 being that the player gets a dramatic slow-motion walking scene with Otacon—flanked by our dual heroes Snake and Raiden—holding his dead sister’s parrot aloft on his arm, while his expression exudes dogged determination. Oh yeah, as if everything with Emma wasn’t weird enough, she also had a pet parrot. And Otacon takes the bird with him after she bleeds out from stab wounds. There are just so many perplexing choices made here.

It sure seems like there is about 40 minutes of cutscenes/Codec calls that come after fighting all the Metal Gear Rays, before the climatic battle with Solidus. Technically there is a brief moment of interactivity in there, but it’s an infuriating button-mashing torture sequence with Solidus suffocate Raiden with one of his weirdo tentacles.

Speaking of Solidus’s tentacles, where did he get his cybernetic suit? Does the new cyborg ninja really have cybernetic implants, or is she faking it? Who’s the mad scientist behind these contraptions? Seriously, is this stuff never addressed?

Why do all of the female characters—all those in the field, I mean—meet truly grizzly deaths? Emma doesn’t live long after being introduced, she gets stabbed. Olga’s death is especially brutal and traumatic to witness. And then Fortune too gets a cruel death after the narrative gave her basically nothing at all to do. I didn’t really notice it back in the day, but it seems as though the game does not care for its female characters whatsoever. It’s like the ladies are here to be manipulated and abused, then swiftly disposed of. I tell you what; I don’t like it. They deserve better.

Plenty of the story elements in MGS2 feel insanely prescient, especially the parts about media manipulation, a deluge of trivial information making truth irrelevant, and AI controlling the masses. Honestly, it is even more relevant today than when the game was released two and half decades ago. There is a lot of good, thought-provoking, prophetic stuff in there absolutely, and it makes the game worth playing just for that alone. It’s the reason MGS2 is still remembered, and somewhat revered, today.

On the other hand, the ending of MGS2 is genuinely terrible. It’s so utterly forgettable that replaying it again 20+ years later, I literally didn’t remember a single thing about it. They use a lot of real-life footage of the streets of New York, Snake waxes poetically about finding meaning for oneself, and a lame jazz song with nonsensical English lyrics plays as the credits roll. This ending has none of the gravitas of MGS1, and musically it is a far cry from “The Best Is Yet To Come”.

The main thing I had remembered about playing MGS2 back in the day, was how it was technologically superior to MGS1 in every conceivable way…and yet ultimately it still felt like a bit of a letdown. While the actual gameplay is certainly more fun, the narrative delivered is pretty lackluster, and the overall experience is less satisfying as a result. Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy playing the game back in the day, or that I didn’t enjoy replaying it now. Honestly, I still found a lot to love in MGS2. I just think it had one tough act to follow and couldn’t live up to the hype.

Ending with a climatic rooftop sword duel was pretty cool though.

With hindsight, I now realize that a disappointing sequel coming after a super successful genre-defining classic is really par for the course. There are several examples of this in the world of cinema, just look at The Matrix for example. The first Matrix movie was an instant classic, a timeless masterwork that took the world by storm. The second Matrix movie and the third, well…they, uh…they exist? To be blunt, the sequels completely failed to recapture the magic of that first film.

Video games saw the exact same sort of thing play out here. And it happened two years earlier to boot! So I guess what I’m saying is that MGS2: Sons of Liberty is The Matrix Reloaded of video games.