The Metal Gear Solid Retrospective: Part 1 - Metal Gear Solid - Page 3 of 5

The Metal Gear Solid Retrospective: Part 1 - Metal Gear Solid

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OK, that about does it for the game’s characters. Yeah, it was a lot but if you read all of that, it only goes to show you how detailed they really were. However, detailed or not, the characters were nothing without the great localization and voice acting efforts that are too rarely seen in video games but thankfully will be coming back in the fourth installment.

What made the efforts more amazing was the fact that voice acting in games was really still in its infancy at the time and on top of that, while Metal Gear Solid did have some of the best graphics for the time, the faces were made up of very simplistic gray pixels. So there was little or no visual emotion, but it almost didn’t matter because you could instantly pick up character vibes from the tones in their voices.

Or if you couldn’t pick up on that, the awesome soundtrack provided by Konami’s in house team served more than well enough to set any mood. From the haunting “The Best is yet to come” composed by Rika Muranaka and sung beautifully by Irish performer Aoife In Fhearraigh to the electric-pop of the theme song by TAPPY.

Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear Solid’s creator, had this quirk of breaking the “fourth wall” and he did this quite often with the game. Basically, breaking the fourth wall means that the experience is broken and the participant is brought back to reality. While the practice doesn’t sound like something one would intentionally want to do, it’s something that made the experience of playing the game a memorable one.

There was the codec frequency for Meryl that could only be obtained by reading the back of the CD case. A few of those codec conversations would tell Snake to rest before he became fatigued at 3:00 in the morning. And what has to be the best, yet most frustrating one, the infamous boss fight with Psycho Mantis where players would have to switch controller slots in order to beat him because he was psychic, he could read your ‘every move’. He would also read the memory card that was inserted and pick up any Konami games, such as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

The game also came packed with extra VR missions where players were pitted in virtual wireframe areas and had to accomplish goals in a certain time limit. This feature was later spawned off into a retail game of its own.

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