YMMV / Metal Gear Solid

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YMMVs for both the original game and The Twin Snakes

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • In the Spanish translation of the game, Gray Fox's banter "that's good, Snake! Hurry up and catch me!" was translated as "¡Bien hecho Snake! ¡Snake date prisa y cógeme!". While "cógeme" means "catch me", the word has been used as slang for "fuck me" in countries like Argentina and Mexico, meaning that one could interpret the translation as Fox asking Solid Snake to have sex with him. Granted, Metal Gear Solid was already rife with Ho Yay, but nevertheless.
  • Baker's pronunciation of MUF raised giggles even back in the 1990s. You probably should have just spelled the letters out, Baker.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Psycho Mantis really helping Snake and Meryl out by opening the secret passage into the caves? Keeping in mind the caves lead to the Communications Tower where Sniper Wolf is waiting.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • Psycho Mantis was recruited by the KGB and the FBI during the Cold War due to his psychic abilities. In real life, during the Cold War, both the East and the West were studying psychic abilities, and the FBI has been known to consult psychics for its harder to solve cases.
  • Otacon mentions that the stealth camouflage devices are prototypes. At the time that the game was made, the U.S. military was actually researching ways to implement stealth into the battlefield.
  • The "Ear Pull" is an actual World Eskimo Indian Olympics sport that tests the contestants' ability to endure pain. The Muktuk Eating Contest is also surprisingly enough, a very real event in the WEIO as well, meaning Snake wasn't merely snarking about Raven's size. The "Stick Pull" and "Four Man Carry" events mentioned in The Twin Snakes are also real events.
  • Though it's already listed rather fairly on the main page as Improbable Piloting Skills, Liquid's shooting down of F-16s with the Hind D feels a smidge less improbable to anyone familiar with the J-CATCH exercises where fighters usually lost five to one. For bonus points the experiments were actually done in response to the Hind itself becoming a major threat to NATO forces.
• Awesome Bosses:
  • Psycho Mantis. You fight against the world's most powerful psychic, who continually breaks the fourth wall by reading your memory card ("You like Castlevania, don't you?") and makes the controller move "on its own" by using the rumble feature. You have to break the fourth wall yourself to beat him by plugging your controller into the second port to nullify his mind-reading powers.
  • The Sniper Duel against Sniper Wolf in the middle of a freezing Alaskan blizzard.
  • Snake versus Metal Gear REX piloted by Liquid Snake, especially in The Twin Snakes, with the entire cutscene showing Fox's heroic Last Stand. Then the fist fight against Liquid himself atop the burning wreckage of REX. Then Liquid chases you out of Shadow Moses on a Jeep, survives machine gun fire and the resulting crash, and only dies from a bloody virus of all things.
    Liquid: ... Fox...!?
    Snake: Die.
• Awesome Music: Several of its tracks can be found here.
• Breather Boss: Vulcan Raven is pretty easy once you know where to set the mines or find an area you can fire the Nikita without him spotting you.
• Continuity Lock-Out: Many a player will be confused with the incidents of Outer Heaven and Zanzibar Land if this game's their first. Hideo Kojima added dossiers in the main menu to bring newbies up to speed, and Snake's in-game dialog does a good job of expositing without being too obvious, unlike in later games.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Quite a few, which tended to get a lot of references in later games:
  • Cyborg Ninja, for being utterly badass, clashing with the aesthetic of the game, having a hell of an Establishing Character Moment, and his tragic past. The concept would later be revisited with Raiden.
  • Psycho Mantis for his clearly supernatural abilities in comparison to his allies, his ingenious boss fight and fourth wall breaking, and his strangely heartwarming final speech. Metal Gear Solid 4 even brought him back as a One-Scene Wonder, in addition to making the Screaming Mantis boss fight a big reference, to say nothing of his appearance in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
  • Sniper Wolf for her engaging Sniper Duels and emotional death scene, to the point that Crying Wolf is fought in the same location in Metal Gear Solid 4.
• Even Better Sequel: Not many people know this is technically a sequel to Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, but this is the game that improves many of the previous game's mechanics such as a full 3D environments, engaging boss fights, and amazing attention to detail.
• Evil Is Cool: FOXHOUND completely steals the show. It helps that half of them are Recurring Bosses.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Due to Master Miller really being Liquid Snake in disguise, fans sometimes jokingly refer to him as "Master Liquid" or "Liquid Miller".
  • When Liquid Snake takes control of Metal Gear REX, he is effectively "Liquid Metal".
• First Installment Wins: For some. It's probably the most consistent fan favorite after Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and remains in the public conscious more than the other games, which tend to be Contested Sequels.
• Genre Turning Point:
  • Before Metal Gear Solid, action games traditionally had nothing more than Excuse Plot. This began changing after the game became a critical and commercial smash hit, with its story particularly being pointed out for praise, and noticeably making the gameplay and action segments more intense than almost anything else on the market. For games as a whole, the production values, strong voice acting (at a time where most voice acting in games ranged from mediocre to awful) and gripping story showed the potential video games had for cinematic storytelling, and brought a possibly permanent shift in the acceptable Gameplay To Story Ratio.
  • In hindsight, this game was also the first to truly bring up the idea of games as an art form in the mainstream eye, with its cinematic influences, real-world political allegory, and deconstructing of action game tropes demonstrating a far greater level of artistic prowess than what games were previously known for, helping give Kojima his Auteur License in the process; while plenty of games before Metal Gear Solid could be considered artistic (including the very game it's a sequel to), this was the first of that kind to really make a splash with the broader public and challenge preconceived notions about the medium.
• Genius Bonus: Sniper Wolf's use of "Saladin" for Big Boss is both this and a bit of Accidentally-Correct Writing; it was an epithet given to a well-known Muslim Sultan of Egypt in the Middle Ages who fought against Crusaders. Its actual meaning (Sallah Al-Din, "The Rightness of Faith") means little for Big Boss. The fact that Saladin was perhaps the most famous Kurd in history makes Wolf's use of it poignant.
• Growing the Beard: Before Solid, the Metal Gear franchise was a mildly popular stealth action series completely taking cues from other popular action movies of the time. With Solid's advent, the franchise exploded into a massive juggernaut thanks to its far more complex and deconstructive plot, qualities that later Metal Gear games would follow.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • When recruiting Snake for the operation, Campbell says that if he refuses, he'll be sent to the stockade until he's an old man. Considering how rapidly Snake ages by the fourth game, that's not exactly a long time.
  • After defeating Sniper Wolf, Snake ends up talking with her and then, at her request, shot her in the head to euthanize her. In Metal Gear Solid 3, his father, Naked Snake/Big Boss, does something very similar to The Boss late into the game.
  • Otacon's established backstory and even Metal Gear REX's design take on a darker, more tragic tone in The Phantom Pain given that not only could REX be based on subconscious memories of Metal Gear Sahelanthropus, but that Otacon's own father planned for him to be a guinea pig and used on it.
  • Liquid's insinuation that soldiers like Big Boss are no longer valued in the modern day, and that in the Cold War, warriors were valued— even desired— becomes bitterly laughable in subsequent games. The treatment of The Boss in particular is a smack in the face to Liquid's notions.
  • Cyborg Ninja is the first of Snake's allies to die onscreen. His Japanese voice actor, Kaneto Shiozawa, was the first of the main cast to die in real life at only 46.
  • Otacon's line about a ball and chain around his legs, and hating his name, suddenly makes perfect sense after playing later entries in the series, particularly Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain:
    Otacon: My name, my father, my grandfather. ...It felt like all those things were a ball and chain around my legs, dragging me down... But now that I think about it, I realize that I was blessed. At least I know who I am...where I came from...
  • Taking into account Snake's physical state by Metal Gear Solid 4, there's this bit from Campbell just after you reach the helipad, provided you clear the Dock without much hassle:
    Campbell: Excellent Snake! Age hasn't slowed you down one bit!
  • Naomi Hunter calling Snake out for smoking and pointing out he could develop cancer becomes this in Metal Gear Solid 4 when it's revealed that Naomi had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
  • If you call Master Miller on the Codec during the interludes between your torture sessions, he'll appeal to your Heroic Resolve and tell you that you are no ordinary soldier and he doesn't want you to crack or tell Ocelot anything. The revelation that he was really a disguised Liquid Snake means that he was really just hoping you'll give Ocelot an excuse to torture you to your limit, and is actually an example of Liquid's own sadism and petty grudge against Snake.
  • When Snake mentions that Meryl was motivated to become a soldier because of her late father, Meryl's uncle Campbell is horrified. That's because he's her father, and he blames himself for getting her into this mess. Even worse, the reveal of their true relationship only happens in the ending in which Meryl dies.
  • While torturing Snake, Ocelot makes a rant on how the new Russia have nothing compared to the USSR which, in his view, at least had an ideology to follow. It seems Putin took Ocelot's advice to heart due to his switch from a democratic system to an authoritarian one, Russia's attempts to annex Crimea from Ukraine in February to March 2014, and, later, the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 2022.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Otacon wonders if love can bloom on a battlefield. Metal Gear Solid 4 shows with Meryl and Johnny’s relationship that yes, it can.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Remember the Yoshi doll in The Twin Snakes, the one that, unlike the Mario doll, doesn't actually do much for you when you shoot it other than having it cry its name? Well, with Snake Eater 3D, the Yoshi doll will have a bit more use this time.
  • Remember when Fox tells Snake "You haven't aged well"? Becomes extremely true by Metal Gear Solid 4 where the genetic alterations made when he was cloned cause Snake to age so rapidly that he looks like an old man.
  • When Psycho Mantis reads your memory card in The Twin Snakes, one of the games he can read is Super Smash Bros. Melee. Snake would show up in Super Smash Bros. Brawl four years later.
  • In one of the Mystery stages in VR Missions, Snake picks up and dons a hairpiece to resemble Liquid. He's also a dead ringer for Raiden, or Raikov if you prefer.
  • Sniper Wolf orders Otacon to be quiet before her final fight with Snake after Otacon begs them to not fight through Codec. Then The Phantom Pain arrives, and there is a female sniper codenamed "Quiet", who can also be given the exact same attire Sniper Wolf wears in battle.
  • One of Kojima's original ideas for this game was to make Game Over into Final Death Mode, either by deleting your save file or making the game disk unusable. Almost twenty years later, the PlayStation 4 game Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice uses a similar concept for Out of Continues, where dying too many times will erase your save file entirely. Additionally, the initial release of GOG version had the game deliberately crashed when you game overed due to rendering bug. However, this has been fixed in an update.
  • Mega Man X8 has Dark Mantis, who is also fought at the end of a stealth-based level.
  • During his Dying Speech, Vulcan Raven says that Decoy Octopus, disguised as the DARPA Chief, "could not deceive the Angel of Death." Later, when Liquid kills Gray Fox, he remarks "He prayed for Death, and it found him!" Years later, the DARPA Chief's and Gray Fox's shared voice actor, Greg Eagles, would actually voice (The Angel of) Death himself.
  • In the original, but not The Twin Snakes, Psycho Mantis will have a comment if you have Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on your memory card. Fast forward to 2018, and Snake, Simon, Richter and Alucard^note the latter as an assist trophy are all in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
  • One Codec call has Snake and Mei Ling discussing how memories can be theoretically stored into data- or rather, Snake telling her she can't do that. This concept is also discussed between Snake and Naomi when she’s discussing why she got into genetics research. There’s also lots of research in reality dealing with the prospect of genetic memory. Many years later, a certain franchise revolving around digitized memories of long dead assassins would be born, exploring that very concept.
  • The fact that Liquid disguised himself as Master Miller may now call to mind Miller's memetic line from Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes: he played Snake like a damn fiddle!
  • The tuxedo being a homage to James Bond is all the better since No Time to Die uses a FOXDIE-like bioweapon as a major plot point.
  • In one conversation, Liquid states that "Father knew what kind of balance was best". Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, which features Big Boss as the protagonist, has perhaps the best balance of Gameplay To Story Ratio in the franchise.
• It Was His Sled:
  • The one scene described in great detail whenever anyone tells someone who hasn't played it is Psycho Mantis' boss fight and the trick to beat him.
  • Solid Snake and Liquid Snake are clones of Big Boss - which is established fairly early on in the game. And then The Stinger reveals that there is a third clone of Big Boss, called Solidus, who is also the President of the United States and Revolver Ocelot's employer, who ends up being the Big Bad of the sequel.
  • The Cyborg Ninja is Gray Fox, which has become his most iconic appearance in the series.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The most common criticism of the game, especially at the time. A typical player will finish the game in about 10-11 hours, well over half of which is cutscenes and Codec conversations. This is mitigated by the ranking system, multiple endings, and New Game Plus bonus items, but that still smacks of Fake Longevity.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Criticisms have been leveled at the version released with the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection. The big complaint is that it's simply an emulator of the PlayStation original, and didn't receive any kind of upscaling or remaster.
• Magnificent Bitch: Sniper Wolf is a devious and cunning member of FOXHOUND that joined Liquid Snake's insurrection to exact vengeance on the world for ignoring the plight of herself and her fellow Kurds following the Second Kurdish-Iraqi War. Introduced ambushing Solid Snake and Meryl Silverburgh, Wolf wounds Meryl to lure Snake into the open. After Snake fights back, Wolf affects a retreat and then ambushes Snake with guards, taking him prisoner. Ambushing him one last time after he escapes, Wolf is finally defeated, expressing regret for helping Liquid and dying on her own terms. Humanized by her kindness to the wolves of Shadow Moses, her kindness towards Otacon and sparing Meryl’s life because she doesn't kill for sport, Sniper Wolf was a proud soldier, "wild" and "untamed."
• Mondegreen: The Irish lyric for the end credit song, "The Best is Yet to Come", has one line that sounds a lot like "Sony is the shit in our mouth". Doubles as Hilarious in Hindsight given the close relationship between Sony and Kojima after the latter's split from Konami.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The Codec beeps and the alert sound are iconic to the franchise, to the point that they're used in all the later entries. The incoming call Codec beep is even a popular ringtone for mobile phones in real life.
• Narm Charm:
  • Just about every cutscene has at least a few moments like this. Repetitive, heavy-handed dialogue with clunky exposition? Check. Villains so over the top and gimmicky with various violent fetishes that have little chance of being taken seriously? Check. Said villains having melodramatic death scenes that stretch on for at least over 5 minutes just to explain their tragic backstories? Again, check. All topped off with some of the most ridiculously unsubtle and long-winded speeches in a game even by today's standards. Whether or not all of these are flat-out Narm or contribute to the charm and the cheesiness of the series is up to you. In either case, all of this would become a part of and escalate even further in future installments.
  • The over-the-top action scenes in The Twin Snakes go around from being unintentionally hilarious to absurdly awesome. The Twin Snakes may have taken this to the logical extreme, but the original Metal Gear Solid wasn't far behind in this regard.
• Nausea Fuel: Snake smuggles a pack of cigarettes by swallowing them and then regurgitating them back out.
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • The stealth gameplay may seem rather crude and simplistic compared to later entries in the genre, especially to players who have only played the likes of Hitman or Splinter Cell. The story, which was highly praised at the time, nowadays is considered by the standards of modern gamers as an Info Dump train wreck with way too much Parrot Exposition; though it can still hold up as part of the overarching mythology of the series, and is still fondly regarded by many fans of the series.
  • The Psycho Mantis fight was groundbreaking at the time, but most new players nowadays don't get what was so mindblowing about it. It doesn't help that the PC version of the battle does not include the controller or memory card tricks.
• Polished Port: The PC version is a port of the Japan-only Metal Gear Solid: Integral and features updated graphics, improved sound quality, and a number of extras not present in the original PS1 version. The game is known to have some graphical hick-ups on modern PCs, but these are easily remedied through some unofficial patching.
• Porting Disaster: The port that's included in the Nintendo Switch version of the Master Collection will drop audio in some conversations, most notably when Campbell instructs you how to use the Codec at the beginning of the game. This is to avoid having to re-record any new audio for the new buttons (- instead of Select, for example.) The text is altered to reflect these changes, but the audio cuts out whenever a different button should be mentioned.
• Signature Scene:
  • The Psycho Mantis boss fight, in all its fourth wall breaking glory.
  • The Heroic Sacrifice of Gray Fox.
• So Bad, It's Good: Many French players like to make fun of the French dub, notably some of its weirdly translated lines and at times tone-deaf delivery. Others, however, consider that its badness is highly exaggerated and that it was actually quite good for the time.
• Superlative Dubbing: The game is still praised for having one of the best English dubs in the history of video games. Even back in the late '90s where most English dubs and voice talent were based in Japan, Metal Gear Solid was already ahead of its game with a Los Angeles union cast and some of the greatest performances ever to grace The Fifth Generation of Console Video Games.
• That One Boss:
  • Sniper Wolf, since the sniper rifle is so annoying to control. Though the second battle can be easy if you use the Nikita.
  • The Hind D is pretty tough since you get a limited window to hit it and the final attack can take a good chunk of your health away, or even one-hit KO you if on a higher difficulty. Hope you didn't waste your rations beforehand. Also, you are supposed to keep track of the Hind by listening for it with stereo speakers on the television, but god help you if your TV only outputs mono audio.
• That One Level:
  • The communications tower. Right when you enter it a camera sees you even if you throw a chaff grenade, and you then have to make your way up to the top of the tower while being shot at repeatedly by guards. With the exception of boss fights, there have been no forced combat sections up to now. Once the player reaches the top, they have to rappel down the tower with finicky controls while being shot at by Liquid and potentially getting hurt by steam, and cross a bridge which has three alert guards at the other end, happy to tear Snake to pieces. The next tower is much easier to get up, but players will either have to lose four chaff grenades or try and tank hits from the turrets mounted to the wall ...right before the aforementioned Hind D fight.
  • The first floor of the nuke building. Naomi uses nanomachines inside your body to make it so you're incapable of using any weapons or explosives while on this floor out of fear you might damage one of the warheads in storage with a stray shot. The Twin Snakes applies this rule to your nonlethal weapons as well. Unfortunately, the enemy adheres to no such rules and will gun you down given the chance using shotguns which will knock Snake flat on the ground which will get annoying very fast. Finally the room fills with poison gas when an alert is raised, which means that even if you get away from the enemy you might choke to death before the security level drops back to the caution phase. Getting the gas mask makes dealing with the gas easier, but you can't even get your hands on that item until you've gone through this room at least once.
• The Un-Twist: Liquid's identity, and to a lesser extent, he and Snake being twins, isn't hard to figure out hours before the characters do, considering Liquid doesn't really bother to change his appearance or voice in any way, and he's conveniently there to give Snake advice just as Liquid's presumed escaped or dead.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Although most PS1 games haven't aged well at all, MGS is considered to be one of the best-looking games on the console, due to its realistic lighting and high level of detail. It was even one of the first games ever to avert Going Through the Motions in cutscenes, with characters expressing unique and highly specific body language throughout cutscenes depending on what they're doing or talking about, which was something that was incredibly rare before the advent of motion capture.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Decoy Octopus, FOXHOUND's resident Master of Disguise, who disguised himself as the DARPA chief to pass along false information to Snake, only to succumb to FOXDIE immediately afterward. This makes him the only member of FOXHOUND not to get a boss fight. His very existence isn't revealed until much later, and then it's only acknowledged in passing before being forgotten.
• The Woobie: Poor Otacon got tricked into programming a nuke-toting weapon. He thought that he was working on a nuclear deterrent. He's also pretty awkward and pathetic in this game, which only serves to make the player feel more sorry for him.
• Woolseyism:
  • Most of the script was modified during the localization into the English version. Jeremy Blaustein himself eventually wrote an article about the entire localization process and his thought process behind a lot of decisions that eventually went into the final script. Ultimately, his intent was to preserve the spirit of Kojima's story while keeping the dialogue natural for English speakers. However, as he himself notes, Kojima apparently did not see it the same way, and was angry that his script was "tinkered with", and would become significantly more involved with the localization process for future games:
    • Mei Ling originally quoted only Chinese proverbs in the Japanese version. She would say the original proverb in phonetic Chinese and then repeat the same proverb in Japanese. This proved to be rather difficult to localize, since she simply ended up saying the same thing twice in English, so Blaustein expanded Mei Ling's expertise to include Western literature and proverbs as well. This is one of the few changes retained in the remake The Twin Snakes.
    • Before dying, Psycho Mantis says that using his power to help someone for the first time ever "[felt] kind of nice". In the Japanese version, he says "It feels so... nostalgic".^note Which is a reference to his mom dying from childbirth, an event he at least recalls the emotions of.
    • Ocelot's line about making bullets go wherever he makes them was not in the Japanese script. It's totally in-character, though.
    • Snake's explanation about how Liquid would be "chopped up faster than an onion in an infomercial" had he ejected from the Hind was not in the Japanese script. The Japanese script, as well as the rewritten English script for The Twin Snakes, was more technical in nature, simply stating that Liquid would be chopped up by the rotor blades.
    • In the Japanese version, Dr. Clark's gender was alluded to only once, when Naomi responds that it was Fox who killed Dr. Clark (she uses 彼 "kare", a masculine pronoun). The English version added in more references to Dr. Clark being a male. Dr. Clark's gender was retconned in later games. The novelization, which was released a couple of weeks prior to Metal Gear Solid 4, lampshades this by having Colonel Campbell simply assume Dr. Clark is a man, only for Naomi to quickly correct him.
    • Liquid's reference to Big Boss always telling him that he was a failure as his reason for hating Big Boss was not in the Japanese version. The original script, as well as that of The Twin Snakes, simply had him exclaiming outrage that Big Boss seemingly chose him, knowingly, to be the inferior one.
    • Liquid's mention about Big Boss being in a coma, when explaining the history of the Les Enfants Terribles project, was also a Woolseyism. Originally, he simply stated that Big Boss was sterile. Like Mei Ling's use of Western quotes, this was retained in The Twin Snakes. Unlike other changes, it would actually then get retconned into canon.
  • The Spanish dub of the original PS1 game, considered to be one of the best dubs ever made for a video game in Spain, translated Snake's "What the...!" into "¡Pero qué coño...!" ("What the fuck...?!"). Thanks to the performance of Alfonso Vallés, Snake's Spaniard voice actor, the phrase got full blown Memetic Mutation status among Spaniard gamers, which it maintains even up to this day.

YMMVs exclusive to The Twin Snakes

• Awesome Music: Some consider The Twin Snakes soundtrack to be superior to the original one. It's certainly longer. Unfortunately, it's not available by retail, though you can find it pretty easily for download.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In The Twin Snakes, during the Psycho Mantis scene when he's forcing your controller to move, he begins laughing. A second later, three photos in the back, which show real people in them (specifically, Kojima, Ryuhei Kitamura, the game's cutscene director, and Denis Dyack, head of Silicon Knights), come to life and begin laughing in extremely high pitched voices that serves as both frightening and quite hilarious. That's never explained nor mentioned again, though it's not entirely out of the realms of possibility that it's all an illusion created by Mantis.
• Broken Base: Worthy and improved remake or insult to a masterpiece? Those who like it like some of the improvements featured in the re-dubbed script, the redone voice acting, and Rob Paulsen providing the voice of Gray Fox. Detractors dislike the gameplay changes and the cutscene being really over the top. The fact that it hasn't been re-released only adds more fuel to the fire.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Prior to his battle with Snake, Psycho Mantis creates an illusion of a massive firestorm. Fast-forward to The Phantom Pain and as a young boy he was partnered with a pyrokinetic that could actually conjure such infernos.
  • Many of the stunts Fox performs during the cutscenes would not be out of place at all in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: The Twin Snakes included many features originally introduced in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, but the level design was hardly changed at all to match the new features, leading many players to complain about how much easier the game is when you can aim in first-person view and guards attack in finite amounts—as opposed to the endless waves that would swarm you until you ran out of ammo or died in the PS1 original, not to mention the fact that Snake starts out with full health instead of gaining health incrementally after beating each boss. It's worth noting that the enemy AI in The Twin Snakes is vastly improved over the original, making them much more difficult to run from, hide from, and fight.
• Mis-blamed: It's a common misconception among The Twin Snakes detractors that Kojima disliked the various changes that were made by Silicon Knights and/or Ryuhei Kitamura without his permission. In reality, Kitamura made faithful recreations of the cutscenes before the changes were requested by Kojima because he admired Kitamura's cinematic style and wanted them incorporated into the game.
• Scrappy Mechanic: This version had the ridiculous concept of, when giving you instructions, not telling you what buttons to actually press. Rather than tell you to press the X button to climb a ladder, they tell you to push the "action button". It renders the (often forced) tutorials completely pointless because, without looking through the manual to see what the game insisted on calling the buttons (thus making the in-game tutorials even more pointless), it amounts to telling you to "do the thing to make the thing happen": thanks, Colonel, care to tell the class which button is the "action button" now?
• Self-Imposed Challenge: A Pacifist Run is doable thanks to the inclusion of non-lethal weapons such as the tranquilizer firing M9 and the inclusion of the stamina meter for the bosses. In the original version, bosses, as well as some enemies, must be killed to finish the game.
• Signature Scene: Snake backflipping off a live missile in mid-air is the one thing everyone remembers about this game.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Compared to the original, while a bunch of the new additions make the game easier, if the player actually gets caught, Genome Soldiers during Alert mode wear non-cosmetic body armor that makes them more resistant to damage, use highly damaging shotguns that'll knock Snake down and use Riot Shields to block bullets, all carried over from MGS2.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Most of the criticism of The Twin Snakes come from this. Specifically, it's the over the top Cutscene Power to the Max, the unbalanced mechanics from Metal Gear Solid 2 and the new soundtrack.
  • An accidental result of having tranquilizer weapons in the game, Snake's mercy kills come off quite a bit worse in hindsight. Sniper Wolf's in particular; even with the cutscene finale to the battle if you never grabbed the regular sniper rifle, then you're basically murdering an unconscious woman who needs a bit of medical attention for a collapsed lung and exhaustion from being hit with tranquilizers while downing pills like candy.
  • The redone voice acting. A major point of contention were the removal of Mei Ling's Chinese accent and Naomi's British accent, which fans of the PS1 original thought made them really stand out and either sound cuter (Mei Ling) or sexier (Naomi). Retconning the accents was intentional as the characters' backstories made their original accents moot.^note The former was born and raised in America, while the latter had been raised in America since her childhood. When Metal Gear Solid 4 later made the American accents canon, PS1 purists either blamed the remake for "ruining" Mei Ling and Naomi, or just went ahead and reluctantly accepted the new canon accents. Another complaint about the redone voice acting is how some of the characters (including Naomi) sound flat or even lifeless compared to the voice acting done in the original game.
  • Some fans didn't like how the fight with Gray Fox ended instantly the moment his HP bar reaches zero, and actually enjoyed gimmick that came with it. To elaborate; completely depleting Gray Fox's health bar in the original did not end the fight there and shift to a cutscene (like most bosses), instead, he actually performs his Desperation Attack where he would unleash a powerful AoE shockwave that dealt a good amount of damage to Snake, which made engaging him in hand-to-hand risky unless he temporarily got himself exhausted from using it.

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YOU IDIOT!

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