YMMV / Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

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• Alternative Character Interpretation: An optional Codec with Pliskin will reveal that Raiden used to smoke, but "quit it a long time ago". Just a minor detail, or Foreshadowing regarding Raiden's stressful past?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Dead Cell is based on Red Cell, a SEAL division tasked with infiltrating U.S. military bases to test their preparedness. It was originally commanded by Richard "Demo Dick" Marcinko, a man whose life, according to Cracked, "eerily resembles the Rambo franchise". Also, just like Dead Cell's commander, Jackson, Marcinko was arrested for supposed misappropriation of government funds, although he never died in prison.
• Annoying Video Game Helper:
  • In the Plant mission, your support team can get on your nerves. Especially in the early game to explain gameplay mechanics you probably already picked up on in the Tanker.
  • Toward the end of the game, the Colonel will call you every few seconds, and lines will quickly begin to repeat. At least answering the calls is largely optional. Of course, by this time, it's debatable whether he can be called a video game helper.

• Awesome Bosses:
  • Fatman's fight is very fun. You are fighting against a fat evil bomber on roller skates.
  • The Harrier fight has Snake and Otacon helping you out from the helicopter the whole time. It also doubles as a Breather Boss in most of the difficulties.
  • Fighting against an onslaught of Metal Gear RAYs in Arsenal Gear's Rectum.
  • The final fight with Solidus on top of Federal Hall.
• Awesome Music: See here.
• Bizarro Episode: "External Gazer" of Snake Tales. The plot of the other scenarios were tactical missions ops, this one revolves around Snake and Otacon investigating a colossal monster at the Big Shell before finding out that parallel universes are converging around the space-time continuum that are connected via the VR system which Solidus plans to exploit by using paradoxes to prevent the deaths of his alternate selves.
• Broken Base:
  • Metal Gear Solid catapulted Hideo Kojima to becoming the James Cameron of gaming. After Metal Gear Solid 2, people began to wonder if he wasn't the M. Night Shyamalan of gaming. Expectations were high to the point Zone of the Enders sold well for including a demo of Metal Gear Solid 2. The game was a best-seller but whether it fulfilled expectations is contentious. Nearly every aspect of the storyline was a magnet for controversy: the Gainax Ending and subsequent attempts to make sense of everything that happened; the quasi-incestuous relationships of Otacon and Emma; major plot developments occurring off-screen between Solid Snake and Olga Gurlukovich, with Raiden restricted to being a non-participant; and, of course, some particularly long-winded sermons from Snake on the nature of free will, identity, the importance of legacy, and hope. Fans of Metal Gear Solid 2 instead find the climax and message of reaching your own answers extremely complex for a video game, and believe it was ruined by the expositions of Metal Gear Solid 4.
  • Quinton Flynn's performance as Raiden in the English version. Some feel that he did a very good job providing his voice, while others believe that his performance made Raiden seem too whiny. Not helping matters is that in the Japanese version, Raiden has an awesome baritone voice.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Pliskin is Snake.
• Character Perception Evolution:
  • For years, the game was panned for not living up to the massive hype created by both its demo and its status as a sequel to its highly successful predecessor, and much of that ire was directed at Raiden, who surprised players by becoming the playable character after spending the prologue as Solid Snake. Raiden was the complete opposite of what players expected from Snake: instead of being a gruff and manly veteran, Raiden was a naïve and emotional pretty boy who frequently argued with his girlfriend, which clashed harshly with Western expectations of masculinity. The hate for Raiden got bad enough for Hideo Kojima to include some Self-Deprecation about him in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater before revamping his characterization in later games to much acclaim. However, as MGS2's reputation improved, so too did Raiden's portrayal in it, with fans coming to both recognize his more sympathetic traits as a traumatized Child Soldier and appreciate his role in deconstructing the series' relationship with its fans.
  • The Patriots were initially seen as an out-of-left-field antagonist who were incredibly confusing with their nature of being an artificial intelligence Ancient Conspiracy, not helped by how the game goes completely apeshit the moment they really begin to show themselves. However, opinion towards them rapidly shifted during The New '10s thanks to online misinformation and digital surveillance becoming hot topics. Consequently, the Patriots went from being seen as overly bizarre even by the franchise's standards to being considered one of the most effective villains of Metal Gear, with their talk of controlling public narratives via the internet now being seen as eerily predictive of the future. Many people noted how Kojima was ahead of his time in terms of predicting how the internet and technological advancement could be used to affect politics and geopolitics.

• Contested Sequel: It's either an Even Better Sequel due to the gameplay refinements and ambitious plot, or a letdown for its Bait-and-Switch protagonist and Mind Screw plot. As time has healed the wound a little, opinions have begun to shift more towards the former, or at least something in between.
• Critical Dissonance: This is the best reviewed game in the entire series, but fan reaction is very mixed, though the reception from fans has overall leaned towards the positive side as time goes on.
• Damsel Scrappy: Emma for some. Yet, her death is usually still a Tear Jerker for them anyway.
• Discredited Meme: At the time of the game’s release, it was a meme in the fandom to make fun of Raiden for being “effeminate” and claiming that he’s secretly gay. It even got Meme Acknowledgment in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater with Raiden’s Expy Raikov, who is canonically gay and the masochistic partner of Volgin. However, this has fallen out fashion in the years since then for multiple reasons. The first was that Raiden Took a Level in Badass and ended up becoming a fan favorite in both Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, which made fans like him too much to want to make fun of him anymore. The second was when mainstream society as a whole became much more accepting of LGBT people over the years and being gay was no longer seen as the source of mockery it once was, making the idea of using “gay” as an insult toward Raiden a case of Values Dissonance with the fandom in the earlier years. And finally, deeming Raiden gay because he's effeminate completely ignores the fact that Raiden’s relationship drama with his girlfriend was a major part of the story, in addition to his attraction to Emma and Olga.
• Ending Fatigue: The battle with the RAYs seems like the climax of the game... except there are a good forty minutes of cutscenes/Codec messages between that and the final fight with Solidus. And after that, there's another ten minutes of cutscenes.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Colonel, who is actually a AI replica, is one of the more fondly remembered characters of the game, to the point of being referenced in future games, and even eclipsing the popularity of the real Roy Campbell. He's such a whacko, a scoundrel, and a creep that you can't help but love him:
  Colonel: One shouldn't stoop to vulgar levels just because they've set foot on the battlefield. (under his breath) But I sympathize with you there...
  Rosemary: You WHAT?
  • Fatman. Despite only appearing for one boss fight and not being as important to the overall plot as Fortune or Vamp, he's managed to remain fondly-remember for being a hammy, Laughably Evil kook who doesn't give a shit about any of the Gambit Pileups his allies are engaging in, and instead only cares for the endless destruction his explosives cause.
• Epileptic Trees: The VR Theory is an old one; while it has obviously been rebuked by the existence of a direct sequel, it makes for a pretty good case considering Sons of Liberty was originally intended to be the last in the series.
• Even Better Sequel: While the story is heavily debated among fans to this day, almost everyone agrees that the gameplay is a major improvement over the first Metal Gear Solid.
• Fountain of Memes: The AI Colonel is singlehandedly the biggest source of memes from this game, to the extent that nearly everything they said during the game’s last stealth segment became a meme.
• Fridge Brilliance: Since so much of the game is the product of stressed developers tossing gimmicks at a wall to see what sticks, the result is a warped kind of genius: the Big Shell is a crude copy of the Shadow Moses Incident, and Raiden is an inferior agent to Solid Snake. It makes sense to have him muddle through missions with roller-blading fat men, spritzing inanimate objects with a coolant spray, clearing hallways of lice, holding hands with little girls, cartwheeling around naked, and other indignities.
• Friendly Fandoms: Metal Gear Solid 2 popularized a theme of deconstructing video games and invoking elements of postmodernism in its story and gameplay. About a decade later, the games Spec Ops: The Line similarily deconstructed AAA military shooters, Undertale deconstructed violence in RPGs for the sake of leveling up characters and Doki Doki Literature Club! deconstructed romance and dating sim games. All three of these games have fans that thank MGS2 for inspiring the trend.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The M9 tranquilizer handgun, or the silenced SOCOM. Take your pick. Both are capable of instantly incapacitating headshots from distances that only a sniper rifle would remain accurate at in Real Life, the ammo is extremely common, and abusing them almost guarantees you never being seen. The M9 is the better of the two, since you get it far sooner (you start the Tanker with it and get it from a locker in the first room in the Plant) and don't aim it down the iron sights, meaning the gun takes up less of the screen in first-person view, and the laser is much easier to line up shots with than the SOCOM's ironsights. Plus, your endgame status is better if you don't kill anyone, and you get extra dog tags from the bosses to unlock goodies for New Game Plus. Meanwhile, the silencer for the SOCOM comes literally about an hour into the game. This gets reversed on higher difficulty levels, where even tagging an enemy in the head for an instant knockout with the M9 will have them get back up faster than it'd take for you to pause the game and go piss, while outright killing people with SOCOM headshots remains as effective as ever.
  • The Stinger missiles Snake gives Raiden make the boss fight against Vamp a piece of cake.
  • Long-range sniping using the binoculars and a pistol is possible in this game, as well as in Metal Gear Solid 3, via a complex sequence of button presses. Take out the binoculars, zoom in, hold down the first-person button, unequip the binoculars while still holding the first-person button, hold the fire button to aim. Wherever you were looking at, your weapon will be aimed directly at it, no matter how far you zoomed in.
• Genius Bonus: Philanthropy, Snake and Otacon's anti-Metal Gear group, takes its name from the classical definition of the word "philanthropy": "Love of humanity"—derived from the Greek "philia" ("love") and "anthro" ("human"). A fitting name for a group dedicated to protecting all of humanity from the threat of nuclear war.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The "New York Incident" is referenced in Metal Gear Solid 4; it seems the destruction of Lower Manhattan took the place of the (comparatively smaller) destruction of the World Trade Center. It also leads to a dramatic rise in private military contracting and increased turmoil in the Middle East. Furthermore, in Kojima's unedited version, the WTC is about the only New York landmark that doesn't get destroyed.^note Unfortunately, in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance Sundowner references 9/11, indicating that the WTC was destroyed after all.
  • Solidus Snake's political extremism and secessionist views aren't too dissimilar from the political climate of the U.S. in the 2010s. Even better: they think they're continuing on in the spirit of the Founding Fathers while having nothing in common with them, and have named themselves after the Boston Tea Party, in the game's case, the perpetrators. In 2009. Kojima: calling the Tea Party a decade in advance.
  • In 2001, it was incredibly far-flung speculating to suggest that it was realistic that a shadowy, omniscient cabal of post-nationalist boogeymen could manipulate information on the Internet to control geopolitics at such a massive scale as rigging a Presidential election and making the sitting President a stooge for their interests instead of the people of America's interests. Come the 2016 election, this is a topic that's on the tongue of many Americans.
  • Note the existential horror the game rings out of the loss and theft of personal identity: Raiden's identity is stolen out from under him, Solidus steals Snake's identity, etc. This was at a time when Internet-enabled identity theft and fraud was just beginning to become a big deal for people outside the tech industry, since most people's personal information was not on the Internet yet. These days, thanks to Friending Networks and social media, massive personal data breaches happen every few months or so, forcing everyone to wonder about whether we've let the proliferation of personal information hitting the Internet get out of hand.
  • Crossing somewhat into Hilarious in Hindsight meta territory, FBI head Robert Mueller's investigation into the 2016 elections indicted thirteen Russian nationals that were aiding the Trump campaign through data harvesting and social media manipulation. Paul Eiding would do a reading of the report in Colonel Campbell's voice, just to drive the point home.
  • In 2018, it was revealed that British tech firm Cambridge Analytica took data from millions of Facebook users to influence elections. This article even looks at how Metal Gear Solid 2 and other games in the series all but predicted this technological near-dystopia.
  • Snake's stern warnings about the dangers of "turning war into a video game" can seem even more chilling today than they did in 2001, both on the side of video games ("realistic" shooters like Modern Warfare becoming ridiculously popular in 2007 - the same year the Tanker Chapter takes place in, even) and on the side of actual war (thanks to the advent of drone warfare).
  • The issue of censorship and intel concerning the Patriots, then the Patriot Act of 2001, effective 2002.
  • A secret security hole being used by the government to spy on and control the citizens? Heartbleed being used by the NSA anyone?
  • The Patriots AI's speech at the end of the game is viewed as an eerily accurate prediction of the state of American politics and online communities in The New '10s, notably the extreme polarization and self-enclosure into echo chambers:
    The Colonel: You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems.
    Rosemary: Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large.
    The Colonel: The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right.
  • The Patriots' plan of controlling the flow of digital information to block out things they don't approve of lines up shockingly well with Konami's treatment of Kojima in 2015. Even more so is that the game mocks you if you input the Konami Code anywhere in a terminal — which becomes quite the future shock with the events transpiring the two above.
  • Raiden was designed as a bishonen character due to fan letter from a fangirl stating that she didn't want to play as "an old man". Come Metal Gear Solid 4...
  • The Colonel's rather pervy behavior in some of the optional Codec conversations. The real Campbell ends up marrying Rosemary in Metal Gear Solid 4, though he's merely her beard.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance has Raiden wearing Gray Fox's Cyborg Ninja outfit for VR missions. It seems fun now, right? Well, it won't be fun or amusing after playing Metal Gear Solid 4 where Raiden does become an actual Cyborg Ninja under painful and extremely tragic circumstances.
  • Otacon recalls an incident involving his family after Emma dies that his family broke apart when his stepmother had sex with him, thus his father committed suicide by drowning himself (giving Emma a fear of swimming because she almost drowned with him). When we see Huey in the prequel games, he was a near Generation Xerox of his son, but in a wheelchair. However, Huey committed several crimes working under Big Boss and Venom Snake, ones that included the destruction of MSF, the murder of Hal's mother, Strangelove, and unleashing a vocal cord parasite onto Venom Snake's Diamond Dogs personnel. This indicates that Huey may have attempted to intentionally take Emma with him, rather than it being an accident as Otacon assumes here.
  • The game's message about social media being exploited by politicians in bad faith to deliberately circulate misinformation on behalf of their agenda, which also doubled as contemporary commentary on the Japanese government's past efforts to censor or downplay the country's war crimes in WWII, took on an extremely ironic bent when far-right French politician Damien Rieu and even official Greek news broadcasts falsely attributed the assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe (who was controversial during his tenure for his denial of WWII war crimes) to Hideo Kojima, claiming his name was "Samyueru Hydeo".
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance has Raiden wearing Gray Fox's Cyborg Ninja outfit for VR missions. It seems fun now, right? It gets a lot more fun with Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, which embraces the badass Cyber Ninja aesthetic.
  • The premise of the game being a computer program with implied sentience manipulating all of humanity and causing a lot of atrocious deaths via a terrorist group all for an "experiment," and that program being voiced by Paul Eiding, gets very interesting when Dirge of Cerberus did something very similar for its plot.
  • Raiden recalling that he never actually met the Colonel even once will sound pretty funny after Metal Gear Solid 3, where Raiden's expy in that game, Major Ivan Raidenovitch Raikov, definitely knows a colonel.
  • One of the cardboard boxes found in the game is labeled "The Orange". Years later, an unrelated compilation titled The Orange Box would be released. And one of the games in it, Team Fortress 2, would later allow spies to hide in a box directly based on the one from this game.
  • Solidus using an offshore plant to revive Outer Heaven becomes much more meaningful if you've played Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and/or Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
  • Snake's tirade against VR training when he meets Raiden is funnier now that VR games have started becoming popular. Even better, the U.S. Armed Forces have started experimenting with training soldiers using VR technology.
    "A virtual grunt of the digital age. That's just great."
  • Otacon's affair with his stepmother and the Ship Tease between him and his stepsister Emma can be seen as this given the porn industry's ridiculous reputation for stepmother/stepsister videos in The New '10s and The New '20s.
  • During the Patriots' conversation with Raiden before the Final Boss, AI Rose remarks that "Genes don't contain any record of human history." Six years later, Assassin's Creed would disregard that statement for the sake of its Framing Device.
  • In 2007, an American football team based in New England was caught illegally filming an opponent's sideline signals during a game. The scandal caused mistrust among fans who wondered if the team's recent run of success during the decade came from other shady methods, not helped by the team's overly secretive head coach. The team's name? The Patriots.
  • Famously, Raiden ends having to sneak around Big Shell completely naked near the end of the game. Come Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, and he won't need any clothing at all.
  • The idea of taking a random soldier and turning them into Solid Snake takes on a darker meaning after Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain reveals that Ocelot had already been successful at turning a random soldier into Big Boss in the past.
  • As would be lampshaded by Max0r, this would not be the first game where Raiden battled a politician as the final boss while using a sword.
• Ho Yay: It's a Metal Gear Solid game. And one where a Depraved Bisexual joins the fray!
  • Snake and Otacon have only become even closer friends since the previous game. Snake can even take photos of a Marine in his underwear and send them to Otacon during the Tanker chapter.
  • President Johnson introduces himself by grabbing Raiden's crotch. Ostensibly, he had mistaken him for Olga and was checking his gender, but it comes across as this trope instead.
  • Vamp, the above-mentioned Depraved Bisexual. His habit of licking blood and his knife is arguably supposed to make him seem vampiric, but easily comes across as this trope instead. He's also confirmed as having been lovers with Scott Dolph and comments on how he can supposedly read Raiden's movements through his muscles.
  • Ironically, this game gives Ocelot his fewest moments of this trope.
• Inferred Holocaust: Thanks to various cuts within the final version due to the unfortunate timing of its release, Arsenal Gear crashing into Manhattan as well as the results was glossed over.
• It Was His Sled:
  • By the time of the release of the PC port of the game, around 2003, two years after the game first came out for the PS2, reviews of the game had already abandoned trying to keep the game's Decoy Protagonist a secret.
  • The long delay of the game's release in Europe saw the video game press just come out and reveal the switch between Snake and Raiden rather than try and keep the twist a secret whilst it was being discussed on the Internet.
  • Pliskin is Snake. In fairness, it's a Paper-Thin Disguise and the only way you could possibly be fooled is if you'd never played a Metal Gear game before (including the Tanker chapter).
  • The game's Gainax Ending is well-known at this point, and is generally one of the most famous examples across the entire medium for how convoluted and disregarding of the fourth wall it is.
• Love to Hate:
  • Because he didn’t stand out that much from the other villains in the first Metal Gear Solid, and then was given sympathetic qualities in all of the games after this one, this ends up being the one game in the series where Ocelot fully achieves this from fans. Despite being completely despicable in this game in particular, he just has so much fun with it that you can’t help but love it, especially during his Info Dump near the end when he’s essentially bragging about how thoroughly he manipulated everyone and rubbing it in the faces of both the heroes and the villains alike.
  • The AI Colonel, like Ocelot, is a completely despicable character and also gives the player an Info Dump about just how thoroughly they manipulated everyone in the game shortly after Ocelot does. Adding to this, their absolutely bonkers dialogue near the end of the game gave them Fountain of Memes status, something not even Ocelot was able to get.
  • Vamp is seen as an incredibly cool villain and loved by fans despite killing Emma, not to mention the scene of him slaughtering people, and was so popular that he was brought back for Metal Gear Solid 4.
• Memetic Molester:
  • Vamp. It's not uncommon to see fan art of him doing something like licking Raiden.
  • President James Johnson's infamous Crotch-Grab Sex Check lands him in this territory.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "I NEED SCISSORS! 61!"
  • Raiden "MANAGING TO AVOID DROWNING."
  • The way Stillman "KILLED HIS SOUL!" and has to "DEFUSE HIS SINS!"
  • "A DUD!!!"
  • Fission Mailed.
  • This game has been actually used to teach Meme Theory.
  • A running joke amongst fans is to add "Definitely not!" at the end of Raiden's dialogue.
• Moe: Emma. Raiden thinks so when he talks to her via Codec.^note He also does the same thing when he talks to Rose. Even Snake, of all people, is infatuated of her.
• Moral Event Horizon: Vamp's murder of Emma.
• Narm: Besides the fact that there's an entire page of it, Fatman and Fortune in particular stand out. The former is a mad bomber on rollerskates who sees his bombs as a timely form of art and keeps his fingers manicured on par with a woman's, not to mention his pure ham and cheese performance. Fortune on the other hand is followed by a lonely sax leitmotif, and virtually brings an entire bucket's worth of angst and drama to just about every single scene she's in - something she's explicitly called out on in-universe.
• Narm Charm:
  • "We managed to avoid drowning!" Seems pretty narmy at first, but you just completed an underwater Escort Mission in which the escortee has life and oxygen meters smaller than yours. It's not hard to feel relieved that you're past awkward control central.
  • Vamp's knife holster is located on his crotch. In any other context this would be simply absurd, but since Vamp is already a blatant parody of a Mr. Fanservice, it instead becomes the cherry-on-top of his over-the-top sexual nature and fits him perfectly.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Everything that happens after Emma's death is so fucked up that you cannot tell what is real and what is not anymore. The Fission Mailed screen is particularly disturbing - with the obviously twisted English words and you still fighting alright.
  • The Colonel's last words to you before you fight Solidus are a hideously rasped and digitally distorted "Our beloved monsters — enjoy yourselves." All the while, it flickers between its recreation of Campbell's face, and a skull, which leers at you.
• Older Than They Think:
  • This game technically isn't Raiden's first appearance; that would be Metal Gear: Ghost Babel, where he's referenced in The Stinger.
  • BioShock was acclaimed for its deconstruction of the concept of linearity in video games, but this game beat it to the punch by six years. You could also make a compelling argument that Metal Gear Solid 2 predated The Stanley Parable by ten years, particularly the torture room gag with Ocelot.^note The Stanley Parable's lead developer Davey Wreden cited this game as an influence when developing TSP.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2 was not the first game in the series to order the player to shut off their console. That credit goes to the first game in the series.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2 wasn't the first game to have a Whole-Plot Reference to its predecessor, considering how much Metal Gear Solid lifted from Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Admittedly, though, Metal Gear Solid 2 takes this idea much, much further than the original Metal Gear Solid ever did.
  • Ocelot's now-iconic body language made its debut in this game rather than the next one, as well as his Chronic Backstabbing Disorder.
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • While some of the later video games released were acclaimed for its deconstruction of the medium, Metal Gear Solid 2 is now considered the earliest popular example to explore this.
  • Anyone who played the games from the Subsistence edition of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater tends to find the old overhead view from this game difficult to get back to grips with.
• One-Scene Wonder: Liquid Ocelot only appears once every chapter, but he owns every scene he's in.
• Play-Along Meme: A number of fans jokingly play along with the idea that Solid Snake actually dies in the prologue and that Iroquois Pliskin is a new character that just so happens to look like him. This goes as far as to suggest that Pliskin is either lying about being Solid Snake, or that Snake actually did survive, but Pliskin mysteriously goes missing towards the end of the game.
• Player Punch: This game loves this so much it makes the entire final third of the story this.
• Porting Disaster:
  • While the PS3 version of the HD Edition plays just fine, it has an infamous Game-Breaking Bug that causes the game to consistently freeze during the (unskippable) credits sequence with no real known solution.^note A makeshift solution involves turning off PS3 notifications and not wearing body armor when dealing the final blow to Solidus, but it doesn't always work. While it doesn't really affect someone just playing the game once to see the story, it makes accessing the final stats and New Game Plus (with its associated rewards) a serious hassle since the game only makes a viable save file after the credits end.
  • The Nintendo Switch port contains several bugs, but most egregiously, it cuts the framerate in half, despite being on stronger hardware than even the PS3 used for the HD Edition, let alone the original PS2. Because the game was made with 60 fps in mind, this also causes other graphical glitches, especially in the rain-covered Tanker Chapter. The port can also randomly crash on the VR screen.
• Protection from Editors: Likely the reason for why the game turned out the way it did. Apparently, Kojima's original script was over 800 pages long.
• Realism-Induced Horror: For all this game's use of fantastic technology, it does manage to strike a chord with many players with the whole idea of a Government Conspiracy controlling information flow and scripting global events, two things you don't have to be a covert special-ops agent to be terrified of.
• Replacement Scrappy:
  • Raiden was loathed by fans for replacing Snake, and for overall being a bland character, but Metal Gear Solid 4 and Metal Gear Rising in particular rescued him.
  • Rose also got (and still gets) a lot of hate for replacing the more popular Mei Ling from the first game. It doesn't help that while Mei Ling's lines could be funny and charming, many find Rose's dialogue intrusive and annoying.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: Rose. Her conversations are important for the player to learn of her and Raiden's characters. Unfortunately, the timing of these conversations cannot be any worse if they tried. This is mainly because Rose will ask Raiden about the date April 30 and talk about their relationship at the most inopportune times.
• The Scrappy: In addition to Raiden, Rose was seen as this by many, as they found her constant melodrama and clinginess to be downright irritating. Fortunately, her role in Metal Gear Solid 4 was much better received.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The swimming controls are weird, unintuitive and rather squirrely to get a grasp of. And then the game throws you into sections where they have sea mines ready to take chunks off of your health bar if you mess up — and then an Escort Mission of guiding someone back through these areas, with their own oxygen meter to manage to boot. This was so infamous that numerous gaming news outlets at the time called attention to and lambasted these sequences above all else, regardless of their thoughts on the rest of the game; they were more controversial to some than Raiden himself.
  • The sword gameplay didn't work very well to begin with — just Raiden making short, awkward-looking slices which had only a passing relationship to how you manipulated the right analog stick. Especially annoying since it was introduced very late in the game, giving you about one minute to practice before an hour of shooting giant robots/cutscene and then final boss swordfight.
• Take That, Scrappy!: "External Gazer" takes a good bit of piss out of Metal Gear Solid 2's story, even more than Metal Gear Solid 3 did. The much-loathed romance angle between Raiden and Rose is lampshaded by their VR avatars, the misdeeds of which earned "the combined hate of the entire universe" and whose mere presence "has the ability to destroy a world."
• That One Achievement: The trophies for completing the VR Missions. If one were to attempt these trophies while playing the streamable version of the HD Edition, it has become practically impossible. The PS4 controllers have none of the pressure-sensitivity that the PS2 ones did; even the PS3 controllers had it to an extent. That means anytime an assault rifle is used, the second you press square, Raiden or Snake starts firing immediately- which means triggered alert phases (ruining hold up missions), and burning through ammo quickly.
• That One Attack:
  • Vamp's shadow hypnosis, which freezes you in place, thus leaving you helpless to defend against a nasty hit from Vamp unless you happened to toss an explosive first. Thankfully, you can shoot out the lights to prevent him from using it.
  • The knee missiles of the Metal Gear RAYs, used when they get up close and personal. If you're unlucky enough for them to be fired just as you try to fire a Stinger missile, say goodbye to a good chunk of your health.
• That One Boss:
  • Fighting the Metal Gear RAYs on Arsenal Gear. On Easy mode, you only have to fight three, the pattern is pretty easy, and there are rations in the middle of the floor. How many do you fight on Extreme mode? 20.
  • Solidus on top of Federal Hall counts for one and only one reason; you probably still haven't had much time to really master using your sword, and your final boss battle is nothing but a sword fight. Akin to taking a test for the finals you haven't even studied for. He's even harder in the Snake Tales level: External Gazer, due to Snake not having the sword to block and fighting Solidus with his bare fists.
• That One Level:
  • The segment where Raiden has to escort Emma through a series of flooded sections infested with aquatic mines, with Emma having shorter life and oxygen meters than Raiden's. Suddenly, Raiden saying "We managed to avoid drowning!" doesn't sound so narmy after all.
  • Arsenal Gear-Jejunum, where you have to sneak past Tengu guards butt-naked (which prevents you from using your chokehold). If you get spotted, you're pretty much screwed and have to run all the way back to the torture room to get them off your tail.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Fans disappointed with the Snake Tales, which act as a No Budget rehash of several events in the main game, felt the entire mode should have focused on Snake's perspective during his mission at the Big Shell.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The High-Frequency Blade is a really cool weapon that works much differently from everything else in the game and can even parry bullets. Problem is that you only get it when the story is just about over. While it's understandable in that it would have been a Game-Breaker otherwise, it still would have been a fun idea to make the sword a reward for collecting enough dog tags so you could fool around with it all throughout the plant, but even that wasn't implemented.
• The Un-Twist: Iroquois Pliskin is actually Solid Snake. Word has it they made it as blatantly obvious as possible just to see if anyone would fall for it anyway. Interestingly enough, the concept art for Pliskin shows him with blonde hair, something that would have made him look very unlike how Solid Snake normally appears. This was, indeed, the reason why they made him a brunette in the first place: he looked too unlike Snake for it to work, despite how the first game implied that Snake is a natural blonde himself.
• Values Dissonance: Part of the reason for Raiden's lukewarm reception in the West, at least in 2001. In Japan, there isn't nearly as much stigma against men with feminine features, and it's actually very traditional to cast them in heroic roles.
• Values Resonance: The AI at the end of the game discussing how the internet age is leading to rumors and half truths drowning out accurate information seems eerily prescient.
• Vindicated by History: Though its gameplay and graphics were praised, the storyline was deemed convoluted at best and exploitative at a few points. However, as years go by, more are finding it to be an excellent early example of post-modernism in the video game medium, as well as a decent deconstruction of But Thou Must! games. These two traits would later be championed by the critically acclaimed BioShock series. In addition, critically acclaimed games that act as a Deconstruction of the medium such as Spec Ops: The Line and The Stanley Parable have only boosted this game's vindication. As these sorts of games become more popular, Metal Gear Solid 2 has also become much more accepted. Additionally, after 2016, the political side of the game went from "dense and long-winded" to "Kojima warned us". It also helps that Raiden's appearances in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance helped him become one of the most popular characters in the series, which makes his appearance in 2 much more bearable. As a result of all this, it's become common to see people ranking Metal Gear Solid 2 as one of the best games in the series alongside its predecessor and successor.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: HD Edition aside, the graphics and the detail were unbelievable for a console game when MGS2 was first released in 2001. Keep in mind, the PlayStation 2 was only a year old, yet the game in its original release is still absolutely gorgeous to look at. It also kept an extreme attention to detail all while running at 60 frames per second.
• Waggle: The pressure-sensitive controls are highly awkward, at first. Especially for the assault rifles where they remain such even after you're used to them. Lightly pushing the button to shoot will make you aim your weapon, while depressing it fires. This is distinct from the pistols, where pressing the button will make you aim, and quickly releasing it fires, whereas slowly releasing the button lowers your weapon without firing. This is an important distinction, as accidentally shooting guards you're holding up can be very annoying. In addition, movement with the D-pad is also pressure sensitive just like on the left stick — pressing a direction lightly causes the player character to sneak fairly quickly, while a full depression causes you to run noisily. Metal Gear Solid 3 fixed this, where normal movement is now solely on the left stick and the D-Pad is for sneaking more sneakily.
• Wangst:
  • Fortune seems to be a deliberate example, since even in-universe Ocelot notes that she "couldn't get enough of the drama" and was "absorbed" in her own "misfortune".
  • Rose won't shut up about her and Raiden's relationship problems, even in places where she knows he is in mortal danger.

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