Day 7
Okay, time to backtrack to the Zanzibar Building. Now that I've got a bunch more keycards I can poke around there more, and quickly get the Blue Card, which combines ID cards 4, 5 and 6. I appreciate the game doing this, it reduces the inventory clutter and the juggling of all these IDs.
There's a kid on the fourth floor who says that if I put Gustava's brooch in the sauna or freezer, it will change shape. Why does this random child know this?
Near the room with the brooch youth is the infirmary. It's full of napping guards and the floor is loud so you have to crawl through. At the way back there's cold medicine. I guess now I am protected in case I have to sneeze. It's attached to the sauna, so I guess I can check that brooch. Egads! Its shape is alter'd! I hope that the sauna-relaxing towelclad guard sprite never gets used again, that it was produced just for this room.
The sauna changed the shape of the brooch into a key. Interesting. There's a locked locker right near here so I guess that's what opens that. Inside is a cassette tape that holds a recording of the Zanzibar Land national anthem. Oh yeah, ages ago I learned that when the anthem plays all soldiers stop and salute. So I guess this is for a puzzle.
Poking around in the basement with the blue card yields a wealth of booty: an O2 tank, a camo mat, some gas grenades, a mouse… jackpot. I think this should let me swim now. Also, there's an SMG. Rat-a-tat. And body armor. All the good stuff is down here!
Anyway there's a huge door right by the vent I used way back at the beginning of the game to get into this building that the Blue Card can open. It's full of guards… but I play the anthem and they all stop.
Propaganda is a heck of a drug.
Actually I think they're all dummies except one, which does deaggro with the anthem. Either way, they were guarding a hang glider. Bonzai! I wonder if it's possible to just fight your way through here and ignore getting the cassette. Probably. Now it's time to pursue Grey Fox. Back through the jungle and desert…. Again…………
As I take the elevator back up to the busted bridge though, there's a twist! Grey Fox calls me and says FRIENDSHIP ENDED WITH SOLID SNAKE. He has sent the Four Horsemen, an elite close-quarters assassination team, to end me. Time for some elevator action.
"We get our orders directly from the President."
Excuse me?
This boss isn't hard, but it is very annoying. It's basically just a fight against four regular mooks but they have a very, very large health pool that isn't shared between them and their damage is higher. If you get close to one they jump to the walls and won't come down or attack until you move away, so realistically you can lock two of them out of fighting at a time just by standing close by. Once one of them dies the fight is basically over because you can just fight a series of one-on-ones. They drop ID card 7.
When the fight ends the elevator has its cable cut or something and plunges back to floor 1 while an alarm sounds. I guess I better take the stairs. Well, there aren't any that I've found, but there are plenty of other elevators so I just waltz to the next-closest one and go up. On floor 10 where I had to bomb all the fake walls and thought there was good signaling there's an unmarked wall I need to bomb to proceed. Okay, I take it back. That's not so great.
Behind that bit are the stairs, because that's a logical place to put your stairs. They're packed with goons and there's no real way to avoid being seen so it's just a mad dash to ascend. You have to climb the other ten flights. This is what they call metal gear rising. I love it. Final Fantasy VII's stairs sequence rules and so does this. Just make me climb the actual amount of stairs. Don't shortcut it.
Out on the balcony my "number one fan" calls and says I can only make the jump when the wind blows north. Hmm.
The trick is to use gas grenades to see the direction of the wind, which is cool, but I used mine all up and the wind never changed. Then I used the glider and it worked anyway. Maybe I got lucky?
Once across the gap, there's a short walk to the next boss: Jungle Evil. Why wasn't he in the jungle?
Welcome to the Evil?
For this guy you hide behind a box and throw grenades when he pops out of the tall grass. His arena is huge – four screens, the same as the Hind D – but there's no reason to ever move off the first one. I don't really know what they were going for here because it's very hard for him to hurt you. Maybe if you only had a gun, things would be different. He drops ID card 8.
Jungle Evil was guarding a facility building of some sort. Inside, there are eggs. Okay. Maybe I can eat them later.
Some kids tell me that they keep animals in a room to the northwest and that the laser fences get turned off at night. Some security! I came from the northwest so I guess that was the egg house. Actually the eggs have hatched into Snake and an Owl. The snake eats all my rations. Why…
Equipping the owl make it hoot and the guards that controls the gate to the next aria think it's nighttime so they turn off the lasers. That's kind of funny. Inside a kid tells me that B1 rations have chocolate in them. Tasty. One of these houses has a sewer sweeper robot in it for some reason. Probably to troll the player.
I take an elevator into the basement of this area and my number one fan calls again with a warning. Night Fright, the last surviving member of the legendary guerilla unit the Whispers is stalking me. It's time for yet another boss fight.
Night Fright's deal is that he's invisible unless he's shooting at you. He doesn't show up on radar either. As a result you just gotta shoot at him when you see bullets coming at you. The floor is squeaky so you can hear him coming but that's about it. Luckily with body armor he is very, very easy. I just sat there and traded bullets with him until he died, you can get a lot more hits in than he can because he gets stunned for a second when shot.
Something I didn't realize until a boss or two ago was that this game actually has a "level" or "rank" system much like Metal Gear 1, it just doesn't explicitly display it. Each rank up increases your health bar length and how many bullets/weapons you can carry.
Sadly I can't proceed further because there's a room filled with acid and a door I don't have the keycard for. When I reach the locked door behind the acid (which kills me once, but then I recall something something child clue… equipping B1 rations neutralizes the acid…) there's another call from the number one fan. Jungle Evil has ID card 9, which opens the door. But he only had 8, Snake replies. The fan says that Evil must've dropped it somewhere Time to explore and backtrack? I eventually get it from the grass field where he was. I admit I actually walked over the place where you grab it and it wasn't there, it seems like you can't sequence break this because the card does not spawn until you are told of its existence. Bogus.
ID card 9 in hand I go back to the acid room and finally reach Dr. Marv! Dr. Madnar is here and says it's too late – Marv is dead, his heart gave out from the stress of imprisonment. Snake says wait a sec, what's that bruise on his neck? Madnar says don't worry about it, the plans for the OILIX are safe because Marv left a copy of the plans behind for emergencies. Also he loved video games, and hid the plans inside an MSX game cartridge made by a fictional Japanese video game company named Konami. The plans are locked inside a locker now, but Madnar doesn't know where the key is.
At this point Holly calls and says Madnar is bad news – he's been a double agent this whole time, playing both sides and feeding secrets across the east/west political divide. Madnar was behind the theft of the OILIX all along. Who could have foreseen this?
"I'm afraid you've got me, Snake."
Turns out that all he wanted to do was finish Metal Gear and the scientific community rejected him as madman, so he swore revenge. Then he jumps on Snake's back and attacks! It's a boss!
"I can't breathe…"
To get Madnar off your back you have to use remote missiles to hit him since he's always behind you. Your health is constantly draining from being choked, and Snake yells "I can't breathe…" throughout the whole fight which definitely reads today with some associations that did not exist when this came out.
Once Madnar is toast (or is he?) Gustava's brooch should unlock the locker, but it's the wrong shape, so I need to go back to the freezer to make it right. Back to the Zanzibar Building I go…
A truck ride acts as a shortcut back to the tower building, thankfully (but am I going to have to glider back?) and from there I just have to cross the desert and the jungle for the umpteenth time. In the Zanzibar Building I use ID card 9 to unlock a door to the Green Card, which condenses cards 7, 8 and 9. Now if they let me combine Red, Blue and Green into some sort of Master Card that would be great. Up to the fourth floor cold storage room where I freeze the brooch, then back through the jungle, desert, tower building, acid room… so much backtracking in this game. At least I don't have to go up to the roof and glide again – there's another transport truck.
Inside the locker is… nothing! There's a hole in the back though. Crawling through, it seems some rats have stolen the cartridge and if you touch one it's lethal. Demonic rats. They can be lured out of the hole with a B3 Ration and shot. Something about this game and animals and food always going together. I grab the cartridge.
Madnar is still alive. He gives me a gift to give to his daughter Ellen, and tells me how to destroy the new Metal Gear: use grenades on the legs. Seems easy enough. Then a pit opens and Snake falls. Grey Fox taunts us: "The final delusion of a senile old man. There's no way to destroy this Metal Gear, Snake!" It's time to take this sucker down.
BOSS FIGHT: METAL GEAR D
This gif is basically what I did except I didn't even bother to move in front of it.
This guy is very easy. I just stood on the side of the room and threw grenades while dodging the various projectiles it lazily lobbed. I dunno if there were more mechanics that I just didn't see, but the fight is overall representative of the entire gamut of bosses thusfar: basically trivial. At least this one had some spectacle to it, the sprite is huge and cool.
After Metal Gear blows up Grey Fox steals the game cartridge and lights Snake on fire, so I have to toss out my entire inventory since it's burning me alive. A door opens to the next room and Grey Fox is there – time for another boss fight!
Grey Fox plays Slappers only! ruleset since you just had to toss out every single item in your inventory. He does almost no damage but the room is lined with invisible land mines so you gotta stay in the middle. I was worried he'd kill me but he actually poses very little threat. I spent most of the game's combat in punch mode to conserve ammo because I am a packrat and it pays off here.
Grey Fox talks about his reasons to being loyal to Big Boss, how Big Boss pulled him out a situation of racial abuse and then rescued him again when he was being tortured as a special agent. He also reveals he's been the one helping Snake as the number one fan, due to his conflicted feelings on this entire scenario. Tragic? I guess, but also I cannot understand that level of loyalty to a guy who wants to nuke the planet. He explodes and leave the cartridge behind. He is now reunited with his love Gustava.
A voice calls out "Over here, Snake!" so I follow it through a few rooms. The voice was Big Boss. I'm shocked. Shocked! Big Boss has some weird circular logic about how war is the reason for human existence and all must be fed into its gristmill.
I don't really think this is well-written at all. Anyway time for yet another Big Boss fight.
A Red Beret distinguishes him from the other kind.
This is a puzzle fight. Since Snake has no gear, you just have to run away from him. There are a bunch of doors and one of them has an ID card behind it. You just have to run around trying all the doors with the card until you find one that opens, and then repeat with the next card you find. Eventually Snake finds a lighter and an aerosol spray can, makes a flamethrower, and the fight is over at that point as the flamethrower can shoot through walls and has infinite ammo. Big Boss burns to a crisp.
Holly shows up to complain about how her undercover uniform was too tight in the chest. Are you kidding me Kojima? She gives Snake a gun and he says "Yeah, I can see how this would be hard for a woman to use." My face: -__-
The two of you call for extraction and run for the exit. Move speed is turbo. Wish it were always this fast! This is another chase sequence with guards coming after you like the stairs bit was. You get to the point and have to hold off waves of guards until the rescue gets there but there's also a pitfall trap just to troll you with a one-shot death. Come on, why is this here in the middle of the jungle? Just as Snake runs out of ammo and gets surrounded, Charlie's chopper arrives and extracts them, just in time for Christmas. Holly and Snake live happily ever after. The End.
Post-credits, Snake and Holly turn in the OILIX recipe cartridge but then Snake vanishes. Holly is peeved because he promised he'd buy her dinner. Sigh.
Final Thoughts
I didn't really like this game very much – as I mentioned, it felt very, very long, the backtracking became comical by the end with how often they expected you to walk across the whole world, and the pacing left a lot to be desired. All of that said, this game is a universe above the original Metal Gear in quality. It feels much more like a complete idea, something I reasonably could have picked up in the past few years from an independent studio. Many parts of it feel fresh and modern even by the standards of 2022, and I could easily see a remake with some tuning and quality of life updates being a big hit. I don't think that there's much here that needs changing to modernize it effectively. I'm just not big on stealth games and I eventually just started ignoring the need for stealth and running through the zones because I'd seen them so many times and was tired of waiting for patrols. Also by the end I had so much health and so many rations that damage became irrelevant – only one-hit kills mattered.
Statistics
Difficulty: Original
Play Time: 6:31:56
Save: 10
Continue: 21
Alert Mode: 165
Humans Killed: 152
Ration Used: 22
Special Item: Not Used
Code Name: Zebra
Final Rating: 6.5/10 – LordHuffnPuff says "a colossal improvement, if overlong and frustrating at times – check it out!"
Next Time: Metal Gear Solid
