Where do I even start?
I guess I could start with a disclaimer: I'm not interested in relitigating what makes an immersive sim when I already did that a while back. While immersive sims are predominantly a western, PC-gaming phenomenon, this doesn't preclude Japanese devs (who up until very recently were almost exclusively producing games for consoles) from applying similar principles in a case of convergent evolution. We can talk about the mutual influence of Metal Gear and Deus Ex on each other at another time, but the Metal Gear games (most of them anyway) are pretty conclusively immersive sims in my book, and I think Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is where the series really comes into its own as an immersive sim franchise.
Just as Metal Gear Solid 3 is a prequel, let's go back to the beginning, especially since I haven't covered a Metal Gear game in this space yet. Metal Gear, better known by the name Metal Gear Solid, is a series of stealth games going back to 1987 with Metal Gear, a military sci-fi game produced by young would-be auteur Hideo Kojima for the MSX2 home computer system. Set in the near future, you played a special forces soldier code-named Solid Snake, infiltrating a mercenary-led breakaway nation with the goal of stopping them from using Metal Gear, a revolutionary walking tank, capable of firing a nuclear missile from anywhere in the world. While somewhat primitive by today's standards, its stealth-focused gameplay and engaging story were a big hit. The NES port is something of a remix, and while I don't think it's as good, it still has a lot of what made Metal Gear great. The West never got a proper sequel, which remained an MSX2 exclusive for years; instead, we got Snake's Revenge, which... well, it's okay. The franchise disappeared for a while as Kojima worked on some other stuff, but Metal Gear Solid for the PlayStation not only marked its return to the gaming world, the broader switch to 3D, and demonstrated Kojima's deepening interest in video games' power of storytelling and cinema, but firmly established Metal Gear (Solid) as a landmark franchise that has maintained lasting power even after Kojima left Konami and we haven't had a new entry in the Metal Gear storyline since Metal Gear Solid 5 back in 2015. Metal Gear Solid 2: The Sons of Liberty (for the PlayStation 2) defied everyone's expectations, but... well, we'll talk about that one when we get there.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater did something entirely different: instead of continuing the story that left off at the end of Sons of Liberty, Kojima took us all the way back to the early days of Big Boss, once considered the greatest soldier the world had ever seen, who became the villain of the two MSX2 games (sort of) and posthumously cast a long shadow over the Solid games. After all, the philosophy behind the mercenary nations he kept founding (Outer Heaven in Metal Gear 1, Zanzibar Land in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake) had to have come from somewhere. Snake Eater shows us where.
The year is 1964. America and the Soviet Union, once friends, are now deep into a bitter Cold War, suspicious of each other yet afraid of an open confrontation thanks to the specter of nuclear warfare. A young CIA agent, code-named Naked Snake (the father of Solid Snake) and attached to the covert infiltration unit FOX, is betrayed by his former mentor, a woman known as The Boss, when she defects to the Soviet Union during a mission to rescue a defecting weapons scientist (in what's implied to be Soviet Tajikistan.) At the same time, Colonel Volgin, a sinister GRU officer aligned with the Brezhnev faction, detonates a nuclear weapon at a nearby weapons lab. Khrushchev, in a back-channel conversation with President Lyndon Johnson, gives America one week to clear its name and avoid World War III: assassinate the Boss (and ideally Colonel Volgin as well.) The Boss is highly respected, considered the "mother of America's special forces," and perhaps the one true idealist in a world full of cynics. Assassinating her was intended to be painful, both for America as well as Naked Snake, to whom the Boss was something of a mother figure. Also part of his mission was to attempt once again to rescue the defecting scientist and destroy the Shagohod, the rocket-powered tank he built that could launch a nuke from anywhere in the world. (Sound familiar?)
If you're not familiar with Metal Gear, you're probably already asking a bunch of questions, and sister, let me tell you, you don't know the half of how weird this series can get. The best way I can describe it, it's like if Tom Clancy saw Patlabor while hopped up on horse crank. Metal Gear has everything from nuclear-equipped walking tanks (some of which roar like dinosaurs) to psychic soldiers to an almost completely non-existent fourth wall to lengthy cutscenes, directed just like a movie. The idea of America's special forces being founded by not just a woman, but a woman who gave birth on the battlefield during the invasion of Normandy, is barely notable by Metal Gear standards. But the series is also suffuse with pathos; these are characters you get attached to, especially if you spend time listening to their conversations on the radio screen. They may be weird, but they're unambiguously human, prone to mistakes and lies and betrayal and heroism and depression. Even some of the worst villains have their humanizing elements, like Sniper Wolf being a Kurdish survivor of genocide. Metal Gear also has a lot of cogent things to say about nuclear weapons, human relationships (both on the individual level and on the macro level of geopolitics), and how our perceptions shape the world and vice-versa. It's also host to some of the most entertaining stealth/action gameplay in the business; almost every item you can find has multiple uses, such as using cigarette smoke to not just steady your nerves while aiming, but also identify trip lasers in Metal Gear Solid, even though your radio contacts lecture you on the dangers of smoking (and it also drains your health slowly!) The granularity of gameplay has only increased with each new game; in the original MSX2 title, you could cancel an alert by leaving the area, but by Metal Gear Solid 3, you have a lot more places and ways to hide.
While the gameplay up to this point had been, broadly speaking, iterative improvements between the first title and Metal Gear Solid 2, Metal Gear Solid 3 turned the whole stealth system on its head. Instead of relying on direct line of sight as in previous games, you now have a camouflage system that affects your visibility. You can swap camo more or less on the fly for a given situation, and collect different kinds of camo as you progress through the game. Tiger stripe works best in the forest, splitter is great for infiltrating installations, and so on. You'll have access to disguises as well, such as a scientist disguise for infiltrating laboratories (just don't let actual scientists see your face, as they all know each other and will sound the alarm.) You'll also have a stamina bar that you have to keep topped off with food. Most of your food is found in the jungle; what, did you think "Snake Eater" was purely allegorical?
As in previous games, you won't enter the battlefield heavily armed; Naked Snake got that code name for infiltrating with almost no gear. You'll have to find weapons and equipment on your own. While previous games had a permanent, functioning radar to help you gauge enemy positions and even their field of vision, you'll need to find a radar of your own, and given that this is 1964 and not the near-future setting of the earlier games, it's not as good. Passive radar updates with every sweep; active sonar will tell you the position of every item, NPC and animal then and there, but makes noise. Both of these, as well as the obligatory night vision and thermal goggles (called experimental in this game but otherwise function like they did in Metal Gear Solid 2), rely on batteries that recharge when not in use. Even the almighty suppressor has a lifespan: you can find separate suppressors for your M1911, your Mk. 22 tranquilizer gun, and the XM16E1 (an early model of what would become the M16) and they all will wear out with use. But even unarmed, you can still be dangerous. A big emphasis is on CQC: Close Quarters Combat, presented here as a form of martial arts somewhat resembling judo, focused on disarming the enemy and knocking them into submission. It can be a little tough to learn; the CQC button works for a three-hit combo, but there's more you can do with it. It's possible, for example, to grab someone and slam them into the ground, or grab them from behind and interrogate them, then choke them out (or slit their throat, if you're so inclined.)
Survival is the watchword in this game; you're not just infiltrating Soviet territory, you're traversing a hostile wilderness. The weather can change on a dime, leaving you drenched (which drains your stamina.) While Life Medicine will give you an immediate boost to your health bar (similar to the way Rations work in earlier games), they're comparatively rare, and what you're supposed to do is keep your stamina up, which will restore your health bar over time. But be careful: you can actually incur severe injuries, which add a permanent red bar to your health that won't heal back (or will heal much slower.) But that's why you have a medical kit: each injury has specific medical items you need to apply to cure the injury, from sutures to close up cuts to a knife to dig out bullets. If you get sick, medicine is on hand to clear it up... or you could simply spin Snake around a bunch in the viewer screen and he'll ralph up whatever nasty thing gave him food poisoning the next time you switch back to the game. All the myriad animals have varying stamina benefits; some have additional benefits, like glowing mushrooms recharging your batteries (call Para-Medic, your medical advisor, after doing this, for a hilarious conversation.) But don't wait too long to eat it: unless it's pre-packaged, like instant ramen, or kept alive in a cage, the food you gather will rot over time. But you can use that rotten food to incapacitate hungry enemy soldiers! (This works better if you destroy the area's food storage first.)
Not everything is different from previous games. Obviously, most of the cast are a collection of freaks and weirdos, and Snake is no different. But you can still open up your radio screen and call your support staff: there's Major Zero, the CO who reminds you of what to do next; SIGINT the technical advisor, who explains your equipment and whatever machinery or vehicles you might find in the field; Para-Medic the medical advisor who likes movies, tells you about local flora and fauna, gives advice on staying healthy in the jungle, and will save your game for you; and finally EVA, the insider who gives you intel on the surrounding area. While you have to manage your inventory, that is, you have a maximum of 8 weapons and 8 items you can carry (and their combined weight affects your stamina drain) and the rest must be stored in your backpack, you still access your un-packed equipment the same way you do in previous games. If you're caught, it'll trigger an alert phase, though in this game, if you're quick enough, you can keep an enemy from raising the alarm. Otherwise, you'll need to get out of sight for a while; after a few seconds of the evasion phase, you'll switch to a caution phase, as the enemy actively searches for you. You can shake enemies down for ammo, knock them out and drag them to a locker to stuff them into. If you can do it in Metal Gear Solid 2, you can probably do it here.
While Snake Eater is over two decades old at this point, it really must be said: it's still an extremely beautiful game. The forests and mountains of Tajikistan are rendered about as well as the PlayStation 2 hardware could manage, complete with some gorgeous water reflections. Nowhere is this more obvious than the battle against The End, a century-old sniper who is almost more plant than man. No high-energy shootout this, instead it's a slow-paced game of cat and mouse as Snake and The End hunt each other through a sprawling, beautiful forest. Combined with the sharp cinematographic sense of the cutscenes and Snake Eater is a visual feast, even now.
If there's a flaw to Snake Eater, it's probably the Survival Viewer. This is your main menu throughout the game, from which you access your camo kit, your backpack, the food and cure menus, as well as the game options (or going back to the title screen should you so desire.) Constantly having to go into the Survival Viewer to change camouflage or dig out gunshot wounds can be a bit disruptive to the gameplay. At this point, I'm used to it as an aspect of the game's survival focus, but it can be annoying to someone who is used to more immediate gameplay. The original PlayStation 2 version of the game also only had one camera mode, the fixed camera, which behaved the same way as previous games. Prior to Snake Eater, it didn't really matter that much, because you had the radar and nearly all of your time was spent in indoor or otherwise confined locations. Snake Eater, with its sprawling jungles, really needed a freer camera, which Kojima reluctantly added for re-releases of the game.
Speaking of re-releases, there's quite a few. The first version, obviously, was for the Sony PlayStation 2 in 2004. The following year, Konami continued the tradition of Metal Gear Solid games getting updated re-releases, this time with the subtitle Subsistance. Subsistance was notable for coming with a second disc full of goodies including localizations of the MSX2 versions of Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, the latter of which had never been released outside of Japan until then. The 2011 HD Collection for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were high-definition ports of the Substance and Subsistance versions of Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 (including the MSX2 games), as well as a brand new home console port of the previously handheld-exclusive Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. The more recent Master Collection, available for a variety of consoles as well as PC, is essentially an expanded version of the HD Collection, though as of this writing only Volume 1 is out collecting Metal Gear Solids 1 through 3, the MSX2 games, the NES games, and some of the digital comics. If you're interested, Volume 2 is due in August 2026 and features Peace Walker as well as the previously PlayStation 3 exclusive Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, which is kind of a big deal. (It also comes with Metal Gear Ghost Babel, a non-canon spinoff for the Game Boy Color that was absolutely my shit for a couple years back in the early Aughts.) I'll talk more about Master Collection in a sec, but I did want to point out that there was a Nintendo 3DS port of Snake Eater that, despite running like dogwater, had some cool features like being able to use the handheld's camera to create unique camo patterns. There is also Metal Gear Solid Δ, a modern-day remake. Don't worry, I'll cover that one fairly soon.
Anyway, the Master Collection... whoof. I'd originally considered just emulating Subsistance; I own HD Collection for PlayStation 3 (of course I do) and I was always dissatisfied with the, frankly, lazy porting job. Master Collection is little different, though they have fixed some of the most egregious issues since the collection's release. For the rest, there's MGSHDFix, which combined with the Community Bugfix Compilation, go quite far in making the Master Collection version of Metal Gear Solid 3 the definitive one, at least on PC. That's not to say I didn't have problems: at some point in an earlier patch, Konami stripped out XInput support for gamepads, forcing the games to rely solely on SteamInput; the going rumor is as an anti-piracy measure. The problem is that Steam's controller input drivers are absolute shit, and break easily. I tried multiple solutions, but ultimately I was forced to reinstall Steam entirely before controllers would work in the game. In the process, I forgot to move my game installation folder, and uninstalling Steam wound up nuking all of my installed games, except for Stardew Valley, which I was able to save. Very painful, but I try to tell myself that I needed to clean up my installed games anyway. If you're new to the series and playing on console, you probably won't notice anything wrong with the game, but I would still recommend using the fixes if you're on PC.
I've talked a lot about the mechanical and gameplay side of the game, but I really do need to emphasize if you're new to the franchise: the main draw of Metal Gear is that at its core, it's a magical realist military drama wrapped around a stealth game that is all too aware that it's a game. Almost from the very first game, the series has been extremely honest about the fact that a video game is a dialogue between the player, the machine the game is played on, and the developers of that game. Most games in the series use some element of the console hardware as part of the gameplay; for instance, the PlayStation 2 controller had pressure-sensitive buttons, which Kojima utilized to give buttons different functions (i.e. holding the ■ button down gently to bring up your weapon, and pressing it all the way to fire it.) Pressure sensitive buttons were something of a passing fad, and Sony did away with them for PlayStation 4, requiring the Master Collection ports to improvise. Your mileage may vary on which is better. In any case, if this kind of self-awareness isn't your thing, maybe play Splinter Cell instead or something.
I'm just a cat on the internet, but Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is in my estimation a perfect game. Yes, I know I complained about the Survival Viewer and stuff, but that's just small potatoes. Little things. Snake Eater embodies everything that's cool about Metal Gear, while taking the franchise in a new direction. The historical aspect alone makes it relatively unique; while the franchise has acknowledged how much it owes to James Bond movies, Snake Eater really leans into it, with a title sequence that 007 could be proud of. The deeper visibility-based stealth brings to mind the Thief series, another franchise that sits alongside Metal Gear as one of the greatest stealth series ever made. Its story manages to blend the serious (nuclear war! betrayal! what loyalty and patriotism really mean!) with the silly (the main villain has lightning powers! there's a guy who shoots bees at you! the hero is a food-oriented dumbass!) for an experience that is uniquely both extremely Japanese and yet universal.
Some games are made for me. Metal Gear Solid 3 is one of them. I don't know that it's my favorite Metal Gear game (that's probably Metal Gear Solid 1) but it's absolutely my favorite PlayStation 2 game and one of the best games ever made. If you like stealth games, story, or immersive sims, and you're not terribly hung up on ideas of "realism," maybe Metal Gear Solid 3 could be for you too.
Master Collection Vol. 1
(games can be purchased individually):
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