Just a little retrospective I wrote.
It is super interesting to me that there was a time when you could have a giant twist like this: a hugely successful prior game setting the stage for Solid Snake being a main character, then the ‘rug pull’ of making the following sequel feature someone else.
As I’ve read elsewhere in some comments, this kind of twist couldn’t really work today, with the immediacy of social media covering every facet of everything.
From the typical action star Snake to the over-confident Raiden, the shift was a big one for Metal Gear Solid 2.
But good lord was that leap in graphics a giant one for just a few short years!
I just wrote up a little look back at how/why it was done, and since I’ve got a terrible cold/sore throat, it was an effort. If you’ve got some nostalgia for MGS2, you might enjoy this one. And my question to you here, is were you there for this? Playing the intro on the tanker as Snake, settling in to what you thought would be a Snake-filled game, then finding out Raiden was the focus? Was it a shock?
Anyway, as ever:
How the hell would it have connected to MGS and not just Metal Gear? 🤨
And Ground Zeroes was always planned as a separate game to MGS5. They were supposed to release at the same time, but 5’s development got delayed.
The ending shows that the whole game exists to explain a “plot hole” that literally nobody cared about (how Big Boss survived his “death” in Metal Gear). The scrapped final mission, Mission 51, would have come before that and finished Eli’s plotline, setting him on the path to becoming Liquid Snake by the time of Metal Gear Solid.
I’m going off of what people said around the time of Kojima’s exit, which is that Konami were unhappy with how long V was taking and forced Kojima to release Ground Zeroes as a standalone. It seems I misinterpreted what that meant!