Metal Gear/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alas, Poor Villain: Solidus Snake
    • Wolf and Mantis's death speeches reveal them to be thoroughly tragic.
    • Olga
    • Python.
    • Fortune. Helps that she also saves the heroes just before she dies.
    • Even Vamp's death is sad. What with him obviously being in horrible pain, begging Naomi to end his suffering and being happy at the fact of him finally dying.
    • The End and The Fury's deaths. The death of The Boss, despite the fact that she wasn't really evil, is very sad.
  • Broken Base: Some people debate as to what Raikov's actual fate was, as well as whether recruiting him is canon. Heck, there are even some who wonder if Raikov was actually related to Raiden due to their likeness.
  • Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch: One of the most common complaints about the series is that Hideo Kojima takes his world of carboard boxes, cyborg ninjas, and bisexual vampires "too seriously". This instantly marks them out as not having played any significant portion of any Metal Gear game, ever.
  • Complete Monster: Col. Volgin is a sadist (and possibly a rapist) who gets off on brutally torturing people in the most horrific ways (severely beating and electrocuting them), and has taken part in war crimes, not to mention that his sole motivation is to elevate the faction he supports to power, and setting off World War III.
    • Don't forget Hot Coldman from Peace Walker.
    • The Patriots A Is qualify beyond a doubt. See their entry in Video Games for more details.
    • General Wiseman
  • Crazy Awesome: A Badass soldier with a strange affection and reliance on cardboard boxes is this. MGS4 upped the ante with the drum barrel which had much of the same functionality plus it could be used to literally barrel over multiple enemies. Peace Walker seems to be taking the crazy awesomeness to even greater heights with a tank-shaped cardboard box (with a working gun turret!), an ambulence-shaped box (complete with siren) that can heal people dragged into it, and a "Love Box" that has room for two... no implications there at all.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: So much it has its own page.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Vamp, Volgin, Ocelot.
  • Die for Our Ship: Rosemary, Johnny
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Quite a few.
    • Gray Fox and Raiden in their Cyborg Ninja forms.
    • Psycho Mantis, for having one of the most ingenuous boss fights in the series.
    • Liquid Snake, who was such a beloved villain that he was brought Back from the Dead with a really bizarre plot device in Sons of Liberty.
    • The End.
    • Raikov, whose main reason for existing was to make fun of Raiden.
  • First Installment Wins: The original Metal Gear Solid easily has the most famous story and gameplay, followed by Metal Gear Solid 3. It's a weird case of third installment wins...twice.
  • Ho Yay: So much.
  • It Was His Sled: Solid Snake is Liquid's twin brother. The remake gave this away in its title.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Revolver Ocelot is widely considered to be one of the most magnificent bastards ever created. Also Big Boss, The Boss, Zero, Solidus and Liquid, B.B.
  • Memetic Mutation: Has its own page.
  • Memetic Badass: Solid Snake, natch. Big Boss to a slightly lesser extent.
  • Memetic Sex God: Everyone is gay for Big Boss! Also, Snake's Thong of Shielding.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Each one of the Patriots crosses it at one point or another, and that's just with the human founders. Going by the A Is, the A Is probably were already on the other side in a very short time, especially given the fact that not only were they the ones who masterminded the Manhattan Incident as well as the mess that was the War Economy, but the Head AI also implied to Raiden that they viewed humanity as nothing more than tools and weapons for them to discard once they no longer serve a use.
    • Vamp's pointlessly cruel murder of poor Emma Emmerich, Otacon's adorable little sister.
    • Major Zero. He had Paz attempt to get Big Boss to rejoin Cipher (the original name for the Patriots). Snake refused, so what did Zero do? He also ordered Paz that, should Big Boss refuse, she frame Big Boss and the Militaires Sans Frontieres by having her launch a nuke via a hijacked ZEKE at the East Coast, and then pinning them as an extremist cult.
  • Narm:

"The raven on my head thirsts for blood!"

"The raven on my head thirsts for blood!"

    • The series as a whole, really.
  • Never Live It Down:
    • Rosemary's...very memorable Codec conversation.
    • Major Zero's Codec calls about tea and James Bond. And Sigint's about the Metal Gear made out of feces.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page.
  • Periphery Demographic: It's rather odd that women like this series so much, considering it's basically a crazy action movie in video game form. Yes, even the strong male bonding is verbatim action movie.
    • Given the way the series relentlessly sexually objectifies male characters, it's amazing that so many heterosexual men are comfortable playing the game. For Pete's sake, Snake is wearing a corset.
  • Player Punch: E.E, The Boss, the list goes on.
  • Punch-Packing Pistol:
    • For every game in the series, as soon as you can find a silencer for the pistol, it instantaneously becomes your best weapon. This is especially true when the series introduces first-person view, because you can line up headshots so easilly. Combine this with the fact that every gun is wildly accurate, and you can easilly have situations where you line up a headshot from across the loaded map to where you can barely see the enemy textures, and it will work.
    • Metal Gear Solid 3 not only skips the step of making you find the Silencers which make the pistol so effective (though you can run out and need to restock them), but when you get it, Naked Snake goes on an extended monologue about how awesome the pistol is, and if you call Sigint later, he'll go even more in depth.
    • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots almost seems to lampshade this when they give you the Operator at the beggining of the game, which is already a good gun, (according to the in-game stats) but then you can acquire the similar except better Mk.45 (the SOCOM from the original) and the M1911A1 that Naked Snake used in the third game, each gun being better than the last.
  • Recycled Script: Several plot elements and set pieces used in Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2 reappear in Metal Gear Solid, with no comment from anybody. Metal Gear Solid 2 returns the favor and cribs off of Metal Gear Solid - but this time, the lead character is well aware of this and won't let the player forget as the storyline spirals inexorably towards its Mind Screw Gainax Ending. Part of this has to do with the low profile of the MSX2 games and the megahit status of MGS1 - Kojima later regretted making MGS1 a sequel rather than a remake.
  • The Scrappy:
    • Raiden, before his cybernization.
    • According to the Director's Commentary, the English localization tem apparently did not like EVA due to some parts of her behavior.
    • Rosemary.
  • So Bad It's Good: The serious dialogue.
  • So Cool Its Awesome: The wonderful mix of the complex story and the engaging gameplay.
  • Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: While a lot of video games are content to simply let players have fun and let them learn something from the experience if they so choose, this series hammers its players over the head with complex philosophy and hard-hitting truths about the way war works that even most novels shy away from. And it doesn't stop. The repetition may seem a bit like overkill, but it's exactly what makes each game's message so effective, because it will not let you forget. Check out the example page for more details.
    • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is an excellent example. It constantly drives the point that enemies are not enemies in absolute terms and that enemies today may be friends tomorrow and vice versa. The game's DEVASTATING ending makes this point all the more poignant.
  • Tear Jerker: The ending to MGS3. MGS4 as well, but to a lesser extent. There is probably no other game series that makes grown men cry so much.
  • Too Cool to Live: Gray Fox and The Boss.
  • Viewer Gender Confusion: Meta example. The teaser site before E3 09 showed this image, and many fans wondered who the hot chick in Raiden's armour was. Turns out it was Raiden.
  • Villain Sue: Ocelot. Aside from the slight complication of getting his hand sliced off by Yaeger in MGS1, absolutely everything in the many Xanatos Gambits he sets up goes perfectly to plan. By the time he eventually died at the hands of FOXDIE 2.0 in MGS4, he had achieved everything he set out to do, so he probably wouldn't have cared anyway.
    • The Boss, particularly in MGS4. In the preceding game, her politics are presented as something of a moral grey zone, with some good points and some bad. By MGS4, however, almost every character you meet takes the time to gush over what a wonderful, brilliant person she was, and one character evens states his belief that she was a messiah who was martyred before she could bring forth her vision of a perfect world. Possibly a deconstruction of Villain Sue with the fact that the Boss was actually dead for years by that point, not to mention she never actually betrayed her country, and more of an Alternative Character Interpretation.
  • The Woobie: Nine tenths of the major characters in the series. Where do we start?
  • That One Boss: Leone.
  • Wangst:
    • How Old Snake (and quite a few players) sees the predicaments (See Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped) of the Beauty and the Beast Corps. It's part of the reason why he doesn't really give a crap and why he's annoyed whenever Drebin comes in to explain their origins.
    • Fortune. Ocelot awesomely calls her out on it.
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