Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater

 

Baseball's on hold for the All-Star break and it's still 53 days until the start of the Georgia Bulldogs football season. Let's talk e-sports.

For most of the year, at least since February 7, I've been playing Assassin's Creed: Shadows. I kind of burned out on it, but kept going back for reasons I don't fully understand. But on June 27, I finally switched things up and started playing Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, a remake of the classic video game Metal Gear Solid 3.

I never played 3. I wasn't much of a gamer when it first came out in 2004, and I've never owned a PlayStation. However, I have played MGS 5 (2015) on PC but to be honest, I had no idea what the story was all about or who the characters were. I still had fun stealthing my way through Afghanistan and Angola in the game, but I haven't touched it since September 2019. While I was burning out on AC: Shadows, I thought about revisiting the game, and when I saw Delta on a Steam sale, I thought that would be a good way to reenter the MGS universe.

I'm not reviewing or critiquing the game here: this is a sports blog, not a review site. Suffice it to say that after my first playthrough, I immediately started a New Game + and finished my second playthrough last night.

My motives for restarting weren't purely enthusiasm, though. It took me a while to get the hang of the game the first time through, and I realize that I missed a lot of things on the first playthrough. My first playthrough took me 26 hours and 48 minutes as I kept getting killed by bosses over and over again before I figured out how to beat them (each one requires a different technique).

I played a second time to see what I missed on my first playthrough and to test some of my late-game lessons learned on early-game adversaries. I completed the second playthrough in 16:07, and it would have been even quicker if I hadn't spent so much time searching around for "collectible" frogs and ducks.

Hidden throughout the game are 64 toy frogs (Kerotans) and the same number of rubber ducks (GA-KOs). They're not easy to find, and I can easily imagine playing the whole game through and not even noticing they're there. If you found all 128 without referring to one of the many online guides, I'm pretty impressed. I only bagged 49 of each of the 64 after two complete playthroughs, even with access to online guides. 

Also, I wonder what the hell some of you were doing in those obscure nooks and crannies where they had hid the toys, or why, when you're racing down a runway on a motorcycle with the game's penultimate boss chasing you in a nuclear-powered death machine, while motorcycles guards are shooting at you and trying to run you off the road, you were scanning signs along the road in front of you through the scope of your sniper rifle for three-inch-tall toy frogs and rubber duckies. Who does that? On my second pass, even knowing exactly where they were based on the game guides and YouTube videos, I still couldn't hit them all as you have maybe two seconds to find them in your scope, aim, and fine as you're speeding past on a bumpy ride.

I ended up "killing" 156 NPCs on my first playthrough, but that's bad - it's a stealth game, and you're supposed to kill as few as possible. That number was reduced to 65 on my second pass, but that's still far from bragging levels.   

The game is a faithful remake of the Hideo Kojima original, and like any Kojima game (Metal Gear, Death Stranding) there's plenty of eccentricities and weirdness, like the toy frogs and rubber duckies, and long, long cut scenes. My total playing time based on the in-game statistics (42:55) doesn't match the total number of hours on my Steam statistics (65.9 hours) and I don't know why. Does the game not count the minutes in cut scenes as "play time" and if not, that implies a total of 23 minutes in cut scenes, which actually would be on the lower side of my guess.  

Whatever the exact number, I'm satisfied with my hours and don't feel a burning desire for a third playthrough. But rather that starting MGS 5 now like intended, I see that a PC remake of MGS 4 will be released on August 27, and it seems logical to wait for that and then to play 5 after completing 4. I probably still won't fully understand the story (I'm not sure I'll ever follow all the twists and turns of a Kojima game) but that seems like as good a plan as any.