Konami got the main thing right with Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2, but it could and should have offered so much more
Thursday’s PlayStation State of Play brought the announcement of Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2, and the headline news is undoubtedly the inclusion of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. There’s also the brilliant PSP game Peace Walker, a mainline entry in all but name, and then a surprising bonus: the excellent Metal Gear: Ghost Babel, a Game Boy Color game of all things, but one that goes for absolutely crazy money.
And… that’s your lot. Now I’m not going to start off with ingratitude: MGS4 is truly a big deal. For most of its life Metal Gear Solid was a Sony-exclusive series, and MGS4 was the culmination of this relationship: it was the flagship PlayStation 3 game, designed as a showcase for the hardware. Sony poured eye-watering amounts of money into it.
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Three games, though, two of them originally for handhelds? A huge chunk of Metal Gear Solid’s history is still missing. When Sony was launching the PlayStation Portable it once again turned to Kojima and Konami, fresh off MGS2’s colossal success, and said “please sirs, can we have some more?”
Five games would result from this, including the before-its-time Metal Gear Acid. A kind of genre-mashup deckbuilder where you guide Snake through environments with turn-based movement and stealth, before getting into card-based combat, Acid is stylish, constantly ingenious in how cards and action points can be used, and somehow manages to still have that stealth element to it.
It’s also gonzo Kojima: a presidential candidate’s jet is hijacked by a pair of marionettes and flown somewhere in Africa, a secret research weapon is involved, special forces go in and get slaughtered, and Snake is sent in to save the hostage and eventually the world.
The sequel is even better, overhauling the visual style into a spectacular cel shaded look and expanding everything the first game got right.
Both were designed and directed by Shinta Nojiri and produced by Kojima, and are regarded as “non-canonical”, though that seems to me like the least interesting conversation to have about them. They’re as much a part of Metal Gear’s legacy as any of the other spinoffs.
And that almost goes double for the PSP’s Portable Ops, which is a flawed game but incredibly important for where the mainline Metal Gear games would end up going. This is a full-on Metal Gear action experience on a handheld, but built around a squad mechanic where you take a team of four into missions and swap between them. You can capture and interrogate enemy soldiers, the first time Metal Gear began toying with the idea of building out a crew.
An expansion, Portable Ops+, was like a remix mode and director’s cut all-in-one, adding an “Infinity mission” mode that basically turns it into a never-ending roguelite.
All four of these PSP games were made by the golden era Metal Gear Solid team, all are referenced at points in the mainline games, and for neither Acid nor Portable Ops to feature in the Master Collection Vol. 2 feels like an oversight.
I suppose there’s a disclaimer necessary here: Konami could have held some titles back from the initial announcement for an easy PR win down the road. Or it may well be that there’s a Master Collection Vol. 3 planned, in which we’ll presumably see MGSV: TPP and Ground Zeroes, maybe Revengeance, and these PSP games. But none of those outside the PSP ones needs a remaster in the slightest. And in terms of when the handheld games were made, they’d make a lot more sense in Vol. 2.
Calling something “The Master Collection” is a bold move: it makes you think of master tapes and something definitive and final. Right now Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 2 looks light to me, even with the miracle of. MGS4. Am I being too hasty? If so, I hope Konami comes out and declares that it fully intends to collect every entry in the series, no matter how minor. A lifetime of playing Metal Gear has, at least, taught me how to wait for the right moment.
