A Metal Gear Solid 2 HD Wish List September 19, 2011

In December, both Metal Gear Solid games that released on the PS2 as well as Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker, which was a Playstation Portable exclusive, will be bundled together and remastered for High Definition TVs in the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

The initial previews of the game have come back from the trade shows they have been demoed at. The previews have been partially negative, because Konami did not touch any of the graphics in the games, opting instead to increase resolution and performance. I think the people who have been previewing these games are idiots. Honestly, I don’t have a problem with that at all. I’m glad that they’re keeping the game’s aesthetic completely intact, and only updating what they have to in order for it to run on modern systems (and modern HDTVs).

However, there are some problems I do have with the versions of the games that Hideo Kojima has announced they are releasing in December, and that is if they release everything as intact as they said they will. Now, I have no problem with the fact that they’re releasing the versions they are of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, which is the Subsistance Version of the game, or of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, which should have the ability to exchange save files between the PS3 and PSP versions of the game. Those game versions are perfect, and I’m glad they’re including those versions.

No, I have a problem that they’re including the version of Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance which came to the United States, when there’s so much more they could have included with that version of the game, including things fans like me have been requesting for the past ten years.

I don’t know if a lot of people know this but Metal Gear Solid 2 released in November of 2001. That was two months after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. As someone who’s played the end sequence in the released version of the game, you can easily tell something is missing before the final Solidus fight. In what was probably intended to be a spectacular finale sequence, all you see is Arsenal Gear go under a bridge and then all of a sudden Raiden and Solidus are knocked on top of Federal Hall with rubble all around them. The first time I saw that sequence I asked myself, “What did I miss here? Did I hit the X button and something jumped?”

Ryan Payton confirmed (while he was still working for Kojima Team) in the official Kojima podcast that there were more scenes that were supposed to be in the game which they did not have time to redo before ship, so instead they just had to chop them out of the game. GameTrailers.com, when they did their retrospective on the game, mentioned some glaring omissions that we never got to see. The first was an all out attack on New York City by Arsenal Gear just before it crashed into Manhattan! It was obvious we saw the first part of this sequence when Arsenal Gear was cruising up the Hudson something terrible was about to happen. This attack would have caused the displacement of the Statue of Liberty, which has been done already in action movies. We’ve seen things like it happen in Batman Forever or Judge Dredd, heck, even Ghostbusters II. Finally the American Flags all over Wall Street were removed. Anyone who’s ever been to Wall Street (I have) knows that there are American Flags hanging from poles every ten feet across the building entrances. You can clearly see the flagpoles in the final version of the game, but no flags on any of them, including the one that should be on the pole on top of Federal Hall. The reason why Raiden raises up his sword after defeating Solidus was because he was chopping the flag down on top of the building, and this flag would have fallen to cover Solidus’s dead body. The action wasn’t to look cool, Raiden gave a final honor for the game’s former President of the United States.

After the end credits, a news report would have revealed the Statue of Liberty had been fully restored and was given a new home, Ellis Island. I smiled when I found out they would have restored the statue, and I think the fact that they put things right at the end gives them the creative liberty to restore all this in the game without fear of any lingering repercussion.

I liked this original ending so much when I wrote the story “That Day at Federal Hall”, which told the story of two normal people caught in the middle of that event, I included that nod to the deleted scene in the story’s coda. I can moderately understand why they would feel the need to cut all this content out at the time, but that was ten years ago. When Steven Spielberg refused to cut the Twin Towers out of A.I. for its DVD release, the insanity of censoring anything happening to New York in any fictional medium started to calm down. Watchmen depicted New York City exactly as it was in the original book, with it’s unaltered 1985 skyline, with no media repercussion.

Also, Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance did not ship with two important things that other countries got. It did not have a complete demo theatre feature that is in Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 3. Metal Gear Solid 2’s story is my favorite of the three games, and I wanted to be able to watch the cutscenes from start to finish with a tub of popcorn just like I could do with the other games (or even games like Metroid: Other M). From what I heard, the European Version and Japanese Version of the original game, since they released after the American Version, did ship with this feature, although I could have been misinformed about this. It would be nice to see it included in the American release of the HD collection, or at the very least have the demo theatre that was included with the US version of MGS2 Substance have all the game’s cutscenes included, instead of just the few that were.

My other desire is for a re-release of the Document of Metal Gear Solid 2 disc. This was a budget title released for the PS2 shortly before the Substance re-release of Metal Gear Solid 2, and included a very in depth DVD-style documentary about the making of the game and included a playable preview of the VR missions that shipped with Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance. This is a heavily sought after collector’s item I am not fortunate enough to own, as it shipped at an awkward time before I owned a PS2 and did not have the ability to get one. When Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance was released in Japan, the Document was included as a bonus disc, but the US never got a re-release of it. For a game that was $20US at launch new, prices on Ebay for it go for over $30, even for one that’s been badly scratched. This has been considered one of the best game documentary discs of all time. It would be nice to see this re-released, even if it’s the original PS2 version of the disc, I would leap at the chance to buy it if they released it again.

With the release of the HD Collection in November, Konami has the chance to bring back everything they were not politically allowed to do, and provide much requested fanservice to those who have wanted them to rectify these decisions for the past ten years. No mention has been made specifically about any of these features of the game, but they are three months from releasing it. If you’re going to do it, Konami, do it right, and give us a great reason to rebuy it.

Ed- Thank you to the Unknown Cameraperson for the correct nautical term for describing what a boat does on water.