Metal Gear Solid: Ranking The Series From Worst To Best

From Outer Heaven to Mother Base and back again.

By Scott Tailford /

It's all over. Finally, after a 28 year stint that's seen more intersecting and overlapping plotlines than the LOST writing room waste paper basket, creator Hideo Kojima has put out his last instalment in the legendary Metal Gear Solid on September 1st, 2015.

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The Phantom Pain has seen mostly positive reviews thanks to some of the finest gameplay the franchise has seen yet, but a number of behind-the-scenes issues sadly plague its retail state, stemming from a huge amount of corporate interference from Konami when it came to crunching deadlines in various ways to get the game on shelves.

Still, like the seams of a perfectly knitted garment, if you're not looking for them, you can't tell; and regardless, it's a far better tact to think back on the series as a whole now we can definitively say it's come to an end.

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Remember the first time you sleuthed your way through Shadow Moses on the PS1 ("A surveillance camera?!")? How about realising the Tanker section was only one tenth of the entire game for MGS 2, battling The End in an intense sniper battle Snake Eater, witnessing some of the finest fan-service of all time in MGS 4, or air-ballooning out all sorts of soldiers in both Peace Walker and Phantom Pain?

The legacy of Metal Gear will carry on as a bastion for artistic-minded creativity, and in the spirit of that, let's try to get a handle on a definitive listing of the games, from worst to best.

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Note: Spin-offs Metal Gear Acid, Ghost Babel, MGS Mobile etc. don't count - we're talking about the main entries in the canon. The ones that contribute to the mythology and have truly shaped the series.