2. Snake's Sorrow
And again we have a
Metal Gear Solid game on this list.
Snake Eater, or MGS 3, takes place in the mid-sixties and explores the formative years of the legendary Big Boss (at this point known as Naked Snake). Given that it takes place thirty years before the Solid game, it served as a breath of fresh air after the multi-threaded mess that was Metal Gear Solid 2's story, whilst still building up the series' complex lore. The game built up on the already strong stealth aspects of the previous instalments and added survival mechanics (like hungry and individual wounds to heal), but kept the emphasis on fun, tactical gameplay.
So, what's so disturbing about Metal Gear Solid 3? Snake Eater is one of the wackier MGS games, taking its established setting and plonking it straight down into the sixties - in a sort of Connery era
James Bond/
Rambo spoof. And it's for that reason why Snake Eater is my favourite game in the series - Hideo Kojima knew the franchise was bonkers, so clearly just decided to have fun with it: why not have a boss that's so old you could just wait a week until he died; or let Snake have a playable nightmare about vampires. It's like a
Naked Gun game that has you fight a giant mecha at the end. Still, it is a Metal Gear Solid game, so some of the weirdness is a bit too 'out there.' Though this
peculiar river sequence takes the biscuit.
The Sorrow is one of the game's bosses, and is a member of Snake Eater's equivalent to Foxhound. He continues the tradition of having a Psycho Mantis like opponent in every instalment (Vamp - MGS2, Screaming Mantis - MGS4), though his powers and abilities relate more to manipulating the spirit world than the real one. What sets him apart from his contemporaries is that the entire battle with him is essentially a mini-judgement day. He is punishing Snake for every murder that he - or more accurately, the player - has committed throughout the game. Depending on how many people you killed prior to this point, you could potentially be wading through a never-ending river of hundreds of ghosts. It's quite an interesting game mechanic; one that causes the player to reflect on the ridiculous kill counts that we rack up in games. The Sorrow also taunts Snake with a lot of foreshadowing towards the destructive chain of events he will become a part of (leading the birth of Les Enfants Terribles). You can't kill him either; in fact the only way to end the battle is to let him kill you - or kill yourself. That's right; a stealth game that berates you for killing then expects you to kill. Make up your mind Kojima.