Why beat around the bush?
Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol 1 is an interesting thing: basically, it’s Metal Gear Solid HD Collection (for a third time) with the added bonus of a couple additional games. Whilst five Metal Gear games for $100 AUD might sound like a good deal, it’s not.
Konami has done the bare minimum here, offering up a lazy bundle for far too much. There were far better — far more consumer-friendly — ways to make these titles available to fans who’ve likely purchased them before.
Master Collection bundles HD Collection‘s versions of Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater alongside an upscaled version of the original PlayStation’s Metal Gear Solid and some NES games you likely don’t care about — they literally don’t have the word “Solid” in their primary title, and I’d argue that means they shouldn’t have made the cut.
Stevivor reviewed TWO versions of Metal Gear Solid HD Collection in 2012, and while the non-Vita version stood out at the time, an additional eleven years has passed since then. With Xbox back compatibility with Xbox 360 remaining a thing, I could play Sons of Liberty and Snake Eater without the need to buy these games again, and the only difference would be playing in 60FPS rather than 30FPS; you don’t even get a 4K bump with this collection despite it being two console generations down the line.
Well, on that — I personally could just play in back compat because I already own the HD Collection digitally on Xbox 360. If you’re not in that camp — or on PS5 — you’re out of luck; it was removed from digital storefronts back in November 2021. Hence, the problem I have with this collection.
Metal Gear Solid is one of my favourite games of all time. Metal Gear Solid The Twin Snakes on GameCube is its definitive version; I thought that upon its release and I still do now. On GameCube, it shone… and as part of this release, it plays like a game that should have been offered to PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers as a PSone classic perk.
Literally nothing has changed — voice actors weren’t consulted to provide new voiceovers, so terms like “select button” are still spoken in Metal Gear Solid even though Konami has replaced on-screen text with “Touch Pad” on PS5. You’re in a 4:3 ratio that’s generously described as 1080p. Controls haven’t been updated, so changes in camera angles mean a little bit of brain confusion because we’re all modern gamers and this isn’t 1998.
On PS5, each game downloads as a separate install, and that means going through Konami’s legality acknowledgement process more times than I want. There’s also discrepancies between games in the collections — a changing confirmation button chief among them — that is just confusing and uncalled for.
Audio across the Solid titles is also… bad. Just, bad. There’s a ton of clipping all throughout and I’m at a loss as to why this was allowed to happen.
As an aside: if you thought that I was hard on Hideo Kojima in my Death Stranding review, I might just throw in this exerpt from my Metal Gear Solid HD Collection review to remind you I’m nothing but consistent.
“Nostalgia doesn’t put rose-coloured tints on some aspects; the ridiculously long, exposition-rich, mind numbingly slow and boring cutscenes you remember? Still there,” I wrote at the time. “Someone needs to slap Hideo Kojima across the face and explain that cutscenes do nothing for the Metal Gear Solid series.”
“Easily understood plot points are explained in great detail, as if you couldn’t possibly understand them; integral plot points are skipped over as if that act provides a sense of mystery and suspense,” I continued. “For those playing along at home, that’s backwards.”
It’s not all bad, though — these are legitimately amazing games if scrutinised individually, far removed from this bundle. I’ve spent countless hours within the Metal Gear Solid franchise and — apart from some overly long cutscenes — don’t reget a single minute of that time. There are neat touches, like the ability to load other Konami-published save games onto a virtual card (for reasons I won’t spoil) when playing Metal Gear Solid.
Even then though, that starts to get too complex; various region-based versions of the same game aren’t compatible with one another, so having them all at hand might be more tedious than helpful.
Here, the question isn’t whether or not Kojima’s works are good, it’s if Konami should have repackaged them. Again. I’d argue not. Or at least, I’d argue not in this fashion.
Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol 1 is unnecessary, and available from 24 October on Windows PC, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, PS4, PS5 and Switch.
Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol 1 was reviewed using a promotional code on PS5, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.
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