Rank the Metal Gear Games

[Forsaken Lover]

I'm ranking them overall but if you want to rank them from best to worst in specific areas, more power to you.

1. Metal Gear Solid - A person on an MGS board once summarized the reason MGS1 wa sso good is because it's MGS2+3. 2 tried a bit too hear to be intellectual while 3 tried too hard to be emotional. The result is that 2's plot comes off as preachy while 3's plot comes off as pretty weak. Metal Gear Solid meanwhile blended a lot of emotion with its pretty interesting story and you came away satisfied with both the characters and the plot. FOXHOUND is also easily the best boss squad in the series. Oh and don't forget t eh music. The MGS1 soundtrack is a masterpiece.
Metal Gear Solid Soundtrack: The Best Is Yet To Come - YouTube
Metal Gear Solid OST : Escape - YouTube
Metal Gear Solid Soundtrack: Mantis' Hymn - YouTube

2. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty - I love this game. I thought Raiden was a great protagonist and Solidus was a superb antagonist. MGS2 easily has my favorite story in the series. Its shortcomings are the Big Shell was a kind of boring area after a while, some characters and dialog kinda suck and are totally unnecessary and the huge swaths of cut content really are irritating.

3. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater - This game...it's by no means a bad game. I just have never understood why it makes so many cream their pants. I liked it but I did not love it is the best way i can think to sum up my feelings.

4. Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake - This game is awesome. The soundtrack is outright fantastic for that time and even today, the story is pretty neat and it just has a nice retro feel.

5. Metal Gear: It has some cool music too.

6. Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops - ....um...oh yeah! It has Calling to the Night!

7. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots - ...I hate this game. Let's just leave it at that.

[Del Murder]

1. MGS
2. MGS 3
3. MGS 4
4. MGS 2
5. MG

Never played MG2 for the NES but MG was too hard for me and I only played like 5 min of it. My favorite is the first MGS because it was really an epic game with a lot of great twists and was well written. At MGS 2 the series started going downhill in terms of convoluted plot, but MGS 3 saved it by going back in time and forgetting all that Raiden/Patriots crap. Plus I loved trapping and eating animals. It was so fun. MGS 4 was great and tried to tie things together but there was too much focus on combat and collecting guns.

[Pete for President]

Ranking from favorite to least favorite (please note I do like all these games, but some just have a downside);

1: MGS1. Smooth stealth action, amazing pacing, creepy and tense vibes, cool bosses, simple but very effective control scheme and game mechanics really made me feel like a professional infiltrator. It still is my third favorite game of all time. Such a blast.

2: MGS3. Again, awesome pacing. I really like how the setting changes after each few areas; there's so much variety, even in the jungle. Not to mention there's some pretty unique gameplay features not many games dare to set foot on, like being able to kill the End before the actual battle starts, or poisoning the Fear, scaring soldiers with the crocodile mask etc. On the downside: the cutscenes can be a little overboard, bosses like the Fear and the Pain are forgettable, I seriously dislike how they removed the 3rd person auto-aim which worked so well in the original MGS.

I also hold a grudge for this: there is a cutscene where Snake literally rips an Ocelot crew apart with all kinds of fancy moves. Very nifty, I thought. Let's see if I can do that with the actual gameplay. But no, that tit is impossible to pull off. The game doesn't fulfill the promise it made in the cutscene, and that is a shame. It makes me feel less like a professional infiltrator and more like a clumsy slowpoke. It's all about immersion, and those sort of cutscenes really take me out of the game.

3: MGS4. First time through I was blown away by this game, it does a lot of things right! Stealthy sneaky action in the midst of a battlefield? Ohyeah. Epic finale? Ohyeah. The return to (SPOILER)Shadow Moses? Ohyeah! But after playing through it last year I came across many flaws. The endless stream of enemy soldiers suddenly pouring out of annoyingly places spawn points, destroying the stealthy route you've been crawling towards for 15 minutes. The cutscenes are long. Very long. And I don't mind long cutscenes when there is a story to be told, but seriously, watching bosses scream and moan for 5 minutes is just plain boring. And then after multiple playthroughs the charm of the game went downhill; why can't I just walk to the end of act 3 if I already know where to go? Make a little easter egg out of it when you do? I never understood Naomi's motivation to double cross everyone. And my biggest issue of all: how the hell do all the good guys live? Raiden should've died while being crushed. Johnny and Meryl should have died fending off the FROGs. Snake should've killed himself. It's like this game had lost it's edge, it's guts to be radical, and therefor comes off as kinda anti-climatic. None of these things bothered me on first playthrough, but now they do. Bummer!

4: MGS2. I have a it mixed feelings about this one. I like it, the music is awesome, the ship is one of the greatest levels ever designed, I liked the freaky stuff going on at the end and even the ninja's and stuff felt like they belonged, even as surreal as the situation was. But I didn't like how they removed the 3rd person auto-aim. It was the beginning of the abandonment of the smooth high paced gameplay that made MGS1 great, and that is a shame.

Some lost potential:
I hated chasing those bombs around. I once read that the original plan was that Raiden would chase Rose around on the Big Shell, visiting each platform, but after not being able to find her and only having contact by codec, the player would start to doubt whether she was actually on the platform or if she exists at all. That would be much more canon with the whole AI theme, and would make for a much greater mindsmurf than just freeze some bombs here and there.

[Aulayna]

MGS1 > The others

The others just got far too intellectual, weird or just downright hard to suspend disbelief. MGS1 struck the perfect balance between all of those things.

Although I do love MGS2 because of



One of the best gaming intro credit things of all time.

[maybee]

MGS1 > The others

The others just got far too intellectual, weird or just downright hard to suspend disbelief. MGS1 struck the perfect balance between all of those things.

This. The future games just feel like they tried way too hard to make a masterpiece and they just feel like that wannabe cool kid at school that you know is trying way too hard to be hip. They are fun to play, but MGS1 is in a class of it's own.

[Zechs]

For me, I'd say:
MGS3
MGS4
MGS
MGS2

Not ranking Peace Walker, Portable Ops or Ac!d.

[Bolivar]

I think 3 is the best. I think it's the perfect game. I could go on forever as to why, but there's too many reasons and I'm sure everyone knows most of them.

Each of the other games I like for different reasons. OP made a great argument for MGS1. MGS4 was the tour de force and probably my favorite 0 Kill/0 Alert playthrough. And MGO was tight. But I do understand where Pete's coming from. MGS2? That game has a character all its own and I've always liked it a lot.

Peace Walker's probably my favorite handheld game I've played.

[I Took the Red Pill]

3
1
2
4

[sharkythesharkdogg]

3
1
2
4

[Raistlin]

I've only played the first three MGS games, but I would rank them:

MGS1
MGS3
MGS2

[edczxcvbnm]

I will probably be the only person to say this but

1) MGS2 - Thats right. I said it. I thought the actual gameplay and level design still stand as the best in the series. The story is a bit weird but I dig it. It is close between this and MGS but I feel the gameplay and level design wins out. On repeated playthroughs, it is so much fun to experiment. Plus in the Demo that came with Zone of the Enders, you could make guards die and seizure up due to blood loss! It was smurfing wicked evil...they removed this from the final game :/

2) MGS
3) MG2
4) MGS3
5) MG
6) MGS4

[Depression Moon]

Not going to bother to list them all, but I would like to note that MGS3 is one of the best games of all time. MGS2 is something awful, and most of 4's boss battles were lame and damn too many long ass cutscenes and that long ass install.