Konami has been between a rock and a hard place from the moment it decided to jump back into Metal Gear Solid. Coming off a contentious split with series creator Hideo Kojima, its inevitable return to the stealth action franchise would never be embraced by everyone. Still, what fans have seen thus far has been commendable, even when considering some of the early stumbles.
All of its efforts, which include a comprehensive re-issue of older games and the all-but-confirmed (and long overdue) port of the least accessible game in the series, have been a respectful preservation of a beloved series. However, the company’s next big swing to keep Metal Gear relevant, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, seems a little pointless, mostly due to its decision to appease the series' most hardcore fans.
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is an Unreal Engine 5 remake of 2004’s Snake Eater. What the publisher has shown looks like a meaningful visual upgrade for the 20-year-old classic. The lush jungles of the Soviet Union have never looked better. And seeing Snake rendered with current-gen hardware for the first time is also a treat for fans who thought we might never see the iconic hero again.
But when previews for the remake finally hit the internet last month, however, there was disappointment regarding the scale of this remake. This wasn’t a ground-up remake of the original in the style of a Capcom Resident Evil remake. This was the original game, with design decisions influenced by the technical limitations of its time, left intact. Levels layouts, loading, cutscene direction, and voice acting have all been as is, just spruced up with better visuals and modern controls lifted from the forgotten 3DS version of the game.
To be fair to the team working on the game, this creative decision wasn’t made lightly. During a recent episode of Konami’s YouTube series Production Hotline, Delta’s lead producer Noriaki Okamura said that the team rigorously debated the scale of this remake.
“I do understand where they’re coming from,” Okamura said of players disappointed by Delta’s lack of innovation. “In the early stages of development, that was actually our most hotly debated issue.”
“But that's just how the game was designed,” he continued. “If we had done anything to change that overarching design, it would have changed the game entirely. And given what we were setting out to do, we questioned whether that really fit with the vision for this project. So we decided that we’d rather come down on the side of ‘too faithful.’”
I can certainly appreciate the reverence Okamura and the rest of the team have for Metal Gear Solid 3. But coming just a year after the original game was remastered and packaged with several other games in the series, it’s a little tough to understand the need for such a faithful remake. Is the ability to move while aiming and see further ahead of players enough to get people loading up a game once again? Are players so adverse to the original game’s graphics that a total conversion was needed?
If Delta includes a Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth-style meta-narrative that makes this remake worth playing, I’d be happy to eat my words. And according to Konami’s metrics, this line of thinking is in the minority among the press that previewed the upcoming game.
But I can’t help but feel like Konami missed a great opportunity to produce a more interesting take on a game that’s been around for two decades. Later entries like Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain have shown how much more engaging the core tenets of the series can be if designed around more modern hardware. And when there have been so many excellent remakes of other games from this era, there’s a certain “what could have been” quality to Delta.
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is still an intriguing remake for fans who want to revisit the series. It’s an even better onboarding point for players who’ve never played any of the Metal Gear games. But while I empathize with the team’s need to cater to fans who want to leave the source material alone, being “too faithful” to the original makes Delta less interesting. Especially when the original was made readily available on virtually all platforms just a year ago.
