Events begin credibly by Metal Gear standards, not kicking off with a secret island fortress or a giant robot in the Hudson, but a far-off muddy forest and a reasonable Cold War espionage premise. In a lengthy mission before the opening credits, Naked Snake is forced to watch as a US-made atomic bomb delivered by a defector detonates on Soviet soil, and the world is pushed to the brink of nuclear war. Protesting its innocence, the US is given permission from Moscow to dispatch Snake back into the Soviet Union to assassinate the defector, destroy a stolen superweapon and generally do the Kremlin’s cleanup work in a thoroughly deniable manner.
Later, in less plausible events, Snake will fight a ghost and a man made of bees. But before the opening credits signal the end of the Virtuous Mission and the beginning of Operation Snake Eater, everything about Metal Gear Solid 3 lives within boundaries of probability no more outlandish than the ones that have bracketed the activities of James Bond since the late 1950s. It’s been said all too often that MGS3: Snake Eater (later updated and repackaged as Subsistence) was Hideo Kojima’s own take on classic Bond movies, but did James Bond ever suffer so much and fail so often? Dropped from the edge of space, caught in a nuclear blast, stabbed, shot, double-crossed, tortured, partially blinded, double-crossed again, forced to kill his surrogate mother, and double-crossed again, Snake is forged into the bitter and betrayed soldier who will become the series’ antagonist.
