To be fair…
It’s time to hate on the boss battles in Metal Gear Solid 2. The only thing I liked better about them was that there were fewer. They were still pretty dumb and unfun, though nothing quite as gimmicky as Psycho Mantis or as frustratingly hard to control as Sniper Wolf.
- Fatman: You have to knock him down before you can shoot him. How do you knock him down? By shooting him, of course! So shoot him, then shoot him more? Got it.
- *Fortune: She’s unhittable and has a ridiculous lightning gun (which the game mistakenly calls a railgun – hey, they’re both Quake weapons, who cares?), so hide until the elevator shows up, then run the fuck away.
- The Harrier: If you can handle the extr33m visual effect when it flies by, you’ve mastered the fight.
- Vamp (first battle): Don’t stand still or fall in the water. Shoot mans.
- Vamp (second battle): SNIPER BATTLE! Don’t shoot the girl or she’ll die. Which, I mean, she will anyhow. But I guess she dies in a bad way if you shoot her.
- Metal Gear RAY: Kill a robot that doesn’t move, doesn’t take very many hits, and has bad aim. Then do it again. And again. And againandagainandagainandagainandagain.
- *Solidus Snake: Hope you practiced the arbitrary ninja sword controls!
So, you see, not a whole lot better, though only the Metal Gear RAY battle is really awful. The boss battles still mostly seem like odd set pieces with strange, senseless rules. Fatman, for example, is wearing Invulnerable Mail, so you can’t hurt his body, and have to knock him down so you can shoot him in the head. Since, I guess, Raiden really sucks at aiming up. And then there’s the first Vamp fight, which features water that, unlike all the other water in the game, you can’t swim in and will kill you instantly. He can swim in it, though, for no particularly good reason. Oh, and your auto-aim feature doesn’t work in this fight, also for no particularly good reason.
Maybe what I’m getting at is that I’d like the boss battles more if they seemed like they were part of the same game I’d been playing.
