You're one of the ones who gets it! Yay! I know it's sometimes annoying when it starts getting in the way of action every three minutes, and Rose is absolutely unbearable... but listening to the whole story as it reaches surreal-politics-sci-fi-symbolism mode is just something any gamer has to do at least once in his/her life. It's so FULL of little details, and delivered with such excellence and audiovisual simplicity (but filled with very interesting and rich discursive content), it just kills you. I consider the ending is overkill, though. Still, one of the deepest stories ever made, there. Oh, and I also liked Raiden. There's like three of us who did, in the world, is there not?
Add me to the raiden liking list! I did play substance when it came out and his English voice was rather bad (up there with wakka!). His japanese voice was quite cool and as a person he was quite interesting imho. I think kojima was brave to put him in the game, considering that it is an "international" game. As for the story it takes you a couple of plays to take it all in, but I really liked the idea (without spoiling it for people) of what arsenal contained. Vague philosophy of kojima's is never that thrilling for me, but the sci-fi politics really worked for me. I am very interested to see what the very futuristic MGS4 has in store for us. Mega conspiracy here we come!
See, I liked MGS2 but had lots of problems with it. Primarily, Vamp and Fatman. Secondary, the gameplay is essentially more of the same (good thing) however, part of the story is that its a cheesy rip-off of MGS (The whole, re-creating the shadow moses incident). Fair enough you're doing the same stuff for a 3rd time, but no need to force it into the story. It didnt really work for me. Finally, as is with most people, I was annoyed at not getting to play as Snake enough. Sure, I enjoyed Raiden....but I missed Snake. I mean, I would have enjoyed some sort of A/B scenario style like Biohazard2, where you could play as "Pliskin" (Kudos on the movie references again, Kojima).
And to tie this whole conversation back in to the original subject... The entire Metal Gear Solid series of games was designed, coded, and produced in the same ammount of time it's taken for DNF to come out. MGS started development in '96, so did Duke Nukem Forever....
