For various reasons I'm replaying Metal Gear Ac!d 2 and here is my observation about the plot: Both are about elite child abuse rings but MGA1 feels Ep-pilled and MGS2 is QAnon as fuck

MGA1 is all presidential candidates and staffers on a hijacked plane while elites do child abuse cult rituals to create a possessed psychic god and all your faves are involved (particularly, the major horror of the plot is that Snake may have been involved in abusing kids)

MGA2 unfortunately fumbles it by making Snake work for a GOOD FBI guy who is trying to secretly and independently get the word out about the child abuse cult until DEEP STATE WEIRDOS hijack it and mean they all have to play nth-dimensional chess

(MGA2 even has "all your favs have been replaced with identical clones because the originals were killed by the government" as a twist)

What does this mean? Absolutely fucking nothing except for the fact that conspiracy theorists think about plotting along the same lines as hack video game writers trying to write political thrillers without being weird anoraks like Hideo Kojima who has Thoughts about materialism

I actually love the plot of the original Metal Gear Acid - a woozy gothic comic book identity tangle about abuse - and even knowing it only ended up as good as it did by accident, it's sad how much less ambitious MGA2 is in comparison (resorting to Just Putting Rei In It, etc)

Anyway the main game design flaw with MGA2, which is significantly the better game of the two (easily Shinta Nojiri's best game), is that the card combat is amazingly fun but the game is obviously set up to reward you for not engaging with enemies, e.g. blandly walking about

Movement is incredibly cumbersome in MGS2 and movement focused levels are always way less good than the combat stages. MGA2 does have a fun combat rush mode, but with only three levels and eight characters to fight, it's limited

I'm not sure how you'd solve this problem in a similar game because a major pleasure is sneaking up on enemies before killing them... you do need that element of tension there, where the enemies don't always know where you are. But the patrol route mode works badly.

Unlike Hideo Kojima who uses multiple codenames/monikers to highlight different aspects of the same character, Acid 2 has a character who uses the call sign "Aphrodite" who later turns out to be codenamed "Venus"

Remember when Metal Gear invented Google Cardboard

Oh come on

Metal Gear Acid had a heroine with booba but they didn't jiggle and she was otherwise a normal, entertaining character. Acid 2 has every girl with massive, massive permanently wobbling tits and an actual live action video of a woman masturbating as a bonus

I don't mind games having hot girls in them, my favourite Metal Gear heroine is EVA, but the grotesquely male gazey cock appeasement of MGA2 sullies it (especially because all the stuff you actually feel in MGA1 is about nonsexual adolescent girls)

(well, two of the "girls" in MGA1 are also boys at the same time, which is one of the great effects of a bad translation casually rendering everyone non-binary)

Again, your mission control in MGA2 is an FBI agent trying to bust an elite child trafficking ring, who then for fired before he could solve the case because of the influence of one of the elite child traffickers