Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater/YMMV

• Anvilicious: The Cold War, and any conflict that bases itself around the idea of an eternal, absolute enemy is utterly pointless.
  • Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: "There is no such thing as an enemy in absolute terms." The entire game is built around that message, and reminds you of it every chance it gets. Its relevance to The Boss' life is what gives it such a huge emotional weight.
• Awesome Music: See here.
• Best Boss Ever: Though the members of the Cobra Unit don't add much to the story (see Filler below), the actual boss fights more than make up for it. Probably the best of them is The End.
• Non Sequitur Scene: The Fury dies. Then he turns into a huge flaming skull which chases Snake around and explodes. This is never, ever explained or even mentioned again.
  • Also, Snake's Nightmare. It was supposed to be a preview of a game in development, Guy Savage. This game was never mentioned again, making it a real life example.
  • Though the Nightmare only partially qualifies in that Snake and Sigint DO talk about it if you call him immediately afterward, after said conversation it's never mentioned again.
• Complete Monster: Colonel Volgin. Unlike most other MGS arch-villains, he has no pretentious ideals or justification; he just wants to blow up everyone in his way. It makes it all the more fun to beat the crap out of him when the time comes.
• Ear Worm: "I'm stiiiiillll in a dreeaaammm, Snake Eater..."
• Even Better Sequel: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty showed a lot of potential that was only fully realized in this game. Even now, it's a fan-favorite.
• Filler: A criticism of the game is the fact that most of the Cobra fights add nothing to the plot and don't particularly tie into or expand upon any of the games themes.
• Fridge Horror: At the end of the game, Naked Snake and EVA slept together in a cabin. If the player looked through her medical history earlier, it will reveal that she has procitis, which causes a lot of terrifying implications of Snake possibly getting infected with procitis.
  • Certainly the more terrifying implication is that she was anally raped by Volgin.
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: In one of the videos for Secret Theatre, Para-Medic and Snake argue over whether Snake should kill and eat The Boss's horse, with The Boss becoming incensed enough to run off in a train fashion and presumably send some GRU soldiers to kill them in retribution. This funny video becomes a lot less funny when Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker has Big Boss being forced to shoot The Boss's horse to put it out of its misery after it ended up severely injured from attempting to scale and falling off the mountainous Nicaraguan/Costa Rican border in pursuit of Peace Walker.
• Game Breaker: The Photo Camo feature in the 3DS version, which generates in-game camouflages from photos taken with the 3DS' cameras, can make camouflages that make the Camo Index 100%, normally only available with the Stealth Camouflage item or the Moss Camo (obtained by holding up The End, and even then you get a 100% camo rating only in the area where you fight him, which has no enemies, and which you leave immediately after the battle).
  • The game gives you a silenced handgun almost almost right off the bat. The tranquilizer version is significantly harder to use this time around, due to the ridiculous size of it's silencer, but the M1911A1 is practically a buffed SOCOM, since the gun now takes up less of the screen, making it easier to use in first-person. Again, ridiculous accuracy, making it capable of across-the-map headshots, common ammo, and on top of that it's CQC compatible. Abusing it means you should never be in Alert mode. Almst lampshaded with Snake's infamous Description Porn when EVA first gives it to him.
• Good Bad Bugs: If you heal your crossbow wounds during the fight with The Fear but neglect to remove the bolts themselves, eventually your health will regenerate to full anyway. By that point, you will no longer be able to remove the bolts, and you spend the rest of the game running around as a human pincushion.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Boss was shown in flashback killing the Sorrow, and her reaction to doing the deed in it as well as her reflection on doing so strongly implied that it was something she did not like or want to do (the exact reasons for it are not revealed until Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker). The Boss's English voice actress was Lori Alan, who, as noted in the Hey, It's That Voice! entry, voiced Diane Simmons from Family Guy, who did end up murdering her lover (in Diane's case, James Woods), although in Diane's case it was for extremely petty reasons, and harbored no regrets to murdering him, for framing Tom Tucker, or for trying to kill Lois Griffin after deducing her murders before her death by Stewie. Double harsher with Peace Walker's revelation that she murdered The Sorrow because the Philosophers essentially forced her and The Sorrow to fight to the death while using their child's life as leverage in case they refused, and that Peace Walker was released a few months before "And Then There Were Fewer", the aforementioned episode of Diane's murder of James Woods.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the Japanese version, Naked Snake is Akio Ohtsuka, who is also the voice of Solid Snake naturally (as well as Solidus Snake), while Zero is voiced by Banjo Ginga, who previously voiced Solid Snake's nemesis, Liquid Snake. While Snake and Zero were friends, their relationship began to resembled that of Solid and Liquid's to say the least, as we find out in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
  • The Boss and Ocelot don't get along very much, which is hilarious because she is his mother, though neither of them are aware of this. It gets even more hilarious when you realize Big Boss considered her a mother, and her real son was gay for the adoptive one.
  • The radio conversation with Para-Medic where she speculates that attack dogs might be replaced with robotic duplicates becomes even more hysterical with the advent of {{en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigDog Big Dog}} a year later.
• I Knew It!: Why would a hero whose motto is "loyalty to the end" betray her country? She says it herself near the beginning: "I didn't." That she's a Fake Defector never really crosses Snake's mind, but just about everyone playing the game totally expected that to be the case. That it doesn't turn out okay for The Boss in the end... that's the real nasty twist.
• It Was His Sled: Naked Snake is Big Boss. In an interesting variation, knowing this twist beforehand isn't detrimental to the experience, as it makes the game's role as a prequel more explicit.
• Magnificent Bastard: Ocelot, obviously.
• Memetic Mutation: "You've created a time paradox! You can't go changing the future like that!"
  • Dubbing the Snake Eater theme song over sequences of game characters climbing really long ladders.
  • Young Ocelot spawned a few as well, such as "You're pretty good" and the cowboy handgesture.
    • "MROW!"
• Memetic Sex God: Despite EVA's plentiful (fake) breasts and Absolute Cleavage, this honour still goes to Big Boss. And by the look of things, his sons seem to have inherited every bit of his charm.
• Moral Event Horizon: Volgin crosses this right after he's introduced, launching a portable nuclear warhead at a rival research facility just to "give it a test drive." The whole time, Ocelot is clinging to his arm, begging him not to. When one of the greatest Magnificent Bastards in history disapproves of you betraying your countrymen like that, you know you've crossed the line big time.
• Narm Charm: In the ending, after Snake shoots The Boss, her scar proceeds to turn into an actual snake and crawl away. There is no way this scene should still be poignant. It is.
• Nightmare Fuel: The rather infamous cutscene where Volgin beats Snake to a pulp shortly after being captured.
  • The entire torture sequence qualifies. Heck, according to the Director's Commentary, they even had to remove a potential questionaire game in the torture sequence specifically because the torture itself was far too disturbing as it was, and adding it in would have increased it.
• Porting Disaster: Thankfully subverted with the Nintendo 3DS remake. The demo drew criticism for its muddy graphics and shoddy framerate, but Konami listened and changed it for the final product. The first review being an 8/10 from Edge Magazine seems like a good start as well.
• Recycled Script: The basic plot premise of the game, not to mention a love interest who abandons Snake in Alaska, is pretty much a rehash of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.
• Scrappy Mechanic: It can get a little irritating having to pause the game and flick through the various menus every time Snake is injured, particularly with bosses like Volgin who injure you almost every time they hit you. Ditto for the camouflage system, which is a pretty cool idea, it's just time-consuming to constantly readjust your uniform. This is probably why the camouflage system in MGS4 was changed to an automatic system and why health restoration went back to the old "eat ration, gain back life" mechanic. Supposedly Justified Trope by the game taking place during the freakin' Cold War, so advanced methods of camouflage and healing (the latter due to nanomachines) hadn't been invented yet.
  • Splitter, Tiger Stripe. Done. If you're good enough, you won't need anything else.
• So Cool Its Awesome: As the main page says, this game is widely considered by fans to be the best game in the franchise. With a franchise that has yet to have a game with a completely negative reception, that's saying quite a bit.
• Squick: Knocking out Eva near the ending will cause her to moan in her sleep (largely so that the player can't cheese the section by doing so, since she alerts enemies by doing this). Each of the three moans is "Mmm...Oh, (someone), that feels so good." The first is Snake, the second is The Boss, and the third is, um, "Fido." It is very hard not to think Horrible Thoughts about the latter after the previous two.^[1]
  • Just read her medical history, you learn she has Proctitis. And breast enhancements! Proctitis? Huh, wonder what that... OH GOD NO.
  • For those of you too scared to look it up, it's an inflammation of the rectum. Need I say more?
• Take That, Scrappy!: Not only is the Raiden expy portrayed as an absolutely terrible human being, the mission demands he be at very least beaten up and hidden in a locker in only his embarassing underwear.
• That One Level: Escorting a wounded EVA through the woods. She loses stamina fast and constantly has to eat to keep it up. Knocking her out or tranquing her doesn't help either because she moans in her sleep, alerting enemy soldiers who might be nearby. Good luck keeping your sanity (and your food) with this one!
  • Just leave a series of Claymore mines on the path behind you, and the soldiers will never get close enough to present a problem. Hell, the alert won't even go off if they can't actually see you when they explode.
• Tear Jerker: The game's ending.
• Uncanny Valley: The Cobra unit minus The Boss.
• Win Back the Crowd: Metal Gear Solid 2 had very much divided the fanbase as to its virtues, with many disliking the postmodernist plot and large amounts of backtracking (as well as Raiden). 3 has a much more straightfoward plot, minimal backtracking, you play as a guy who looks and sounds like Solid Snake and is revealed to be his father in an awesome twist ending, fleshing out the previously one-note character of Big Boss, and was duly greeted with cries that all was forgiven.

1. ↑ And it says a lot about Volgin that she'd rather remember her dog, too