Awesome / Metal Gear Solid

• Topping the charts is Gray Fox's heroic moment at the end of the game, where he rescues Snake from REX. It becomes a Dying Moment of Awesome too, as Gray Fox ends up obliterating REX's radome at the end while suffering from mortal injuries.
  • It gets even better in the remake, as Gray Fox demonstrates just what his cyborg exoskeleton is capable of. Bear in mind, there are spoilers.
• Even though he's a villain, Psycho Mantis gets one of these in his boss battle when he reads your memory card and comments on the games. During the fight, he reads Snake's mind and cannot be hit unless the player actually unplugs the controller and moves it to another port. Or shoots a statue. In any case, yeah, Mantis has No Fourth Wall.
  • When Snake is finally able to overcome Psycho Mantis' mind control, we get this exchange:
    Psycho Mantis: I wasn't able to read the future...
    Solid Snake: A strong man doesn't need to read the future. He makes his own.
  • Twin Snakes builds on this prior to the boss fight. After demonstrating his tricks, Mantis breaks out something new — hallucinations. The portraits on the walls start laughing crazily, and Mantis seemingly unleashes a firestorm of pyrokinesis that immolates everything in the room, including Snake and Meryl. Snake looks around at the conflagration, then back at Mantis. Still on fire, he closes his eyes...and then, opening them, banishes the illusion from his mind. Everything snaps back to normal, and Mantis wordlessly flinches in shock as he realizes that Snake's mental strength rivals his own. The two stare each other down, and then Snake draws his gun as the fight begins.
• Just looking at a shortlist of what Snake does⁺ out-snipe a world class sniper, beat a tank in single combat, and take down a 100 foot tall Humongous Mecha for starters,⁺ withstand a Mind Rape from the world's most powerful psychic, fight a cyborg to a standstill with his bare hands, outshoot a world-class duelist, outfight a giant with a fighter jet's cannon strapped to his back, and survive a virus designed to target him specifically without even getting a sniffle for seconds you'd be hard pressed to think of which one is his crowning moment in this game.
  • Hell, Snake beating a tank with grenades is so badass, that in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots upon Snake's return to the area of the battle, if the player contacts Otacon via the Codec, Snake mentions this battle and Otacon asks how he won. Snake's nonchalant explanation ("I used grenades. Because I didn't have any armor piercing weapons.") immediately gives way to Otacon's utter astonishment, capped with him remarking that Snake is a total badass.
• A Real Life example - In 2010, the UK's Official PlayStation Magazine held a poll for the readers to vote for the best PlayStation game across all three home consoles since 1995 - Metal Gear Solid was second, with only Uncharted 2: Among Thieves coming above it.
• Real life example: When they were making the Twin Snakes remake for the Game Cube, David Hayter ponied up half a million dollars of his own money to get the entire original voice cast back. That...Is awesome.
• In the ending, how Liquid Snake finally dies.
  Liquid: "F-Fox..."
  Solid Snake: "...Die."
• The REX fight is epic for how immersive it is. Prior to fighting it the second time, you have to watch as Gray Fox dies, while Snake can't bear to shoot his Stinger missiles at the thing. After this is done, you just want to Kick. Some. Ass. And REX gives you a great target.
• The final escape in the jeep when Liquid chases you. After Otacon/Meryl yells hop in, you drive down the escape tunnel and what starts is the most adrenaline inducing music ever in the series and with the countdown going on and excitement that you know this the final part of the game, it isn't uncommon for players to shake from how intense the scene is.
• Liquid Snake winds up getting almost as many as his counterpart. Some characters are Made of Iron, but not even iron survives as much as he does. During the events of this game, Liquid survives the Hind D blowing up with him in it, crashing in the Hind, REX blowing up with him in it, falling forty feet down off of REX, getting filled with bullets during the Jeep chase, CRASHING the Jeep, and then when FOXDIE finally hits him, it takes him at least five minutes to finally die. His willpower is truly extreme.
  Liquid: Not yet Snake! It's not over yet!
  • Not only that, though, in the very first few minutes of the game, he successfully shoots down a pair of fighter jets during a blizzard - in a helicopter.
  • Of course, as far as awesome moments for Liquid go, the fact that he was masterminding things from behind the scenes as Miller and getting Snake to unwittingly activate REX for him the whole time. Magnificent Bastard indeed.
• Cyborg Ninja/Grey Fox's intro: he cuts, slashes, and bashes his way through a dozen soldiers, parries one guy's bullets he shoots from an assault rifle faster than he can see, and cleanly splits Snake's bullet forcing them to hit near Otacon's head and in the gap between his arm and body. No wonder Hal pisses himself.
• Let's talk some more about The Twin Snakes cutscenes. Whether or not they diverge too much with the spirit of the original game aside, they definitely lead to some awesome moments.
  • Snake gets held up by three Genome soldiers armed with FAMAS rifles. Slowly and calmly turning around with his hands up, he catches them off guard by deflecting one rifle, grabbing another and holding it safely off-line with his left hand, wrapping his leg around the third guy's gun to hold that safe too and finally drawing his SOCOM on the first guy. In other words, he reversed a 3-on-1 holdup with martial prowess and quick thinking. It's likely he would have then easily ordered them all to drop their guns if it weren't for Sniper Wolf stepping in and aiming her laser dead on his chest.
  • For bonus points, he then tanks a rifle butt to the temple, managing to stay up and conscious for a few beats before finally collapsing to the ground. And making sure to flash his assailant a Death Glare. Appropriately, this gets a brief Oh, Crap! reaction from the sentries.
• Snake's fist fight with Liquid. On harder difficulties, one kick from Liquid does the same damage as around three of Snake's punch-punch-kick combos. Liquid's higher damage output makes sense in that he is the superior clone. But despite this, Snake still kicks Liquid's ass.