Video Game / Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

Due to the nature of being the chronological prequel to the Metal Gear series, Late Arrival Spoilers for all preceding and subsequent entries in franchises will be unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

"I give my life, not for honor, but for you..."

"As long as we have 'loyalty 'til the end,' there's no point in believing in anything, even in those we love. The only thing we can believe in, with absolute certainty... is the mission, Jack."

— The Boss

After the highly polarized reception that Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty received, series creator Hideo Kojima had his work cut out for him: make a Metal Gear game that would reunite the series' Broken Base. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, released in late 2004 for the PlayStation 2, did the job with flying colors.

The year is 1964, at the height of the Cold War. The United States of America have formulated a plan to covertly extract a Soviet defector, scientist Nikolai Stepanovich Sokolov, before he is forced to complete a nuclear superweapon for the USSR. To this end, a lone FOX operative codenamed "Naked Snake" is sent deep into enemy territory by the CIA to secure Sokolov and escort him across the Iron Curtain without leaving a trace.

The mission goes horribly wrong when Snake's lifelong mentor and maternal figure, the legendary soldier known as "The Boss", suddenly intervenes to abduct Sokolov and announce her defection to the Soviet Union. She escapes with the help of her personal "Cobra Unit" and their new commander, Colonel Yevgeny Borisovitch Volgin, who detonates an American nuclear warhead to cover their tracks and frame the USA for his own treasonous activities.

A tense backroom deal is struck between the USA and the Soviet Union in order to prove the former's innocence and stop the warmongering Volgin from staging a coup against the latter. Codenamed "Operation Snake Eater", Snake must infiltrate the Soviet jungle of Tselinoyarsk, eliminate Volgin and his rogue faction, destroy Sokolov's superweapon, and assassinate The Boss. But as the mission goes on, Snake learns there may be more to this operation - and The Boss's defection - than meets the eye...

In terms of gameplay and its mechanics, Metal Gear Solid 3 puts more emphasis on survival than previous games, as it requires the player to hunt, eat, and heal their wounds manually to survive. Kojima Productions swapped out the static indoor maps of the previous games with sprawling outdoor environments that require the player to make use of camouflage to stay hidden from enemy sentries. The player can also distract sentries with a variety of tools, from tranquilizer darts to pornographic magazines, in tried-and-true Metal Gear fashion.

With its far less convoluted story, fans viewed Metal Gear Solid 3 as a return to form. It featured another main character switcheroo, but this time, Kojima Productions eased the pain by replacing Solid Snake with the man he was cloned from, Naked Snake. Since it takes place in the defining years of the Cold War, the plot line embraces every spy movie trope in the book — which includes a James Bond-esque musical intro sequence. Toss in a truly bittersweet Twist Ending, four memorable main characters, an amazing sense of level progression, as well as a number of tense and memorable boss fights, and it doesn't take much effort to see why, twenty years after its release, many fans, gamers, and critics alike still think of Metal Gear Solid 3 as one of the best video games, if not the best, of all time.

Metal Gear Solid 3 also received an Updated Re-release a year later with Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence; this re-release featured a new third-person camera system, a brand-new online multiplayer component titled Metal Gear Online (shut down over a year after its release), ports of the two MSX2 games Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, hilarious animated shorts, and additional stages to the kid-friendly crossover minigame starring the monkeys from Ape Escape. The European release of Subsistence and limited editions included a third disc featuring a nearly four-hour movie version of the story strung together from cutscenes, radio conversations, and in-game footage.

While Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots shifted the focus back to Solid Snake, Metal Gear Solid 3 spawned a series of direct sequels starring Naked Snake in the forms of Portable Ops, Peace Walker, Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain.

Konami released an HD Edition of Metal Gear Solid 3 for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Play Station Vita as part of the Metal Gear Solid: HD Collection; it also released a port for the Nintendo 3DS titled Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D in February 2012. The HD Edition version was later released as part of the Master Collection on October 24, 2023 for Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

On October 17, 2016, Konami released a pachislot game of Metal Gear Solid 3.

In May 2023, Konami announced a full remake titled Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater^note Read as Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows. It is planned to retain the story and level design of the original game while being rebuilt and upgraded with Unreal Engine 5.

For tropes relating to its companion online component, please visit the Metal Gear Online page.

Warning: Spoilers relating to the game's Prolonged Prologue, the Virtuous Mission, will be unmarked below.

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"I'm still in a dream, Trope Eater:"

A-D

• 100% Completion: There are two special items for the completionist in you. The first is the Infinity Facepaint, only awarded to those who finish the game with a perfect score or capture a small invisible animal and keep it alive until you finish the game. The other is the Stealth Camo, only rewarded to those who go through the whole game without killing anyone or being spotted or to those who can find 64 tiny, really well-hidden green frogs (or Yoshi dolls in Snake Eater 3D) scattered around the game. There's also various camouflage uniforms that can only be unlocked by non-lethally defeating most of the bosses.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Snake escapes Groznyj Grad the first time, after being captured, by tricking the guard into opening his cell, sneaking to a manhole in the base, and running through a sewer leading to an Inevitable Waterfall where he is confronted by Ocelot and the Ocelot Unit.
• Ace Custom: The M1911A1 that EVA gives Snake when they meet up the first time is a model that has been extensively customized by an expert gunsmith. Snake even ignores EVA's obvious enticement to geek out over all the ways it has been fine-tuned and adapted from the stock model, saying that he has never before used a weapon as fine.
• Achievements in Ignorance: OK, so Snake collects various plants and animals, which he can call Para-Medic to identify. At the same time, he carries around night vision goggles and other various things which require battery power. When he collects a species of bio-luminescent mushrooms, he assumes that because they glow, that eating them will "recharge [his] batteries." This works even though Para-Medic specifically told him it was impossible. Snake's ignorance is just that good. Sigint theorizes that Snake may be imagining it somehow.
• Action-Based Mission:
  • Most of the boss fights, with the notable exception of The End (against whom a stealthy approach is more viable).
  • The rail shooter sequence towards the end of the game.
• Action Bomb:
  • Every one of the Cobras has a microbomb which detonates when they die, to prevent the enemy from searching and identifying their corpse. With the exception of The Boss and possibly The Sorrow.
  • This is played straight concerning The Boss in the Secret Theater film The Joy when she jumps off the bridge, detonates her microbomb, and screams, "The Joy!" after exploding in mid-air.
• Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene: There are several moments where the game segues into discussing character motivations and histories that add all the more drama when they end up locked in conflict with one another. The Boss' monologue to Snake just before their final confrontation, where she shows him her scar and tells him about parts of her history she has never told anyone before, is one of the more prominent examples of this.
• Action Girl:
  • The Boss goes all the way into Lady of War terrority thanks to how capable she in the battlefield.
  • EVA as she helps Snake during his mission.
• Action Prologue: You overpower the guards, get the captured scientist, and make it back to the extraction point where Snake gets betrayed, thrown of a bridge, and as he pulls himself out of a river, the enemies detonate a nuke some miles in the distance. And as the explosion fades, you get the extremely bond-like actual opening.
• Actor Allusion:
  • Para-Medic calls Snake "a regular Captain Nemo" after he states that his name is John Doe. Akio Ōtsuka, Snake's Japanese voice actor, had previously voiced Captain Nemo in the anime series, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water.
  • In the Japanese version of the game, the comical Non-Standard Game Over messages from Colonel Campbell (when he berates you for creating a Time Paradox via killing Ocelot, EVA or Sokolov) is an allusion to Takeshi Aono voicing Doc Emmett Brown in the Japanese dub of the Back to the Future movies.
• Adam and/or Eve: The game presents EVA and Major Ocelot as ADAM. There's a Snake, too. It gets much better in the epilogue of the game, when it is revealed that EVA was in fact a Chinese spy who ran into him in the forest. When Snake asks if she is the ADAM he's looking for and tells her that his code name is Snake, she goes with it and says her codename is EVA. This is precisely the code name of ADAM's partner, so Snake no longer questions her about not knowing the password.
• Affectionate Parody: Metal Gear Solid 3 features many affectionate nods towards the spy movies that inspired the series in the first place, as well as a few at rival near-future series like Splinter Cell; in particular, the use of cutting edge 1960s hardware seems a gentle nudge at modern games' obsession with futuristic gadgetry.
• After-Action Patch-Up: The game uses a Self-Surgery version of this to teach the player how to use the Cure screen. After being thrown off a bridge, Snake speaks to Para-Medic over his radio while lying in a quiet riverside meadow. It serves the same dramatic purposes in that it slows down the action and allows a little bit of flirtation, albeit from afar.
• Alien Abduction: Sigint remarks that Zero claimed he was abducted by aliens once as a reason for him to suspend disbelief in regards to Snake procuring the Spirit Camo.
• All There in the Manual:
  • The Pain's ability to control bees/wasps isn't explained in the game itself. However, bios from the official Metal Gear Solid 3 website and the Metal Gear Solid 4 Database state that it's because he carries a Queen in one of his hip pouches.
  • There was a leaked voice casting document that elaborated on some details on the main characters. It gave the real name of Major Zero (David Oh), and elaborated on a few things about some characters, such as mentioning that the American colleague of Granin was actually Otacon's father (which was later confirmed by Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker).
  • Although it is heavily implied in this very game, the Metal Gear Solid 4 Database is also the only place you'll find a direct confirmation that Ocelot is the son of The Boss and The Sorrow.
• All There in the Script: Major Zero's real name, David Oh, is never mentioned anywhere in the game, but was brought up in many supplemental materials and guides, including a casting sheet leaked prior to the game's release.
• Always Close: The final battle itself is under a ten-minute time limit and not finishing it by then will see you blown up by the incoming bombing run. However, regardless of how long it takes you, the subsequent conversation afterwards will play out even if you were cutting it close in the battle itself. The planes don't start their run until the following cutscene.
• American Kirby Is Hardcore: Two sets of promo character renders were made for the game: one for Japan, and one for America. The Japanese renders show Big Boss and The Boss standing unarmed, with Big Boss looking a little naive but also tough and sexy, and The Boss looking noble and idealistic but also muscular and strong. The American renders show them both scowling and in Ass Kicking Poses, brandishing knives. They are both dressed in less revealing clothes, and The Boss has her Navel-Deep Neckline done up.
• Anachronism Stew: Considering the games that came out after this one, which featured technology that's implausible even today, Metal Gear Solid 3 is surprisingly faithful to the level of technology available in the 1960s. Despite that, it does fudge the dates a bit. If the previous Metal Gear Solid games took place 20 Minutes into the Future then it could be said this one is twenty minutes into the future for the 1960s:
  • Colonel Volgin's absurd resources are said to have allowed him to develop quite a few things "early:" the passive IR goggles are lampshaded as being ridiculously high-tech for the setting, the Mi-24 first flew in 1969 (and Snake's reasoning for giving it the "Hind" callsign is based on its relation to another helicopter that wouldn't be adopted by the Soviets, much less become familiar to American forces, until 1967), and the WiG is from the early '70s.
  • The XM16E1 is about a year early to have been issued for evaluation in any significant number, though enough were delivered that it's still somewhat plausible, and they did nail the designation.
  • The Lockheed M-21 that delivers Snake for Operation Snake Eater first flew in December 1964; the first drone launch from one wouldn't occur until 1966.
  • One of the foods that Snake can eat to replenish his stamina is the CalorieMate, a food that would not hit Japanese shelves until 19 years later, and it would be another ten years after that before the chocolate flavor featured in the game was introduced. In the HD Edition, it's specifically the maple flavored CalorieMate, which only started being made in 2009.
  • The Sabra magazines that Snake can pick up weren't even published until about four decades after the events of the game. In Snake Eater 3D, the magazines in question are Hooters Japan magazines, which is even further removed from the period the game is set. The first Hooters franchise in Japan opened in 2010, nearly 50 years after Operation Snake Eater took place and even about six years after MGS3 itself first released.
  • The various Yoshi figures found throughout Snake Eater 3D. Para-Medic gives the Hand Wave that Yoshi must be getting popular in the Soviet Union. However, this is about thirty years before Yoshi was ever in a game.
  • A table in the Graniny Gorki lab has a magazine advertising Metal Gear Solid 3 itself on the cover. The HD Edition makes it worse, with more magazines also advertising Metal Gear Solid 4 and Peace Walker.
  • Zero mentions the use of gadgets in James Bond films. While Dr. No and From Russia with Love had been released by the date the game takes place, the only gadget Bond had ever had at that point was the briefcase in the second movie. Given that Goldfinger, which was the beginning of gadget use in Bond films, came out a few weeks after the end of the game, it's possible Zero saw a pre-release or something.
  • While the Skorpion machine pistol acquired late in the game fits for the time period, the Laser Sight mounted underneath it is way off base. Lasers themselves were only created in 1960, with ones capable of projecting a continuous, visible beam under normal room-temperature conditions only being created in 1970 and ones designed to mount under a gun as an aiming aid not being designed until the late '70s. The model on the in-game Skorpion is also way too small, closer in size to a 2000s-onward laser sight; the first lasers designed to attach to firearms were almost as big as the Skorpion itself is,◊ and needed way too much power to function for that kind of portability.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: The game jokes with this: If the player chooses MGS2 as his favourite of the franchise when starting a game, the player characters starts the game wearing the Raiden mask... which he soon discards after the first cutscene.
• And This Is for...: A villainous use of this. Just listen to Volgin's reason for beating up Snake in one of the game's biggest horrifying moments, as it was trying to avenge Raikov being hurt. If the player hasn't killed many soldiers, it is also implied that the Flame Troops at Krasnogorje are sent there to roast Snake alive because Volgin wanted to avenge The Pain, The Fear, and The End. Of course, if the player gets trigger happy, the Flame Troops themselves are instead implied to be doing this to avenge their comrades.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Following the introduction of changeable camouflage/outfits, this and subsequent games in the series have offered a variety of outfits for the player to change into. Most notably, Old Snake can dress as Altair from Assassin's Creed in Metal Gear Solid 4. It is also worth mentioning that the costumes and Octo-Camo disguises do have their uses: the Altair costume makes all rebels instantly trust you (rather than having to earn it) and you can use the Octo-Camo faces to fool guards.
• Angry Guard Dog: There are guard dogs around the Russian base that Snake can kill.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: When EVA is gravely wounded, this exchange between her and Snake takes place:
  Snake: EVA, I need you!
  EVA: (Beat) S-say that one more time.
  Snake: I need you! ...I can't fly the WIG by myself.
• Antagonist Title: The titular operation is derived from having to fight against The Boss and her Cobra Unit.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Anticipating that the sniper duel with The End was going to be very prolonged and difficult, they added a number of ways to make it easier and even outright bypass it:
    • Though it's tricky, since you need to know to visit an optional warehouse and grab an appropriate weapon before triggering a cutscene where he appears, you can snipe him immediately after that cutscene and actually kill him, preventing the fight altogether. Doing this, however, will lead to The End being replaced by the Ocelot Unit later on.
    • You can save during the fight, wait a week or adjust the clock, and resume to find that The End died of old age.
    • The End will never kill you, instead using non-lethal weaponry and simply carrying you back to a prison cell when you lose, which allows you to stock up and try again without losing progress.
    • Typing the Konami Code at the map screen will show you The End's current location on the map, which effectively renders him a Zero-Effort Boss.
  • Snake's inventory is completely cleaned out when he's captured at Grozny Grad, and even though he gets all of his gear back after he escapes, he'll lose any live animals he'd been keeping. If you lucked out and caught the very hard-to-find Tsuchinoko earlier, another live specimen will be sitting out in the open in the very next jungle area that allows you to scavenge for food.
  • Subsistence added an extra camera mode that gave you free control over the camera, in direct response to fan complaints that the original's sky-view locked camera, even with the ability to shift it further towards one direction, made it way too frustrating to keep track of where enemy soldiers were. Interestingly, the original camera was still kept as a toggle-able option, because it was genuinely more useful in a rare few areas, like climbing up the switchbacks of the Krasnogorje Mountainside area.
• Anti Poop-Socking:
  • Since saving is equated with going to sleep in this game, the game replenishes more health and stamina depending on how long a break the player takes between sessions. If the player goes too long without returning, however, food will start to spoil.
  • During the boss fight with The End a reversal occurs: The player is advised not to save, due to a "bad feeling". If you save and come back in less than a week, The End sneaks up on and captures Snake; if you leave the game off for more than a week, Snake finds that The End has died of old age.
  • An Easter Egg of this type occurs after Snake has been jailed and tortured. If you save, Para-Medic relates to Snake a passage from Dracula, to which Snake surprisingly reacts in fear. Reset the system and load up the file and rather than seeing the normal screen, you'll open on a Hack N' Slash game called "Guy Savage", where you eviscerate monsters with cane weapons. After a set amount of time, Snake wakes up and calls Para-Medic to berate her for her "Pillow Talk".
  • A chance to save thankfully appears between the twenty minute ending and equally long epilogue.
• An Arm and a Leg: Variation: While none of the characters actually lose a limb in this game, the player has the option of stabbing Major Ocelot in one of his limbs when he's knocked unconscious after their first meeting during the Virtuous Mission, thus forcing him to wear a bandage over the stab wound for the remainder of the game.
• Artifact Title: This game takes place before the implementation of the Metal Gear project, and it features the main protagonist, who isn't even named Solid Snake, trying to take down the Shagohod instead. Granted, the Shagohod fulfills the same purpose as a Metal Gear, but it's made clear in-universe that they're two different projects. This would ordinarily just be a Non-Indicative Name, but considering the next game in the series isn't even about stopping a nuclear threat...^note unless one counts Liquid Ocelot's plan to fire a nuclear warhead at a satellite to stop the Patriots in that game as being a nuclear threat. For what it's worth, however, this game introduces the originator of the Metal Gear concept: Granin, Sokolov's Unknown Rival.
• Artificial Brilliance:
  • The game takes this a step further by adding a camo system. If a guard sees rustling grass or some oddly colored spots in the environment, they will go to investigate.
  • If your stamina is low enough, your stomach will start growling and if an enemy is nearby, they will hear it and investigate, effectively screwing over the player if they are out of food because your accuracy and wound healing both depend on your stamina.
  • If you manage to outrun your pursuing soldiers during an Alert, and manage to hide in some room in a fortress, for example, they'll sweep each room thoroughly, starting by chucking a flashbang into the room, temporarily blinding and deafening you, then storming in, finding you, and proceeding to carve you up with bullets. If enemies have access to gun-emplacements, you can bet your life on it they'll use them against you. They'll also be able to smell your cigar if you happened to be smoking it, or the smell of your clothes if you happened to be wearing the Fly camo, or the sight and smell of your vomit if you happened to retch either from sickness or Easter Egg. And these are just regular Mooks. There's a special brand of Elite Mooks that appear only on special areas, that are specifically designed and programmed to patrol the area hunting for Snake while setting up positions for both spotting and ambushing him. This includes setting up a sniper from the rooftop of a building Snake just escaped from, while having about another half-dozen guys patrolling the surrounding area, each and everyone equipped with top-grade weapons, fast reflexes and efficient tactics.
• Artificial Stupidity: For all of their capabilities for worldly interactions and tactics in dealing with the player, however, the A.I. comes into one major problem that is inherent to the previous games as well: a literal cone-of-vision. So long as the player doesn't make a noticeable sound that can cause them to turn around, you can walk around them, to their sides, and practically be holding a lit torch behind their back rotating in place like a mad man and they won't suspect a thing. They also have a noticeable action delay, so if something pushes or hits them, they'll then take a moment to look in the affecting direction after the impact animation finishes; if the player happened to move just out of sight and didn't do a lethal action like a gunshot to them, they'll straight up be confused as to what happened and shrug it off. This is very exploitable.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • The Pain doesn't seem that sure if his pets are bees or hornets. The two species don't exactly get along. Unless the strangled cry of "my HORNETS!" refers to something else altogether.
  • There are plenty of made up plants and animals in the game. For example, there's no such thing as a Baltic Hornet (hornets can't make honey) and there is no golova fruit (although it's based off of a real fruit called a jackfruit).
• Artistic License – Chemistry: According to Sigint, The Fury's flamethrower uses UDMH-NTO^note unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide rocket fuel mixture instead of conventional incendiary liquids. While this is a real rocket fuel, using it in a flamethrower would be a terrible idea for several reasons. Burning it produces heat around 3000 degrees celsius (for comparison, napalm burns at roughly 1000 degrees and white phosphorus at 2500), which could easily injure or kill the user with radiated heat, especially in closed quarters. The high-energy combustion would toss anyone firing the flamethrower backwards. Even fumes from the fuel are highly toxic when inhaled.
• Artistic License – Economics: The Philosophers' Legacy consists of enough money to fight World War II five times over. The economic repercussions of putting this much money aside and then losing it would have been huge. These repercussions aren't even so much as acknowledged until Portable Ops and to a lesser extent Peace Walker.
• Artistic License - Firearms: The Boss shooting a fake death pill into Snake's leg. Random objects that happen to fit into a barrel do not make projectiles; no gunpowder, no fire.
• Artistic License – Geography: Good luck finding all those tropical animals in the former Soviet Union. The justification is that the animals were brought into the jungle from other regions by the scientists for research purposes.
• Artistic License – Medicine: Removing leeches by burning them off with a cigar is never a good idea, as it can make them regurgitate into the wound, leading to infection. Scraping them off is the recommended method. Made even worse when The Boss herself recommends it.
• Artistic License – Military: The Shagohod's pitch of being a stealthy, mobile nuclear missile launcher that significantly extends the range of the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal sidesteps the fact that by late 1964 both the Soviet Union and the United States already had access to a piece of technology that already fills that role: The nuclear submarine. The Soviets delivered the first submarine-launched nuclear missiles to their fleet in 1963, making the Shagohod with its massive logistical requirements and operational constraints seem outright obsolete in comparison.
• Artistic License – Physics: The Shagohod wouldn't quite be the doomsday weapon everyone makes it out to be. While obviously meant to fulfill the same role as Metal Gear REX in the original Metal Gear Solid, the Shagohod is grossly impractical for its intended purpose. It requires 3 miles of runway or other flat, straight terrain for its intended acceleration that has to be pointed in the right direction to fire the missile at the intended target. However, accelerating the tank to 300 mph before launching the missile wouldn't actually significantly affect the missile's range, especially not when being launched from ground level where air resistance is the highest. Launching the missile from a bomber in flight would actually be more effective than the Shagohod.
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign: Some Russian names seems out of place, but the Shagohod takes the cake. It's a quite uncommon term for any Humongous Mecha that moves by walking, but in-game it clearly doesn't walk. To a Russian speaker, its name is analogous to naming a car model "a boat".
• Attack Its Weak Point: The back of the Walking Behemoth Shagohod falls off when you attempt to destroy it by blowing up a bridge from underneath it and the only part left unarmored is the back of the cockpit, which was never to be exposed. Shooting the threads with the RPG-7 also helps considerably.
• Attack the Injury: Subverted at the very end of the game. Snake and Ocelot get into a hand to hand fight, and Ocelot takes advantage of an opening to give Snake a finger jab right in the eye. There's just one little problem: Snake lost that eye earlier in the game, so Ocelot's blow hits an eyepatch that has nothing behind it. Snake responds by giving Ocelot an amused smirk.
• Auto-Revive: Played with. Unlike in other games, food only increases your stamina to give you Gradual Regeneration rather than outright healing you.
• Award-Bait Song: Star Sailor's "Way to Fall," which makes up for the game's credits song.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • While the non-suppressible weapons have their uses when surrounded or during an alert, the M63 and RPG-7 will most likely only get used when infinite ammo is granted during the Shagohod chase because machine guns that eat through ammo^note and even make Snake scream like John J. Rambo! and rocket launchers that nuke small areas aren't exactly ideal for a stealth mission.
  • The Fear's camo (obtained from stamina-killing him) gives a huge boost in the camo index, at the cost of rapidly draining your stamina and the effect stops cold once your stamina is fully depleted.
  • At one point, if you call Sigint, he will talk about the possibility of a bipedal tank. He mentions that an American (Huey Emmerich, Otacon's father) wrote a proposal on such an idea. Much to the hilarity of the player, Sigint considers this idea ridiculous and impractical, stating that the entire idea of a tank needing to walk is pointless, because tanks have treads. This seems to be an inside joke over the impracticality of the series' eponymous mechs. Ironically, MGS4 reveals that Sigint is Donald Anderson, the man who helped fund Metal Gear REX in the original Metal Gear Solid.
  • According to Sigint, wielding a flamethrower in combat is this, as while a very effective anti-infantry weapon (especially in entrenched or enclosed areas), their fuel tank is left exposed to gunfire, and also because whenever a flametrooper gets caught they are almost always put to death. Sigint notes that either Volgin wants Snake to suffer by sending these guys, or, should Snake accrue enough body count, went on their own volition for the same reason as Volgin's.
• Back Stab: From this game onwards, it's difficult to perform the CQC Grab (and follow up with a chokehold or throat slit) unless you approach your target from behind.
• Bad Boss:
  • Colonel Volgin dismisses his own subordinates, and is implied to kill off those he feels have no more use for him (such as the scientists and engineers after the Shagohod was completed), plus running over his own men and destroying his own base simply because they were in his way when piloting the Shagohod.
  • Going by statements EVA makes about Raikov after disguising as him, plus the personnel's reaction to Snake disguised as Raikov - including his ability to beat up those personnel and get away with it - Raikov is cut from the same cloth as Volgin.
• The Bad Guy Wins: A subtle variation: The Stinger reveals that, despite Volgin's defeat and the destruction of the Shagohod, his plans to overthrow Khrushchev ultimately succeeded, albeit in a pyrrhic fashion.
• Badass Bandolier:
  • After Ocelot takes up Snake's advice and switches to the Single Action Army revolver, he starts wearing an ammo belt around his shoulder.
  • Volgin wears a long machine gun ammo belt over his shoulder and around his waist once he's ditched the overcoat. This might seem like a bad idea, given his Psycho Electro powers, but he is wearing a rubberized suit, and only emits his lightning from his hands. Though this does come back to bite him in the ass at the end of the final battle, when he's struck by lightning, setting off the ammo belt.
  • And of course, Snake himself.
• Badass Boast:
  • Played with. During their second encounter, Snake lectures Ocelot about his poor choice of weaponry, ending it by boldly proclaiming that the latter doesn't have what it takes to kill him. It looks like it's just Snake pointing out Ocelot's relative lack of combat skill... until Ocelot pulls the trigger and realizes his revolver is empty.
  • Each member of the Cobra Unit makes one before their battles. Most, like The Pain and The Fear, simply detail how they're going to kill Snake, but The End and The Fury expound on their backstories while doing so, and The Sorrow has a more personal message for Snake.
• Badass Normal: Snake and his mentor, The Boss. Most of the latter's subordinates have bizarre, often horrifying superpowers, but her only skills are the ability to shoot an assault rifle-caliber machine pistol one-handed and enough martial arts prowess to dismantle a gun in two quick moves. Volgin, the Psycho Electro, shows his only truly vulnerable moment when he mentions he doubts her loyalty, and backpedals immediately when she turns to face him with an angry glare. And, of course, Snake earns himself the title of "Big Boss" by defeating The Boss and every one of her subordinates despite having no superpowers at all, just good aim and a lot of tenacity. The game also highlights Ocelot's progression towards becoming a badass himself (Improbable Aiming Skills aside), courtesy of Snake's inexplicable compulsion to mentor him.
• Bag of Holding: While not described directly as such, Snake's (rather smallish) backpack is this in practice. The amount of items he carries "at the ready" count their weight when determining the drain on his stamina due to encumbrance. However, anything stored in the backpack is not counted for determining encumbrance, and there is no limit to how much can be stored in the backpack at once. His support team even tell him to put things he does not have an immediate need for into his backpack to save on weight.
• Bag of Spilling: The game makes a point of singling out how important this trope is. Since it's set during the Cold War, finding evidence of American soldiers tramping around on Russian soil could trigger World War III.
• The Battle Didn't Count: Near the end of the game, you rig a warehouse holding an experimental supertank to explode and have a duel with the Big Bad. He falls, the place goes boom, and as our heroes escape the Big Bad drives out in the tank, meaning that neither planting the bombs nor the battle mattered; not helped by the presence of two more battles against the duo later.
• Battle in the Rain: The final battle with Volgin is overshadowed by an approaching storm. Ironically, the Psycho Electro Volgin is zapped by a stray bolt of lightning, immolating him. The reappearance of a spectral character, The Sorrow, implies that he was responsible for the meteorological intervention.
• Battle Theme Music: There's a unique theme for each of the Cobras (with the exception of The End, where only ambient noises are played), as well as Ocelot and Volgin. During the final battle against The Boss, an extended version of the intro theme, "Snake Eater", is played when the time limit is running out.
• Bee-Bee Gun: The Pain can control hornets. Sure, some of the things he does with the bees are a little silly, but the basic power itself has horrifying potential. Just imagine how much being stung to death by a thousand bees would hurt.
• Been There, Shaped History:
  • Granin claims that his Granin Design Bureau and the designs that came out of it were the reason why the Nazis lost World War II. In particular, he claims to be responsible for the R-17 Elbrus missile.
  • Similar claims are made about The Boss and her Cobra unit's role in winning the war. The Boss also implies that she was involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion, and is still bitter over President Kennedy denying further air support that could have made the invasion a success.
• Big Bad: Colonel Volgin, a psychotic, rogue Russian colonel with plans to heat up the Cold War. Not only that, everything that happens in every other Metal Gear title stems from his actions in this game.
• Big Boo's Haunt: At one point near the game's climax, the dead quite literally come back to haunt you. In a downright creepy non-battle with The Sorrow, Naked Snake must wade upstream in an eerie, fog-shrouded river, where he is accosted by the ghosts of all soldiers he's killed in the game. If the player has avoided lethal methods to this point, this encounter will be nearly deserted. Not only that, but the manner in which you killed each soldier affects how they appear and what some may scream. Cutting a throat will render that person's head hanging by a thread from their neck when you encounter them on that river. It even gets to the point that, if you kill a soldier up in the mountains, let a vulture pick at his corpse, and then kill and eat that vulture, that soldier will appear there with it, and cry out "You ate me!"
• Bittersweet Ending: Although Snake succeeds in defeating Volgin and destroying the Shagohod, he was forced to kill his beloved mentor. After spending a night together with EVA, she leaves. The next morning, Snake listens to a recording she left behind. It reveals EVA's true colors and the true nature of her mission. Later, he's awarded and praised for killing The Boss and even given her title, but is practically dead on the inside for going through with it. Armed with the fact that he now knows the truth of why he had to kill her, and that she will go down in history as a traitorous scumbag, the game ends with his salute at her unmarked grave while Big Boss sheds a Single Tear.
• Bizarre and Improbable Ballistics: In a case of Shown Their Work gone awry, The Boss' Patriot assault rifle is shown firing bullets that tumble end-over-end as they travel through the air, which would also make any sort of accuracy impossible and drastically limit their muzzle velocity. Kojima gets partial credit for this, since it's based on a real fact that seems to have been misunderstood: the type of bullet this gun fires really can exhibit this behavior in real life (and all bullets can tumble like that once they travel past their effective range), but only after it's hit something, not as it leaves the barrel.^note It's more or less true that cutting a rifle barrel down to pistol length like The Boss did will seriously affect the bullets' stability in-flight, but they also wouldn't be able to travel in a straight line or have much penetrative power, unlike what we see in the game.
• Blackout Basement: The cave you fall into after your duel with Ocelot. There are four ways to illuminate your surroundings. Two of them (a torch and a set of Night-Vision Goggles) are old standards for this trope. The third is Snake's cigar, which won't provide nearly as much light as the torch, but will help a little. The fourth way is a classic example of the attention to detail that Hideo Kojima is known for: just wait a couple minutes and the area will gradually grow brighter, to represent Snake's eyes adjusting to the darkness.
• Bleak Level: The setting of the fourth Cobra battle, namely against "The Sorrow". Snake is forced to wade through a waist-high mangrove swamp during downpour, while the boss and the ghosts of every person the player has killed thus far tries to kill Snake. Considering everything goes from campy/realistic to gritty/grim in a few scenes, creepy is an understatement.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: Subverted. Ocelot gets an engraved revolver and Naked Snake mocks him for this, pointing out that the engraving serves no tactical advantage whatsoever. Ocelot later gets a regular revolver. Nicely contrasted with a gun that EVA gave Snake that actually had been modified for tactical purposes (a better line-sight, altered grip to make it easier to switch from knife to gun, etc.)
• Blown Across the Room: The shotgun will do this to anyone close up. This includes The Boss.
• Bolt of Divine Retribution: Colonel Volgin, who has electrical powers, tends to chant "Kuwabara, kuwabara"^note Japanese folklore states that kuwabara, or mulberry, can ward off lightning in the presence of storm clouds, presumably just to be on the safe side. During his final boss fight, in the presence of another nearby storm, Volgin angrily sneers at it, foregoing his chant, and promptly meets his end when a freak lightning strike fries him.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Volgin does this twice in the game, both times when talking about the Philosophers' Legacy. Given the game is an Affectionate Parody of Bond and '60s spy films, it's likely intentional.
• Bonus Feature Failure: Some of the unlockable bonus camouflage wouldn't be worth picking up for free, let alone actually going to the effort to obtain:
  • Both The Pain and The Fury's camouflage. The former's makes bees follow you harmlessly and attack guards instead, while the latter reduces explosion damage and grants immunity to catching flame. The problem isn't that neither of these abilities are so esoteric you'll never bother to use them, but that they tend to give poor camouflage indexes, often in the negative values, which will greatly hinder you. Ironically, The Fury's camo is actually quite useful against The Fury himself, but that means you'll still have to beat him once without it and carry it over into a New Game Plus.
  • The Nine National Facepaints, rewarded to the player for getting all 27 ranks in Snake Eater 3D. Not only do they all grant poor camouflage indexes, but they grant absolutely no abilities whatsoever. Compared to the much easier to acquire green and brown facepaints that grant unlimited grip or oxygen, respectively, such a difficult to acquire prize being only a Cosmetic Award is a fantastic fail.
• Book Ends: In the beginning of the game, Snake loses his backpack by it snagging onto the tree. During the last few moments of the game, his backpack is thrown out of the WIG by Ocelot.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Per series tradition, the suppressed tranquilizer gun. In this case, the Mk. 22 "Hush Puppy". Quiet, takes out guards, allows you to capture animals (which means not only will it prevent them from rotting, but you can then throw live snakes at enemies, with venomous snakes even being able kill enemies for you via their venom killing them after biting them when you throw it at them, and this method does not add to your kill count at your total number of human kills due to it being an indirect kill similar to shooting explosive barrels to kill foes which has the same effect, making it a viable tactic when aiming for a "no kills/total stealth" run), is one of the game's few silent weapons, and stamina kills are tremendously important.
  • The old punch, punch, kick melee combo can sometimes end up being far more useful than CQC, particularly against bosses, who seem to be immune to CQC.
  • Sigint designed a knife with a hollowed out grip used to store accessories. Snake points out that this means the knife will break much easier. Instead Snake uses a sturdier, more reliable survival knife.
  • The Crocodile Cap. While it seems entirely useless at first glance, it's surprisingly helpful in a number of ways if used correctly. The most notable instance is when Snake has to venture past a straight one-way route through the Ponizovje mangrove swamp that's patrolled by enemy soldiers on flying platforms, if Snake dons the Croc Cap and stays underwater whilst wearing said cap, the soldiers on the aerial platforms will just think Snake is a crocodile swimming in the water and not be alerted, turning an otherwise-annoying section into a cakewalk. Just don't wear it nearby actual crocodiles though, as they won't take it too well.
• Boss-Altering Consequence:
  • The player can assassinate The End at the earliest opportunity by sniping him at the Ponizovje Docks. Another way you can deal with him is by saving and quitting the game during his boss fight and loading it back up a week later to find that he passed away of old age.
  • In the fight against the Sorrow, he causes the spirits of all the soldiers you killed to appear before you and attack you. Of course, if you never kill any soldiers, then the only spirits that appear are the previous bosses, who die regardless of what you do.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy:
  • The Pain can command an army of hornets to swarm and overwhelm his enemies. However, the insects obviously can't swim, meaning any potential victim can easily escape his attacks by diving underwater. So where, of all places, does he decide to fight Snake? In a cave full of water.
  • The Fury's weapon is a flamethrower, but he decides to fight Snake in an underground tunnel filled with water pipes that can be shot at to put out the flames.
• Boss Corridor: The Pain and The Fury both get one. The former hangs out in an underground spring, while the latter patrols the catacombs beneath Grozny Grad.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: If you trigger an alert at the cliff near Groznyj Grad (by sniping the patrols in the base), helicopters will be sent after you. Unlike the earlier ones, these have powerful attacks and it's nearly impossible to hit them with rockets. Fortunately, these helicopters don't have to, and most likely won't be encountered. And they only spawn in areas where Snake can man a gun turret.
• Bottomless Magazines:
  • Zigzagged. Enemies do need to change magazines in battle. They won't run out of extra mags, though, unless you blow up their ammo dumps. Then they only have one mag for their assault rifle, one for their handguns, and then they need to rush you with their combat knives or go home. This is also subverted with the mounted turret guns, unusually.
  • The game plays this straight but still lampshades it with the Patriot, a gun you obtain after beating the game once. When you call up your tech specialist over the radio, he asks how it never runs out of ammo or needs to be reloaded. Snake's answer: "Because the internal feed mechanism is shaped like an infinity symbol." It apparently explains the whole thing adequately.
  • The on-rails action against the Shagohod, where you do get unlimited ammo of whatever weapons you had at the moment. The explanation is that the sidecar of the motorcycle that you're riding in has lots of ammunition in it.
  • Taken to the extreme with the unlockable Infinity face paint, which, as its name suggests, gives Snake infinite ammo for as long as he has it applied. One camo pattern for his uniform unlocked by beating the game once does the same for his battery-powered items.
• Bowdlerise: The game went through some changes in the European and and Australian releases. You can see a full list of censorings/edits here, but to name a few examples:
  • Volgin's electricity color was changed to white.
  • During the scene where Volgin realizes Big Boss was disguised as Raikov and proceeds to beat him up horribly, the electric surges are gone.
  • During the torture scene, Big Boss does not twitch as much after each electric shock, and his skeleton is not shown as much.
  • The explosion of the base holding the Shagohod is less intense.
• Break the Cutie: Snake starts the game as a rather good-hearted rookie soldier with many dorky personality quirks. The events of Operation Snake Eater are just the start of his breaking into the bitter, angry shell of a man who would eventually become Big Boss. First, the amount of physical trauma the man is put through is absurd: During the ill-fated Virtuous Mission, he has his arm broken, a shattered rib and multiple lacerations from losing his first fight with The Boss and being thrown from a bridge into a river. Given not even a week of recovery time where his medical officer suggests he should be back in intensive care rather than out on another mission. He is then shot through the thigh with a crossbow bolt, poisoned with the venom of one of the deadliest spiders on earth, beaten to within an inch of his life, subjected to 10 million volts of electroshock torture which is so painful that he pisses himself from the agony, and then he has his right eye shot out. This is just counting canon injuries, and any lesser man would be a physical and psychological wreck by the end of it, but what really breaks him is having to murder his mentor and mother figure, who in actuality never betrayed her country to begin with, just so the government could save face. This completely shatters Snake's faith in his country and renders him emotionally dead.
• Butterfly of Doom: Used for a joke; there's a point in the game where you can kill the young version of Ocelot. Doing so ends the game instantly, with the game telling you that you created a time paradox. If you do this in the HD Edition, you also get an achievement/trophy stating that all the problems in the series are solved, thus it's over. You still get a Game Over though.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": There is no such fruit as a golova. However, it is based off of a real fruit called a jackfruit.
• Call-Forward: See this game's dedicated page for more information.
• Camp: The Metal Gear franchise was already very campy to begin with, but this game goes beyond. While it is an Affectionate Parody of old Spy Fiction, it still fully embraces many of its conventions, and then adds its own brand of Metal Gear madness like over-the-top action and characters, ridiculous Boss Battles and several amounts of Mind Screw.
• Canon Character All Along: Naked Snake initially seems like an Expy of Solid Snake. But then at the end of the game, he is awarded the title of "Big Boss", meaning that he is the man Solid Snake was cloned from as well as the Big Bad of previous installments of the franchise.
• Car Fu: EVA's counterattack toward Ocelot after she got free of the hostage situation in Rassvet should count. It starts with a stare down, then she rams Ocelot and ramps up his torso, not only hitting him hard in the face, but also hitting with a Groin Attack with the back wheel (put simply, the whole maneuver is something like a somersault kick to the face combined with a crotch kick — with a motorcycle).
• Cast from Calories: The Fear makes use of a prototype stealth camo during his fight with Snake. However, it's powered by his bioelectricity and drains his stamina very quickly. To compensate, he has to eat near constantly when using his stealth camo. It even makes him so hungry that he will happily scarf down food without checking to see if it's rotten or poisoned first.
• Casting Gag:
  • Volgin shares some traits with Raoh, including having unusual powers and being military dictators. Both Volgin and Raoh were voiced by Kenji Utsumi. Also, this wasn't the only time Utsumi played a tyrannical leader of an army with the words "Red" and "Army" in it.
  • Two of the Cobras, The Pain and The Fear, are voiced by Gregg Berger and Michael Bell, respectively. They previously voiced many characters on G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, whose main antagonists were a terrorist group called Cobra. While Colonel Volgin isn't a member of the Cobras, he's also voiced by another G.I. Joe veteran, Neil Ross.
• Cat-and-Mouse Boss: The sniper battle against The End would qualify as a variation of a cat & mouse boss, in that Snake and his opponent are each attempting to get the other in their sights, while remaining unseen themselves.
• Catch Your Death of Cold: Naked Snake can catch a cold if you make him run around in the "Naked Camo" or hang around in water or rain. In addition to his random sneezing alerting guards like in previous games, his stamina will drain more quickly, the camera will shake in first person view, and the controller will vibrate (explained in-game as Snake shivering) until you cure him.
• The Cavalry: The ending contains a few nods to the original Metal Gear Solid. Khrushchev quietly calls off his MiGs before they can shoot down EVA and Snake's plane, a coded acknowledgement that the U.S. has fulfilled its obligations and that tensions have cooled. Snake and EVA are given safe passage to Galena Air Force Base in Alaska (the same base where Colonel Campbell recalls his stealth bombers in Metal Gear Solid).
• Cave Behind the Falls: Snake and Eva rendezvous in one of these after the former barely survives a precarious escape from enemy soldiers.
• Celebrity Paradox: The game subtly mentions many movies which served as an inspiration for the game, and the first Metal Gear Solid ends (if you submit to the torture) with Snake openly discussing his Theme Naming with his new friend, Otacon (they're called Dave and Hal).
• Centrifugal Farce: you can do this to Snake at will by spinning him around in the Survival Viewer. If Snake's sick from eating rotten or poisoned food, you can cure him by forcing him to vomit. You can also escape from the prison cell by making Snake vomit, then taking out the guard when he comes in to check on you.
• Chameleon Camouflage: It's possible to kill The End during his introductory cinema. If you chose not to kill him, you'll have to track him across three massive areas using infrared vision since he can seamlessly blend in with the surrounding forest.
• Character Filibuster: The Boss gives a ten-minute speech about how "there is no such thing as an enemy in absolute terms." As the game goes on, it becomes clear how her entire life is contained in those words, and the she repeats the speech again at the end of the game.
• Chekhov's Boomerang:
  • If the player chooses "I like MGS2!", Snake wears a Latex Perfection mask to hide his identity on the plane ride during the Virtuous Mission. Later on, he wears it to disguise himself as Major Raikov.
  • Snake begins the second and main storyline with two pieces of nifty but largely useless equipment, a suicide pill and an antidote which can be strategically used to play dead. As the player gets better camouflage packs and weapons it becomes less and less useful to the point where the player has no real need to use either until a certain boss fight later where Snake is killed while in the world of the dead and the player has to use the antidote to 'wake up' to progress in the game.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Subverted: The lipstick zip-gun gets pulled out a couple of times near the climax, but never turns out to be important other than as a failed attempt at killing Volgin.
  • A subtle example: At one point, the player will acquire the Snow camo, which is almost entirely white. It seems a little pointless when the game takes place almost entirely in the jungle. This is before they fight The Pain, whose bees won't attack Snake wearing the Snow camo due to apparently thinking that he's wearing a beekeeper uniform. While it can be used when on a high-up mountain with some minimal amounts of snow, there are other camos that blend in with the environment better. Then the player gets to the final battle between Snake and The Boss, which takes place in a field of white flowers.
• Chekhov's Skill: Given how many weapons are available, it's easy to forget about CQC... until you actually fight The Boss. Also, The Boss takes and disassembles Snake's weapons in almost every cutscene they share. Three guesses as to what happens when you try pulling a weapon in close quarters during the actual fight.
• Cherry Blossoms: The game doesn't use cherry blossoms, but the white petals in Rokovoj Bereg turn a deep shade of pink after The Boss is killed. It's clearly symbolic, as one petal Snake took with him becomes white again once he lets go of it.
• Cherry Tapping: The End actually does this to you. He only uses tranquilizer rounds, but since he's so good at sniping, it actually makes for a fairly effective weapon. Plus, losing to him is actually even more inconvenient than just dying, since he knocks you out and carries you back to the basement of a lab you went through earlier. You can do it to him as well, though, as the only way to get his rifle is to defeat him with the tranquilizer pistol you've been carrying since the beginning of the game.
• Chummy Commies: Though the rogue Spetznaz are antagonists for most of the game, there is a poignant Easter Egg cutscene accessible by throwing the guard your rations three times while in captivity in Groznyjgrad. The guard has a chat with Snake and turns out to be a Nice Guy who is lonely and misses his family, he admits to having no hard feelings against Snake and laments that their two countries are now bitter enemies when they defeated the Nazi empire together only a couple of decades ago. Though he refuses to let Snake out, he does return Snake's cigarettes (the ones that unbeknownst to him are actually a knockout gas gadget) and shares a photo with his family that has an emergency codec number on the back that you can use to unlock the door. He also reveals in the conversation that he's the grandfather of Johnny Sasaki - showing the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
• City People Eat Sushi: Lightly parodied when EVA is flirting with Snake, and asks him to take her somewhere nice to eat once the mission is done. EVA, being a refined NSA codebreaker used to high class trendy food, suggests sushi, which is "all the rage". Snake, the Extreme Omnivore who's not adverse to eating raw meat while in the forest, is all for the idea once she explains it's made of raw fish:
  EVA: It's Japanese. I hear it's all the rage right now. Supposedly, it's made from raw fish.
  Snake: Raw fish? Just the place for my survival techniques!
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Used to parody some of the more unrealistic game mechanics. For instance, if Snake finds some Russian glowcap mushrooms, he can call Para-Medic to discuss its nutritional properties. When he starts to wonder if eating the mushrooms will replenish the batteries in his equipment, she tells him to believe whatever the hell he wants. As luck would have it, eating the Russian glowcap does replenish the batteries. Para-Medic and Sigint then assume that this is some sort of weird placebo effect.
• Clark Kenting:
  • EVA's pretty good at this. Her face and voice are the same, but her body language, speaking tone, hair style, and, yes, glasses, combine to give the player the impression that the nervous, mousy girl Volgin's captured is an entirely different person from the dazzling, cleavage-exposing showoff Action Girl helping out Snake. Even some first-time players get totally suckered.
  • Snake does this late in the game, where he must pose as a maintenance worker to infiltrate a fortress, but at this point he has an eye patch, and the enemy knows his face.
• Climax Boss: Colonel Volgin and the Shagohod, confronted shortly before start of the game's final chapter.
• Code Name: The Cobra Unit uses emotions that were felt by the members on the battlefield — for example, The Pain, The Sorrow, and The Fury. "The End" is a bit more esoteric, but comes from the total sense of oblivion he felt when on the hunt. Sometimes, the codenames were cool. Sometimes, not so much. Compare such names as "Psycho Mantis" or "Vamp" to such names as "Fatman" or "Revolver Ocelot". (Just don't do it to their faces...) Every last one is a dead giveaway as to that character's skill and personality, but serves the purpose of obscuring the individual's real name.
• Codename Title: Operation Snake Eater. The goal was for Naked Snake to assassinate the founding member of the Cobra Unit, The Boss, and to destroy Sokolov's nuclear carrying weapon. At least that's what Snake's officials told him as more of the story unfolds.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Colonel Volgin's favorite pastime. He seems rather proud of his skill, though in actuality, he's very, very bad at it; nobody he tortures ever talks, and he actually manages to interrogate himself while torturing Snake. Not that this matters to him. It's outright stated by EVA that he literally gets off on the pain of others, and doesn't really care if his victims talk as long as he gets his kicks. After witnessing it firsthand, Ocelot decides that torture isn't as bad as he previously thought; anyone who's played Metal Gear Solid will know his ratio of people tortured versus information extracted is similar to Volgin's.
• Comedic Sociopathy: While disguised as Major Raikov, Snake can get away with anything, including punching his subordinates in the balls without anyone even batting an eyelid. According to EVA, Raikov is "just that kind of guy".
• Comically Missing the Point: Calling EVA before locating Raikov will have EVA attempt to explain to Snake, in an unsubtle manner, that Raikov is completely uninterested in the opposite sex. Snake seems to understand, but then asks if Raikov broke up with her, causing EVA to react angrily and remark that if the conversation continues, she'll jam her radio up Snake's head.
• Company Cameo: The logo of the FOX unit is the same as that of the company that made the game, Kojima Productions.
• Compensating for Something: The director's commentary states that the reason why Volgin deduced "Raikov" was not Raikov is because Raikov and Snake's groin size was different.
• Competitive Balance: The game has two assault rifles available for Snake: The AK-47 and the XM16E1. The former has slightly better stopping power and a larger magazine at the cost of higher recoil and more difficult to use sights. The latter has lower recoil, more user friendly sights, select fire options, and the ability to take a suppressor, all of which make it viable as both an assault rifle and as an alternative to the 1911 for stealth kills at the cost of a smaller magazine than the AK and less available ammo.
• Concussion Frags: The game seems unsure about what grenades do. Sigint outright states that they frag, but actually getting hit by one results in a backflip and a burn. Hit an enemy with one, and he'll spend about two seconds in the air before bouncing around on the ground a bit. Humorously, the descriptions for the frags throughout the series generally states that they have an effective range of two feet. The grenades do, however, have a much larger blast radius when standing. Going prone will minimize their effect.
• Continuity Lock-Out: The game is an interesting exception when compared to other Metal Gear games in that, while the story can be completely enjoyed and understood on its own, it's packed with Continuity Nods and back story for characters in the other games.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Sergei Gurlukovich had a throwaway line in Metal Gear Solid 2 claiming that "even the technology that gave birth to these weapons is Russian!" While possibly meant at the time as a reference to Dr. Madnar from the MSX2 games, in this game it is revealed that the concept of Metal Gear was invented even earlier by another Russian scientist, Aleksandr Leonovitch Granin.
  • Ocelot, in the aforementioned cutscene, notes that "I abandoned [Russia] during the Cold War" when he reveals his allegiance to the Patriots. Sure enough, The Stinger has him speaking with the CIA Director, revealing that he was the actual CIA support agent, ADAM, sent to assist Snake.
  • During the final battle, the player can find a trio of snakes, "Snake Solid", "Snake Liquid", and "Snake Solidus". All three provide the best stamina recovery in the game.
• Contractual Boss Immunity:
  • Played with. After a cutscene, Ocelot is unconscious, and you're able to shoot him... but doing so gives you a Nonstandard Game Over due to creating a "time paradox".
  • Mostly averted with the Stealth Camo item. In previous games, it would have no effect on bosses. In this game, your camo index is set to 95% instead of the usual 100% during a boss fight, and as this would imply it does make it much harder for bosses to spot you. Whether this makes any real difference depends on the specific boss fight mechanics and arena. With The End's fight in particular, ok it allows you to wander around with impunity, but there are several other battles where it makes it much easier to get a drop on your opponent.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: Raiden from the previous game is an optimistic, idealistic rookie with no real combat experience and a steady girlfriend. Naked Snake in this very game is energetic and confident, experienced, and sleeps with the Chinese spy EVA at the end of the game.
• Contrasting Sequel Setting: In contrast to the two previous games (which take place in industrial/military bases), this game is largely set in sprawling temperate rainforest.
• Controllable Helplessness: The most helpless ever. The "Snake gets captured and tortured" scene begins with the screen completely black, and we only hear what others are saying. However, it's not quite a "blank cutscene", because we still see Snake's health bar and camo index... and we can't do anything about it as it goes down while we're getting punched by Volgin.^note Except holding the item or weapons menu open, thus preventing health damage.
• Cool Bike: EVA's bike is a Chinese-produced copy of the German BMW R75, with an optional Cool Sidecar.
• Cool Plane: Operation Snake Eater commences with Snake being delivered via a Lockheed M-21.
• Cool Tank:
  • The Object 279 tanks stationed at Groznyj Grad are real, and based on a tank that was really too cool for its own good. The vehicle was built by Troyanov for survivability on a battlefield where tactical nuclear weapons were being deployed; the lozenge hull was to prevent the tank being flipped over by blast waves, and the unusual quad tread layout to increase the tank's ground footprint for the same reason. The result was too expensive to mass produce, and the only prototype is now in the Russian tank museum at Kubinka proving ground.
  • The Shagohod. It's a tank with a rocket engine with screw-like treads which Volgin literally could afford to mass-produce. Historically, the plan never got off the ground.
• The Coup: According to the series' mythology, Volgin was the puppeteer behind the movement to depose Khrushchev. Sokolov holds that the Colonel won't be satisfied with that, and will leverage the confusion of a third World War to take over the USSR.
• Coup de Grâce Cutscene: The player is forced to pull the trigger on The Boss. It will still happen automatically if the player waits for too long.
• Counting Bullets: Snake manages to pull this on Ocelot after he switches from a pistol with eight rounds to a revolver with six.
• Critical Encumbrance Failure: Select too many heavy items to your active inventory and you will pay for it in poor stamina conservation.
• Crosshair Aware: During the sniper battle with The End, occasionally there's a short period where you're looking at Snake through The End's scope, just before he fires. This doesn't happen very often, but when it does it's a serious Oh, Crap! moment.
• Crossover: With, of all things, Ape Escape. Solid Snake would return the favor by appearing in Ape Escape 3, which was released at around the same time. In the HD Edition, however, the Snake vs. Monkey minigame was removed.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Colonel Volgin dies when he gets struck by lightning, set on fire, and the bullets in his bandoleers go off causing little chunks to be blown out of his body. The death is so graphic that EVA, who Volgin raped and tortured, has to turn away, and even Snake seems disturbed by it.
• Cruelty Is the Only Option: How the final battle ends. After you defeat The Boss, you, the player, have to shoot your mentor; the story will not proceed until you pull the trigger.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Whenever Snake and The Boss cross paths, Snake gets his ass handed to him. The degree of curb stomping that occurs, however, becomes steadily and noticeably less and less as the game goes on. The first time they fight, Snake only gets a very brief grab on The Boss before she breaks the hold and then his arm before hurling him off the bridge they are on. The last time they fight in a cutscene, Snake holds her off for quite a while and even forces her to a knee before she takes him down.
  • An almost identically parallel situation to The Boss easily defeating Snake constantly while Snake slowly improves occurs with Ocelot. Several times Snake champions Ocelot through CQC and gunplay, but after while Ocelot seems to improve, until finally he is able to match Snake one-on-one in CQC during the final plane duel.
  • The battle with The Sorrow. You can't do any damage to him, and you're forced to wait until your health goes down all the way.
• Cutlery Escape Aid: When you get captured, one of the items you get is a Fork. After you eventually escape, it serves as your main melee weapon until you can get your gear back. It can also be used for medical treatment like the standard knife, and any animals or plants you hit with it are eaten instantly.
• Cutscene Incompetence: During the Virtuous Mission, while the game relies on sneaking and catching the enemy by surprise, in the cutscenes, Snake seems to prefer the method of running around waving his gun everywhere, which often leads to him getting ambushed.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: Mostly averted. Any time the player sees Snake performing CQC maneuvers in cutscenes, he's using the exact same moves that are available outside the cutscenes, although the stunts that Snake pulls off are a bit tricky to recreate during gameplay.
• Cutting the Knot:
  • Early on you need to sneak into a lab and disguise yourself as an enemy scientist, with the "proper" means being to sneak onto the compound and crawl through a vent. However, you can just knock, and the enemy guard will think you're one of the sentries and open the door for you. If that is too much work, just throw on the scientist uniform and be spotted by a guard — he'll think you're a scientist trying to escape and escort you "back" inside.
  • If you don't want to be pestered by helicopters later while in the mountains, you can blow them up earlier in the game before they even take off with TNT.
  • The Fear can be taken down easier by dropping spoiled food, which will stun him for a while.
  • The End can be defeated by not playing the game for two weeks or just simply changing the clock. If you're particularly sharp with a sniper rifle, you can take him out after a cutscene much earlier in the game and have his boss room occupied by the Ocelot Unit instead.
  • When escorting EVA in the end, who is slow and keeps trying to stand her ground against enemy soldiers, rather than trying to coax her along, you can just tranquilise her (which also stops her accelerated stamina drain) then drag her to your destination like a caveman.
• Cynicism Catalyst: Big Boss slipping into anti villainy started out when he found out the extent of The Boss "betrayal" come the end of the game.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: In the original version of the game, the circle button is used to confirm decisions and the X button to cancel. This is reversed in the HD Edition.
• Danger with a Deadline: The boss battle against The End can be won without actually fighting him — you have the option of saving during the battle, leaving the game, waiting for a whole week, and then picking up where you left off. The End, who is already well over 100 years old, will die of old age. It's not very sporting or even fun to do, but it works.
• Darkened Building Shootout: The battle with The Fury starts out dark, but his flamethrower gradually lightens things up, making it harder to hide from him.
• Dateless Grave: The Boss' gravestone reads "192X-1964".
• Dead All Along: Snake frequently sees a mysterious man who only appears while it's raining. At one point in the game, Snake drowns and in this state of "almost death" meets that man in a dream, at which point he introduces himself as The Sorrow. It's only after the "battle" with him that Snake learns the truth: The Sorrow was the lover of The Boss - Snake's mentor and mother figure - and was also killed by her willingly so when their respective missions forced them to clash.
• Death by Irony: Volgin, the game's Psycho Electro, gets killed by lightning. Snake lampshades the irony of the situation. For an extra dose of irony, the entire game Volgin used the phrase "Kuwabara Kuwabara", a Japanese saying that was believed to ward off lightning, every time it rained. Right before his death, he hears thunder go off and instead of saying the phrase, he taunts the storm with "Who's afraid of a little thunder?"
• Death Is the Only Option: The "fight" against The Sorrow (when Snake is at death's door) cannot be won. He is a ghost, so you cannot hurt him no matter what you do. The only way out is to let him kill you at the end of your walk in the river, then use a revival pill to wake up in the "world of the living". Alternately, you can just get on your stomach and wait until you drown, as your head is under the water, then use the pill like normal. Same effect, but much shorter than doing it the normal way, especially if you killed a lot of people before this point. However, you cannot get The Sorrow's camo this way.
• Death Mountain: The Krasnogorje mountain is high up enough that the air is thinner, and as such Snake's stamina drops faster in this area.
• Deconstruction: The game plays most of the standard Bond movie tropes straight, but the game's twenty minute epilogue manages to completely brutalize how those films usually end. Sure, Snake is a bit sad he had to kill his mentor and maternal figure, but he still managed to save the world, destroy the Shagohod, and get the girl, right? Turns out EVA is a Chinese spy who only didn't kill Snake because she made a promise to The Boss not to. The Boss was actually a Fake Defector who was the United States' Fall Guy. Snake was used to dispose of her and secure the Philosophers' Legacy for the U.S. The entire event inspires Snake's Start of Darkness.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: The Cobras all die by going boom... except The Boss. In this case, it's explained that the Cobras were equipped with microbombs that would explode when they died, in order to prevent the enemy studying their corpses.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: The racism of The '60s is briefly touched upon. During a radio conversation, Sigint mentions that before being recruited by Zero, his talents weren't recognized simply because he was black.
• Delicious Distraction:
  • Tossing your personal stock of food to where a guard can see it can prove to be a useful distraction to get by them or dispose of them more easily. It's can be an especially useful tactic if you managed to find and destroy the local food storage shed, which will leave the enemies famished and desperate to eat anything. For added bonus, you can feed them food that is spoiled to make them sick, or poisoned to just kill them.
  • The Fear's camouflage drains his stamina quickly and drives him to seek something quick to eat. He'll quite happily go for your rations, which as usual, can be spiked in a few ways.
• Demographic-Dissonant Crossover: The Snake vs. Monkey minigame, which crosses over an E-rated franchise with an M-rated franchise.
• Denser and Wackier: The Snake vs. Monkey minigame. Yes, in this very grim and violent game about the Cold War, you get to prance around the jungle capturing monkeys, and cartoonish-looking ones at that.
• Description Porn: Snake does this when EVA hands him the M1911, to the point that he's completely ignores EVA unzipping her jacket to show off her cleavage moments ago. The player, however, can get a good look for themselves by pressing the first-person button. He also does this a few times if the player calls Sigint after they get a new gun or camo, or if they're near a vehicle or similarly technical object.
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment: Snake's custom .45, the Patriot rifle used by The Boss, and the Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle used by The End during his boss battle.
• Developer's Foresight: See this page.
• Did Not Do the Bloody Research: Shagohod. Makes perfect sense if you understand the Russian name. If you don't, you might only pick up on the first few letters... If you do, don't go to Russia. "Shag" by itself means "step", so you'll be exhausted by giggling every time it's used in about an hour and a half.
• Difficult, but Awesome: This game's version of CQC is considered the most complex version in the series. That said, it's generally considered the most powerful iteration.
• Disability Immunity: When Ocelot tries to poke Snake in the eye to disorient him, he reflexively does it to the one Ocelot accidentally blinded him in. Snake's only reaction is a sly grin.
• Disarm, Disassemble, Destroy: The Boss is very good at this, able to field strip an opponent's weapon and discard the pieces, in the heat of combat, in a lot less time than is plausible in some cases. She even does it to Snake in their proper fight, although for gameplay reasons it's limited to just scattering his intact weapon and its ammunition across the battlefield.
• Disc-One Final Dungeon: Groznyj Grad, the fortress for Big Bad Volgin where he's building his Shagohod vehicle missile launcher. Snake stops them both but the final level is the lake at Rokovoj Bereg, where Snake has to face his mentor at the field of white lilies.
• Discontinuity Nod: The game introduces a minor character named Ivan Raidenovich Raikov, who was put into the game specifically to make fun of Raiden (the controversial main character of the game's predecessor). At one point, Naked Snake (Solid Snake's predecessor) must disguise himself as Raikov. With his uniform and mask on, his commander tells him he looks so much like Raikov that "you're starting to irritate me already." Upset, Snake responds, "But this look should make me more popular!"
• Disney Villain Death: Volgin initially falls into a ravine thanks to EVA and Snake exploiting the C3-rigged bridge that the former set up earlier to get rid of the Shagohod. Unfortunately for them, he managed to eject the rear part of the Shagohod in order to get back up to the ravine, although on the flip side, the Shagohod's now vulnerable.
• Disproportionate Retribution: In The Ultimate Weapon, Snake and The Boss have a Rock-Paper-Scissors fight, with Snake doing a combination of all three to win. She nukes him at point-blank range, killing the main cast.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The Boss, a powerful female character, has a habit of walking up to men she's angry with and forcibly dismantling their firearms.
  • Snake's "cardboard box" lecture to a thoroughly squicked Sigint:
    Snake: You should come inside the box... Then you'll know what I mean.
    Sigint: Man, I don't wanna know what you mean!
• Doomed by Canon: Big Boss wears an eyepatch in earlier games, so most players expect him to lose it at some point in the game. The scene where it happens knows this and plays with that expectation horrifyingly.
• Double Agent: EVA, Ocelot, and The Boss. Bonus points to Ocelot for being a triple agent.
• Double-Meaning Title: The game's subtitle refers to the name of the operation the protagonist takes part of, the fact that he may have to eat snakes while on the mission or the Final Boss chewing the protagonist (codenamed: Naked Snake) out of his naivety.
• Downer Beginning: The game starts with Naked Snake going on a mission to extract a scientist named Sokolov. Heading back to the chopper, Snake's own mentor, The Boss, appears and reveals she's defecting from the US to Russia, before pummeling Snake and almost killing him. As The Boss leaves, Volgin then fires a mini-nuke, causing major diplomatic damage to the US-USSR relations.
• Downer Ending: In addition to the game's actual ending, which at best is a very bitter Bittersweet Ending, several of the Secret Theater videos have downer endings as well, though usually they're Played for Laughs:
  • The Beginning is the End: During his insertion jump for operation Virtuous Mission, Snake releases his parachute a little too late and falls down the cliff. Colonel Campbell then informs Snake that he has caused a Time Paradox.
  • Metal Gear Sigint: Sigint upstages Snake, Snake gets bombed by Soviet jets after beating The Boss, isn't able to stop Sigint's make-out with EVA, as he collapses from exhaustion, and is unable to prevent Sigint from receiving the title of "Big Boss" from President Lyndon Johnson, causing a massive time paradox, and changing the series' name:
    Snake: You've gotta be kidding.
  • Gotcha this Time!: Snake slams the C3 explosive onto fuel-tank of the Shagohod too hard, and the timer goes to 0, resulting in a large explosion, killing him.
  • The Ultimate Weapon: The Boss, upset at Snake doing a combined version of all the options of Rock-Paper-Scissors, points a Davy Crocket nuke launcher right in his face, and detonates it, killing the main cast as Major Zero tries to contact Snake.
• Downloadable Content: There were a few bonus camo patterns available for PS2 owners who had an online connection. The camo patterns can be found on-disc in Subsistence. Unfortunately, a single camo takes up an entire megabyte off the player's memory card.
• Down the Drain: Big Boss' escape from Groznjy Grad; it is fairly short and the challenge mainly comes from the lack of equipment as opposed to typical sewer level mechanics.
• Do Wrong, Right: While Snake was impressed by Ocelot's Improbable Aiming Skills, he chews him out and gives him advice on firearms such as not to use techniques on the field that he hadn't practiced let alone even properly existed and most notably to use a revolver instead due to a tic he noticed which would normally damage regular firearms, but would be better with a revolver.
• Dressing as the Enemy:
  • The game requires you to knock out a GRU officer and steal his uniform. The officer in question looks suspiciously like Raiden. When playing in most of the uniforms, you can't do anything too weird (rolling around, beating up guards, etc.) or you'll be caught. As the GRU officer, you're explicitly allowed to do anything you want, because "Raikov's just like that". It's probably because no-one wants to tick off the villain's boyfriend.
  • Snake is required to dress in scientist garb twice, once to infiltrate a warehouse for a rescue mission and the other to infiltrate a military base... for a rescue mission for the same person. Armed guards don't spare a second glance (unless you stand in their way or something, in which case they kick you over for no reason before moving on), but if one of the actual scientists sees your face, they will stare at you for a while before sounding the alarm since they don't recognise you. Hence, turn away so the scientists can't see your face. It's anyone's guess how this works in the first place, since Snake doesn't look Russian at all, he's far from clean-shaven, and this works as normal while missing an eye (which, of course, isn't reflected on the ID badge).
• Dub-Induced Plot Hole: Colonel Campbell's cameo as a kind of guardian of time who yells at you if you take actions that contradict the storyline of the previous games is baffling in the English version, only making sense as some gag to show you how far time has broken down. In the Japanese version, where the Colonel is voiced by the dub actor for Christopher Lloyd, it is (while also implying a Time Crash) incredibly funny.
• Duel Boss: The Boss. Snake's main mission is to fight and eliminate her, and thus their unavoidable confrontation is hyped up for the entirety of the game. It does not disappoint.
• Dungeon Bypass: One of the most frustratingly difficult bosses in the entire game, The End, can be entirely bypassed by simply saving during the boss fight and waiting an entire real-life week (or tampering with the system clock) - The End is a very old man who will have died of old age in the middle of the battle when you reload the save.
• Dying Dream: The fight with The Sorrow qualifies as this. Afterwards, Snake wakes up, realizing it was all just a dream. Or was it?

E-N

• Earn Your Title: This game shows how Snake earned the moniker that would stay with him for the rest of his life, by defeating his lifelong mentor, The Boss, and surpassing her in the eyes of his superiors. It also shows why he spends years resenting the title and continuing to go by Snake, and why, by the time of Metal Gear, his use of the title is a big spoiler of his ultimate motivation.
• Easter Egg:
  • Some cutscenes have moments where you can switch to Snake's point-of-view. Watch the upper-right corner of the screen; when a button prompt appears, pressing the first-person button reveals something completely different going on, invisible from the third-person perspective. There are, however, several scenes where you can go to first-person mode without any prompt appearing. These secret scenes range from very silly to significantly helpful.
  • All the hidden Kerotan dolls. It surprises you the first time you find one- "What is that Kermit-looking thing?" And there are sixty-four of them to find!
• Easier Than Easy: The game notches this up a bit by giving the player the EZ Gun, which drastically increases your camouflage level, has infinite ammo and a laser sight (which is otherwise exclusive to one gun you find in the last thirty minutes), and the silencer doesn't wear out. The EZ Gun is available on higher difficulties as a New Game Plus bonus.
• Easy Level Trick:
  • The fight with the Shagohod tank can be resolved fairly quickly by shooting out the treads so it can't move at all. The game, of course, doesn't tell you this. Its health can also be lowered by killing (not just non-lethally incapacitating) all of the engineers in its hangar.
  • A lot of areas, as well as the battle with The Pain, can be made much easier by answering "I like MGS3" at the beginning of the game, which gives you the brown face paint that gives you unlimited oxygen (not that the game bothers to tell you this). Most enemies can't see you underwater, no enemies can follow you into the water (save for crocodiles, but they're rare), and The Pain is completely unable to harm you when you're submerged, giving you a handy safe space in a lot of areas.
  • The Fear can be taken out in seconds if you think ahead and bring some Poison Dart Frogs to the battle. Let him drain his stamina attacking, throw them to the middle of the room, let him eat them, finish him off with your tranquilizer gun. This takes about a minute tops.
  • If you know where to look to get the SVD sniper rifle at the first opportunity, you can use it to shoot The End in the face after the first cutscene that features him, which saves you an ungodly amount of time later on if you're not especially good with the sniper rifle. The Ocelot unit that takes his place can be gunned down or sneaked past with relative ease.
• Edge Gravity: If the player character dives or rolls off the edge they will fall, but if they run or walk off, they will grab the edge and hang there. Irritatingly, certain traps are made by changing the Edge Gravity of a given set of floor...
• Elite Mooks: The Ocelot Unit, as well as the flamethrower unit.
• Embedded Precursor: The second disc of Subsistence includes updated versions of the original Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, which were originally released for the MSX2 and never released outside Japan in their original form before then (only the first game had an infamous NES port). Both games are included in the HD Edition of MGS3 released for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PS Vita, where they're selectable via the main menu.
• The Ending Changes Everything: The ending of the game: After having defeated the Big Bad Colonel Volgin, killed his traitorous mentor the Boss, averted World War 3, recovered the secret microchip, and retreating to a remote hut with the triple agent love interest, Snake wakes up the next morning to only find a tape record explaining that said love interest was a quadruple agent who stole the microchip while he was asleep — not that the last part would make a difference, since another quadruple agent had switched the real chip for a fake one — and was supposed to murder him and would have done so, but being unable to refuse the last wish of the Boss upon learning the truth about her actions. As it turns out, the Boss never actually defected to the Soviet Union. Her supposed Face–Heel Turn was actually a Fake Defection, and she would have used that in order to kill Volgin and stop the construction of the Shagohod, but when Volgin decided to nuke a building to test out the capabilities of a small-yield nuclear missile, her fate was sealed. At that point, the original covert operation that Snake took part in was unveiled to the Kremlin, making America and the Soviet Union ready to nuke each other out of orbit unless someone could go in and kill both Volgin and The Boss. In short? She died to save face for both countries (especially her own), and to be known in history as a traitor, and she was completely fine with that. "Loyalty to the end" indeed. Snake learning the truth about this and seeing how his government treated one of their best soldiers like garbage led him to leave America's service in order to become a mercenary, which puts him down the eventual path that will turn him into one of the greatest threats that the world has ever known — and it's not hard to blame him.
• Enemy Chatter: The option to blow up the guards' food supplies. Afterwards, you can overhear them complain about being hungry.
• Enemy-Detecting Radar: As a prequel, the game doesn't feature the radar, as the game is set in a preiod before it was invented. There's a number of more primitive alternatives that can be found through the game, all of which need battery power. The Motion Sensor will only show moving guards and animals, so a stationary guard won't be shown. The Sonar will indicate everything, but has to be manually triggered and the 'ping' can alert guards. The AP sensor will vibrate when guards are near.
• Escort Mission: Towards the end of the game, an injured EVA becomes the player's charge. She moves slowly, will often start shooting at enemies with an unsuppressed weapon and needs to be constantly fed in order to keep her stamina up. Otherwise, there is moaning and stopping. You can, however, tranquilize her and drag her the whole way.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Ocelot is horrified when Volgin decides to launch the nuke at the jungle, claiming that even though their enemies are in there, they're still their comrades. It's actually a hint as to where his true allegiances lie, as he takes issue not with the needless deaths of the Russians, but the fact that the nuclear weapon is American-made.
• Event Title: "Snake Eater" is the name of the operation where the main act of the game takes place.
• Exact Words: "You don't have what it takes to kill me." Snake isn't being metaphorical; Ocelot used up all the ammo showing off.
• Exploding Barrels: Can be found at all the bases except Graniny Gorki.
• Eye Scream: Double Subverted. The Boss prepares to cut out Snake's eyes in order to clear her name as the spy, but she is stopped at the last second by Tatyana/EVA. Then Snake's right eye is destroyed by a muzzle flash (courtesy Ocelot, albeit accidentally). The prospects of the first half of that scene are quite frightening during the first playthrough, considering Big Boss is well known for having an eyepatch.
• Face Death with Dignity: The Boss, who seems eerily at peace with the idea of her own demise. It demonstrates how strong her spirit is, as a lesser person would have broken under the strain, while she barely sheds much tears.
• Face Palm: Snake can be seen doing this in response to some radio calls, usually the ones involving Sigint and/or Para-Medic.
• Fake Defector: A Deconstructed Character Archetype in the case of The Boss, in that it does not end happily like it does in spy movies. It's an absolutely heartbreaking take, and the outcome is what inspires Big Boss's Start of Darkness.
• Faking the Dead: A gameplay option. You can use fake death pills to simulate being dead and fool enemy soldiers into leaving you alone or dropping their guard, complete with fake Game Over screen. However, there is a time limit; let the Game Over text change to Time Paradox and the death becomes real.
• Falling into the Plot: Naked Snake's mission starts right after he drops himself from the plane where he's being transported and parachutes into a jungle, not too far from his target destination.
• False Teeth Tomfoolery: The End's poignant death soliloquy comes to an abrupt stop when the explosive in his body arms itself and he spits his false teeth into the air, where they hover in slow motion for a moment just before he goes kablooey.
• Fan Disservice: Snake can take his shirt off and show off his toned upper body. You also get a chance to see Snake shirtless when he's been captured and being tortured by Volgin, who not only beats him to a bloody pulp but also electrocutes him so much that he pisses himself through the sheer excruciating pain, something Volgin apparently finds amusing and maybe even sexually exciting.
• Fantastic Light Source: Snake can eat luminescent mushrooms to power his Night-Vision Goggles and other battery powered items. How this works is unknown.
• Fatal Family Photo:
  • Sokolov shows Snake a picture of his wife and daughter. He gets tortured to death in the very next cutscene. Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops reveals that he survived using a fake death pill.
  • Johnny Sasaki's grandfather shows Snake a photo of his family if you trigger the cutscene. If you feel like being a complete asshole, you're free to kill him as soon as you escape afterwards. Otherwise, feel free to subvert it.
• A Father to His Men: The Boss, to her Cobra Unit. She was the one who trained Big Boss and thought of him as her greatest student, having developed CQC alongside him. Their relationship became a more literal example of this trope than most, as she became a surrogate mother to him after losing her own son to the Ancient Conspiracy and being rendered infertile by her involvement in Operation Buster–Jangle, whereas Big Boss was a teenager in a war zone.
• Fear of Thunder: In a somewhat ironic twist, Big Bad Colonel Volgin of game is afraid of storms. Although this is directly passed on via radio communication from one character to another, there are other subtle hints, such as how Volgin retreats to his quarters during storms and chants a Japanese charm against lighting strikes when forced to be outside while it's raining. This is ironic because Volgin himself has control over electricity, uses it as his primary weapon, and one of his nicknames is "Thunderbolt." Naturally, he is killed at the end of the game by a direct hit from a lightning bolt when he decides not to say his little anti-lightning mantra for once. Standing knee-deep in exposed electrical cables on top of a giant tank probably didn't help.
• Feed It a Bomb: This is an extremely easy way of farming gavial meat. Cock a grenade and wait until the gavial yawns. Another example occurs when one boss (The Fear) looks for food when he runs low on stamina. By leaving rotten or poisoned food lying around, you can make him vomit to death, for which you are rewarded.
• Fighting Your Friend: The fight with The Boss. The whole mission and her defection were all a ruse to avoid a potential war between East and West, and she is dying for her country.
• Filler: A common 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 game's themes, in spite of being generally well-received mechanically. Mythology Gag is probably the more appropriate trope to describe this.
• Final Boss Preview: Done twice in the early game. The first is to showcase her CQC abilities to disarm Snake, giving a few injuries and tossing him off the bridge, leading into the cure tutorial for the survival menu. The second was to disarm Snake and dismantle the gun for a weaponless section, with her demand for him to go home, which let Snake clue in there was a mole.
• Final Speech: This is the only game in the series to downplay this. All the bosses hardly get more than a sentence or two before exploding for no valid reason. Played straight with The Boss, on the other hand.
• Fire/Water Juxtaposition: Used to contrast The Fury and The Sorrow, whose boss battles occur back-to-back. The Fury is a perpetually angry Badass Normal soldier who tries to mow Snake down with an oversized flamethrower, whereas The Sorrow is an eerily calm ghost/shaman who battles Snake in a river in the middle of a raging rainstorm, and he can't be defeated through traditional combat.
• Firing One-Handed: The Boss's gun, the Patriot, is a modified XM16E1 with a shortened barrel and the stock removed, effectively making it a sawed-off version of an an automatic rifle. Sigint notes that due to its modification, the gun generates a massive amount of recoil, but the Boss being able to fire it accurately just one-handed shows just how strong she is.
• Fission Mailed:
  • You can invoke this at any time by taking the Fake Death Pill to trick enemies into thinking you've died, "SNAKE IS DEAD" screen and everything, then take the Revival Pill when the coast is clear. Do note that the effects of the FDP will actually kill you if you don't take the Revival Pill in time.
  • The player just cannot win the battle against The Sorrow no matter how hard they try, but then the player notices the inventory still works and take the Revival Pill just in time. Less obvious and more serious than the one in Metal Gear Solid 2 for it implies all hope seems to be lost at this very moment.
• Fisticuffs Boss:
  • The Final Boss doesn't need to be a Fisticuffs Boss, but since she has the bad habit of breaking your guns, it's generally better to do it that way, though she also has the habit of breaking arms.
  • The succeeding Cutscene Boss, Ocelot, drops all your gear into a lake and engages you in some fancy CQC.
• Five Stages of Grief: Before Naked Snake confronts The Boss, he faces the Cobra Unit. Each member of the unit "carries an emotion into battle", which each somewhat align with a stage of grief. Notable in that the last one he faces is The Fury, foreshadowing his Start of Darkness.
• Fixed Camera: Snake Eater featured this in keeping with the previous games in the series, but it was very poorly received and criticized for being unsuited to the sprawling, open-ended jungle environments. This prompted its revision in Subsistence to an Always Over the Shoulder camera more typical for the third person genre. This is the only camera option available in Snake Eater 3D.
• Foregone Conclusion: Snake is told at the beginning of Operation Snake Eater that his goal is to kill The Boss. You know what's coming, especially since this Snake goes on to become Big Boss. It's also no surprise that Big Boss loses an eye during his mission.
• Foreign Cuss Word: EVA says "Fuck you" in English to Volgin in the original Japanese. The English dub, having to contend with three syllables of lip-flap, toned it down to 'go to hell'.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The Boss' first call to Snake at the start of the Virtuous Mission lays out much of the game's and (series) plot. How leaders change and are replaced foreshadowing the Patriots, how enemies and allies are relative terms and can change over time foreshadowing her own allegiances through the game, as well as EVA and Ocelot's own allegiances, and even Big Boss' future conflict with Zero. Soldiers being political tools with no say in right or wrong foreshadows her ultimate sacrifice for her country. She also mentions that Snake's duty to follow order will clash with his own belief in what right and he'll come to regret what he'll have to do such as killing her.
  • A player who's paying attention will spot several details that reveal EVA isn't who she says she is:
    • When she meets Snake, she doesn't give the password because she doesn't know it.
    • Her pistol and bike are both Chinese built. In addition, her use of the "broomhandle" shooting technique, holding the gun sideways and letting the recoil move the gun in a sweeping motion, is a Chinese technique.
    • All this comes together when EVA reveals in the ending she's a Chinese agent after the Philosophers' Legacy.
  • In the same scene where Snake first meets EVA, the former's supposed to be meeting an agent named "ADAM" who never shows up, but Ocelot and his men zero in on the player's hiding place without warning. Guess who Ocelot really is? For bonus points, during your final encounter with him, he introduces himself as Adamska. And then there's his love of American revolvers, a shooting style right out of a western and taking the name of an American wildcat. Guess who has his real loyalties? Another tell is during the scene where Volgin is frying Snake with his electric torture, there's a quick shot of Ocelot starting to reach for one of his guns and then stopping himself. As if he's debating whether he should break his cover and rescue Snake or let things play out.
  • The Boss when Snake asks her the reason why she defected to the Soviet Union: "I didn't." The one time in the whole game where she is being completely honest and level with him.
  • The game hints at the characteristics of the Cobra Unit in the areas before their boss fights. Snake is attacked by bees before he fights The Pain, Snake moves through The Fear's trap filled arena before he actually needs to fight him, Snake encounters flamethrower mooks before he fights The Fury and so on. The exception is The End, who is introduced just a minute before The Fear but is fought afterwards.
• Fun with Acronyms: FOX, the organization Naked Snake works for, stands for Force Operation X.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Look carefully at the Ocelot soldiers' bodies right after their first run-in with Snake. Almost all the Ocelots have been knocked unconscious, but one soldier in particular has been tranquilized with a dart, just like in the preceding cutscene.
  • Ocelot's AI during his boss fight is tailored to his in-story personality. He reloads his gun in the open because he simply doesn't think he can be (seriously) harmed (and if you shoot him while he's reloading, he wises up and seeks cover to do so subsequent times), and most of the time he has a chance at hitting Snake with a straight shot, he'll disregard it in favor of a fancier ricochet shot instead. In the event you carry over a Single Action Army from a previous playthrough, spinning it will cause Ocelot to do the same and give another opportunity to hit him.
  • The Sorrow's fight is a Hopeless Boss Fight against a ghost. The game demonstrates this by showing his life meter: it's already empty. You can't kill what's already dead.
  • After Snake has his eye shot out, if you go into first-person mode, the far-right of the screen is darkened and your depth perception is off, forcing you to relearn how to aim. This goes even further in Snake Eater 3D, which forcibly disables the 3D option in first-person view, regardless of your settings.
  • When Snake is discovered by Volgin in Groznyj Grad, he's able to successfully perform a CQC counter on him. The Boss does the same seconds later, hinting at how it can be used against Volgin later on during his boss fight. This might surprise players given that for the most part, CQC hasn't been an ideal strategy to use against any of the previous bosses.
  • Beating Ocelot and Volgin (pre-Shagohod) lethally do not count as kills in the final results, as they survive those fights.^note You still have an incentive to beat them non-lethally, as you are rewarded with their camo uniforms.
  • The Boss will admonish Snake if he dons any ill-fitting or otherwise goofy camouflage options during the Virtuous Mission after expressing her surprise. One such piece, the Monkey Mask from Snake vs. Monkey, will surprise her enough to the point where she will literally leave herself open during her boss fight.
  • Prior to her boss fight, The Boss engages Snake in CQC three different times; while he still loses each encounter, he does progress further in mastering CQC. Come the actual boss fight itself, and the player can defeat The Boss purely through CQC by countering any of her grabs and then throwing her in turn.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Snake is airdropped into the mission and told by Major Zero that the enemy may be listening to their communications. Zero then gives a detailed briefing, including explicitly stating who Snake is working for, where he is, and what he's doing, over these same comms.
  • This same briefing details the operating procedure that Snake must adhere to by the letter: He must not engage the enemy, and must leave no trace of his presence: no equipment, footprints or even bodily fluids. This has absolutely no bearing on the gameplay, as - except on the highest difficulty, on which the game ends if you're seen by an enemy - Snake is free to shoot his way through hordes of guards and allow himself to be seen by anyone.
• Gangsta Style:
  • EVA's preferred method of fire. Her weapon of choice is a Shanxi Type 17, a Chinese copy of the Mauser C96. She relies on an actual method of firing the weapon known as "Bandit Shooting," which involves using the muzzle jump of the gun to create a sweeping effect that is very useful for clearing rooms and helps prevent cases from jamming in the gun. It's only very useful at a maximum range of about five yards, though. The fact her gun and her shooting style are of Chinese origin are your first major clue that she's not actually a Soviet agent, but a Chinese one.
  • Ocelot aims his semi-automatic pistol sideways in the first part of the game.
• Gaussian Girl: Ocelot sees Snake this way after their initial encounter. Admittedly, he is losing consciousness at the time. Ever since then, Ocelot has become his Stalker with a Crush. Played with jokingly in the Secret Theater film, He's Still Got It, where The End sees EVA like this.
• Gender Is No Object: Surprisingly, nobody ever gives The Boss any guff for being a woman, despite this taking place in the '60s, long before the glass ceiling disappeared for women in the military (and as far as combat-intensive roles go, that ceiling still hasn't really gone away)—and she's been doing this at least since the '40s. It's possible nobody dares bring it up because she's that good. Her connection to the Philosophers probably doesn't hurt either.
• Genre Deconstruction: The game deconstructed spy films such as James Bond and (to a lesser extent) action films like Rambo. Most of the usual tropes are there — beautiful Bond Girl who is actually a spy for the enemy, the Fake Defector, the Soviet scientist defecting to the U.S. and so on. Most are unexpected plot twists, all are horribly tragic, and all combine to make the protagonist into the biggest villain in the series.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: The End, a well-camouflaged sniper who only attacks from elevated locations and only moves around if he knows he's been spotted or to keep you from figuring out his location.
• Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex: Naked Snake and EVA have sex in the ending cutscene, after barely escaping an enemy base that got hit with a nuclear impact. After that though, it took a very depressing turn.
• Glowing Flora: The "Russian Glowcap" mushroom is one of the many collectible fungi/plants that Snake can find in the wilderness, and it faintly glows enough to be visible in darkness. The bioluminescence is fairly realistic (Para-Medic cites it using the luciferin-luciferase reaction found in some real-life glowing fungi), but this leads to a bizarre throughline where consuming it doesn't grant Snake stamina, but instead recharges his batteries, something he celebrates to his hopelessly confused mission control.
• Good All Along: The Boss. Even before The Reveal that she's a Fake Defector, it's made quite clear that she's a good woman.
• Good Guns, Bad Guns: The true allegiances of characters are actually hinted by their weapons. Snake, as The Hero, carries a modified M1911A1. Ocelot switches to the Colt Single Action Army after his Makarov jams and The Boss carries a chopped down variant of the M16, hinting that they are both actually working for the United States. EVA, on the other hand, carries a Chinese copy of the Mauser C-96, a clue that most will miss until the game's ending.
• Gotta Catch Them All: In order to obtain the EZ Gun on any difficulty above Very Easy, the player has to catch at least one of every 48 plants and animals in a single playthrough. If the player passes one of several points of no return without a certain food, the game needs to be started again, and this includes catching the undetectable Tsuchinoko.
• Grandfather Paradox: If you kill Major Ocelot instead of just knocking him out, you get the "TIME PARADOX" Nonstandard Game Over. Ocelot is integral to the plot of the previous games in the series, which take place chronologically after Metal Gear Solid 3. Hilariously, the HD re-releases of the game have an achievement/trophy for doing this entitled, "Problem Solved, Series Over."
• Grapple Move: Naked Snake can use grab his opponent and subdue them using CQC.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: Immediately after praising Snake's Russian with both speaking in English, Sokolov says the name "Shagohod" in Russian. Snake then accepts the rather flowery translation "The Treading Behemoth" as opposed to the more mundane meaning of "Step-Walker."
• Greater-Scope Villain: By the end of the game, Snake views President Johnson and the entirety of the U.S. government as such, having intentionally sacrificed the life of The Boss so they could pin the nuclear strike on her and label her as a traitor and a war criminal whilst using him as a pawn in their plans.
• Green Hill Zone: Dremuchij is a forest region that serves as your practice point before having to maneuver through the much tougher levels.
• Groin Attack:
  • The game has a surprisingly large amount of groin attacks. For starters, it serves as an auto kill against enemies (or auto-KO, if the player does it unarmed).
  • In the battle with The Sorrow, the ghosts of people who received this at some point have special dialogue. "I'm worthless now!" "Do you know how THIS feels!?"
  • If the player wears the Raikov Mask and the Scientist disguise, as demonstrated in the beginning of this video here, Raikov will look at Snake, then go "Hey!", grab Snake's gonads, unzip his pants, and then hit them hard enough to send Snake flying back.
  • If the player harasses EVA long enough late into the game, she will get fed up and then deliver a swift kick into Snake's crotch that is hard enough to kill him.
  • In the Secret Theater film Cat-like behavior, Ocelot shoots Snake in the groin shortly after Snake says that he doesn't have what it takes to kill him, a shot that was also implied to have killed him.
  • EVA receives a groin attack from Volgin after he discovers she's the KGB spy. The fact that she's a girl mattered little as it hurt her all the same, and was also not intended to be funny.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Why on Earth would you hire soldiers who can't swim to guard a lake?
• Guide Dang It!:
  • The method for defeating The Sorrow is best described as "moon logic." To be specific, the player has to let him kill them, then realize the inventory is still active on the game over screen and use the Revival Pill item that normally wakes the player up from using the Fake Death Pill. Mercifully, if the player goes through this enough times, Zero will just call the player and tell them to do this. It's probably less of a conundrum for those who actually tried using a Fake Death Pill even once beforehand.
  • Want to get the "Markhor" title to unlock the EZ Gun? Better make sure you know exactly where all the food in the game is and not miss a single one.
• Guilt-Based Gaming: The game guilts you in a cosmic sense- if you die and quit, you get a message telling you that you've caused a "Time Paradox". It also happens if you kill Ocelot.
• Gun Accessories: Snake has to collect silencers since each has a finite lifespan, and there's also the matter of Ocelot pulling out a clip-on skeleton stock for one of his revolvers, The End's horrible mutant Mosin-Nagant (with a folding stock and pistol grip) and Snake's custom M1911, which has been variously twiddled and re-customized to the point it takes him over a dozen closeup photographs to adequately describe it to Sigint.
• Guns Do Not Work That Way:
  • Slow-motion scenes of The Boss firing the Patriot show the bullets tumbling in flight tip over tail from the moment they exit the barrel. There is absolutely no reason the gun should do that to the bullets, and there would be no practical benefit to be gained from firing bullets that behave like that.
  • Volgin is able to use his electrified suit to detonate the ammunition slung across his chest in bandoliers, which behaves exactly as if it were fired from an actual rifle. With no chamber to contain the round or barrel to control the bullet's direction, the rounds should simply pop off like a glorified cherrybomb.
• Hand Wave: Seemingly in response to criticism of the over-extended and often silly origin stories of the Dead Cell unit in Metal Gear Solid 2, the Cobra Unit and Volgin's powers simply aren't explained. They just have them. The Pain holds a queen bee in his backpack and uses his acrobatics to command the bees by spreading pheromones, while The Phantom Pain reveals that The End and perhaps The Fear owed their powers to the vocal cords parasites.
• Handshake Refusal: President Johnson awards the Distinguished Service Cross to Snake. He shakes Johnson's hand, but refuses to shake the DCI's hand, because it's believed that the DCI had him kill his mentor to both prevent an international incident and recover a massive sum of money from the Big Bad. The latter is true. In the former instance, it was his predecessor who was actually responsible because he was afraid of her charisma.
• Have a Nice Death: During the fight with The Boss, if the player was paying attention, they'll remember that she calls in an air strike before the fight begins, ensuring that she'll die. She warns the player to kill her before that happens. If the player fails to kill her in 10 minutes, she'll remark that it's all over and the player will get a cutscene showing both of their demises via MiGs. At least you get to hear the most triumphant rendition of the game's theme song.
• Heart Container: Snake's maximum life will increase by a small amount every time he uses the CURE function to restore red health (a portion of the life meter that won't regenerate over time because of injuries like embedded bullets, broken bones and the like).
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: The Cobras. The Pain controls bees and is effectively a living beehive. This makes him pretty much unstoppable on an open battlefield, stinging to death any soldiers without having to even be present himself. The Sorrow is kind of a spirit Aquaman. He didn't just talk to spirits, he could pull battle plans, orders and other assorted information regarding the opposition from ANY dead soldier, which, you know, there can be a lot of in a war.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Ocelot spends the entire plot jumping between helping and hindering Snake (such as betraying Volgin to help Snake, before trying to crash Snake's plane for a duel to the death). Taken even further when it's revealed he was ADAM, making him a triple agent.
• He Knows About Timed Hits:
  • The Boss gives a complicated and difficult sounding explanation of how one would move silently in real life. However, Snake is speechless for a second and The Boss settles for saying "But all you need to do is press the directional button in the direction you wish to move," since the real life info is useless to the player.
  • There's another conversation where The Boss goes into detail about using your sense of smell to your advantage, only for Snake to point out that he can't smell anything at all. While anosmia is a real condition, Snake's reaction is more likely because the player can't smell anything through the game itself.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: The Boss posthumously becomes this. EVA lampshades her tragic fate:
  "In America, she's a soldier with no sense of honor. In Russia, she's a monster who almost unleashed a nuclear catastrophe..."
• High-Speed Battle: There's a chase involving Snake and EVA escaping an exploding base with enemy soldiers and the Big Bad in the Shagohod in hot pursuit.
• Hilarious Outtakes: The Secret Theater films in Subsistence qualify as such.
• Historical Domain Character: Lyndon B. Johnson and Nikita Khrushchev. The former in fact presents Big Boss with the Distinguished Service Cross and the title of "Big Boss" at the end.
• Historical In-Joke: Several relating to 1960s projects and events:
  • If Snake calls Major Zero shortly after arriving in Dremuchij North, during the conversation, Snake will tell Major Zero that the drone he used to infiltrate Tselinoyarsk may need its landing buffer redesigned, as potential pilots will get hurt or killed if they have to use it in its current state. This refers to the real-life reason as to why the project ended up canceled: a launch went awry and crashed midair into the M-21, which killed the drone operator.
  • One of the radio conversations with EVA has her discussing the Katyn Forest massacre with Snake; apparently, in the Metal Gear timeline, Volgin was personally responsible for starting it and most of the actual killings.
  • If one calls Major Zero shortly after meeting up with EVA before infiltrating Groznyj Grad via Tikhogornyj, Zero will be holding back tears in regards to the phrase "I'll be your eyes." This is because this phrase was also used by an American spy who worked within GRU, Oleg Penkovskiy, who was discovered and executed in 1963. Appropriately, his codename was "Hero."
  • At one point, Sigint will mention that the Russians trained dogs to plant bombs below enemy tanks during World War II, where while they were successful in training the dogs to do the process itself, they messed up in that they ended up having the dogs bomb their own tanks by mistake, due to their using their own tanks to train the dogs. This actually happened in real life, with the suspected cause being that the Russians and the Germans used different fuel sources for their tanks.
  • If Snake holds a Claymore mine and calls Sigint, he suspects that the ones the player finds were stolen from an American arsenal or from performance trials in Southeast Asia. He then suspects that it won't be long before the Russians make their own version. In real life, the Russians eventually did develop their own directed anti-personnel mine, the MON-50, which shares more than a few similarities to the Claymore.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • In Krasnogorje, there are anti-aircraft guns on the mountainside. You can actually use them against their own Hinds.
  • Colonel Volgin, who has the ability to course electricity through his body, gets killed by a bolt of lightning. It's lampshaded with Snake saying, "Fried by a bolt of lightning, a fitting end." It's made even more interesting in how, throughout the game, he commonly chants "Kuwabara, kuwabara", a Japanese expression meant to ward off lightning. In the final battle against him, however, when a storm rolls in, he not only neglects to say it, he outright mocks the lightning!
• Honey Trap: EVA is a shameless homage to the Honey Trap Bond girl. For both sides (Snake and Volgin).
• Hong Kong Dub: Very apparent, considering the previous games' lip flaps matched up to the English dialogue. It's most noticeable in a scene after the torture sequence, when The Boss talks to Snake in private, her mouth flaps for a couple seconds before we hear a strained "Run."
• Hopeless Boss Fight: When you encounter "The Sorrow", any sort of offense is useless since you can't hurt him or his spirits. The only way out is by essentially dying, game over screen and all, and taking the revival pill.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Food will instantly restore stamina, can be used mid-combat as a free action, and can be consumed all in one go. Unlike other examples of the trope, some food becomes rotten if left in inventory for too long but can be treated by medicine. This example is most noticeible when dealing with stamina drainers such as leeches or The End.
• I Ate WHAT?!: Naked Snake will eat almost anything he finds in the woods with glee. The one exception to this is if Para-Medic informs him that the vultures are known to eat human flesh after he's already sampled some of their meat. He's notably disturbed by the prospect of being a cannibal. If you eat a vulture that fed on a dead soldier, when you reach the Sorrow's river, that soldier's ghost will have a vulture on its shoulder and moan, "YOU ATE ME!"
• I Call It "Vera": The Fear wields two crossbows he calls the Little Joe and the William Tell.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: The Boss, though it's because she's under orders from the U.S. government not to kill herself or tell Snake the truth behind her mission. The only way to avert a nuclear war is for Snake to eliminate The Boss. No other course of action will do. She accepts her orders and follows them through to the end, showing a truly unparalleled sense of honor that no other character really lives up to:
  EVA: A lesser woman would have been crushed by such a burden.
• Iconic Sequel Character: The Boss, EVA, Major Zero, and Volgin have become the most crucial characters for the story and world building of latter Metal Gear games, but did not appear in the series until this one.
• I Didn't Mean to Turn You On: Snake probably didn't expect Ocelot to get turned on by his torture session.
• If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: Volgin orders The Boss to cut out Snake's eyes to prove her loyalty. The scene is especially tense since we know for a fact that Big Boss lost an eye at some point, so the framing of the moment suggests to us that we're about to find out why. Fortunately, someone stops The Boss from committing the act. Unfortunately, Snake loses his eye from a completely unrelated means in the same scene.
• I Let You Win: Ocelot's excuse every time. Or maybe not an excuse, since he's your CIA contact.
• I'll Never Tell You What I'm Telling You!: When Volgin tortures Snake, he insists that Snake is after "the legacy." Snake actually doesn't know what he is talking about, so Volgin brags of what it is and where he's hidden it. Cue The Mole, currently in the room with them, going to steal it for themselves.
• Impairment Shot: Seen once Snake is shot in the eye; from then on, if you enter first-person view that side of the screen is blacked out.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Ocelot, as usual. If the player gets the Single Action Army, this can apply to Snake as well.
• Improbable Weapon User: Most of Snake's weapons are completely normal (if a bit advanced for their time period). However, you can also throw food and captured animals around. This includes live poisonous snakes. Throwing a king cobra at a GRU soldier is one fun way to creatively get rid of an enemy without wasting a bullet. Or, if you've destroyed the food storage in the area, the soldiers will be starving and will pick up any rotten or poisonous food you throw out for them.
• Improperly Placed Firearms:
  • The Patriot is an XM16E1 with a Beta C-Mag, during the time when the M16 was still in the evaluation phase. The customizations given to it make it handle more like a handgun, allowing The Boss to wield it one-handed (and keep it steady) despite the recoil. Snake says the magazine's feed mechanism is shaped like the infinity symbol, to which Sigint admits that would indeed give unlimited ammo.
  • The XM16E1 is also found in the game as well, complete with a supressor and camo paint job. Sigint suggest that they might have been captured from the evaluation phase held in Southeast Asia.
• Improvised Lightning Rod: Russian Glowcap mushrooms can be used to draw Volgin's lightning bolts if you throw them into the battlefield during his boss fight. They can only take one hit before being destroyed, though.
• I'm Standing Right Here: Several times, particularly the Russian glowcap conversation, Snake's support team will speak in the background and hope he can't hear them.
• Incredibly Obvious Bug:
  • Happens once unobtrusively and once inserted into an open wound by Ocelot. Ocelot's transmitter would be pretty hard to find, if it weren't because you have to manually heal your wounds, and the transmitter shows up as... well, as a transmitter in a wound. Leaving it in means you have to sneak past several enemies in an area that would be unoccupied otherwise, but grants an extra cutscene when Snake meets up with EVA where she finds the transmitter and helps remove it in the most innuendo-laden manner the devs could think of.
  • The Boss plants a less obvious one on Snake so the Cobra unit can track his movements and set up ambushes, which Volgin finds.
• Indestructible Edible: CalorieMates(TM), Instant Noodles and Russian Rations do not go stale, though the rations taste horrible.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • The EZ Gun, which is either given to you for free by setting the game to "Very Easy" or else by collecting every single living thing in the game (harder than it sounds since there are a few easily missable ones). It's an infinite-use tranquilizer pistol with a suppressor that never wears out, but it gets better: there's a laser sight for greater accuracy, it partially regenerates your stamina and just holding it will keep your camo index at a minimum of 80%, more than enough to freely walk almost anywhere without the enemy seeing you unless they're right on top of you.
  • invoked The Patriot, the uniquely modified XM16E1 The Boss carries, is given to Snake during New Game Plus mode. It has a high rate of fire and a Bottomless Magazine thanks to the magazine being shaped like an infinity symbol. When Sigint asks Snake how he got his hands on that when The Boss has the only one of it in existence, Snake tells him not to think about it too much.
  • The Sneaking Suit is found in the locker Snake dumps Raikov's body in when he returns to Groznyj Grad. Despite appearances, it does fit the name in that it provides respectable camouflage in any environment, although not to the extent of dedicated patterns. It also has the added benefit of reducing the damage Snake takes and the amount of stamina drained over time. As such, it's near fitting that it's one of the best uniforms to use against The Boss.
• Informed Equipment: Snake only carries the gun he's currently equipped with no matter what's in his inventory; unsurprising, as his full inventory would barely fit in the back of a pickup truck and he'd look a bit silly with cages containing three live snakes attached to his back. Based on cutscenes, the only weapons Snake needs to complete the game are the Survival Knife, Mk 22, M1911A1 Custom, SVD, Single Action Army, and the RPG-7, all of which he's given in cutscenes if he's not obtained them ingame already.
• Injured Player Character Stage: Four-fifths of the way through the game Snake gets captured and shot in the eye, permanently blinding him. Thereafter for the rest of the game, if the player enters first-person view mode, the extreme right-hand side of the screen will be darkened and the depth perception will be inaccurate compared to beforehand. This is taken even further in the remake of the game for the 3DS: the 3D effect is disabled when entering first-person view mode after Snake gets shot in the eye.
• Insistent Terminology: Most people who see CQC in action refer to it as "judo." In the 1960s, judo was an extremely popular buzzword, so even if it's not fully the same thing, it makes sense why everyone would keep saying that.
• Instant Leech: Just Fall in Water!: Leeches have a nasty habit of clinging to Snake's body if he moves about in water for too long.
• Invisibility Cloak:
  • The Fear's uniform grants him near-invisibility, at the cost of rapidly depleting his stamina. It doesn't hold up so well under infrared, however. If the player stamina kills him, they can receive his camo. It gives a guaranteed 80% camo index, but drains the player's stamina so fast that it's Awesome, but Impractical.
  • As in the previous games, the player can unlock the stealth camouflage that makes them 100% invisible (95% during alert phase).
• Interactive Start Up: The left and right analog sticks can be used to change aspects of the opening credits, such as what language the credits are displayed in, what symbols scroll across the screen, and how fast and in which direction they do so.
• I Only Read It For The Articles: invoked After Snake escapes from Groznyj Grad's prison, should he have the magazines on him prior to capture, calling EVA will have her reveal that she knows about the magazines, although she nonetheless promises not to throw anything away, with Snake being unable to explain why he had them. EVA, however, isn't too upset that he has them in themselves, more that he would actually read them during a mission, or that he would use them to distract an enemy, explaining that he should request her help [in distracting the enemy], at least.
• Ironic Name: The Sorrow is always seen with a smile, whereas The Boss, a.k.a. "The Joy", is almost always scowling.
• Is It Something You Eat?: An interesting subversion; Snake, being a survivalist, will eat anything, flora or fauna. Rather, the question asked to Para-Medic is "How does it taste?" She really calls him out on his stupidity for questioning the taste of a fly agaric mushroom after being explicitly told it would kill him.
• Is This Thing Still On?: In an optional radio conversation with Zero, Zero will excuse himself after learning that Snake saw the other side during his battle with The Sorrow and talks with Para-Medic about Snake's condition. However, he and Para-Medic are standing a bit too close to the mike, or he forgot to turn it off, causing Snake to hear the entire conversation.
• It Has Been an Honor: When it seems as though Snake and EVA's WIG is going to be shot down by two MiGs, Snake gives this exchange:
  Snake: You were great, EVA.
  EVA: Huh?
  Snake: Thanks.
• It Only Works Once: You can use the mask given to you at the start of your mission during Colonel Volgin's first bossfight to stall him, making him believe you're his lover, Ivan Raikov. Whether you choose to get in a free hit or just wait too long, he will eventually wise up and aggressively charge at Snake, never being fooled by that ploy again.
• It's All Upstairs From Here: There's an incredibly long ladder which the player is required to climb. The ladder is so long, in fact, that there's enough time to play a sizable chunk of the game's theme song. However, the bottom of the ladder is in a jungle, while the top is on a mountain.
• It's a Wonderful Failure: Kill any important characters, and Campbell yells at you for causing a Time Paradox. On any of the Game Over screens, the words slowly morph into "Time Paradox" if you let it sit.
• It Will Never Catch On: Sigint wonders what Granin is thinking trying to design a tank on legs,^note ironically enough, Granin likewise disparages Sokolov's "rocket engine on a tank" idea, which does indeed not catch on, save for a non-nuclear-capable, unmanned weapon in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker resembling it and Snake mocks the addition of a three-round-burst firing mode on the XM16E1.^note Most variants of the gun in military use today are incapable of fully-automatic fire. Snake also scoffs at Para-Medic's description of an early VCR — though he expresses interest in "movies where you control the characters yourself." On the opposite end, Para-Medic is certain Godzilla will still be popular by 2004,^note Godzilla was indeed still popular by the time Godzilla: Final Wars came out in the same year as this game to commemorate the series' 50th anniversary and has remained so since, but people had mixed opinions on the quality of Final Wars. and Major Zero states he won't be surprised if 20 more James Bond movies are created.^note Two Bond films had been released by the time the game is set in late 1964, with a third being released about two weeks after the end of Operation Snake Eater. Number 22, Quantum of Solace, would release about four years after the game came out.
• It's Raining Men: How Snake enters Tselinoyarsk during the Virtuous Mission and, to a slightly lesser extent, Operation Snake Eater. He parachutes out of the drone upon ejecting in the latter mission.
• Jack of All Stats:
  • Tiger Stripe camo to some extent, as it actually is the best option in a few areas, while remaining effective but not the best for several more.
  • The Snake camo, which the player gets for stamina-killing The Boss.
• Jungle Japes: Most of the game, more specifically at the first quarter of the game, during the fights with The Fear and End, and while you're meeting up with/escorting EVA. You also come across the typical jungle animals like snakes, crocodiles, and frogs to further cement this trope.
• Just Between You and Me: Volgin actually says outright that he's going to explain all his plans to Snake before he kills him, in so many words.
• Justified Extra Lives: Whenever Naked Snake dies (or takes certain actions), he creates a "Time Paradox", preventing Solid Snake from being "born" and/or the earliest Metal Gear games from ever happening. It's up to the player to ensure that doesn't happen, making the whole game feel kind of like a Wayback Trip in a meta sort of way.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • Preferred strategy of The Fury, as well as the mooks who use standard flamethrowers (his uses rocket fuel).
  • Snake can incinerate enemies with the White Phosphorus grenade.
• Kill the Ones You Love: Even before the cruel Twist Ending, it's brought up a lot about whether Snake is, not just physically, but emotionally capable of pulling the trigger on his beloved mentor and substitute mother. When he finally gets to that point, it's clear that he's using every bit of emotional willpower he has to go through with it.
• Knight in Sour Armor: The Boss who still believes to the end that the world can be made into a kinder, gentler place, who in turn turned Snake into another one at the end of the game.
• Konami Code: On Normal or easier difficulty modes, the notoriously tricky boss The End can be seen on the Map screen with the help of the code (with Square and Triangle substituing for B and A).
• Ladder Physics: Naked Snake has to climb a very tall ladder to get to the top of a mountain. The only exhaustion experienced is on the part of the player. The ladder is so long, about a quarter up, the game starts playing the theme song to kill time.
• Lampshade Hanging: The explanation of why the Patriot has infinite ammo is a particularly amusing example:
  Sigint: ...and it never runs out of ammo?
  Snake: Never.
  Sigint: Why's that?
  Snake: Because the internal feed mechanism is shaped like an infinity symbol.
  Sigint: Ah, I get it. Yep, that'll give you infinite ammo.
• Large Ham:
  • Volgin is clearly having entirely too much fun in more or less every scene he's in.
  • The Pain spends virtually all of his screen time posturing and posing like a combination between Sentai hero and a pro wrestler; as expected of a guy whose entire thing is using large swarms of hornets to kill people, subtlety isn't exactly his thing.
• Last Lousy Point: The 64 Kerotan frog toys distributed throughout the game (Yoshi plush dolls in Snake Eater 3D) aren't all that bad, set against the standard of other games on this page. There's a camouflage available that lets you hear Kerotans in a room or screen you haven't shot yet, so you know to keep looking for them. The real problem is the Kerotans you need to shoot during the bike chase scene. You only get about a second to line up a proper shot, and seldom have the time after making a shot to listen for the sound they make to confirm that you even got it. Save-scumming is the only safe option. Failing to get the Kerotan Rank after being completely sure you got all the Kerotans in the bike scene is, to say the least, highly distressing.
• Last Note Nightmare: When you get a Time Paradox, the music goes on for a while until the whole screen reverses color and plays a loud noise followed by a gunshot when the letters become "TIME PARADOX".
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: When the game was originally announced, Naked Snake being Big Boss was meant to be a spoiler. It took everyone watching about 10 seconds to figure it out once the time period was revealed, though, so Konami quietly stopped acting like it was ever supposed to be a secret.
• Law of Inverse Fertility: Zig-Zagged by The Boss, who was written to be a motherly woman in accordance with the game's maternity theme, but her own family life was a disaster. While she managed to successfully birth a child (during Operation Overlord no less), he was kidnapped by the Ancient Conspiracy who then forced her to kill her lover and the father of their child, The Sorrow. After that, she was rendered infertile from her involvement in Operation Buster–Jangle. As a result, she compensated by becoming A Father to His Men and a surrogate mother to 15-year-old Big Boss.
• Leave No Witnesses:
  • Naked Snake gets told this early on. Actually doing so is ill-advised, as it makes a later boss fight harder. (It's actually more of a directive to remain unseen, rather than kill everyone)
  • The actual Snake Eater mission goes out of its way to subvert this: if you leave no witness or evidence of US involvement in the mission, then Russia won't be able to prove that the US cleaned up the mess it created. So you have to leave some people alive (though nothing really comes of it if you ''do'' kill everyone, mostly because of the way the story is ultimately framed).
  • Later in the series we learn that Operation Snake Eater had a cleaner following Snake, who dealt with any loose ends after Snake infiltrated and compromised the area. From what we know about Skull Face, he didn't leave much to chance. Or anything, for that matter.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: The game features a short load every time you go into the pause menu. Ordinarily this wouldn't be too much of a problem but in order to take the stealth option you're required to change Naked Snake's camo in the pause menu quite often. Also, Naked Snake's food has to be accessed from the pause menu as well (failure to eat for an extended time results in lower stamina and a rumbling stomach which can alert nearby enemies; not something you'd want when sneaking up behind an enemy to slit his throat).
• Locked Door: There's a tricky door. Just remember to disguise yourself as a scientist before attempting it. Or hide.
• Lonely Funeral: The Boss. The only person who bothered to visit her grave and pay respect to her was Big Boss (Naked Snake). Well, at least he consistently did it, and even during her final moments, he was there. Possibly done to show how shallow the other higher-ups were, and how they didn't really care about her sacrifice. Also, due to the nature of her final mission, she was never even given a proper funeral. She is buried as an anonymous soldier.
• Long Song, Short Scene: There's a mix of "Snake Eater" that only plays during the final fight with The Boss. It's never been released on any official CD, and it's quite hard to find on the Internet. Also worth mentioning The Boss's theme that plays during the radio conversation with her at the beginning of the Virtuous Mission, not heard again and also not featured in any soundtrack.
• Lost in Translation:
  • In the Japanese version of the game, the comical Non Standard Game Over messages from Colonel Campbell (when he berates you for creating a Time Paradox via killing Ocelot, EVA or Sokolov) is an allusion to Takeshi Aono voicing Doc Emmett Brown in the Japanese dub of the Back to the Future movies. Since Campbell is voiced by Paul Eiding in English, the joke is effectively lost.
  • Like every game since Metal Gear Solid 2, the implications of the Patriots' true name are lost in the English version. "La Li Lu Le Lo" are the missing vowel sounds in Japanese; the point of the name is that it's not technically possible to write or say it in Hiragana (because there's no distinction between "L" and "R" and the string is usually "Ra Ri Ru Re Ro"), so the Patriots censor their name to something that can't be written down or spoken. This is never really gone into in the English version (since English doesn't do that), so it just seems to be meaningless babble.
  • Volgin uses the phrase "Kuwabara, Kuwabara" several times. It's a Japanese expression equivalent to the English "knock on wood" that is believed to ward off lightning. At the end of the game, he refuses to say the phrase, instead mocking the storm, and is promptly struck by lightning.
  • Raikov's name "Raidenovitch" can be read in Japanese as "Raiden no Bitch," meaning "Thunderbolt's Bitch." The impossible-to-translate pun seems basically the only reason for Volgin's once-off nickname. While it means "Son of Raiden" in Russian, it hardly helps since Raiden wasn't even born yet in the '60s. However, Raikov clearly is a spiritual successor to him, at least, chronologically in real life.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: A combination of radio conversations with EVA and The Boss's own admission that she gave birth on the battlefield at Normandy reveal that The Boss is Ocelot's mother. While it is never outright said in Metal Gear Solid 3, if the player talked to the support team throughout the game, this will be pieced together.
• A MacGuffin Full of Money: The Philosophers' Legacy. Volgin describes the sum on two occasions as "one hundred billion dollars" and "enough to fight the war five times over."
• Magic Mushroom: "These Glowing Mushrooms recharged my batteries!" Worth noting is that after Snake mentions this, Para-Medic consults with one of the other Mission Control agents over how the hell that's even possible.
• Makeup Weapon: The "Kiss of Death" which is based on a KGB-issue 4.5mm single-shot pistol disguised as lipstick. In Tatyana's first appearance during the Virtuous Mission, Volgin forcibly confiscates the kiss of death from her when he notices her reaching for it, thus resulting in them suspecting she was KGB, although Volgin gives it back to her anyway, thinking she'll prove useful. Tatyana is implied to be using one when she attempts to threaten Sokolov into giving up the Shagohod's test data, but it turns out to be ordinary lipstick. She later tries to use the real one from earlier against Volgin, only to have him twist her arm (and the gun's barrel) away before she can trigger it.
• Male Gaze: During cutscenes between Snake and EVA, switching to first-person view will usually show the player where Snake's attention really is. This is heartwarmingly subverted later on, towards the end of the game.
• Manly Tears: Snake sheds one manly tear in the final shot, and he's perfectly justified in doing it, as is the player. In an example of Developer's Foresight, if the player switches to first person view during that scene, the screen will be a little blurred. This is because Big Boss's good eye is tearing up.
• Marathon Boss:
  • The End, a sniper battle that can easily take an hour or more if you don't kill him via Easter Egg (by sniping him long before the battle starts, or by waiting a real-time week for him to die of old age). As a webcomic said it... "Hey, you wanna have a 45-minutes sniper fight?" Hideo Kojima originally wanted the fight to last two weeks, but was talked out of it.
  • The fight with The Sorrow can easily become one if you've been playing aggressively so far, and you don't know (or don't use) the quick way.
• Marathon Level: The mile-long ladder. It only lasts a few minutes, and the game's theme song does play in the background, but a few minutes of tactical ladder climbing action is far too many.
• Marked Bullet: Ocelot has one for Snake. It's a blank.
• Maximum HP Reduction: The injury system ultimately works in this manner. When Snake gets damaged in certain manners he'll suffer an injury of some sort (a cut for being slashed by a guard's knife, a broken leg for falling a long way, etc.) that will cause a part of his health bar to turn red and be unable to heal until the player goes into the Survival Viewer and treats the injury.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The Boss's former codename was "The Joy", ostensibly because she's really only happy when in battle (hence why she's a sourpuss whenever out of combat). There's another phrase, however, that goes: "The greatest joy is the joy of duty," which fits her perfectly.
  • Volgin's fortress is "Groznyj Grad," meaning "Fearsome City."
  • "Snake Eater" is a (usually insulting) nickname for U.S. Green Berets (of which Snake was a member of prior to the game), referring to the fact that survival training doesn't exactly encourage a picky eater. In-universe, it's also a reference to the fact that Snake's mission entails taking out The Boss and her Cobra Unit.
  • The members of Snake's Mission Control all have meaningful codenames:
    • During the Virtuous Mission, Major Zero chooses the codename "Tom" (from Tom, Dick and Harry) after what he thought was the codename of the tunnel that the POWs used to escape from a prison camp in The Great Escape. After the mission goes awry, he learns that "Harry" was the actual escape tunnel, and he decides to revert to being called Major Zero.
    • Para-Medic takes her name from her idea of medics parachuting into battle.
    • Sigint is short for "Signal Intelligence", his specialty. He's also the go-to guy for information on weapons and camo.
  • Subverted to hell and back with the two main characters: "Snake" is the one who ends up tempted and fooled by "EVA's" lies, and "ADAM" ends up playing both of them by posing as Major Ocelot with no one the wiser.
• Medal of Dishonor: Snake receives the Distinguished Service Cross for killing The Boss. While the medal is genuinely meant to be an award for playing out his part perfectly in the whole thing, Snake has by this point learned the truth behind The Boss' motives, and as such he doesn't see it as an honor in the slightest.
• Medals for Everyone: As aforementioned, Snake and his support team show up at a ceremony where Snake is given the Distinguished Service Cross and the title of Big Boss. The drama comes from the fact that Snake is being rewarded for successfully completing Operation Snake Eater after he learns the truth about what the mission really was. He ends up walking out in disgust after shaking hands with the President, despite the fact that everyone there is applauding him and other people want to congratulate him.
• Menu Time Lockout:
  • Snake can switch his camo, heal wounds and eat things (all at the same time, if need be) instantly, since all these actions take place in a paused menu.
  • If the player has the game paused during the final boss fight for more than ten minutes, the airstrike that The Boss called in will trigger once they unpause.
• Messianic Archetype: The Boss has certain elements of this. Her death, in which she sacrificed everything for her country, is what set in motion the events of the entire series from Big Boss' Face–Heel Turn to the formation of the Patriots. Plus there's her dying in a white sneaking suit in a field of white flowers that are stained red with her blood. And all this is before we get to Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.
• Military Coup: A large premise of the plot is trying to halt a military coup that is being orchestrated by the Big Bad, Colonel Volgin, in the Soviet Union against Khrushchev as a means to prevent World War III. The stinger reveals that the coup would ultimately be successful anyway, but Volgin's plans for a new war died with him.
• Mind Screwdriver: Served as the first part of one for Metal Gear Solid 2 with Metal Gear Solid 4 finishing the job. For example, the whole subplot with The Sorrow serves to very neatly retroactively explain why Ocelot could be possessed by Liquid in the second game: because his father was a medium.
• Mirror Boss: The final fight with The Boss is effectively this. Snake has three basic specialties: stealth, CQC, and guns. The Boss counters with her own powerful machine pistol, is a master martial artist, and wears white camouflage in a field of white flowers that makes her hard to see. If the player finds the black prototype sneaking suit, they can choose to wear it during the battle, mirroring The Boss's white Sneaking Suit. Is it practical? Not really. Does it look cool and symbolic? Yep. Flashbacks in Peace Walker depict Snake wearing the sneaking suit.
• Misplaced Wildlife: Tons of it, although Para-Medic can give a detailed explanation of every animal in the game, and explain that most of the animals that aren't supposed to be there were brought in for testing. Presumably, the misplaced wildlife was scattered all over the place to prevent players of the demo version from guessing where exactly the game takes place.
• Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: Snake is sent on a mission to assassinate his mentor, The Boss, who had defected to the Soviet Union. He joins forces with EVA, defeats both his fallen mentor and the Big Bad, alongside his Weapon of Mass Destruction, and is hailed as a hero. All's well that ends well right? Nope. Turns out in the big reveal, The Boss was actually a Fake Defector who had been implicated by the U.S. government as a scapegoat for them to retrieve a huge sum of money, EVA is actually a Chinese spy who had been manipulating Snake's emotions, and the entire operation was just a way for the government to save face, with The Boss, an agent who was like a mother to Snake, and who loved her country, forever known after this as a traitor of the worst kind, when the truth was the exact opposite. Both Snake and the player find out about this at the same time, which greatly contributes to the depressing tone the game ends on. No surprise then that Snake later becomes Big Boss.
• Mobile Shrubbery: Snake can have several different camouflage patterns of boxes and they still fool guards... except when they notice a box moving. Of course, none of the Comm Officers believe them.
• Moe Greene Special: The Sorrow's broken lens and the blood leaking from the eye behind it heavily imply this. Seeing as his assassin was his lover The Boss, her method of execution was probably meant to be as quick and painless as possible in addition to professional.
• Moment Killer:
  • Snake manages to cock-block himself. EVA moves in to kiss him and suggests a little more when he out of the blue decides to offer her a roasted snake, while moving his head away from her.
  • Later on, he declares his love for her... except he doesn't:
    Snake: EVA, I need you.
    EVA: Say that one more time.
    Snake: I need you. I can't fly the WIG by myself.
• Mood Whiplash: While Metal Gear Solid 3 is the most willfully goofy entry in the series, it also has some dark moments. The use of this is perfectly illustrated in a single scene in which Snake is disguised as Volgin's effeminate boyfriend Raikov, who looks exactly like Raiden from Metal Gear Solid 2, and Volgin playfully grabs at his crotch in much the same way President Johnson does to Raiden in the second game. One might think that this is just a Mythology Gag. However, once Volgin realizes the person in question is not actually Raikov, it leads to him pummeling Snake half to death in one of the series' most shocking scenes.
• Mook Chivalry: Mooks are notorious repeat offenders; however, they will gang up on you, and they only grudgingly let Major Ocelot fight Snake one-on-one. When they break the code and attack Snake during the battle, Ocelot yells at them.
• Mr. Fanservice:
  • Snake. The player can even play as him shirtless throughout the entire game.
  • Ocelot is a strapping young man with sharp features and a cool, if evil, style.
• MST3K Mantra: Invoked. Call Sigint during a New Game Plus and he's in awe of Snake's new weapons. When he asks Snake where he got them, Snake's response is essentially, "Don't worry about it."
• Mucking in the Mud: There are pools of mud like this. If the mud is deep enough, Snake will eventually sink to his death. What's more, the mud houses leeches which will cling to Snake and sap his stamina.
• Mugged for Disguise: Major Raikov; whether he's killed for it is up to you. In a Mythology Gag, if you do kill him, he'll be naked in The Sorrow's river battle, shamefully clutching his crotch just like Raiden in 2.
• Mundane Fantastic: Most Metal Gear games involve this to some degree and this one is no exception. Lots of real-world weapons and technology stand side-by-side with terrorists with bizarre superpowers. More tellingly, people don't even bother to explain the superpowers. Everyone's in awe of Volgin's electrical powers, but nobody ever questions it for a moment.
• Mundane Made Awesome:
  • Ask anyone what the most memorable part of the game is, and whilst many will point to the numerous bombastic action sequences, just as many players will point to the ladder. Two solid minutes of Snake climbing a ladder, often regarded as one of the most iconic moments in gaming, primarily due to a vocal-only version of the main theme playing as you climb.
  • In Secret Theatre, Snake and The Boss fight... with Rock–Paper–Scissors. The Boss wins with the Davy Crockett.
  • Plenty of the alternative uses of the game's many, many items. A rotten piece of rat meat can be weaponised to neutralise a guard non-lethally if you so happen to have taken out their supply depot so that all of the guards are starving. Throw it at him and he'll happily eat it, then have a bout of stomach illness.
• Mundangerous: Get shot a few dozen times with an assault rifle? Just wait a bit and it heals. Fell asleep while climbing a tree? Instant death, regardless of height (many are shorter than some ledges the player can jump off with no damage).
• My Death Is Just the Beginning: Subverted. The Boss didn't have any plan of her own past dying, but before the final battle, she ominously states that whoever lives will have to face an endless series of battles and will never obtain peace. This is undoubtedly true, as Big Boss's victory is what sets up the rest of the series.
• Mythology Gag:
  • There are conversations related to the old game mechanics, including one on the silliness of eating food to instantly recover health, and an extended discussion between Snake and Sigint about why Metal Gears wouldn't actually work.
  • Ocelot's boss fight is prefaced with him pulling out two revolvers and saying "This time, I've got twelve shots." As opposed to the six he had in the original Metal Gear Solid.
  • Snake says that he feels he can't help but compare himself negatively to James Bond all the time when explaining to Zero, a huge James Bond fan, why he is disinterested in the franchise. In the original MSX2 version of Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Big Boss' appearance was modeled after Sean Connery, who actually played James Bond around the time the game is set.
  • Before the boss fight with The End, EVA talks to Snake to inform him what he is going up against. She asks if he has any experience as a sniper, and Snake says he has in urban and marine environments.
  • The full codenames for both, Naked Snake and The Boss, have the same number of letters as "Solid Snake" and "Big Boss".
• Navel-Deep Neckline:
  • EVA has her outfit unzipped to her pelvis, leaving her torso exposed, although she's at least wearing a bra.
  • The Boss rips open her shirt to show off her snake scar, exposing her cleavage and navel and unlike EVA she's clearly not wearing a bra. For some reason, she doesn't see fit to button it back up for the ensuing fight.
• Near-Death Experience: A boss fight takes place during one of these after Snake jumps off a cliff into a river some 50-100 feet below to escape from an enemy base. There you meet The Sorrow, a medium and former member of The Cobras, and you have to face everyone you've killed in the game before you can come back to life.
• Necessarily Evil: In order to save the world, The Boss has to be perceived as a traitor and die by Snake's hands. This causes some nasty emotional trauma to him, and differences in interpretation of her will ultimately made things worse for the next half-century.
• New Game Plus: Snake keeps all his gear and camo pickups in a New Game Plus, and can also get several rewards, including Ocelot's Single Action Army and The Boss's Patriot carbine. Weapons found during gameplay are exempt as always, however, which sadly includes The End's tranquilizing sniper rifle. Notably, this is the first Metal Gear Solid game in which you can equip both stealth camouflage and infinite ammo simultaneously, due to the infinite ammo item being a face paint.^note Earlier games had these bonuses accompanying certain items; however, only one item can be equipped at a time. The infinite ammo bonus being provided by a face paint gets around this limitation.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: It's The Boss' death that finally push the formation of Patriots and Naked Snake's, a.k.a. Big Boss' Start of Darkness.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: When he tries to interrogate Snake, Volgin thinks he's really after the Philosophers' Legacy, and ends up telling him everything about what and where it is. Ocelot is in the room too, so he learns. And so does EVA, in disguise as Tatyana. And The Boss. And this is after The Boss tells him Snake was trained by her, and simply will not break. Volgin fails to successfully interrogate anyone in the entire game. Given that he's a major sadist, one assumes he loses a certain amount of objectivity.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: President Lyndon B. Johnson and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev aside, two of the attendees at Big Boss's award ceremony (implied to be the CIA Director and a high-ranking member of the DOD) were based on John McCone and Robert McNamara, who were the real-life CIA Director and Secretary of Defense, respectively, during that time period, and had it not been for some retcons in the story, they most likely would have been the exact same people. Likewise, while not actually seen, The Stinger has Ocelot briefly talking to the KGB Chief Director, who is strongly implied to be Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny (the real-life Chief Director at the time), about the time arriving to overthrow Khrushchev. Semichastny, in real life, was indeed involved in the overthrow of Khrushchev and the installment of Brezhnev.
• No-Gear Level: There's a point where you get captured and stripped of almost all your weapons, along with all your equipment and food, leaving you with only a fork and a gun with no ammunition with which to make your escape. It is, however, possible to trick the guard into giving you another weapon before attempting your escape - he pilfered your smokes, unaware that they're fake cigarettes that can emit sleeping gas, and will give them back if you throw enough food back at him to get him to talk to you - and you can also knock him out to get smoke grenades once you're out of your cell.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Volgin does this to Snake. It's not pretty.
• Noiseless Walker: The Spirit camo, which you can obtain by touching The Sorrow's body at the end of his boss battle, silences your footsteps. Combined with the Stealth Camouflage, you can be completely invisible and undetectable.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • As a result of having to kill The Sorrow, The Boss, formerly known as The Joy, never smiles throughout the events of Metal Gear Solid 3.^note Except for a warm-and-sad one after sharing with Snake her loss and her vision of a kinder, gentler world. Conversely, The Sorrow always wears a sinister grin whenever he appears, which essentially makes their original titles into misnomers.
  • Applies to all the Cobras considering The Pain is the loudest and angriest member, The Fury fights you slowly and oppressively in a dark tunnel with a terrifying atmosphere, and The Fear uses bolts that contain very painful poisons. The End meanwhile fights you with a tranquilizer rifle so he will never actually "end" you.
  • Joy, Sorrow, Fury, Pain, End and Fear are the emotions the Cobra Unit feel in battle.
• Non-Standard Game Over: Kill a character that plays a major role in the storyline (Ocelot, Sokolov or EVA), and the game ends with Colonel Campbell chiding Snake for causing a Time Paradox.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: The first time we see Sokolov, he actually is burning the production notes to the Shagohod, explaining why nobody tried building another.
• The Nose Knows: Ocelot realizes that Tatyana/EVA was the spy in their midst by the smell of motorcycle gasoline on her. Earlier, it was her distinct perfume.
• Not-Actually-Cosmetic Award: The Brown and Green Facepaints, one of which can be "awarded" based on a question you answer at the beginning of the game, have the secondary (and unmentioned) ability of giving you unlimited O2 and Grip, respectively.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: After the hilarious Russian accents in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Konami went with the Translation Convention route for all characters speaking Russian.
• Not Right in the Bed: The game's Big Bad, Volgin, grabs the crotch of Naked Snake, who is currently disguised as Volgin's subordinate/lover Ivan. He is able to identify Snake as an impostor just from this moment.
• Not So Above It All: Sigint is usually the Only Sane Man. However, even he has his quirks, as shown by his bizarre dreams and making a Latex Perfection mask with working eyeballs, but a mouth that never opens.

O-Z

• Obligatory Swearing: One of the radio conversations you can have is about a nightmare Sigint had about a giant walking turd that turns everything it shoots into shit.
• Odd Name Out:
  • Para-Medic ponders why Ocelot, a Russian agent, is named after a North American big cat. Snake speculates it attests to his speed and agility. Turns out he's an American spy planted to help Snake.
  • The End with the rest of the Cobra Unit. All of them have names about the emotions they feel during battle. "End" isn't an emotion. ^note  Sigint describes his emotion as "true oblivion". Based on The End's defeat cutscene, his emotion could alternatively be described as "acceptance of death", as he states he has "no regrets".
• Offscreen Teleportation: During your fight with The End, he can immediately appear right next to Snake if the player spends too long in first-person mode.
• Old Save Bonus: Completing both this game and Metal Gear Ac!d allows you to hook your PSP up to the PS2 via a USB cable and automatically unlock three bonus items which can only be obtained otherwise by long, difficult and arduous means.
• Ominous Save Prompt: Inverted. Right before facing The End, Para-Medic will tell Snake not to save his game in the middle of battle, since saving equates to falling asleep in this game. If the player still decides to save and load the game three days later, The End shoots Snake in the neck with a tranquilizer dart and carries him all the way back to the lab. If the player waits a week before playing again, however, The End will die of old age.
• One Dose Fits All: The game features a tranquillizer pistol, with which enemies can be dispatched non-lethally. Tranquilizer darts will be equally effective on any regular enemy regardless of size, provided they are not wearing full body armor. Bosses can also be defeated non-lethally, but rather than knocking them out with a single dart to the head, they instead have a "stamina" bar, much like their regular health meter, which depletes the more they get hit by tranquilizer darts. However, this stamina bar is based not on the enemy's size, physical fitness or constitution, but rather simply scales up linearly as part of the game's difficulty curve, in the interests of gameplay rather than realism.
• Only a Lighter: One of the gag reels from the Secret Theater, in which Snake gushes over his new custom M1911... only for him to pull the trigger and find out it's a lighter.
• Only Known by Their Nickname:
  • Almost everyone. Inverted in Volgin's case; Sokolov claims that "you in the West know him as 'Thunderbolt'," but aside from Sokolov and Zero, the latter in an optional radio conversation during the Virtuous Mission, nobody else ever calls Volgin by that name - Snake even responds to this claim with "never heard of him".
  • Played straight with Volgin's deceased father: He's never referred to anything else besides "Volgin's father." However, Volgin's middle name, which in Russian doubles as a patronymic name, is "Borisovitch", implying that his name was Boris Volgin.
  • The Boss has a similar case to Volgin. While her real name isn't revealed, it's claimed at various points that she has two other nicknames - "The Joy" being her actual codename among the Cobras, and "Voyevoda" as a nickname the Russians gave to her - which are never mentioned again outside of the cutscenes/radio conversations they're mentioned in (and one Secret Theater video in the Subsistence re-release).
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Ocelot regards Snake this way, even saying at one point: "Don't you die on me yet." The Boss also keeps Snake alive long enough for him to fulfill his mission of killing her.
• Only One Save File: Snake Eater 3D only has one save file, and there's no option to store additional files through an SD card.
• Opponent Instruction: After first encountering and fighting Major Ocelot, Naked Snake can't help but give the latter some pointers on his gun handling (as Ocelot is focusing far more on style than utility at this point in time), most notably recommending that Ocelot replace his automatic pistol with a revolver, seeing as it's more appropriate for Ocelot's instinctive recoil reduction technique. Amusingly, you can call Para-Medic after this, where she'll outright question why Snake is giving pointers to an enemy - and even though he doesn't have a real answer, he continues doing it anyway the next time they fight, when Ocelot gets his hands on the flashiest-looking revolver he could find and then fails to account for its lower capacity.
• On-Site Procurement: It's explicitly laid out that the U.S. government can't risk Naked Snake being captured on Soviet soil with American-made equipment and weapons, though, oddly enough, he finds American weapons almost as frequently as Soviet arms.^*Sigint handwaves this by saying that the Soviets have been capturing American equipment from various conflict zones and through espionage. There's also a distinction made between the opening Virtuous Mission, which was purely an American op and thus only gave Snake his knife and tranquilizer gun, and the later Operation Snake Eater, which was in part a Clear My Name thing after the Virtuous Mission ended with Volgin destroying a Russian lab with an American-supplied nuclear weapon, where Snake is also given a regular lethal pistol so that there actually is some indication that an American is operating in Russia.
• Operation: [Blank]: Part spoof and part Shout-Out, the first mission is codenamed "Virtuous Mission." Anyone who had been annoyed by Raiden in the previous game must've been glad to know that it was not, as Snake joked, "Virtual Mission". The second mission fits as well, being codenamed "Operation Snake Eater."
• Orbiting Particle Shield: The Pain uses live bees to protect himself from bullets.
• Orchestral Bombing: The final boss fight takes place in a field of white flowers and has a 10-minute time limit. If you have not defeated your opponent by that point, you both get killed in an airstrike. The fight starts with no music at all, but after 5 minutes an instrumental version of the games main theme, which you have heard several times at that point, starts playing and you know that if you haven't won by the final note, you'll be dead.
• Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: Unidentified Mysterious Animals (UMAs).
• Our Dragons Are Different: The Shagohod is a colossal screaming dragon made of steel, but a dragon nevertheless.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: There's an interesting experience with this trope. While in prison, Naked Snake can fall asleep if you save and quit. When you load it back, a hack-and-slash minigame starts. After a few minutes of slicing up giant mutant prison guard monsters, Snake wakes up from his nightmare, evoking a hilarious radio conversation from Para-Medic when called.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic: There are a lot of creative ways to defeat some of the bosses in the game. Some methods are even necessary for players embarking on a pacifist run:
  • There are lots of ways to deal with Ocelot during the duel with him. You can shoot beehives to force him to leave cover and get a shot at him. He will accuse you of playing dirty if you do this, for some reason. You can also shoot his hat off of his head, which stops him for a while until he can put it back on, giving you a free shot.
  • If The Fear's stamina is half-depleted, he will start hunting for food. The player can then throw poisoned or rotten food at him, further depleting his stamina, and leaving him vulnerable for a few more shots. Conveniently, the area is full of poisonous dart frogs and mushrooms, which you can collect during your first pass through the area before fighting him.
  • One of the things which make the boss fight with The End so entertaining for players is the immense variety of ways you can fight him. It's actually easier, in fact, not to try to beat him at his own game; except for his scope lens reflecting sunlight and a noisy parrot companion, it is seriously difficult to find him if you just keep looking through a scope, more so when doing so while he's already shooting at you. You can: track his footprints down with the thermal goggles and follow him around the battlefield; capture his parrot, which you can follow back to him; use the Directional Mic to listen for his heartbeat; among other strategies. Or if the whole thing is just too frustrating, you can actually use the Konami Code to show his location on the map. Or advance the internal clock of your console by seven or more days, resulting in him dying of old age.
  • For a non-boss variant (as well as a Call-Back to MGS1), there are several ways to escape your prison cell after Volgin's torture. If you caught the Easter Egg during the torture scene and saw The Sorrow holding up a chalkboard with a radio frequency written on it, you can use that to open the cell door. One very elaborate method of escape can be initiated by throwing the food you're given back at the guard. After doing this three times, a cutscene will ensue, which ends with the guard giving Snake back his cigarettes, which turn out to be the Cig-Spray tranquilizer gas weapon. You can then use that to incapacitate the guard as he walks in front of the cell door, opening it for you. Another method weaponizes an Easter Egg: going into view mode in the uniform menu and spinning around for long enough will cause Snake to vomit when the game is unpaused, and the guard will stupidly open the cell to investigate.
  • As opposed to just mowing him down with your guns, there are lots of other tactics which can be used against Volgin in the first fight with him. CQC is surprisingly effective against him, although you have to time your approach or risk getting damaged. Wearing the Raikov mask will disorient him for a second, allowing you a free shot, although this only works once. Throwing a tree frog at him also has the same effect. A more bizarre yet viable tactic is throwing a Russian Glowcap mushroom near him, which results in the mushroom absorbing all of his electrical attacks. One mushroom can only absorb one attack, however.
• Overly Long Gag: The sequence where the player climbs a ladder. For a very long time (about two minutes, in fact). Admittedly, Snake is actually climbing up a mountain. At some point, a vocal variation of the theme song starts playing for no apparent reason. Said ladder serves as the game's intermission, splitting the game into two halves.
• Pacifist Run: You can avoid killing the bosses. They have non-lethal hit bars, and you get a special bonus for defeating a boss with non-lethal force, but if they were supposed to die, they commit suicide in the following cutscene. However, there is one exception: Even if you defeat The Boss nonlethally, the game still forces you to kill her. Alternately, even using lethal force against bosses who survive the encounter either way (Ocelot and Volgin) doesn't count as a kill, allowing you to "kill" them and still perform a pacifist run (you just don't get their camouflage this way).
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • EVA's able to successfully fool the GRU members, except for The Boss, while acting as a former KGB officer by putting on glasses, slightly changing her hairstyle, and wearing a Soviet officer's outfit. The director's commentary even lampshades this fact.
  • When Snake puts on the scientist or technician disguises, he still wears his bandana. Soldiers are fooled, but run into another scientist/techie and they'll see right through it.
  • Snake manages to disguise himself exceptionally well as Raikov, to the extent that, in Zero's words, not even his own mother would tell them apart, but Volgin saw through the disguise after grabbing Snake's crotch. Later on, the player can gain a free hit on Volgin simply by putting on the Raikov mask in front of him.
• Paradiegetic Gameplay: You can "kill" The End by saving the game and then waiting for one real-life week (or, more commonly, fiddling with your system's date). When you load your game, The End will be dead from old age.
• Patriotic Fervor: The Boss, despite all that's happened to her in service of the U.S. government, remains loyal to America. Both out of genuine love of country and a desire to bring the divided world together.
• Peaceful in Death: The Boss. She even orders Snake to pull the trigger.
• Percussive Prevention: Punching out Eva and dragging her is the best way to keep her from doing something stupid that might attract enemy guards. Also saves on food since her stamina doesn't go down while asleep.
• Personal Space Invader: If Snake swims or wades in the jungle waters for too long, leeches may attach themselves to his skin and drain his stamina. You can burn them off with a cigar.
• Pinball Projectile: The game lets you do this once you get your hands on a Colt Single-Action Army, though its usefulness doesn't go far beyond Rule of Cool since it's 100% reliant on your own ability to use it with no auto-aiming feature.
• Pistol-Whipping: Ocelot very foolishly attempts to do this to Snake rather than attempt to un-jam his gun, a very bad move since Snake is a hand to hand expert. A few moments later, Snake shows Ocelot how it's done when he easily parries another attack from Ocelot, hits him in the gut, then smacks the already stunned Ocelot on the back of the head/neck with the butt of his own pistol.
• Player Mooks: The now-defunct online multiplayer mode for Subsistence had players controlling the enemy soldiers (from the KGB, GRU Spetsnaz, and Ocelot units) from Snake Eater in addition to Snake and other "unique characters".
• Playing Possum: On his mission, Snake is equipped with a fake death pill in case he gets caught, which drops his vital functions down to almost nothing. When the coast is clear, he can bite down on the Revival Pill embedded in his tooth to get back into action. Of course, trying to pull this trick on The Boss does not amuse her. And if you remain "dead" for too long (if the words "Snake Is Dead" change completely into "Time Paradox"), it's Game Over.
• Point of No Return: There are certain circumstances in the game that result in you being unable to backtrack to earlier areas. Once you’re thrown in the cavern after the Ocelot battle, you can’t return to the previous jungle areas, and the cave itself has a steep slope that prevents you from backtracking it as well. You’re also sealed off once you reach Groznyj Grad, preventing you from going back to the mountain areas.
• Poison Mushroom:
  • The game has poisonous food items. These have one beneficial use: if The Fear is damaged enough, he will retreat from attacking you to find any Rations or Food around the battlefield, to heal himself. If you collect all of them and plant a Poisonous item, he will eat it without a second thought, further hurting his Stamina. Excellent for those trying to do Stamina-defeats on the bosses.
  • One gag plays with this in a very literal way: whenever Snake captures wildlife or plants to eat, he can call Para-Medic of Mission Control to give him an overview of his catch, if and how it can be consumed or otherwise applied, and how good it tastes. Her reports are reliable 99% of the time, but the sole exception is with the "Ural Luminescent" mushroom — Para-Medic claims it's safe, but eating it will poison Snake. Call her back, and Snake will chew her out on giving him incorrect information, which she excuses as a misprint in her reference material.
  • A tracking device get planted on you during the torture segment. Not removing it causes the Ocelot Unit to show up while escaping along the riverside. This will lead to a bonus scene behind the waterfall.
• Poorly Disguised Pilot: The nightmare minigame is a tech demo for an original game that was being developed by the Zone of the Enders team titled Guy Savage. However, Guy Savage was cancelled and the minigame was removed in the HD Edition version of MGS3 along with the cutscene and radio conversation referencing it.
• Post-Climax Confrontation: Snake completes his mission, and is now on his way back to America with EVA; suddenly, they are assaulted by Ocelot. Cue a one-on-one close-quarters fight aboard the WIG, and finally an old school pistol duel between Snake and Ocelot.
• Post-End Game Content: New Game Plus, the Tuxedo, the Patriot and every unlockable that the player gets by obtaining a specific rank or collecting something.
• Post-Final Boss: The game features a showdown after the final boss. Ocelot jumps on board the escape plane and challenges Snake to a duel with two revolvers, one with one bullet and one totally empty. No matter what, Snake and Ocelot are unhurt (the bullet is either a blank or you can miss on purpose), and the ending proper starts immediately afterwards.
• Power Copying:
  • Revolver Ocelot. According to the supplemental material, after merely witnessing a tactic on the battlefield, he can them use said tactic thereafter. This certainly explains his ludicrous skills with revolvers, but he is noticeably clumsier as his younger self in this very game, where Snake calls him out on using a tactic he's only heard about in battle. At the end of the game he fights Snake hand-to-hand, and uses CQC moves seconds after Snake uses them on him.
  • All main Metal Gear games, starting from Metal Gear Solid 3, feature this trope to some extent. Stamina killing a boss in MGS3 gives you a camo pattern that provides a certain bonus (for example, The Fear's pattern increases Snake's camo index at the cost of a stamina drain, while the Fury's halves all fire and explosive damage.)
• Power Glows: Since these mushrooms glow, that means eating them should recharges the batteries, right?
• Power Incontinence: Colonel Volgin is covered in burn scars and wears a rubber suit, making it clear he has little control over the electrical charge in his body. Not that he has much control in the first place. He's also a walking lightning rod and terrified of being struck, and chants "Kuwabara kuwabara" in the rain hoping it will ward it off.
• Power Up Letdown: Starting with this game, they began dumping loads and loads of weapons on the player (as opposed to the "one of each kind" mentality previous games used). Sad to say, most of these weapons you will never end up using as you typically get your hands on the Penultimate Weapon for Snake fairly early that you will become comfortable with using, and everything else you get simply won't be as effective, too clumsy to use, or just not worth mastering to begin with. If nothing else the developers anticipated this, and also started the Backpack mechanic in this game: weapons and items you don't intend to use can be stashed away, leaving your inventory far less cluttered and allowing for you to quickly cycle through items you do use.
• Press X to Die: You can use the fake death pill to fake your death and throw off an enemy pursuit. You can take a revival pill to return to action once the coast is clear. If you wait a while, however, Snake will die for real.
• Press X to Not Die: Used precisely once, and it's inverted: The player has to press the button to end The Boss' life.
• Pressure-Sensitive Interface: As a demonstration of the PlayStation 2's Button Mashing problem, the game uses the pressure-sensitive button for only one function —the threatening command on captured enemies, which has Snake put a knife to their neck. A light button press would interrogate the captive. A full button press slits their throat. This resulted in a lot of dead guards and scientists and complaints about the interrogate command not working.
• Previous Player-Character Cameo: Solid Snake returns as the playable character in the Snake vs. Monkey minigame.
• Production Foreshadowing: Attempted with "Guy Savage", a minigame using an engine that was to be used in Zone of the Enders 3. The game got cancelled, though. Due to the game's cancellation, the minigame was not included on the HD version of MGS3.
• Product Placement: The CalorieMate and the Sabra magazine are available, although the latter item is simply mentioned to be a book. Both of those are also anachronisms as the CalorieMate and Sabra weren't made until 1983 and March 2000, respectively, and in the case of the former being the chocolate variety in the original version, which didn't exist until 1993, and changed to maple in the HD Edition, which didn't exist until 2009.
• Prolonged Prologue: The Virtuous Mission, which sees the player visiting multiple areas of the game and introduces most of the cast along the way, all before the titular Snake Eater mission which comprises the bulk of the game's runtime (and plot).
• Promoted to Playable: Big Boss, having been the final boss of the series' first two MSX games, is the playable protagonist of this game.
• Psycho Electro: Colonel Volgin. There is actually a scene of him casually using Electric Torture and he is described to be a sadist. Don't believe it? Check out the medical records of his Honey Trap sometime. There's a reason his boss music is named: "Clash With Evil Personified." Hell, halfway through the game he takes one of his own people he believes to be a traitor and rather than interrogate him, stuffs him in an oil drum and beats him death while he's inside it.
• Purposely Overpowered: The game swaps the Infinity Bandana from prior games for face paint that does the same job, and also adds the EZ Gun to the mix. As you could guess from the name, the EZ Gun is a great tranquilizer pistol with infinite ammo, a silencer that never runs out and a laser sight, and it replenishes your stamina and bumps your camo index to 80% when you hold it. Normally. it's only available on a New Game Plus, but it's instantly added to your inventory if you start a game on Very Easy Mode. There's also the Patriot (the Boss's gun of choice), which is a cut-down assault rifle with infinite ammo, and is also unlocked for the New Game Plus. Its only downside is wrecking your camo rating, but on the plus side, now you have an infinite-ammo machine gun. Ho ho ho.
• Quick Draw: The last part, with Naked Snake and Ocelot doing a strange quick draw slash Russian Roulette thing. In the earlier boss battle, if you stand in plain sight and unequip your pistol. Ocelot will come out of hiding for a quick draw duel.
• Quicksand Sucks: The bottomless mud pits that prominently appear in Dremuchij Swampland, and a couple of later areas. They behave much similar to quicksand, causing you to slowly sink and eventually drown if you're not quick to get out. On the positive side, it makes for a great way to dispose of enemy bodies.
• Quirky Miniboss Squad: The Cobra Unit, comprised of The Pain, The Fury, The Fear, The End, The Sorrow posthumously, and led by The Joy (aka The Boss).
• Rainbow Pimp Gear: The game is a prolific source of memes among Japanese fans who enjoy combining Big Boss's shirtless uniform (or occasionally his Ga-Ko uniform, which is printed with kawaii-style ducks) with his Monkey Mask and Torch. This gives him a lot of protection against dogs (they ignore him in the Monkey Mask and the smoke from the Torch irritates their sensitive noses) but looks absolutely stupid. Meanwhile, the infinite ammo face paint needs no explanation of why it's good to leave on at all times, but the pattern is redundant kanji graffiti covering Big Boss' entire face from forehead to chin, which looks rather silly.
• Rank Inflation: This happens in-universe, as Naked Snake, for defeating The Boss, is awarded the newly-created title of Big Boss (even though she actually allowed herself to be killed by him, so he hadn't truly surpassed her at all).
• Rapid-Fire Interrupting: Para-Medic doesn't let Sigint explain the life medicine to Snake, much to his chagrin.
• Reality Is Unrealistic:
  • Those flying buckets sure do look goofy and impossible, don't they? Wait, those things actually existed in the sixties?^note Though granted, they didn't actually work all that well.
  • Oh wow, tumbleweeds during the fight with Ocelot, how cliché... wait, they actually are native to Russia?
  • And that weird plane at the end, that could never—Oh, wait, that's a real plane.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Naked Snake loves the Ga-Ko camo, because "What's wrong with being cute?" He also develops a fondness for the Oyama face paint (which emulates a woman's makeup), and — let's not start on the "Love Pack" in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Nikita Khrushchev, during his brief appearence in the prologue, is portrayed as such. Following the nuclear detonation, Khrushchev is willing to personally believe President Johnson's assurances that US had nothing to do with the explosion and that it was actually a rogue GNU agent who was behind it, if mostly because he doesn't want the matter to escalate to a full-on nuclear World War III scenario. He also warns Johnson that his options are limited; his cabinet are calling for a retalation attack against America, but while he can stall them, he notes that he can only do so for a week, by which point the Americans must have produced some kind of evidence proving their innocence in the matter, or else war will happen.
• Recycled Script:invoked Sigint's explanations for the active sonar, the motion detector, and the anti-personnel sensor are a complete copy of Zero's explanations of the respective items, with Snake remarking on the similarity. Sigint then deduces that Zero most likely read his notes of the respective devices word for word.
• Red Herring:
  • Late in the game, when Snake is captured by Colonel Volgin, Volgin asks The Boss to cut out Snake's eyes. Since Snake is Big Boss, we know that eventually he loses his eye. However, he actually loses his eye a few minutes later trying to protect EVA.
  • Toyed with in terms of how Ocelot discovers EVA is Tatyana. Early on, he notes that EVA is wearing perfume, and later does the same to "Tatyana". When EVA is captured after Snake plants the charges on the Shagohod's fuel tanks, Ocelot reveals that he actually figured her out due to Tatyana smelling of motorcycle fuel. Another red herring in this case is that the camera focuses twice on the scuff marks on EVA's boots, when it's not even what gives her away as Tatyana.
• Red Scare: Snake and Zero were almost executed, the former while hospitalized, because the government felt that they were involved in The Boss's defection, and an optional radio conversion reveals that during the week between the Virtuous Mission and Operation Snake Eater, several less stalwart key government members were placed under house arrest due to The Boss's defection, fearing that they'd follow her example. And, over on the Red end, Volgin attempts to justify his actions by claiming that spies are everywhere, and that his job is to root them out and then kill them. Of course, the former was actually all just an act due to their intention of getting the Philosophers' Legacy that went sour.
• Refused by the Call: The protagonist, Snake, is tasked with hunting down and killing his mentor, "The Boss." She's waiting for him right where he's supposed to be inserted into Soviet territory, beats him soundly with her bare hands, and tells him to go home, because he can't defeat her. She sends each of her subordinates after him one after another, which he beats, and each time Snake encounters and fights the Boss, he does better in their hand-to-hand encounters until he's finally good enough to be able to defeat her. Since her mission was to be killed by him, it seems the entire operation was one giant Secret Test of Character to strengthen him up.
• Regenerating Health: Snake's health bar will slowly recover to the full length, being only effective outside of combat. If there's a red section, that represents injuries that won't heal unless they're treated - these injuries also recover over time but at an even slower rate. In contrast, the stamina bar will slowly drain.
• Regional Bonus: The European version of the game featured a boss battle mode, demo theatre, some extra facepaint patterns based on international flags, two new Snake vs. Monkey levels, and the "European Extreme" difficulty setting. The default European version of Subsistence was the three-disc pre-order version of the North American release.
• Remixed Level: all of the regions visited during the opening Virtuous Mission are revisited a week later in Operation Snake Eater, just at night up until you reach the final area, where Snake goes to sleep. You also visit the Graniny Gorki South area twice, once coming into the eponymous lab at night, then coming back through the next morning where you take on The Fear.
• Renegade Russian: Volgin and co. are a rare example of this being used in a time period when the USSR was still around.
• Required Secondary Powers: Volgin the Psycho Electro has superhuman strength. The strength allows him to punch holes in solid concrete, but it's also required for another of his favorite moves: using his electricity to fire bullets held between his fingers. Without super-strong hands, the kickback would break his fingers.
• Resting Recovery: After meeting with Eva, Para-Medic will tell you about sleeping. When you save the game and quit, you'll sleep, and regain stamina naturally.
• Retcon:
  • How Naked Snake/Big Boss managed to lose his right eye was different than previously stated. In the manual for Metal Gear 2, it mentioned that Big Boss lost his eye while in combat during the 1980s.
  • Ocelot, under the possession of Liquid, said in MGS2 that Big Boss was in his late fifties when Solid, Liquid, and Solidus were born. He was 39 in Peace Walker, meaning that he is 29 in this game, and was in his late 30s when the sons of Big Boss were born in 1972.
• The Reveal: EVA was a Chinese double agent sent to steal the Philosophers' Legacy from the Russians, but the Boss was loyal to America the whole time — the American government actually betrayed her. Meanwhile, Major Ocelot is actually Snake's CIA contact "ADAM", who has been Playing Both Sides as a Soviet double agent.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Revolver Ocelot starts off with a semiautomatic and is pretty good with it, killing one man with a richochet shot. However, Snake notes his technique is more suited to using a revolver, and he soon switches to the Single Action Army. Interestingly, when he first switches to the revolver, it's shown he has to do some adjusting; for example, he doesn't realize the gun's only got six shots the first time he takes on Snake with it.^note Compare the quote on top of this page, showing off his growth over the years. In any case, he rather enjoys reloading.

  This way of reloading is a revolution!
  There's nothing like the feeling of slamming a long silver bullet into a well-greased chamber.
  I've never felt a tension like this before!

• Rewarding Inactivity: One of the bosses, The End, dies of old age (should the player wait too long before resuming the game mid-battle, or change the PlayStation 2's internal clock), Snake will feel guilty for letting him down, since the guy's dying wish was to fight him. Zero will also comment that Snake's mission is "not a game."
• Right Through His Pants: During the ending, EVA and Snake share a romantic moment, only for Snake to wake up while still wearing his pants and shoes.
• River of Insanity: The River of Sorrow, where the protagonist Naked Snake has to walk up a stream and meets the dead Cobra Unit member The Sorrow, who summons ghosts of the soldiers he has killed throughout the game, provided the player actually killed them.
• Rock–Paper–Scissors: Spoofed in one of the Secret Theater segments, where Snake manages to combine the three hand gestures into one. The Boss then demonstrates that nuke beats every thing.
• Romance Ensues: After loads of Unresolved Sexual Tension between main character Snake and Femme Fatale / Sidekick Eva throughout the game, Volgin is killed, the Shagohod destroyed, and the Boss is defeated by her former student, allowing Snake and Eva to return to their homes, but not before making a stop at a nice little cabin in the mountains where Snake does what he's been thinking about for days by laying Eva down and making sweet love to her on a bearskin rug in front of a roaring fire. Far away from the enemy armies, and the prying eyes of their respective governments, at a place just for them, Snake and Eva finally allow their romance to flourish.
• Rouge Angles of Satin: In the HD version of the game, the subtitles misspell soldier as "solider" during the line "And, like a true soldier, she saw through it to the end."
• Rule of Cool:
  • Sigint outright states that the reason he based the EZ Gun on the Liberator was purely because the Liberator looked cool to him.
  • Deconstructed. The eponymous bipedal tanks exist entirely due to this. In a conversation with Snake, Sigint details the reasons why this would be pointless as well as a bad idea.
  • During Snake and Ocelot's final showdown, Ocelot draws a revolver he must know is empty. And EVA throws Snake "her" revolver, which she must also know is empty. Snake may not realize this, so it makes sense he'd try to fire it, but why does Ocelot fan through his own revolver's magazine in tandem with him? Because that looks cool.
• Rule of Funny: Some videos in the Secret Theater included in Subsistence. For instance, in "How not to handle C3", no matter how hard the C3 slams into another C3, it won't detonate prematurely as C3 is mechanically and chemically stable. When Snake slams the C3 into the other, the timer trips to 0. That sets off the C3, not the impact.
• Running Gag: Snake's desire to eat everything and Para-Medic's disgusted reactions.
• Russian Roulette: Ocelot's favorite method of intimidating his foes, complete with juggling three Single Action Armies. Surprisingly, The Boss snatches the loaded gun and shoots the bullet before Tatyana can come to harm from this. It's also the reason why Big Boss cannot use his right eye anymore.
• Sad Battle Music: The final boss starts with no music, but five minutes in, the instrumental of Snake Eater kicks in, followed by the full song. The melancholy elements of the song come to the forefront here, as the instrumental removes the lyrics to allow the somber strings to command the melody, and when the vocals come in, the player becomes fully aware of how the lyrics reflect the tragic tale of The Boss.
• Samus Is a Girl: When talking to Para-Medic about Ocelot being the son of a "legendary hero" and how he was born in the middle of a battlefield. Snake assumes that said legendary hero is a man. Turns out that Ocelot's mother and the hero are the same person. Specifically, The Boss.
• Saved by Canon: You get a Non-Standard Game Over if you kill Ocelot at any point, due to creating a Time Paradox if you do so, as he's involved in the plot in the future. Weirdly, this also applies to EVA, as killing her will also cause a paradox, yet this is the first time we've met her. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots reveals why: She's the surrogate mother of Solid and Liquid.
• Say My Name: The Cobras shout their names before dying in a massive explosion, except for The Sorrow, who's already dead, and The Boss, who is killed with a gunshot to the head. She does do it in one of the Secret Theatre films, except she uses her previous codename, The Joy.
• Scary Scorpions: An Emperor Scorpion appears as an edible animal during the mountainside section of the game, though it provides little stamina and in any case Snake hates the flavour. Sadly, they're also depicted as being capable of killing Snake when they sting him, despite the fact that Emperor Scorpion venom isn't fatal to humans. That said, this makes them a pretty decent (if lethal — remember the Pacifist Run option) Improvised Weapon if you capture one alive and throw it at an enemy.
• Scary Stinging Swarm: The Pain, the first encountered member of The Cobra Unit sent out to kill Snake, who possesses the ability to control hordes of bees. Your actual first encounter with him is during the first duel between Snake and Major Ocelot and is denoted with a huge bee swarm appearing out of nowhere — Snake and Ocelot manage to only barely escape (Snake by jumping into a shallow ravine, Ocelot by... twirling his revolvers to swat them away), but Ocelot's troops aren't as lucky and suffer a horrifying fate within seconds.
• Scenery Porn: The game's Final Boss fight takes place within an idyllic, breathtaking area with white flowers.
• Schizo Tech: Downplayed, surprisingly. Unlike Peace Walker and The Phantom Pain, which have outrageously advanced tech for the decade they take place in, all the tech in Snake Eater is reasonably accurate, if farfetched. Even the floating platforms and handheld nuclear launchers are based on real prototypes from the era, and the game spends a lot of time laying the groundwork for how the Shagohod uses contemporary rocket technology to function.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • The team dialogue for the scientist camo. Guess what usually happens next:
    Major Zero: It won't do you any good to go around the jungle wearing a scientist disguise.
    Para-Medic: No one would be that stupid.
    Major Zero: If they did, they'd have to be a fool. *snicker*' No, more than a fool—a complete dumbass. Don't you think so, Snake?
  • The player may be tempted to attack Ocelot after he's knocked out early in the game. Killing him results in a Game Over.
• Schrödinger's Gun:
  • The Flame Troops will always be present at Krasnogorje, but the actual reason for why they are present depends on how many of their men the player killed. Sigint will explain if the player got too trigger happy, they want revenge on Snake for his killing a lot of their soldiers. If not, they are only there because Volgin ordered them to as revenge for Snake killing off The Pain, The Fear, and The End.
  • The bullet in the duel near the end of the game is different depending on the player's actions: if Snake or Ocelot fires at the other, the bullet was a blank. If Snake picks the right gun but then fires at the wall (and, presumably, if he didn't fire at all), the bullet was real.
• Secret Test of Character: Twice! The End won't kill the player because he wants them to surpass him, and The Boss spares Snake's life at the beginning of Operation Snake Eater, telling him to either toughen up or go home.
• Self-Deprecation: The game features an extended lambasting of the somewhat whimsical design of the entire Metal Gear concept in general, with the military expert Sigint explicitly pointing out that putting a tank on legs rather than treads makes little logical sense.
• Sense Loss Sadness: Naked Snake loses the use of one eye during a torture sequence. Later, when he's recuperating, there's a sad moment where he fails to grab a butterfly because he lost his depth perception. He later forms some C3 into a butterfly, tosses it in the air, smoothly catches it, and slams it into place to blow the target sky high.
• Sequel Hook: The game ends with an embittered Naked Snake becoming Big Boss, and with a call between Ocelot and his true employer the CIA Director, setting up the alliance between Ocelot and Big Boss that will give birth to the Patriots.
• Serious Business: In one of the hilarious outttakes, The Boss takes rock, paper, scissors a wee bit too far.
• Sexposition: At several points you can press a button to stare at EVA's breasts while she exposits. This is actually significant — the last time it happens, you find that Snake is for once looking her in the eyes, showing he's come to respect, admire, and perhaps even love her.
• Shared Family Quirks: It's revealed that Snake shares his future sons' love for cardboard boxes.
• Shock and Awe: Colonel Volgin, who can generate static electricity through his body and channels it through held rounds of ammunition. He can also launch said ammunition like a rail gun.
• Shoot the Dog: Near the very end, when Snake has to finish off The Boss. Made even worse by the fact that the player has to pull the trigger. If the player doesn't pull the trigger after a while, it will happen automatically.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Everything that occurs only served to further the actions of the corrupt, with The Boss forever known after this as a traitor, and Big Boss is left broken by the end, leading to his inevitable Face–Heel Turn.
• Short-Range Shotgun: The shotgun is a near game breaker up close, but its power fades over range.
• Shout-Out:
  • The theme song of the game, "Snake Eater," is rife with allusions and parodies of '60s spy movies, with a female lead singer, a Title Drop, and plenty of jazzy swing.
  • Obvious cases are Snake berating overly complicated survival knives (Rambo), Zero's love of James Bond movies and Para-Medic's B-movie obsession.
  • In one sequence, Snake flees Ocelot and his men and jumps out of a high storm drain. This is lifted directly from The Fugitive.
  • Want to know what the trophy/achievement for CQC-interrogating a soldier is called in Metal Gear Solid: HD Collection? "Tell Me Where the Bomb is!"
  • In the intro for Snake vs. Monkey, Snake asks Colonel Campbell if Sam or Gabe can go on the mission instead of him, referring to the main protagonists of Splinter Cell and Syphon Filter, respectively.
  • Colonel Volgin sounds very similar to "Colonel Vogel", as in the Nazi Colonel from Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade. Just like Colonel Vogel, he ends up falling into a ravine while inside of a tank, although to be fair for Volgin, it wasn't completely his fault, as he was forced to fall in due to EVA rigging the bridge with C3 and Snake blowing it up. Unlike Vogel, however, Volgin does actually manage to get back up.
  • In Snake Eater 3D, the magazines are from Hooters.
  • In an optional cutscene,^note You have to keep the transmitter inside your body by the time you encounter EVA in Tikhogornyj to view it EVA will inspect Snake's body in order to remove a transmitter. Every now and then, in a manner somewhat similar to the Austin Powers franchise, it cuts to EVA and Snake's shadows on the wall doing things that make it look like they're... wrestling.
  • "Way to Fall", the song that plays during the credits, has clear allusions to "It's a Long Road", another heartbreaking guitar ballad of loss and betrayal, played over the credits of First Blood.
  • If the player contacts Major Zero while wearing the crocodile cap, Para-Medic brings up The Alligator People:
    Para-Medic: "The Alligator People." It's a science fiction movie. You've never heard of it?
    Snake: No.
    Para-Medic: Oh... well you should see it sometime. It's about this guy who gets hurt in a car accident and tries to heal his wounds by injecting himself with a crocodile serum, but then his head turns into a crocodile head. You look just like him with that mask on. That's awesome.
    Snake: Right...
  • The crocodile cap itself is probably a reference to Octopussy, which sees James Bond infiltrate an island occupied by smugglers by swimming there in a submersible crocodile.
  • The Cig Gas Spray Gun is a gadget taken straight from both Thunderball and The Spy Who Loved Me.
  • During the Virtuous Mission, Major Zero instead goes by the callsign "Major Tom", providing two references: one, which Zero himself mentions when Snake asks about it, to The Great Escape, where "Tom" was one of the holes the group of allied POWs use to escape from a German POW camp. The other reference comes earlier, when Snake calls him on the radio and asks, "Can you hear me, Major Tom?"
  • Not only is Godzilla named-dropped by Para-Medic, but the game uses the obscure Davy Crockett portable nuclear launcher used in King Kong vs. Godzilla.
• Significant Name Shift: While everyone else always refers to him as "Volgin," for the majority of the game Ocelot addresses him as "Colonel." However, during Volgin's fight with Snake, Ocelot calls the man out on his underhandedness, saying, "Fight like a man, Volgin!" It is at roughly this point where Ocelot no longer feels the need to maintain his cover, as Volgin' plans begin unravelling, and Ocelot no longer needs to feign loyalty to Volgin.
• Simple, yet Awesome: The Mk22 tranquilizer gun isn't flashy, but it's very accurate and great for head shots during a Pacifist Run. It's also surprisingly satisfying to use in boss fights, especially for the different camos the bosses drop if you beat them non-lethally.
• Skippable Boss:
  • During the fight with The Sorrow, the player can simply lay down so Snake's head is under the water and wait until he "drowns". This will skip straight to the end of the scene where the player can use the revival pill and wake up. However, the player won't receive his Spirit camo if this method is used. Alternately, the fight can be shortened dramatically by laying down and then simply swimming the whole way through, which is significantly faster than wading through the water and avoids the Sorrow's own attacks.
• Smoking Is Cool: Snake outdoes his son by smoking the one thing cooler than a cigarette: a cigar. When The Boss complains, he'll mention that she used to smoke, and she'll actually bring up several uses a cigar would have, such as a torch or to remove leeches. She'll still be a spoilsport and order him not to smoke on duty.
• Sniper Duel: A long, drawn out battle spanning three maps against The End, which eventually turns into a literal test of endurance, as The End will only use tranquilizer darts in the battle and refuses to kill you outright. The duel may be bypassed by sniping The End before it or waiting for him to die of old age.
• Sniping Mission: When fighting The End, the only way to stop him without cheating outrageously is to beat him at his own game; run around like an idiot with no camouflage and the player will be blown off their feet before they even see him. And unlike most video game snipers, he does not give away his position with a laser beam (though he does have an extremely shiny scope). It takes most first-time players hours to wear him down, but it feels awesome when they do.
• Soft Reset: Aside from game overs, there's no menu option to quit. Instead, hold all four shoulder buttons and press start and select at the same time.
• Solemn Ending Theme: "Way To Fall" by Starsailor is a mournful alt-rock ballad.
• So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear: Happens about two thirds of the way through the game, wherein Snake recovers all of his equipment after a No-Gear Level sequence, except for all of his previously captured animals and collected food (including the pricelessly valuable Tsuchinoko, if you were lucky enough to find it - fortunately you can catch it again just after getting your gear back). Humorously, you can call EVA about this, and she will confess that she rifled through your pack for instant noodles, but the rest of Snake's pack was emptied by Ocelot because "he wanted to eat the same things Snake did".
• Some Dexterity Required: Every button on the joypad seems to be pressure-sensitive in some way or another and pressing too hard is the difference between grabbing an enemy and slashing his throat. Not to mention holding down this button for first person, this to pull out the gun, then this one to lean/tiptoe into view, then if you want to force him to surrender his supplies you have to go out of first-person to circle around him, then back into first person to threaten him and then a slow release of the button to then perform a close quarters takedown^note assuming you're not using a tranquilizer gun, at which point just shoot him in the face and be done with it. Not to mention that some enemies need you to hold them up with something bigger than your pistols, meaning pressing the weapon button too hard (which must be held throughout this ritual) will result in you just blasting the enemy in the face, and pressing it too lightly will result in you lowering your weapon, at which point the guy you're trying to hold up will instantly attack you.
• Something Else Also Rises: When Snake and EVA are kissing, the fire starts burning brighter.
• Songs in the Key of Panic: The player has ten minutes to defeat the final boss. The first five minutes are silent, after which the instrumental of the Snake Eater theme kicks in. With three minutes to go, the full bombastic song races you to the end.
• Soviet Superscience: The Shagohod, the predecessor to the Metal Gear weapons, as well as the basic designs for Metal Gear itself, were developed by Sokolov and Granin, respectively. In addition to the giant robots of doom, the hover platforms, planes, and weaponry are extremely advanced for the time period and most of the characters marvel at some of their capabilities.
• Spell My Name with a "The": The Pain, The Fear, The End, The Fury, The Sorrow and The Boss (a.k.a. The Joy).
• Stalker with a Crush: Ocelot's obsessive pursuit of Snake is almost certainly as a result of this.
• Start of Darkness: This game is one for everyone: Thanks to this incident, Naked Snake became Big Boss, and, along with Zero, Signit, Para-Medic, EVA, and Ocelot, formed the Patriots and gives grief to the world for the next fifty years.
• Stat Grinding: A subtle example, Snake's health slightly increases after he recovers from big injuries.
• Stating the Simple Solution:
  • Inverted during the fight with Volgin. After the battle stops going his way, Volgin looks up at Ocelot and orders him to shoot Snake. Ocelot replies, "I'm afraid I can't do that. Fight like a man, Volgin."
  • In the remakes, the achievement for killing Ocelot and creating a time paradox is "Problem Solved, Series Over." Snake Eater is a prequel, and Ocelot is a major Wild Card with a hand in just about every problem in the series.
• The Stinger: Typical for a Metal Gear game. Ocelot talks with the KGB's Chief Director and states that Volgin's coup successfully ousted Khrushchev and that no American technology could be salvaged from the ruins of Groznyj Grad, which The Boss annihilated prior to her death. After putting the phone down, Ocelot then calls the CIA Director and mocks the obliviousness of the Russians to the fact that he's actually a triple agent for the CIA. He also reveals himself as ADAM, whom Snake was supposed to meet in the latter's mission, and states that America successfully secured what EVA thought she had retrieved for the Chinese, including a large share of the Philosophers' Legacy.
• Story Difficulty Setting: The Updated Re-release Subsistence came packaged with two bonus discs which included (among other things) an option to watch a "film" version of the game, consisting of the numerous cutscenes in the game spliced together, with additional footage to bridge the gaps between them. Hideo Kojima explained in the game's manual that this feature was offered for the benefit of players who might not have the free time to play through the entire game, but nevertheless wanted to experience its story.
• Straight Gay: Colonel Volgin comes across as extensively macho, so his little affair with Raikov (who is also an example, to an extent at least) might be a bit of a surprise.
• Suicide Mission: It's eventually revealed that the Boss' motive throughout the entire game was completing a mission from the US government - faking her betrayal at the cost of her life, reputation and legacy. From the start she was aware that she would have to eventually die at the hands of Snake, but she agrees to the mission anyway in an act of patriotism.
• Super Drowning Skills: Snake has this when it comes to mud. It also means Indian gavials can instantly kill the player by knocking them on their ass in the wrong place.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: The Brown face paint will keep your oxygen meter from diminishing.
• Super Title 64 Advance: The 3DS version of the game is called Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D.
• Super Window Jump: Snake can use this as an alternate escape route to escape the Ocelot Unit at Rassvet. However, the shattering glass will alert troops, so a better idea would be to punch out the glass before sunrise. Snake can also somersault though select windows in Granin's lab.
• Surpassed the Teacher: Snake finally surpasses The Boss in a final confrontation where he had ten minutes to defeat her or else the area would be napalmed. For his efforts, Snake is awarded the title of Big Boss showing that, in the U.S. government's eyes, he had surpassed his mentor.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity:
  • If you try and save during a certain boss fight, your ally will claim she has a bad feeling about it and advises against it. If you happen to go a week after saving here, the boss will die of old age and you lose your chance to beat him properly and snag his camo and weapon. But if you load the save before waiting a week, you get knocked out cold via a cutscene where the boss snipes Naked Snake in the head with his tranquilizer Mosin Nagant as soon as you load the save!
  • In the Krasnogorje Mountaintop area, you'll come across a lot of ointment and bandages laying around. This will be useful in treating the burns you'll undoubtedly get during your fight with The Fury shortly after.
• Sympathetic Murder Back Story: The game is the story of Big Boss's Start of Darkness, where he's manipulated into killing his mentor and mother figure, as part of her and the Philosophers' Zero-Approval Gambit.
• Tail Slap: Indian Gavials will do this to Snake if he wanders too close to one.
• Take It to the Bridge: Naked Snake is betrayed and left for dead by his beloved mentor, The Boss, just as he has retrieved his target from imprisonment and they're crossing the rope bridge towards their recovery point. The confrontation ends with her breaking his arm and throwing him off the bridge.
• Take That!: One radio conversation with Sigint about the Survival Knife will have Sigint lament that Snake didn't take the knife he made for him with a hollowed out grip and a compass in the pommel. Snake points out that such a knife is useless in a fight, as the hollowed out grip unbalances the knife and makes it more brittle.
• Taking the Bullet: Naked Snake, when he was being tortured by Volgin, ends up counting the bullet chambers as Ocelot decides to play his version of Russian Roulette with Tatyana when deducing that the latter's the spy, and flings himself at Ocelot to deflect the bullet away from Tatyana. It worked, but in the process, he received muzzle burn near his right eye, costing him the use of his right eye.
• Take Your Time: Sort of. You start out Operation Snake Eater being informed that USA and Russia are on the brink of nuclear conflict, which implies that this is an urgent mission that must be completed as soon as possible. That doesn’t stop you from taking the time to goof around in the jungle, raid as many warehouses as you can, and sample every animal you come across without Mission Control getting on your ass about it. Para-Medic also states that saving and exiting is the equivalent to sleeping in-game, so you can turn off the game and come back after a while with no changes other than your food expiring. One boss will even die of old age if you come back after too long.
• Tank Goodness: The Shagohod, a rocket-propelled nuclear-capable tank.
• Tears of Remorse: At the end of the game, Snake stands before the grave of his mentor The Boss, with his newly awarded title of Big Boss marking him as her successor. As he reflects on the conspiracy that forced him to have to kill her, Big Boss does all that he can do given the top-secret nature of what really happened and salutes the grave of his mentor. As this happens, a single tear of remorse flows from his eye as the gravity of what he had done and what he has lost weighs down on him. This marks the Start of Darkness for Big Boss's character; nothing would ever be the same after this.
• Tech-Demo Game: The 3DS remake was this for the 3DS, starting out as a literal tech demo called "The Naked Sample" before being completely remade.
• Temporal Paradox: Killing EVA or Ocelot causes a Time Paradox. The standard Game Over screen also shifts to "Time Paradox" if the player wait a while. This is because Naked Snake is Big Boss. The HD Collection has an trophy/achievement for killing Ocelot (thus killing the man behind almost everything in the series) called "Problem Solved, Series Over".
• Tempting Fate:
  • There are two cutscenes in which Volgin says to himself, "Kuwabara kuwabara", a Japanese phrase that is believed to ward off lightning when uttered. When he has a third opportunity to say it:
  Colonel Volgin: "Who's afraid of a little thunder?"
  • Sigint mocks the idea of "walking tanks" in a radio conversation. He later ends up becoming the DARPA Chief.
  • During his first encounter with Snake, Ocelot and his men mock his CQC pose. They immediately regret it as Snake wipes the floor with them in less than two minutes.
• Theme Music Abandonment: The game drops the classic Metal Gear Solid theme tune due to legal pressure by the estate of the deceased Russian composer Georgy Sviridov, whose song "The Winter Road" sounds very similar to the theme.
• Theme Music Power-Up: The game invokes the song Snake Eater if the player is running out of time in the final battle with The Boss.
• Theme Music Withholding: The classic theme is heard only in the final moments of the end credits.
• Theme Naming: The Cobra Unit each use emotions as their codenames. A radio conversion with Sigint reveals that they name themselves after what they feel in battle. Some are easy to figure out (The Fury, The Sorrow, and The Joy), while others are a little trippy ("The End" is supposedly because of the oblivion of sleep, but "The End" is a pretty good name for a sniper in general, considering how lethal they are to enemy soldiers). The Fear promises to scare the player, but his antics reveal that his combat style is pretty cowardly itself, hiding and poisoning them (going with his "spider" theme). The Pain can obviously cause a lot of pain with his bees, and once he pulls off the mask, the player will see that he's in quite a lot of it himself.
• That Came Out Wrong: When calling EVA after escaping the prison, should the player have magazines up to their capture, EVA will state that Snake could have asked for her help. She meant in regards to distracting the enemy, but the way she said it made it seem as though she would prefer for him to ask her to seduce him instead of reading magazines.
• Third Is 3D: An odd variation: while not true for the original release, it does hold true for the Nintendo 3DS remake.
• Time Keeps On Ticking: During the big cutscene before the Volgin fight, Snake has just set the building up to explode. Volgin goes on a classic Metal Gear villain Motive Rant, but The Sorrow spends much of the cutscene holding up a timer to remind you of how long you have left. If you skip the cutscene, you'll have time from then to defeat Volgin with. In harder difficulty modes, there's a danger of the bomb actually going off during the cutscene and killing you unless you skip it early on.
• Time-Limit Boss:
  • In the first battle against Volgin, you're given a time limit because Snake had planted C3 on the liquid fuel tanks.
  • The Final Boss battle against The Boss is set on a ten-minute time limit until the battlefield is hit by missiles. While the time limit isn't shown, The Boss will warn the player when there are five minutes, three minutes, one minute, and thirty seconds left. An extended version of the game's main theme song, "Snake Eater", also starts playing partway through the battle, timed perfectly so that the song ends at the same time the time limit is reached.
• Title Drop:
  • The words "Metal Gear Solid 3" is seen on Snake's helmet during the HALO jump in the beginning of the HD Edition.
  • The bulk of the game takes place during Operation Snake Eater, a name chosen because Snake is taking on The Boss and her Cobra Unit, and actual cobras also eat other snakes.
• Together in Death: After killing The Boss, there's a hidden scene where the player will see her ghost standing next to The Sorrow.
• Too Awesome to Use: The Tsuchinoko. A one-of-a-kind incredibly rare and hard-to-find mythical snake that you can eat to restore full stamina... which nobody ever does, because keeping it in your inventory until the end of the game unlocks the infinity facepaint, and your Mission Control will hate your guts if you eat it.
• Torture First, Ask Questions Later: Volgin winds up actually giving critical information to the interrogated during the torture scene.
• Translation Convention: Snake and Sokolov talk for a short time at the beginning. Sokolov seems to have some sort of British accent, which is strange for a Russian scientist, until he compliments Snake on his excellent Russian. Throughout the rest of the game, the characters are assumed to be talking to each other in Russian, with only Granin exhibiting a noticeable Russian accent, presumably either because he's drunk and is slurring his speech, or is actually speaking English in the scene in which he appears.
• Triumphant Reprise: The theme to Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was replaced with a different track in this game. Absent a muzak version in a cutscene, it stays out of the game until the ending, in which it plays twice over two minutes: a subdued version over a very sad Snake receiving the title of Big Boss, and then, ninety seconds later, a fully orchestrated version over the revelation to the player that the Boss was sent on a suicide mission that was to end with Snake killing her. It ends up being both triumphant and tragic in the same breath.
• Truth in Television:
  • During the Virtuous Mission briefing, when Zero mentions that the Turkey Deal was actually misinformation, he explains that the nukes in Turkey were obsolete, and they were planning to get rid of them anyway. This part was actually quite true, as the nukes had been obsolete, both in lifeline as well as the fact that America had updated nuclear submarines patrolling Turkey.
  • An optional conversion with Zero has him remarking that the U.S. government is currently at DEFCON 2 because of the failure of the Virtuous Mission. The penultimate protocol before a nuclear war is indeed DEFCON 2 (DEFCON 1 is nuclear armageddon, contrary to some mediums claiming it to be DEFCON 5).
• Tsuchinoko: You can catch one if you're lucky. The team congratulates you when you do and you get an achievement in the HD Edition.
• Turns Red: The Pain. Once down to about half health, he takes off his mask, revealing his disfigured face. He then becomes more aggressive and unleashes his "Bullet Bees," poisonous bees that he shoots like bullets... from his mouth.
• Twist Ending: The Boss never actually defected to the Soviet Union — her mission was originally to retrieve the Philosopher's Legacy. However, after Volgin fired his nuke, she and the Cobra Unit willingly took the fall and let Snake kill them in order to prevent a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
• Understatement: Near the end of the game, Snake asks EVA how she feels, and she answers by saying "not good". EVA says this after Ocelot had shot out the engine of the WiG with his revolver that she was piloting to get Snake and her out of Russia, Ocelot then jumps onto the plane and proceeds to engage Snake in a hand to hand brawl with Snake not having a gun to defend himself should Ocelot pull his out (which he does), all the while EVA is trying to keep the plane stable so it doesn't crash into the lake they happen to be over. So of course EVA's current situation is not good.
• Undressing the Unconscious: Snake can knock out Major Raikov and undress him to steal his outfit and assume his identity. Snake can also just kill him for it, before or after, in which case he will be one of the dead enemies that haunt Snake in The Sorrow's river battle. He will actually be naked and covering himself in the same manner Raiden did in Sons of Liberty.
• Unexpected Genre Change:
  • The Guy Savage minigame, which the player can play by saving the game in the jail cell and reloading. It isn't included in the HD Edition though, because the minigame was actually a demo for a game was in development at the time but was soon cancelled.
  • From stealth to rail shooter, near the game's end.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay:
  • The Pain attacks with a swarm of bees in water-filled caverns. And since everyone knows bees hate water, you can actually toss grenades into the water to splash him.
  • You have to open a locked door. How do you do it? Disguise yourself as a scientist, and knock.
  • The Fear constantly uses up all of his stamina to turn invisible and jump around. He replenishes it by finding food on the battlefield. Thus, Snake can leave his rotten or spoiled food around for The Fear to find and actually poison him with it.
  • You can defeat The End by sniping him the first time he appears in a cutscene, thus skipping his entire boss fight. Barring that, you can also skip the fight entirely by just saving the game and leaving it alone for a week. Since The End is over 100 years old, he'll actually die waiting for Snake to show up again.
  • You just ingested rotten food and don't have digestive medicine to counteract it, so what do you do? Well, just go to the Medical screen and start spinning Snake around until he gets dizzy and pukes it out.
  • The Fake Death Pill has several uses. Many enemies will reveal their positions, expose vulnerabilities or unlock doors to see what the hell happened if Snake just suddenly "dies" right in front of them. It's also the only way to pass one particular boss fight.
• Unique Enemy: The Flame Troops, of which there are only 3 in the entire game, and they all only appear in Krasnogorje just before the fight with The Fury. And unlike many of the examples on this page, there was a minor historical/story justification for this. Sigint explains that, in addition to being a short range weapon with limited ammunition, the soldiers carrying them have giant targets painted on their backs and are usually put to death when captured. So why do you see them at all? The reason changes depending on how you've been playing the game. They've either come of their own volition, as revenge for killing so many soldiers through the game, or if you've been playing nonlethally, Volgin sends them as revenge against you for killing The Pain, The Fear, and The End.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: The explanation given, which is set in 1964, is that Naked Snake doesn't trust the reliability of weapons that may have been poorly maintained, instead preferring fresh weapons from armories.
• Unwilling Suspension: The torture sequence has Snake hanging from a hook on a track, and the momentum of his swing is used to increase the force of the blows he is receiving. This is repeated in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, only this time, his feet are off the floor, and we see him dangling in the cutscenes.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: If sending The Boss to die for money wasn’t bad enough, Snake, Zero, Ocelot, Eva, Sigint and Para-Medic would go on to create The Patriots to fulfill her last will.
• Updated Re-release: Besides the aforementioned Subsistence re-release, there is also the HD Edition, which is based off the former but lacks a few features, such as the Secret Theater, the Existence disc, Metal Gear Online, Snake vs. Monkey and the Guy Savage minigame, to name but a few. The 3DS version adds in crouch walking and proper third-person shooting as introduced in Metal Gear Solid 4, the ability to create camo patterns using the camera and scattered Yoshi dolls, but is otherwise similar to Subsistence.
• Variable Mix: Several of the boss tracks change depending on what the boss is doing—instrumentation changes when The Fear is hungry, when Ocelot is breaking from the fight to reload his gun, when The Pain is shooting Bullet Bees, when The Fury's suit gets ripped, and so on. The vocal track only cuts in while fighting The Boss if you sustain nearly to the end of the ten minutes, and before that, you only hear the instrumental backing.
• Version-Exclusive Content:
  • Substance, the expanded edition of the game, was first released as an Xbox-exclusive a year after the original Sons of Liberty edition was released on the PS2. In addition to having all the extra difficulty settings and game modes that were added in the Japanese and European version of Sons of Liberty (e.g. European-Extreme, Casting Theater, Boss Survival), Substance also added two new game modes: VR/Alternative Missions, a series of non-story-based missions with varying goals, and Snake Tales, five stand-alone non-canon missions in which the player controls Snake in environments from the main game. The PS2 version of Substance, which came a bit later, added a third new mode, Skateboarding, in which Snake and Raiden do Exactly What It Says on the Tin on the Big Shell.
  • The game has a few features not available in later ports. One is "Mesal Gear", a series of missions featuring Snake hunting the apes of Ape Escape. Another is a special minigame which can be played during the main campaign under certain conditions, the horror-themed beat-'em-up "Guy Savage".
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Groznyj Grad, the fortress where Shagohod is being kept and the final whereabouts of Colonel Volgin, who is the true villain (The Boss is secretly Good All Along).
• Victor Gains Loser's Powers: If the player defeats The End non-lethally, they get his sniper rifle, the Mosin Nagant. If the player defeats the other bosses non-lethally (specifically The Pain, The Fear, The Fury, Volgin, and The Boss), they will receive their camouflage that includes their abilities (The Pain's camouflage allows for Snake to manipulate the bees, The Fear's camouflage significantly boosts his camo at the cost of stamina, The Fury's Camo allows for Snake to survive fire and explosions, lessening the damage of the former, Volgin's camouflage allows Snake to keep Soviets from firing at him when facing them, and The Boss's camo basically yields a decent camo in most areas (although not to the extent of The Fear's Camo), The End's abilities of regenerating under sunlight as well as 100% camouflage under grassy and mossy areas also qualify (although that only necessitates holding up The End thrice), and technically, The Sorrow's camouflage (which allows Snake's footsteps to be silent and drain stamina of the enemy when holding them up) can be unlocked by defeating him, should Snake end up reaching the end of the path.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • It's entirely possible to beat the game without killing anyone, with one exception: the game still forces the player to pull the trigger on The Boss.
  • If you decided to play the Nice Guy, you can feed good condition food to enemy soldiers. Their reaction upon eating it on site will have them comment it tasted good.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • See all those helpless scientists, mechanics, and cute animals? They're all killable. Snake can also throw poisonous or spoiled food items to hungry enemies, which has the expected effect.
  • The player can throw live snakes at people.
  • The player can throw people off cliffs, blow up barrels near guards, cause death of enemies via food poisoning, electrocute guards on electric fences, drown guards in water, and it will still count as a Pacifist Run.
  • The player can, while disguised as Raikov, beat up the soldiers and scientists without reprisal or being suspected of anything, something that is even lampshaded in a call to EVA, because Raikov "is just that kind of guy."
  • The player can destroy food stores, causing all guards in the area to slow down, and start complaining about hunger. If the player throws out any food, they'll desperately run for it as soon as they see it... and if it was poisoned, their day gets even worse.
  • You can hurl a grenade into a gavial's mouth when it yawns, causing it to detonate inside its stomach.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: The more people the player kills, the longer their fight with The Sorrow will be.
• Video Game Remake: Appallingly, the pachislot adaptation of the game features the game's cutscenes and visuals completely remade from the ground up in HD, giving players a glimpse at what a Snake Eater remake would have looked like in 2016 despite being chained to a gambling machine. A proper remake in the form of Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater was eventually announced in 2023.
• Video Games and Fate: The game drops the anvil that the Cold War was this in Real Life. Snake's mentor explains, at length, during the tutorial, that "enemies" and "allies" are never chosen by the people who are called thus; in World War II, America and Russia were allies against the Nazis, and immediately became enemies once they were defeated, fighting over the resources they created to fight them.^note Better yet, in Kojima's original proposal, said resources included the spoils of the war - the wealth and scientific discoveries the Nazis acquired through ruthless conquest, human experimentation and mass murder. She herself had a Russian lover - the father of her child - whom she was later forced to kill on a Cold War mission on orders from her superiors. The events of the game itself only occurred because those same superiors ordered it - and she only obeyed because she couldn't think of anything better. This is the start of the Protagonist Journey to Villain - his transformation from loyal soldier to fanatical anarchist guerilla leader - because he refuses to die the way his mentor did, let alone sacrifice his allies and subordinates for the sake of his superiors.

  The Boss: People's values change over time. And so do the leaders of a country. So there's no such thing as an enemy in absolute terms. The enemies we fight are only in relative terms, constantly changing with the times.
  The foibles of politics and the march of time can turn friends into enemies just as easily as the wind changes. Ridiculous, isn't it? Yesterday's ally becomes today's opposition. And this Cold War? Think back... When I was leading the Cobras, America and Russia were fighting together.

• Violation of Common Sense:
  • Eating Russian glowcaps recharges your batteries. This is even considered ridiculous in-game; Para-Medic and Sigint lampshade how that can't be possible and lacking any explanation for why it is, just pin it down to a placebo effect.
  • If Snake is on fire, equipping a cardboard box will put the flames out. Seriously. The cardboard box also makes Snake immune to fire on the ground, which makes most of the fight against The Fury a joke. It can't stand up to a direct hit from The Fury's flamethrower, though; the force of the blast knocks the box off of Snake.
  • Deliberately drowning Snake to escape The Sorrow faster. This does not net you the Spirit camo, though.
  • The most dangerous weapon to use against The Boss isn't a gun; it's the non-lethal Cig Spray. You remember, that thing you picked up at Graniny Gorki hours ago and never bothered using? It works with Snake's CQC combo, and The Boss can't disarm you. It can hit The Boss while she's on the ground, and can even hit her out of her shooting and walking animations. This can be used to exploit the game's programming, too. The Boss won't shoot when she's within CQC range. As long as you stay close and know how to consistently counter her grabs, she'll be finished in about two minutes. This turns one of the best and most dramatic fights in the entire series into little more than a high-stakes game of tag.
  • The Torch, of all things, works almost as well on The Boss as the Cig Spray. Apparently, she can't see a huge, fiery stick despite it being a dead giveaway to Snake's position. It has a longer reach than the Cig Spray and can hit her out of animations, but its combo does less damage and can't touch The Boss while she's grounded. She can also disarm you, which is the biggest problem. However, it's surprisingly easy to beat The Boss - non-lethally - with a stick.
• Visual Pun: You see that stamina-killing ladder? You know who's climbing it up? Yes. Snakes and Ladders.
• Vodka Drunkenski: Granin. The game even takes place in the USSR, so it's not as though this was the one Russian character in the cast.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: The game makes it explicitly clear that, unlike previous Metal Gear games, Snake's contacts on the radio cannot actually see Snake, and the "faces" communicating with him are actually just photographs similar to a slide projector. However, in quite a few spots, they can tell what Snake's up to before he even says anything. EVA even freaks out if Snake calls her wearing the Raikov mask, somehow mistaking him for the real Raikov despite only being able to hear his unaltered voice.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot:
  • Eating too much rotten or poisonous food will cause Snake's stomach to heave it all up, which is exactly what tends to happen in real life.
  • In the boss battle against Volgin, taking a solid uppercut from him will have Snake sent skyward at least a story high, and when he comes down, he'll vomit from the sheer pain.
  • Going into view mode when changing your outfits and spinning around for long enough causes a funny Easter Egg where Snake vomits out of dizziness once gameplay resumes. Doubles as an Outside-the-Box Tactic when this technique can be used to trick a guard into opening your prison cell door.
• Waiting Puzzle: You can defeat one boss just by waiting out the battle due to the boss being so damn old. Alternatively, just save, change your PS2's internal clock to a week in the future, load your save, and pat yourself on the back. Also you can "defeat" a later boss by just waiting while underwater, thus drowning yourself. It's a Mind Screw boss, but it's expected given the series title.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Naked Snake, abiding by his codename, has an option of having him run around shirtless. Playing on the easiest settings, you can have him fanservice you the whole game through, as you don't have to care for either camo or stamina. Additionally, he does have a few scenes in the game in which this is mandatory.
• Walk It Off: Snake recovers health automatically, depending on how much stamina he has, but first he has to heal his wounds through impromptu surgery to recover to full health. Although rations no longer heal Snake, he can take some Life Medicine to instantly heal himself (at the cost of a penalty to his final ranking). Conveniently, taking and healing wounds also increases Snake's maximum health in the long run.
• War Is Hell: The game is an unflinching look at war and what it does to its soldiers. The Big Boss is forced to assassinate The Boss, the greatest hero of World War II and the single most important person in his life, all because factions of the Philosophers are fighting over money. The core message is that there is no such thing as an enemy in absolute terms, and that our allies today might be our enemies tomorrow. This is because our enemies are human beings, just like us. The game hammers that point home with the subtlety of an anvil, but it's a very effective message regardless.
• Warmup Boss: Ocelot fills this role, mostly to teach you two important things about this game's bosses. You can always cheat or find creative ways to battle bosses, in this case by shooting down beehives or standing out in the open to have an outright Showdown at High Noon (complete with a tumbleweed), and to expect the bosses to cheat as well: Ocelot's guards will fire at you even in spite of Ocelot's insistence of a fair fight.
• The War Sequence: Near the end of the game, an Unexpected Gameplay Change happens. The game changes to a fast-paced rail shooter with unlimited ammo and a swarm of Mooks upon which to unload it.
• We Have to Get the Bullet Out!: Snake is able to dig out bullets, arrows and various other projectiles from his body with his knife. Doing this ingame will cause the wounds to heal faster, but leaving them over time will cause the wounds to naturally heal around them, leaving the projectile in there for the remainder of the game.
• Wham Episode:
  • The first hour or two of play time, and all of the Virtuous Mission turn out to be merely a Prolonged Prologue thanks to The Boss' Face–Heel Turn, which doubles as a First-Episode Twist.
  • Snake's captivity in Groznyj Grad, including, among other things Sokolov's death and Snake getting his eye burnt out as a result of Ocelot's muzzle flash.
  • The Reveal at the end of the game that EVA was a Chinese spy sent to steal the Philosopher's Legacy and The Boss was actually a Fake Defector on a Suicide Mission who died a hero but will forever go down in history as a traitor.
• Wham Line: The point at which the Twist Ending is revealed is in EVA's closing monologue, while she explains the truth about what the Boss did:
  EVA: Snake, listen to me. She didn't betray the United States. No... Far from it. She was a hero who died for her country. She carried out her mission knowing full well what was going to happen. Self-sacrifice... Because that was her duty.
• What Could Have Been: An in-universe example: Rassvet was originally going to have a factory built in the area (explaining the half-completed structure's origins), but the Kremlin at some point decided to reorganize Tselinoyarsk into a secret military center and a research facility (Groznyj Grad and Graniny Gorki, respectively), thus cancelling the construction plans of the factory. A similar story exists for the Graniny Gorki lab: it was originally built as a prison, but at some point, it was converted into a research lab instead (which explains the presence of prison cells in the eastern portion of its basement).
• What Did You Expect When You Named It ____?: Assigning three spies named ADAM, EVA and Snake to a sensitive espionage mission? Yeah, that seems like a pretty big risk. In a subversion, though, Snake is the only completely trustworthy agent of the three.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • An optional conversion with Para-Medic will have Snake explain why he recommended Ocelot use a revolver instead of a semi-auto. Snake doesn't really have an answer when Para-Medic responds by asking him why he was giving combat tips to his enemy.
  • Attacking EVA while escorting her will invoke this from the entirety of Mission Control.
• What the Hell, Player?:
  • If the player interrogates a certain guard at Graniny Gorki, the guard will state "The isolation cell guard... what an idiot!" which is obviously referring to the amount of easy escapes regarding scientists that end up in an isolation cell.
  • If the player calls The Boss wearing the Ga-Ko camo, she berates them.
  • Bypassing The End via the internal clock trick will have Snake regretfully explain that fighting him was the old man's dying wish and that he feels like he disappointed him by not granting him that wish.
  • Try starting a New Game Plus, wearing the tuxedo and calling The Boss, and be prepared to be berated.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Tselinoyarsk is explicitly stated to be within the Soviet Union, and it's implied to be bordering Pakistan in the beginning. Also, a map during the briefing at the beginning of the Virtuous Mission shows the Eastern Bloc and zooms in on the specific area where Tselinoyarsk is at. The developers also stated that the entry route for the Virtuous Mission was west of China and north of Southeast Asia. There is a fan theory that it is also the location of Zanzibar Land in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.
• White Shirt of Death: Snake will fight The Boss who's wearing the white sneaking suit she dons since the main act started. The Final Battle even happens on a field of white flowers. After her death, said flowers become red.
• Whole Costume Reference: The style of Snake's fatigues strongly resemble the ones worn by Olga Gurlukovich in the Plant Chapter of Metal Gear Solid 2.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The plot is lifted from Crossfire by J. C. Pollock, about a Soviet scientist who attempts to defect, but a special forces extraction mission fails and a week later a second mission is attempted (other elements were used in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake).
• Why Am I Ticking?: TNT is normally used to destroy food storage and armory sheds, and even the Hind parked at the Bolshaya Past base. With the Infinity Face Paint, however, you can afford to experiment. TNT can be set almost anywhere to create distractions and chain reactions. This includes attaching TNT on guards' backs. You have to sneak up on them, but they'll never notice they've been rigged. Cue as many explosive shenanigans as you want.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Snake is terrified of the undead and ghosts. Just mentioning Dracula gives him nightmares. It can be inferred, then, that facing all those ghosts of the men he's killed really was the worst possible thing Snake could encounter.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?:
  • Played straight in almost every other cutscene in the whole game. The pre-boss-fight cutscenes usually feature Snake creeping around, gun and knife at the ready, only for the boss to announce themselves and give Snake a monologue about his upcoming demise. Snake never takes the opportunity to just shoot them. Even if he's supposed to be "playing fair" and not firing first, The Fear opens their battle by shooting him in the leg with a poisoned crossbow bolt.
  • Volgin's first action upon realizing that Snake's most likely going to win is to order Ocelot to shoot Snake. Ocelot refuses, and he implies that the reason why he won't shoot him is because The Boss made him promise to neither kill Snake, nor aid in his death. Later, The Boss made EVA make the same promise.
• Why We Are Bummed Communism Fell: Well, a case of "Why We're Bummed Communism is ABOUT to Fall". When Snake meets Aleksandr Granin, the head of a Russian weapons lab. In between moaning about his glory days and how his recent projects have failed, Granin shows he sees the writing on the wall that the Soviet Union is not long for this world anymore, but he's too loyal to his country to leave.^note Granin is being a little premature, though. The game takes place in 1964. The Soviet Union still had a good 24-27 years left in it.
  Granin: I...love this country. I could not imagine living anywhere else.
• With This Herring: Being the first game chronologically in the series, Metal Gear Solid 3 gives this one a proper explanation: Snake's presence in Russia is already a violation of international law, so he can't leave any evidence of his presence, which is why Snake begins the mission with minimal equipment, hence his codename, and has to procure his equipment on-site, a tradition which both the FOX and FOXHOUND units would later uphold for all their sneaking missions.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: Or your stamina will suffer for it.
• Worst Aid:
  • Burning leeches off with a cigar in real life makes them vomit into the wound, increasing the risk of infection.
  • The game doesn't care what order you perform medical tasks, or whether you attempt to perform a completely pointless bit of medication. This can lead to you disinfecting a wound after stitching and bandaging it up, stitching up a bullet hole before removing the bullet, or using your knife on a deep cut.
• Worthy Opponent:
  • The End consistently refuses to kill Snake for good, because he wants him to prove his worth by out-sniping him. Instead, The End uses harmless tranquilizer darts, and shows genuine disappointment in Snake should he ever pass out in the middle of the fight.
  • The Boss takes it even further than that, calling in an airstrike that will kill them both in ten minutes, thus giving Snake a time limit to complete his mission, which is to kill her. She seems eerily at peace with the prospect of her own death, even smiling as she tells him: "Let's make this the greatest ten minutes of our lives, Jack."
  • Ocelot does this, challenging Snake a number of times and coming away even more impressed every time. The final fight is a variation of Russian Roulette (one bullet, two guns, and they shoot at each other). No matter the outcome, Ocelot just laughs and jumps out of the plane, confident that he'll see Snake again. In fact, in most of the scene's variations, it is revealed that the bullet Ocelot has been carrying on a chain around his neck with the express purpose of defeating Big Boss is a blank.
• X-Ray Sparks: In the torture sequence, Snake's skeleton is sometimes shown as he is repeatedly electrocuted by Volgin. Unlike most examples of this, this one is not even Played for Laughs in the least bit.
• You Bastard!: Thought it was funny to shoot a man in the balls or slit a bunch of throats? Now face their specters in the river of the dead. There's also a few times in the game when a radio conversation mentions whether or not the player has gone on a killing spree.
• You Have Failed Me:
  • Surprisingly averted in regards to Ocelot and his unit at the end of the Virtuous Mission. Considering how they technically failed to capture Sokolov, since The Boss and her Cobra Unit is literally the only reason they even captured him in the first place, you'd think Volgin would have his unit executed. Instead, he is seen talking with Ocelot celebrating the overall success over their capture of the Shagohod and Sokolov without even a hint at wanting to punish Ocelot for the blunder.
  • It's heavily implied from a radio conversion with EVA that the reason why Johnny was unwilling to let Snake escape from the prison is because Volgin would have executed him if he either had Snake escape or if Snake died in the cell before Volgin could continue torturing him.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: Snake gains the title of Big Boss after killing The Boss.
• You Monster!: EVA says this to Volgin during his torture of Sokolov.
• Youngest Child Wins: This is referenced in an optional radio conversation with Major Zero regarding Raikov.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: You've nearly finished the Virtuous Mission and just need to get to the extraction point. Then one of your Mission Control characters betrays you and after a long cutscene, the opening credits run.
• Zero-Approval Gambit: It's revealed at the end of the game that The Boss' defection was an act; in order to save America's face and prevent a nuclear war, she ends up having to be killed by Snake. The end result: The Boss is dead, her reputation is permanently ruined, and the entire world believes her to be nothing more than a war criminal and a traitor to her country. On top of it all, it's revealed in subsequent games that her death wasn't even really about preventing war; instead, the U.S government had set the whole thing up because they were scared of her and wanted to get rid of her.
• Zero-Effort Boss:
  • The Sorrow from the same game straddles the line between this and Hopeless Boss Fight. The "fight" is simply wading through a river. Whether you make it to the end or not doesn't matter in terms of story, since either way, you have to take the revival pill. The only difference is that you get a bonus piece of camouflage for making it to the end.
  • After beating The Boss, Snake and EVA head off in their plane...only to be accosted by Ocelot demanding one last pistol duel. No matter what you do in this "fight", the end result is the same — no one gets shot, and Snake and his foe separate on relatively good terms.
• Zombie Gait: The ghosts of people you killed during the Sorrow's battle do this.

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Son... you've got a way to fall...

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