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Not pictured: cigarettes and cardboard boxes.

"Metal Gear?!"

The Metal Gear series, produced by Konami beginning in 1987, is the Trope Maker and Trope Codifier of the Stealth-Based Game genre. Moreover, it is also considered to be one of the pioneers of cinematic storytelling within video games, famously being very Cutscene-heavy and being one of the first mainstream games to feature professional voice acting for all characters.

The idea came when the series' creator and lead designer, Hideo Kojima, realized that the MSX2 couldn't show more than a few enemies at a time without flashing epileptically and generally breaking — so why not make a game where avoiding your enemies is the theme? This concept received a lot of criticism — one famous quote from a boss Kojima had at the time is, "Hiding from your enemies? That's not a game!" But then the critics (and other people) started playing it, and it became quite a hit, spawning a great many sequels (with countless ports and editions).

The storyline is famously complicated, but, in its simplest possible form, can be described as an episodic plot that follows a dynasty of mercenaries, each with the Code Name "Snake", in various military events that take place from the mid-20th to the early 21st centuries, involving a series of revolutionary nuclear weapons called "Metal Gear".

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    Franchise summary 
To boil the franchise's plot down to the essentials, a former CIA Agent codenamed "Naked Snake," traumatized after his first mission, became a freelance soldier during the Cold War, making a name for himself as the infamous mercenary commander "Big Boss." Eventually, he returned to America and helped the US Army train an elite black-ops unit known as FOXHOUND. Later, his clone joined FOXHOUND and inherited his "father's" former codename, becoming equally famous as "Solid Snake." While the two go through similarly harrowing adventures throughout their careers, they come out of them with near-opposite worldviews, the former growing jaded and ruthless while the latter remains hopeful for the future.

Fighting a vast global conspiracy which secretly rules the world, their adventures also invariably revolve around the titular Metal Gears — walking battle tanks capable of launching nuclear strikes from any geographic position. A major theme is the spiritual cost of being a soldier. Particularly in a post-Soviet/World War II world in which battles are not always fought for great ideological or religious causes, but are prolonged, brutal proxy wars, where soldiers are sent to die, and then discarded when they're no longer useful. If that's not enough explanation for you, we do have a Recap page for you to check out.

The series loves Breaking the Fourth Wall and has a distinct quirky sense of humor—running jokes involve the iconic use of a cardboard box to sneak around a base (wait until nobody is looking, run to a new location, and repeat). Another trademark is a general tendency for each new installment in the series to retcon at least one more-or-less significant plot detail about at least one of its predecessors. Kojima's irreverence is such that he's been trying to kill the series off since Metal Gear Solid 2 made its protagonist switch, so he can get on with more interesting things, but a rabidly devoted fanbase simply won't let him.

One of the most engaging parts of the games is the huge focus on multiple uses for items; for example, whilst smoking cigarettes seem like a gag item that just drains your health and earns you a lecture from your contacts, they come with the hidden bonuses of showing laser beams with the smoke, and allowing for steadier aiming by calming your nerves. Metal Gear was also a pioneer of non-lethal gameplay. Every title in the series after Metal Gear Solid allows the player to complete the game without killing enemy soldiers. There are pros and cons to each approach, and the player's willingness or refusal to kill becomes a plot point in several stories.

Following the initial Metal Gear, each game has been a deconstruction of action movies and video games, playing tropes so painfully straight they curve right back in on themselves. Very few tropes are invoked without logically following them through, especially those of spy movies - we see exactly what kind of mind and complete control of a situation would be needed to pull off the absurdly complex Gambit Roulettes that happen once per game, exactly what happens to a Tyke-Bomb forced to take up a normal life, and there's a female on male sexual abuse subplot which is not at all okay, to name just a handful.

Solid Snake began as a Deconstructed Character Archetype of the Action Hero trope, as his wartime experiences had not turned him into the ultimate action hero, but into a bitter, broken-down wreck of a soldier who just wanted to retire but could not escape the life of conflict that had entwined him for so long. After fans missed the point slightly, this theme was hammered home with Raiden, who was put through the same torments as Snake in explicit detail. Not even Big Boss is immune to this theme: as Naked Snake, he's not the suave, impeccable agent that would fit perfectly into the '60s spy film pastiche of Metal Gear Solid 3, but a likable, kinda-dorky (though admittedly brilliant at what he does) everyman. Only after going through immense psychological and physical scarring does he begin to resemble the ultimate soldier known as Big Boss.

The series is acclaimed for a lot of good reasons — stellar gameplay, superb boss fights, very complex plots with pitch perfect deconstructions, excellent direction, intelligent character development and weird stylized dialogue. Just prepare for a lot of cutscenes. A lot of cutscenes. As in Metal Gear Solid 4 seriously holds the world records for both "longest cutscene"note  and "longest cutscene sequence."note  Honestly, you play the game for two-fifths of the time and watch a full-length movie the other three-fifths, though if you like the plot you probably won't mind too much.

The 2013 spinoff game Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, features Raiden, a controversial bait-and-switch protagonist who has certainly Taken A Level In Badass since his introduction in Metal Gear Solid 2. Although stealth is present to some extent, it is an (very over the top) action game, because Platinum.

Finally, there's Metal Gear Solid V, released in 2014/2015 and, following his departure from Konami, Hideo Kojima's last entry for the series. Acting as the first Wide-Open Sandbox and (as of yet) the finalé to the Metal Gear saga, the game is split between a stand-alone prologue and main game, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain respectively. The story chronicles the remaining gaps in the Big Boss story, detailing the final steps that made him Greater-Scope Villain for the main series (albeit not in the way many expected), and finally bringing the story full circle with an ending scene that led directly into the events of the original Metal Gear. The Phantom Pain was ultimately well received as the Grand Finale of the series, though like the other titles, it is still divisive among fans.

    Video games 

Main series

Spin-offs

Collection sets

  • Metal Gear 20th Anniversary: Metal Gear Solid Collection (2007) - A box set released exclusively in Japan that includes MGS and MGS2 in their original Japanese editions, plus the Subsistence edition of MGS3 (first disc only), The Document of MGS2, a bonus PS2 disc featuring the MSX2 games (as they appeared in Subsistence), the PSP game MPO in a special UMD case and a Metal Gear Saga DVD Video, essentially including all the canonical Metal Gear games prior to MGS4.
  • Metal Gear Solid: The Essential Collection (2008, PS2) - The international equivalent of the previous set. It includes the original PS1 version of MGS in a PS2-style DVD case, as well as the Substance and Subsistence editions of MGS2 and MGS3, respectively. Unfortunately, it's missing the MSX2 games, despite the fact that they were included in the previous Japanese set.
  • Metal Gear Solid: HD Collection (2011, PS3 / Xbox 360 / PS Vita) - A collection featuring HD editions of MGS2, MGS3 and (except on Vita due to its PSP backward compatibility) PW. The MSX2 games are also included as part of MGS3. The Japanese version of the collection lacked PW, which had a separate physical release instead, but the PS3 release made up for it by including a product code to download the original MGS on the PlayStation Network.
  • Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection (2013, PS3) - A collection of every canonical game directed by Kojima (leaving out MPO and MGR), which means every game previously included in the HD Collection, plus the original MGS and MGS4. As a bonus, this set also includes the VR Missions/Integral expansion and both Digital Graphic Novels for the first time in Blu-ray Video format.
  • Metal Gear Solid: The Master Collection (2023, PS5 / Xbox Series X|S / Nintendo Switch / PC) - Revealed at the March 24, 2023 Playstation showcase, Volume 1 contains the first three Metal Gear Solid games, along with the original two MSX titles, the NES version of Metal Gear, Snake's Revenge, and the graphic novel adaptations of Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2. While not officially announced yet, the widely-rumored Volume 2 is expected to include Metal Gear Solid 4, PW and Metal Gear Solid V.

Chronological order of the series (ambiguously canon entries are in parentheses):

  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater - 1964
  • (Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops - 1970)
  • Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker - 1974
  • Metal Gear Solid V
    • Ground Zeroes - 1975
    • (Metal Gear Survive) - 1975
    • The Phantom Pain - 1984
  • Metal Gear - 1995
  • Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake - 1999
  • Metal Gear Solid - 2005
  • (Metal Gear Solid: Mobile - 2006)
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
    • Tanker chapter - 2007
    • Plant chapter - 2009
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots - 2014
  • (Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance - 2018)

    Other media 

Other adaptations

  • Metal Gear (1988) - A gamebook acting as a sequel to the NES version of the original game
  • Metal Gear Solid (1998-1999) - An audio drama
  • Metal Gear Solid (2004-2005) - Comic-Book Adaptation written by Kris Oprisko and illustrated by Ashley Wood
    • Metal Gear Solid: Sons of Liberty (2006-2007) Comic-Book Adaptation written by Alex Garner and illustrated by Ashley Wood
  • Metal Gear Solid: The Board Game (2019)

Crossover appearances

  • Konami Krazy Racers (2001, GBA): Cyborg Ninja appears as a playable character.
  • Evolution Skateboarding (2002, PS2 / GameCube): Solid Snake and Raiden appear as selectable characters. Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance also featured a hidden minigame using this game's engine.
  • DreamMix TV World Fighters (2003, GameCube / PS2): Solid Snake appears as a hidden character, with the Shell Connecting Bridge serving as his home stage.
  • Ape Escape 3 (2005, PS2): A crossover minigame modeled after the series, titled "Mesal Gear Solid", can be unlocked after competing the main campaign. Snake and Roy Cambell appear alongside monkey versions of Snake and Ocelot.
  • Super Smash Bros.:
    • Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008, Wii): Snake appears as an unlockable character, along with a stage based on Shadow Moses Island and Gray Fox as an Assist Trophy. Several other Metal Gear characters make cameos in the form of trophies and stickers, and hidden conversations between Snake and his support team from Metal Gear Solid (and, in one case, Slippy Toad from the Star Fox series) can be triggered by performing a secret taunt on the Shadow Moses Island stage. Snake's inclusion — and as one of the first 5 newcomers revealed for the game at that — made history, as he became the first Guest Fighter in the series.
    • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (2018, Switch): After being absent from Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, Snake returns as a playable character with Shadow Moses Island once again serving as his home stage. Gray Fox returns as an Assist Trophy and several other Metal Gear characters make cameos in the form of spirits and spirit battles.
  • New International Track & Field (2008, NDS): Solid Snake appears as a playable athlete.
  • Scribblenauts (2011, NDS): Several Metal Gear characters can be spawned by typing their names into the notebook, but only in the Japanese version.
  • PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale (2012, PS3): Raiden appears as a playable character, with his home stage being an area from LocoRoco that gets attacked by a Metal Gear RAY.
  • Super Bomberman R (2017, Switch / PS4 / Xbox One / Windows): Characters based on Solid Snake, Naked Snake, and Raiden were added in the "Version 2.1" patch on June 27, 2018, along with a battle map based on Mother Base.
  • Fortnite (2024): Snake and Raiden were added as skins in Chapter 5, Season 1.

The Metal Gear series provides examples of:

Please do not dump tropes that only apply to specific games on this page; put them on the appropriate pages or on the character page. This page is for tropes that appear several times throughout the series.

    Tropes A to H 
  • Action-Based Mission: At least Once per Episode, though it varies per entry. Most boss fights meet this description, and each game typically includes a number of fast-paced action setpieces to contrast with the slower-paced stealth gameplay:
    • There's often a high-tempo Rail Shooter sequence where Snake covers while a supporting character drives. Examples include: end of MGS, end of MGS3, end of Second Sun and middle of Third Sun in MGS4.
    • There's often an outmatched fight against an enormous vehicle. Examples include: Tank and Hind D in MGS, Harrier Jet in MGS2, all the vehicles and AIs in Peace Walker.
    • There'll probably be a forced alert sequence with difficult mooks, which often bring means of Respawning Enemies, unique Elite Mooks, or Super Powered Mook.note  Examples include: the stairway running from 10F to 20F of the tower building in MG 2; the prison, first tower stairs, second tower elevator and underground elevator in MGS; the post-core alert in MGS2; the optional Ocelot squad battle in MGS3; the FROG sequences in MGS4; and the Skull sequences in MGSV.
    • There's always straight-up battles against the Quirky Miniboss Squad. The only exceptions are Decoy Octopus in MGS (already dead), Fortune in MGS2 (can only be evaded), The End in MGS3 (tactical sniper battle or entirely skippable), and the entirety of Peace Walker and MGSV (no squad, just a Big Bad or two).
    • Finally, there's always a battle against the newest giant mech for entry: Metal Gear Rex in MGS, the Metal Gear Rays in MGS2, The Shagohod in MGS3, the last Ray while piloting Rex in MGS4, Peace Walker then later Metal Gear ZEKE in Peace Walker, and Sahelanthropus in MGSV.
  • Action Duo: Several:
    • Solid Snake and Meryl Silverburgh in Metal Gear Solid. Also, Snake and Otacon in the final car chase if you let Meryl die.
    • Snake and Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2.
    • Naked Snake and EVA in Metal Gear Solid 3.
    • Meryl and Johnny in Metal Gear Solid 4.
    • Venom Snake and Quiet in Metal Gear Solid V.
  • Action Girl: The Boss, Meryl, EVA, Olga Gurlukovich, Fortune, Sniper Wolf, the Beauty and the Beast Unit, the FROGS, Quiet, and various random female soldiers in Diamond Dogs and the Skulls.
  • Air-Vent Passageway: Handy to escape guards. At least half-invented this, at least in the world of video game publishing.
  • All Up to You: In most of the games, the radio contact who usually supplies info in regards to how to defeat various bosses is, for various reasons, unable to help Snake out in defeating the final boss. The only notable exceptions to this rule are Metal Gear Solid 3 where everyone in Snake's control team is cheering him on in beating The Boss, and Portable Ops, where Roy Campbell supplies some hints on how to beat Gene.
  • All There in the Manual:
    • Many of the characters' backstories are only revealed in supplemental materials or in optional radio/Codec conversions within the games. The most notable is the true identity of The Boss and The Sorrow's son, who is only revealed if you trigger a radio call between Snake and EVA in Metal Gear Solid 3. It's Ocelot.
    • The Metal Gear Solid 4 Database, in addition to compiling every piece of Metal Gear lore up to Metal Gear Solid 4, features an extensive backstory for Raiden of what happened to him between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4 that is not even mentioned in the game itself.
  • Alternate Continuity:
    • Ghost Babel is an alternate sequel to the original Metal Gear; the first Acid game follows a different story (though Snake is still a legendary soldier) and the second goes further. In the case of Ghost Babel, it contains some hidden foreshadowing concerning the plot of Metal Gear Solid 2.
    • Snake's Revenge was also relegated to an alternate continuity after Metal Gear 2 was made, although it was originally intended to be a true sequel.
    • Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance included "Snake Tales", a series of five missions that featured Snake going through stages from Sons of Liberty, but with different plot point (there's no mention of the Patriots, and Snake's backstory is subject to changes). "A Wrongdoing" features Snake trying to save the President from Fatman, which turns out to be a plot by a third party. "Big Shell Evil" features Snake saving Emma Emmerich from Russian drug traffickers, while another third party is planning another plot. "Confidential Legacy" features Snake facing off against Sergei Gurlukovich and Meryl aboard the Tanker, and serves as a direct sequel to the first game. "Dead Man's Whisper" features Iroquois Pliskin helping Commander Dolph apprehend Vamp, with another conspiracy transpiring in the background. "External Gazer", the fifth and final tale, involves an alternate-universe Solidus planning on wrecking the multiverse by having Solid Snake destroy a fifty foot tall guard with death ray eyes.
  • Alternate History: In the Metal Gear verse, history appears to have diverged at some point during World War II, with the Cobra Unit being instrumental in the defeat of the Axis Powers. Cloning, AI and robotics technology of the 1970s are more advanced than even now in Real Life and the Cold War ends later (though Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots appears to have retconned this).
  • Alternate Universe:
    • Cloning was perfected extremely early, and apparently, so were exoskeletons, mecha, holographic interfaces, PDAs and gigantic Big Brother ships. Oh, and batshit AI.
    • This also happens in the games set in the future from their release, thanks to real life catching up and surpassing them. As above, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake has the Soviet Union lasting at least into the final week of 1999, when the real Union dissolved a year after the game's 1990 release. There's also a reveal near the end of Metal Gear Solid that the "Gulf War syndrome" experienced by numerous soldiers returning from the first war in the Persian Gulf (generally attributed in reality to exposure to things like depleted uranium in weapons and tank armor) being the result of injecting those soldiers with "soldier genes" as an early attempt at creating something similar to the Genome Army that act as the basic mooks in the game.
  • Anachronic Order: It's not as bad as say Castlevania, but the sequence of events is not entirely relayed chronologically. To break it down: the MSX games and the first to MGS games are in order. Then, Snake Eater travels back to the 1960s to tell the origin of Naked Snake/Big Boss. After that, Guns of the Patriots ties up all of the loose ends from the end of Sons of Liberty after which all subsequent games follow the events of Snake Eater.
  • Ancient Conspiracy: Subverted in Portable Ops and further in Metal Gear Solid 4. The actual conspiracy, the Patriots, were formed fairly recently, in the 1970s, and only use the "ancient" conspiracy, the Philosophers which was itself founded in the early 1900s as a disguise to hide behind. The only link between the two is that the Patriots were founded with the money that the Philosophers left behind when they split.
  • Anti-Villain: Zero. Even though he is behind creating the Patriots, his ultimate goal was good and he is far more caring and humane than the typical Knight Templar. However, this is extremely debatable given his "caring" solution led to a network of AI crashing the world into sterile, hopeless future dominated by proxy wars and iron-fisted information control. Overall, straight-up non-Anti Villains are more the exception than the rule in this series.
    • It's also worth noting that this was not his original plan. His original plan was using vocal cord parasites that kill people who speak particular languages to eliminate all languages except English to force world unity. He later decided to use the technology gained from researching the parasites to target individuals rather than ethnic groups.
  • Anyone Can Die: A good number of main characters do. At the end of Metal Gear Solid 4, more than 80% of all characters are confirmed dead.
  • Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: Particularly in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, most of the elite cyborgs favor swords and other melee weapons over guns (in Metal Gear Rising, Mooks use guns, but the Elite Mooks use giant hammers and most of the UGs have some form of melee weapon or other). It's justified by explaining that bullets don't have the energy to get through cyborg armour, while HF Blades and other advanced weapons do.
  • Arc Words:
    • You'll hear "It's not over yet!" in a lot of the games.
    • Also: "Neither enemy or friend", "I've still got a job to do", and "The world needs only one Boss/Snake/Big Boss".
    • Snake's usual response to people telling him smoking is dangerous; "So's war and I've done that all my life" tends to show up, making for a heartwarming moment when Snake gives up at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4, after he learns he doesn't have to fight anymore.
    • Both Snakes like to say "Kept you waiting, huh?" whenever they make their first appearance. The fact that Venom Snake just silently refuses to do so, when Miller tries to prompt him into saying it, is a sign that he isn't who he appears to be.
  • Arrow Cam: Nikita Remote Controlled Missiles - First Person Mode.
  • Artifact Title: As is often the case with Mac Guffin Titles, as the number of entries in the franchise grew, the more the titular mecha had to be shoehorned into the plot. Starting with Metal Gear Solid 2, the robots basically function as elite mooks in a story about something else entirely. By the time of The Phantom Pain — the last Kojima-led entry — the story is mainly about the villain Skull Face getting his hands on a deadly bioweapon (the vocal cord parasites) that would make for a perfectly fine spy thriller plot on its own, but he also needs to have a Metal Gear too because it's in the title.
  • Artistic License – Biology: Most infamously in the original Metal Gear Solid, where it is revealed that Solid Snake and Liquid Snake are both clones of Big Boss. Yet somehow they have different genetic make-up. It is revealed in Metal Gear Solid 4 that the two were genetically manipulated by the Patriots for different purposes. Solidus is the only 100% identical clone of Big Boss.
  • Artistic License – Military: The Gurlukovich Mercenaries, an army of 1000 former GRU Spetznaz, have set foot on US soil, all without the Pentagon noticing. Bringing with them are military hardware of Russian origin — they gave Liquid's FOXHOUND an Mi-24 Hind in Solid and have hijacked a tanker (secretly) manned by the US Marine Corps, via the Kamov Ka-60 Kasatka, in Sons of Liberty. In reality, having a large army from adversary nations (especially the likes from Russia) setting foot in the US is enough for Washington and the Pentagon to raise an alarm due to breach of national security, and resources will be devoted into neutralizing them before they can carry out an operation.
  • Attack Its Weak Point: Metal Gears tend to have a weak spot that can be exploited. This is usually the legs.
  • Audio Adaptation: There was a two volume Metal Gear Solid Drama CD in Japan (titled Drama CD Metal Gear Solid) that basically served as a continuation to the PS1 game, while the fictional radio drama IdeaSpy 2.5 in Ghost Babel became an actual radio drama starring Hideo Kojima as the title character.
  • Auto-Pilot Tutorial: Some of the games show the player how to play by automatically scrolling through the items and sometimes controlling the player character.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: The Metal Gear concept itself. Sure, it seems like the ultimate weapon, given that it can launch nukes essentially undetected from any terrain, but the idea seems to run on Rule of Cool. The games seem to acknowledge this, though. The first two games have the legs of the titular Metals Gears as a serious weak point (the TX-55 is brought down with multiple C4 charges at its feet. Metal Gear D is destroyed by hurling frag grenades at the knee joints), a flaw that is uncorrected until the development of Metal Gear REX. Even the later Metal Gear RAY can be disabled by firing Stinger missiles at its knee joints and Solidus is able to disable multiple RAY units with a submachine gun. The Shagohod, while technically not a Metal Gear, also has a similar (but not quite as fatal) flaw with its augers, as well as needing three miles of runway to launch its nuke. The ICBMG, a Metal Gear In Name Only, needs to be launched into the upper atmosphere to deliver its payload from low orbit, defeating the entire Metal Gear purpose. Sahelanthropus is literally unable to function without a psychic to control it. Arsenal Gear takes this trope up to eleven, as without a massive fleet of ships, troops, air support, and RAY units, it's a nothing but a huge target.
  • Ax-Crazy: Half the freaking cast.
  • Back Tracking:
    • One of the more egregious examples occurs in Metal Gear Solid. Upon encountering Sniper Wolf, Snake is told to go find a sniper rifle, which is in a room fairly close to where the player started the game. Snake even lampshades it. The Twin Snakes alleviates this by placing a non-lethal one much closer to where the player actually needs it.
    • Metal Gear 2 forces backtracking for nearly the whole game.
  • Badass Longcoat: Ocelot. Liquid would count except he only has the coat on for maybe two scenes maximum. Big Boss sports one in concept art, briefly at the start of Portable Ops and in the ending of Metal Gear Solid 4.
  • Badass Normal:
    • Snake, at least when compared to the majority of his supernaturally-gifted or crazy-equipped foes. He does have enormous willpower and is Made of Iron, but he can't carry an M61 Vulcan autocannon and doesn't usually have kickass battle armor to help him.
    • Big Boss. He's the greatest soldier to have ever lived, period. He's such an incredible example that considerable expense was made to clone him to create Super Soldiers.
    • Johnny, of all people, qualifies. He's patently useless in the majority of appearances, but his actions at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4 cement his status (considering he was just a normal completely unmodified human soldier).
    • Revolver Ocelot is a rare villain example. He's so skilled with the revolver that he can take out six assault rifle-armed men with a single shot each, taking out the last guy hiding behind cover by ricocheting a shot around the corner. Plus his incredible reflexes and spectacular Magnificent Bastard streak. It stands out since every other member of his team in Metal Gear Solid 1 has some kind of superpower, while his gimmick is just being really good at using his weapon.
  • The Bad Guy Wins: Most of the Metal Gear Solid games (barring Metal Gear Solid 4) has the main characters actually unwittingly allowing the bad guys from behind the scenes to succeed in their overall evil plan, usually revealed in The Stinger. Metal Gear Solid 2 and, to a certain extent, Peace Walker are notable exceptions to the whole Stinger route, where it is made pretty clear that the behind the scenes villains won even before we get to The Stinger. It helps that the bulk of the series is essentially one big Enemy Civil War, with the Patriots as an elusive Greater-Scope Villain. The Big Bads of all of the main series Solid Snake games (Big Boss, Liquid Snake, Solidus Snake and Ocelot) all turn out to be rebelling against the Patriots for personal gain, so stopping them invariably just helps the Patriots maintain their stranglehold on the world.
  • Bag of Spilling: In most of the games, Snake loses all of his acquired equipment towards the end of the mission. In Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, it's destroyed by being set on fire, though he does acquired another pistol for the Escape Sequence. In Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, it's all taken away by the Big Bad, although Solidus does give Raiden his sword back for their final battle. At the end of Metal Gear Solid 3, Ocelot tosses Naked Snake's equipment pack into a lake. Later Big Boss games avert this by virtue of being set while he was building Outer Heaven, though Ground Zeroes plays it straight with the destruction of Mother Base. Interestingly, the original Metal Gear has Snake keep all his gear, as does Metal Gear Solid 4 in spite of its Fisticuffs Boss Final Boss battle against Ocelot, since Snake brings his .45 to Arlington Cemetery in the epilogue.
  • Banana Republic: Outer Heaven and Zanzibar Land in the original MSX2 games. Oddly enough, the Metal Gear Solid games mostly avert this, with the exception of "Army's Heaven" in Portable Ops. The sidestory installments also have Gindra in Metal Gear: Ghost Babel and the Moloni Republic in Metal Gear Acid.
  • Beat Them at Their Own Game: Sniper Wolf and then Crying Wolf. The matching second names are not a coincidence, right down to a similar location for the boss fight, both in a snowfield and Communications Tower on Shadow Moses Island. Although it's not impossible to take down Sniper Wolf with Nikita or Stinger missiles at the final confrontation.
  • BFG:
    • Lots and lots of them, especially in Metal Gear Solid 4. Remember the rail gun Snake takes from Crying Wolf?
    • In Metal Gear Solid, Vulcan Raven uses a M61-A1 Vulcan 20mm gatling gun that he ripped out of an F-16.
    • Crying Wolf uses the same rail gun as Fortune.
    • Big Boss can wield a plethora of them in Peace Walker including a hilariously powerful minigun.
  • Because I'm Good At It:
    • The mentality which leads to the formation of the Patriots, and various incarnations of Outer Heaven. Regardless of their allegiances, they're all military. Their lives revolve around war, and nobody in Metal Gear goes unscathed.
    • The theme of indoctrination and war propaganda runs deep in Metal Gear. The Genome Soldiers from Shadow Moses are genetically predisposed to war, creating in months what once took Big Boss several years and an army of war orphans to build. Raiden's old unit is snidely referred to by Snake as "grunts of the digital age," conditioned using the Force XXI virtual reality programs and lacking any real talent or experience. MGS2 focused on memes instead of genes, so the S3 Plan was a method of trying to ensure that people who support the Patriots could be generated at will and, theoretically, at a mass level. The Paradise Lost Army is, or course, yet another example.
    • Even in MGS3, Big Boss' support staff had that tiny bit of psychosis in them: Para-Medic talks enthusiastically about genes and cloning, Sigint's kinda obsessed with his projects, like the mask that could blink and the bioelectric battery; Zero loves his James Bond movies, but seemed to have had a particular fascination not just with the gadgets, but also the warmongering Bond villains, like Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
    • One of those little moments occurs in Peace Walker when Big Boss talks to Paz about the great stone spheres of Costa Rica. He instantly thinks of shooting them in a fire fight. Because, to Paz's horror, he just doesn't get or understand the value of anything that can't be used for war.
  • Biblical Motifs: All over the place. Big Boss' efforts to establish Outer Heaven, an Eden-like paradise for soldiers, play a major role in the mythos; appropriately enough, his utopia is brought down by a secret agent called "Snake". And Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has Snake working alongside two CIA agents code-named "ADAM" and "EVA", and seducing both of them. And in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Ocelot even crushes an apple in one poignant scene.
  • Big Bad: One per game, until the plot goes into Grey-and-Gray Morality. To elaborate:
  • Bittersweet Ending: Every individual game, though the bitterness and sweetness varies with each one.
    • Metal Gear Solid 3 verges on Downer Ending territory.
    • The only Solid game that doesn't really count is probably the original Metal Gear Solid. Even then, the non-canon ending where Meryl dies is very bittersweet and wasn't revealed as non-canon until ten years later in Real Life, when Metal Gear Solid 4 was released.
  • The Blank:
    • Decoy Octopus and Laughing Octopus.
    • By extension, Old Snake, after he gets Laughing Octopus's mask.
  • Blocking Stops All Damage:
    • Any Cyborg Ninja worthy of the name in Metal Gear can deflect more than they weigh. Grey Fox held back Rex from crushing Snake easily and Raiden could also block hits from a massive mech easily. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance gave Raiden a block function that is pivotal to success, but he can still take damage while blocking if his opponent is awesome or big enough.
    • Similarly, any MSF member in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker can prevent any damage from being crushed by a Humongous Mecha, especially the massive tank that is Cocoon, simply by catching their massive weight with their hands.
  • Blood Knight:
    • Big Boss. He wants to create a place in the world for people like him.
    • Solid Snake as well, although he is downright repulsed by the thought of being one.
    • Liquid and Solidus, who want to carry out Big Boss' fantasy.
    • Gray Fox. Well, kind of. He doesn't necessarily enjoy battle, but he does feel like he needs it.
    • Raiden. Not until he turns into his Jack The Ripper persona, but when it happens, he becomes THE Blood Knight.
  • Book Ends:
    • If taken chronologically (and canonically, in light of Metal Gear Rising), the series begins and ends with Big Boss smoking a cigar.
    • The entire franchise begins and ends with a charcter being briefed on Solid Snake's mission to Outer Heaven.
  • Boring, but Practical: All games post-MGS2 have a tranquilizer gun than can attach a suppressor. It's usually one of the first weapons you get. It will likely see more use than all of your rocket launchers, shotguns, railguns, grenade launchers, and automatic weapons combined, especially in games where recruiting enemy soldiers is a major gameplay element. Beyond recruiting, it doesn't alert enemies due to being silenced, shooting enemies with it doesn't cause their comrades to realize something is up (they'll just awaken the asleep victim; contrast the less fun experience of them finding a dead body), and is pretty much necessary for rewards that necessitate a Pacifist Run.
  • Boss Battle: The series is famous for, among other reasons, its excellent boss battles:
    • Metal Gear: Shotmaker, Machinegun Kid, Hind D, Tank, Fire Trooper, TX-11 Cyberoid "Bloody Brad", Dirty Duck, TX-55 Metal Gear, Venom Snake.
    • Metal Gear 2: Black Ninja/Kyle Schneider, Running Man, Hind D, Red Blaster, Four Horsemen, Jungle Evil, Night Fright, Drago Pettrovich Madnar, Metal Gear D (controlled by Gray Fox), Gray Fox, Big Boss.
    • Metal Gear Solid: Revolver Ocelot, Tank (controlled by Vulcan Raven), Cyborg Ninja/Gray Fox, Psycho Mantis, Sniper Wolf, Hind D (piloted by Liquid Snake), Sniper Wolf, Vulcan Raven, Metal Gear REX (piloted by Liquid Snake), Liquid Snake.
    • Metal Gear Solid 2: Olga Gurlukovich, Fortune, Fatman, Harrier (piloted by Solidus Snake), Vamp, Tengus, Metal Gear RAY army, Solidus Snake.
    • Metal Gear Solid 3: Major Ocelot, The Pain, The Fear, The End, The Fury, The Sorrow, Yevgeny Borisovitch Volgin, Shagohod (piloted by Volgin), The Boss.
    • Metal Gear Solid 4: Laughing Octopus, Raging Raven, Crying Wolf, Vamp, Metal Gear RAY (piloted by Ocelot), Screaming Mantis, Ocelot.
    • Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker: Pupa, Chrysalis, Cocoon, Peace Walker, Peace Walker (quadruped form), Metal Gear ZEKE (piloted by Paz).
    • Metal Gear Rising: Metal Gear RAY Mod.0 (Desperado), Hammerhead, LQ-84i/Bladewolf, Mistral, GRAD, Monsoon, AI!Mistral, AI!Monsoon, Sundowner, Jetstream Sam, Metal Gear EXCELSUS (piloted by Armstrong), Armstrong, Armstrong (Ripper Mode). The DLC add four more: LQ-84i, RAY and Armstrong for Sam, Khamshin for Bladewolf.
    • Metal Gear Solid V: The Man On Fire, Parasite Unit (Mist), Quiet, Parasite Unit (Armor), The Man On Fire, Eli/young Liquid Snake, Parasite Unit (Camo), Parasite Unit (Armor), Metal Gear Sahelanthropus.
    • Metal Gear Survive: Wanderer Seth, The Lord of Dust.
  • Boss Rush: Very often a bonus mode, seen in Metal Gear Solid 2 and individual boss battles of 3, and an extra treat in the Acid series and Portable Ops Plus. The Subsistence version of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater adds this to the original MSX games as well.
  • Bottled Heroic Resolve
  • Breaking the Fourth Wall:
    • In Metal Gear, Big Boss orders Snake to turn off the MSX2 or NES console.
    • In Metal Gear Solid, Psycho Mantis will scan your PlayStation or GameCube memory card for existing save files from other Konami games. He also does a harmless attack called "Hideo" which blacks out the screen and displays the aforementioned words to fool the player into checking their tv.
    • In Metal Gear Solid, revolver Ocelot warns Snake that if he detects a controller with rapid-fire capability, he'll automatically disqualify him and kill Meryl.
    • Metal Gear Solid 2 introduced Fission Mailed.
    • In Metal Gear Solid 3, Naked Snake says he can't smell in a CODEC conversation with The Boss. She replies that he'll just have to use his instincts as a gamer (something Miller also told Solid Snake in Metal Gear 2). Obviously, the player can't use their sense of smell to aid in their awareness of their surroundings.
    • Portable Ops has Snake mention to Sigint that the equipment has been completely changed to be lighter and more compact, and he can now take the equipment outside—being the first canon game in the series on a handheld system.
  • But Not Too Foreign:
    • Pretty mild for most characters but up the ying-yang for the Snake "family." Although Western in origin, and in spite of the fact that both Otacon (who's surname is Jewish-German) and Mei Ling look much more Asian than any of the Snakes, the characters are told again and again how Asian they are. Says Vulcan Raven in Metal Gear Solid: "The blood of the East runs in your veins" and he then goes on to describe (how he knows this we have no idea) that Snake's ancestors were from Japan and before that the Mongolian plains. As it turns out, Snake and his brother Liquid were cloned using a donor egg from a Japanese woman (so their mitochondrial DNA is East Asian).
    • Otacon himself is a pretty good example as, while (as far can be told) he's entirely European in origin, he is an emphatic Japanophile. Likewise, Raiden, while not a Japanophile, seems like he walked straight out of one of Otacon's Japanese animes.
  • Butt-Monkey:
    • Johnny, who gets knocked out a lot and keeps getting bad diarrhea problems, and is the least competent of Rat Patrol Team 01... up until he gets some badass points and steals Meryl from our lovable, crotchety old clone.
    • Raiden has it pretty rough as well. In Metal Gear Solid 2 he is nagged by his girlfriend, is urinated on, he gets beaten up and used as bait for certain people, it is revealed that his parents were murdered by Solidus, and that's just his first appearance. In Metal Gear Solid 3 he was parodied by Volgin's gay lover Raikov, a usable face mask that Major Zero and Sokolov both apparently dislike, and Metal Gear Raiden: Snake Eraser where he travels back in time to kill Big Boss so that he could become the main character of the series. To say he failed miserably there would be a understatement. In between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4, he is told by Rose that she suffered a miscarriage (don't worry she was lying) after which he is tortured by the Patriots and used as a guinea pig for their experiments, his head is severed from his body at the jaw and transplanted to an entirely synthetic body, which is later upgraded to the exoskeleton we see him wearing in Metal Gear Solid 4.
  • But Thou Must!: While it's understandable given certain events need to occur, there's a few instances in the series where the game is just plain unfair with forcing you into situations, often triggering a non-standard alert and rending your stealth camo useless.
    • MGS infamously has the first communications tower, wherein players must pass through a door with crisscrossing sensors, a camera trap through the other side, and a screwy camera angle to encourage you to fall for it the first time you reach it. Naturally, this means an endless hoard of mooks spawns and you have to sprint all the way up four dozen flights of stairs spamming stun grenades or blindly firing your FAMAS.
    • MGS2 has the core alert after finding Ames. You've got enemies on high alert actively patrolling the core in increased numbers, but now your guard disguise doesn't work and they're not going away until you're caught or you escape. Expect to get frustrated.
  • The Cake Is a Lie/Mole in Charge:
    • In the original Metal Gear, Big Boss deploys Snake to Outer Heaven with the expectation that he will be captured and put away for a while, just like Gray Fox. When this fails, Big Boss comes out of hiding to kill Snake for interfering.
    • In Metal Gear Solid, the Pentagon turns Snake into a carrier for FOXDIE, an intelligent pathogen which targets members of FOXHOUND, as well as Kenneth Baker, the only man on the island who can implicate the Secretary of Defense Jim Houseman in the ArmsTech graft scandal. When the plan goes belly up, Houseman tries to nuke the island with bunker busters to remove all of the evidence anyway.
    • Metal Gear Solid 2 shares more in common with Portal than just the trope: in the prologue, Snake is framed for an eco-terrorist attack, spilling crude oil in the Hudson River.note  This forms the pretext for the construction of an offshore "cleanup facility" which is actually a copy of Shadow Moses' nuclear disposal facility. Years later, Raiden, under the guidance of an AI masquerading as Colonel Campbell and his girlfriend, Rosemary, is sent to reenact the Shadow Moses Incident so the Patriots can gather data from it for their S3 Plan.
    • In Metal Gear Solid 3, Snake is betrayed twice: once when The Boss dupes FOX into handing Sokolov over to the Russians, and again when Snake is coerced into executing her for treason. In reality, The Boss was working undercover for the American government to siphon billions of dollars from their rivals, and wound up taking the fall for the CIA after Colonel Volgin fired an American nuke at Sokolov's research facility.
  • Camp: So, so much. This is a very tongue-in-cheek series.
  • Canon Discontinuity: Snake's Revenge, a sequel to the NES version of the first Metal Gear which Konami produced for the international market without Kojima's involvement. It was technically the first Metal Gear sequel, as it actually inspired Kojima to make Metal Gear 2 in the first place.
  • Captain Obvious: There are a whole lot of these. Some examples:
    Otacon: Snake, this a war zone, so you have to be on your toes.

    Snake: A surveillance camera?!
  • Central Theme: One of the most notable things about the franchise is that every entry has its own theme; each unique, but also inherently tied to the others. While this allows each game to have a unique atmosphere, it also allows the story to have individual themes pertaining to each game, and explore them thoroughly.
    • Metal Gear Solid: GENE (how a person's genetic history, biology, and more affect them not just in physical makeup, but also in their reputations, expectancy, their own legacy, and whether or not it's genes or the environment that make the person)
    • Metal Gear Solid 2: MEME (how society at large is changed by information and control, how humans can be easily controlled through things they want to hear, and how information and ideas spread through social interaction)
    • Metal Gear Solid 3: SCENE (how a person's personality, physical makeup, likes and dislikes, and more can be changed by the environment they're put in, and how far people can go from where they started)
    • Metal Gear Solid 4: SENSE (how a person views the world, how others interpret that persons view of the world, and what happens when that person dies and their views and wants continue to influence others)
    • Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker: PEACE (the idea of perfect peace in the world, how far some will go to achieve it, if peace is possible at all, and, if it is, how long it can last before new conflict arises)
    • Metal Gear Solid V: RACE (how a persons drive to get revenge on others can affect the world around them, the constant competition between others and how it affects the world at large, and how language affects a persons mental growth and development)
    • Across the entire series:
  • Solid Snake, the face of the franchise, spends all of his time stopping other guys from using Metal Gear, nuclear warhead carring robots, to threaten the world peace.
  • Big Boss, despite also stopping the world from nuclear war like Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, later in life became the thing he was opposing, and made his own Metal Gear in order to make the world full of conflicts. At the end of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, however, he understood a true meaning of The Boss's message - to leave the world be.
  • The Boss, fully understanding that country alliances frequently change, decided to sacrifice her life for her country in hope for peaceful world without conflicts.
  • The Patriots see the human society as fools who harm themselves with their ideas and as those who need their control. At the beginning of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, it became the status quo of the world, controlling every armed conflict.
  • Revolver Ocelot, by the end of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, managed to fool The Patriots and free the world from it's control.
  • Char Clone: Gray Fox in the remastered Metal Gear 2, Ocelot in Snake Eater and Liquid in the original Solid.
  • Character Outlives Actor: Kōji Totani, the Japanese voice actor of villain Revolver Ocelot, died during the production of Metal Gear Solid 4. As a result, the role was recast to Banjo Ginga (Liquid Snake's Japanese voice), with Liquid Snake's persona having (apparently) taken complete control of Ocelot's mind as a convenient excuse for the recast. This wasn't much of an issue in the English version, since Ocelot's English voice actor Pat Zimmerman was still alive and reprised the role anyway.
  • Chekhov's Gunman:
    • The first we hear about Sunny is while she's still a developing embryo in Olga's womb early in Metal Gear Solid 2. She becomes a recurring character in Metal Gear Solid 4, and at the end, plays a big part in defeating the Patriots.
    • Johnny Sasaki was just a guard who had his clothes stolen and caught a cold in the original Solid, but still warranted a full name in the credits. Come Metal Gear Solid 4, and he was one of the major players who Took a Level in Badass.
  • Child Soldiers: Null/Gray Fox, Raiden, Drebin, Chico, and technically the Les Enfants Terribles clones.
    • The Phantom Pain gets...messy with this trope in that you have to fight them. They can kill you, despite being poor soldiers as they are, well, children. Fight back and it's mission failed. Snake discovers they are forced into the blood diamond trade and he fakes their deaths to cover up him recruiting them, when Kaz protests it turns out they will be given an education, basic jobs, a future they were denied. Then there's the ending: Eli/Liquid Snake hijacks Metal Gear and takes it for a joyride, and Snake has to stop him and the children he took with him.
  • Chevalier vs. Rogue:
    • In Metal Gear Solid, Snake is the ninja (ironically enough) to the knight of the Cyborg Ninja (AKA his old Friendly Enemy Grey Fox). The latter wears a suit of Powered Armour, slaughters his way through scores of enemies and follows a strict code of honour (if you use your fists in the boss fight with him, he'll likewise discard his sword). Meanwhile Snake sneaks around everywhere and is forced to hide if he's caught.
    • In Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance Raiden actually is a ninja (a cyborg ninja, in fact). The Rival, Jetstream Sam, is essentially a cyborg samurai (he even fights with a High Frequency Blade made from his father's antique katana). Bonus points for the fact that Raiden started the game talking about his admiration for Bushido (the samurai's code of honour) but had started to abandon it and embrace traits of his Jack the Ripper persona by that point.
  • Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: The name comes from The Last Days of FOXHOUND, a webcomic based upon the game, which is used to describe Revolver Ocelot's habit of betraying anyone and everyone. Including his own soldiers in 4.
  • Code Name: Every special forces group in the Metal Gear universe seems to have some sort of codename system. Most notably, the FOX unit (and later FOX HOUND) uses animal-themed names.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Meta-example. The packaging art for each MGS game (at least in Japan) have a main color each. This is further reflected in tie-in products such as the Acid series and Social Ops.
    • MGS = rednote 
    • MGS2 = blue
    • MGS3 = green
    • MGS4/MGS5 = black
    • MPO/MGSPW = yellow
  • Combat Sadomasochist: Vamp and Raiden seem to enjoy hurting each other a little too much.
  • Comm Links: The codec.
  • Companion Cube: The cardboard box. Both Solid and Naked Snake apparently have some sort of sexual fetish with it, and Naked Snake believes that not only is his being in the box his destiny, but it is also the true key to happiness. The former finds it relaxing to sit in the box - or, y'know, barrel. Solid Snake doesn't just find the box relaxing, to him, it's the most important thing he has on him. He even lectures Raiden about it, giving the famous "Take care of your cardboard box, and it'll take care of you" comment.
    • "I'm not exaggerating when I say the success of your mission hinges on how you use that cardboard box."
  • Conspicuously Selective Perception: AI can only see in front of them in the earlier games. Of course, an enemy spotting you right away would piss off many.
  • Contemplate Our Navels: The series has to be a Lifetime achievement Award contender, especially the Metal Gear Solid games. Characters spend lots of time waxing poetic about the harshness of war, the dangers of genetic engineering, the military-industrial complex, their tragic childhoods, etc.
  • Continuing is Painful: Variation: You can continue as much as you want without any harm except your rank at the end suffer. On the other hand, with the exception of a few bosses that your support team gives you more specific advice for (and on two cases, both tell you the secret that makes the fight possible) on future attempts, there is no reason to not just select "exit" to go the main menu and then load instead as long as you remember to save at the start of each area (where "continue" will return you to).
  • Copy Protection: Both, the MSX2 version of Metal Gear 2 and the original MGS, had a certain character's contact number written on the back of the retail packaging. In the latter's case, this became problematic to players who bought the game secondhand without the original CD case or were merely renting it.
  • Creepy Crows: Vulcan Raven in Metal Gear Solid, Raging Raven in MGS4. The similar codenames are not a coincidence.
  • Crew of One: Metal Gears and the Shagohod are designed to be piloted and operated by one person. Some models, such as Peace Walker and the later RAYs don't even need a pilot.
  • Cut Scene: Let's just say there are two types of people in the Metal Gear fandom: those who hate Metal Gear because of the cutscenes, and people who don't.
    • It is frequently said by fans that Metal Gear's an interactive story, rather than a game, not that it's a bad thing.
  • Cutscene Incompetence: Very frequent. It's pretty common for the player to be doing great, only for a certain cutscene to hit and have the protagonist screw up and/or cause a non-standard alert for Rule of Drama.
    • MGS3 has the notorious bike sequence, wherein Snake and EVA both stop watching the road for several seconds (at the same time too) to examine the bike closely. Unsurprisingly, by checking the bike the exact way a pair of idiots would, they end up crashing which forces the player into the widely disliked Escort Mission sequence.
    • MGS4 has a few parts wherein Old Snake has his symptoms flare up, causing much incompitence. The worst offender is probably the end of First Sun, wherein Liquid Ocelot gets away simply because Snake is suddenly unable to take the shot he's managed fine for the past hour of gameplay.
    • Cleverly invoked in the cut epilogue of MGSV. A blast causes trauma to Snake's shrapnel wound, triggering a mild seizure and impacting his ability to differentiate between red and white. With Snake panicking and surrounded, the game helps the player rapidly gun down the hazmat mooks, only for the last one to shriek like a child; returning color reveals that the seizure made Eli's red hazmat suit look like the XOF white suits, effeectively tricking the player into triggering this trope.
  • Cyber Cyclops: The Ninja in MGS1 and Metal Gear Ray are both cyclopes.
    • Only the mass production models of Metal Gear RAY are Cyclopes. The prototype has two optical sensors.
    • Also, although Gray Fox's mask affects the appearance of a cyclops, if you look closely the eye holes are actually two slits immediately next to the giant red scanner. However, the aesthetic remains similar.
    • However, and this is more noticeable in Twin Snakes but still present in the original, if you look at Gray Fox's face when he's unmasked you'll note that he only has one eye left, as the result of his near-death experience.
  • Death by Transceiver: The ever-popular "Snake?! SNAAAAAAKE!!"
  • Death Seeker: Metal Gear Solid had Gray Fox, who was looking for one last battle with Solid Snake. MGS2 introduced us to Fortune, whose father died in the tanker incident, followed by her husband's death and a miscarriage as a result of all the stress. She cannot be hit by bullets due to a top secret electromagnetic weapon that she unknowingly carries. Vamp doesn't really start playing this role until MGS4, and injects himself with nanomachine suppressants in order to cancel out his healing factor and finish himself once and for all. Snake himself arguably counts in MGS4, since his reasons for living are rapidly disappearing. He decides to see the world with Otacon during his last few months, however.
  • Deconstruction: Lots of it. While the first two Metal Gear games played everything relatively straight, the Metal Gear Solid sub-series is intended as a deconstruction of action movies (and, to a lesser extent, video games), twisting tropes common to them around in extremely horrible ways to establish how damaged everything and everyone would have to be for an action movie scenario to work in the real world. By the second game it's way out into the shocking parts of the Deconstructor Fleet territory, shamelessly tackling video games, the player/audience, sequels, the expectations of fans and even its own prequel and characters.
  • Depraved Bisexual: Both Volgin from MGS3 and Vamp from MGS2 & 4.
  • Derivative Differentiation: The games were initially just a tongue-in-cheek take-off of American spy and action films, but Metal Gear Solid was where the series started to establish its own identity (as the Sequel Displacement can attest to).
  • Did Not Get the Girl:
  • "Die Hard" on an X:
    • The games, and particularly the MGS series, follow the beats of a typical Hollywood blockbuster: a VIP is taken hostage (in MGS1 and MGS2, the victims are nabbed during an unveiling of their pet development project, and the government forces Snake to comply with the rescue — both premises taken from Die Hard and Escape From New York); a fat ransom is demanded; the terrorists fan out and get picked off one-by-one by a solitary intruder.
    • MGS2 follows the same playbook, though roughly half the game is spent tailing behind Snake and being deliberately kept in the dark about his movements, much like the terrorists themselves. You're not playing as Bruce, or even Sam Jackson. (That's Stillman.) You're more like Justin Long. Alternatively, Raiden starts the mission as a deep cover enemy agent, unknowingly helping the Patriots to further their goals. As the mission progresses, Raiden starts to realize why Snake and his allies hold Raiden at arm's length, and the game is primarily about him earning the right to be a driving force in the storyline.
  • Do Not Run with a Gun: Until Guns of the Patriots and onwards.
    • In Metal Gear Solid, Sons of Liberty, and Twin Snakes, selecting either a Nikita/Stinger Launcher or a PSG-1 Sniper Rifle will cause your character to automatically switch to First-Person aiming mode with no option to move (this is much worse in the original where Snake automatically goes prone first before aiming).
    • In Snake Eater and Portable Ops selecting a sniper rifle (SVD) will cause Snake and the player operatives will instantly switch to a First-Person view while holding their rifle, and their only option is to crouch, prone, or aim with their scope. While selecting an RPG-7 or Binoculars will instantly switch to aiming mode.
  • Dysfunction Junction: The games go to lengths to point out just how incredibly screwed up almost every single character is, and the tragic consequences of such.
  • Easter Egg: Tons of 'em.
  • Edge Gravity: Unless of course you encounter a pit trap.
  • Elites Are More Glamorous: Played with. In MGS1, the 'high-tech next-generation special forces' are the useless Mooks of the game, and in MGS2, the US Marines and Navy SEALs are Red Shirt Armies. Normal forces are more or less never shown, and the Redshirt Army status of supposedly elite forces just go to show how dangerous the enemies are or how badass the heroes are.
    • Played straight with FOXHOUND, Dead Cell, the Cobras and the B&B Corp. In each case, they are specifically described as some of the most dangerous people on planet Earth.
  • Elite Mooks: The Hi-Tech Soldiers, Arsenal Tengu in MGS2, the Ocelot Unit in MGS3, the Rocket-men and FROG units in MGS4, the Skulls Unit in MGSV.
    • Peace Walker has Scouts, who can counter CQC with fibre wire, and armoured escorts, who take much more damage and carry heavier weaponry in later boss battles.
  • Enemy Chatter: Only during Alert, Evasion, and Caution phases. However, there is some chatter to be found in most games, if you look hard enough.
  • Enemy-Detecting Radar: Present in all of the main MGS games, in one form or another. The first two had the "Soliton Radar" which showed you the position and facing of enemies on a nearby radar minimap. Some people complained—justifiably—that the radar actually made things a little too easy. For MGS3, the prequel, they had a number of lower-tech solutions that all ran off of battery power: a motion sensor that would not detect stationary enemies, a "sound ping" radar that could give away your position to someone nearby, and an "AP sensor" that made the controller vibrate when enemies were near. MGS4 gave players the "Threat Ring" which showed the relative locations of enemies surrounding Snake, but only when he held still and knelt on the ground, and also a sound-detecting radar in the form of the Solid Eye—loud explosions, gunfire and other turmoil would make it not work as well, but it provided a nice balance between the previous incarnations. MGS5 uses the "Marking" system, which tags people and important items (such as vehicles, fixed guns or supplies for your base) while looking at them using binoculars or aiming with a gun ; tagged items and people appear as pictograms on your map and on your screen (if you are close enough) until they are killed/destroyed or leave the map.
  • Equal-Opportunity Evil: The ranks of the various Quirky Miniboss Squads tend to be quite diverse. And then there're the Patriots.
  • Escort Mission: Raiden and Emma; Big Boss and EVA; Old Snake and Drebin's Stryker; Old Snake and the Van.
  • Everything Fades: Averted - except for the first MGS, dead bodies don't go and need to be hidden.
    • However, enemies killed in alert mode or action sequences will disappear (flicker out more like it), and occasionally in normal status if one waits long enough.
    • As a possible reference to this, Liquid Ocelot's elite FROG units immolate themselves once they're dead, and if Snake touches the bodies, they crumble to dust.
    • Played straight in Revengeance, since bodies cut down by Raiden exploded right after, of if cut down for to much time in Blade Mode or the HF Wooden Sword, simply faded (this happens due to the possible crash that lots of scattered enemies pieces would cause).
  • Evil Brit: Two of the most influential villains in the entire series are British: Zero, founder of the Patriots, and Liquid Snake, one of the only men in the world who can face Solid Snake in equal combat. Ironically enough, in the Japanese version they're voiced by the same actor, Banjo Ginga.
    • Subverted with Strangelove, who is more like an anti-heroic albino, Emma (who was the daughter of a British woman), and possibly Otacon, as the in-game novel In The Darkness Of Shadow Moses: The Unofficial Truth implies that Otacon has some British ancestry.Peace Walker ends with Strangelove and Huey coming to an 'understanding', and MGSV canonises her as Otacon's mother.
  • Exposition Break: Utterly infamous for these.
    • The CODEC seems to stop time, so Snake and his Voice with an Internet Connection can carry on long conversations during a firefight, or even while Snake is kneeling down right in the line of sight of an enemy sniper.
    • Averted in Peace Walker, where not only does time not stop during a Codec call, but it's also actively encouraged that you don't attempt to call when near enemies. MGS4 also has some Codec calls in real time, where the person calling is just telling you where to go next or commenting on something nearby.
    • Subverted in Revengeance. The traditional codec screen returns, but is only used for optional conversations between Raiden and his support team. All story-related codec calls are done through an Expository Gameplay Limitation so as to hide a loading screen, and occasionally as Dialog During Gameplay.
  • Expy: Snake shares many characteristics with Snake Plissken from Escape from New York, while Colonel Campbell is Colonel Trautman from Rambo. Given that Kojima is an avowed movie fan, this is no surprise.
    • Raiden is an expy of Solid Snake, and probably Jack from Titanic (1997).
      • Raikov in turn is an expy of Raiden.
  • Exactly Exty Years Ago: The Kojima-directed prequel games (Snake Eater, Peace Walker and Phantom Pain) all take place ten years apart from each other (1964, 1974 and 1984).
  • Eyepatch of Power: Subverted slightly in that Big Boss' eyepatch really is an eyepatch, while Old Snake's Solid Eye simply provides optical enhancements... as well as 'radar,' of sorts. Well, then there's also Solidus.
    • Raiden Custom Body's eyepatch acts as a cybernetic eye, since Doktor couldn't get a replacement after he lost his eye to Sam (in fact, the eyepatch he uses has all the benefits of a fully operational artificial compound eye, and all the coolness of an eyepatch).
  • Fallen Hero: Big Boss, along with Major Zero, Para-Medic, and Sigint.
  • Fan Disservice: See trope entry.
  • A Father to His Men: Big Boss and Gene.
    • The Boss in reference to the Cobra Unit.
  • Female Gaze: A good deal of Metal Gear is geared towards the Female Gaze, given how taut and firm Snake's ass is, even when he's an old man.
  • Femme Fatale: Sniper Wolf, EVA, Naomi, Mistral.
  • Fight Like a Card Player: The Ac!d series.
  • Final Speech: Every single character death includes one of these. No exceptions, bar the bosses in the first Metal Gear game.
  • First-Person Snapshooter: Each Metal Gear Solid features a digital camera that allows the player to take screenshots of the game and save them to the memory card.
  • Fisticuffs Boss: Frequent. There's Solid Snake vs Liquid (ending Metal Gear fistfight in MGS1), Naked Snake vs The Boss (ending CQC fight in MGS3), and Solid Snake vs Liquid Ocelot (final boss in MGS4). The only exception in the first four games is MGS2, where the final boss fight with Solidus a sword fight.
  • Flawed Prototype: The eponymous Metal Gears, nuclear-armed walking tanks that never actually get into the production stage. RAY and the GEKKO are exceptions, but as the games are quick to remind us, they aren't actually Metal Gears.
  • Forced Friendly Fire:
    • In Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker an interactive cutscene occurs wherein Big Boss tries to escape the custody of a squad worth of heavily armed CIA mercs. At one point he pulls the Human Shield variation of the trope. Forcing the guy to fire an M4 rifle one handed, no less. Well, both of their hands are on the gun...
    • In the fourth game a cybernetic variant occurs during Raiden's over the top battle with the Gekko mecha. One of the badass moves he pulls is to leap onto a Gekko's head and force it's M2 Browning HMG to cut down one of it's partner IFVs. Justified by his augmented robotic strength.
  • Forgotten Superweapon: REX was more or less abandoned at Shadow Moses. Justified since REX was developed illegally.
  • Foreshadowing: In Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Yes, Hideo Kojima snuck in hints about MGS4 on the Killer App of a competing company in an Intercontinuity Crossover. It's really not out of place.
    • The games themselves are riddled with foreshadowing. Starting from the first Metal Gear Solid we have references to Snake not aging well and the mention of a few characters from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. MGS2 gave us the revelation that the Metal Gear technology was originally Russian. MPO brought in hints of who the Patriots really were.
  • Form-Fitting Wardrobe: Everyone's sneaking suits.
  • Four Is Death: There are four games set in years ending in a 4, and every major character in the earliest of these games by series chronology is dead by the end of the latest—which is Metal Gear Solid 4. Furthermore, that game in particular kills off four such characters: Big Boss, Ocelot, EVA, and Major Zero. note 
  • Future Badass: Raiden in MGS4, Null to Gray Fox. Additionally, Portable Ops can count - the remaining survivors of the San Hieronymo incident later become part of Big Boss's mercenaries.
  • Future Spandex: The sneaking suits.
  • Gambit Pileup: It seems no one in this series can commit to a plan unless it's as labyrinthine as possible.
  • Generational Saga: The series (if you don't count Rising) takes place over a fifty year period with two of the three actually four playable characters being a father and son.
  • Generation Xerox:
    • All of Big Boss' children are skilled soldiers. Not surprising, since they're clones and were in fact raised specifically to be perfect soldiers.
    • Even more egregious is Otacon and his father, both genius robotics engineers with similar personalities, who wind up unwittingly creating walking nuclear death tanks and then actively work to stop their work from being used. Huey's relationship with Big Boss mirrors Otacon's with Solid Snake's as well. Until it's revealed that Huey was actually an asshole.
  • Genre Shift: The gameplay elements remain largely the same, but each time takes on subtle changes to story and visual style:
  • Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Series protagonist Solid Snake smokes cigarettes. Original Big Bad Big Boss, on the other hand, loves cigars.
  • Gone Horribly Right: The Patriots started the Les Enfantes Terrible project because they wanted perfect soldiers like Big Boss. They succeeded, and ended up with three guys who do not enjoy getting dicked around at all.
  • Gratuitous French: The name of the project that spawned the Snake clones; Les Enfants Terribles (The Terrible Children).
    • There's also the first incarnation of Big Boss's Outer Heaven, Militares Sans Frontiers (a take off Medicines Sans Frontiers, which they had to throw a legal disclaimer saying the two weren't related.)
    • Mistral's polearm L'Etranger. Justified in the fact that she is a big Shout-Out to Albert Camus' novel The Stranger ("L'étranger" in French).
  • Graying Morality: Most of the games feature a de facto villain while playing with moral ambiguity as a thematic device. That is until MGS4 which is a full on Grey-and-Gray Morality story which also retcons the series conflict into one as well.
  • Greater-Scope Villain: A few of these across the series, but again, the whole thing is more of a Grey-and-Gray Morality situation. Chronologically:
  • Cipher, led by Zero for Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, except not really for Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain as Skull Face was not operating under orders from Zero in Ground Zeroes, and sometime before The Phantom Pain, Zero realized his mistake in creating Cipher, and soon after, Skull Face attacked him with a parasite that slowly crippled his brain and turned him into a human vegetable while Skull Face took control of Cipher, except for the Patriot AI project, which was overseen by Donald Anderson/SIGINT, and would later become…
  • The Patriot A.I.s, the products of Cipher's AI project that eventually outgrew and subsumed Cipher, and carried out Zero's final will of a unified world through suppressing rebellions against them, information control and the implementation of a "war economy", is the Bigger Bad retroactively for Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and Metal Gear Solid, and is the official Bigger Bad for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Ironically, the Big Bads in the Solid Snake games are battling the Patriots themselves, though for different reasons.
  • Groin Attack: In MGS2 and MGS3, shooting an enemy in the family jewels was a one hit kill. In MGS4, you can knock out a male enemy by crushing their balls. Performing it on a FROG-Trooper, however, turns it into a grope and a very angry FROG trooper.
  • Hand Cannon: Meryl's Desert Eagle in MGS, which she claims to have used since she was a child; in MGS4 she has both that and a long-barrel version with an attached scope. There's also the Patriot in MGS3, essentially a sawn-off version of an M16 prototype that only The Boss can effectively fire one-handed. And Gray Fox has a plasma cannon which replaces his right hand when he needs it.
  • Harder Than Hard: The European releases of MGS2 and 3 add an unlockable "European Extreme" mode as a PAL Bonus. It's like the regular Extreme difficulty, with the added stipulation that triggering an Alarm phase ends the game immediately.
  • He Knows About Timed Hits: Made into an art form.
  • Heal Thyself: Resting in hidden areas in MGS3 and MGS4 restores health, not to mention the fast-regenerating camouflage given to you by one of the bosses in MGS3. (In MGS4 there are at least two iPod songs that specifically increase Old Snake's recovery rate.)
    • In MGS2, when bleeding, Raiden can stop the bleeding if he stays still because of the fast acting nanomachines.
  • Heterosexual Life-Partners: Snake and Otacon. They're serious competitors with Mario and Luigi for the title of "Most Badass Bromance in Videogame History".
  • Honor Before Reason: Averted and commented on by everyone, especially Solid Snake, who mocks the idea.
  • Hopeless Boss Fight: In MGS4, Vamp would be unless you use the Syringe to end his nanomachine-enhanced regeneration.
    • In MGR:R, Senator Armstrong just punches and kicks you like a ball in the first and second fights, until you get Murasama HF Blade and kicks his butt.
    • Fortune in MGS2 is truly a hopeless fight; all you can do is dodge her shots until events force her to leave.
  • Hospital Hottie: Dr. Naomi, Rosemary, Para-Medic and Elise.
  • Human Weapon: The franchise has this as the main theme. The plots usually revolve around the protagonist and their direct opposition being manipulated by politicians, conspiracies, and other forces, and being treated as expendable tools with no goal or aspirations of their own.
  • Humongous Mecha: The titular Metal Gears. They're a little different from the standard of the trope in that, while they're certainly a powerful force on the battlefield by themselves, what makes them truly dangerous is that they are all-terrain mobile nuclear launch platforms.
  • Hyperspace Arsenal: Unabashedly. You can carry about fifty weapons in MGS4, but only five at a time that you can wield in your menu. You can also carry an oil drum.
    • Portable Ops and Peace Walker downplay this trope heavily. Portable Ops allows you to carry four items only, regardless of type. Peace Walker, on the other hand, will allow you to carry between one and three primary weapons, depending on which outfit you're wearing, and a couple of secondary weapons as well as a limited number of items.
    • Averted in The Phantom Pain. You can only carry one large primary weapon* , one hip-holstered primary weapon* , one small secondary weapon* , a bionic fist (Snake only), a knife, and a range of throwable/placeable weapons and items.

    Tropes I to P 
  • I Cannot Self-Terminate: Gray Fox has absolutely nothing to live for except one last battle with Solid Snake. Vamp's nanomachine-enhanced Healing Factor prevents him from committing suicide. Fortune cannot be hit with bullets, and any grenades thrown in her vicinity end up being duds due to the top secret electromagnetic weapon developed by the Patriots that she is unknowingly carrying, but she lost everything after the tanker incident so this is actually a curse. All three are looking for a Worthy Opponent to finish them off. The Boss was a special case, as the Philosophers ordered her to die at Naked Snake's hands for the sake of a cover-up. She couldn't commit suicide, and she couldn't tell Snake what was going on. The fact that nuclear war would likely result if she stayed alive was also a factor. Even Snake fits this during MGS4, as he cannot die until he completes his mission.
  • Identical Grandson: Big Boss and the three Snake brothers are meant to resemble each other (notably in the fact that Solid Snake is a dead-ringer to Naked Snake, the young Big Boss, while Solidus Snake resembles the elder Big Boss).
  • Idiot Hero: Despite having the situation explained to them every 3.5 seconds, both Snakes and Raiden are unbelievably dense. Though considering how many plot twists get revealed in each cutscene and the Mind Screw nature of MGS2, it could just be an effort to identify with the players who are probably just as confused.
    • Johnny (Akiba) in MGS4 also qualifies.
  • I Have Many Names: Many characters, especially those appearing in multiple different games, have several identities they are referred to as. These include:
    • Solid Snake (David, Iroquois Pliskin, Old Snake)
    • Big Boss (John, Jacknote , Naked Snake, Saladin, Ishmael, The Man Who Sold The World)
    • Revolver Ocelot (ADAM, Adamska, Shalashaska, Liquid Ocelot)
    • Raiden (Jack, Jack the Ripper, Mr. Lightning Bolt)
    • EVA (Tatyana, Matka Pluku, Big Mama)
    • Gray Fox (Frank Jaeger, Frank Hunter, Null, Perfect Soldier, Your #1 Fan, Cyborg Ninja, Deepthroat)
    • Major Zero (David Oh, "O", Major Tom, Cipher)
    • McDonnell Benedict Miller (Master Miller, Kazuhira Miller, Kaz)
    • Punished "Venom" Snake (Ahab, Big Boss's phantom)
    • The Boss (The Joy, Voyevoda)
  • I Just Want to Be Badass: Deconstructed with Solid Snake, and even more savagely deconstructed with Raiden.
  • Instant Awesome: Just Add Mecha!: The Metal Gears themselves.
    • Seriously, though...piloting REX in MGS4 proves why Otacon's design was the most badass weapon ever developed in a semi-realistic setting.
  • Instant Sedation: Subverted and played straight. Shooting a guard (with no vest or helmet) in the chest, butt, or head does this; but it'll take anywhere from thirty seconds to five minutes, depending on the difficulty level, to knock out a guard in any other zone.
  • Interface Screw: For realism (when sniping, if you don't take a relaxant medicine the character's hand shiver) or just messing with the player's mind (Fission Mailed, the Psycho Mantis battle).
  • Intercontinuity Crossover: Peace Walker features a bonus mode crossing over with Monster Hunter, and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater had "Snake v. Monkey", a crossover with Ape Escape. There was also Snake's inclusion in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
  • Ironic Echo: Solid Snake to Liquid Snake in Metal Gear Solid.
    Liquid Snake: I'm going to swat down a couple of bothersome flies.
    *Later in the game*
    Solid Snake: I've got to go and swat a noisy fly.
  • Kidnapped Scientist: At least one per game.
  • Kill It with Fire: Pyro Bison, Fire Trooper, The Fury, Incendiary Grenades and Molotovs in MGS4, and flamethrower units in Metal Gear Acid 2.
  • Knight in Sour Armor: Solid Snake, Big Boss, and the Boss are all this.
    Solid Snake: I'm no hero. Never was, and never will be. I'm just an old killer, hired to do some wet-work.
  • Kudzu Plot: Starts off mild in the early games. MGS2 will mess with the player a lot.
  • Lampshade Hanging: Taken to an art form.
  • Large Ham: Liquid Snake and his wacky arm gestures, Revolver Ocelot, and Death Seeker Fortune are guilty of this. And when Liquid's arm possesses Ocelot, the hamminess can barely be described.
    • Ocelot even calls Fortune out on this at the end of 2, before killing her "You were hamming it up as the tragic heroine, thanks to the script the Patriots wrote for you."
    • Justified in MGS with Liquid as the graphics in the 90's didn't exactly allow for subtlety of movement. Not to mention it's supposed to be a deconstruction/homage of classic 60's spy and horror movies, a fact which Paramedic effectively spells out in 3.
  • Laser Sight: Useful for aiming, especially in MGS1 (since you can't fire from first-person except for the PSG1 or rocket launchers) or with the tranquilizer M9 in MGS2 (since Snake/Raiden insist on not actually aiming down its sights like with the USP or SOCOM). In MGS4, they're an optional attachment for several of the guns that don't already come with one, which increases the lock-on distance for weapons when using auto-aim on top of making it easier to aim them in third-person.
  • Latex Perfection: Somewhat subverted; the mask's lips don't move, Snake's facial structure is roughly recognizable beneath the mask, and the FaceCamo used by Laughing Octopus and Snake is MUCH more advanced than current technology.
  • Legacy Character: MGS3 was the first game to establish the fact that Big Boss used the Snake codename before his clones were conceived, essentially turning Solid Snake into this (not so much for Liquid and Solidus though, who are never actually addressed as Snake by anyone). This is further emphasized in the subsequent prequels (MPO, PW and GZ) where Big Boss continues using the Snake codename, despite having already been awarded the title of Boss by that point. TPP takes this idea further by making the main character into a body double of Big Boss, making him the third playable Snake in the mainline series.
  • Liberty Over Prosperity: Freedom is pretty much the entire point for "followers" of Big Boss' supposed ideology.
  • Limited Animation: The CODEC cutscenes in the first three of the MGS series:
    • The first one represented conversations on the radio by showing a portrait of each character in the conversation, with Mouth Flaps when they spoke. The most expressive they got were the occasional change in expression, such as Mei Ling sticking her tongue out at the player, or Otacon jamming his face up against the camera to warn Snake about stealthed assassins.
    • MGS2 upped it with facial models of the characters - however, the Mouth Flaps are really off, and the characters frequently used CODEC when they were standing right in front of each other (the in-universe reasoning being that CODEC calls are inaudible to eavesdroppers, but it's obviously just a time/memory-saving measure that allowed the developers to provide exposition between characters without having to render the environment surrounding them or animate a proper cutscene for the infodump).
    • MGS3 dealt with the first problem by representing the character Snake is calling with still pictures, as it took place in the 1960s, when two-way video-phone devices would be nonexistent (not that this stops the game from occasionally replacing the still pictures with video footage to demonstrate something the character is discussing). Snake is rendered similarly to in MGS2, though well out of focus in the background in return for having his full body rendered.
    • MGS4 avoided it entirely by showing full videos of the character Snake was speaking to, although Snake only has two main contacts in that game (Otacon and Rosemary) and two out of the other three (Raiden and Drebin) instead get minor animated logos.
    • Revengance plays with it, for some reason. The required calls are done in a Gears of War or Batman: Arkham Asylum style, with Raiden putting two fingers up to his ear and walking really slowly, although there's a floating full model portrait, and the optional ones have the same thing, but done in the classic style. However, the mouth flaps are still extremely, extremely off, even though it seems out of place in a modern game.
  • Live-Action Cutscene: The "Solid" games often used live-action Stock Footage in their (in)famously long cutscenes about real-world issues.
  • Load-Bearing Boss: Golab in AC!D2, Fatman in MGS2.
  • Long-Lasting Last Words: A Running Gag example, where a good part of the bosses (if not all of them), give a long Final Speech where they tell all about their lifes, stories and such before dying, even when they were hit in vital points.
  • Long-Lived: Each of the numbered games since MGS2 has had at least one character whose age is in triple digits: the cut Old Boy in MGS2, The End in MGS3, Major Zero in MGS4, and Code Talker in MGSV.
  • Lost in Translation: "La Li Lu Le Lo" are "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 dub (since English doesn't do that), so it just seems to be meaningless babble.
  • Luke, I Am Your Father: Snake, Liquid, and Big Boss; Raiden and Solidus.
  • McNinja: The various incarnations of the Cyborg Ninja, none of them Japanese. Revengeance even opens with Raiden quoting from the code of Samurai, whom he obviously esteems.
    • In Sons of Liberty, the Russian soldiers eventually trade in their camo for futuristic "Tengu" uniforms, complete with Naruto sandals and blades.
  • Made of Iron: All the Snakes qualify to some extent, but Liquid takes the cake. He survives a helicopter crash, a large explosion, a high fall and several gunshot wounds before finally succumbing to the FOXDIE. Even then, he is able to possess Ocelot through his arm except he isn't possessing Ocelot, it's a trick.
    • Raiden, too, especially once he's a cyborg ninja. In fact, pretty much anyone in combat in this franchise.
  • Magic Bullets: Quite literally with some bosses.
  • Magic from Technology: Even though some abilities of characters seem downright magical, mostly they are given a scientific explanation. For example, Vamp's regeneration and Screaming Mantis' mind control both take advantage of nanotechnology. There are a few notable aversions in the series as well - the source of Psycho Mantis' or The Sorrows powers are never explored and they appear to be genuinely paranormal.
    • However, the series is infamous for its love of complexity. Don't expect any single explanation to cover a character. In the case of Vamp, while he used nanomachine regeneration, his other abilities are never given solid explanation, and at least one character turned out to have genuine powers separate from the technology that was assumed to provide them. Basically, don't assume that the wizard has been done in until you see the body. And even then...
  • The Man Behind the Man: Like you wouldn't believe, though the Patriots could be more accurately described as the computer behind the man.
  • Mandatory Twist Ending: Saved from being predictable simply for the batshit levels of crazy. At least Once per Episode:
    • Events have been playing out totally differently to player expectation. Typically the Player Character has actually been a pawn in the grand scheme of events, and they've actually been dancing to the villain's secret Gambit Roulette.
    • Several people aren't who they seem, and thus have ulterior motives:
      • MGS: Colonel Campbell is really Meryl's father, the DARPA Chief was Decoy Octopus, Solid and Liquid Snake are clones of Big Boss, the Cyborg Ninja is Gray Fox (and Naomi's adoptive brother), Naomi wanted Snake dead for trying to kill Big Boss and Gray Fox, Master Miller has been Liquid Snake in disguise.
      • MGS2: Plissken is the real Solid Snake, Solidus Snake is the third Big Boss clone and Raiden's adoptive father, the Colonel is a Patriot AI, the Cyborg Ninja is Olga Gurlukovich acting to save a loved one.
      • MGS3: The Boss is only pretending to be a turncoat to prevent WW3, and in the ending EVA turns out to really be a Chinese spy.
      • MGS4: Rat Patrol 01 is another set of unaware Patriot puppets, Drebin is still loyal to the Patriots, Cypher is Major Zero, Big Boss was never really dead and has woken up, Naomi is terminally ill and trying to fix things, The Patriots are revealed to be Major Zero's team in MGS3 plus EVA and Ocelot, the true villains are revealed as Patriot A.I.s gone haywire and plunging the world into a war economy, the list goes on.
      • Peace Walker: Galvez is a Russian agent called Zadornov, The Boss is only an AI, the ending reveals The Boss truly did believe in fighting for peace (to Snake's dismay), the epilogue reveals Paz is Pacifica Ocean (an agent of Cipher).
      • MGSV: By the ending we have Venom Snake revealed as a doppelgänger for Big Boss, Skull Face is Big Boss' shadow (having acted as his uncredited support), and the additional tapes reveal Zero tried to make amends with Big Boss only to be made vegetative by Skull Face.
    • If he appears, then Ocelot has a reveal regarding his affiliations as per his Chronic Backstabbing Disorder.
      • MGS: A phonecall reveals he was really working for the US President.
      • MGS2: In the Tanker, he betrays Gurlukovich and Russia to steal a Metal Gear for himself. In the Plant, Ocelot turns on Solidus and fleeing in a Metal Gear after revealing he was a Patriot spy.
      • MGS3: A phonecall reveals he was ADAM (Snake's original contact) and that he was working for for the KGB all along, only to later betray them for the CIA.
      • MGS4: The epilogue reveals he was loyal to Big Boss all along and one of the original Patriots.
      • MGSV: The final cutscene reveals he was Big Boss' only confidant, and deliberately sabotaged his own memories to keep him loyal to Venom.
    • There's one or more ending stinger(s), which puts a huge spin on the game itself or the series as a whole.
      • MGS: Ocelot escaped with the Metal Gear data, and is passing it on to the US President.
      • MGS2: The Patriots have seemingly been dead for decades.
      • MGS3: Ocelot has the real Philosophers' Legacy.
      • MGS4: Big Boss is alive and stops Snake killing himself.
      • Peace Walker: Two: One where Big Boss rejects The Boss' ideals, and another where he officially announces Outer Heaven.
      • Ground Zeroes: Skull Face reveals that his goal is to kill both Big Boss and Zero and Paz is implied to reveal Zero's location to him.
      • The Phantom Pain: Ocelot reveals Big Boss' body double ruse to Miller, and the two pick sides knowing there will eventually only be one Big Boss.
  • Manly Tears:
    • In Snake Eater, after Naked Snake is promoted to the rank of Big Boss, having killed his mentor, The Boss, he visits her grave, and salutes her one last time as a single tear roll down his cheek.
    • Fifty years later, Big Boss visits her grave one final time, and attempts to salute her before collapsing from exhaustion...as as he enjoys one final smoke with his son, one more tear rolls down his cheek, and he dies with a faint smile on his face.
  • Menu Time Lockout: Generally played straight. Subverted in only one instance so far: in MGS3, pausing for 10 minutes during the final battle with The Boss will result in the MiGs destroying the battlefield as she said they would if she wasn't defeated in that time.
  • Methuselah Syndrome: Four different characters are stated to have lived for over a century (The End, 1861?-1964; Code Talker, 1880?-???? [known to be alive in 1984]; Old Boy, 190?-2008 and Major Zero, 1909-2014).
    • Snake and Solidus (and Liquid, but he doesn't live long enough to decay) are an inversion, similar to the Replicants from Blade Runner. They're not engineered to last.
  • Mission Control: In every game, there's not just one Voice with an Internet Connection; there is a whole team dedicated to providing backup for the player. You can call them at any time to have conversations that alternate between useful and amusing (and Anvilicious). Unfortunately, they can call you as well....
  • Mind Screw: The last few hours of MGS2.
    • Also anything involving Psycho Mantis and Screaming Mantis, who sometimes attacks the ''player''. Screaming Mantis can even fake the game resetting to the title screen.
  • Mind Screwdriver: Presumably, the two games immediately after the glorious insanity of MGS2's ending were intended to be this.
  • Mobile Cardboard Box
  • Mr. Exposition: Happens at the start of every game with the Colonel, Otacon, Major Zero, et cetera.
  • Multi National Team: The Quirky Miniboss Squad from each game tends to be this. The Cobra Unit was a group of American, Russian and possibly other nationalities who fought against the Nazis in World War II. Big Boss tends to recruit people regardless of nation or ideology, hence the diversity of his armies. FOXHOUND and Dead Cell, while (originally) ostensibly American special forces units, carry on this tradition with Brits, Kurds, Russians, Americans, Chinese and others. To boot :
    • Metal Gear: Shotmaker (Russian), Machinegun Kid (British), Fire Trooper (German), Dirty Duck (Australian), Big Boss (American)
    • Metal Gear 2: Black Ninja (South African), Running Man (French), Red Blaster (Russian), Four Horsemen (British/German/American), Jungle Evil (South African), Night Fright (Vietnamese), Gray Fox (German/Vietnamese-born American), Big Boss (American)
    • MGS: Decoy Octopus (Mexican), Revolver Ocelot (American/Russian), Vulcan Raven (Native American/Inuit), Sniper Wolf (Iraqi Kurd), Psycho Mantis (Czech), Liquid Snake (British)
    • MGS2: Olga (Russian), Fortune (American), Vamp (Romanian), Fatman (American), Old Boy (German), Chinaman (Vietnamese-born American), Solidus (American)
    • MGS3: Major Ocelot (Russian), The Pain, The Fear, The End, The Fury, The Sorrow (Russian), Volgin (Russian), The Boss/The Joy (American)
    • MGS4: Laughing Octopus (Scandinavia), Raging Raven (Southern Asia), Crying Wolf (Central Africa), Screaming Mantis (Southern America), Vamp (Romanian), Ocelot (Russian)
    • Peace Walker: Amanda and Chico (Nicaraguan), Paz (Costa Rican and perhaps Russian), Strangelove (British) and Miller (Japanese with an American father)
    • Metal Gear Rising: Khamsin (American), Mistral (Algerian-born French), Monsoon (Cambodian), Sundowner (American), Jetstream Sam (Brazilian Japanese), Armstrong (American)
    • MGSV: Big Boss (American-born mix of British Japanese), Miller (Japanese-American), Ocelot (Russian), Quiet (Unknown Caucasian), Eli AKA Liquid Snake (British Japanese), Code Talker (Navajo)
  • Mysterious Informant: Used in Metal Gear 2, Metal Gear Solid, and MGS2. The reason it was repeated in the original MGS was because Metal Gear 2 was only released in Japan, and MGS1 followed more or less the same plot in a different setting. The second time this happened was for another reason.
  • Mythology Gag: The series has a few recurring jokes and themes, most notably the cardboard box (which appears in every main game in the series).
  • Nanomachines: Everything supernatural that happens? It's caused by these buggers in one way or another (with the possible exceptions of The Sorrow, Psycho Mantis, and Vulcan Raven). It's even Lampshaded by Armstrong during his battle with the now memetic sentence: "Nanomachines, son!"
  • Navel-Deep Neckline:
    • Sniper Wolf in Metal Gear Solid.
    • EVA, even as a much older woman in Metal Gear Solid 4.
    • The Boss during the final battle of Metal Gear Solid 3 when she opens her sneaking suit to reveal her snake-shaped C-section scar.
    • Naomi Hunter in Metal Gear Solid 4, where she leaves her labcoat unbuttoned and is obviously wearing no bra. Her lack of a bra is even a point that gets brought up in gameplay in one level; after being "rescued" by PMC soldiers and Haven Troopers, you're forced to track Naomi. The Haven Troopers use a variety of tricks to try and catch you including a voice recording and a pink bra left on the trail. According to the Integral Podcast, the designers wanted to have leave various pieces of female clothing throughout the trails, and a naked, unconscious female soldier near the end of the level. It also comes up as an Easter Egg. As part of the Rule of Funny/Rule of Drama schtick where certain cutscenes will affect Old Snake's psyche bar, Naomi runs some tests on Snake and estimates his accelerated ageing gives him less than a year, causing his psyche to plummet. When she stoops to his level to comfort him, however, players can enter first-person without warning and look down said obscene cleavage and restore psyche to full.
  • New Game Plus: You start out with goodies in games before MGS4. MGS4, you get all your weapons and earned gear, plus goodies.
  • Ninja Butterfly: Your support crew in each game.
  • Nintendo Hard: "Extreme" and "European Extreme" mode. The difficulty varies depending on the title, with Snake Eater on the low end, and Sons of Liberty on the "Holy-Shit-Twenty-Metal-Gears-Are-You-Serious" end.
  • No Celebrities Were Harmed: The cover artwork of the original Metal Gear is blatantly traced from a well-known publicity still of Michael Biehn in The Terminator, while the character designs in the MSX2 version of Metal Gear 2 are clearly modified photographs of actual celebrities such as Sean Connery, Mel Gibson, Tom Berenger, Richard Crenna, and Albert Einstein. In subsequent ports of Metal Gear 2, the character designs were revamped to resemble Shinkawa's designs from the later MGS games. Which still draw a lot from actors: Solid Snake started as Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter, evolved into Kurt Russell (after all, he was Snake Plissken - Big Boss resembles Russell even more) and then became an eyepatched Lee Van Cleef, who had already inspired Revolver Ocelot, and later Skull Face.
  • No Fourth Wall: One of the trademarks of the series. Characters explicitly describe the game's controls with a straight face; the Copy Protection involves a character asking you to look at the back of the game package; one of your Voices With An Internet Connection provides constant real-world advice on how to play your video game properly and healthily; a Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique scene involves the resident Magnificent Bastard warning you not to try to use autofire to beat the Mini-Game; and everything involving Psycho Mantis, who used your save game content to "read your mind," the rumble feature on your controller to move it with "telekinesis," had a special move that caused your screen to turn black, and could only be defeated by unplugging your controller and plugging it into the second port (or by already having a second controller in the second port, and picking it up). And that's only what the first game does; the second, which explicitly aims to break the fourth wall, was worse.
    • It got to the point of Lampshade Hanging: during Act 4 of MGS4, Otacon calls Snake and tells him to put in disc 2. Then he remembers that, because the game is on a dual-layer Blu-ray disc, there is no disc 2. (Snake tells Otacon to stop fooling around, while players freak out due to the exact location of this conversation.) Then, when Psycho Mantis shows up again, he tries to pull the same tricks. However, he can't read your memory since the PS3 doesn't have a memory card, and he can only make the controller vibrate if the player is using the Dualshock 3. And again in the previous boss fight, where the Colonel recommends using the same tricks against a different psychic boss, only to have them all shot down. Oh, and in Metal Gear AC!D2, when General Wiseman explains bits of the COST and CARD system to Snake, "Agent" Dalton hears all of this and confusedly says, "That just went right over my head."
  • No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Volgin to Naked Snake in Snake Eater, and even worse, Ocelot to Solid Snake in Guns of the Patriots.
  • Non-Linear Sequel: Why this series has one of the messiest chronologies known to mannote . Metal Gear Solid Mobile is a good example. It seems to clearly fit in to the main timeline between MGS and MGS2, but the game's ending apparently makes it Canon Discontinuity.)
  • No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Averted. Almost every Metal Gear built is based on the plans of the previous Metal Gear. Then the plans to make one got on the black market and everyone had a Metal Gear.
  • Not Even Bothering with the Accent
  • Notice This
    • Soldiers and scientists have a lot in common in the Metal Gear series; Snake, Liquid, Solidus, Raiden, the Boss and Big Boss are used as Unwitting Pawns. Otacon, Dr. Madnar, Huey and Sokolov wind up being manipulated into creating horrific superweapons. It adds a bit of Fridge Brilliance to Solid Snake and Otacon's Odd Friendship. They've both been used as tools for long enough and have decided to fight back, much the same way that Big Boss, Liquid and Solidus have.
  • Novelization
  • Nuclear Weapons Taboo: The whole franchise stands in defiance of this trope.
  • Old Save Bonus: See Psycho Mantis, above.
  • Ominous Save Prompt: Two of them. In MGS2, immediately after being captured and brought onboard Arsenal Gear, and in MGS3, after taking a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from the Big Bad.
    • MGS3 actually kind of inverts it. When fighting The End, Para-Medic says that she has a bad feeling about saving. If you save and reload the game, The End sneaks up behind you and tranqs you in the head. However, if you save and wait a week before playing again, The End will have died of old age.
  • On-Site Procurement: Trope Namer and Zig-Zagged in usage — MG-MGS2 are this in spades, as players always start with the bare minimum (plus any unlocked cheat items); MGS3-4 have it as first, but replays allow you to keep several/all items; and subverted in MGS:PW-MGSV, as unlocking/developing equipment gives you the luxury of dropping in with it.
  • Once an Episode: Regardless of which game you're playing, you can set your watch by these ("Snake" refers to whomever currently goes by the moniker):
    • Snake makes a memorable (and death-defying) entrance.
    • In the Big Boss games, modern technology will exist decades in the past, from e-cigs to artificial intelligence to the Walkman to the smartphone and holograms.
    • Snake will be imprisoned, then escape without much fuss.
    • Snake keeps somebody waiting.
    • Snake gets tortured at some point.
    • Snake's CO will betray him, usually more than once. (This has become a recurring Unreveal.)
    • Snake must backtrack to an earlier point in the game to retrieve an obscure item.
    • Snake will exclaim, "What the hell...?!"
    • Snake's antagonist, whoever it is in this game, will shout a variation of "It's not over yet!"
    • And of course, Snake will always exclaim, "Metal Gear!?"
    • The Stinger puts the events of the entire game in a completely different light.
    • The Solid Snake-centric entries in the Solid series feature a clone of Big Boss as the Big Bad:
      • Solid - Liquid Snake
      • Sons of Liberty - Solidus Snake, though played with once the Patriots are revealed to be the Greater-Scope Villain, and Solidus, while certainly not a good guy, had much better intentions than previously thought.
      • Guns of the Patriots - Once again played with in that it initially seems as if Liquid has permanently taken control of Ocelot (something that started happening in Sons of Liberty), but it's later revealed that Ocelot was faking it with hypnotic suggestion and nanomachines.
    • There's at least one extensive sniper-centric section in a game, usually against an elite enemy sniper who's part of the Quirky Miniboss Squad (Sniper Wolf in MGS, The End in MGS3, Crying Wolf in MGS4, Quiet and later a squad of Skull snipers in MGSV).
  • One Bullet Clips: Portable Ops does this, and so does the R2-tapping strategy.
  • One Dose Fits All: Zig-zagged in 2, 3 and The Twin Snakes, due to Gameplay and Story Segregation. Both games feature a tranquilizer 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 armour, making this a straight example. In boss fights, however, it's played with. 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. So it's averted, but in the interests of gameplay rather than realism (could be considered an Acceptable Break from Reality, as the boss fights would be very anticlimactic if the bosses reacted to tranquilizer darts the same way the regular enemies do).
  • One-Steve Limit: Strongly averted. The series has six characters whose names are variants of John - two Johns (one also called Jack), another Jack, two Johnnys and an Ivan, plus two more of the similarly-sounding Jonathan. Five of them appear in Metal Gear Solid 4, and each game in the series has at least one. The same series also includes two Davids, Jim and James, Natasha and Nastasha, two President Johnsons (the real-life Lyndon Johnson and the fictional James Johnson), and no less than six characters who have at some point gone by the codename Snake.
  • One-Winged Angel: This trope usually doesn't come into effect in the series, since it deals more or less with more realism compared to most games. That being said, there are a few points where it comes pretty close canonically. For instance, Volgin merging with the Shagohod's wiring during the final battle, or Peace Walker turning from bipedal into a quadruped. The only game to play it completely straight is the non-canon sequel to Metal Gear, Snake's Revenge, with Big Boss.
  • Optional Stealth: Metal Gear is a stealth-based game series— Rather, it's the stealth-based game series. The games have varying difficulty levels. If one chooses the easiest difficulty, then it's a valid option to plow through the game without really needing to use its stealth elements. However, selecting anything above "Normal" makes using stealth absolutely necessary, as guards will be vigilant and difficult to take down, and using stealth is far easier than trying to macho one's way through. The most extreme gameplay modes in the Metal Gear series actually force the player to restart from the beginning if they are so much as noticed by one guard.
  • Pacifist Run: You receive a lower score at the end if you kill everything. Also, in MGS3 and MGS4, you get good bonus items from the bosses if you tranquilize them into submission instead of kill them. In MGS3, The Sorrow, a sub-boss that can't be killed, tries to kill you with guilt, sending the ghosts of your fallen (but not tranquilized) enemies stumbling towards you. The other bosses show up regardless of their ultimate demise, since even if you sedate them, they still use bombs to self-destruct. In MGS4 beating the Beast forms of the Beauty & the Beast Corps allows the player to acquire their statue (collect them and the FROG statue for the Solar Gun), and beating the Beauty forms allows the player to collect their FaceCamo. As before, some of the Emblems (ranks) require a certain amount of kills (less than or more than) to acquire; the Pigeon and Big Boss Emblems for example require no kills.
  • Paper-Thin Disguise: In MGS1, Liquid disguises himself as an ally on Snake's codec by putting on sunglasses and changing his accent. Note that he still has the same voice, one distinctive enough that many players became suspicious the moment he opened his mouth. On the other hand, its subverted when the re-releases of Metal Gear 2 as well as his appearance in Peace Walker show that he actually does look like a disguised Liquid, and in the case of the latter game, even sounds like Liquid in disguise.
    • And, of course, you can hide inside cardboard boxes, which are literally a paper-thin disguise. Soldiers aren't totally fooled by these, though, especially in later games, and especially if the box is out in the open and in their way.
    • There's also Solid Snake disguising as Iroquois Pliskin in MGS2, by changing his uniform and nothing else.
    • And EVA as Tatyana in MGS3, which had her wearing glasses and her hair differently. However, she was so much better at disguise than Snake in 2.
  • Parrot Exposition: David Hayter has joked in interviews that most of the dialogue he has to record consists of repeating the last couple words the other person said, and adding a question mark to it.
    • Lampshaded in Metal Gear AC!D2, when Snake hears General Wiseman describe what Doctor Koppelthorn did hi-jack: Metal Gear.
      Snake: Metal Gear?!
      Dalton: Huh? You're familiar with it?
      Snake: No. Had to blurt it out...
    • Reversed in Peace Walker when Huey parrots Snake's obligatory "Metal Gear..." during the former's exposition.
  • Parrying Bullets: Justified in the fact that A) the blades are meant to deflect bullets, and B) the suits they wear increase reflexes.
    • When playing with Cyborg Ninja Raiden, you don't have a block button, you just have to Ninja Run to automatically deflect bullets.
  • Player-Guided Missile: Most of the games have at least one sequence where Snake must utilize a Nikita missile launcher to solve an electrified-floor puzzle.
  • Playing with Syringes: Les Enfants Terribles; the experiments that made Gray Fox.
    • Ironically in MGS4, used by Old Snake to restore Psyche until his body builds up a tolerance (in both gameplay and a cutscene near the end of the playable part of the game), as well as to make Vamp mortal and to free himself and Meryl from Screaming Mantis' nanomachine control.
  • Pop-Cultured Badass: Ocelot loves Spaghetti Westerns, and Solid Snake's a fan of Escape from New York.
  • Post-End Game Content: You'll always get something the first time you complete the game, and some more rewards if you also fulfill certain objectives during it. New Game Plus gives you access to it.
  • Powered Armor: The Cyborg Ninja in the first MGS was a partial case, being a cyborg and all. The ninja and Solidus in MGS2 on the other hand are textbook cases.
  • Potty Failure: A running (ew) theme in the Metal Gear Solid games is toilet humour; generally, at least one case of someone wetting themselves occurs per game. 4 upped the ante with a scene of a man soiling himself in the middle of a heated gun battle. Um... Thanks, Kojima.
  • Prison Episode: Both Metal Gear and MPO involve a relatively easy prison escape, while Metal Gear Solid, MGS3 and Peace Walker have relatively challenging ones.
  • Product Placement: Since Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, this trope has been in effect in some form or another. The most ridiculous example occurs in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots with Apple products permeating throughout.
  • Prosthetic Limb Reveal: At the end of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Ocelot had been taken over by the transplanted arm of Liquid Snake the last we saw him. In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, their personalities had (supposedly) merged. Come the climax of that game, Ocelot throws off his coat, to reveal said arm is now robotic. This hints that the merged persona was an act all along.
  • Punch-Packing Pistol:
    • For every game in the series, as soon as you can find a silencer for the pistol, it instantaneously becomes your best weapon. This is especially true when the series introduces first-person view, because you can line up headshots so easily. Combine this with the fact that every gun is wildly accurate, and you can easily have situations where you line up a headshot from across the loaded map to where you can barely see the enemy textures, and it will work.
    • Metal Gear Solid 3 not only skips the step of making you find the Silencers which make the pistol so effective (though you can run out and need to restock them), but when you get it, Naked Snake goes on an extended monologue about how awesome the pistol is, and if you call Sigint later, he'll go even more in depth.
    • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots almost seems to Lampshade this when they give you the Operator at the beginning of the game, which is already a good gun, (according to the in-game stats) but then you can acquire the similar except better Mk 23 (the SOCOM from the original) and the M1911A1 that Naked Snake used in the third game, each gun being better than the last.

    Tropes Q to Z 

  • Quirky Mini Boss Squad: In almost every game, the enemy unit leaders have unique powers or abilities that complement one another, and they work together as a team (though are fought individually, of course). They even tend to be united around a common theme, such as Foxhound’s animal motifs or Dead Cell’s weapon specialties. However, they are portrayed relatively realistically, at least compared to other examples, replacing "quirky" with "homicidal", "batshit insane" and "nightmarish".
  • Rated M for Manly: The story of a ruggedly handsome and tough-as-nails Anti-Hero stealth operative, cloned from the greatest soldier to have ever lived, a master of unarmed combat and all kinds of weapons ranging from sniper rifles to tranquilliser dart pistols and knives, with an IQ of 180 and fluency at least six languages, who travels the world and destroys nuclear-armed Humongous Mecha and often faces down whole armies and super-soldiers with seemingly supernatural abilities in the process? You bet this is a manly series. That said, a lot of the portrayals of manly and cool tropes are, at best, bad life choices and at worst, the symptoms of mental disorders obtained through battlefield trauma. Even the aforedescribed protagonist is not immune to it. Also, it's a stealth game, so running around blowing things up like an Action Hero is usually not a good idea. Usually.
  • Recruited from the Gutter:
    • In Metal Gear Solid, Naomi reveals that her adopted brother rescued her (and put her through medical school) after she was orphaned. Her brother was Grey Fox, Snake's old Friendly Enemy; she joined the team to get revenge on Snake for killing him.
    • In Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Grey Fox reveals that he's defected to Big Boss's side because he was recruited to Foxhound by him as a child soldier (the later games which starred Big Boss would elaborate on this).
    • Big Boss in general founded Outer Heaven as a refuge for disenfranchised soldiers and war orphans...albeit to form a private army. To his credit, he does sincerely care about them.
  • Redshirt Army: The SEALs sent in to deliver the Nuclear Football in MGS2 (to be fair, they're up against a vampire and an unkillable woman with a railgun), the US Army/Marine Corps task force in MGS4 (though they later fend off a horde of FROG units).
  • Retcon: A few aspects of the story have been changed occasionally, such as MGS4 ignoring that Dr. Clark was a man in MGS1 to allow the character to also be Para-Medic from MGS3).
  • Revolvers Are Just Better: Played with. This is definitely the case with Ocelot, as his particular style of gunplay is well suited to his preferred firearms, the Colt Single Action Army. Zigzagged in gameplay terms, however. Any time one is usuable ingame, it's powerful, but has low ammo capacity and, more importantly in a Stealth-Based Game, cannot fit a suppressor, so ends up being a rather niche weapon than anything else.
  • Ruder and Cruder: * The Metal Gear series is, as a whole, very light on profanity, though there was a noticeable increase in its use as it went on. Snake Eater featured EVA cursing out Volgin, but only in Japanese. English fans would have to wait until Guns of the Patriots to hear the franchise's first Precision F-Strike. Revengeance fully embraces this newly-discovered freedom to have multiple F-bombs throughout its dialogue, and even has its main villain be Sir Swears-a-Lot. The Phantom Pain dials it back to being used extremely sparingly in incidental dialogue.
  • Rule of Symbolism: In MSG3 (Naked) Snake is given the order to meet with his contacts Adam and Eva. Eva goes so far to ask him if he has come to seduce her.
    • Rather interesting, as (Naked) Snake manages to successfully seduce both Adam and Eva. Without even trying or noticing, even.
    • In MSG4 an apple falls from (Old) Snake's pocket and rolls towards Eva, who picks it up. Later she hands the same apple to Adam (aka Ocelot), who crushes it and throws it away.
  • Say My Name: Every single Metal Gear Solid has this, with both enemies and allies screaming "SNAAAAAAAAKKKEEEE!!!"
    • Substituted with "Raiden, what happened?! Raiden! RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIDEEEEEN!" in Sons of Liberty.
    • "FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOX!!" when Grey Fox is Killed Off for Real during the REX battle.
    • The intro to MGS2 (itself a sort of Nostalgia Level) with Otacon shouting, "...Snake..? Snake?! SNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE" whenever your net a game over, and later "E.E.? E.E.!? E.EEEEEEEEE-!!" if the player screws the pooch and gets Emma killed.
    • The series' use of it is inverted near the end of Guns of the Patriots when the Scarabs start piling on Snake: "OOOTACOOOOOOON!" Inverted both for Snake being the one to use it, and it being a genuinely tense and dramatic moment instead of meme-fuel.
    • Snake screamed Otacon's name again earlier in Guns of the Patriots when he got half of his face burned very badly.
    • This almost qualifies as a CMOA during the final duel when after Snake takes an absolutely brutal beating at the hands of Liquid Ocelot he turns the fight around by breaking his enemy's fingers. As Snake rises he screams his rival's name with a cry of rage and frustration, to be answered in kind as the camera spins. And they they really start beating the hell out of each other.
  • Save Token: You can save by using your codec/radio/etc to call a "data analyst" and have them save your game for you.
  • Scare Chord: !
    • The stingers to Solids 1-3 all feature one after the respective Wham Line comes up. In the original after learning that Ocelot was working for the President, in Sons of Liberty after Snake learns the Patriots have been dead for a century, and in Snake Eater after Ocelot reveals he was "ADAM".
  • Security Blindspot: includes surveillance cameras, which have a blind spot directly underneath the camera, and who's vision cone is shown on the radar. Alternatively, they can be destroyed by explosives, with later games allowing using first-person view to shoot cameras.
  • Sequential Boss
  • Sequel Escalation: Subverted in terms of presentation. Solid Snake was at his peak in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and declined sharply afterwards, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots saw the greatest stakes and most dangerous enemies and remains the culmination of the series, and the final boss of Metal Gear Solid appears to be the most powerful mech in the series.
    • That said, because of the plethora of prequels developed on more advanced hardware than Metal Gear Solid 4, the adventures of Big Boss generally include more advanced challenges and tools than the events occurring decades later, in terms of gameplay at least. It's hard to believe that Metal Gear Rex is supposed to be more advanced than Peace Walker, Metal Gear Zeke, or Metal Gear Sahelanthropus, who were developed two or three decades earlier.
  • Sensor Suspense: You will be looking at the radar minimap quite often, and you will most definitely notice when one of the blip's vision cones turns yellow.
  • Shadow Government: The Metal Gear series explore this trope in the form of the Philosophers, a group of influential families from the Allied Forces in World War II that would eventually turn to Cipher and the Patriots, controlling the world from the shadows.
  • Shirtless Scene: At least one per game.
  • Shown Their Work: Oh, boy, do they! If you've got time to kill, spend some time calling up your codec contacts repeatedly. Once they get past the talk about the immediate location you're in, and you'll be treated to thorough lectures on military history and weapons, wildlife, politics, and whatever else Kojima was geeking out about during development.
  • Shout-Out: Vietnam War-era jungle setting of the game aside, Snake of Metal Gear Solid 3 is a shout-out to James Bond AND John Rambo. The former is paid tribute to in the music of the alert phases, whereas the latter happens when Snake roars Sylvester Stallone's trademark battle-cry when firing an M63 machine gun. Solid 'Old' Snake also roars like this when firing the M60E4 in Guns of the Patriots, signifying how much he has become like his father.
    • There's many others as well. For example, Raiden's real name is Jack, and his girlfriend is named Rose
      • Not only that, but in both endings of MGS1, Snake reveals his name to be David, or "Dave" as his rescue partner calls him. With his techie buddy Hal.
      • Bonus points for Hal actually being named after HAL from the movie.
      • The Meryl ending continues the shout out fest, this time being one of several shoutouts to Kojima's earlier visual novel game Policenauts.note 
    • Drebin and his "naked guns" is a shout out to a rather unexpected franchise.
    • Of course, Hideo Kojima has shoutouts to his own work as well, with Policenauts posters and Snake can actually use the Gun De Sol from Boktai as a bonus weapon, the Solar Gun, by acquiring the FROG statue and the B&B Corps statues, by defeating them (for the B&B Corps their Beast forms) all nonlethally.
      • Metal Gear Mk. 2 originally appeared in Kojima's Snatcher. Except that one was a reference to the original Metal Gear. A reference is even made to the "Metal Gear Menace" of the late 20th century.
    • The freight Elevator in MGS is a near exact duplicate of the one in AKIRA, and even leads down to a sub-zero area.
    • Solid Snake's name is a shoutout to Snake Plissken from Escape from New York. The film is one of Kojima's favourites, and was a large influence on the series (particularly notable is the theme of an uncaring government sacrificing heroes for minor or personal gain).
    • The MGS4 "Chair Race" trailer featured a battle between Snake and Raiden over a chair labeled "main character". Snake's gear and method of movement in the trailer is reminiscent of Sam Fisher.
  • Shout-Out Theme Naming: While it's not necessarily intentional, all but one of the characters with the codename "Snake" share names with characters from The Bible.
    • Naked Snake/Big Boss is named John note  and later Ishmael note .
    • Venom Snake is given the name Ahab.note 
    • Solid Snake is named David.note 
    • Liquid Snake is named Elinote 
  • Simultaneous Warning and Action: Who's there?! In addition, the Alert/Caution/Evasion calls to HQ.
  • Skippable Boss: MGS3's The End - using two methods! Either set the clock ahead so that he dies of old age, or snipe him when he appears in his wheelchair — albeit the latter will lead to the boss fight areas being instead patrolled by 20 enemy soldiers. In MGS4 there are no truly skippable bosses, but any damage to her Life or Psyche that Raging Raven takes during the motorcycle chase sequence will carry over to the 'true' boss fight, so go fire on her with whichever bar of hers you wish to damage later.
    • Also in 3, if you blow up the HIND at the ammo dump, you won't have to face it later when you're climbing the mountain. If you blow up ammo and/or food dumps, the soldiers you face later will run out of bullets quickly and/or be weakened and hungry (meaning tranqs and CQC will take them down faster and they'll eat anything they find, including poisonous food).
  • Simple, yet Awesome: Who needs high-tech invisibility camo when you can cozy up in an inconspicuous cardboard box, be entirely Beneath Notice, and even trick your enemies into quite literally delivering you into the heart of their heavily-guarded installation?
  • Sleepy Enemy: Sleeping guards can be found from time to time in the series. They will fall asleep right where they're patrolling while standing up. The player can walk by them with no problems as long as they don't touch the guards or make loud noises in their vicinity. And of course if Alert Mode is reached, they will wake up and pursue the player.
  • Smoking Is Cool: You can say this is the Trope Codifier on the Video Games entry.
  • Sniper Scope Sway: Sniper rifles are common, and generally accompanied by this. You can use pentazemin (or a cigarette) to relax and reduce the tremble when scoping.
  • Sniping Mission: Raiden must protect Emma this way in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. The battle with Sniper Wolf in Metal Gear Solid, The End in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Crying Wolf in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and Quiet in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
  • Solemn Ending Theme: Most of the games — see the trope page for details.
  • Spider Limbs: Laughing Octopus and Solidus Snake.
  • Spotting the Thread: The fact that the DARPA Chief refers to the terrorist act as a revolution is a major hint that he might not be who he claims to be. Yet no one picks up on this, despite the fact that they know for a fact a master of disguise is among the Fox Hound renegades.
    • And in MGS3, there are several blatantly obvious hints that EVA might not be who she says she is, in her very first scene. She fails to answer the code phrase, instead gunning down several mooks... with a .45 ACP copy of the Mauser C96, which was only made and used by one nation during the Cold War: China. She even uses the "Bandit Shooting" technique that was invented specifically to take advantage of that gun's tremendous recoil. She ends up being a Chinese triple agent tasked with tracking down the Philosopher's Legacy. Of course, Snake doesn't pick up on any of this, due to EVA's Navel-Deep Neckline. Neither do most players.
  • Spy Catsuit: Inverted - only the men get them. And look damn Fan Servicey in them, too. EVA comes close in her form-fitting motorcycle outfit with Navel-Deep Neckline, and the FROGs wear a combat version of this.
    • The Beauties get some very form fitting suits. When facing off against Raging Raven, after she sheds her suit and turns away, still quite insane, Snake stares at her butt. Please note that originally, it was intended to be averted.
  • Start of Darkness: Metal Gear Solid 3, Portable Ops, Peace Walker and Metal Gear Solid V detail the events behind Big Boss' transformation from a young, patriotic soldier into a war hero disillusioned with the modern world's treatment of soldiers.
  • Stealth-Based Game: Trope Codifier.
  • The Stinger: Usually Once per Episode in a post-credits phone-call:
    • MG1: Big Boss survived the explosion and is waiting for Solid Snake, eager to fight him again.
    • MG2: The cartridge believed to contain Dr. Marv's secret plans turns out to be a joke. When inserted into an MSX computer, it seems to do nothing, but Dr. Marv left his mark: the boot-up screen reads "VRAM: 01K", which is "Kio Marv" spelled backwards.
    • MGS1/Twin Snakes: Ocelot was working with the President... and President George Sears is a third Big Boss clone named Solidus Snake.
    • MGS2: Most of the Patriots (later revealed to be their predecessors, The Philosophers) have been dead for up to a hundred years, leaving Otacon's "contributor" to be one of the few living members.
    • MGS3: Ocelot is triple crossing America and the Soviet Union, and stole the real Philosopher's legacy with the CIA Director to revive the Philosophers.
    • Portable Ops: Ocelot has retrieved the Philosopher's Legacy, and agrees to use it to start "The Patriots" with an anonymous figure, most likely Zero, on the condition Big Boss is allowed in too.
    • MGS4: While the FOXDIE isn't going to become a non-discriminatory weapon, Snake's aging still means he hasn't long to live. Since he doesn't have the ability to pass on anything to the next generation, Otacon decides to spend the rest of Snake's life with him as a witness.
    • Peace Walker: The first has Snake accept the title of Big Boss after learning the truth about The Boss. The second has Big Boss deliver a speech wherein he defines MSF's beliefs, and christens their base "Outer Heaven."
    • Revengeance: World Marshall is overthrown, but more PMCs are still on the rise. Raiden declares he still has his own war to fight.
    • MGSV: After The Reveal that Venom is not Big Boss, Miller resolves to support the Sons of Big Boss as well as the Phantom to eventually defeat his former friend. Ocelot then foreshadows that they will eventually have to fight each other.
  • Stompy Mooks: Inverted. Walking too fast behind a guard makes him turn around and notice you, turning you into the Stompy Mook. Most mooks themselves walk about normally, so unless they're walking on something noisy, making a status report, or wearing headphones, you won't hear them walking until you get fairly close.
  • Story to Gameplay Ratio: To reiterate. There are a lot of cutscenes. MGS4 has about nine hours of 'em. Check the helpful chart on the trope entry for how the average Metal Gear game breaks down.
  • Straw Civilian: Zig-Zagged in various ways as there are non-combatants with sympathetic backstories, but the scientist and technicians introduced Snake Eater and Portable Ops tend to be more troublesome to handle than soldiers. If held up (Snake and the other operatives will use a different callout by telling them to talk than tell them to raise their hands), rather than cooperate, they scream and panic (resulting in an instant Alert Phase), which by all laws is against common sense of personal safety. Interrogating some of the Soviet scientist reveal that they don't get along with the troops. This translates to gameplay where the enemy soldiers have zero problems shooting at Snake through a non-combatant, instead of holding their fire and ensuring their safety.
  • Supervillain Lair: Shadow Moses, Gronzyj Grad, Arsenal Gear, Outer Haven (and its later incarnation), you name it...
  • Super-Soldier: Many different versions of this are developed to varying degrees of success:
    • Most of the Cobra Unit, save for The Boss and maybe The Sorrow gain their unusual abilities from parasites. This research continues into the 1980s, leading to developments such as Quiet and the Skulls, Lightning Bruisers who are Made of Iron.
    • Brainwashing techniques and mental manipulation are used to make a soldier more focused on a particular task, such as with Null and Venom Snake. This is revisted with the B&B Corps and Ocelot.
    • Cloning and genetic modifications are used to create the Snake clones and the Genome Army. However, this is generally seen as a failure, especially with the Genome soldiers.
    • Nanomachines are widespread in the later games, allowing soldiers to work in perfect sync, as well as not need to sleep, eat, or defecate at inopportune moments. However, once the system goes down, it leads to many of them being reduced to gibbering wrecks.
    • Cybernetics are used to replace missing limbs, or even entire bodies of critically injured soldiers, giving some, such as cyborg ninjas like Raiden and Gray Fox, superhuman strength and speed.
  • Symbolic Mutilation:
    • Big Boss's trademark is an Eyepatch of Power, which we see him receive in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (when he attacks Ocelot to keep him from assassinating Tatyana and ends up getting his right eye blinded by muzzle flare in a freak accident). His loss of the eye doesn't happen at exactly the same time as the large traumatic event that sculpts his character (the death of The Boss), but does serve to distinguish the difference from a rather innocent and ordinary soldier to a single-minded, ambitious and traumatised one. This injury is then repeated with over the course of the series symbolising the difference in each character's outlook compared to Big Boss:
      • In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Raiden accidentally injures Solidus's left eye, which he appears almost ecstatic about, in accordance with his general fixation on Big Boss. He immediately starts wearing an eyepatch on it and even suggests being grateful to Raiden for doing it to him. Of course, his injuries are actually a mirror-image of Big Boss's, signifying that he himself is just a reflection of Big Boss rather than an individual in his own right.
      • In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Solid Snake begins wearing an electronic sensor over his eye that resembles Big Boss's eyepatch. Between that, his visible ageing and the fact that his muscle-suit resembles Big Boss's bulky build rather than his own more sinewy one, he resembles Big Boss a lot - more to screw with the audience than anything (going from a Big Boss who looked like Solid Snake in 3 to a Solid Snake who looked like Big Boss in 4). While saving Big Mama (the same person as Tatyana, just many years on) from a fire, the sensor explodes and damages Snake's face, with the result of inverting Big Boss's injury - a burned face but a functioning eye. This serves to indicate Solid Snake's defiance of his own fate - his face, the thing that ties him to Big Boss, has been mutilated; and his ties to Big Boss - he got the injuries rescuing the same person; but most importantly his ability to still "see" things Big Boss has become "blinded" to.
      • Raiden also has a missing eye in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. This is because his eye and his arm were mangled by Sam at the beginning of the game - throughout the game, Raiden gets bonuses for chopping off enemies' right arms, repeating the injury done on him. The eye injury is covered, instead of with an eyepatch, with a bandanna resembling the one worn by Solid Snake, signifying to whom his allegiance is.
    • Metal Gear Ac!d 2 significantly uses a copy of The Boss's caesarian scar on the back of the female character Lucy - particularly unusual as the Ac!d games happen in an entirely separate universe to the main games. However, it supports Lucy's character as being a horrible monstrosity of a matriarch, child and wife figure simultaneously (referencing the description of The Boss from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater - "she was like a mother to me, and my master." "And your lover?"). As well as, more directly, suggesting some of the horrible surgical mutilations she would have received from the Mad Scientist responsible for creating her.
  • Sympathy for the Devil: Most villains in the series can be sympathized with to a certain extent. The Patriot A.I.s, Volgin and Hot Coldman avert this.
  • Take Cover!
  • Taking You with Me:
    • Cunningham uses those exact words after his defeat in Portable Ops.
    • Big Boss later utters these words before fighting Solid Snake in the original Metal Gear.
  • Talking Is a Free Action: Happens with nearly all codec conversations, often at absurd times. Though starting from Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, the series averts this.
  • Theme Naming: All Quirky Miniboss Squads are some of the most notable examples.
    • FOXHOUND had a two-part codename: the first part comes from the boss' specialty/weapon, the second part comes from an animal.
    • The Cobra Unit base their names off the emotions they carry into battle. For reference, this is where The Boss' second codename, The Joy, comes from.
    • The Beauty and the Beast Unit combines the emotion of a Cobra with a FOXHOUND operative's animal.
    • The Peace Walker AI Weapons are based off different names of a butterfly's formation. In addition, Dr. Strangelove named the A.I.s after American presidents (the same names would be reused for the Patriot A.I.s.
    • Lastly, the Winds of Destruction are named after powerful winds from their respective home countries.
    • While the theme isn't as obvious as in the above examples, each member of Dead Cell has a misleading or ironic name; for example, Vamp's codename is actually because he's bisexual, rather than because he's like a vampire. It's an early hint that things aren't as they initially appear to be in the mission.
  • Title Drop: Solidus Snake's terrorist group in MGS2 are the Sons of Liberty, Snake's mission in MGS3 is codenamed Operation Snake Eater, and Ocelot calls his master plan in MGS4 the Guns of the Patriots. Metal Gear is first introduced this way in the first game. Also, Snake Eater, despite not having an actual Metal Gear, introduces the man behind the original concept.
  • Together in Death: Ironically enough, several "happy" endings are this trope. The Boss and The Sorrow are reunited at the end of Snake Eater, Big Boss is implied to have longed to die in order to be reunited with The Boss (A wish which, according to Kojima, is granted), and Venom Snake and Quiet are reunited after Venom is killed by Solid Snake in Outer Heaven.
  • Transplant: Very few people knew that Meryl Silverberg was originally from the Japan-only Policenauts, and a version of Metal Gear Mk. II from Snatcher appears in MGS4. However, they are very different verisons of those characters. Versions of Jonathan and Ed appear in MGS4 as well, and in Japanese are played by the same Policenauts actors, just like Meryl. Incidentally their actors happen to be Otacon and Psycho Mantis as well.
  • Treacherous Advisor: Big Boss in the original Metal Gear, Liquid disguised as Master Miller in Metal Gear Solid (and technically Naomi and the entirety of the Pentagon in the same game), The Colonel/AI in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, The Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (kind of), General Wiseman in Metal Gear Ac!d 2.
  • Trilogy Creep: In interviews around the release of MGS3, Kojima said that he viewed the three Metal Gear Solid games at that point as a loose trilogy. Naturally, even that informal designation didn't last for long.
  • Trope Namer: Fission Mailed and On-Site Procurement
  • A True Hero: Defied. One of the major themes of the franchise is that there are no "heroes" in war: only different sides. Today's allies may be tomorrows enemies and vice-versa, and things are rarely as black-and-white as they seem.
  • Try Everything: The codec frequencies, if you miss the hint.
  • 20 Minutes into the Future: Barring the Big Boss sections (which obviously take place in the past), the series tends to take place 4-8 years after the game's release and with appropriately advanced technology.
  • Two Lines, No Waiting: Since MGS3, the games have been split into telling the stories of Solid Snake and Big Boss.
  • Uncle Sam Wants You: Not in any of the games themselves, but a promotional poster for GDC recruitment for Kojima Productions regarding the "Next" Metal Gear Solid game has Big Boss, a'la Uncle Sam, pointing at the viewer with the caption "BIGBOSS wants YOU! THE "NEXT" MGS"◊
  • Undressing the Unconscious:
  • Unexpected Gameplay Change:
    • The Shagohod chase in MGS3 is an on-rails shooter.
    • Escaping from South America in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots mixes Zombie Apocalypse and turret gunplay, there's more on-rails shooter stuff with Big Mama again in Eastern Europe (albeit you're limited to one-handed firearms), and mecha combat in Shadow Moses—REX versus RAY.
    • As a rule, games made by Kojima that take place chronologically after the original game have final battles that don't use guns:
      • In Metal Gear 2, defeating Metal Gear D results in an explosion that lights most of Snake's items, weapons included, on fire; all must be discarded. Gray Fox must be fought with fists, and Big Boss requires you to avoid him until you get enough items to light him on fire.
      • In Metal Gear Solid, Liquid engages Snake in a fist fight after the defeat of REX. The second part of the fight is an on-rails shooter.
      • In Metal Gear Solid 2, the final battle is a sword duel between Raiden and Solidus.
      • Finally, in Metal Gear Solid 4, Liquid Ocelot follows the fisticuffs tradition.
  • Unusable Enemy Equipment: Though MGS2 managed to partially subvert this by having one CODEC conversation that explained that the weapons had an ID system that recognized a specific person, it's odd though how they didn't explain this more directly.
    • Finally averted in MGS4 by Snake getting a "hack" into the system... as a result, weapon pickups are a notable part of gameplay, and in Screaming Mantis's case it's necessary to pick up her Mantis Doll to defeat her.
    • Also averted in V. While the weapons aren't permanently unlocked until researched, Snake can use any that his enemies drop. Or gun emplacements. Or tanks.
  • Unwilling Roboticization: Grey Fox and Raiden were turned into Cyborg Ninjas against their will.
  • Variable Mix: Quite stunningly good in this instance.
  • Vehicle Title: The eponymous Metal Gear are bipedal tanks.
  • The 'Verse: The series frequently jumps between three protagonists; Solid Snakenote , Naked Snakenote  or Raidennote .
  • Video Games and Fate: An underlying theme of many entries in the series, which is particularly pronounced in MGS and MGS2.
  • Video Game Caring Potential:
    • It's entirely possible (and encouraged) to clear TTS, MGS2 and MGS4without killing a single enemy. MGS3 also falls into this, as you are only required to kill a single enemy: The Boss. In fact, the fewer enemies you kill in 3, the easier time you will have with one of the boss fights.
    • MPO introduces the ability to rescue prisoners and assign them as staff members in your army. PW expanded on this feature and it looks like MGSV will further expand this feature.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential:
    • Lots of awful things you can do to guards... although in MGS4, touch a FROG the wrong way, and she will fight back.
    • It gets worse in Metal Gear AC!D2. Setting them on fire, throwing them off trains or into the path of trains, dropping things on them.
  • Video Game Cruelty Punishment: The Sorrow's boss fight, in a nutshell. Downplayed in that it just prolongs the "battle", and there's an upper limit on how long it can go on.
  • Video Game Remake:
    • The Twin Snakes for Metal Gear Solid 1 and The Naked Sample for Snake Eater.
    • Zigzagged with Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater Pachislot. A surprising amount of effort was spent on remastering a decent chunk of MGS3's cutscenes within MGSV's FOX Engine, using brand new models. However, due to being a slot machine, the actual "gameplay" is boiled down to prerendered loops of Naked Snake sneaking through the jungle with the occasional action shot to punctuate chances at big payouts, much like other pachislot games.
  • Virus and Cure Names: There's FOXDIE and FOXALIVE.
  • Vodka Drunkenski: Several of the San Hieronymo Soviet personnel, Colonel Skowronski, and Granin were shown drinking vodka a lot, and they are also all Russian (obviously). Unlike most examples of the trope however, their reasons were completely justified, due to certain incidents that were depressing or angering enough for them to require getting themselves drunk.
  • Voice with an Internet Connection: The Codec. Probably a fourth wall breach, although it is also implied a few instances that the Codec does have people observing what is going on.
  • War Is Hell: Largely no one is really proud of what they are doing, and only the real baddies don't suffer a lot because of it or have any real joy in what they do. Metal Gear's use of this trope is one of the most well-known and oldest uses of it in all of video games.
  • Warp Whistle: In a few of the games, the cardboard boxes can be used to be transported to different areas.
  • The War Sequence: Raiden fights up to twenty mass-produced Metal Gears in MGS2, and several Gekkos in MGS4.
  • Warrior Heaven: Big Boss and Liquid Snake try to make this ideal on Earth by making the world into "Outer Heaven," a world where warriors will always be needed, honored and respected, although in MGS4, it appears that Big Boss' motive may have been to create a world free from the Patriots... that was certainly why Liquid Ocelot claimed to have had Outer Haven, at least.
  • Weapon Title: The eponymous Metal Gear are walking battle tanks that are explicitly described as weapons of mass destruction.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Major Zero, Big Boss, Ocelot, and Solidus Snake.
  • What the Hell, Player?: You can get a lot of reactions like this if you screw around too much.
  • Where I Was Born and Razed: Psycho Mantis and all of the B&B Corps.
  • Where the Hell Is Springfield?: With the exception of Metal Gear, it's largely averted in the canonical installments, where they not only cite specifically where the location setting(s) is/are, they even show a map or other evidence to hint where it is located.
  • Why We Are Bummed: Communism Fell: Kicks off the Solid games, save for Snake Eater and its direct sequels, which took place during the Cold War.
  • With This Herring: Justified as weapons and equipment being OSP, On-Site Procured. In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, we learn that Big Boss' original codename, Naked Snake, is taken in part from this.
    • In a neat twist on previous games' weapons progression, the first weapon pickup in MGS4 is the AK-102 assault rifle found right next to Old Snake after one of the first cutscenes, and it's the Mk.II suppressed tranquilizer pistol and suppressable lethal Operator pistol which are received next, instead of the other way around as in the past. It's markedly inferior though to the M4 Custom which you pick up not long after the pistols.
    • Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker averts this by giving the player an M16, a tranquiliser pistol and some grenades to start with. Ground Zeroes zigzags this depending on whether you play a mission on Normal or Hard; Normal gives the player a rifle and a tranquiliser pistol and Hard gives the player only the tranq pistol with less ammo.
  • When It All Began: Although it's not really apparent until the end of the series, everything that happens in the Metal Gear universe has its roots in August 1964, the Virtuous Mission which sparked Operation Snake Eater and led to the creation of the Patriots.
    • Those are only the deepest roots of the main conflict. Some pieces of the puzzle go back to the turn of the 20th century, when the Philosophers were founded.
  • White Shirt of Death:
    • The most dramatic death scene in Metal Gear Solid takes place in a snow storm, where the poor victim is wearing a white camouflage uniform.
    • The most dramatic death scene in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater takes place in a field of white flowers, where the victim is wearing a silver and white sneaking suit.
  • World of Badass:
    • Snake, of course.
    • Raiden counts as well. By the end of his first solo game, he's taken out several Metal Gear RAYs at once and a Harrier jet with a rocket launcher.
  • Youngest Child Wins: Inverted, the only one of the Les Enfants Terribles children who has anything close to a happy ending is Solid Snake, who was born before Solidus.
Snake! What happened? Snake? SNAAAAAAAAAAAAKE!note 

 
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The Boss

Naked Snake's mentor quickly demonstrates why she's called The Boss.

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The Boss

Naked Snake's mentor quickly demonstrates why she's called The Boss.

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5 (4 votes)

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The Boss

Raiden and Arms...

Metal Gear REX

Colonel Volgin

Metal Gear Miia

Metal Gear Soli...