Hideo Kojima’s science fiction series about the ugly side of war has always been pretty strange, and that’s mostly because of how absolutely out there many of the characters were. The cast has had a colorful array of members in both small and major roles that have really set the crazy bar pretty high, but being crazy isn’t necessarily the same as being “great.” A great Metal Gear character stands out, not just because of their particular quirks, but their over all arcs and relevance to the saga at large. It’s a difficult task to truly narrow down such a huge cast to just a top 10, but lets attempt the impossible, anyway.
10. Roy Campbell
Campbell has always been rather ancillary as far as characters go, but his influence is well realized. Once a Marine, he would rejoin the Green Berets after a brief stint in civilian life, after he and his brother would fall in love with the same woman. His service got him into San Hieronymo and smack dab in the middle of Big Boss and FOX’s beef. The pair would defeat the secret Metal Gear prototypes and go their separate ways until the 90’s where Campbell would serve as the executive officer of FOXHOUND, right after Big Boss put the unit back together. This is around the same time Solid Snake would join the unit, and Campbell would be one of the first people outside of the conspiracy to discover that Solid Snake was Big Bosses son.
Campbell is one of Snake’s truly trusted allies, and this makes him very significant in the games in which his is present. He’s the one that convinces Snake that Big Boss isn’t so great a guy, anymore. He helps Snake see through the crazy obfuscation going on around him, and is one of the most reliable characters in a series full of people just looking for ways to lie to you.
9. Col. Volgin
Yevgeny Borisovitch Volgin, aka “Thunderbolt”, is one of the best examples of Kojima’s special mix of clever historical fiction and straight up sci-fi goofiness. A hardcore Stalinist, he spent his pre-Snake Eater life killing anti-communist rebels and sympathizers before he got wind of the Philosopher’s Legacy, a secret cache of funds stowed away by super powers after WWI. Did I mention he somehow carries an electric charge of 10 million volts in his body?
There’s a significance about Volgin, outside of the fact that he is the first person to use the Philosopher’s Legacy for the purposes of building mobile nuke launchers in the form of Metal Gear predecessor Shagohod. Thunderbolt is probably the only antagonist in the Metal Gear series who is willfully a bad guy. In a world full of moral ambiguity, Volgin revels in masochism and torture. He loves being generally dastardly, and you get the sense that there was not particular heel turn event for him. He was just born a bastard.
Even with that said, Volgin is capable of his own version of affection. He has a lover, Ivan Raikov, whom he is very protective of. Even Kojima’s most straightforward characters are complex.
8. Master Miller
Or Master McDonnell Benedict Kazuhira Miller, if you want to be as complete as possible. Miller has had several different roles in the series, and has been retconned a few times since his first appearance all the way back in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. He’s one of the few characters to meet both Big Boss and Solid Snake, as a friend and partner of the former and radio contact of the latter.
Miller initially saw the same vision Big Boss did after the events of Snake Eater: a world for soldiers who can live and work without a nation, never to be compromised by patriotism. He and Big Boss built the first Mother Base together with this in mind. When it was destroyed by the end of Ground Zeroes, the Miller that survived was far less idealistic.
This is what makes Miller so interesting, especially looking back at his role in the earlier games knowing his state of mind chronologically. He’s slightly sociopathic in The Phantom Pain, and it creates a whole new layer of nuance and intrigue when your realize he’s the man giving you all the information your using. How reliable is this narrator?
7. Otacon
Hal Emmerich has science in the blood, and his family has quite the history with nukes and the Snakes. His grandfather was a part of the Manhattan Project, and his father, Huey Emmerich, would create the first bipedal missile systems, complete with AI’s. Hal would fall right in line when he created Metal Gear REX in Twin Snakes. When Solid Snake would inform Hal that his creation is actually a ridiculously powerful nuclear weapon during the Shadow Moses incident, Emmerich would pledge his allegiance to Snake, and the wonder team of Metal Gear hunting nuke disarmers would be born.
What makes Otacon such an interesting character is how incredibly capable he is without Snake. If he wasn’t so paralyzed by fear and anxiety all the time, he would never need Snake at all. He’s such a crafty engineer and brilliant inventor, he almost could almost always build an answer to a problem. Instead, he often serves as Snake’s quartermaster, giving him on the spot intel and high tech tools to help him solve his in field issues, which may sell the guy alittle short. Another unlikley characteristic that defines Otacon is how terribly unlucky he is with ladies.
Usually a trope resigned to burly, stoic types like Snake, ever woman who’s ever been really close to Hal has died tragically. His mother, Strangelove; his love interests Danziger, Sniper Wolf, and Naomi; even his stepsister Emma have all died in some terribly unfortunate way. You thought Wolverine was bad at women, he’s got nothing on Otacon.
6. Gray Fox
Child soldier Frank Yeager also has a multi-generational history with the Snakes. As the teenage assassin Null, he encounters Big Boss on numerous occasions, eventually being defeated and ushered away from FOX, the covert ops unit that Big Boss was once involved in. His superiors at the time didn’t think Null was ever going to be the same after that, but the always practical Zero wasn’t ready to let it go just yet.
Null would get himself into plenty of dirty work up to the 90’s, before he would join Big Boss’s FOXHOUND, and be rechristened Gray Fox. He is one of the first (and best) examples of Big Boss’s accomplices and choices coming back to harm his son, Solid Snake. Gray Fox and Solid Snake would battle many times between Metal Gear 2 and MGS, with Fox’s mind so broken by decades of conflict, he can’t rightly decern who his friends and enemies are anymore. Made doubly difficult when your friends and enemies look alike.
Null is also the first character, chronologically, to be psychologically and genetically tampered with in the effort to create the “perfect soldier.” He set the pace for the super soldiers seen in the series later on, like Solid Snake or Raiden. Speaking of Raiden…
5. Raiden
Jack “the Ripper” was a child soldier from Liberia before he ever grew into the man that would be the successor of the cyborg ninja motif. Self-taught in sword play, based in part by Solidus Snake’s aggressive psychological manipulation, Jack would excel at getting up close and personal on his foes from a very early age. His service left him unstable, and though much of his childhood was suppressed after being in a relief center and eventually adopted, nightmares still remained. He lived much of his adult life in a fractured, yet functional state. He even joined the military seemingly on his on volition, excelling in every aspect and immediately being recruited for the newly reformed FOXHOUND unit. Then the Manhattan Incident took place.
The oil tanker explosion in the first section of Sons of Liberty is as much of an event metaphorically as it is in the context of the narrative. Our expectations of the sequel to the first game is destroyed and lay harmlessly in the bottom of the sea from that point forward. Our hero from then on was this pretty, almost waifish man who’s self doubt and sniveling ran directly opposite to the rough and tumble Snake we were used to. A man calling himself Snake was the enemy, so we had to be renamed – “Raiden”. As our emotions were being played with, so was the character’s, who would later realize this whole event was just an elaborate test and that Jack would realize that he was being used as a military toy against his will yet again. By the end of the game, he’s done with it all. Of course, its never that simple, is it?
One of the biggest shocks of the series comes the next time you see Raiden, as the cyborg ninja he is currently. Attempts at living a normal life have failed him repeatedly, and now being a weapon has become Raiden’s priority. And boy was he an efficient weapon. But by the end of Guns of the Patriots, Snake convinces him that a normal life is totally worth living, and Raiden finally finds relative peace in that knowledge. He’s one of the few Metal Gear characters who really has a life outside of war.
4. Revolver Ocelot
If Campbell is the most reliable and trustworthy character in the series, than Ocelot has to be the exact opposite. Ocelot has switched allegiances so many times, no one can really tell you who he works for. By Guns of the Patriots, he’s literally confused himself, under going hypnotherapy to attempt to become a personality he isn’t, but living in a state of constant mental conflict as the old personality continuously tries to break through.
Cutting to the core of his life’s work, though, Ocelot did everything after Snake Eater in devotion to the Philosophers, serving as a triple agent to the CIA, KGB, and right hand man of Snake’s Diamond Dogs only to help realize a future where all war was orchestrated, organized, and profitable. As an agent of The Patriots, he would see that dream pretty much realized, only to eventually want to bring it all down anyway. I told you, not even he can get his story straight.
If Ocelot has any great purpose in the story overall, its that he serves as the arch-nemesis of Snake. He is the cackling, mustache twisting bad guy behind it all – a goal to continue to work towards. He’s a tangible, physical force of antagonism in a game full of abstract concepts of bad.
3. The Boss
Ocelot is complicated, but so is his mother, The Boss. The Cobra Unit leader is one of the American military’s shining beacons up until the Virtuous Mission in Snake Eater, when you learn she’s turned traitor. Everything Big Boss knows, everything he is (including his title), came from The Boss, who raised him like a son and a student for most of his life. The Boss is Naked Snakes closest friend, but their relationship transcended any conventional moniker. It’s what made hunting and killing her by the end of Snake Eater such a significant event, as it may have been the single biggest factor is Snake’s downfall.
Even being so significant, much about The Boss is shrouded in mystery. One interesting fact is that she gave birth to Ocelot after being shot in WWII, but he was taken away immediately after. The C-Section scar she has is huge and snake shaped, and is the influence for Snake’s callsign, one she felt was fitting considering he became the son she never had. Outside of that, she’s a curiously figure nebulous figure for someone so centrally important to the entire lore.
2. Solid Snake
The American action hero made manifest, Solid Snake has seen the worst that modern war has to offer and toppled it, with great cost to him personally. Snake gets alot of flak for being sort of one note, but in context he’s nothing short of remarkable. He’s naturally gifted, thanks to the long tried practiced process of super soldier engineering that he is the product of. With a high IQ, and a gift for problem solving and tactical thinking, he was a perfect fit for FOXHOUND after his service in the Green Berets.
How many nuclear disasters has your favorite character averted? Probably not three, which has to be some sort of record. Snake spends most of his life cleaning up his father’s messes, dealing with his allies, and undoing the monolithic info-prison Big Boss and his subordinates have locked the world in. When Snake finally decides to live his remaining life in peace after Guns of the Patriots, I can’t think of a person more deserving of the respite.
1. Big Boss
If there’s a big flaw in Solid Snake, though, its that he is a lot like Batman. Batman is a consistent tone and presence that is colored and enhanced by the zaniness of the people around him. He almost feels like “one of the crazies” in a way, just another shade on the color wheel. Big Boss, on the other hand, had dreams, goals, relationships, purpose. He fought for what he believed in, had that belief shattered, and had to reset his moral compass to a new direction in order to cope. In other words, Big Boss feels far more relatable than Solid Snake.
Part of this comes from the fact that, unlike Solid Snake, Big Boss wasn’t a product of a science experiment. BB was just that damn good, so much so they call him “The Greatest Warrior of the 20th Century” routinely. He was loved as a hero and inspiring presence to his allies, and feared as a cold blooded tyrant by his enemies. He is an excellent leader, running what would be the first ever private military company, and establishing multiple military states as a basis for his overall goal: to free soldiers from nationalism.
His goals would eventually drive him down a dark path that only few living confidants had any real understanding of. He now stands as a tragic figure, as most of these characters do. Examples of the crazy things people will do for principals and ideals.
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