METAL GEAR SOLID MASTER COLLECTION Vol.2 BONUS CONTENT

★☆☆☆☆ Terrible!

Action

Ghost Babel is a Gameboy color exclusive and Solid Snake’s first portable adventure. Ghost Babel tells quite an interesting story set after Metal Gear but not canon to any of the other games. This means that although Mei-Ling and Colonel Campbell are here it’s nothing to do with the PS1 classic Metal Gear Solid.

The basic gameplay is very similar to Metal Gear 2 but not as impressive or enjoyable. You control Solid Snake breaking into an enemy base. The camera takes on a top-down view with you able to run, crawl, use items and weapons. Most levels involve you trying to find an item or person while navigating a maze-like area that fails to feel connected to other parts of the world.[hr]

Metal Gear fans should at least emulate this but more casual fans would be better giving it a miss.

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Metal Gear: Ghost Babel (also released as Metal Gear Solid) for Gameboy Color is a bit of an odd project. Originally pitched as a GBC port of the 1998 MGS, it turned into its own project that has a non-canonical story that, nonetheless, has elements that are referenced in future titles. Also, despite being a 2D game that reuses a lot of concepts that were originally introduced in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, this game does not feel like a remake or a revisit of that game… Which wouldn’t feel odd if not for the fact that Metal Gear Solid did and this title was originally supposed to be that, but back in 2D?.. Either way, Ghost Babel is a very interesting project. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s consistently fun to play.

But yeah, for all intents and purposes, Ghost Babel is an attempt to bring Metal Gear back into 2D after the 3D experience with MGS. And given the series origins, it wasn’t too difficult of a task. Sure, some of the ideas are much closer to MGS than they are to MG2, but a lot of the cool features and innovative mechanics from MGS were originally in MG2, so it’s hard to avoid comparisons. As such, the game works like the series originally did – no “non-lethal” options, stealth is very simple and “arcadey” with enemies having very limited sight and hearing and constant search for key cards and new equipment that will help you overcome the next problem and achieve necessary goals. Oh and health and item/ammo limits increase after each boss fight. The biggest difference here is that the game is divided into stages, so backtracking is only possible (or required) within certain story sections. And you get ranked for each stage too, oddly, focusing on speed rather then alarms or damage, so most of my playthrough the game ranked my careful stealth completion “Terrible”.

Being the Metal Gear of the original kind, you can expect odd immediate goals that are blocked by puzzles. A lot of which are, honestly, just tedious. It’s unlikely you will be confused about them, unlike some of the really cryptic stuff you had to do in the first two Metal Gear games, but you will get frustrated by some of the stages. The conveyor belts level overstays its welcome very early on. And some of the later moments, where you constantly need to go back and forth across the entire level, are also not very good. Boss fights range from uninteresting to infuriating. And the item and weapon switching is very inconvenient with the limitations of GBC original buttons. Shoulder buttons made the inventory a joy to use in MGS, but GBC only had 4 buttons in total and it slows everything down.

It’s still cool how varied and cool most of Ghost Babel is, though. It also has a lot of VR missions to perfect. And after completing the main story you can do harder versions of stages with extra plot added, which is very cool. It looks alright, for a GBC game. And the soundtrack is also pretty good, sometimes perfectly channeling the best tunes of MG2 or even Snatcher on a less capable hardware. But Metal Gear: Ghost Babel is a rather messy experience which, I fear, will not click with that many people. And when you also consider that it’s somehow the only Bonus game for the Master Collection Vol.2, with no ports of Ac!d games or Portable Ops, the overall experience gets even more sour. Still, I think if you are going to get the collection for the big games (MGS4 and/or Peace Walker), Ghost Babel is a fun bonus. I just wish the game wasn’t as frustrating on first playthroughs as it is.

For a Game Boy Color game, Ghost Babel is surprisingly deep. It takes a lot from Metal Gear Solid with some ideas from Metal Gear 2 and captures the essence of the series really well.

Some parts drag a bit, especially the conveyor belt section, but overall this is an impressive Metal Gear game for a handheld.

Ghost Babel is just a fantastic spin off, and further shows how great the batting average for spinoffs of Metal Gear is.

MGS4 and Peace Walker two priceless masterpieces.