That Metal Gear Solid works in two dimensions shouldn’t exactly be a surprise — the series started out as Metal Gear on the 1986’s ill-fated MSX, a keyboard-shaped home computer with big ambitions and small sales.
The real surprise here, then, is that Metal Gear Solid feels Solid-like on Nintendo’s debut handheld. It’s less Metal Gear Game Boy, more Metal Gear on Game Boy. A bit crude today, but it’s easy to how novel the concept of Gear on the go would’ve been in the year 2000.
And kinda still is now.
That’s because it’s almost Metal Gear Solid in two dimensions. It hits that spot. Sneaking, cigarettes, laser beams, and an absurdly big robot — all brought to life by a device your gut tells you shouldn’t be possible. Mechanics you might associate with the PlayStation’s three dimensions are on the table here: crawl under things, push your back against walls, diagonal movement — it’s Metal Gear Solid on Game Boy Color.
That it’s European name, by the way. Konami seemingly believed it could pass as a Game Boy take on its PlayStation progenitor. It’s not quite, though. But almost. It’s more like Metal Gear Solid Gaiden: no cyborg ninja, no genetically superior twin, no snipers named after quadrupeds. Metal Gear Solid proper this isn’t. Similar concept, different content.
For everything it leaves behind, something of Solid did survive: Snake sans Hayter’s voice — or any voice, for that matter. The SOCOM pistol, a helicopter fight, the CODEC, a woman undercover, and bosses with signature schticks. It might be more apt to say Babel was inspired by Solid, not an adaptation.
It’s fitting that Ghost Babel’s base is built on the ruins of the base in Metal Gear 1 on the MSX — perhaps a nod to that fact that Babel, like Solid before it, is built on the foundations of that 1987 original. The series returns to its origins in form, theme, and place here. Like Acid two years later, Babel is a series of tiny revelations. From making a sound when stepping in water to knocking on walls to lure guards to panning the camera over your shoulder, Babel is a lot of Metal Gear on a small slice of silicon.
That silicon was a request from Konami Europe: people apparently want a portable Metal Gear game. Kojima unexpectedly agreed. It’s not hardware that lends itself rich, cinematic experiences you can build trailers around — no close-up shots, no haunting soundtrack, no historical footage. Just 32,000 pixels, each one a precious piece of real estate for Kojima and co.
And yet Ghost Babel can feel just as tense and threatening and doubtful. Guards roam, as they did in Solid. Cameras keep a watchful eye, as they did in Solid — until those limitations start to encroach. You can run past a gate that looks like another gate, which makes orientating yourself a bit of bugger at times. Repetitive assets can make levels feel disorientating. A gate is a gate is a gate here.
Despite that, putting Kojima’s vision on Nintendo’s handheld it reveals that what Solid is known is for isn’t what makes it work at all — because it’s not here in handheld form. We instead have its essence bottled in a grey plastic cartridge. That’s why you should play Ghost Babel.
If you want to know what makes your game tick, put it on Game Boy. Find out what those core decisions you want me to make, and how they make me feel. It’s the ability to make me feel like Snake that makes MGS GB feel like Metal Gear Solid proper. That’s exactly what Fujibayashi and co. did when developing Breath of the Wild — they prototyped it in glorious NES 2D.
It’s intelligent about what exactly what it imports. It doesn’t import the free-roman world mechanic, replacing with a series of free-roam levels. It doesn’t try to import story-heavy narrative, either. Makes sense, too, as that would bloat those bitesize missions to a scope far beyond the comfort of quick, portable play.
It’s a perception-shifting title, too. I’d always seen the Game Boy as a refuge for RPGs, platformers, and puzzle games — yet here we have a full-blown stealth-action game that’s not too dissimilar from its PlayStation partner. It punches well above its weight, and has driven me to see what else the system can do.
In an 1999 interview — catalogued by a Tumbler site called thearkhound — Famitsu asked Nojiri asked whether working on Game Boy was tougher than PlayStation. His response to that was no because “the original Metal Gear released on the MSX back in 1987 was already a 2D game”.
“However, we aimed to create a game that wouldn’t feel dumbed-down to players who already experienced MGS1.”
Nojiri achieved that aim, and made the case for what games aren’t — it’s not ray-tracing, it’s not sixty frames, it’s not resolution, it’s not online multiplayer. It’s some buttons, a map, and some bad guys. It’s some buttons and a farm or a space station or an abandoned military complex.
In that context, Babel is a bottle of Sprite on a warm day or a pair of socks on a cold day — a reminder that video games don’t need much to be good. Metal Gear, after all, is hide and seek with guns and giant robots.
Whereas Acid took the series on an ambitious countryside detour, Babel is a photo album of our grandparents’ grandparents to show us that old doesn’t mean bad. Babel is a return to source and simplicity in an industry that revels in just how deep and immersive and to-do-listy its output is.
And that’s precisely why you should play Babel: It accidentally puts all that pomp and circumstance on trial by making the case that the further forward the industry moves — so called — the further it moves from what made it so appealing in the first place: plain and simple fun.