I completed Metal Gear Solid 2 yesterday!! YAY!!!!

The end-game stats say that I took 13 hours and 33 minutes, only about 4 minutes more than Shaun, which I guess is pretty good, considering I haven't played any of the MGS games before. But then again, I did get help from Shaun and Steven here and there, and I referred to a walkthrough in some parts during the beginning. Hee. :P

Oh, but I only killed 35 people in the whole game. Shaun says that's a good thing. And for comparison, he says that he killed 238 people. 0_0

I figure the 35 people that I killed were probably the ones that I *had* to kill; such as in those situations after Raiden finds himself already *inside* Arsenal Gear, and when he's already got all his gear back from Snake.

After that, you *have* to shoot your way through a room full of ninjas, and then proceed into the next room, a circular room, which you also have to fight your way through; although while I was busy running around using my new weapon, the High-Frequency Blade, Snake was just standing in the middle of the room, blasting all the ninjas dropping down from the upper floors.

By this point in the game, much of the story has also started to come out of the woodwork. We find out that the Colonel whom you've been taking orders from for the whole game is nothing but an AI program, Raiden's backstory reveals him to have MUCH more field experience than he claims to have (earlier in the game, he tells Snake that it's his first time in the field), everyone seems to have been deceived by everyone else (actually, usually Ocelot), and we learn that aside from the The Patriots, there's yet another interest group in this whole thing, a strange intangible... force(?) which claims to be the morality which Americans invoke so often, which has taken the form of the Colonel and Rose, and is really what Raiden has been communicating with all along.

And frankly, all these stories within stories within larger stories coming out all at the same time is really just confusing and disorienting. Albeit, they do make a small measure of sense and are really interesting, but being overloaded with all that information in the space of... twenty minutes? It's a bit much.

All in all, it's been fun and pretty thought-provoking stuff; I found the idea that morality could be something tangible, something in the form of a human being or some other lifeform, interesting, to say the least. And all the conspiracy theories; why the English alphabet has 26 letters instead of 30, why humans are said to have 30,000 genes or so instead of 100,000... very cool stuff.

My aiming skills do seem to be in need of improving though. Although they seemed to improve as I got the hang of things in the game. And I seem to be pretty proficient at sniping. Or maybe that's because the scope is rather large and the crosshairs are quite clear and there isn't so much recoil in the weapon. Or maybe it's the Pentazemin. *shrugs* Oh well.

It was fun. I'll play again on a higher difficulty level after the exams, since Shaun says that Metal Gear has a tradition of changing little things here and there when you've completed the game. :D