Metal Gear Solid Delta Sidesteps One of The Twin Snakes’…

In addition to being a remake of one of the series' most beloved entries, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is a big deal for being the first remake the series has gotten in more than 20 years. Prior to Metal Gear Solid Delta, the Metal Gear Solid series had only ever gotten one genuine remake with 2004's Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, and to say that player reception to the title was mixed is a bit of an understatement. While the gameplay of The Twin Snakes was great, Silicon Knights' handling of the game's direction and audio has ultimately soured fans' perception of the title in the intervening years since its release.

Outside its initial GameCube version, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes has been lost to time, relegated to being a relic of the past thanks to its place as an oddity within the franchise. Visually and mechanically, Twin Snakes does a great job updating the campaign of Metal Gear Solid, but the decision to re-record the game's voice acting and reframe the direction of the game's cutscenes resulted in it being a tonal mess that took a lot of the weight out of the original's story. Metal Gear Solid Delta wisely avoids these issues by opting to leave the original audio alone, and it's a better remake for it.

Metal Gear Solid Delta's Audio Treatment Honors Both the Game and Its Cast

Development on Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes began in a post-Metal Gear Solid 2 world, which inspired Silicon Knights and Konami to try to retrofit Sons of Liberty's framework onto the original Metal Gear Solid. In terms of how this impacted the game's mechanics, there were mostly welcome additions like first-person aiming, but the studio then took it upon itself to re-record the game's voice acting, complete with recasting some of Metal Gear Solid's original talent. The result is that Twin Snakes both fails to match the tonality of the original Metal Gear Solid and doesn't do right by the game's legacy voice cast.

Conversely, Metal Gear Solid Delta immediately stands out as the superior Metal Gear Solid remake thanks to its use of the original audio from Snake Eater. The entire original voice cast is still front and center in Metal Gear Solid Delta, with their lines simply remastered for HD audio rather than re-recorded, and still just as great as they've always been.

It's hard to imagine Snake Eater without David Hayter's iconic performance as Naked Snake or Lori Alan as The Boss, and thanks to Virtuos' handling of Metal Gear Solid Delta, players don't have to.

Snake Eater's Arthouse Take on a Spy Thriller is Better Than Ever in Metal Gear Solid Delta

The same care and attention paid to honoring the original Snake Eater's audio and voice acting carries over to Metal Gear Solid Delta's cutscenes as well, which, aside from their substantial visual uplift, are shot-for-shot remakes of Metal Gear Solid 3's. It's an important distinction to make from how other remakes approach their source material, as Hideo Kojima's artistic vision is still front and center in Metal Gear Solid Delta and a major component of the game's appeal, even without his direct involvement.

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Kojima's penchant for cinematic flair made the Metal Gear Solid series an innovator when it came to storytelling in interactive media, and Metal Gear Solid 3 was always seen as the creator's high point for how it blends elements of more artistic and thought-provoking films with the iconic spy thrillers of the 1960s. Metal Gear Solid Delta's decision to honor that vision and update it without altering it only serves to hammer home the point that Snake Eater is a game still ahead of its time and the pinnacle of its franchise, its visuals now matching the quality of the content like a long-awaited 4K remaster of a classic film.

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