Summary
- Psycho Mantis reads your mind, but switch the controller ports to beat him.
- Sahelanthropus is massive and formidable, with various weapons at its disposal.
- The End battle requires patience and spotting skills, but is easier once found.
Hideo Kojima's legendary Metal Gear Solid is known for its bold storylines and revolutionary gameplay, but also for its fantastic and sometimes fantastically peculiar boss encounters. In a way, MGS paved the way to the re-popularization of the boss formula that FromSoft's Souls series would later begin.
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Boss battles are made interesting by their challenge, and Hideo Kojima never falters when it comes to coming up with original ways to prevent the old formula of the enemy with the large health bar from going stale. Let's look at the toughest foes in the history of the MGS series.
10 Psycho Mantis (Metal Gear Solid)
He Knows All Of Your Moves
Metal Gear Solid
- Released
- October 20, 1998
- ESRB
- M For Mature 17+ Due To Blood and Gore, Suggestive Themes, Violence
- Genre(s)
- Stealth
- He's pretty much unbeatable for anyone who doesn't know his secret
- Not too difficult after that
Psycho Mantis isn't a character with mind-reading abilities inside a game; he's actually capable of anticipating the player's moves and becoming pretty much impossible to hit. That is, unless players learn about his secret. Gimmick master that he is, Hideo Kojima allows players to completely bypass Mantis' mind-reading abilities if they unplug the controller from port 1 and switch it to port 2.
Mantis's mind-reading powers are seemingly more limited than one would've guessed, and after the switch, he becomes a pretty regular boss. If one goes into the fight unaware of the gimmick, however, he'll bring the pain. Though old, this remains one of the most memorable encounters in the whole series.
9 Sahelanthropus (Metal Gear Solid 5)
Somehow More Advanced Than Its More Recent Models
Metal Gear Solid 5 The Phantom Pain
- Released
- September 1, 2015
WHERE TO PLAY
- ESRB
- m
- Genre(s)
- Stealth, Action-Adventure, Shooter, Adventure
- Bigger, badder, scarier
- But not that complicated
The Sahelanthropus, which looks just like the original Metal Gear Rex from Metal Gear Solid, is the game's most imposing enemy, and its battle is quite the visual treat. He's gigantic and, despite having a wide arsenal at his disposal, Snake will have trouble finding anything extremely effective against this beast.
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On top of various projectiles, the Sahelanthropus even has a highly powerful laser sword, just in case players could not get the message that this was a very high-stakes encounter.
8 The End (Metal Gear Solid 3)
A Different Kind Of Challenge
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004)
- Released
- November 17, 2004
WHERE TO PLAY
- A battle of resilience
- And of dirty tricks - if need be
The End serves as an upping of the ante from the battle against Sniper Wolf in the original Metal Gear Solid. This is not a regular shootout, but a battle of stamina and attrition against an enemy that can be camouflaged anywhere, waiting for the player to make a mistake and get shot. The End isn't too difficult once he gets spotted, but spotting him will take skill and patience.
Originally, Hideo Kojima had intended for the battle against The End to necessarily take place over two weeks of real time. Suffice it to say that most players are glad that, instead of that, they can actually just tamper with the console's clock to get him to die from old age.
7 Metal Gear Rex (Metal Gear Solid)
Bullet Hell Time
- Projectiles galore
- And various phases
Metal Gear Rex from the original Metal Gear Solid is as close as it gets to an MGS boss that's also a Final Fantasy boss. This is a beast of nearly impossible dimensions featuring tech so advanced it could almost pass as magic. Also, unlike any other boss in this game, it features multiple battle phases.
Rex forces players to dodge a lot of projectiles, which just isn't the skill set this game had been training players to acquire. Rex might initially prove a challenge for many players, but that does make sense, considering this is the thing giving the game its name.
6 Vamp (Metal Gear Solid 2)
Master Trickster
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
- Released
- November 13, 2001
WHERE TO PLAY
- ESRB
- M For Mature 17+ Due To Animated Blood, Animated Violence
- Genre(s)
- Stealth
- Vamp requires players to adapt to a whole new skillset
Out of all the enemies in the Metal Gear Solid series, Vamp might just have the largest number of wild tricks up his sleeve. Though he appears to be but a normal man, he's basically immortal and has a very unorthodox approach to battle.
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This man is capable of freezing the player by hitting their shadow with a knife, and also dances around one's bullets. It also doesn't help that players have to face Vamp in a really strange area where they have little room to move and can immediately fall to their deaths after one bad move.
5 The Boss (Metal Gear Solid 3)
Remember The Basics Of CQC
- The most intense hand-to-hand battle in the series
Metal Gear Solid 3's plotline spends its entirety setting up The Boss as the best close-quarters combatant in the world, and the final battle in the game sure does prove it. This is where players will have to put into practice everything they've learned throughout the game, and it'll still prove a challenge.
Guns will also have an effect on The Boss - or at least until she catches players shooting at her and disassembles their weapons. All in all, one of the most challenging but also most fun fights in the series.
4 Vulcan Raven (Metal Gear Solid)
Relentless Torment
- The biggest test of one's sneaking abilities
- Absolutely brutal
Vulcan Raven's encounter shows the original Metal Gear Solid at its most extreme, gameplay-wise. Whereas players are used to guards with a relatively short line of sight on their radar, Raven will immediately scare players by showing a cone of sight that seems about ten times wider and longer than anyone else's.
To make matters even worse, he comes running and gunning equipped with a massive minigun that'll rip Snake to shreds if he ever gets caught. Players will have to use their best and quickest stealth to get on Raven's back, hit him as hard as possible, and go back to running, should they want to emerge victorious from this brutal enemy.
3 Mass Rays (Metal Gear Solid 2)
Skill And Resilience Required Ahead
- A good challenge on Normal
- A massive challenge for pros
The battle against the Rays near the end of Metal Gear Solid 2 is similar to the fight against Metal Gear Rex at the end of the original game. Players need to dodge projectiles, then launch missiles at the robot's weak spot, but there are two main differences here. One, players need to hit one weak spot to reveal the *true* weak spot where they'll deal actual damage.
Secondly, this isn't one fight with many phases; this is an unrelenting battle against a number of these beasts. If players are considering facing the mass-produced Rays on the European Extreme difficulty, they're looking at an over ten-minute-long battle where they have little to no room for mistakes.
2 Solidus (Metal Gear Solid 2)
Proto Dark Souls
- A true skill check
The original Metal Gear Solid allows players to breathe with a relatively easy battle against Liquid Snake after defeating REX. Metal Gear Solid 2, however, follows up on the toughest battle with the game up until that point with something even worse. Solidus is extremely fast, has a wide variety of moves, and also features great defense. At first, Solidus will seem like an impenetrable barrier, one somehow capable of dealing immense damage to players either via his tentacles or his swords.
As soon as players begin to get the hang of it, Solidus will enter his second phase, where he becomes even faster and turns the entire battle arena into a sort of bullet hell scenario. Solidus will force players to play with their head, then use their skill to hit Solidus whenever a rare opening arises.
1 Skull Snipers (Metal Gear Solid 5)
Metal Gear Hell
- The true final test
Boss battles are usually made harder by the introduction of multiple phases, but another popular way of making a boss harder that the MGS series never used before was the usage of multiple incredibly hard bosses at the same time. That's the problem with Skullface's snipers, who are incredibly punishing and require players to pay maximum attention to every single one of them at all times.
This one is so difficult that it is entirely optional and skippable, so it's pretty clear the devs put it in the game as the absolute final challenge for any player wanting to feel like the true big boss.
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