For Better or Worse Solid 3 would have been better than the terrible MGS3, a game only fanboys could love.
Didn't it get like, universal praise?
Universal praise is hardly a measure of quality.
I could easily point out things where well reviewed and popular things suck ass, like Gears of War, 24, Lost, the newer movie named Crash, but why point to precendents when I can point to clear examples?
1) MGS3 was the easiest game in the series. Even on the next to most difficult difficulty level, it was rather difficult to die (aside from the few foodless sections of the game towards the end, where it got hairy inexplicably--why did that portion of the jungle have no food?). CQC made the game insanely easy, a good thing because. . .
2) The camera in the original release was amongst the worst cameras in an otherwise good game of last gen. It's Ninja Gaiden bad. It's always been a joke that Solid Snake can only see 5 feet in front of him, and that his enemies are just as bad, but the jungle setting took the laughs to a whole new level. More coverage from above, via trees, made it difficult to see anywhere, and the earthy color palette that took over most of the game did not help matters. The added camera in Subsistence helped a bit, but even that was a rather fiddly camera. I don't want to bitch too much because that was an improvement, albeit imperfect.
3) The presentation. I recall reading that this game is less cutscene heavy than 2. If that is the case, it is a pretty academic distinction, since they appear to both display this issue to equal effect. To make MGS3 even worse, the codec chats frequently border on pure exposition. Between 2 and 3, there is no winner in this category, but I at least found 2's cutscenes and codecs more interestings, mainly because. . .
4) MGS3 was pure animu shit fanservice. This is absolutely inarguable. Not directly tied to this, but still worthy of mention is that the ending is embarassingly hammy.
MGS3, as it stands, is the weakest point in the new series. It signals where Kojima stopped trying to do his own thing (as exemplified in MGS2) and where he started pandering to his audience of animu mouthbreathers.
