It’s hard to imagine a Metal Gear game without a plot twist or two. They’re the series’ lifeblood. Even simpler entries can take wild turns that make players think. Still, some twists are more effective than others. Many Metal Gear twists can be weird, confusing, or out of left field.
Liquid’s arm in Metal Gear Solid 2, Peace Walker’s Hot Coldman, and his involvement in Metal Gear Solid 3, and essentially everything from Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops range from baffling to just kind of there. However, the best plot twists in Metal Gear manage to linger in fans’ minds.
Warning: Spoilers Ahead
10 Big Boss Is The Bad Guy
The MSX was many things, but it wasn’t particularly powerful. It was this lack of power than made Kojima rethink his run & gun concept into a stealth game. Yet it almost meant the original Metal Gear is surprisingly straightforward with little outside the main mission. No time to dwell on Grey Fox or Dr. Pettrovich: Solid Snake’s got a giant tank to stop!
Though it still had room for a big twist. Snake’s commander Big Boss would get increasingly flaky with his advice. The further Snake got into the game, the worse he'd get until he tells the player to switch off the console. Then it’s revealed Big Boss was the head of the Outer Heaven terrorists all along! He wanted Snake to fail, but he underestimated his rookie agent's abilities.
9 Old Friends Become Enemies
With Big Boss exposed, he’d rebuild what he had in Outer Heaven with Zanzibar Land in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, and it would be up to Snake once again to stop him. He’d have a new Metal Gear ready to threaten the world, and a host of defenses to shut Snake down, like a Hind-D helicopter that could actually fly!
Some would say the big twist was Big Boss revealing he was Snake’s father, but that doesn’t actually happen in the game. What does happen is that nearly all of Snake’s allies from the first game turn on him. Kyle Schneider became the vengeful Black Ninja. Grey Fox pilots the new TX-55 Metal Gear against Snake. Even Dr. Pettrovich kills the man Snake was meant to save, then tries to throttle him to death!
8 Les Enfants Terrible
As mentioned, the Big Boss reveal was a retcon made in Metal Gear Solid. Snake doesn’t know how or why he was Big Boss’ son, though the weight of having committed patricide weighed heavily on him. MGS1 would add to that weight by revealing the answers. He’s just one of many clones made from the old man as part of the Les Enfants Terrible project.
The first attempt separated dominant and recessive genes (despite glaring issues with that) and cut down a set of octuplets into twins: Liquid and Solid. They would be the first of many genetic experiments performed using Big Boss’ DNA, producing the game’s Genome Soldiers, and an evenly balanced child who’d be revealed as Solidus Snake, AKA US President George Sears.
7 Raiden
Raiden’s reveal is more of a real-life twist than an in-game one as he wasn't shown at all pre-release. All the trailers for MGS2 showed Snake in action on the Tanker. But once players got their hands on the full game, they'd learn the hard way that Snake was only in a third of the game. The rest was spent as a blonde pretty boy who does nearly all the things Snake did in those trailers, like meet Mr. X or fight Fortune.
He was partly an attempt to reach wider audiences (notably women) and partly a meta-reference on sequels. Why were people excited to get a new Metal Gear game? Because they wanted to be Snake again! So, like them, Raiden becomes a proxy Snake taught to fight via video games, much to the real Snake's chagrin ("A virtual grunt of the digital age, that's just great!").
6 Who Are The Patriots?
On top of that, MGS2 piled twist upon twist, as the truth became harder to trim from a web of lies and misinformation. That’s because Raiden’s mission is revealed to be a set-up for the Patriots’ plan to control humanity by filtering its access to information. As fans got older they saw this as quite profound, comparing it to the internet's ability to bury truth with trivia. It’s also another slam on the player through Raiden.
He was a tool who didn't question how he was used because they praised him afterward. Solidus did this when he was a child soldier. The Patriots, a series of AIs, did the same by replicating authority figures and loved ones. Then Kojima and his crew did the same for players by letting them play secret agent. At least it softened the blow with a happy ending, unlike similar games like Spec-Ops: The Line.
5 The Boss Wasn’t A Traitor
After multiple games proving authority figures can't be trusted, it's refreshing that MGS3 got it out of the way with the opening Virtuous Mission. Naked Snake’s mentor, The Boss, stops him from fleeing Russia with Dr. Sokolov, beats him up, and defects to the Soviet Union to aid military rebel Colonel Volgin against the US and Russian premier Khrushchev.
Now Snake has to stop Volgin and kill The Boss to satisfy East and West. The Boss keeps up her defector role, even when she opens up about everything else. Yet that’s all it was: a role. The Boss was ordered by the US to betray Snake and go undercover to spy on Volgin, then become the States’ sacrificial lamb when that plan went awry. She was loyal to the end, and that's how she was rewarded.
4 Big Boss Returns
Metal Gear Solid 4 twists itself into knots in an attempt to tie up all the series' plot threads to that point. Most of which were summed up by the phrase “nanomachines.” Some of them were rather clever, while others felt kind of shallow. Still, it had a bunch of neat callbacks to the older games here and there. Most notable was the ending, where the credits fake out to reveal Big Boss was alive all along.
He was revived after a series of surgeries using parts from the deceased Liquid and Solidus. He gives a lengthy and strange speech musing on the story (“Cats do love to play as snakes”). Though it was nice to see the old man make peace with his son, from his CQC hug to his last salute. The Japanese version went one further by having Chikao Otsuka, father of Snake's VA Akio Otsuka, play the old soldier too.
3 Miller Was A CIPHER Agent
Most of the games up to this point had a little post-credits teaser that offered one last stinger. Peace Walker went further by giving players three of them: one after beating the titular robot, another after beating ZEKE, and one more after beating all the Story and EX-Ops. The last one was easy to miss as it had to be played from the Cassette Tapes.
It revealed Boss’ right-hand man Miller was a CIPHER (aka the Patriots) agent himself, just like Paz. He’s in the know on the Les Enfants Terrible project, and the AI direction CIPHER would take in the future. Metal Gear Solid 5 would cover his initial about-face from this, though once he learned his Big Boss was Venom Snake, he'd go back to the Patriots' side. Their friendship was truly over.
2 The Paz Subplot
Pacifica “Paz” Ocean's story in Peace Walker is rather ham-handed. She goes from being impossibly nice as “Paz Ortega Andrade,” the Costa Rican school girl, to a cackling supervillain under her true name, despite apparently going in the opposite direction in her diary. Even so, she didn’t deserve her brutal fate in Ground Zeroes.
Despite being blown up, she turns up intact and suffering from a particular kind of amnesia in MGS5. Big Boss has to help her out by gradually aiding her memory. But the twist here is that there was no twist: Paz never survived. Every one of her scenes is a grief-induced hallucination, and her amnesia is a projection of his own mental state. After all, he isn't the real Big Boss.
1 More Than Enough To Fool Anything That Moves
Finally, pretty much everything to do with Revolver Ocelot is a twist. He turns out to be working for Solidus Snake in MGS1, then a Patriots’ plant in MGS2, a CIA double-agent in MGS3, a Patriots co-founder in MGS4, and the one man who knows the difference between Big Boss and Venom Snake in MGS5.
His pro-Russian sympathies in MGS1 become a ruse to betray his old friend Colonel Gurlukovich in MGS2. The CIA director becomes another body for clean-up to him in Portable Ops. His loyalties change so much that it’s hard to pick out his consistent ones, which appear to be Big Boss, the Wild West, and revolvers. He does find that reload time exhilarating somehow.