Metal Gear is a hard series to follow, with plenty of twists and turns and a lot of complicated terminology also thrown into the mix. Everyone in the series seems to be in the know about everything, from the biggest schemes to the tiniest details. Everyone except the Snakes, that is. They and the players are often left in the dark until it's time for the big reveal.
That said, they’re not complete dunces. They know their way around weapons and combat and can think outside the box (often while inside literal boxes). But who exactly are the smartest Snakes in Metal Gear? Finding out will involve revealing spoilers for the whole series, so readers should proceed with caution.
5 Venom Snake
While players do control Big Boss in Ground Zeroes, they play as a customizable MSF soldier conditioned into thinking he was Big Boss in The Phantom Pain part of Metal Gear Solid 5. The real deal escaped to South Africa after helping his double escape the hospital in Cyprus. It’s why Venom Snake can’t speak Russian like the actual Big Boss and had to get an interpreter for interrogations.
He was the doctor who did the emergency bomb removal surgery on Paz in Ground Zeroes, so he isn’t a completely blank slate. Even so, he’s the blankest of the Snakes, with little personality or know-how of his own beyond Master Miller and Ocelot’s urging. Even after learning the truth, he keeps up the ersatz-Big Boss act until his end in Metal Gear. He’s the one who actually fights Solid Snake, while the real Big Boss was on Snake’s radio.
4 Solid Snake
According to his profile, Solid Snake has an IQ of 180 and knows 6 languages fluently; though the player wouldn’t know this from the games. As the main protagonist for most of the games, he’s kept the most oblivious, only knowing what the schemers want him to know. Solid Snake’s at his smartest when he’s out of the player’s hands in Metal Gear Solid 2. He knows all about Solidus’ plan and the Patriots, or at least a lot more than Raiden, anyway.
Even then, for a former Green Beret, he knows surprisingly little about the US Armed Forces. NAVSCOLEOD instructor Peter Stillman saw through his ‘Iroquois Plisken’ cover when, trying to act like a Navy SEAL, he quotes the Marines (“Semper fi”), the British SAS (“Who Dares, Wins”), and makes up a Command rank (Lieutenant Junior Grade) when he should be a field grunt. Clearly, Solid Snake is better at the ‘action’ part of tactical espionage action.
3 Liquid Snake
Another point against Solid Snake was that he was fooled by Liquid in Metal Gear Solid with just a hair tie and a set of shades. That, or Liquid was much better at imitating Master Miller than Solid Snake would be as a Navy SEAL. Either way, he was able to trick his brother into activating REX and saw through the CIA’s plan to infect Liquid and his forces with FOXDIE, an artificial virus that targets individuals via their DNA. That’s putting aside his leadership skills, as he’s been a capable captain since childhood.
Still, he did learn genetics from movies rather than in actual science classes. He believed he was made solely of recessive genes while the superior Solid Snake was made of dominant ones. The two biggest problems with that are (a) that was a lie: he was the ‘superior’ one all along, and (b) ‘dominant’ genes don’t mean ‘better’, and ‘recessive’ doesn’t mean ‘worse’. It’s possible for good ‘soldier genes’ to be recessive and bad ones to be dominant. His hatred for Big Boss and Solid Snake could’ve been curtailed with one science lecture.
2 Solidus Snake
Yet another point against both twin Snakes was that they never watched TV, read a newspaper, or looked at other media and wondered why the US President looked a lot like them and Big Boss. George ‘Solidus Snake’ Sears certainly knew all about his brothers though, as he was in office during the Shadow Moses incident. He was the one behind the FOXDIE plot and the retrieval of Metal Gear REX’s data.
Solidus also knew about the Patriots and how they truly ran the country, then knew how to evade them after they exposed his involvement in Shadow Moses. Solidus also had the drop on Dead Cell and Raiden, using both in his one-man war without either cottoning on to him until the end. His plot might’ve worked if Ocelot wasn’t acting on the Patriots’ behalf, as they outfoxed him at the crucial moment. Even so, he showed more brainpower than all but one of the other Snakes.
1 Big Boss (Naked Snake)
Yes, the guy who thought eating glow-in-the-dark mushrooms recharged his batteries, and had to be shown how to eat his food is the smartest Snake. It seems his gullibility got passed down to his sons along with his soldiering skills. He made up for his prior dunce moments in other ways, however, albeit gradually. By Peace Walker he knew Zadornov was a KGB spy on sight, but not that Paz was a CIPHER plant. Then, with Ocelot’s help, he fooled everyone in Phantom Pain with his Venom Snake double.
He infiltrated the US military and tricked them from within to protect Outer Heaven in Metal Gear, then used Solid Snake’s old allies against him with a mix of charm and planning in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Big Boss had enough gray matter to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes and establish multiple ‘military nations’. It takes more than just smarts to succeed, however, as evidenced by the fact that Solid Snake brought Big Boss down twice.