28 Years Ago, Metal Gear Solid Dropped One Of The Most Beautiful Quotes In Gaming History

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Metal Gear Solid is known for a lot of things, and one of them is its fantastic writing. From the start, dialogue has played a huge role in the experience, with both cinematic cutscenes and frequent codec calls lending personality to Solid Snake, his allies, and the various bosses that he inevitably has to fight.

While Metal Gear Solid‘s writing has always been a cut above the competition, the divide felt especially notable on the original PlayStation, where incorporating movie-like qualities into games was still a fairly new prospect. Anyone who’s played the first Metal Gear Solid likely has a number of quotes that live in their head permanently, and one might rise above the rest as the most potent that the game has to offer.

If the original Metal Gear Solid is about anything in particular, it’s about finding humanity in the least likely places. Sent to a frigid facility in the Bering Sea, Snake is a cold-blooded soldier in a hostile, terrorist-filled environment. There, he manages to discover one true ally — Hal Emmerich, who calls himself Otacon due to his love for anime.

Held in captivity, Otacon has developed an affection for Sniper Wolf, a terrorist who refused to let her compatriots kill the wolf dogs on the island. When he meets up with Snake next to an elevator, Otacon explains that he followed him to pose one question. After fumbling over his words a couple of times, he finally formulates it perfectly, asking Snake, “Do you think love can bloom even on a battlefield?“

Even without any outside context, the scene itself is one of the best in Metal Gear Solid. Snake responds without hesitation, confirming that he does and elaborating that “at any time, any place… people can fall in love with each other.” Otacon’s question is the perfect representation of a traumatized man struggling to process his feelings for one of his captors, and Snake’s response is one of his strongest displays of humanity at that point in the game.

Sniper Wolf with a weapon in Metal Gear Solid

As part of a larger picture, the quote gains even more meaning. It shows up again in the pathos-laden scene of Sniper Wolf’s death, after Otacon hands Sniper Wolf her gun to hold as Snake mercy kills her with a final shot. Otacon returns to the question in frustration, chastising himself for being unable to save Sniper Wolf from her fate.

Outside of Otacon and Sniper Wolf, the question is the perfect encapsulation of Metal Gear Solid‘s themes. Snake himself also falls in love over the course of the game, with the gradual emergence of his humanity making him more than just a perfect soldier. Sniper Wolf might be the most emotional boss fight, but others also present their own pathos, repeatedly establishing that even terrorists threatening the world at large have unique personal depths.

That thread continues throughout every Metal Gear Solid game, with the series always pushing to present a picture of love and complex emotion in the midst of violence. The original quote is only one of many representations of the idea, and it’s also only one of many great Metal Gear Solid quotes as a whole. All these years later, though, the unique magic of hearing Otacon speak it so plaintively remains unmatched.