Metal Gear Solid (Game Boy Color) Playthrough

A playthrough of Konami's 2000 action-adventure game for the Nintendo Game Boy Color, Metal Gear Solid.

The first handheld Metal Gear game, known in Japan as Metal Gear Solid: Ghost Babel, was the fifth game of a franchise that had kicked off thirteen years earlier with the release of Metal Gear for the MSX2 home computer (   • Metal Gear (MSX2) Playthrough  ).

Ghost Babel is posed as a non-canonical sequel to the first game. Set in 2002, seven years after Solid Snake infiltrated Outer Heaven and destroyed Metal Gear during Operation Intrude N313, the story takes place in a parallel time-line in which the incident at Zanzibar Land in 1999 (Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake) never happened. It's a Metal Gear gaiden, if you will, as was the case with Snake's Revenge for the NES (   • Snake's Revenge (NES) Playthrough  ).

This time around, a plane carrying a Metal Gear prototype is highjacked by a group of terrorists, the GLF, who seek to use the weapon to stage a coup of the government of Gindra, a small African nation. The GLF's base of operations, Galuade, is the fortress previously known as Outer Heaven, and so the US government calls upon Solid Snake to once again storm the stronghold and avert a global nuclear catastrophe.

The gameplay crosses elements from Metal Gear 2 and the PlayStation's Metal Gear Solid. The stealth-oriented action is viewed from a top-down perspective, and an always on-screen radar displays nearby enemy positions. To avoid detection, Snake can hide in tall grass and cardboard boxes, crawl under objects, flatten himself against cover, and knock on walls to lure guards. Whenever sneaking fails, Snake can stun or kill his enemies and attempt to escape to cover before reinforcements arrive.

The plot is doled out over the course of thirteen compartmentalized stages, the graphics have been simplified for the GBC's low-resolution screen, the music is annoying, and the controls are awkwardly cramped. The story and the gameplay are as fleshed out here as in the bigger games, though, and even with the concessions made to accommodate the platform, Ghost Babel impresses in how faithfully it represents the MGS brand on an 8-bit handheld.

There's also a ton of content to play through. In addition to the main story mode, you get access to a full set of VR missions, a two-player link-up mode, and a set of unlockable special stages that give the main story missions new objectives and story beats.

Metal Gear Solid: Ghost Babel feels more like a feature-rich console title than it does a game designed for a badly outdated handheld machine. If you can overlook the tiny graphics, the kludgy menu system, and the weak audio, you'll find a quality Metal Gear experience lurking within the cramped confines of this 16 megabit cartridge.

Recorded with a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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