Admittedly, it was only during subsequent playthroughs of this mission that made me think to myself, "yeah, this looks cool and unique enough for me to want to showcase it to a wider audience". The phase 2 final boss is actually super cool in design, simply because you don't expect this kind of thing from a Metal Slug game. But it also highlights a clash of themes and mood that I feel the SNKP developers never got right after the original SNK developers, as the classic, cartoonish Metal Slug humour just looks jarringly out of place in a super serious, super dark, super grotesque setting with a plot that takes itself way too seriously.
I also deeply regret not picking up any Laser Guns in previous missions because I didn't want to scroll through a dictionary's worth of power guns to get to the one I want, since you can't leave weapons you don't want to bring along behind in base. I was running out of ammo for the boss as you can tell, but thankfully I had JUST ENOUGH, eheh.
The plot of MS3D just does not work at all. Sure, Metal Slug games never had much to offer in terms of plot; it was always just "Morden is trying to take over the world, stop him. Oh, Aliens." But they work because the story was never an integral part of the experience; it was just there to justify the endless slaughter. Here the plot is forced in your face, with the storyline conveyed almost exclusively through speeches in cutscenes rather than in the environments and enemies. It wants to be taken seriously, but it has no real weight nor substance beyond "Morden is trying to take over the world, stop him. Oh, Aliens." This creates some agonisingly bad cutscenes, like slow mo running a distance of five meters to... shoot the bad guys while delivering exposition, standing around for MINUTES talking about things of no consequence, because we all know it's going to end in a shootout anyway, so all this talking amounts to absolutely nothing. We're told to value life and evolution, yet are given absolutely no reason to believe in that cause, or any reason why we would relate to the characters in the story. It also kind of shoots itself in the foot when Marco, the one man army, yells at Ogma (was that his name? I forget) to live and value his life, when the ENTIRE GAME we've been slaughtering his men and having him at gunpoint at every opportunity.
Maybe Metal Slug was never meant to have a plot, but it's admittedly difficult to imagine a modern 3D game like this without one.
I don't think this game is exclusively bullshit. There ARE some aspects of it I enjoyed. I wish each character's personality got fleshed out more. I wish we got to hear more of Tarma and his childish confidence. I wish we got to learn why Marco values life so much. I wish Eri was more of a loner, quiet type girl as I'm led to believe she is, with her favourite quote being, "We live, and then we die. All alone". Fio's personality got all the fleshing out it needed with the boob jiggle in Mission 10.
Looking at this game, I feel such a sense of wasted potential. Metal Slug as a series had never been able to recapture the magic of its prime since the bankruptcy of SNK, but I miss the days when the reformed SNK Playmore still saw some potential in the IP of "Metal Slug" to try entirely new things with it, instead of uninspired, money milking mobile games that frankly insult the series and its fanbase. I know this game is more than a decade old as I type this, but this is new to me. And seeing a new Metal Slug game, no matter how flawed it may be... excites me. In a very lonely way, it excites me. Lonely because I know this series is well and truly dead, but I want so badly for there to be a new, PROPER Metal Slug game.
Also, Aikawa Rumi heel turn. GET ON IT SNK.
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