This is more of a collector’s item than it is something to keep in your PSP at all times.
This is a Metal Gear Solid comic. It is the retelling of the Shadow Moses incident, which is the PS game released in 1998 and the GameCube remake released in 2004. You simply boot up the game, press start, and the comic begins. Everything has been well illustrated by Ashley Wood, who has done Metal Gear comics before. What makes this different than any other comic, more particularly, physical comic books, is that since it is digital, there are some special effects that add to the visual presentation of the comic. The images are drawn in layers, so while the background remains static, some characters will slide across the screen, speech bubbles will pop up and disappear, and sound effect words will animate with the sound effects they accompany. When all these things are working in unison, it really makes reading this comic enjoyable.
Fans of the Metal Gear series are going to eat this up. Not only do you get the entire story of the Shadow Moses incident in digital comic form, but you also get to learn so much more behind the story, the characters, and the setup to Metal Gear Solid 2. At any point in the comic, you can press square and enter a scan mode. You will gain control of this circular crosshair and you can zoom in and out and move it all around the current page you paused it on. As you get closer to a scan able area, the crosshairs will spin faster and faster. Scanning these areas gives you a memory item, and you use these memory pieces to link up to other memory pieces. Each piece will give you insight into a particular aspect of the Metal Gear world, more specifically, the Shadow Moses story. There are over two hundred items to scan in the entire comic, and there is a helpful tool that you can use to find them all.
Metal Gear Solid Digital Graphic Novel is not perfect, however. The fact that there is no voice acting besides some laughter and coughing may turn off some people. After all, this comic uses almost the entire original script, which had been voice acted, so I do not see why they decided to leave them out in this. Maybe since this is a budget title, they were not willing to spend any more extra than they needed to make this comic.
Metal Gear purists will definitely notice the slight changes in the story that had to be done to compensate for the gameplay that was in its place. For example, in the scene where Sniper Wolf pins down Meryl and you have to go get the PSG sniper rifle, Snake already has the sniper rifle in the comic. He still gets surrounded by Genome soldiers at the other end of the hallway, just like the game, but the slightest change in the story is noticeable, especially to the hardcore Metal Gear fans like me. Also, linking the memory units is not that fun. Everything is done in a 3-D web grid, and moving around from link to link can be really annoying when you are accidentally selecting the wrong units. You may not notice it at first when there are only two or three units in the grid, but once you fill the thing with over one hundred units, it can be overwhelming to navigate.
Metal Gear Solid Digital Graphic Novel is definitely worth it if are a fan of the Metal Gear series. It is at a budget price of $20 after all, so I would even recommend comic book fans check this title out simply for the visual styles that are incorporated into this comic. What else is there to say? This is really not a game, and reading through the comic will only take you about two hours, so this is more of a collector’s item than something to keep in your PSP at all times.