Summary
The Metal Gear series has always been revered for its fantastic boss fights. Each game has a crew of baddies with unique characteristics they bring into their respective fights.Metal Gear Solid 2’sbosses, most of whom belong to the unit Dead Cell, are more than just great battles. Every one of them plays into the narrative in important ways.
It makes them more memorable than the fights from Metal Gear Solid 3 and 4 where they are put to the side of the story until they show up to duel the protagonist. Metal Gear Solid 2’s bosses throw unique challenges at the player, but which one is the hardest?
This boss difficulty order is ranked based on challenge, attack patterns, and player resources at the time of the encounter.
7Fatman
The second boss in the game comes as the culmination of the bomb disposal missions on the Big Shell. Fought on the heliport, Fatman plants bombs in various locations that you need to disarm while shooting at him to pick away his health.
As long as you stay out of his line of sight, his choreographed attacks are easy to avoid. Shoot him a few times to knock him down,go into first-person, and get a headshot while he is dazed and getting up to take away an even bigger chunk of his health.
6Fortune
To be clear, you don’t really fight Fortune. She is literally impossible to hit for reasons that only become clear at the end of the story. The whole altercation is a series of dodging her attacks and the environmental hazards that pop up from it.
Every shot from her railgun causes debris to fall or fires to start that you also have to contend with. On higher difficulties, just one or two direct hits will kill you, so the battle becomes more about trial and error than direct skill. The fight ends once the elevator behind Fortune reaches the bottom and Vamp walks out, triggering a cutscene.
5Olga
Olga Gurlukovich has no gimmick or extraordinary trait. She is simply a highly trained soldier who knows how to use a gun. All you have at this point in the game is a M9 tranquilizer, so there is no way to actually kill her. What’s more, you load in a new round after every shot so it has a slow firing rate.
Olga will use the environment to her advantage, like obscuring your vision with the light or hiding behind a tarp blowing in the wind, but you can also destroy these distractions with a well-placed shot.
4Harrier
This fight is Solidus Snake’s bombastic introduction as well as the time when Raiden finds out that Snake Plisken is indeed Solid Snake. It is an evolution of the Hind D fight from Metal Gear Solid. The harrier swoops in quick leaves just as quickly, making it hard to get a beat on it with the Stinger’s lock-on capability.
As you deplete the boss’s health, it will occasionally unleash a barrage of explosive damage, some of which you can avoid by hanging off a railing. Even though Snake and Otacon help you out, it does not make the boss much easier.
3Metal Gear Ray
A singleMetal Gear Rayis not a problem, but you are tasked with taking down an army of them. On the hardest difficulty it goes all the way up to 20.
Even once you recognize their attack patterns and can dodge them with ease, you still have to go through so many which leaves plenty of room for error. To take out the most health, you first should shoot their knee with a stinger missile, which will then leave their face open and vulnerable to a powerful attack.
2Vamp
Players interact with Vamp plenty before taking him on, so they already know what he’s capable of. During the fight, he jumps around quickly and swims underwater. He also can dodge a lot of your attacks when he is glowing red. The arena is small, so at least it is not easy to lose track of him.
He has the ability to stop you in your tracks if a knife hits your shadow, but you can counter this by shooting out the lights. After winning, there is a small fight later on where you should him with the PSG-1 while he has Emma Emmerich hostage.
1Solidus Snake
Your challenge with this boss is going to vary based on how comfortable you got with the HF Blade in the prior battles while inside Arsenal Gear. The last boss in the game gives you no other weapon to use other than the sword. Solidus comes equipped with two as and also uses two tentacles attached to his stealth suit.
Keeping your distance won’t help since he shoots missiles at you and has the ability to dash right up to you at a moment’s notice. As hard as he is, he is the last obstacle in the game. Beat him and the last cutscene plays, signaling your completion of this 2001 masterpiece.
