Meh snake sucks. The Big Boss arc is infinitely harder hitting.

I thought I loved Metal Gear before but Snake Eater + Peace Walker hit HARD with feelz and stepped it up orders of magnitude to JRPG levels of tragedy.

I had this knot in my chest for a couple weeks following those two back to back. This is what I love.  Video games with stories that can cause me feelings of irreconcilable personal loss and grief IRL. Games that leave long lasting impressions.

Heavens Divide still gives me goosebumps.

MGSV was awesome from a gameplay perspective but lacked a bit in story depth.  I guess it was just revenge and finishing up the Big Boss story and bringing it full circle to the first Metal Gear.  There wasn't much left to say after MGS3+ PW.

Snake Eater and Peace Walker take the cake for my favorite Metal Gear games.

Who is Snake again?

Let me shine like the sun through the doubts and fear

Do you feel the storm approach as the end draws near

When heavens divide

I never understood this. The story is too complicatrd for me to undetstand, and I never felt like Raiden was a representation of me.

But a different thing is that you didn't grasp it. Doesn't matter how many years you played the game after its released (outside of the initial highlight of information manipulation which happened precisely because everyone expected to play as Snake, and the media release and the cover goes as far as to hide that fact from you), the whole point of the game is both a deconstruction from the videogame design scheme, and the fact that you perceive Solid Snake - the hero of Shadow Mosses - from the eyes of an admirer - Raiden, and by proxy, yourself -, making you realize how much Snake has progressed over all these years (Since Snake in MGS2 is superior to Raiden in almost every single sense).

I would absolutely love this. I always really wanted to see the other struts that only snake visited.

Was Raiden in any promotional materials at all?

As far as I'm concerned, he wasn't.

I mean, outside the original MGS2. The HD Remasters and such do include Raiden in the promo material.

Unless you retcon things like the MGS2 comic did, where Snake, not Raiden, battle'd Solidus, I don't think it would go beyond a "cool idea". There's not enough material there to make something worthwhile than a one-hour extra that's already too late to be released. Snake doesn't fight any boss (save for one that he canonically loses to), and other than the bomb-defusing thing that you also do with Raiden, you'll have to stretch the imagination to add more worthwhile things that go beyond entering a strut and clearing it from enemies.

Then I can certainly understand the outrage. The game was released when I was around a year old, so I never understood the outrage. My first experience with Raiden was from MGS 4, when I saw the infamous the rain transformed scene.