Seventeen games sit under the Metal Gear banner, and that tally leaves out remakes, remasters and ports. The most recent mainline release, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, arrived back in 2015.
A sixth Metal Gear Solid has never been confirmed by Konami. The debate over who should headline it is raging regardless.
Why the fuss? Because this series has cycled through more leading men than most franchises manage in double the time. There’s Solid Snake. There’s his “genetic” father Big Boss, who also goes by Naked Snake. There’s Raiden. And most recently, Venom Snake. Sorting out which snake is which is honestly a chore, yet the fanbase manages it, because Metal Gear is a series people follow obsessively.
The Kojima problem nobody can get around
Hideo Kojima walked away from Konami in 2015, immediately after The Phantom Pain shipped. Any discussion of a sixth entry collides with that detail and grinds to a halt.
Over on r/metalgearsolid, one user asked it straight: “How would you feel about MGS6 with a new protagonist?” What came back had less to do with casting and more to do with whether the game deserves to exist at all.
“I’d rather a spiritual successor myself,” one comment read. “MGS needs to rest; Its story has just finished on Kojima’s terms.”
One reply pushed even harder, from someone who had evidently been holding the thought for ten years: “I said this ten years ago, and I’m still saying it now. A complete reboot is fine. Don’t try and continue the canon with new stories, just start fresh. Scrap everything except the character of Solid Snake and the concept of a Metal Gear. All new characters, all new settings, all new stories. Put Metal Gear in the title, but call it something other than Solid. Establish it as a separate entity from the Kojima games.”
That isn’t a request for more Metal Gear. It’s a request for a firewall.
The Meryl pitch is the most interesting one
Elsewhere, in a different thread, someone proposed Meryl for the lead role — and bothered to sketch out the premise around her.
“I don’t know how many people would feel about this, but there is an opportunity to make that character be better than how she was portrayed before,” the post read.
Here’s the framework: a theoretical MGS6 set a decade after MGS4, pairing Meryl and Johnny in a dynamic much like Snake and Otacon’s. Johnny would go on supplying the comic relief in this imagined MGS6.
“There would of course be more detailed references to Snake and his final days,” the user wrote. “Maybe even a fond memory Meryl has of Snake revisited from previous games. An older Raiden, Sunny, and even Drebin could also make an appearance.”
That’s an actual pitch with actual scaffolding, which puts it ahead of most fan casting. It also tracks with the direction the medium has taken lately. Both The Last of Us Part II and The Witcher IV passed the lead role to a woman well into an established series. Putting Meryl at the front of a Metal Gear game would slot neatly into that trend.
The grumbling from certain “fans” is already audible, too.
Everyone’s got a name and none of them matter yet
Past Meryl, the list keeps growing. Psycho Mantis. Liquid Snake. The Boss. Gray Fox. There’s essentially no limit to the candidates, which is exactly what you get when a series carries this much lore and has no active development to rein in the speculation.
A chunk of the fandom wants Solid Snake reinstated. Others are pulling for Raiden. Some would like a familiar face to inherit the role; others want somebody who has never shown up before.
Metal Gear debuted in 1987. Almost forty years on, the loudest corners of the fandom aren’t arguing about who carries the cardboard box next. They’re arguing about whether anybody should pick it up in the first place, with the franchise left untouched ever since Kojima walked out the door.
