Destiny’s lore is vast and complex, but you’ll only be exposed to it if you go looking for it. Why? Because much of it exists in the Grimoire cards – the out-of-game encyclopaedia you unlock as you play. If you actually go and read those small bits of text on bungie.net or the companion app you’ll find some fascinating stories about the characters, guns, enemies, and much more.

The best thing about it all? The stories are still incomplete. Players are still uncovering the mysteries of Destiny’s universe, piecing together weapon descriptions, Grimoire text and spoken dialogue to understand the overall picture. There is some truly amazing storytelling in Destiny and, while the hunt for Destiny’s tales is something every player must undertake themselves, here is just a small glimpse of the secret narrative threads woven deep into the game.

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Finishing Destiny's first raid was quite the team effort with it's winding paths, challenging bosses, and teamwork-focused trials. But all that cooperation would all be for naught if Kabr and his fellow guardians didn't explore the Vault first. See, there's a relic in the Vault of Glass that is essential to defeating the Templar and Atheon himself, and Kabr was the one who made it.

The Grimoire says that Kabr entered the Vault on his own, killed a Gorgon (a Vex that erases your existence from time), and crafted a light-infused shield for future guardians to use against the Vex. After he created the relic, Kabr was assimilated by the Vex and disappeared leaving only his armor to be found by other Titans.

If you've been playing Destiny, you've seen this guy's name all over item descriptions and bounties. Well, it turns out, he is a very important character. Toland is a Guardian, but not the heroic kind of Guardian. He's more of a mad scientist type. He studied the Hive, and was actually one of the Guardians in Eris Morn's (the creepy-eyed lady that shows up in the Tower with the Dark Below DLC) fireteam that attempted to destroy Crota before the rest of us got a crack at him.

Toland delved into the dark side. He studied the Darkness to such a degree that he was able to commune with it, resulting in him hearing voices, creating dark weapons like the exotic pulse rifle Bad Juju, and experiencing all sorts of unpleasant things. Because other guardians thought he'd gone too far, he was exiled from the city for his practices and considered him a madman, but some Guardians thought his knowledge invaluable. Toland definitely lives in a the grey area between good and evil. Hopefully we'll see him return in the future.

Who or what is the Traveler? Yeah, it's that floating moon thing hanging over the city and it somehow gives the Guardians their powers, but that's pretty much everything the in-game narrative tells you. In the Dreams of Alpha Lupi Grimoire cards, you get a little more detail on what the Traveler is through rather interesting poetic verse detailing visions of the solar system, the Traveler, and the Darkness.

There are a few details to pull from the cards. The Traveler isn't actually the floating sphere you see from the tower, but is a god that drags a moon-sized ball around that contains its memories. For untold eons it's traveled around solar systems establishing civilizations and terraforming worlds. Most importantly, it ushered humanity into the Golden Age. But all that creation work the Traveler was doing came to a grinding halt when the Darkness started chasing after it. Eventually the Darkness caught up to the Traveler, stripped it of it's power, and left a husk hovering over Earth.

When you fire up Destiny for the first time, you're treated to a cinematic showing astronauts landing on Mars and finding a giant, floating sphere. If you collect the right Grimoire cards you'll find the backstory behind this scene detailing the astronaut Jacob Hardy and his crew's discovery of the Traveler. This is the time before the Golden Age, when humans were basically living like we do now, except, they have things like lightspeed travel. The Traveler had been spotted jumping around our solar system and eventually landed on Mars. Because the alien object was coming a bit too close for comfort, humanity decided to investigate.

This event was essentially the equivalent of the real life moon landing (but in the Destiny universe). The Ares 1 crew was the first expedition to investigate the alien sphere on Mars, Jacob Hardy said the famous words, "We're walking into a rising wind," upon setting foot on the planet, and they made contact with the Traveler. What's most interesting about the tale, is that after being exposed to the Traveler's Light, Jacob Hardy inherited a longer life span, saying he felt like a young man at 90 years old.

The next two slides are connected so pay attention. This Wild West tale is told from the perspective of a young boy living in a backwater town ruled by an abusive magistrate named Loken. One day the mysterious Jaren Ward, a Guardian, walks into the town carrying the hand cannon, The Last Word, and at some point (which isn't entirely clear in the Grimoire) rids the townsfolk of their dictator with a lightning fast draw and a bullet between the eyes. The last exchange between to two men: "Those gonna be your last words then, boy?" said Loken. POW. "Yours, not mine," Jaren replied. Pretty badass, huh?

Yup, Jaren Ward is the righteous hero. Eventually, it seems the young boy becomes a Guardian years later and joins up with the hunter Jaren Ward and his group (probably though , lol). The last time the young Guardian hears of Jaren Ward was the sound of a duel between Jaren's Last Word and something "more sinister." And without formation from the Grimoire, we're left with a cliffhanger. That is, until you read about Thorn and the evil Dredgen Yor.

Dredgen Yor's story tells of a once great man and hero who looked to the secrets of the Hive to find a way to destroy the Darkness. But it seems, that the fallen hero lost control because of the evil magic from the Hive weapon Thorn, and got really tired of being a good guy. Once a champion of the Crucible, Yor turns to the dark side, and becomes responsible for the murder of several guardians and more .

The details on the character are still pretty scattered, but one theory out there links Dredgen Yor to the guardian Jaren Ward. As in, they are both the same person. Yor is said to have killed Ward in a duel, but other clues in the Grimoire cards suggest that the two are of the same body. It seems Ward was seduced by the Darkness. The Guardian ceased to be Jaren Ward and became Dredgen Yor. And when that happened, the good man that was Jaren Ward was destroyed. So, what the Grimoire tells us is true - from a certain point of view. Sounds like a familiar plotline, right (hint: Star Wars)? Even Jaren Ward's adopted son grows up to become the hunter that kills Dredgen Yor with the Last Word!

Something strange happens during The Archive mission on Venus – something you probably registered once and then glossed over with every repeated Daily playthrough. When you step into the Archive, you’re called Dr Shim – and your Ghost brushes it off as nothing. While it could be nothing more than your Ghost using Dr Shim’s credentials to power up the bunker (some fans have speculated you play as a revived Dr Shim, which seems unlikely given the evidence, while others instead prefer the theory that you’re Jaren Ward’s protégé Shin Malphur), reading into Dr Shim’s story uncovers a great subplot involving research into the Vex that uncovered a higher definition, but otherwise complete and intact, virtual simulation of the real world inside the Vex’s mind.

When four researchers discovered simulations of themselves debating that very topic inside the Vex mind, it sparked a discussion about reality versus unreality, the morality of preserving their simulated selves over pulling the plug, and whether the Warmind is capable of infiltrating the Vex consciousness and rescuing the simulations of humans. And you thought Inception was complicated.

You’ve seen their decals on the side of weapons and you’ve probably completed many a mission for this faction, but did you know that Future War Cult was formed around a machine called The Device that could predict the future? The FWC Grimoire entry records this story in detail: those who entered The Device were sent mad by the visions (which predicted the Darkness’ coming and the destruction of mankind), so FWC needed to employ stronger minds to help withstand these sights without breaking.

And while not explicitly clear, the inference is that FWC either created, or discovered and repaired, the Exo in order to shoulder this job for them. Which brings us to the Exo Stranger. She’s clearly an important part of the story and we haven’t yet seen the last of her. And consider this: the Stranger’s Rifle she gifts you at the end of the main questline contains parts that shouldn’t yet exist…

During the main game’s story and The Dark Below, we come to learn plenty about Rasputin – the last surviving Warmind. Tasked with protecting humanity – a mission Rasputin believed impossible when the Darkness arrived – the Warmind changed his core’s programming and implemented the MIDNIGHT EXIGENT protocol; eventually powering down to survive the Darkness’ attack.

However, analysis of the Grimoire cards points to a much darker tale during the Darkness’ arrival. Without official confirmation this story teeters on the edge of conspiracy theory, but throughout Destiny we’re told that our souls are Light – and that Rasputin knew that Light must be harnessed to defeat the Darkness. After launching colony ships from the Cosmodrome to protect what little of humanity Rasputin could, the Warmind had to alter his own code in order to then sacrifice the rest of mankind on Earth to stand a chance in the battle against the Darkness, birthing the Awoken in the process.

Have you been following Destiny's lore like I have? Do you have any favorite stories? Have you pieced together any interesting tales? Keep searching for those grimoire cards and let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Want more from GamesRadar? Check out our list of 2015's most anticipated games.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain finally launches on September 1st, but the number in its title is misleading - The Phantom Pain will actually be the twentieth game in the increasingly sprawling and convoluted Metal Gear universe. If you're just tuning in, it can be difficult to sort through nearly 30 years of tactical espionage action, walking nuclear missile-equipped battle tanks, and hours upon hours of expertly directed cut-scenes - and of course, not all Metal Gears are created equal.

While Metal Gear will forever be series creator Hideo Kojima's brainchild (and the series ), it's also much bigger than one man, spiraling out into countless spin-offs and side entries, each one forming a piece of a much larger story. Some of them are far more important to the overall canon - or simply more fun - than the others, though, so I've taken it upon myself to look back over Metal Gear's entire legacy and rank every single game that made it to the West. If you're looking to catch up on the best Metal Gear games before The Phantom Pain hits or simply want to know the best place to start your descent into Outer Heaven, look no further.

While not technically a separate release in the US or Europe (it was only released as a stand-alone disc and as an arcade cabinet in Japan) Metal Gear Online deserves special recognition for its multiplayer ambitions. Taking the core gameplay ideas from Metal Gear Solid 4 and expanding them to take advantage of its online nature, MGO may not have been the best multiplayer game ever, but it was not short of ideas.

MGO brings all the weapons, stealthy moves, and cardboard boxes over from MGS4, but it also makes use of the Sons of the Patriots network of nanomachines to tie everything together. You won't just be able to see where your teammates are - you can even keep track of your enemies by hacking into their nanomachines. Sadly, Konami shut the servers off back in 2012 and effectively patched the game out of existence, though some dedicated fans have found a way to , even if it's practically on life-support.

There are ways to convert popular console franchises to mobile devices without sacrificing what makes those games so special, but everything about Metal Gear Solid Touch screams ‘soulless cash grab’. Loosely following the plot of MGS4, Touch takes the series' trademark open-ended stealth action and converts it into a bland, uninspired shooting gallery. Enemy soldiers appear on each stage, and you swipe your finger on the screen to aim and tap to fire. Occasionally you have to zoom in to shoot a distant enemy or switch to your rocket launcher to take out a lumbering Gekko. That's about it.

Everything about MGS Touch feels cheap - characters and environments look like they've been poorly Photoshopped out of MGS4, enemies fall down in three jarring frames of animation when shot, and the gameplay is far too basic to be engaging. Unless you're so desperate that you absolutely have to have a Metal Gear fix available at all times, it's best to pretend MGS Touch doesn't exist.

Snake's Revenge isn't low on this list because it's a bad game. As a follow-up to the NES version of Metal Gear, it's actually surprisingly decent, providing more of the same stealth gameplay with an all new story. It even has a few interesting gameplay twists of its own, as you can actually interrogate enemy commanders for information by hitting them with a canister of truth gas.

But Snake's Revenge isn't really a Metal Gear game. It was made specifically for North America and Europe because of the popularity of the first game, and series creator Hideo Kojima had no knowledge that the game was even being worked on until well into its development. Kojima began work on a true sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, which released exclusively in Japan six months after Snake's Revenge. Kojima's game went on to become series canon, while Snake's Revenge became apocrypha - an interesting curiosity, but nothing more.

If you follow a franchise long enough, you're bound to see strange spin-offs into completely new genres. While we haven't had a Metal Gear Soccer game (yet), Konami converted the classic stealth series into a turn-based strategy/collectable card game called Metal Gear Acid for the launch of PSP. The most surprising thing? Despite its flaws, it actually works.

Acid takes the sneaking, shooting, and cardboard-box wearing action found in the core titles, and puts them all into the most bizarre board game you've ever played. Actions and items are relegated to cards that you can earn while you play, and Metal Gear Acid is as much about building your deck for each level as it is about figuring out the opportune moment to play your cards. Its pacing isn't for everyone, its story isn't canon, and many of its biggest issues end up getting fixed in the sequel, but Metal Gear Acid is still an interesting experiment.

The first game developed by the (allegedly) recently dissolved Kojima Productions, Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops marks the very first time a canonical entry has appeared on a handheld… kind of. Set six years after the events of Snake Eater, Portable Ops follows the exploits of Big Boss and his attempts to build the beginnings of a soldier's paradise. Since Kojima was only a producer on Portable Ops, though, its importance to the overall storyline is debatable.

Portable Ops does, however, introduce the neat ability to find and recruit soldiers in the field - an idea expanded on by Peace Walker and more fully fleshed out in The Phantom Pain. The controls aren't great (curse the PSP's lack of a second analog stick), but it does a decent job of taking the modern 3D Metal Gear style and making it playable on the go. Just be careful: if you want the story, get Portable Ops, as PO Plus is a stand-alone expansion that rips out the story entirely.

The original Metal Gear may not have aged as gracefully as some classic games, but many of the ideas found in Solid Snake's first outing still show up, even in recent entries. Metal Gear introduces the cardboard box, iconic characters like Solid Snake, Grey Fox, and Big Boss, and the stealth gameplay that would become the series' hallmark. Ironically, this was a design necessity at the time thanks to the limitations of the Japanese MSX2 computer. While both the MSX2 and Nintendo Entertainment System versions are similar in how they play, the MSX2 is officially considered canon, thanks to the host of changes made to the NES version without Kojima's consent.

In order to fit Metal Gear on the inferior NES hardware, Metal Gear was forced to undergo a graphical downgrade - but the changes don't stop there. Plot points were removed, a new intro sequence and additional story elements were added, and the difficulty was greatly increased. Heck, the titular Metal Gear doesn't even show up in the NES version, instead sending Snake into a boss fight against a giant supercomputer. Much of the gameplay remains exactly the same despite these changes, but the MSX2 version is without a doubt the superior entry.

Ground Zeroes is the cold open to a much larger game, a glorified demo sold at a premium as a way to tide die-hard Metal Gear fans over until The Phantom Pain finally launches this year. It's like taking the Tanker chapter from Metal Gear Solid 2 and breaking it out into its own separate release - only worse, because the single story mission offered in Ground Zeroes will only take about an hour to finish. The Side Ops try to add a little more substance, but there's no denying that Ground Zeroes is extremely light on content.

What Ground Zeroes does best, though, is show off the graphical potential of the Fox Engine and the evolution of the series' stealth gameplay - and the gameplay is great. Streamlining many of Metal Gear's more obtuse systems, Ground Zeroes is more accessible to new players while still offering a surprising amount of depth and strategic options. Ultimately, Ground Zeroes currently exists as pure, unfiltered potential of what open-world stealth can look like, and we won't know how successful this experiment really is until The Phantom Pain closes the book on Metal Gear Solid 5 in September.

VR Missions isn't quite a ‘full game’, as there's no campaign or story to speak of, but that doesn't mean it's short on content. Instead, think of VR Missions as a stand-alone expansion to one of the greatest stealth games of all time, taking its core concepts and devising a wide array of sneaking time trials and puzzles to go with them.

Featuring over 300 bite-sized stages, VR Missions runs the gamut, from weapon-based challenges to pure stealth gauntlets. VR Missions isn't afraid to explore the weird side of Metal Gear Solid either, letting you solve murder mysteries, take on Godzilla-sized genome soldiers, or even play as the coolest cyborg ninja ever. If Metal Gear Solid is the main course, then VR Missions is one hell of a dessert.

Metal Gear Acid 2 takes the unique card-battling board game introduced in the first game, and makes everything better. The controls are more refined, turns are faster-paced, and your turn no longer ends when you open doors - a huge improvement from the first game. There are also way more cards to collect, with over 500 this time around, each one representing a different weapon, item, or moment from the storied franchise.

The additions don't stop there, though. An arena mode lets you fight against iconic bosses like Liquid Snake with Acid's unique turn-based system, allowing you to earn points outside of the story to buy new cards. Improved tutorials and guides explain and inform you of Acid's various systems, and are available for perusal at any moment. And the game even comes with a bizarre cardboard contraption called the Solid Eye, which lets you play in 3D for literally no other reason than because it looks cool.

The true, canonical sequel to Metal Gear is better than the first game in almost every way, and it makes the unofficial Snake's Revenge look primitive by comparison. The music is better, the animations are more fluid, and the story is deeper and more complex - which makes it all the more surprising that the game wouldn't officially leave its native Japan for nearly 16 years. Thankfully, the Western release of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence finally gave us a chance to experience this lost chapter in the series' history.

Metal Gear 2 didn't just improve the enemy AI or give Snake a radar and the ability to crawl into tight spots; it's also the first entry that forces the player to break the fourth wall and scan their instruction manual for tap codes and other clues to find new codec frequencies. If not for some unfortunate backtracking, Metal Gear 2 would be the perfect 2D entry in the series.

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes is the glorious result of the unlikeliest of partnerships. Helmed by Eternal Darkness developer Silicon Knights, produced by Hideo Kojima and Shigeru Miyamoto, and featuring new cutscenes by Japanese action flick director Ryuhei Kitamura, The Twin Snakes takes the classic Metal Gear Solid experience and completely overhauls it for the GameCube, featuring updated graphics and controls found in Metal Gear Solid 2, as well as a re-translated and re-recorded script.

So if Twin Snakes is such an improvement over the original, why does it end up ranking lower? Well, for one, the changes to the gameplay actually make Metal Gear Solid way easier, as the level design and boss encounters weren't originally meant to be tackled with first-person shooting, tranquilizer darts, or by hanging from ledges. Plus, Twin Snakes' cut-scenes are perhaps a bit too over-the-top, as and performs other feats of anime ridiculousness. Twin Snakes is still one hell of a trip, even if some of the magic gets lost in the transition.

Metal Gear Solid 2 ended on a bizarre cliffhanger, raising far more questions than it actually answered, and when Kojima wanted to end the trilogy with a detour to the 1960s, fans begged for proper closure to the story that began in Metal Gear Solid. And boy, did Kojima deliver, tying up every single loose thread of Metal Gear's labyrinthine narrative - almost to a fault.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is layered with brilliant systems. Snake's OctoCamo lets him blend seamlessly into his environment like a chameleon. Rebel factions are constantly at war with PMCs, and both sides can be played against each other, allowing Snake to sneak past undetected. Extra guns can be snagged and converted into Drebin points, allowing you to buy new gear and weapon upgrades. But it's all in service to the countless 30-minute-or-longer cut-scenes the game funnels you into. MGS4 offers a satisfyingly outrageous conclusion to one of the most convoluted franchises ever - if only the gameplay had more room to breathe.

Revengeance better than MGS4? Yup. While the Metal Gear series constantly waffles between melodrama and goofiness, Revengeance is pure fan-service, taking Metal Gear's themes and slicing them all up into tiny pieces. It even turns the series' most reviled character into an unstoppable badass. It follows the events of MGS4, as Raiden investigates the fallout caused by the sudden implosion of corporate militarization. His hyper-violent journey leads him right to the doorstep of Senator Anderson, a cyborg who delivers the .

In Revengeance stealth is secondary, a way to thin the field a bit before you inevitably get spotted. But, honestly, who needs to sneak around when you have a sword capable of severing limbs like a hot knife cuts through butter? With a strategic series of cuts, you can remove arms or legs to cripple your foes, or simply rend them in half to reveal their juicy, life-replenishing innards. Don't question it - just go along for the highly entertaining, ridiculously satisfying ride.

It doesn't matter that the Game Boy Color version of Metal Gear Solid (known as Ghost Babel in Japan) isn't canon, taking place on an alternate timeline seven years after the events of the original Metal Gear. It doesn't matter that the Game Boy Color isn't that much more powerful than the NES and sports as many buttons. Somehow, Metal Gear Solid on the Game Boy Color manages to blend the retro stylings of the MSX2 entries with the modern improvements made by the classic PlayStation entry, culminating in the greatest 2D Metal Gear game ever made.

Despite its small stature, Metal Gear Solid on the Game Boy Color packs in a deep, mature storyline (while still being rated 'E', no less), following Snake as he battles a separatist force in Central Africa and listens to (or reads, in this case) reams of codec dialog. It's still amazing what the developers were able to pack into such a small cartridge, how nothing was sacrificed to make a seemingly simple-looking game with all the complexity of its bigger console brothers. Don't write it off just because it's on a Game Boy - this Metal Gear is one of the best.

Hideo Kojima is a master manipulator, and no game proves this more than Metal Gear Solid 2. In the run up to its release, he teased videos showcasing series hero Solid Snake front and center - then pulled the rug out from everyone by replacing him with the inexperienced Raiden for the game's second half. Highly contentious at the time, the dust has settled since its release, and Sons of Liberty is finally appreciated for what it is: one of the first and finest post-modern video games.

As a sequel to one the most highly regarded action games of all time, Kojima was aware of the expectations heaped upon MGS2, and played on them perfectly. The jump from PlayStation to PS2 allowed Kojima to deliver an absurd attention to detail, as well as some of the best graphics of the era (only a year into the PS2's lifespan, too!). But he also used it as an opportunity to reflect on the nature of sequels, effectively reusing the same story beats from Metal Gear Solid and flipping them upside down. By the end of Sons of Liberty, it's hard to separate reality from fiction - which means it's working exactly as Kojima intended.

Some people complain that Metal Gear games have way too many cutscenes and not enough gameplay, and for some entries it's a valid concern (see: Metal Gear Solid 4). But Peace Walker takes those complaints and jettisons them into the ocean, making this portable title one of the biggest, most expansive Metal Gear outings yet.

Taking place a few years after Portable Ops, Peace Walker sees Big Boss continuing to build his mercenary army - only this time, you'll have a full-on outpost called Mother Base to grow. Big Boss undertakes a wide variety of missions set during the backdrop of the Nicaraguan Revolution of the 1970s, recruiting new soldiers, researching gear upgrades, and even developing a Metal Gear of his own. The sweeping story is still here, but between building out Mother Base and fighting actual monsters from Monster Hunter, there's enough gameplay to fill up a dozen Metal Gear titles. The HD release greatly improves the controls and adds online multiplayer, making it the definitive version of the game. If not for its lackluster boss fights and some unfortunate resource grinding, Peace Walker would be the number one game in the series - it's that good.

The original PlayStation hit Metal Gear Solid is still one of the best, as almost every single one of its sequels and spin-offs ends up living in the shadow of this classic. Its story deals in a heady mix of nuclear proliferation, illegal cloning, double-crosses, and paranormal activity, and it moves at a rapid-fire pace for the duration of its 10-hour campaign. It was a revelation at the time, wearing its Hollywood aspirations on its sleeve while never forgetting that it's still a video game at heart.

Few games can boast the sheer amount of amazing twists in Metal Gear Solid. The mysterious death of the DARPA Chief; finding Meryl's Codec frequency on the back of the game's actual CD case; the fourth wall-breaking battle against Psycho Mantis; Snake's capture and escape from prison; and so many more that I could fill this entire slide and still not have enough space to gush about everything cool that happens. Even with its rudimentary 3D graphics, Metal Gear Solid remains a masterpiece, second only to...

The Metal Gear series' hard left turn into the Cold War era remains its best, taking everything fans love about the series' narrative and gameplay and executing on them to near-perfection. Its story is the tightest and most thrilling of the bunch, using a pastiche of 1960s spy movies to tell the origin of just about every single narrative thread in the series. Plus, the story just feels so much more human than the rest, dropping a convoluted web of nanomachines and artificial intelligence to focus on Naked Snake and his subsequent fall from grace as he discovers the truth behind the betrayal of his mentor and friend, The Boss.

The jungles of Russia change up Metal Gear's stealth gameplay for the better, forcing Snake to utilize a wide variety of camouflage to tip-toe through Snake Eater's various locales without getting spotted. But it's not enough just to sneak - Snake has to survive, foraging for food among the flora and fauna of the untamed wilds and tending to wounds he receives on the battlefield. It's hard to top a classic such as Metal Gear Solid, but Snake Eater manages to surpass its predecessors with dozens of memorable moments of its own and gameplay that has yet to be matched - and if you're new to the series, .

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain finally launches on September 1st, but the number in its title is misleading - The Phantom Pain will actually be the twentieth game in the increasingly sprawling and convoluted Metal Gear universe. If you're just tuning in, it can be difficult to sort through nearly 30 years of tactical espionage action, walking nuclear missile-equipped battle tanks, and hours upon hours of expertly directed cut-scenes - and of course, not all Metal Gears are created equal.

While Metal Gear will forever be series creator Hideo Kojima's brainchild (and the series ), it's also much bigger than one man, spiraling out into countless spin-offs and side entries, each one forming a piece of a much larger story. Some of them are far more important to the overall canon - or simply more fun - than the others, though, so I've taken it upon myself to look back over Metal Gear's entire legacy and rank every single game that made it to the West. If you're looking to catch up on the best Metal Gear games before The Phantom Pain hits or simply want to know the best place to start your descent into Outer Heaven, look no further.

While not technically a separate release in the US or Europe (it was only released as a stand-alone disc and as an arcade cabinet in Japan) Metal Gear Online deserves special recognition for its multiplayer ambitions. Taking the core gameplay ideas from Metal Gear Solid 4 and expanding them to take advantage of its online nature, MGO may not have been the best multiplayer game ever, but it was not short of ideas.

MGO brings all the weapons, stealthy moves, and cardboard boxes over from MGS4, but it also makes use of the Sons of the Patriots network of nanomachines to tie everything together. You won't just be able to see where your teammates are - you can even keep track of your enemies by hacking into their nanomachines. Sadly, Konami shut the servers off back in 2012 and effectively patched the game out of existence, though some dedicated fans have found a way to , even if it's practically on life-support.

There are ways to convert popular console franchises to mobile devices without sacrificing what makes those games so special, but everything about Metal Gear Solid Touch screams ‘soulless cash grab’. Loosely following the plot of MGS4, Touch takes the series' trademark open-ended stealth action and converts it into a bland, uninspired shooting gallery. Enemy soldiers appear on each stage, and you swipe your finger on the screen to aim and tap to fire. Occasionally you have to zoom in to shoot a distant enemy or switch to your rocket launcher to take out a lumbering Gekko. That's about it.

Everything about MGS Touch feels cheap - characters and environments look like they've been poorly Photoshopped out of MGS4, enemies fall down in three jarring frames of animation when shot, and the gameplay is far too basic to be engaging. Unless you're so desperate that you absolutely have to have a Metal Gear fix available at all times, it's best to pretend MGS Touch doesn't exist.

Snake's Revenge isn't low on this list because it's a bad game. As a follow-up to the NES version of Metal Gear, it's actually surprisingly decent, providing more of the same stealth gameplay with an all new story. It even has a few interesting gameplay twists of its own, as you can actually interrogate enemy commanders for information by hitting them with a canister of truth gas.

But Snake's Revenge isn't really a Metal Gear game. It was made specifically for North America and Europe because of the popularity of the first game, and series creator Hideo Kojima had no knowledge that the game was even being worked on until well into its development. Kojima began work on a true sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, which released exclusively in Japan six months after Snake's Revenge. Kojima's game went on to become series canon, while Snake's Revenge became apocrypha - an interesting curiosity, but nothing more.

If you follow a franchise long enough, you're bound to see strange spin-offs into completely new genres. While we haven't had a Metal Gear Soccer game (yet), Konami converted the classic stealth series into a turn-based strategy/collectable card game called Metal Gear Acid for the launch of PSP. The most surprising thing? Despite its flaws, it actually works.

Acid takes the sneaking, shooting, and cardboard-box wearing action found in the core titles, and puts them all into the most bizarre board game you've ever played. Actions and items are relegated to cards that you can earn while you play, and Metal Gear Acid is as much about building your deck for each level as it is about figuring out the opportune moment to play your cards. Its pacing isn't for everyone, its story isn't canon, and many of its biggest issues end up getting fixed in the sequel, but Metal Gear Acid is still an interesting experiment.

The first game developed by the (allegedly) recently dissolved Kojima Productions, Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops marks the very first time a canonical entry has appeared on a handheld… kind of. Set six years after the events of Snake Eater, Portable Ops follows the exploits of Big Boss and his attempts to build the beginnings of a soldier's paradise. Since Kojima was only a producer on Portable Ops, though, its importance to the overall storyline is debatable.

Portable Ops does, however, introduce the neat ability to find and recruit soldiers in the field - an idea expanded on by Peace Walker and more fully fleshed out in The Phantom Pain. The controls aren't great (curse the PSP's lack of a second analog stick), but it does a decent job of taking the modern 3D Metal Gear style and making it playable on the go. Just be careful: if you want the story, get Portable Ops, as PO Plus is a stand-alone expansion that rips out the story entirely.

The original Metal Gear may not have aged as gracefully as some classic games, but many of the ideas found in Solid Snake's first outing still show up, even in recent entries. Metal Gear introduces the cardboard box, iconic characters like Solid Snake, Grey Fox, and Big Boss, and the stealth gameplay that would become the series' hallmark. Ironically, this was a design necessity at the time thanks to the limitations of the Japanese MSX2 computer. While both the MSX2 and Nintendo Entertainment System versions are similar in how they play, the MSX2 is officially considered canon, thanks to the host of changes made to the NES version without Kojima's consent.

In order to fit Metal Gear on the inferior NES hardware, Metal Gear was forced to undergo a graphical downgrade - but the changes don't stop there. Plot points were removed, a new intro sequence and additional story elements were added, and the difficulty was greatly increased. Heck, the titular Metal Gear doesn't even show up in the NES version, instead sending Snake into a boss fight against a giant supercomputer. Much of the gameplay remains exactly the same despite these changes, but the MSX2 version is without a doubt the superior entry.

Ground Zeroes is the cold open to a much larger game, a glorified demo sold at a premium as a way to tide die-hard Metal Gear fans over until The Phantom Pain finally launches this year. It's like taking the Tanker chapter from Metal Gear Solid 2 and breaking it out into its own separate release - only worse, because the single story mission offered in Ground Zeroes will only take about an hour to finish. The Side Ops try to add a little more substance, but there's no denying that Ground Zeroes is extremely light on content.

What Ground Zeroes does best, though, is show off the graphical potential of the Fox Engine and the evolution of the series' stealth gameplay - and the gameplay is great. Streamlining many of Metal Gear's more obtuse systems, Ground Zeroes is more accessible to new players while still offering a surprising amount of depth and strategic options. Ultimately, Ground Zeroes currently exists as pure, unfiltered potential of what open-world stealth can look like, and we won't know how successful this experiment really is until The Phantom Pain closes the book on Metal Gear Solid 5 in September.

VR Missions isn't quite a ‘full game’, as there's no campaign or story to speak of, but that doesn't mean it's short on content. Instead, think of VR Missions as a stand-alone expansion to one of the greatest stealth games of all time, taking its core concepts and devising a wide array of sneaking time trials and puzzles to go with them.

Featuring over 300 bite-sized stages, VR Missions runs the gamut, from weapon-based challenges to pure stealth gauntlets. VR Missions isn't afraid to explore the weird side of Metal Gear Solid either, letting you solve murder mysteries, take on Godzilla-sized genome soldiers, or even play as the coolest cyborg ninja ever. If Metal Gear Solid is the main course, then VR Missions is one hell of a dessert.

Metal Gear Acid 2 takes the unique card-battling board game introduced in the first game, and makes everything better. The controls are more refined, turns are faster-paced, and your turn no longer ends when you open doors - a huge improvement from the first game. There are also way more cards to collect, with over 500 this time around, each one representing a different weapon, item, or moment from the storied franchise.

The additions don't stop there, though. An arena mode lets you fight against iconic bosses like Liquid Snake with Acid's unique turn-based system, allowing you to earn points outside of the story to buy new cards. Improved tutorials and guides explain and inform you of Acid's various systems, and are available for perusal at any moment. And the game even comes with a bizarre cardboard contraption called the Solid Eye, which lets you play in 3D for literally no other reason than because it looks cool.

The true, canonical sequel to Metal Gear is better than the first game in almost every way, and it makes the unofficial Snake's Revenge look primitive by comparison. The music is better, the animations are more fluid, and the story is deeper and more complex - which makes it all the more surprising that the game wouldn't officially leave its native Japan for nearly 16 years. Thankfully, the Western release of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence finally gave us a chance to experience this lost chapter in the series' history.

Metal Gear 2 didn't just improve the enemy AI or give Snake a radar and the ability to crawl into tight spots; it's also the first entry that forces the player to break the fourth wall and scan their instruction manual for tap codes and other clues to find new codec frequencies. If not for some unfortunate backtracking, Metal Gear 2 would be the perfect 2D entry in the series.

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes is the glorious result of the unlikeliest of partnerships. Helmed by Eternal Darkness developer Silicon Knights, produced by Hideo Kojima and Shigeru Miyamoto, and featuring new cutscenes by Japanese action flick director Ryuhei Kitamura, The Twin Snakes takes the classic Metal Gear Solid experience and completely overhauls it for the GameCube, featuring updated graphics and controls found in Metal Gear Solid 2, as well as a re-translated and re-recorded script.

So if Twin Snakes is such an improvement over the original, why does it end up ranking lower? Well, for one, the changes to the gameplay actually make Metal Gear Solid way easier, as the level design and boss encounters weren't originally meant to be tackled with first-person shooting, tranquilizer darts, or by hanging from ledges. Plus, Twin Snakes' cut-scenes are perhaps a bit too over-the-top, as and performs other feats of anime ridiculousness. Twin Snakes is still one hell of a trip, even if some of the magic gets lost in the transition.

Metal Gear Solid 2 ended on a bizarre cliffhanger, raising far more questions than it actually answered, and when Kojima wanted to end the trilogy with a detour to the 1960s, fans begged for proper closure to the story that began in Metal Gear Solid. And boy, did Kojima deliver, tying up every single loose thread of Metal Gear's labyrinthine narrative - almost to a fault.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is layered with brilliant systems. Snake's OctoCamo lets him blend seamlessly into his environment like a chameleon. Rebel factions are constantly at war with PMCs, and both sides can be played against each other, allowing Snake to sneak past undetected. Extra guns can be snagged and converted into Drebin points, allowing you to buy new gear and weapon upgrades. But it's all in service to the countless 30-minute-or-longer cut-scenes the game funnels you into. MGS4 offers a satisfyingly outrageous conclusion to one of the most convoluted franchises ever - if only the gameplay had more room to breathe.

Revengeance better than MGS4? Yup. While the Metal Gear series constantly waffles between melodrama and goofiness, Revengeance is pure fan-service, taking Metal Gear's themes and slicing them all up into tiny pieces. It even turns the series' most reviled character into an unstoppable badass. It follows the events of MGS4, as Raiden investigates the fallout caused by the sudden implosion of corporate militarization. His hyper-violent journey leads him right to the doorstep of Senator Anderson, a cyborg who delivers the .

In Revengeance stealth is secondary, a way to thin the field a bit before you inevitably get spotted. But, honestly, who needs to sneak around when you have a sword capable of severing limbs like a hot knife cuts through butter? With a strategic series of cuts, you can remove arms or legs to cripple your foes, or simply rend them in half to reveal their juicy, life-replenishing innards. Don't question it - just go along for the highly entertaining, ridiculously satisfying ride.

It doesn't matter that the Game Boy Color version of Metal Gear Solid (known as Ghost Babel in Japan) isn't canon, taking place on an alternate timeline seven years after the events of the original Metal Gear. It doesn't matter that the Game Boy Color isn't that much more powerful than the NES and sports as many buttons. Somehow, Metal Gear Solid on the Game Boy Color manages to blend the retro stylings of the MSX2 entries with the modern improvements made by the classic PlayStation entry, culminating in the greatest 2D Metal Gear game ever made.

Despite its small stature, Metal Gear Solid on the Game Boy Color packs in a deep, mature storyline (while still being rated 'E', no less), following Snake as he battles a separatist force in Central Africa and listens to (or reads, in this case) reams of codec dialog. It's still amazing what the developers were able to pack into such a small cartridge, how nothing was sacrificed to make a seemingly simple-looking game with all the complexity of its bigger console brothers. Don't write it off just because it's on a Game Boy - this Metal Gear is one of the best.

Hideo Kojima is a master manipulator, and no game proves this more than Metal Gear Solid 2. In the run up to its release, he teased videos showcasing series hero Solid Snake front and center - then pulled the rug out from everyone by replacing him with the inexperienced Raiden for the game's second half. Highly contentious at the time, the dust has settled since its release, and Sons of Liberty is finally appreciated for what it is: one of the first and finest post-modern video games.

As a sequel to one the most highly regarded action games of all time, Kojima was aware of the expectations heaped upon MGS2, and played on them perfectly. The jump from PlayStation to PS2 allowed Kojima to deliver an absurd attention to detail, as well as some of the best graphics of the era (only a year into the PS2's lifespan, too!). But he also used it as an opportunity to reflect on the nature of sequels, effectively reusing the same story beats from Metal Gear Solid and flipping them upside down. By the end of Sons of Liberty, it's hard to separate reality from fiction - which means it's working exactly as Kojima intended.

Some people complain that Metal Gear games have way too many cutscenes and not enough gameplay, and for some entries it's a valid concern (see: Metal Gear Solid 4). But Peace Walker takes those complaints and jettisons them into the ocean, making this portable title one of the biggest, most expansive Metal Gear outings yet.

Taking place a few years after Portable Ops, Peace Walker sees Big Boss continuing to build his mercenary army - only this time, you'll have a full-on outpost called Mother Base to grow. Big Boss undertakes a wide variety of missions set during the backdrop of the Nicaraguan Revolution of the 1970s, recruiting new soldiers, researching gear upgrades, and even developing a Metal Gear of his own. The sweeping story is still here, but between building out Mother Base and fighting actual monsters from Monster Hunter, there's enough gameplay to fill up a dozen Metal Gear titles. The HD release greatly improves the controls and adds online multiplayer, making it the definitive version of the game. If not for its lackluster boss fights and some unfortunate resource grinding, Peace Walker would be the number one game in the series - it's that good.

The original PlayStation hit Metal Gear Solid is still one of the best, as almost every single one of its sequels and spin-offs ends up living in the shadow of this classic. Its story deals in a heady mix of nuclear proliferation, illegal cloning, double-crosses, and paranormal activity, and it moves at a rapid-fire pace for the duration of its 10-hour campaign. It was a revelation at the time, wearing its Hollywood aspirations on its sleeve while never forgetting that it's still a video game at heart.

Few games can boast the sheer amount of amazing twists in Metal Gear Solid. The mysterious death of the DARPA Chief; finding Meryl's Codec frequency on the back of the game's actual CD case; the fourth wall-breaking battle against Psycho Mantis; Snake's capture and escape from prison; and so many more that I could fill this entire slide and still not have enough space to gush about everything cool that happens. Even with its rudimentary 3D graphics, Metal Gear Solid remains a masterpiece, second only to...

The Metal Gear series' hard left turn into the Cold War era remains its best, taking everything fans love about the series' narrative and gameplay and executing on them to near-perfection. Its story is the tightest and most thrilling of the bunch, using a pastiche of 1960s spy movies to tell the origin of just about every single narrative thread in the series. Plus, the story just feels so much more human than the rest, dropping a convoluted web of nanomachines and artificial intelligence to focus on Naked Snake and his subsequent fall from grace as he discovers the truth behind the betrayal of his mentor and friend, The Boss.

The jungles of Russia change up Metal Gear's stealth gameplay for the better, forcing Snake to utilize a wide variety of camouflage to tip-toe through Snake Eater's various locales without getting spotted. But it's not enough just to sneak - Snake has to survive, foraging for food among the flora and fauna of the untamed wilds and tending to wounds he receives on the battlefield. It's hard to top a classic such as Metal Gear Solid, but Snake Eater manages to surpass its predecessors with dozens of memorable moments of its own and gameplay that has yet to be matched - and if you're new to the series, .