Even though none of the Snakes are completely dumb, the smartest Snakes in the Metal Gear series make some of the other Snakes look like complete idiots.
Metal Gear is a hard series to follow because it has a lot of twists and turns and uses a lot of complicated words. Every character in the show seems to know everything, from the biggest plans to the smallest details. That is, everyone except the Snakes. Usually, they and the players don’t know what’s going on until the big reveal.
Still, they aren’t complete idiots. They are good with weapons and in battle, and they can think outside the box (often while inside literal boxes). But which Snakes in Metal Gear are the smartest? Finding out will give away important details about the whole series, so readers should be careful.
Venom Snake
In Ground Zeroes, players control Big Boss, but in The Phantom Pain, they play as a customizable MSF soldier who has been trained to think he is Big Boss. After helping his double get out of the hospital in Cyprus, the real guy ran away to South Africa. This is why Venom Snake can’t speak Russian like the real Big Boss and had to get an interpreter for interrogations.
In Ground Zeroes, he was the doctor who did emergency surgery on Paz to remove the bomb, so he isn’t a blank slate. Even so, he’s the blankest of the Snakes, with little personality or know-how of his own beyond Master Miller and Ocelot’s urging. In Metal Gear, he keeps acting like a fake Big Boss even after he finds out the truth. He is the one who fights Solid Snake, while the real Big Boss was talking on Snake’s radio.
Solid Snake
Solid Snake’s profile says he has an IQ of 180 and is fluent in 6 languages, but the player wouldn’t know this from playing the games. As the main character in most games, he is kept the most in the dark. He only knows what the people behind the plots want him to know. In Metal Gear Solid 2, Solid Snake is smartest when he’s not being controlled by the player. He knows everything there is to know about Solidus’ plan and the Patriots, or at least a lot more than Raiden.
Even so, he doesn’t know a lot about the US Armed Forces for someone who used to be a Green Beret. Peter Stillman, a NAVSCOLEOD instructor, figured out who “Iroquois Plisken” was when he tried to act like a Navy SEAL by quoting the Marines (“Semper fi”) and the British SAS (“Who Dares, Wins”) and by giving himself a Command rank (Lieutenant Junior Grade) when he should have been a field grunt. Solid Snake is clearly better at the “action” part of tactical spy action.
Liquid Snake
In Metal Gear Solid, Liquid was able to trick Solid Snake with just a hair tie and a pair of sunglasses. That, or Liquid was much better at imitating Master Miller than Solid Snake would be at being a Navy SEAL. Either way, he was able to trick his brother into turning on REX, and he saw through the CIA’s plan to infect Liquid and his forces with FOXDIE, which targets people based on their DNA. That doesn’t take into account how good a captain he has been since he was young.
Still, he didn’t learn about genetics in a real science class. Instead, he watched movies. He thought he was inferior to Solid Snake because he only had recessive genes and Solid Snake had dominant ones. The two biggest problems with that are (a) that was a lie; he was always the “better” one, and (b) “dominant” genes don’t mean “better” and “recessive” genes don’t mean “worse.” Good “soldier genes” can be recessive, while bad ones can be dominant. One science lesson would have been enough to make him stop hating Big Boss and Solid Snake.
Solidus Snake
Another thing that went against both twin Snakes was that they never watched TV, read a newspaper, or looked at other media and wondered why the US President looked a lot like them and Big Boss. George “Solidus Snake” Sears knew everything about his brothers, though, because he was in charge when Shadow Moses happened. He was the one who came up with the FOXDIE plan and got the data from Metal Gear REX.
Solidus also knew about the Patriots and how they really ran the country. When they found out about his work with Shadow Moses, he knew how to get away from them. Solidus also had the upper hand on Dead Cell and Raiden. He used both of them in his one-man war, and neither of them figured out who he was until the end. His plan might have worked if Ocelot hadn’t been helping the Patriots. At the most important moment, they outsmarted him. Even so, he was smarter than all of the other Snakes except for one.
Big Boss (Naked Snake)
Yes, the smartest Snake is the one who thought eating glow-in-the-dark mushrooms would give him more energy and had to be shown how to eat his food. It looks like his skill as a soldier and his trustworthiness were both passed on to his sons. He made up for his earlier mistakes in other ways, though it took time. By Peace Walker, he could tell right away that Zadornov was a KGB spy, but he didn’t know that Paz was a CIPHER plant. Then, with the help of Ocelot, he used his Venom Snake double to fool everyone in Phantom Pain.
In 8 Ball Pool, he joined the US military and tricked them from the inside to protect Outer Heaven. In Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, he used a mix of charm and planning to turn Solid Snake’s old friends against him. Big Boss had enough brainpower to fool everyone and set up a number of “military nations.” But it takes more than smarts to be successful, as the fact that Solid Snake beat Big Boss twice shows.