The Metal Gear Solid series is full of iconic boss fights, but perhaps none surpass Naked Snake's fight against geriatric sniper, The End. Like a real-life fight between snipers, fighting The End requires patience, smarts, and a little bit of luck. And it could have been way harder if Kojima hadn't shrunk the map during Metal Gear Solid 3's development.Most boss fights in the Metal Gear series take place in smaller arenas, but the fight against The End occurs in a much larger area of the Tselinoyarsk jungle. That's so you're forced to actually use a sniper rifle with its long-range scope. In a recent tweet, however, series creator Hideo Kijima said that he'd originally intended The End's arena to be much larger.In a thread that discusses the game, Kojima said he'd "planned a full-scale Stephen Hunter-esque sniper fight on a huge map with multiple areas to go back and forth." But after some playtesting, "I found it unbalanced with the back and forth boss fights, so I eventually shrunk it."
Sniper fights are supposed to be lengthy duels, but sitting for hours waiting for someone to show up in your sights because the map is so huge is certainly not the most engaging gameplay. Even in its shrunken state, it can be a significant time-sink defeating The End.
A much easier tactic is to just wait him out in real-time. If you save your game in the middle of the fight against The End and then wait over a week (at least eight full days) then when you come back you'll find The End to have expired from old age. You can even rush things by adjusting your PlayStation's clock, although that's technically cheating.
However, if you log back in before the eight days are up, The End will ambush you with a tranquilizer. Snake wakes up in a cell in Graniny Gorki and has to hoof it all the way back to The End's boss fight, which starts over from the beginning.
Elsewhere in the Twitter thread, Kojima confirmed something that fans had suspected for years. The ladder Snake climbs during the "Snake Eater" scene was measured to be exactly long enough to run the entire length of the song provided the player keeps climbing without interruption.
Speaking of Snake Eater, singer and actor Donna Burke has confirmed that she's not working on a remastered version of the song for the rumored Metal Gear Solid 3 remake, although she is working on a fan project of the same name.