Regarding MGS3's general level of popularity, I've been to just about every so-called big-time MGS fansite since the beginning of the last decade and I've followed the MGS boards here for almost as long.
Among the mainstream, they're all amazing. Among the more dedicated fandom, MGS1 and MGS3 are far and away the most talked-about concerning "god-tier" in Kojima's franchise. And critically, MGS2 is the biggest darling but they're all really good. (And Gamespot has a huge crush on MGS4, but shh, don't tell anyone.)
Filtering everything else out, let's just go with MGS fandom at-large: 1 and 3 are the most common answers. So neither Demon Hunter X's, nor everyone else's, answer is totally off from the fandom's uber-generalized perspective. But putting MGS2 as "much better" than MGS3 isn't the most common statement.
End of the day, everyone's obviously entitled to their opinions. So on, so forth. I think Final Fantasy V is much superior to IV but a lot of folks disagree!
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Sir Chris Police ~Ace Detective in Homicide~
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