Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-6512-20150911195557/@comment-3116033-20151001094418

I heard too much people saying that PO is non-canon just because Kojima didn't write it himself or because was not included in the Legacy Collection. What kind of evidence is that? It's like saying that Solidus is not a clone of Big Boss because he lost the left eye instead of the right one, or that Liquid is a clone of Miller as they're both blond. It makes no sense.

I know I'll get a lot of bad feedback from this, but being this a discussion and hopefully a respectful one as should be, I have to say my part and spend my two cents.

Kojima himself said that the "core" of PO is canon (however he admitted that some informations given by the game contradicts the rest of the series, thus the "core" only he consider it canon). Also, it's present in the same timeline as the canon series (unlike Snake's Revenge, Ghost Babel, the two Acid and Mobile, with openly contradicts the events of the canon timeline, thus comes the "non-canon" definition; just think that GB sets in 2002 and ignores the events of MG2, Acid and Acid 2 contradicts pretty much everything established about the LET project etc.), and its events are mentioned in MGS3 (although indirectly, in the ending timeline), MGS4, PW and TPP. Plus, Gene's ideology of "Army's Heaven" had a huge part in the inspiration of both the concepts of Outer Heaven and Cipher. The fact that the events in PO are not referred to all the time like other titled tied-in (eg. MGS references MG2 all the time, MGS2 does the same with MGS, PW with MGS3 and GZ/TPP wth PW) does not mean the game itself is out of canon.