MGS4 decimated all the symbols and mannerisms of the franchise, until there was nothing left to enjoy. Phantom Pain exists in a completely irrelevant space, it is a game that has no "story to tell", because all the stories are already established.
More post-modern than MGS2, it serves to prove that Metal Gear never had a "fourth wall" and canonize the player as a in-universe character. We are a phantom that repeats the steps of the legend, but we are the legend. Venom Snake doesn't take more actions than the player would, because he does what Big Boss would do... and the player has already been Big Boss -twice-.
You are Venom, Venom is Big Boss, Big Boss is Snake, Snake was Solid Snake and Raiden. Choose who you want to be today, choose the game you want to play. Let it die but with hope for the future.
More post-modern than MGS2, it serves to prove that Metal Gear never had a "fourth wall" and canonize the player as a in-universe character. We are a phantom that repeats the steps of the legend, but we are the legend. Venom Snake doesn't take more actions than the player would, because he does what Big Boss would do... and the player has already been Big Boss -twice-.
You are Venom, Venom is Big Boss, Big Boss is Snake, Snake was Solid Snake and Raiden. Choose who you want to be today, choose the game you want to play. Let it die but with hope for the future.
I have so much to say about this game, but for now, I'll just say that, while my recent playthrough of MGS 4 made me like it a little bit less, replaying The Phantom Pain for the first time since it came out, far removed from all the hype and my own expectations for what I thought the game would be, made me enjoy it more and appreciate some of the elements that maybe I overlooked before, especially while contrasting it with the rest of the series and Kojima's games in general. It obviously has flaws, some really apparent, but I feel it also manages to convey its themes and messages through its story and mechanics in a very efficient way.
Boss get down! That's an enemy gunship. A single burst from its machine gun can cut a man in half. Stay low and crawl along the ground. That should enable you to sneak past enemies.
This review contains spoilers
I couldn't finish this game when I first started it due to burnout but I am really glad I revisited this game. Is it perfect? No. Is it finished? No. Is its storytelling and overall premise good? No. Does Konami suck donkey balls for booting Kojima and not finishing this game? Yes. But goddamnit I can't give it anything less than a 10/10.
This game is quite possibly the best open world game. Sure, other games give you a lot more areas to explore and have better stories and overall premises. But can you trick an enemy guard into losing their focus by putting an anime girl on the front of your cardboard box and then pop out and slam them to the ground? I didn't think so. The amount of creativity and freedom this game gives to the player is unmatched. There are quite possibly an infinite amount of ways for you to complete each mission in the game for both lethal and non-lethal routes. The different weapons and tools available allow you to pretty much play this game however you want. Other Metal Gear games have had this feature as well but it is obviously nowhere near where this game has managed to provide. That being said however, the mission structure itself is a big departure from the rest of the series. At first I hated it and eventually I grew to not disliking it, but the way you progress through the missions makes no sense. If they were going to do a mission structure I would at least appreciate it being more linear or at the very least not require you to play through tons of side content just to unlock the last mission in the game. Some side content was required and some main missions weren't required. Why didn't they just switch the places of these missions? Who knows, based Kojimber.
The characters are really good in this game, on par with the rest of the series. The Diamond Dog crew are all super entertaining and the supporting characters are also enjoyable. Skull Face giving the speech to the wrong person and then dying afterwards after being hacked by Psycho Mantis will always be hilarious.
Overall, this game grew on me a lot and I understand it has many flaws but I won't acknowledge them cause uhhh Venom Snake is cool.
This game is quite possibly the best open world game. Sure, other games give you a lot more areas to explore and have better stories and overall premises. But can you trick an enemy guard into losing their focus by putting an anime girl on the front of your cardboard box and then pop out and slam them to the ground? I didn't think so. The amount of creativity and freedom this game gives to the player is unmatched. There are quite possibly an infinite amount of ways for you to complete each mission in the game for both lethal and non-lethal routes. The different weapons and tools available allow you to pretty much play this game however you want. Other Metal Gear games have had this feature as well but it is obviously nowhere near where this game has managed to provide. That being said however, the mission structure itself is a big departure from the rest of the series. At first I hated it and eventually I grew to not disliking it, but the way you progress through the missions makes no sense. If they were going to do a mission structure I would at least appreciate it being more linear or at the very least not require you to play through tons of side content just to unlock the last mission in the game. Some side content was required and some main missions weren't required. Why didn't they just switch the places of these missions? Who knows, based Kojimber.
The characters are really good in this game, on par with the rest of the series. The Diamond Dog crew are all super entertaining and the supporting characters are also enjoyable. Skull Face giving the speech to the wrong person and then dying afterwards after being hacked by Psycho Mantis will always be hilarious.
Overall, this game grew on me a lot and I understand it has many flaws but I won't acknowledge them cause uhhh Venom Snake is cool.
This review contains spoilers
The Man Who Sold The World and The Man Who Saved It: A Short Retrospective on The Metal Gear Franchise
Note: this review covers my thoughts and feelings about the entire Metal Gear Franchise. Please skip to the bottom for my thoughts on just MGSV. Spoilers for each game follow.
Metal Gear
On December 23rd, 2023, I sat down and opened Metal Gear for the NES. Yes, the NES version, and not the MSX version. By today's standards, it's not a good game. The environments are bland, the combat is clunky, and the inventory systems are frustrating at best - debilitating at worst.
Despite this, it did two things that immediately kept me on the line: for one, the game is actually interesting. It's finishable. Not to come off as a Gen Z-er that can't play old games, but if I'm being honest Metal Gear is supremely accessible for what it is and when it came out. The video-gamey name of Big Boss and the interesting appearance of Gray Fox are chuckle worthy at a glance, and it creates a really unique tone that stays all the way throughout the series until (I'd argue) Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.
The other thing that Metal Gear does that creates its appeal is actually in conjunction with Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. It's the birth(s) of the stealth gameplay system.
^not the first but you know what I mean.
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
In Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, it seems to be played off as a
fun, slightly bullshit revival when Big Boss is revealed to be alive. But, it never mattered because these are NES era games. Hell, I welcomed it. Despite my frustration with Metal Gear, I really do think that Big Boss was interesting, even though I never knew anything about him. It even wasn't until later on in this series that I realized how important these events are.
On its own, though, this game is actually really decent. I can fully see why these games became a phenomenon when it comes to this game, despite its clunky backtracking and flawed UX/design philosophy.
Metal Gear Solid
Metal Gear Solid is finally a turning point in quality though - while there are many conventions established before this game, they're all solidified by this entry. The codec calls, the saving, the fourth wall breaks, the actually excellent stealth - it's all perfect. Moments like Psycho Mantis' boss fight, or the end credits scene are stand out moments to an already great game with inventive boss fights and wonderful level design. I do take most issue with the final boss sequence, which is honestly pretty frustrating because everything else is so good. But as an entry in the franchise, it's evident why almost every game that followed carried the SOLID subtitle.
There are a few negatives that have been carried through the series thus far, though. By this point in the series, the very genes of the series include incessant backtracking, frustrating combat (even in Solid, at times), difficult menu-ing, and despite some interesting stories, the characters sometimes feel flat.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty changes everything. It's impossible to put into words what makes this game special even among the series' entries. I can say with certainty that this is its best entry, in my opinion. The ending in particular is possibly one of the best, albeit indulgent, hours of gaming created thus far.
I am fully aware of the disdain for Raiden at this point. I unequivocally disagree with this general take. His tragic story felt very new and fresh for the series. While I liked Solid Snake, I knew that there was very little they could do to make him interesting at that point. Making him a side character, honestly, was one of the best options. He's characterized through Raiden, who's juggling conversations with "Rose" and "The Colonel" alongside completing his mission. The map design almost mirroring a Resident Evil type game with its comfortable, samey, yet easy to backtrack and explore design was a huge plus. This is especially true retrospectively. Again, the series exemplifies incredible boss design and it boasts possibly the best story in the franchise.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater feels like the next turning point in design philosophy. I almost would split the franchise in three parts - this game is the beginning of the second part. This is the beginning of the linear, mission-based gameplay. This game also contains possibly one of the best video game OSTs in the medium, alongside, again, an incredible story. (Getting a little repetitive, right?) Playing as Big Boss was an extremely interesting experience, especially knowing what he was to become later in the series' timeline. The End, The Sorrow, and The Fear are three of the series best boss fights, and the franchise as a whole has another tone setter in this game.
However, this game also marks a turning point in its intended audience. This, of course, is not necessarily a bad thing. However, it becomes more evident from this point on that Kojima and Konami were developing for Western audiences more and more.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots continues that trend from the very beginning of the game. This game contains a new difficulty selection - the difference between Solid Normal and Naked Normal. A Western Normal, and an Eastern Normal. It mirrors an addition in Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3 - the European Extreme - but this time, more and more players can engage with a difficulty select that mirrors Western audiences' capabilities with shooters. It's also more possible than before to play Metal Gear Solid 4 loud rather than quiet.
This game, from my understanding now, was not well received on launch. I think I can see why that was the case. Mission 3's tailing mission, Old Snake's addition and rationale for existence, and the cutscene lengths are especially unique to this entry. And yet, it finally feels like an ending to the franchise. And if I'm honest, it's a damn good ending. The twists are good, the last boss is amazing and mirrors everything great and bad about the franchise. It embraces it all. That's really Metal Gear Solid 4's strength.
The franchise could have just stopped there. I could have stopped playing the games and be happy the rest of my life knowing that the series ended there.
Both fortunately, and unfortunately -
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is my least favorite game in the series. Remember how I said that this franchise can be split into three parts? We're now fully in the last part. I'll save most of my main criticisms for this game when I get to Metal Gear Solid V, but there are so many things I fundamentally disagree with when it comes to the game philosophy going forward.
Reaching back into the franchise's roots, the game features plenty of misguided, absurd, and non-explanatory functionality especially surrounding its base building systems and Metal Gear Zeke building. It also features an absurdly convoluted secret ending sequence, which, to be open, I couldn't get! It's too hard! and literally every website has a different explanation on how to get it, and none of them worked. The gameplay mirrors Metal Gear Solid 3, but a lot of this game is part of the new push towards Fulton Gaming, or otherwise kidnapping the enemy for more base building. This is an art in and of itself, and it's a boring one.
Additionally, the time sink for this game, a PSP game, is abhorrent. It's really cool for those looking for a game to play long term, but as someone who played only the singleplayer functionality, it doesn't work. Metal Gear Zeke building also relies on repeated boss fights, which checks one of my gaming cardinal sin boxes.
Lastly, the story of this game is extremely lackluster, and the cutscene design is very hard to look at. This game also includes some really uncomfortable moments during cutscenes, such as being able to x-ray some characters' clothes.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
I don't feel the need to say a lot about this game - it's been talked to death in the past three years. But I do have some criticisms that people don't typically talk about from what I usually see.
For one, the stealth in Metal Gear Rising is abhorrent if not nonexistent. The movement is way too clunky to do minute movements for stealth actions, and none of it works that way. Secondly, going into the game, I was happy to see more Raiden and in a role that people really like him in. But I realized pretty quickly that Raiden really has no personal attachment to the events transpiring like he does in 2 (and kinda 4). It's slightly disappointing. Lastly, the game lacks enemy variety and that is probably its biggest issue.
Again, I loved the game, but anything I could say about it has already been said a lot, very recently. As a side note: after playing Metal Gear Solid 4, it's really strange to know that people play this game standalone. The story doesn't work standalone lol. It is so necessary to play 4.
Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Alright. Finally. The ending of the entire franchise.
Let's get the comparisons to the previous entries out of the way. This game has very little in common with anything else going on in this franchise. The fun little UI bits during cutscenes, the fourth wall breaks, the hard hitting story, the lovable and flawed characters - GONE. None of it is here. The game has replaced all of the style of the series with gameplay. Luckily, this means there is so much gameplay. So much. But I can't help but miss a lot of what makes these games so good. Tongue is no longer in cheek.
The gameplay in this entry is revolutionary. I kept thinking about how this style hasn't really been emulated again - the stealth/open world combo worked incredibly well. Items and development and hell, even the side ops in the combined open areas were so well designed. I think that some of the game gets a little, a tadge, a smidgen repetitive. But every time I felt that way, I switched up my style. I picked a new weapon, a new arm, a new buddy. Boom - new game. It feels so good to experiment.
I did about 150 of the 157ish side ops in the game. Similar to Peace Walker, these did not feel important, but the gameplay does genuinely make them work in this format. It was lowkey strange to see "important side ops" (why not make them main missions???) but the nonimportant ones were decent encounters to tackle.
However, what the game gets so, so wrong are the boss fights. Sahelanthropus is a pushover. The Skulls are exceedingly difficult. Quiet is fun, but it's one of the only, very very short instances of great boss design. It's disappointing.
The game does not have a particular take on killing or going non-lethal, which felt really out of place. I did mostly non-lethal, and the only real indications for these things are the shrapnel and the codenames you receive. It's another disappointing part of the game.
Metal Gear Solid V's story gets really close to being great. I would probably say it's just good. Maybe just decent. There's not a whole lot of it. And had I stuck with just the first credit roll, the one after Chapter 31, it's bad. The twist(s) after are really good, and the way it recontextualizes the original games (where are the remakes!!) is incredible. Really what sucks is the prevailing theme that this Boss is just a terrible person. He's an antagonist in the franchise for a reason. So is Ocelot. It genuinely is hard to play as Big Boss sometimes, even during cutscenes. There are many, many uncomfortable torture scenes, some filled with gore and other impossible-to-look-at scenarios. I have a pretty good stomach for these things and yet this game pushed my buttons.
This brings me to probably the most conflicting and confusing part of Metal Gear Solid V - the game is cruel. It's weirdly cruel. I had this thought many, many times throughout the game. The torture scenes are one thing, but even then this game generally just seems to have a disposition towards making the player do more and more difficult things for no real reason. The sickness in the game is tragic but the game never makes you feel the weight of the losses in a meaningful way. Even the ashes scene is very short lived and doesn't actually account for anyone in the first wave of the sickness. We stopped Skull Face from unleashing his language disease throughout the world and I don't feel like a hero. You're not supposed to. It's intentional, and yet I feel bad. The strong feelings the game elicits out of me are worth the discussion for sure, and it feels intentional to feel this way, but I'm not a fan of this decision. This is especially true knowing that Kojima goes to Death Stranding next, a game build on love and connection - these games are night and day. So strange.
I have a lot more I could say on each game I mentioned. But I don't want to bloat this retrospective up. I played every game within a month, and I would need more reflection on each anyways. I know that 2 is my favorite, but 4 is the one I want to replay the most. V feels like such a black sheep, and it's not even the worst game in the franchise. If you've made it this far, you've most likely already played these games, but if you haven't, please do give them a try. Even V and Peace Walker. I knew going in that this was a massive hole in my library, and I feel changed after this series in a way that I couldn't explain in words. It's too bad that V feels this way, but the main universe and vision that Kojima and crew had when making these games is so unique and wonderful and grounded and real and fantasy. This dichotomy is what made this series such an amazing experience.
I wanted to write this retrospective on the whole series but focus on V (this is the V page and all) but I do have a lot more thoughts on each game. Feel free to pick my brain (especially about V, 4 or 2 smile) or criticize my takes in the comments. Can't wait for Death Stranding 2 and OD. Thanks all.
Note: this review covers my thoughts and feelings about the entire Metal Gear Franchise. Please skip to the bottom for my thoughts on just MGSV. Spoilers for each game follow.
Metal Gear
On December 23rd, 2023, I sat down and opened Metal Gear for the NES. Yes, the NES version, and not the MSX version. By today's standards, it's not a good game. The environments are bland, the combat is clunky, and the inventory systems are frustrating at best - debilitating at worst.
Despite this, it did two things that immediately kept me on the line: for one, the game is actually interesting. It's finishable. Not to come off as a Gen Z-er that can't play old games, but if I'm being honest Metal Gear is supremely accessible for what it is and when it came out. The video-gamey name of Big Boss and the interesting appearance of Gray Fox are chuckle worthy at a glance, and it creates a really unique tone that stays all the way throughout the series until (I'd argue) Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.
The other thing that Metal Gear does that creates its appeal is actually in conjunction with Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. It's the birth(s) of the stealth gameplay system.
^not the first but you know what I mean.
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
In Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, it seems to be played off as a
fun, slightly bullshit revival when Big Boss is revealed to be alive. But, it never mattered because these are NES era games. Hell, I welcomed it. Despite my frustration with Metal Gear, I really do think that Big Boss was interesting, even though I never knew anything about him. It even wasn't until later on in this series that I realized how important these events are.
On its own, though, this game is actually really decent. I can fully see why these games became a phenomenon when it comes to this game, despite its clunky backtracking and flawed UX/design philosophy.
Metal Gear Solid
Metal Gear Solid is finally a turning point in quality though - while there are many conventions established before this game, they're all solidified by this entry. The codec calls, the saving, the fourth wall breaks, the actually excellent stealth - it's all perfect. Moments like Psycho Mantis' boss fight, or the end credits scene are stand out moments to an already great game with inventive boss fights and wonderful level design. I do take most issue with the final boss sequence, which is honestly pretty frustrating because everything else is so good. But as an entry in the franchise, it's evident why almost every game that followed carried the SOLID subtitle.
There are a few negatives that have been carried through the series thus far, though. By this point in the series, the very genes of the series include incessant backtracking, frustrating combat (even in Solid, at times), difficult menu-ing, and despite some interesting stories, the characters sometimes feel flat.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty changes everything. It's impossible to put into words what makes this game special even among the series' entries. I can say with certainty that this is its best entry, in my opinion. The ending in particular is possibly one of the best, albeit indulgent, hours of gaming created thus far.
I am fully aware of the disdain for Raiden at this point. I unequivocally disagree with this general take. His tragic story felt very new and fresh for the series. While I liked Solid Snake, I knew that there was very little they could do to make him interesting at that point. Making him a side character, honestly, was one of the best options. He's characterized through Raiden, who's juggling conversations with "Rose" and "The Colonel" alongside completing his mission. The map design almost mirroring a Resident Evil type game with its comfortable, samey, yet easy to backtrack and explore design was a huge plus. This is especially true retrospectively. Again, the series exemplifies incredible boss design and it boasts possibly the best story in the franchise.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater feels like the next turning point in design philosophy. I almost would split the franchise in three parts - this game is the beginning of the second part. This is the beginning of the linear, mission-based gameplay. This game also contains possibly one of the best video game OSTs in the medium, alongside, again, an incredible story. (Getting a little repetitive, right?) Playing as Big Boss was an extremely interesting experience, especially knowing what he was to become later in the series' timeline. The End, The Sorrow, and The Fear are three of the series best boss fights, and the franchise as a whole has another tone setter in this game.
However, this game also marks a turning point in its intended audience. This, of course, is not necessarily a bad thing. However, it becomes more evident from this point on that Kojima and Konami were developing for Western audiences more and more.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots continues that trend from the very beginning of the game. This game contains a new difficulty selection - the difference between Solid Normal and Naked Normal. A Western Normal, and an Eastern Normal. It mirrors an addition in Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3 - the European Extreme - but this time, more and more players can engage with a difficulty select that mirrors Western audiences' capabilities with shooters. It's also more possible than before to play Metal Gear Solid 4 loud rather than quiet.
This game, from my understanding now, was not well received on launch. I think I can see why that was the case. Mission 3's tailing mission, Old Snake's addition and rationale for existence, and the cutscene lengths are especially unique to this entry. And yet, it finally feels like an ending to the franchise. And if I'm honest, it's a damn good ending. The twists are good, the last boss is amazing and mirrors everything great and bad about the franchise. It embraces it all. That's really Metal Gear Solid 4's strength.
The franchise could have just stopped there. I could have stopped playing the games and be happy the rest of my life knowing that the series ended there.
Both fortunately, and unfortunately -
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is my least favorite game in the series. Remember how I said that this franchise can be split into three parts? We're now fully in the last part. I'll save most of my main criticisms for this game when I get to Metal Gear Solid V, but there are so many things I fundamentally disagree with when it comes to the game philosophy going forward.
Reaching back into the franchise's roots, the game features plenty of misguided, absurd, and non-explanatory functionality especially surrounding its base building systems and Metal Gear Zeke building. It also features an absurdly convoluted secret ending sequence, which, to be open, I couldn't get! It's too hard! and literally every website has a different explanation on how to get it, and none of them worked. The gameplay mirrors Metal Gear Solid 3, but a lot of this game is part of the new push towards Fulton Gaming, or otherwise kidnapping the enemy for more base building. This is an art in and of itself, and it's a boring one.
Additionally, the time sink for this game, a PSP game, is abhorrent. It's really cool for those looking for a game to play long term, but as someone who played only the singleplayer functionality, it doesn't work. Metal Gear Zeke building also relies on repeated boss fights, which checks one of my gaming cardinal sin boxes.
Lastly, the story of this game is extremely lackluster, and the cutscene design is very hard to look at. This game also includes some really uncomfortable moments during cutscenes, such as being able to x-ray some characters' clothes.
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
I don't feel the need to say a lot about this game - it's been talked to death in the past three years. But I do have some criticisms that people don't typically talk about from what I usually see.
For one, the stealth in Metal Gear Rising is abhorrent if not nonexistent. The movement is way too clunky to do minute movements for stealth actions, and none of it works that way. Secondly, going into the game, I was happy to see more Raiden and in a role that people really like him in. But I realized pretty quickly that Raiden really has no personal attachment to the events transpiring like he does in 2 (and kinda 4). It's slightly disappointing. Lastly, the game lacks enemy variety and that is probably its biggest issue.
Again, I loved the game, but anything I could say about it has already been said a lot, very recently. As a side note: after playing Metal Gear Solid 4, it's really strange to know that people play this game standalone. The story doesn't work standalone lol. It is so necessary to play 4.
Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Alright. Finally. The ending of the entire franchise.
Let's get the comparisons to the previous entries out of the way. This game has very little in common with anything else going on in this franchise. The fun little UI bits during cutscenes, the fourth wall breaks, the hard hitting story, the lovable and flawed characters - GONE. None of it is here. The game has replaced all of the style of the series with gameplay. Luckily, this means there is so much gameplay. So much. But I can't help but miss a lot of what makes these games so good. Tongue is no longer in cheek.
The gameplay in this entry is revolutionary. I kept thinking about how this style hasn't really been emulated again - the stealth/open world combo worked incredibly well. Items and development and hell, even the side ops in the combined open areas were so well designed. I think that some of the game gets a little, a tadge, a smidgen repetitive. But every time I felt that way, I switched up my style. I picked a new weapon, a new arm, a new buddy. Boom - new game. It feels so good to experiment.
I did about 150 of the 157ish side ops in the game. Similar to Peace Walker, these did not feel important, but the gameplay does genuinely make them work in this format. It was lowkey strange to see "important side ops" (why not make them main missions???) but the nonimportant ones were decent encounters to tackle.
However, what the game gets so, so wrong are the boss fights. Sahelanthropus is a pushover. The Skulls are exceedingly difficult. Quiet is fun, but it's one of the only, very very short instances of great boss design. It's disappointing.
The game does not have a particular take on killing or going non-lethal, which felt really out of place. I did mostly non-lethal, and the only real indications for these things are the shrapnel and the codenames you receive. It's another disappointing part of the game.
Metal Gear Solid V's story gets really close to being great. I would probably say it's just good. Maybe just decent. There's not a whole lot of it. And had I stuck with just the first credit roll, the one after Chapter 31, it's bad. The twist(s) after are really good, and the way it recontextualizes the original games (where are the remakes!!) is incredible. Really what sucks is the prevailing theme that this Boss is just a terrible person. He's an antagonist in the franchise for a reason. So is Ocelot. It genuinely is hard to play as Big Boss sometimes, even during cutscenes. There are many, many uncomfortable torture scenes, some filled with gore and other impossible-to-look-at scenarios. I have a pretty good stomach for these things and yet this game pushed my buttons.
This brings me to probably the most conflicting and confusing part of Metal Gear Solid V - the game is cruel. It's weirdly cruel. I had this thought many, many times throughout the game. The torture scenes are one thing, but even then this game generally just seems to have a disposition towards making the player do more and more difficult things for no real reason. The sickness in the game is tragic but the game never makes you feel the weight of the losses in a meaningful way. Even the ashes scene is very short lived and doesn't actually account for anyone in the first wave of the sickness. We stopped Skull Face from unleashing his language disease throughout the world and I don't feel like a hero. You're not supposed to. It's intentional, and yet I feel bad. The strong feelings the game elicits out of me are worth the discussion for sure, and it feels intentional to feel this way, but I'm not a fan of this decision. This is especially true knowing that Kojima goes to Death Stranding next, a game build on love and connection - these games are night and day. So strange.
I have a lot more I could say on each game I mentioned. But I don't want to bloat this retrospective up. I played every game within a month, and I would need more reflection on each anyways. I know that 2 is my favorite, but 4 is the one I want to replay the most. V feels like such a black sheep, and it's not even the worst game in the franchise. If you've made it this far, you've most likely already played these games, but if you haven't, please do give them a try. Even V and Peace Walker. I knew going in that this was a massive hole in my library, and I feel changed after this series in a way that I couldn't explain in words. It's too bad that V feels this way, but the main universe and vision that Kojima and crew had when making these games is so unique and wonderful and grounded and real and fantasy. This dichotomy is what made this series such an amazing experience.
I wanted to write this retrospective on the whole series but focus on V (this is the V page and all) but I do have a lot more thoughts on each game. Feel free to pick my brain (especially about V, 4 or 2 smile) or criticize my takes in the comments. Can't wait for Death Stranding 2 and OD. Thanks all.
From the man who sold the world
This fucking game man. Its such a hodgepodge of so many great things and so many bad things. The gameplay is fantastic and honestly some of the most fun I've had in an open world game I have no gripes against that. Yet the story is such a mess, some of it hidden in cassette tapes and the whole story just gets super unstructured after the 2nd chapter. But I still really like the story and the characters (for the most part). The Man Who Sold The World was such a perfect song choice for this game. I love how that ending just ties together the whole series like a nice bow.
This fucking game man. Its such a hodgepodge of so many great things and so many bad things. The gameplay is fantastic and honestly some of the most fun I've had in an open world game I have no gripes against that. Yet the story is such a mess, some of it hidden in cassette tapes and the whole story just gets super unstructured after the 2nd chapter. But I still really like the story and the characters (for the most part). The Man Who Sold The World was such a perfect song choice for this game. I love how that ending just ties together the whole series like a nice bow.
"Quiet's design is sexist!" No, the desert is just really hot. (Only for women.)
Inicialmente, eu acho que Metal Gear funciona muito mais sendo linear, agrega mais para o storytelling, e o estilo de narrativa do Kojima para Metal Gear é mais eficiente sendo mais direto.
Esse jogo tem disparado a melhor gameplay de Metal Gear, o level design é muito bom, é bizarro como apenas das posições dos inimigos serem diferentes, ou a existência de uma limitação ou outra, faz mudar COMPLETAMENTE a execução do jogador, ele se renova muito bem na variedade. Suas mecânicas adicionadas são muito boas, o modo reflexo balanceia bem com a quantidade de inimigos e complexidade das bases, e o sistema da Mother Base e Fulton é bem mais divertido do que no Peace Walker. E as próprias mecânicas clássicas da franquia tem uma execução sem igual aqui, todas as maneiras criativas de realizar a missão, separando os inimigos, usando barulhos, decoys, ameaçando/tirando informações, ou apenas ignorando a todos, cada maneira se difere o suficiente para tornar uma experiência única. Em narrativa, de fato eu acho que Metal Gear funciona melhor na linearidade, mas na gameplay, isso aqui foi o ápice do stealth, uma junção perfeita com o mundo aberto.
Sua temática principal é sobre idiomas e a importância das palavras, o medo de perder sua língua nativa, e toda a importância cultural disso. É muito bem expressado com o Skull, com seus traumas e objetivos, e a Quiet, com uma linda exploração do silêncio e impacto das palavras.
A direção do Kojima nesse jogo oscila entre momentos excepcionais e momentos falhos, o prólogo (que é linear) tem uma execução perfeita, daria para eu fazer um paragrafo unicamente comentando das qualidades de direção, o impacto com o coma, o foreshadow, a ótima mescla do realismo e irrealismo (que em direção lembra a introdução do psycho mantis no primeiro jogo), e seu fim, abrindo o maior hype existente ao ver o Ocelot junto ao Snake como aliados.
Apesar de eu detestar a existência do Emmerich, a exploração dele aqui foi MUITO melhor do que no Peace Walker, acompanhar todas suas hipocrisias e mentiras, como ele critica a base mas comete os mesmos erros. O Ocelot se carrega no carisma e estilo, infelizmente me decepcionou nas interações com o Snake, mas gera um bom contraste com o Kaz, quase como "um anjinho e demônio", de lados opostos para a mesma decisão na Mother Base. E o Venom Snake... bom, o Kojima tem um propósito, eu não sei avaliar os problemas disso.
Um destaque especifico para a missão 43, a mensagem de violência sempre foi tratada na franquia, mas sua execução aqui foi marcante, além do paralelo com o começo do jogo, é impactante demais...
O final verdadeiro desse jogo é genial, o Kojima é provavelmente o diretor mais audacioso que já vi na indústria de jogos, eu fiquei desacreditado com tamanha decisão, além dela ser extremamente pensada nos detalhes. Não só a direção para a cena é incrível, como é muito inteligente a forma que ela se liga a "The Man Who Sold the World" do David Bowie, até nos detalhes de cover. Essa conclusão abre uma profundidade tão grande para o Big Boss, seus propósitos e sua hipocrisia.
O jogo de fato tem MUITOS problemas, certos plots não concluídos, missões repetidas no segundo capítulo, falta de exploração para certas ligações com o primeiro jogo (sim, há algumas, mas poderiam ir além), carisma do Venom Snake, mas ainda sim ele se sustenta muito, tendo a melhor gameplay stealth que já vi, coesa perfeitamente com seu mundo aberto, e com ótimas idéias narrativas, audaciosas e profundas, principalmente em sua temática e seu desenvolvimento para o Big Boss.
Esse jogo tem disparado a melhor gameplay de Metal Gear, o level design é muito bom, é bizarro como apenas das posições dos inimigos serem diferentes, ou a existência de uma limitação ou outra, faz mudar COMPLETAMENTE a execução do jogador, ele se renova muito bem na variedade. Suas mecânicas adicionadas são muito boas, o modo reflexo balanceia bem com a quantidade de inimigos e complexidade das bases, e o sistema da Mother Base e Fulton é bem mais divertido do que no Peace Walker. E as próprias mecânicas clássicas da franquia tem uma execução sem igual aqui, todas as maneiras criativas de realizar a missão, separando os inimigos, usando barulhos, decoys, ameaçando/tirando informações, ou apenas ignorando a todos, cada maneira se difere o suficiente para tornar uma experiência única. Em narrativa, de fato eu acho que Metal Gear funciona melhor na linearidade, mas na gameplay, isso aqui foi o ápice do stealth, uma junção perfeita com o mundo aberto.
Sua temática principal é sobre idiomas e a importância das palavras, o medo de perder sua língua nativa, e toda a importância cultural disso. É muito bem expressado com o Skull, com seus traumas e objetivos, e a Quiet, com uma linda exploração do silêncio e impacto das palavras.
A direção do Kojima nesse jogo oscila entre momentos excepcionais e momentos falhos, o prólogo (que é linear) tem uma execução perfeita, daria para eu fazer um paragrafo unicamente comentando das qualidades de direção, o impacto com o coma, o foreshadow, a ótima mescla do realismo e irrealismo (que em direção lembra a introdução do psycho mantis no primeiro jogo), e seu fim, abrindo o maior hype existente ao ver o Ocelot junto ao Snake como aliados.
Apesar de eu detestar a existência do Emmerich, a exploração dele aqui foi MUITO melhor do que no Peace Walker, acompanhar todas suas hipocrisias e mentiras, como ele critica a base mas comete os mesmos erros. O Ocelot se carrega no carisma e estilo, infelizmente me decepcionou nas interações com o Snake, mas gera um bom contraste com o Kaz, quase como "um anjinho e demônio", de lados opostos para a mesma decisão na Mother Base. E o Venom Snake... bom, o Kojima tem um propósito, eu não sei avaliar os problemas disso.
Um destaque especifico para a missão 43, a mensagem de violência sempre foi tratada na franquia, mas sua execução aqui foi marcante, além do paralelo com o começo do jogo, é impactante demais...
O final verdadeiro desse jogo é genial, o Kojima é provavelmente o diretor mais audacioso que já vi na indústria de jogos, eu fiquei desacreditado com tamanha decisão, além dela ser extremamente pensada nos detalhes. Não só a direção para a cena é incrível, como é muito inteligente a forma que ela se liga a "The Man Who Sold the World" do David Bowie, até nos detalhes de cover. Essa conclusão abre uma profundidade tão grande para o Big Boss, seus propósitos e sua hipocrisia.
O jogo de fato tem MUITOS problemas, certos plots não concluídos, missões repetidas no segundo capítulo, falta de exploração para certas ligações com o primeiro jogo (sim, há algumas, mas poderiam ir além), carisma do Venom Snake, mas ainda sim ele se sustenta muito, tendo a melhor gameplay stealth que já vi, coesa perfeitamente com seu mundo aberto, e com ótimas idéias narrativas, audaciosas e profundas, principalmente em sua temática e seu desenvolvimento para o Big Boss.
Одним словом, Metal Gear Solid 5 - это игра, которую лучше пропустить, чтобы не испытывать полное отвращение к игровой индустрии.
I understand the criticisms of the story, but I haven't played any other metal gear game (yet), so I can't comment on it.
However the gameplay in this game is simply amazing, I'm a big fan of stealth options in games and this just completely blows it out of the water with how fun it is.
However the gameplay in this game is simply amazing, I'm a big fan of stealth options in games and this just completely blows it out of the water with how fun it is.
I love this game but I hate this game, I hate this game but I love this game. This game is quite a specimen, it's unfinished, it's padded out and almost all of these things were out of the developers' control, yet despite all that they managed to REALLY polish what did ended up being finished, performance, gameplay, FOX Engine's insane identical look and performance among 7th and 8th gen platforms. I assume they also focused on ending and beginning first and hence we could have a conclusion at all, who knows. Regardless this game felt like a lot of nothing to me at first as I'm not a big fan of non-city open world settings but everything I saw and heard over the years helped, it also helped to play Peace Walker first this time. There is so much in this game that is beautiful, that is powerful, this game despite all its flaws is one of those that proves games are art in my honest opinion. "You're all diamonds" and Quiet are a few things of note I'll say without spoilers as how powerful this game was to me.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain é uma experiência gratificante do ínicio ao fim e apesar de muito defeituosa, é uma despedida emocionante de uma das maiores franquias da história dos videogames.
Comentando primeiro sobre o maior ponto positivo desse jogo, a gameplay, pela primeira vez na franquia (e em toda sua carreira), Kojima experimenta uma estrutura nem um pouco linear, desenvolvendo a partir de raízes muito bem estabelecidas no título anterior de PSP. Nesse aspecto The Phantom Pain é intocável, aqui o diretor busca entregar uma experiência de liberdade total, dando ao jogador (ou melhor, deixando que o jogador obtenha por conta própria por meio do ótimo sistema de base management também herdado de Peace Walker) uma infinidade de recursos que podem ser usados da forma que o jogador preferir, criando assim uma estrutura de mundo aberto beirando o sandbox, que entrega um cenário de ação que pode ser abordado de infinitas formas, dependendo apenas da capacidade e criatividade de quem está segurando o controle. Com uma execução técnica impecável que somente a equipe por trás de uma franquia como essa que constantemente testa seus limites e inova criativa e tecnicamente poderia proporcionar, criando assim um mundo em que tudo que pode ser imaginado pode ser feito (ou pelo menos tentado) se o jogador for habilidoso o suficiente.
Agora que a gameplay já foi comentada chegou o momento de falar sobre o aspecto mais complicado do jogo, a sua história. Aqui Hideo Kojima entra fundo na proposta de deixar a franquia mais séria e "realista", o que parecia ser a intenção faz algum tempo, apesar de todos os títulos anteriores serem recheados das bizarrices extravagantes que são características da direção de seu criador e por vezes beiram (e até ultrapassam) a linha do tosco. Essa proposta mais séria e pesada é até de bom tom levando em conta o momento da história que o jogo retrata, porém durante sua progressão, Metal Gear Solid V enfrenta uma série de obstáculos que não seriam tão prejudiciais à história caso ela não buscasse esse tom e aceitasse o caratér extravagante do restante da franquia.
Por si só a história de The Phantom Pain é muito competente, carregando algumas das propostas mais interessantes da franquia assim como alguns dos temas e personagens que mais demonstravam potencial, porém muito do que o a história tinha oferecer se perde devido a uma execução profundamente falha. Tanto os temas quanto os personagens não conseguem riscar a superfície da profundidade que o jogo buscava alcançar, isso se deve, num primeiro momento, a estrutura não-linear do jogo, que não permite o grande volume de cutscenes e codecs que o diretor estava acostumado a ter a disposição na hora de contar suas histórias e em outro momento (especificamente o segundo capítulo do jogo) devido aos tão comentados problemas na sua produção que resultaram em muito conteúdo removido e ideias perdidas que resultaram em ainda mais pontas soltas na franquia, vindas de um jogo cuja principal proposta era fechar todas as pontas e conectar a história de uma vez por todas, levando aos eventos de Metal Gear (1987) e Metal Gear Solid (1998). Code Talker; Quiet; Skull Face; Huey; Miller; Eli; Ocelot e até mesmo Venom Snake, todos nomes interessantes cujo potencial fora desperdiçado assim como o jogo por um todo, tornando-se apenas um fantasma, uma sombra, um "Phantom", do que ele poderiam ter sido (Se me permitem a presunção em me dar a liberdade de usar na minha crítica o tema que o próprio jogo propõe).
Apesar de todos os defeitos, Hideo Kojima ainda consegue deixar o jogador com um final emocionante, principalmente sabendo que foi também sua despedida da franquia, conversando diretamente com o jogador, que acompanhou as jornadas não só dos snakes mas também do próprio Kojima, que apesar de sua arrogância como artista, reconhece o caráter interativo da mídia com que trabalha e deixa seu último agradecimento e reconhecimento a quem jogou, e jogando, deu vida ao jogo. "And thanks to you I've left my mark. You have too - you've written your own history. You're your own man. I'm Big Boss, and you are too... No... He's the two of us. Together. Where we are today? We built it. This story - this "legend" - it's ours. We can change the world - and with it, the future. I am you, and you are me. Carry that with you, wherever you go. Thank you... my friend. From here on out, you're Big Boss".
Em conclusão, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain como conclusão para uma das maiores franquias da história dos jogos, com mais de 30 anos de história, é uma experiência frustrante e decepcionante, enquanto como experimento do possível artista mais talentoso em atividade na indústria em um novo tipo de jogo, trata-se de uma jornada fascinante e empolgante, e apesar de todas as turbulências eu só tenho a agradecer a todos os envolvidos por colocarem no mundo a VIDA que é Metal Gear Solid.
Por fim deixo aqui o que eu acredito ser também uma dedicatória do Kojima e da equipe ao jogador para todos que também viveram essa experiência, "I won't scatter your sorrow to the heartless sea. I will always be with you. Plant your roots in me. I won't see you end as ashes. You're all diamonds." Obrigado.
Comentando primeiro sobre o maior ponto positivo desse jogo, a gameplay, pela primeira vez na franquia (e em toda sua carreira), Kojima experimenta uma estrutura nem um pouco linear, desenvolvendo a partir de raízes muito bem estabelecidas no título anterior de PSP. Nesse aspecto The Phantom Pain é intocável, aqui o diretor busca entregar uma experiência de liberdade total, dando ao jogador (ou melhor, deixando que o jogador obtenha por conta própria por meio do ótimo sistema de base management também herdado de Peace Walker) uma infinidade de recursos que podem ser usados da forma que o jogador preferir, criando assim uma estrutura de mundo aberto beirando o sandbox, que entrega um cenário de ação que pode ser abordado de infinitas formas, dependendo apenas da capacidade e criatividade de quem está segurando o controle. Com uma execução técnica impecável que somente a equipe por trás de uma franquia como essa que constantemente testa seus limites e inova criativa e tecnicamente poderia proporcionar, criando assim um mundo em que tudo que pode ser imaginado pode ser feito (ou pelo menos tentado) se o jogador for habilidoso o suficiente.
Agora que a gameplay já foi comentada chegou o momento de falar sobre o aspecto mais complicado do jogo, a sua história. Aqui Hideo Kojima entra fundo na proposta de deixar a franquia mais séria e "realista", o que parecia ser a intenção faz algum tempo, apesar de todos os títulos anteriores serem recheados das bizarrices extravagantes que são características da direção de seu criador e por vezes beiram (e até ultrapassam) a linha do tosco. Essa proposta mais séria e pesada é até de bom tom levando em conta o momento da história que o jogo retrata, porém durante sua progressão, Metal Gear Solid V enfrenta uma série de obstáculos que não seriam tão prejudiciais à história caso ela não buscasse esse tom e aceitasse o caratér extravagante do restante da franquia.
Por si só a história de The Phantom Pain é muito competente, carregando algumas das propostas mais interessantes da franquia assim como alguns dos temas e personagens que mais demonstravam potencial, porém muito do que o a história tinha oferecer se perde devido a uma execução profundamente falha. Tanto os temas quanto os personagens não conseguem riscar a superfície da profundidade que o jogo buscava alcançar, isso se deve, num primeiro momento, a estrutura não-linear do jogo, que não permite o grande volume de cutscenes e codecs que o diretor estava acostumado a ter a disposição na hora de contar suas histórias e em outro momento (especificamente o segundo capítulo do jogo) devido aos tão comentados problemas na sua produção que resultaram em muito conteúdo removido e ideias perdidas que resultaram em ainda mais pontas soltas na franquia, vindas de um jogo cuja principal proposta era fechar todas as pontas e conectar a história de uma vez por todas, levando aos eventos de Metal Gear (1987) e Metal Gear Solid (1998). Code Talker; Quiet; Skull Face; Huey; Miller; Eli; Ocelot e até mesmo Venom Snake, todos nomes interessantes cujo potencial fora desperdiçado assim como o jogo por um todo, tornando-se apenas um fantasma, uma sombra, um "Phantom", do que ele poderiam ter sido (Se me permitem a presunção em me dar a liberdade de usar na minha crítica o tema que o próprio jogo propõe).
Apesar de todos os defeitos, Hideo Kojima ainda consegue deixar o jogador com um final emocionante, principalmente sabendo que foi também sua despedida da franquia, conversando diretamente com o jogador, que acompanhou as jornadas não só dos snakes mas também do próprio Kojima, que apesar de sua arrogância como artista, reconhece o caráter interativo da mídia com que trabalha e deixa seu último agradecimento e reconhecimento a quem jogou, e jogando, deu vida ao jogo. "And thanks to you I've left my mark. You have too - you've written your own history. You're your own man. I'm Big Boss, and you are too... No... He's the two of us. Together. Where we are today? We built it. This story - this "legend" - it's ours. We can change the world - and with it, the future. I am you, and you are me. Carry that with you, wherever you go. Thank you... my friend. From here on out, you're Big Boss".
Em conclusão, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain como conclusão para uma das maiores franquias da história dos jogos, com mais de 30 anos de história, é uma experiência frustrante e decepcionante, enquanto como experimento do possível artista mais talentoso em atividade na indústria em um novo tipo de jogo, trata-se de uma jornada fascinante e empolgante, e apesar de todas as turbulências eu só tenho a agradecer a todos os envolvidos por colocarem no mundo a VIDA que é Metal Gear Solid.
Por fim deixo aqui o que eu acredito ser também uma dedicatória do Kojima e da equipe ao jogador para todos que também viveram essa experiência, "I won't scatter your sorrow to the heartless sea. I will always be with you. Plant your roots in me. I won't see you end as ashes. You're all diamonds." Obrigado.
Since I put so many hours and days into this game and this is almost certainly going to be the last game I write something serious about before next year, this is going to be a longer text than normal.
I’ll start by saying the idea I want to communicate with this text: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a mess. This is a game that has really good stealth mechanics, probably the best ones I’ve ever seen, but everything else is the most bland, boring and uninteresting it could be. Mechanically, MGSV presents an extensive sandbox to mess around with. Plenty of gadgets, vehicles, guns and whatever you can think of. In fact, I had fun! It is fun to roam the map with D-Dog, completing missions, in a jeep, playing songs I downloaded for the Music Player (yeah, this is one of those games where you can download your own music to hear it in-game, wish more games had that). This is, and I say it with all the confidence possible, the best part of this game. While yes, the open world is THAT kind of open world, where the environment is nothing but a contextualization of the conflict, roaming it is quite fun, even if all the interesting zones are just outposts and everything else is an empty field with nothing to do (besides hunting animals). And clearing outposts and completing missions is fun too! Thanks to the great sandbox provided, there’s alway more than two different approaches for every mission. The three (four if we count the D-Walker) buddies have unique abilities to be used in combat. For example, D-Horse, the first buddy you get, can be ordered to poop. This might sound like it’s a fun detail (I’ll be discussing this game’s tone in a bit), but if it poops on the road, you can have cars lose control when they run over the doodoo. This is useful for missions where you need to stop a car in movement. But maybe you don’t have or don’t want to use the horse, then you can use a silenced sniper to take out the drivers, or you can put C4 or landmines in the road, or whatever you can come up with really. There are so many options that it becomes overwhelming, in a good sense. There’s so much stuff available to do that despite the side missions being the same five or six reused over and over (I’ll get to that later), if you’re willing to experiment with the mechanics, every mission will feel different than the last one.
But to unlock all the stuff on the sandbox, you’ll need to be constantly upgrading the Mother Base. And here’s when the problems start showing up. I have a kind of love/hate relationship with the Mother Base mechanics, for the first THIRTY HOURS it was nice seeing it expand and grow, sometimes I’ll come back to the Mother Base just to see how it’s expanding although there’s nothing to do besides walking around. I’ll admit I kinda liked the waiting hour and a half to build new platforms, cause I’ll be completing missions while it’s being built, so I didn’t care much about it. At first. Later in the game, I NEEDED to get those platforms built and quick, since I needed to level up the different departments so I could get more and better equipment, and looking up how much time is left to get the platforms built made me roll my eyes. This is just Clash Of Clans-type gameplay. And this includes microtransactions as well, because the in-game currency earned only by paying real life money or some online garbo nobody cares about was totally necessary. It is greatly documented how Konami is one of the worst companies to ever exist in the videogame industry, a company that only cares about profit and nothing more, so it’s easy to understand why there is in-game currency paid with real cash in a singleplayer game. Add to this the inclusion of an unnecessary multiplayer component that just exists to waste the player’s time and a Metal Gear Online side mode that I can only describe as a bargain bin Call of Duty. Nothing about these mechanics is interesting, it bored me whenever I had to engage with any of this stuff. I'm eventually going to get tired of waiting and waiting just so the gameplay experience becomes better, and I can do so many missions before it turns out tiring and tedious.
The missions themselves aren’t anything particularly amazing or greatly designed either, what makes them great, as I said two paragraphs ago, is the player creativity, lateral thinking and the many, many ways they can be approached. But there are 150+ side missions and most of them are the same six types recycled all the time, repeating the same outposts, encounters and tropes over and over. Around fifty or so hours in, I just didn’t care about them and ran around the map with heavy armor and an entire armory up my ass to take out every single guy who dared to get in my way while doing these missions. So, if the side content is something between somewhat entertaining and utter trash, how about the main content? The main missions are, for the most part, the same as the side missions. What makes them different is that now there’s a narrative context to make you think that rescuing Generic Prisoner #57 is more important this time around. The narrative in this game is so poor that it would have benefited more if it had a simpler narrative instead of the mess it actually has. Truth be said, I did not care about the story. Most of the missions don’t even progress the narrative and the actual story happens in the background, in tapes you can find in the menu. Besides the fact that VIDEOGAMES are meant to be PLAYED and that having the player to take their time to sit around and listen to dozens of minutes of people talking and talking is the most boring way of telling a story, this is really bad because there’s zero action to be experienced and a lot of exposition to be heard. In the end, even if the most important parts of the narrative took place in those tapes and took my time to listen to all of them, I’ll eventually forget about that stuff because the game puts no effort into having the player invested in the story.
First off, this game is split into two chapters, for now I’ll be talking about the first chapter, but I’ll discuss the second chapter later and the ending. Main missions are usually like this: go here, do something and get a cutscene in reward. Or maybe not, maybe instead of a cutscene there’s a glorified powerpoint exposition telling you that what you have just done is actually important. There’s a kind of disconnect between the gameplay and the narrative. The gameplay is stealth, upgrading Mother Base and crafting gadgets and weapons among more stuff. The narrative is something something the importance of language something something “we need to get revenge, NOW!” something something betrayals. The narrative goes one way and the gameplay goes another way. I just want to stealth places, I don’t care about this unfinished espionage thriller! Because yes, this game is unfinished. It’s so blatantly unfinished that it boggles my mind how do people defend this. I could come here, after watching various mediocre video essays instead of forming my own opinion, and tell you that “this is part of the message! It was actually intended to be this way!” as some people try to make it out to be, but no, it isn’t part of anything and has no greater meaning. If anything, it just devaluates the whole game. But before talking about cut content and the second chapter, I want to take a drift and talk about why I don’t think the narrative works.
The game puts no effort in trying to involve the player in the narrative, and that is mostly the fault of the disconnect between gameplay and narrative I described earlier. But heavier is the fact that cutscenes (which is the way this game communicates its story) are sparse and disjointed from each other. You’re not playing the game to advance in a story. You are completing missions and then shown a cutscene where something happens that might be important in another cutscene, and everything in-between has nothing to do with whatever the game wants to tell. I also find kind of funny that the armed forces you’re fighting against for the whole game have next to nothing to do with the main conflict, and you just interrupt in another conflicts that also have nothing to do with you just because everything important seems to happen in Afghanistan and Africa, in the same ten outposts. Okay, but is the story good? Nah. Starting off, the main character talks like two or three times in the entire game. Snake never has anything to say and despite being the leader of the organization, he has a passive role, being more of a listener than anything else. But maybe what happens around it is more interesting? Also nah. Every character’s personality is reduced to being bad because yes or literally no personality whatsoever in the case of Quiet, the most literal take on the objectification of women. An almost naked, hot lady that never speaks, and in every cutscene she appears, the camera pans quickly to her boobs or ass, and you can even go to her cell to see her more closely. I don’t care if there’s a plot reason for her to be half-naked, the fact that someone had to sit down and come up with an excuse for why the only “important” female character in the game is this exposed and hyper-sexualized is what should be criticized. Anyways, going back to the other characters. Yeah, they’re equally as bland, so there’s not much to extract. Or there would be if they weren’t part of the Cut Content Void™, but I’ll get to that in the next paragraph. But the worst offender here is the lack of tonal coherence this game has. One cutscene will have you witnessing the very explicit torture of someone to then have a side mission where you… rescue Hideo Kojima himself. You can bet your ass Kaz tells you he’s one of the most valuable assets for the company and one of their best agents. Fun fact: In Ground Zeroes, the sold-apart prologue for The Phantom Pain, there's also a side mission where you also have to rescue Kojima. And speaking of Ground Zeroes, did you know that in that game, on one of the tapes, you can listen to the (also) very explicit physical and psychological torture of two minors? Now you can find mildly-sexualized lolicon posters of one of those minors (who, mind you, died) around your base! Now that’s what I call tonal coherence, right there! This lack of a proper tone hurts the game a lot, because if the game makes the least effort possible to take itself seriously, why would I take it seriously?
Going back to the Cut Content Void™, the second chapter is the worst part of this game, and the one who ruins everything good the game had going for it. After the first chapter ends, the game doesn’t seem to know what to do and just tumbles around with no direction. This time there are not even main missions, the game throws you harder versions of missions from the first chapter to complete again, and then, after completing a certain amount of missions, you might get a cutscene as a reward, or… sigh... more tapes with more exposition that explain what’s going on in the background. That disconnect I described earlier is emphasized more than ever, because now you’re not even completing missions that, despite being generic and pretty whatever, had something to do with the plot, now you’re just completing missions you’ve already completed but with arbitrary limitations to stretch out the runtime with artificial difficulty. And the very few missions that are actually something original don’t even advance the plot. I kid you not when I say there are like three or four missions in a row where you do stuff that adds literally nothing to the plot and only exist to give fans some fanservice and unlock some stuff to develop/build. And talking about the plot, this second chapter adds some new conflicts that never evolve or go nowhere. Quiet gets some kind of “closure” to her “story”, but to call it closure there should be an arc or something, but no, it comes out of nowhere and happens for the sake of it. Another example, during the second half of the first chapter, you start construction on a new armed vehicle that is hyped to be the most powerful weapon in the game, but it never goes anywhere and it is very clear that it got scrapped and these are just the leftovers of greater ambitions. Unmeasured ambitions is what best describes the unholy mess that is Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
[SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH, JUMP TO THE NEXT ONE IF YOU DON’T WANT TO GET SPOILED]
Before concluding, I want to dedicate a small paragraph to talk about the ending. MY GOD, what an atrocious ending. The first chapter set the bar low, with a bland antagonist, an uninteresting conflict and something about vengeance that can be best described as background noise. But they outdid themselves with this one. I don’t even believe that calling this an ending is right, because knowing the black hole of cut content this game is, it was probably not even intended to be the actual ending. This ending is the most disjointed from the rest of the game it could be. It has nothing to do with what was going on in the plot at that point and is that kind of ending where the movie flashes back to the start to exhibit some details that went unnoticed but were hinting towards something greater. The twist here is that you were never the REAL Big Boss, you were the doctor that accompanied him in the chopper that crashed when the Mother Base got obliterated in Ground Zeroes. There are four things wrong with this ending: 1) This is the “but it was a dream all along!” type of ending, nothing meaningful is conveyed and it comes out of nowhere just to give a half-assed conclusion and to spit on your face to tell you that almost everything you did was for nothing, because the REAL Big Boss is building the REAL Outer Heaven somewhere else. 2) This ending only exists to retcon some stupid continuity error (it’s not really an error, but eh, whatever) between Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. 3) The story isn’t even finished, no narrative arc gets any kind of closure and this twist reveals nothing that actually adds to the narrative. And 4) This is just the saME ANNOYING TUTORIAL LEVEL FROM THE START! OH MY GOD THEY DID IT AGAIN! THEY REUSED ANOTHER MISSION FROM THE GAME! HOW CAN THEY GET AWAY WITH IT! HOW DID PEOPLE GIVE THIS GAME TENS AND CALLED IT A MASTERPIECE WHEN IT CAME OUT!
[SPOILERS CONCLUDED]
Anyways, now I’m done. The Phatom Pain is a mess. A phantom of unmeasured ambitions with no scope put together with nothing but duct tape and a dream where for every moment of fun there’s thrice as more of exposition, mediocre writing and barely functional mechanics and systems, as well as the worst second half ever included in any video game, probably ever. Despite all the bad things I said about the game, I still enjoy stealthin’ around the map and experimenting with the mechanics it has to offer, it’s everything else that draws me back. A shame, it could have been way better.
I’ll start by saying the idea I want to communicate with this text: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a mess. This is a game that has really good stealth mechanics, probably the best ones I’ve ever seen, but everything else is the most bland, boring and uninteresting it could be. Mechanically, MGSV presents an extensive sandbox to mess around with. Plenty of gadgets, vehicles, guns and whatever you can think of. In fact, I had fun! It is fun to roam the map with D-Dog, completing missions, in a jeep, playing songs I downloaded for the Music Player (yeah, this is one of those games where you can download your own music to hear it in-game, wish more games had that). This is, and I say it with all the confidence possible, the best part of this game. While yes, the open world is THAT kind of open world, where the environment is nothing but a contextualization of the conflict, roaming it is quite fun, even if all the interesting zones are just outposts and everything else is an empty field with nothing to do (besides hunting animals). And clearing outposts and completing missions is fun too! Thanks to the great sandbox provided, there’s alway more than two different approaches for every mission. The three (four if we count the D-Walker) buddies have unique abilities to be used in combat. For example, D-Horse, the first buddy you get, can be ordered to poop. This might sound like it’s a fun detail (I’ll be discussing this game’s tone in a bit), but if it poops on the road, you can have cars lose control when they run over the doodoo. This is useful for missions where you need to stop a car in movement. But maybe you don’t have or don’t want to use the horse, then you can use a silenced sniper to take out the drivers, or you can put C4 or landmines in the road, or whatever you can come up with really. There are so many options that it becomes overwhelming, in a good sense. There’s so much stuff available to do that despite the side missions being the same five or six reused over and over (I’ll get to that later), if you’re willing to experiment with the mechanics, every mission will feel different than the last one.
But to unlock all the stuff on the sandbox, you’ll need to be constantly upgrading the Mother Base. And here’s when the problems start showing up. I have a kind of love/hate relationship with the Mother Base mechanics, for the first THIRTY HOURS it was nice seeing it expand and grow, sometimes I’ll come back to the Mother Base just to see how it’s expanding although there’s nothing to do besides walking around. I’ll admit I kinda liked the waiting hour and a half to build new platforms, cause I’ll be completing missions while it’s being built, so I didn’t care much about it. At first. Later in the game, I NEEDED to get those platforms built and quick, since I needed to level up the different departments so I could get more and better equipment, and looking up how much time is left to get the platforms built made me roll my eyes. This is just Clash Of Clans-type gameplay. And this includes microtransactions as well, because the in-game currency earned only by paying real life money or some online garbo nobody cares about was totally necessary. It is greatly documented how Konami is one of the worst companies to ever exist in the videogame industry, a company that only cares about profit and nothing more, so it’s easy to understand why there is in-game currency paid with real cash in a singleplayer game. Add to this the inclusion of an unnecessary multiplayer component that just exists to waste the player’s time and a Metal Gear Online side mode that I can only describe as a bargain bin Call of Duty. Nothing about these mechanics is interesting, it bored me whenever I had to engage with any of this stuff. I'm eventually going to get tired of waiting and waiting just so the gameplay experience becomes better, and I can do so many missions before it turns out tiring and tedious.
The missions themselves aren’t anything particularly amazing or greatly designed either, what makes them great, as I said two paragraphs ago, is the player creativity, lateral thinking and the many, many ways they can be approached. But there are 150+ side missions and most of them are the same six types recycled all the time, repeating the same outposts, encounters and tropes over and over. Around fifty or so hours in, I just didn’t care about them and ran around the map with heavy armor and an entire armory up my ass to take out every single guy who dared to get in my way while doing these missions. So, if the side content is something between somewhat entertaining and utter trash, how about the main content? The main missions are, for the most part, the same as the side missions. What makes them different is that now there’s a narrative context to make you think that rescuing Generic Prisoner #57 is more important this time around. The narrative in this game is so poor that it would have benefited more if it had a simpler narrative instead of the mess it actually has. Truth be said, I did not care about the story. Most of the missions don’t even progress the narrative and the actual story happens in the background, in tapes you can find in the menu. Besides the fact that VIDEOGAMES are meant to be PLAYED and that having the player to take their time to sit around and listen to dozens of minutes of people talking and talking is the most boring way of telling a story, this is really bad because there’s zero action to be experienced and a lot of exposition to be heard. In the end, even if the most important parts of the narrative took place in those tapes and took my time to listen to all of them, I’ll eventually forget about that stuff because the game puts no effort into having the player invested in the story.
First off, this game is split into two chapters, for now I’ll be talking about the first chapter, but I’ll discuss the second chapter later and the ending. Main missions are usually like this: go here, do something and get a cutscene in reward. Or maybe not, maybe instead of a cutscene there’s a glorified powerpoint exposition telling you that what you have just done is actually important. There’s a kind of disconnect between the gameplay and the narrative. The gameplay is stealth, upgrading Mother Base and crafting gadgets and weapons among more stuff. The narrative is something something the importance of language something something “we need to get revenge, NOW!” something something betrayals. The narrative goes one way and the gameplay goes another way. I just want to stealth places, I don’t care about this unfinished espionage thriller! Because yes, this game is unfinished. It’s so blatantly unfinished that it boggles my mind how do people defend this. I could come here, after watching various mediocre video essays instead of forming my own opinion, and tell you that “this is part of the message! It was actually intended to be this way!” as some people try to make it out to be, but no, it isn’t part of anything and has no greater meaning. If anything, it just devaluates the whole game. But before talking about cut content and the second chapter, I want to take a drift and talk about why I don’t think the narrative works.
The game puts no effort in trying to involve the player in the narrative, and that is mostly the fault of the disconnect between gameplay and narrative I described earlier. But heavier is the fact that cutscenes (which is the way this game communicates its story) are sparse and disjointed from each other. You’re not playing the game to advance in a story. You are completing missions and then shown a cutscene where something happens that might be important in another cutscene, and everything in-between has nothing to do with whatever the game wants to tell. I also find kind of funny that the armed forces you’re fighting against for the whole game have next to nothing to do with the main conflict, and you just interrupt in another conflicts that also have nothing to do with you just because everything important seems to happen in Afghanistan and Africa, in the same ten outposts. Okay, but is the story good? Nah. Starting off, the main character talks like two or three times in the entire game. Snake never has anything to say and despite being the leader of the organization, he has a passive role, being more of a listener than anything else. But maybe what happens around it is more interesting? Also nah. Every character’s personality is reduced to being bad because yes or literally no personality whatsoever in the case of Quiet, the most literal take on the objectification of women. An almost naked, hot lady that never speaks, and in every cutscene she appears, the camera pans quickly to her boobs or ass, and you can even go to her cell to see her more closely. I don’t care if there’s a plot reason for her to be half-naked, the fact that someone had to sit down and come up with an excuse for why the only “important” female character in the game is this exposed and hyper-sexualized is what should be criticized. Anyways, going back to the other characters. Yeah, they’re equally as bland, so there’s not much to extract. Or there would be if they weren’t part of the Cut Content Void™, but I’ll get to that in the next paragraph. But the worst offender here is the lack of tonal coherence this game has. One cutscene will have you witnessing the very explicit torture of someone to then have a side mission where you… rescue Hideo Kojima himself. You can bet your ass Kaz tells you he’s one of the most valuable assets for the company and one of their best agents. Fun fact: In Ground Zeroes, the sold-apart prologue for The Phantom Pain, there's also a side mission where you also have to rescue Kojima. And speaking of Ground Zeroes, did you know that in that game, on one of the tapes, you can listen to the (also) very explicit physical and psychological torture of two minors? Now you can find mildly-sexualized lolicon posters of one of those minors (who, mind you, died) around your base! Now that’s what I call tonal coherence, right there! This lack of a proper tone hurts the game a lot, because if the game makes the least effort possible to take itself seriously, why would I take it seriously?
Going back to the Cut Content Void™, the second chapter is the worst part of this game, and the one who ruins everything good the game had going for it. After the first chapter ends, the game doesn’t seem to know what to do and just tumbles around with no direction. This time there are not even main missions, the game throws you harder versions of missions from the first chapter to complete again, and then, after completing a certain amount of missions, you might get a cutscene as a reward, or… sigh... more tapes with more exposition that explain what’s going on in the background. That disconnect I described earlier is emphasized more than ever, because now you’re not even completing missions that, despite being generic and pretty whatever, had something to do with the plot, now you’re just completing missions you’ve already completed but with arbitrary limitations to stretch out the runtime with artificial difficulty. And the very few missions that are actually something original don’t even advance the plot. I kid you not when I say there are like three or four missions in a row where you do stuff that adds literally nothing to the plot and only exist to give fans some fanservice and unlock some stuff to develop/build. And talking about the plot, this second chapter adds some new conflicts that never evolve or go nowhere. Quiet gets some kind of “closure” to her “story”, but to call it closure there should be an arc or something, but no, it comes out of nowhere and happens for the sake of it. Another example, during the second half of the first chapter, you start construction on a new armed vehicle that is hyped to be the most powerful weapon in the game, but it never goes anywhere and it is very clear that it got scrapped and these are just the leftovers of greater ambitions. Unmeasured ambitions is what best describes the unholy mess that is Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
[SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH, JUMP TO THE NEXT ONE IF YOU DON’T WANT TO GET SPOILED]
Before concluding, I want to dedicate a small paragraph to talk about the ending. MY GOD, what an atrocious ending. The first chapter set the bar low, with a bland antagonist, an uninteresting conflict and something about vengeance that can be best described as background noise. But they outdid themselves with this one. I don’t even believe that calling this an ending is right, because knowing the black hole of cut content this game is, it was probably not even intended to be the actual ending. This ending is the most disjointed from the rest of the game it could be. It has nothing to do with what was going on in the plot at that point and is that kind of ending where the movie flashes back to the start to exhibit some details that went unnoticed but were hinting towards something greater. The twist here is that you were never the REAL Big Boss, you were the doctor that accompanied him in the chopper that crashed when the Mother Base got obliterated in Ground Zeroes. There are four things wrong with this ending: 1) This is the “but it was a dream all along!” type of ending, nothing meaningful is conveyed and it comes out of nowhere just to give a half-assed conclusion and to spit on your face to tell you that almost everything you did was for nothing, because the REAL Big Boss is building the REAL Outer Heaven somewhere else. 2) This ending only exists to retcon some stupid continuity error (it’s not really an error, but eh, whatever) between Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. 3) The story isn’t even finished, no narrative arc gets any kind of closure and this twist reveals nothing that actually adds to the narrative. And 4) This is just the saME ANNOYING TUTORIAL LEVEL FROM THE START! OH MY GOD THEY DID IT AGAIN! THEY REUSED ANOTHER MISSION FROM THE GAME! HOW CAN THEY GET AWAY WITH IT! HOW DID PEOPLE GIVE THIS GAME TENS AND CALLED IT A MASTERPIECE WHEN IT CAME OUT!
[SPOILERS CONCLUDED]
Anyways, now I’m done. The Phatom Pain is a mess. A phantom of unmeasured ambitions with no scope put together with nothing but duct tape and a dream where for every moment of fun there’s thrice as more of exposition, mediocre writing and barely functional mechanics and systems, as well as the worst second half ever included in any video game, probably ever. Despite all the bad things I said about the game, I still enjoy stealthin’ around the map and experimenting with the mechanics it has to offer, it’s everything else that draws me back. A shame, it could have been way better.
How many game off the top of your head can you think of where you can rocket punch exotic animals and send them through space and time into a wormhole back to your glorified oil rig of a base? I get to do that and Kaz still tells me i'm the best of the best.
SO MANY CUTSCENES UGH, IT'S BORING. I BOUGHT A GAME, I WANT TO PLAY A GAME, IF I WANTED TO WATCH TV I WOULD WATCH TV. Also, the desert is ugly as hell to look at and running around with your horse or on foot or driving around is such a waste of time. Just because you can make something "open world" doesn't mean you should. Boundaries create structure which this game lacks. It's not bad, I may return to it
writing this before i finish the game and if they dont play The Man Who Sold the World during the credits I'm gonna be so disappointed
UPDATE: GOD IS REAL
This game feels pretty disconnected from most of Metal Gear but I honestly don't mind. This is definitely the best stealth game mechanically that I've played probably ever. Being able to approach missions in so many unique ways is just so fantastic and it's executed amazingly. Also, love having cassettes for music, because there is a KILLER soundtrack here.
I could give this a 10/10 on fun factor alone, but there are a lot of issues for me. My biggest problem is the linear story missions. I don't really think they work. A lot of the fun of this game, for me at least, is throwing shit at the wall at seeing what sticks. There were just too many missions that were overly scripted and didn't really have room for player expression. Bosses are pretty weak, too. Repetition is awful, and it genuinely feels so detached from the previous games to have such high amounts of vapid filler.
I will make an exception for the last stretch of main missions though, they really hit the narrative highs the series is known for. But the requirements to unlock those missions are just complete filler. Having to repeat missions is, very unfun. Especially with the tacked on challenges.
And that intro being so long is just inexcusable. Ground Zeroes is basically already a tutorial, the intro could've been a cutscene, and a much shorter one at that.
Overall though I think MGSV is... good, and a milestone for stealth games in general. Worst numbered entry though, and could've been improved by not having the terrible AAA design.
I'm gonna replay the MGS quadrilogy and review it soon :P
UPDATE: GOD IS REAL
This game feels pretty disconnected from most of Metal Gear but I honestly don't mind. This is definitely the best stealth game mechanically that I've played probably ever. Being able to approach missions in so many unique ways is just so fantastic and it's executed amazingly. Also, love having cassettes for music, because there is a KILLER soundtrack here.
I could give this a 10/10 on fun factor alone, but there are a lot of issues for me. My biggest problem is the linear story missions. I don't really think they work. A lot of the fun of this game, for me at least, is throwing shit at the wall at seeing what sticks. There were just too many missions that were overly scripted and didn't really have room for player expression. Bosses are pretty weak, too. Repetition is awful, and it genuinely feels so detached from the previous games to have such high amounts of vapid filler.
I will make an exception for the last stretch of main missions though, they really hit the narrative highs the series is known for. But the requirements to unlock those missions are just complete filler. Having to repeat missions is, very unfun. Especially with the tacked on challenges.
And that intro being so long is just inexcusable. Ground Zeroes is basically already a tutorial, the intro could've been a cutscene, and a much shorter one at that.
Overall though I think MGSV is... good, and a milestone for stealth games in general. Worst numbered entry though, and could've been improved by not having the terrible AAA design.
I'm gonna replay the MGS quadrilogy and review it soon :P
me when
"I laughed and shook his hand
And made my way back home
I searched for form and land
For years and years, I roamed
I gazed a gazely stare
At all the millions here
We must have died alone
A long, long time ago"
"I laughed and shook his hand
And made my way back home
I searched for form and land
For years and years, I roamed
I gazed a gazely stare
At all the millions here
We must have died alone
A long, long time ago"
This review contains spoilers
this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
i have arrived, at last, at the end of metal gear – and what a strange conclusion it is. a genuinely challenging game, and not in the sense that the gameplay is difficult. who could’ve predicted that this series would go out on such a hollow, lonely, and above all dissonant note?
some wonderful thematic analyses of this game have already been written on this website, and i by and large concur with the game’s defenders – the “phantom pain” is intentional, as plainly evidenced by the game’s title. i love how hollow, confusing, depressingly repetitive and alienating the game is and how those qualities tie into the game’s deliberate abandonment of a traditional “villain arc” for snake, as well as the metatextual sense that the series is running on fumes, well past even the point of self-devouring (mgs4). but the word on this part of mgsv’s storytelling has already been written by people more capable than me (the best piece undoubtedly being caebl201’s review), so i’m not very interested in retreading that ground. likewise, it feels like there are very few original observations left to make about mgsv’s (stellar, series peak) broader mechanics. so instead, i'll settle for making some scattered observations that hopefully bring something a little bit new to the conversation.
- as previously stated, the dominant goal of mgsv seems to be to subvert and alienate by way of anti-climax and liberal blurring of truth and fiction. that said, this doesn’t account for everything that mgsv attempts to do. one of the larger themes of the game, one that seems somewhat disconnected from the above-mentioned aspirations, is the theme of language, which mostly finds its expression in the concept of the infamous “vocal cord parasites”, supposedly the catalysts of our species’ development of language, capable of granting supernatural abilities and being weaponized as language-targetting ethnic cleansers. to put it simply, i find this theme quite underdeveloped (if conceptually fascinating) and struggle to see how it ties into the game’s larger ethos. the most i can muster in terms of a connection is some notion of language’s causal relationship to truth and its subsequent unreliability (the game, after all, quotes nietzsche in the final mission), but this is tenuous at best. the parasites are mostly connected with the characters of skullface and quiet, both of which are extremely and fundamentally ridiculous and whose value to me lies mostly in their playing into the off-putting, anti-climactic feel of the game. skullface’s car monologue and the subsequent sins of the father needle drop is, as noted in caebl201's previously linked review, absolutely hysterical, and quiet’s parasite infection feels like a blatant, contemptibly cynical excuse to make the hot woman side kick scantily clad and unable to express herself. i think it’s a stretch, however, to say that kojima included the theme of language solely as a practical joke when it’s so frequently elaborated on and emphasized, so what we’re left with a major part of the game’s narrative that feels pretty undercooked and silly (the alternative is that i’m stupid and not grasping the true depth and utility of this theme, which is entirely plausible).
- something i really came to like in this game was the absence of traditional boss fights. they're here, but they're treated instead like any other obstacle you're going up against and the battle is crafted around what's fitting for the type of enemy you're fighting and not from the ad hoc perspective of what would create the most intense, empowering gameplay experience. the result is a rogue's gallery that will see you engage in a thrilling sniper-duel against a superpowered assassin, and also put you up against a scary, borderline impervious fire man, where the only recourse seems to be to send an entire water tower crashing onto him before booking it. yeah, you could be honorable and employ cqc against the dipshit kid who wants to fight you... or you could decimate him with stun rounds in no time. the approach is not only refreshing but it allows for both player expression and further identification with venom as an avatar.
- it’s a shame that ground zeroes was sold as a seperate product instead of being more directly integrated into the phantom pain, because it serves a similar role of misdirection that the tanker chapter in mgs2 does. it promises a shocking downward spiral into horror and madness, a grim, self-serious study of big boss’s turn towards villainy, his “one bad day”. and then the actual game consists of a confused, dead-eyed, deferential and borderline mute snake abducting soldiers, banally managing war crime spreadsheets, absent-mindedly taking job offers from anyone willing to pay, fighting battles to build up his army to fight more battles in a cycle that never actually ends, not after the credits, or the last mission on the list, or the “true ending” where you learn that you’re not actually big boss at all.
- the real big boss, as it turns out, had his villain arc off-screen. or did he? when you listen to the truth tapes, and hear him rationalize and go along with not only mentally decimating and enslaving one of his closest comrades, but also using an entire hospital staff as his personal meat shield, not long after waking up from his coma, you realize that his “one bad day” never came – naked snake became the sort of person comfortable with throwing a bunch of people (including personal friends that trust and rely on him) to the meat grinder gradually, over a prolonged period of time, through events you tagged along with, and it all happened before this game even begins.
- i think sutherland deserves more credit than he gets for his performance in this game - his big boss is as gruff as he is charming, but venom is perpetually half-bored, confused, aimless, glum, and speaks with a sort of dazed, lethargic cadence, as if sleepwalking through life. this soulless performance totally distinguishes the two characters, despite them sounding and looking identical, which i think is a pretty damn impressive feat. that said, the few moments of genuine emotion that venom gets, sutherland totally sells – more, i suspect, than hayter ever could (no disrespect to him, though, i think he was great in mgs4)
- in a game where so much of the storytelling feels like an elaborate joke at the player’s expense, what maybe surprised me most is that it contained what i consider to be kojima’s most successful dramatic payoff, something that affected me far more emotionally than mgs3’s ending. and what’s more, it’s through probably kojima’s most ridiculous, tasteless character yet: quiet. but the scene where she guides pequod through the sandstorm is elegant in a way that kojima’s attempts at drama very rarely are – it’s not a monologue, it’s not a lengthy exposition dump, it’s not histrionic, affected melodrama; it’s just an earnest, somber expression of love and sacrifice through action. that it managed to make me forget what is probably the worst mission in the game preceding it is a testament to its genuine quality.
- kojima is a man, above all, of Big Concepts, and i think his decision to cap off the series by way of ouroboros, with snake eating his own tail (or phantom) – is one for the books. metal gear will never be game over. i'm stiiiiiiilll in a dreeeeeeaaam....
this is the way the world ends
i have arrived, at last, at the end of metal gear – and what a strange conclusion it is. a genuinely challenging game, and not in the sense that the gameplay is difficult. who could’ve predicted that this series would go out on such a hollow, lonely, and above all dissonant note?
some wonderful thematic analyses of this game have already been written on this website, and i by and large concur with the game’s defenders – the “phantom pain” is intentional, as plainly evidenced by the game’s title. i love how hollow, confusing, depressingly repetitive and alienating the game is and how those qualities tie into the game’s deliberate abandonment of a traditional “villain arc” for snake, as well as the metatextual sense that the series is running on fumes, well past even the point of self-devouring (mgs4). but the word on this part of mgsv’s storytelling has already been written by people more capable than me (the best piece undoubtedly being caebl201’s review), so i’m not very interested in retreading that ground. likewise, it feels like there are very few original observations left to make about mgsv’s (stellar, series peak) broader mechanics. so instead, i'll settle for making some scattered observations that hopefully bring something a little bit new to the conversation.
- as previously stated, the dominant goal of mgsv seems to be to subvert and alienate by way of anti-climax and liberal blurring of truth and fiction. that said, this doesn’t account for everything that mgsv attempts to do. one of the larger themes of the game, one that seems somewhat disconnected from the above-mentioned aspirations, is the theme of language, which mostly finds its expression in the concept of the infamous “vocal cord parasites”, supposedly the catalysts of our species’ development of language, capable of granting supernatural abilities and being weaponized as language-targetting ethnic cleansers. to put it simply, i find this theme quite underdeveloped (if conceptually fascinating) and struggle to see how it ties into the game’s larger ethos. the most i can muster in terms of a connection is some notion of language’s causal relationship to truth and its subsequent unreliability (the game, after all, quotes nietzsche in the final mission), but this is tenuous at best. the parasites are mostly connected with the characters of skullface and quiet, both of which are extremely and fundamentally ridiculous and whose value to me lies mostly in their playing into the off-putting, anti-climactic feel of the game. skullface’s car monologue and the subsequent sins of the father needle drop is, as noted in caebl201's previously linked review, absolutely hysterical, and quiet’s parasite infection feels like a blatant, contemptibly cynical excuse to make the hot woman side kick scantily clad and unable to express herself. i think it’s a stretch, however, to say that kojima included the theme of language solely as a practical joke when it’s so frequently elaborated on and emphasized, so what we’re left with a major part of the game’s narrative that feels pretty undercooked and silly (the alternative is that i’m stupid and not grasping the true depth and utility of this theme, which is entirely plausible).
- something i really came to like in this game was the absence of traditional boss fights. they're here, but they're treated instead like any other obstacle you're going up against and the battle is crafted around what's fitting for the type of enemy you're fighting and not from the ad hoc perspective of what would create the most intense, empowering gameplay experience. the result is a rogue's gallery that will see you engage in a thrilling sniper-duel against a superpowered assassin, and also put you up against a scary, borderline impervious fire man, where the only recourse seems to be to send an entire water tower crashing onto him before booking it. yeah, you could be honorable and employ cqc against the dipshit kid who wants to fight you... or you could decimate him with stun rounds in no time. the approach is not only refreshing but it allows for both player expression and further identification with venom as an avatar.
- it’s a shame that ground zeroes was sold as a seperate product instead of being more directly integrated into the phantom pain, because it serves a similar role of misdirection that the tanker chapter in mgs2 does. it promises a shocking downward spiral into horror and madness, a grim, self-serious study of big boss’s turn towards villainy, his “one bad day”. and then the actual game consists of a confused, dead-eyed, deferential and borderline mute snake abducting soldiers, banally managing war crime spreadsheets, absent-mindedly taking job offers from anyone willing to pay, fighting battles to build up his army to fight more battles in a cycle that never actually ends, not after the credits, or the last mission on the list, or the “true ending” where you learn that you’re not actually big boss at all.
- the real big boss, as it turns out, had his villain arc off-screen. or did he? when you listen to the truth tapes, and hear him rationalize and go along with not only mentally decimating and enslaving one of his closest comrades, but also using an entire hospital staff as his personal meat shield, not long after waking up from his coma, you realize that his “one bad day” never came – naked snake became the sort of person comfortable with throwing a bunch of people (including personal friends that trust and rely on him) to the meat grinder gradually, over a prolonged period of time, through events you tagged along with, and it all happened before this game even begins.
- i think sutherland deserves more credit than he gets for his performance in this game - his big boss is as gruff as he is charming, but venom is perpetually half-bored, confused, aimless, glum, and speaks with a sort of dazed, lethargic cadence, as if sleepwalking through life. this soulless performance totally distinguishes the two characters, despite them sounding and looking identical, which i think is a pretty damn impressive feat. that said, the few moments of genuine emotion that venom gets, sutherland totally sells – more, i suspect, than hayter ever could (no disrespect to him, though, i think he was great in mgs4)
- in a game where so much of the storytelling feels like an elaborate joke at the player’s expense, what maybe surprised me most is that it contained what i consider to be kojima’s most successful dramatic payoff, something that affected me far more emotionally than mgs3’s ending. and what’s more, it’s through probably kojima’s most ridiculous, tasteless character yet: quiet. but the scene where she guides pequod through the sandstorm is elegant in a way that kojima’s attempts at drama very rarely are – it’s not a monologue, it’s not a lengthy exposition dump, it’s not histrionic, affected melodrama; it’s just an earnest, somber expression of love and sacrifice through action. that it managed to make me forget what is probably the worst mission in the game preceding it is a testament to its genuine quality.
- kojima is a man, above all, of Big Concepts, and i think his decision to cap off the series by way of ouroboros, with snake eating his own tail (or phantom) – is one for the books. metal gear will never be game over. i'm stiiiiiiilll in a dreeeeeeaaam....
This review contains spoilers
“Who knows? Not me
We never lost control
You're face to face
With the man who sold the world"
It’s difficult to talk about Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain without acknowledging the elephant in the room. This is the most awkward Metal Gear entry to sit down and pick apart because it’s the only one where the troubled development and behind-the-scenes drama between Kojima and Konami has bled into the game. It’s where you can really feel Kojima’s vision, storytelling and gameplay wise, has just been compromised into a stitchwork pattern of some of the best moments in the entire franchise that shows how much Kojima and his team has evolved with some of the most unsatisfying parts that make you step back and question a bit. There’s an argument to be had on if MGSV is truly ‘unfinished’. Kojima and company nowadays seem content with the state of the game as it is. There exists tangible proof of cut content during production that wasn’t given enough funding by Konami to make it fully realized and in the actual game. Mission 51 is baffling because regardless of what Kojima or Konami says, this is clearly something very important story-wise, especially with who the mission is centered on, that I cannot understand why it wasn’t deemed worth keeping in. If I was to agree to the level of, yeah, maybe this wasn’t technically ‘unfinished’, this was roughly meant to be what it is in the end of the day, but it gives truth to the fact that there was so much that felt lacking and missing to make MGSV feel like the best possible version of itself that we’ll never get.
I dunno about you but ‘Open World Metal Gear Solid’ sounds like the tackiest idea I’ve ever heard. It does scream like a series very set in what it does uniquely, selling away its own creative freedom in favor of mindless mass consumption trying to give you a depthless version of freedom. 8th Gen, looking back at it now, is also mostly just creatively tunneled vision into sprawling, massive open worlds with resource gathering, crafting, and base management being the real grind to keep your runtime hitting the 80 hour mark. Like, it’s funny how people generalize all RPGs as being 100+ long grind fests when that’s more rare than you’d even care to look at in actuality, and that stigma feels much more deserving for the open world genre. MGSV is admittedly one of the better 8th Gen open world games from this period. This is where doubting Kojima proves futile because he knows how to take these design staples and make it feel fun. The Metal Gear Solid formula, though undergoing so many levels of evolution, bounces back at the core gameplay idea of handling obstacles with a wide variety of different solutions that typically draws the least amount of attention to you. Or, you could just say ‘fuck it’, and just go full explosive guns blazing on enemy guards and outposts with no regard for being sneaky or quiet. Not quite how I imagine you get the best experience for why these games excel hard in game design but it’s not like it’s ever discouraged too much since you’re still given weapon and tool options to choose and play with. Dropping this into the sandbox of an open world is surprisingly a natural step for Metal Gear’s continuing evolution and shakeup. It takes cues from MGS3, MGS4, and Peacewalker to deliver a solid playground where you can ride your horse, travel Afghanistan or Africa, vibe with your radio cassette set to some banger licensed tunes, scout out enemy outposts to infiltrate/assault, and maybe even kidnap the enemy soldiers and send them flying to your Mother Base to force them to serve under you! Fulton Extraction and the Mother Base system, first introduced in Peacewalker, feels fully conceptualized, though not refined, as something worth engaging with. The first dozen hours of the game I was immediately impressed by all of this. The prologue especially is some of Kojima’s greatest work, showing off how unbelievably ahead of its time the Fox Engine is graphically, while being a prime showcase of how ready Kojima is to tackle survival horror in what could’ve been Silent Hills. I don’t normally let expectations, especially from what’s been said surrounding this game, really get to me much when I play something. Here, I was willing to be this game’s strongest soldier…until it becomes very clear why MGSV: The Phantom Pain is unfortunately deserving of its status as being messy, woefully underdeveloped, and confusing but not because of the story but because of what it tries to pull itself together creatively as a Metal Gear game.
This is a roughly 60+ hour game to try to complete, yet throughout my extensive playthrough I felt like I only experienced maybe 4 hours worth of story material that’s stretched thinly yet offered sparingly. What’s frustrating isn’t that the story material itself is ‘bad’, as I feel some might easily write it off as because of how it’s presented and executed, I think it’s actually quite strong for the most part. I appreciate how it contributes to the larger Metal Gear Saga with how it puts the characters introduced in Peacewalker into a radical new dramatic context, exploring incredible themes that makes me appreciate some of the past entries in a better light through juxtaposition. Take Huey Emmerich; originating from MGS2 but properly introduced in Peacewalker, who more or less served as this cheeky wink to the fans over how Solid Snake and Otacon’s dad share the same voice actors and baseline dynamic their sons inherited later down the timeline. Aside from how seeds were planted to see how his character withers into here, there wasn’t a lot to Huey than that. I didn’t expect Huey Emmerich to wind up becoming one of my favorite villains in the whole franchise. Metal Gear has a roster of memorable villains embodying different philosophies and beliefs about the status quo. Though, you can argue many of them are at least understandable, misguided, ‘human’ I dare say, in why they’re driven this way. You can’t say the same for Huey Emmerich. He’s just the worst. An actual insufferable, petty, cowardly, hypocrite with no moral responsibilities for anything he’s done which caused indirect or direct pain and loss to the characters, not just in this game, but throughout the rest of the series. Having him share Otacon’s likeness, demeanor, and voice actor was a brilliant creative decision because we of course associate Huey with Hal, the most genuinely endearing character, only to see how that’s betrayed and subverted once his true colors became ugly and plain to see. Every single detestable thing about Huey is just further ammo for why we absolutely adore Otacon since he could’ve easily been just as low as his father but he chose not to. It’s the way they’re both broadly similar but meaningfully different in the finger details that enriches the Metal Gear Saga in close reflection. It’s not even just Huey who gets this treatment. Revolver Ocelot has been a recurring character who we’ve seen through different stages of his life that paint an interesting picture of who he really is and this is no exception. Skull Face is an underappreciated main antagonist who could’ve benefited from more screen time but once you’ve cracked who he is deep down, he makes for a surprisingly effective foil for Venom Snake for, uh, spoilery reasons I don’t want to dive into. To keep it brief; his motivation regarding his loss of identity and taking revenge on a world that took it away feels oddly resonant when you remember what this series, especially by MGS2, is all about.
It’s only too bad that most of these character beats are just not frequent enough to chew into. You have to slog through so many repetitive missions and side-ops to get even a nugget of a cool cinematic or story moment. The Mother Base management system reveals itself to be shallow as no matter how much you upgrade or develop it, the actual Mother Base you can return to see your progress of building up an army is severely uninteresting to witness. You can…drive around to platforms you just built? There’s maybe a few more generic guards who greet you autonomously and maybe have conversations you could overhear? You might even come across a cutscene that happens with certain important characters stationed there when you make enough mission progress, but, uh, that’s it. It’s quite unrewarding and boring which made me feel like I was playing through some of the most tedious excess of an 8th Gen open world game again and all its warts. Chapter 2 is the worst offender for this because it’s framed as the “postgame” or “epilogue” even though that’s where you’ll get some proper closure for loose story threads that haven’t been resolved yet. To get access to these story related missions, however, you have to play through a bulk of ‘new’ missions which are just older ones you’ve already gone through but at a higher challenge level. Keep in mind, the missions have mostly been repetitive as hell, devolving to the same “find outpost, infiltrate/assault, and eliminate/capture target” formula for hours on end. You don’t technically need to finish these missions to unlock the ones that actually matter, doing leftover side ops does the job kinda, but this is still egregious busywork to have some semblance of finality with a story hinting at incredible themes that just doesn’t pan out well.
This is the only Metal Gear game that I had trouble rating for. Rising should be shot into the sun for how it irreparably damaged the cultural perception of the series, so there were no hardships there, believe me. Peacewalker was interesting, had some fun, but clearly too limited by its design to amaze me in any way that broadened my love for these games. But Metal Gear Solid V, severe flaws and all, emboldened my passion for this franchise with what Kojima tried to tackle, only to get crushed through the grinder of Konami. I guess this game was my own Phantom Pain after all.
We never lost control
You're face to face
With the man who sold the world"
It’s difficult to talk about Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain without acknowledging the elephant in the room. This is the most awkward Metal Gear entry to sit down and pick apart because it’s the only one where the troubled development and behind-the-scenes drama between Kojima and Konami has bled into the game. It’s where you can really feel Kojima’s vision, storytelling and gameplay wise, has just been compromised into a stitchwork pattern of some of the best moments in the entire franchise that shows how much Kojima and his team has evolved with some of the most unsatisfying parts that make you step back and question a bit. There’s an argument to be had on if MGSV is truly ‘unfinished’. Kojima and company nowadays seem content with the state of the game as it is. There exists tangible proof of cut content during production that wasn’t given enough funding by Konami to make it fully realized and in the actual game. Mission 51 is baffling because regardless of what Kojima or Konami says, this is clearly something very important story-wise, especially with who the mission is centered on, that I cannot understand why it wasn’t deemed worth keeping in. If I was to agree to the level of, yeah, maybe this wasn’t technically ‘unfinished’, this was roughly meant to be what it is in the end of the day, but it gives truth to the fact that there was so much that felt lacking and missing to make MGSV feel like the best possible version of itself that we’ll never get.
I dunno about you but ‘Open World Metal Gear Solid’ sounds like the tackiest idea I’ve ever heard. It does scream like a series very set in what it does uniquely, selling away its own creative freedom in favor of mindless mass consumption trying to give you a depthless version of freedom. 8th Gen, looking back at it now, is also mostly just creatively tunneled vision into sprawling, massive open worlds with resource gathering, crafting, and base management being the real grind to keep your runtime hitting the 80 hour mark. Like, it’s funny how people generalize all RPGs as being 100+ long grind fests when that’s more rare than you’d even care to look at in actuality, and that stigma feels much more deserving for the open world genre. MGSV is admittedly one of the better 8th Gen open world games from this period. This is where doubting Kojima proves futile because he knows how to take these design staples and make it feel fun. The Metal Gear Solid formula, though undergoing so many levels of evolution, bounces back at the core gameplay idea of handling obstacles with a wide variety of different solutions that typically draws the least amount of attention to you. Or, you could just say ‘fuck it’, and just go full explosive guns blazing on enemy guards and outposts with no regard for being sneaky or quiet. Not quite how I imagine you get the best experience for why these games excel hard in game design but it’s not like it’s ever discouraged too much since you’re still given weapon and tool options to choose and play with. Dropping this into the sandbox of an open world is surprisingly a natural step for Metal Gear’s continuing evolution and shakeup. It takes cues from MGS3, MGS4, and Peacewalker to deliver a solid playground where you can ride your horse, travel Afghanistan or Africa, vibe with your radio cassette set to some banger licensed tunes, scout out enemy outposts to infiltrate/assault, and maybe even kidnap the enemy soldiers and send them flying to your Mother Base to force them to serve under you! Fulton Extraction and the Mother Base system, first introduced in Peacewalker, feels fully conceptualized, though not refined, as something worth engaging with. The first dozen hours of the game I was immediately impressed by all of this. The prologue especially is some of Kojima’s greatest work, showing off how unbelievably ahead of its time the Fox Engine is graphically, while being a prime showcase of how ready Kojima is to tackle survival horror in what could’ve been Silent Hills. I don’t normally let expectations, especially from what’s been said surrounding this game, really get to me much when I play something. Here, I was willing to be this game’s strongest soldier…until it becomes very clear why MGSV: The Phantom Pain is unfortunately deserving of its status as being messy, woefully underdeveloped, and confusing but not because of the story but because of what it tries to pull itself together creatively as a Metal Gear game.
This is a roughly 60+ hour game to try to complete, yet throughout my extensive playthrough I felt like I only experienced maybe 4 hours worth of story material that’s stretched thinly yet offered sparingly. What’s frustrating isn’t that the story material itself is ‘bad’, as I feel some might easily write it off as because of how it’s presented and executed, I think it’s actually quite strong for the most part. I appreciate how it contributes to the larger Metal Gear Saga with how it puts the characters introduced in Peacewalker into a radical new dramatic context, exploring incredible themes that makes me appreciate some of the past entries in a better light through juxtaposition. Take Huey Emmerich; originating from MGS2 but properly introduced in Peacewalker, who more or less served as this cheeky wink to the fans over how Solid Snake and Otacon’s dad share the same voice actors and baseline dynamic their sons inherited later down the timeline. Aside from how seeds were planted to see how his character withers into here, there wasn’t a lot to Huey than that. I didn’t expect Huey Emmerich to wind up becoming one of my favorite villains in the whole franchise. Metal Gear has a roster of memorable villains embodying different philosophies and beliefs about the status quo. Though, you can argue many of them are at least understandable, misguided, ‘human’ I dare say, in why they’re driven this way. You can’t say the same for Huey Emmerich. He’s just the worst. An actual insufferable, petty, cowardly, hypocrite with no moral responsibilities for anything he’s done which caused indirect or direct pain and loss to the characters, not just in this game, but throughout the rest of the series. Having him share Otacon’s likeness, demeanor, and voice actor was a brilliant creative decision because we of course associate Huey with Hal, the most genuinely endearing character, only to see how that’s betrayed and subverted once his true colors became ugly and plain to see. Every single detestable thing about Huey is just further ammo for why we absolutely adore Otacon since he could’ve easily been just as low as his father but he chose not to. It’s the way they’re both broadly similar but meaningfully different in the finger details that enriches the Metal Gear Saga in close reflection. It’s not even just Huey who gets this treatment. Revolver Ocelot has been a recurring character who we’ve seen through different stages of his life that paint an interesting picture of who he really is and this is no exception. Skull Face is an underappreciated main antagonist who could’ve benefited from more screen time but once you’ve cracked who he is deep down, he makes for a surprisingly effective foil for Venom Snake for, uh, spoilery reasons I don’t want to dive into. To keep it brief; his motivation regarding his loss of identity and taking revenge on a world that took it away feels oddly resonant when you remember what this series, especially by MGS2, is all about.
It’s only too bad that most of these character beats are just not frequent enough to chew into. You have to slog through so many repetitive missions and side-ops to get even a nugget of a cool cinematic or story moment. The Mother Base management system reveals itself to be shallow as no matter how much you upgrade or develop it, the actual Mother Base you can return to see your progress of building up an army is severely uninteresting to witness. You can…drive around to platforms you just built? There’s maybe a few more generic guards who greet you autonomously and maybe have conversations you could overhear? You might even come across a cutscene that happens with certain important characters stationed there when you make enough mission progress, but, uh, that’s it. It’s quite unrewarding and boring which made me feel like I was playing through some of the most tedious excess of an 8th Gen open world game again and all its warts. Chapter 2 is the worst offender for this because it’s framed as the “postgame” or “epilogue” even though that’s where you’ll get some proper closure for loose story threads that haven’t been resolved yet. To get access to these story related missions, however, you have to play through a bulk of ‘new’ missions which are just older ones you’ve already gone through but at a higher challenge level. Keep in mind, the missions have mostly been repetitive as hell, devolving to the same “find outpost, infiltrate/assault, and eliminate/capture target” formula for hours on end. You don’t technically need to finish these missions to unlock the ones that actually matter, doing leftover side ops does the job kinda, but this is still egregious busywork to have some semblance of finality with a story hinting at incredible themes that just doesn’t pan out well.
This is the only Metal Gear game that I had trouble rating for. Rising should be shot into the sun for how it irreparably damaged the cultural perception of the series, so there were no hardships there, believe me. Peacewalker was interesting, had some fun, but clearly too limited by its design to amaze me in any way that broadened my love for these games. But Metal Gear Solid V, severe flaws and all, emboldened my passion for this franchise with what Kojima tried to tackle, only to get crushed through the grinder of Konami. I guess this game was my own Phantom Pain after all.
goofy ass fun for the time i played it, what other game lets u send animals into the sky with balloons n shit, cmon
Kojima be like: "Cês querem mais MGS? Então toma mais MGS ae. Só que tem um detalhe... não tem mais MGS pra dar"
Esse é um jogo que me deixou triste... tantas coisas boas, mas falhando exatamente onde ele precisava acertar, pra ser digno do nome da franquia...
O melhor ponto de longe é a gameplay, primorosa no gênero, abrangente demais, cheia de rejogabilidade, responsiva, fluida, e o mais importante de tudo: divertida no geral
O level design acompanha muito bem a base do gameplay, sempre te permitindo realizar as tarefas de basicamente qualquer maneira que tu quiser. Esse lado do jogo merece palmas, pois com certeza ensinou muito sobre stealth pros que vieram depois dele, e também tornou as minhas horas no jogo menos cansativas. A história poderia ser um desastre, mas o gameplay tava lá pra me consolar...
Falando em história, que porre, ein?
Enquanto eu não ache a história em si, objetivamente ruim, ela é no mínimo diferente e fora do padrão de qualidade da franquia, com personagens chaves sendo muito fracos na escrita, momentos importantes entregues de forma muito simples, detalhes passando em branco e tendo que ser explicados via arquivos de áudio... uma experiência longe do que eu esperaria de um título numerado da série
Agora, uma coisa que eu julgo sim ser objetivamente ruim é o terror que é o pacing da história, e a progressão do jogo num geral. Basicamente, são 5 missões filler pra 1 que avance significantemente na história, e geralmente tu ainda corre o risco de não entender esse avanço na hora, pq né,
é MGS
Isso se alastra por toda a duração do jogo, e eventualmente, por mais que a gameplay seja realmente divertida, as coisas não se sustentam. Tu tá lá, ansioso pra ver o próximo pedaço de história, a próxima cutscene, pra ver se tudo finalmente começa a fazer sentido, mas o jogo empata a foda e te manda ir resgatar fulano não sei das quantas lá no cu do Afeganistão pela terceira vez consecutiva, com a fraquíssima desculpa que ele conhece alguém, que também conhece alguém, que provavelmente pode dar um avanço ao plot geral. Muito, mas MUITO broxante, ao ponto de que eventualmente nem as fitas de história, pra ouvir entre ou durante as missões, te entretém
A gameplay é boa, mas eu nunca joguei MGS pela gameplay, ela sempre foi OK, as vezes um pouco melhor, mas no geral, longe do foco. MGS existe pela história, pela alma/personalidade, pelo storytelling... e nada tá aqui.
Falando em alma, um dos fortes de MGS sempre foi o humor característico. Nesse aqui, não tem nenhum codec engraçadinho, nenhum guarda fazendo bobice, NENHUM dos personagens principais sendo goofy, tudo e todos sendo o mais sério possível, passando a impressão que esse é só mais um jogo de stealth padrão, com uma história extraordinariamente doidinha.
As coisas não param por aí... além da inflação de horas pelas missões filler, o jogo parece ter uma inclinação muito grande a te fazer perder tempo... a animação de helicóptero inicial das missões demora demais, tu larga o controle por tempo demais, o mesmo pode ser dito pra chamar o helicóptero (mesmo depois dos devidos upgrades) e depois que ele chega, ainda tem uns segundos de animação... se tu pegar o heli em um ponto da base pro outro, tu tem que ver tooooooooda a viagem, o que é simplesmente MALUQUICE pq são 1-2 minutos do personagem parado, olhando pro mar, enquanto o heli avança. Um loading demoraria 20 segundos... Enfim, não é frutífero se aprofundar em cada cantinho do jogo aqui no Backloggd, o site não foi feito pra isso, IMO
Falo de novo, eu saio desse jogo consideravelmente triste, teve ÓTIMOS momentos, o início, a parte do hospital africano, a parte da pandemia, Sins of the Father, a Quiet, os Diamond Dogs... mas simplesmente não conseguiu se sustentar. Eu tentei gostar, as primeiras 10 horas foram promissoras, mas o resto... o resto é história.
Eu pretendo volte e meia voltar nele e ir fazendo umas missões, talvez até ir atrás de uns troféus, pq, de novo, a gameplay é muito boa, mas aos olhos do nome Metal Gear Solid e tudo que ele representa, esse é o mais decepcionante dentre todos os jogos "principais". 😕
Esse é um jogo que me deixou triste... tantas coisas boas, mas falhando exatamente onde ele precisava acertar, pra ser digno do nome da franquia...
O melhor ponto de longe é a gameplay, primorosa no gênero, abrangente demais, cheia de rejogabilidade, responsiva, fluida, e o mais importante de tudo: divertida no geral
O level design acompanha muito bem a base do gameplay, sempre te permitindo realizar as tarefas de basicamente qualquer maneira que tu quiser. Esse lado do jogo merece palmas, pois com certeza ensinou muito sobre stealth pros que vieram depois dele, e também tornou as minhas horas no jogo menos cansativas. A história poderia ser um desastre, mas o gameplay tava lá pra me consolar...
Falando em história, que porre, ein?
Enquanto eu não ache a história em si, objetivamente ruim, ela é no mínimo diferente e fora do padrão de qualidade da franquia, com personagens chaves sendo muito fracos na escrita, momentos importantes entregues de forma muito simples, detalhes passando em branco e tendo que ser explicados via arquivos de áudio... uma experiência longe do que eu esperaria de um título numerado da série
Agora, uma coisa que eu julgo sim ser objetivamente ruim é o terror que é o pacing da história, e a progressão do jogo num geral. Basicamente, são 5 missões filler pra 1 que avance significantemente na história, e geralmente tu ainda corre o risco de não entender esse avanço na hora, pq né,
é MGS
Isso se alastra por toda a duração do jogo, e eventualmente, por mais que a gameplay seja realmente divertida, as coisas não se sustentam. Tu tá lá, ansioso pra ver o próximo pedaço de história, a próxima cutscene, pra ver se tudo finalmente começa a fazer sentido, mas o jogo empata a foda e te manda ir resgatar fulano não sei das quantas lá no cu do Afeganistão pela terceira vez consecutiva, com a fraquíssima desculpa que ele conhece alguém, que também conhece alguém, que provavelmente pode dar um avanço ao plot geral. Muito, mas MUITO broxante, ao ponto de que eventualmente nem as fitas de história, pra ouvir entre ou durante as missões, te entretém
A gameplay é boa, mas eu nunca joguei MGS pela gameplay, ela sempre foi OK, as vezes um pouco melhor, mas no geral, longe do foco. MGS existe pela história, pela alma/personalidade, pelo storytelling... e nada tá aqui.
Falando em alma, um dos fortes de MGS sempre foi o humor característico. Nesse aqui, não tem nenhum codec engraçadinho, nenhum guarda fazendo bobice, NENHUM dos personagens principais sendo goofy, tudo e todos sendo o mais sério possível, passando a impressão que esse é só mais um jogo de stealth padrão, com uma história extraordinariamente doidinha.
As coisas não param por aí... além da inflação de horas pelas missões filler, o jogo parece ter uma inclinação muito grande a te fazer perder tempo... a animação de helicóptero inicial das missões demora demais, tu larga o controle por tempo demais, o mesmo pode ser dito pra chamar o helicóptero (mesmo depois dos devidos upgrades) e depois que ele chega, ainda tem uns segundos de animação... se tu pegar o heli em um ponto da base pro outro, tu tem que ver tooooooooda a viagem, o que é simplesmente MALUQUICE pq são 1-2 minutos do personagem parado, olhando pro mar, enquanto o heli avança. Um loading demoraria 20 segundos... Enfim, não é frutífero se aprofundar em cada cantinho do jogo aqui no Backloggd, o site não foi feito pra isso, IMO
Falo de novo, eu saio desse jogo consideravelmente triste, teve ÓTIMOS momentos, o início, a parte do hospital africano, a parte da pandemia, Sins of the Father, a Quiet, os Diamond Dogs... mas simplesmente não conseguiu se sustentar. Eu tentei gostar, as primeiras 10 horas foram promissoras, mas o resto... o resto é história.
Eu pretendo volte e meia voltar nele e ir fazendo umas missões, talvez até ir atrás de uns troféus, pq, de novo, a gameplay é muito boa, mas aos olhos do nome Metal Gear Solid e tudo que ele representa, esse é o mais decepcionante dentre todos os jogos "principais". 😕
What is there to say about this game that hasn't been told yet? I'd rather quote Venom Snake.
"I won't scatter your sorrow to the heartless sea. I will always be with you. Plant your roots in me. I won't see you end as ashes. You're all diamonds."
"I won't scatter your sorrow to the heartless sea. I will always be with you. Plant your roots in me. I won't see you end as ashes. You're all diamonds."
MGSV: TPP was a mess in almost every way and I absolutely loved it.
Let's get this out of the way - this game had so much potential and it ultimately didn't end up meeting it. Whether that's due to Kojima's direction, or his friction and fallout with Konami, it doesn't matter - it feels unfinished and it will probably always remain that way.
With that being said, however, I think this game is great. This is the best open-world sandbox I've ever played in, and I was shocked when I saw that I had put almost 60 hours into this game because it definitely didn't feel like it - it's just that fun to play. There are so many ways to approach each objective, and everything just felt so satisfying; the combat, stealth, vehicles, movement - everything was polished to perfection.
While the story did leave something to be desired, I didn't think it was that bad. I thought chapter 2 was a lot stronger than chapter 1 (which was probably the most uneven/unsatisfying part of the game for me), which is a bummer because I think a lot of people who play this will think the game formally ends at the end of chapter 1 and will let that part of the story influence their opinion of the game. I wish Big Boss had some more spoken lines and was utilized within the story a bit better, but I thought the the supporting characters were all really well done. I really loved the Fox Engine too - for a game that came out in 2015, TPP is gorgeous, although I think Kojima could've lightened up on the lens flares a bit during the cutscenes.
From a cinematic standpoint, this game is remarkable. It honestly feels like you're watching a really well directed/shot movie a lot of the time, and the use of camera movement in particular is really impressive. That's something I've always admired about Kojima's work, and it's clear that he takes a lot of inspiration from film for his games.
I'm sad to see my Metal Gear Solid journey come to an end with TPP, but I'm so grateful I got to experience this incredible series. I was always hesitant about playing it because I've never been too big on stealth games, but looking back at the end of this journey, MGS has become one of my all-time favorite series. I'm already looking forward to my replay of the series, and can't wait to dive in to Death Stranding to continue experiencing that Kojima weirdness.
Let's get this out of the way - this game had so much potential and it ultimately didn't end up meeting it. Whether that's due to Kojima's direction, or his friction and fallout with Konami, it doesn't matter - it feels unfinished and it will probably always remain that way.
With that being said, however, I think this game is great. This is the best open-world sandbox I've ever played in, and I was shocked when I saw that I had put almost 60 hours into this game because it definitely didn't feel like it - it's just that fun to play. There are so many ways to approach each objective, and everything just felt so satisfying; the combat, stealth, vehicles, movement - everything was polished to perfection.
While the story did leave something to be desired, I didn't think it was that bad. I thought chapter 2 was a lot stronger than chapter 1 (which was probably the most uneven/unsatisfying part of the game for me), which is a bummer because I think a lot of people who play this will think the game formally ends at the end of chapter 1 and will let that part of the story influence their opinion of the game. I wish Big Boss had some more spoken lines and was utilized within the story a bit better, but I thought the the supporting characters were all really well done. I really loved the Fox Engine too - for a game that came out in 2015, TPP is gorgeous, although I think Kojima could've lightened up on the lens flares a bit during the cutscenes.
From a cinematic standpoint, this game is remarkable. It honestly feels like you're watching a really well directed/shot movie a lot of the time, and the use of camera movement in particular is really impressive. That's something I've always admired about Kojima's work, and it's clear that he takes a lot of inspiration from film for his games.
I'm sad to see my Metal Gear Solid journey come to an end with TPP, but I'm so grateful I got to experience this incredible series. I was always hesitant about playing it because I've never been too big on stealth games, but looking back at the end of this journey, MGS has become one of my all-time favorite series. I'm already looking forward to my replay of the series, and can't wait to dive in to Death Stranding to continue experiencing that Kojima weirdness.
My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
Calm down Ahab, We’re your friends!
This review contains spoilers
"The world calls for wetwork, and we answer. No greater good, no just cause. Cipher sent us to hell... but we're going even deeper."
"I know. I'm already a demon. Heaven's not my kind of place anyway."
The Phantom Pain is a lot. It's a conclusion to the Metal Gear Solid story, while also being a prequel to most of it. It's an innovative open-ended stealth sandbox adventure, while also being a base management game. It's about how the cost of war and the cycle of revenge cannot coexist with ideologies of heroism and peace, while also being about how fun it is to strap a balloon to a man and watch him fly away. It does all of these things perfectly. Now, you might be asking yourself how that's possible. Everyone has said their piece on this before; "it's unfinished, the story is undercooked, the gameplay is repetitive, it's not a satisfactory conclusion to the series etc." I'm not going to try and change anyone's mind, it doesn't matter to me if you hate this game or not, but I have a lot to say that might prove insightful, at the very least mildly interesting. This is going to be a long one.
I'll start with the story. Firstly, if you haven't played Peace Walker it's impossible to get everything you possibly can out of this. There's a ton of payoff and parallels that stem from that story, The Phantom Pain is essentially the anti-Peace Walker. Secondly, the cassette tapes are the codec calls, they've just been changed to where you have to go out of your way to listen to them. I've come to love this change overall, even if sometimes I do miss getting a call while in the field. There's much less over explaining in this than the other games. Kojima is known for going into too much detail at times, and while it still happens here, it feels a lot less aggregious. This is probably due to many of these kind of conversations being in the tapes, this way you can get the extra information you might want without it interrupting the narrative.
Punished "Venom" Snake is one of the most mischaracterised figures in gaming history. Many people wish that he had spoken more, wish that he had more agency, wish that he was more light-hearted, much like how Big Boss used to be. But Snake's lack of spoken dialogue, lack of agency, lack of anything you'd expect of him to have is incredibe characterisation. His silence speaks volumes as to the kind of man he is and to the kind of place he's in, both mentally and physically. Seeing him in charge of an extremely formidable military force, while also having a literal devil (Kaz) on his shoulder and an angel (Ocelot) on the other, both vying for approval from a man who's not all there, it's amazing. And at the end of it all, Snake and Kaz's quest for revenge ends on a whimper. It leaves them empty, it's an embarrassing display from both of them. All they can think of is back to the good old days, back to Peace Walker. They're both longing for a way of life that they shouldn't want, a life they pretty much still have. Stuck in the same cycle over and over and over and over again.
The gameplay is obviously great, anyone can see that, even just mere minutes into your first real mission in Afghanistan. I don't need to go into detail about the quality, it's one of, if not the best game in terms of moment to moment gameplay ever made. What it does exceptionally well it how it marriages it's themes and narrative into that gameplay loop.
Snake is trapped in a war without end, all he knows how to do is fight. Your own side ops keep piling up, you've always got something to do, someone to save, someone to kill. No matter how hard you try, no matter how much heroism you gain, no matter how many people you spare and save, that horn is never going away. You're a demon and you always will be. The feeling will never go away, you'll never be finished in a war without end. And just to top it off, just to add insult to injury, you're not even the man you think you are. You're not Big Boss. You're just some guy he knew. And when the truth is revealed, Big Boss talks for one final time in the entire franchise, directly to us; "I cheated death thanks to you. And thanks to you I've left my mark. You have too. You've written your own history. You're your own man. I'm Big Boss, and you are too. No... he's the two of us together. Where we are today, we built it. This story, this 'legend', it's ours. We can change the world, and with it the future. I am you, and you are me. Carry that with you wherever you go. Thank you, my friend. From here on out... you're Big Boss."
"I know. I'm already a demon. Heaven's not my kind of place anyway."
The Phantom Pain is a lot. It's a conclusion to the Metal Gear Solid story, while also being a prequel to most of it. It's an innovative open-ended stealth sandbox adventure, while also being a base management game. It's about how the cost of war and the cycle of revenge cannot coexist with ideologies of heroism and peace, while also being about how fun it is to strap a balloon to a man and watch him fly away. It does all of these things perfectly. Now, you might be asking yourself how that's possible. Everyone has said their piece on this before; "it's unfinished, the story is undercooked, the gameplay is repetitive, it's not a satisfactory conclusion to the series etc." I'm not going to try and change anyone's mind, it doesn't matter to me if you hate this game or not, but I have a lot to say that might prove insightful, at the very least mildly interesting. This is going to be a long one.
I'll start with the story. Firstly, if you haven't played Peace Walker it's impossible to get everything you possibly can out of this. There's a ton of payoff and parallels that stem from that story, The Phantom Pain is essentially the anti-Peace Walker. Secondly, the cassette tapes are the codec calls, they've just been changed to where you have to go out of your way to listen to them. I've come to love this change overall, even if sometimes I do miss getting a call while in the field. There's much less over explaining in this than the other games. Kojima is known for going into too much detail at times, and while it still happens here, it feels a lot less aggregious. This is probably due to many of these kind of conversations being in the tapes, this way you can get the extra information you might want without it interrupting the narrative.
Punished "Venom" Snake is one of the most mischaracterised figures in gaming history. Many people wish that he had spoken more, wish that he had more agency, wish that he was more light-hearted, much like how Big Boss used to be. But Snake's lack of spoken dialogue, lack of agency, lack of anything you'd expect of him to have is incredibe characterisation. His silence speaks volumes as to the kind of man he is and to the kind of place he's in, both mentally and physically. Seeing him in charge of an extremely formidable military force, while also having a literal devil (Kaz) on his shoulder and an angel (Ocelot) on the other, both vying for approval from a man who's not all there, it's amazing. And at the end of it all, Snake and Kaz's quest for revenge ends on a whimper. It leaves them empty, it's an embarrassing display from both of them. All they can think of is back to the good old days, back to Peace Walker. They're both longing for a way of life that they shouldn't want, a life they pretty much still have. Stuck in the same cycle over and over and over and over again.
The gameplay is obviously great, anyone can see that, even just mere minutes into your first real mission in Afghanistan. I don't need to go into detail about the quality, it's one of, if not the best game in terms of moment to moment gameplay ever made. What it does exceptionally well it how it marriages it's themes and narrative into that gameplay loop.
Snake is trapped in a war without end, all he knows how to do is fight. Your own side ops keep piling up, you've always got something to do, someone to save, someone to kill. No matter how hard you try, no matter how much heroism you gain, no matter how many people you spare and save, that horn is never going away. You're a demon and you always will be. The feeling will never go away, you'll never be finished in a war without end. And just to top it off, just to add insult to injury, you're not even the man you think you are. You're not Big Boss. You're just some guy he knew. And when the truth is revealed, Big Boss talks for one final time in the entire franchise, directly to us; "I cheated death thanks to you. And thanks to you I've left my mark. You have too. You've written your own history. You're your own man. I'm Big Boss, and you are too. No... he's the two of us together. Where we are today, we built it. This story, this 'legend', it's ours. We can change the world, and with it the future. I am you, and you are me. Carry that with you wherever you go. Thank you, my friend. From here on out... you're Big Boss."
This game is fantastic, great visuals, great gameplay that reimagines/expands how Metal Gear is played in this sandbox-esque format, great voice cast, and really great music.
Though compared to Ground Zeroes, it has a lot less atmosphere compared to Camp Omega, while a few areas managed to have an atmospheric vibe, a lot of the areas features a lot of identical structure which makes them feel less unique.
The story to this game is pretty odd too, while I do like the characters/development they endure throughout the story, there are oddities sprinkled throughout the storyline, and unnecessary additions to explain elements from previous games that didn't needed to be explained. Doesn't help that the Eli plotline cuts short in the campaign too.
Though compared to Ground Zeroes, it has a lot less atmosphere compared to Camp Omega, while a few areas managed to have an atmospheric vibe, a lot of the areas features a lot of identical structure which makes them feel less unique.
The story to this game is pretty odd too, while I do like the characters/development they endure throughout the story, there are oddities sprinkled throughout the storyline, and unnecessary additions to explain elements from previous games that didn't needed to be explained. Doesn't help that the Eli plotline cuts short in the campaign too.
Basically a mixture of Blacklist, Farcry and Gta. Not a masterpiece and I hate the new edgy Kaz even though I kind of understand the reason behind it.
Would have given it 2 but +1 star because the game wishes for your birthday which I think is wholesome.
Would have given it 2 but +1 star because the game wishes for your birthday which I think is wholesome.
i really wish i liked it but it was such a fucking slog with its 50+ missions despite all the things you can do in it. and while i enjoyed certain reveals of the story, the parts i did not like, and particularly the way the story is delivered unfortunately outweigh the pros. and because i already didn't vibe with either the story or gameplay, the classic Kojima Moments stick out even more negatively. the long-memed ride with the main villain or just everything about quiet... just. sigh.
This review contains spoilers
Metal Gear Solid V twists my mind up like few works do. It takes so many different ideas and concepts and so masterfully interweaves them even when it feels like it shouldn't work it always does. You get the endless tragedy in motion, the descent into villainy the radical nature of the anti imperialist sentiment along with the anti war ideals this game yells so loudly, the importance of language and the feelings that are so deeply and personally connected to one's mother tongue, and then also the ideas of dualism so prevalent, the fact that game closes the loop of the series like fuck, and the big brain meta concepts of Venom Snake (Who I could dedicate pages of endless rambling to god he is incredible) and how the incredible immersion of the game enhances that and the connection with the player and the fucking Moby Dick stuff like it's all so much and yet it all works perfectly. The level of subtextual masterclass in this game as well with all of the thematic cohesion it really shouldn't be possible. I wish I could talk about this game and sound like a sane person but this story just simply won't let me. For one last bit I'll try; This is the perfect final game in the Metal Gear saga for what it is and in so many ways I wouldn't want it to end any other way. I can't wait to think about this game more and more looping The Man Who Sold The World and have everything settle more and have more things click into place in time. With the way this game rots my brain it'll truly never be game over.