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.
Moister
5 months ago