Metal gear solid V: The Phantom Pain is a game that I recently 100% completed, and my opinion on this game’s quality is that it is very inconsistent. It does so many things well but at the same time does other things terribly. If this game had a more consistent quality throughout the game and fixed the things that I thought were bad, it would probably be a 9/10 rather than what it is currently rated right now.

The best things about MGSV: TPP are how great the graphics look and how inventive and fun its gameplay is. I will start with the least important thing about the game, which is the graphics. The Graphics are very impressive, even 8 years later, it is still one of the prettiest games I have played and completed (so far).

The gameplay is fantastic, you can tackle practically any problem in the game in a unique way, which is like the previous games, but ten-fold. You can deal with missions in so many ways, for example, you could directly finish the objectives of a mission, or you could disable the enemies support, so they cannot call for reinforcements which makes missions a lot easier than going straight to finish objectives. The game is open world and is one of the only open world games I have completed currently. You can go to Africa and Afghanistan, which both have large playable areas. The open world is so large that they can sometimes take minutes to get to where you need to go (for side ops, not main missions). My favorite gameplay moment was infiltrating OKB Zero to confront Skull-face. Infiltrating OKB Zero was great because of the scale of the area, it was unlike most of the other missions due to the other missions unfortunately being small in scale.

The weapons and items felt great to use, the traditional guns (like the AM MRS-4R or WU S.PISTOL) felt less clunky to use than the weapons in the earlier Metal Gears. The only item I thought felt was worse to use than in the earlier games, was the cardboard box which felt slow to use. The new weapons added to MGSV were great to use, like the decoys, and especially the bionic arm. The uniforms mostly felt the same except the “nostalgia outfits” and the parasite suit. The Parasite suit has abilities like going invisible or being able to armor through any attack (I only used it once during my playthrough). The “nostalgia outfits” are MGS1 Solid Snake (who doesn’t have anything too unique about it), MGS1 Gray Fox (which has a small speed boost) and MGR Raiden (which has a large speed boost).

This game also introduced buddies to help you in the game. The buddies are, d-walker, d-horse, d-dog, and quiet. D-horse is just a horse to help you travel faster on the massive maps. Quiet is a sniper who can also mark enemies like D-Dog but worse, and she is important to the plot of the game. I didn’t use her that much because of her default rifle not having a suppressor until she is level 30 which is terrible for missions because without the suppressor, she alerts enemies every time she shoots her gun, and she was worse than D-Dog for identifying enemies. D-dog helps find enemies without you having to scan them first and can also attack them if you want him to, he was also the buddy I mostly used because of how useful his identifying was. One the of the things about D-Dog I disliked was how he could block your shots or even cause enemies to search for you and interrupt tasks which was awful for the 100%. D-Walker is a mech that you get after saving Huey, you can freely upgrade it to match your playstyle and needs for that mission, it could detect enemies, auto attack enemies, go invisible, go as fast as d-horse, and use a ton of weapons like flamethrower or chain gun for example. I sadly did not use D-Walker much because of how late I finished upgrading it, which is practically its only flaw with it plus its cost, but if I ever play MGSV again I will probably use it more, and I mostly used D-walker for boss fights and taking down helicopters.

I had a few large problems with the general gameplay of MGSV. One of the problems was how empty the open world felt, and when you found something (a common enemy outpost for example) they normally only have like five people in them, which makes them feel like they were just there to waste time. Another gameplay related thing I disliked was that there were not that many large bases to infiltrate, like OKB Zero or the airport, which felt like wasted potential for amazing gameplay. The CQC felt awful, it felt stiffer to use than MGS3, and MGS4 for example, and I wish there were more unique weapons and items to play with. I thought the gameplay was fun but felt it had significant problems that also hindered gameplay.

Before I talk about the plot and why I dislike it, I want to first say something about the mother-base. I feel like the mother-base is incredibly fun, but it also feels like both missed potential and a downgrade from MGS: Peace Walker. The things I felt MGSV improved about MB’s (mother-base) from peace walker was how it let you explore your base, how it let you directly upgrade your MB’s, let you directly interact with your recruits and how you can invade other players bases for more resources like fuel or money. Even though I really liked some of MGSV’s new additions to MB’s, there are a LOT of things I do not like about them. I hate how there is practically nothing to do on MB other than target practice, which is such a waste. A thing they added was how you can have much more people that you can recruit and volunteers than peace walker but because of the increase of people, your maximum amount of recruits gets full fast, and you get a lot of volunteers that are below the average level of the other recruits (I had an average of S ranks, but the volunteers were three grades lower). Another thing I disliked was how the game auto-assigns where new recruits go, which removes the fun micromanagement from directly managing your recruits like in peace walker, and if you have a category full Ocelot just places the recruit in a random category which is annoying (plus the waiting room is useless in this game). I think MB in MGSV is good but a step down from peace walker. In peace walker you care more about your recruits compared to MGSV which you do not really care about them at all, it’s less tedious than MGSV because of how long grinding for resources takes and you could have helicopters in Peace walker :(

A major thing about MGSV that I did not like was the plot. I will start by giving a summary of the plot, then explaining a little bit about why I dislike it. The game starts 9 years after the events from MGSV: Ground Zeroes, Big Boss (or Snake) wakes up from a coma, but after he wakes up, “XOF” and the Man on Fire are trying to kill him, but with the help of Ishmael (another patient at the hospital Snake was at), and Revolver Ocelot, he escapes the hospital where he is staying. A little while after escaping the hospital, he saves Kaz, who was the commander of MSF, from being executed by the Skulls who are super-human people who can practically run at Mach 1 and can go invisible. After saving him they go on a mission to take revenge on Skull-Face who caused Snake to be in the coma, Kaz almost gets executed, and the events in ground zeros. After a while, they discover the devil house, which has people infected with parasites who are being experimented on by “XOF.” The parasites are vocal cord parasites, which kill you if you speak a certain language. After Snake finds the person that the contractor wanted snake to save (but unfortunately could not), the man on fire attacks Snake but Snake escapes him. Mother-Base then gets infected by vocal cord parasites which causes many people within Diamond Dog (the name of Snake’s PMC) to die, which causes Snake and Diamond Dogs to track down Code Talker, an expert on the parasites to cure Mother-Base. After getting a lead on Skull-Faces location, Snake goes to confront him and after Skull-Face lectures Snake for 5 minutes straight, Skull-Face makes Sahelanthropus who is a “metal gear” attack snake. After Snake disposed of the metal gear, Skull-Face breaks his leg and Kaz and Big Boss shoot him. Then they capture Sahelanthropus, just for Liquid to steal it for the conclusion of the game that does not actually happen in the game. The final plot mission has Ishmeal being revealed to be the real big boss and revealed the big boss we have been playing as a medic during ground zeros.

The main things I disliked about the plot are the parasites, Skull-Face, and the lack of a conclusion. I wish Skull-Face were more of a presence within the story, he is only in the game for about thirty minutes (in a fifty-hour game) and just monologs what his goals are to you rather than feeling like a threat like in Ground Zeroes. Another thing I disliked was how the plot point of Liquid stealing Sahelanthropus was not concluded within the game, which felt very disappointing. For the parasites, I just dislike them, especially how they try to explain other supernatural things with them like “The End” living so long and the Skulls were not fun to fight. The game’s plot is lacking and has problems, but I enjoyed several story moments in the game, like seeing what is in the devil house. My absolute favorite moment in the game story-wise is when your men get infected with vocal cord parasites, because of the pressure it adds. It forces you to rush to find how to quarantine the infected people and cure them, or else your army will die. A while after curing the vocal cord parasites, you will have to go back to the quarantine platform because of another outbreak of the parasites affects your men, but once you get there, you realize the only way to stop the vocal cord parasites from becoming a much larger threat, you will have to neutralize the infected people. Those two moments are the biggest impact the story had on me, but even though I despise the concept of parasites, those moments were fantastic.

TLDR: Very fun gameplay with several flaws, and the plot mostly sucks.

Also, the 100% was not that fun, especially the “executed” achievement, at the end of the game I had around 138 hours amassed in it.