There was a time in my life where I would rate every Metal Gear game a 10/10 on video game sites and pretend to myself that I was being objective. After all, it had to be perfect - it was Metal Gear, one of my favourite series. Reaching the age of maturity (which, it seems, was 25 in my case) and playing through The Phantom Pain a second time forced me to accept something. It isn't perfect. The series isn't perfect. The first Metal Gear has to be played on mute because its 8-bit sounds are aural torture, navigating the Big Shell in Metal Gear Solid 2 can be frustrating at times, and The Phantom Pain is unfinished. This doesn't mean it's not a great game, just like Metal Gear is still a great series.
Hell, it's the greatest unfinished game ever made. It's among the few games that define the eighth console generation. But, on my second playthrough, it also left me feeling empty.
Much has been made of Konami interfering with the genius of Kojima, so much so that anything I try to write feels trite. This game wasn't developed in ideal conditions, and the publisher shoulders a large portion of the blame for that. But I also feel that Kojima made some missteps too, as I'll explain.
Before that, however, we must laud the Phantom Pain where it's deserved. It is an absolute masterclass in sandbox stealth. There are so many ways to carry out missions, limited by your imagination. The simplest way to explain MGS V's gameplay is, "If you can think it, you can do it." If you've got to take out a tank battalion, you can do it explosively with landmines and rocket launchers. Or, you can let them reach their station, wait for a sandstorm and attach Fulton balloons to them - in and out, like the storm itself swept them away.
If you've got a hostage to rescue, you can invade the camp where he's being held and interrogate the guards about where they're holding him; free him, and be on your way. Or you can wait till they're transporting him, lie down with a sniper rifle on the opposing mountaintop, shoot the jeep driver, and then move in for the rescue.
If you're feeling lazy in a seek-and-destroy mission, you can just call in multiple airstrikes and be done with it. There really is a lot you can do in MGS V.
The enemies aren't complete idiots as well. They take note of your tactics. If you prefer infiltrating at night, they'll start wearing night vision goggles. If you're a headshot junkie, they'll be issued helmets. As the enemies adapt, you're obliged to too.
Few games are optimized as well as MGS V. This game worked perfectly even on my old craptop, which lacked a GPU. There is no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ way this game should run so well on seventh-gen consoles and 2010-era computers, but it does. Whoever programmed this, I love you.
Unfortunately, around the time MGS: Peace Walker was being developed, Hideo Kojima's son did something terrible. He told his dad, "This is ♥♥♥♥! All the cool kids are playing Monster Hunter now." Kojima took this to heart, and decided that from now on, MGS would also be a mission-based series. This, I feel, is to its detriment. For all the banal jokes about its cutscene length, MGS was originally conceptualized as a relatively short game that adults could play - they didn't have to care about levels, or collectibles, or multiple objectives.
MGS V is the exact opposite of that philosophy. A lot of time is spent deploying and taking off in helicopters, and if there's one thing that you can think but can't do, it's that I wish the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ helicopter could fly me across the open world from side mission to side mission, rather than having to go back to the level select menu or make the long trips manually. Base management is gratifying, but also tangential to why I play Metal Gear games. You spend a lot of the game on the verge of brokeness, and have to be very selective about the items you develop. You also have to wait for raw materials to process before you can do so - which means you could have all the fuel, metal and GMP needed to build a new platform, but can't because SOMEBODY back at Mother Base is this close to getting fired.
There are things I love and hate about the plot of MGS V. The foremost of the former is that the cutscene direction is award-worthy: this game really consolidated what would become Kojima's signature style in the coming years. Almost all cutscenes are 'filmed' from a single camera in one continuous shot, lending the game its grit. On a second playthrough, it's incredible how in-your-face the plot twists are, yet I didn't spot them the first time.
Hideo Kojima has never shied away from wearing his influences on his sleeve, and he sure incorporated some classics into this one: 1984, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now... There are nods to all of them - some subtle, some not. Watch out for the pig's head and the 'Big Boss is Watching' posters. The music selection is great too.
However, there's no getting around the fact that this is very much an unfinished game. The pacing of the story is completely off, with the beginning and end of Chapter 1 being the most substantial portion - by the last few missions, I was thinking, "Boy, they're really speeding up, aren't they?"
After that, the game's basically over. In Act 2, you're handed a collection of already-completed missions to repeat under specific conditions, with the odd story bit nestled here and there. It's immensely unsatisfying. The cutscenes are great, but half their context has been ripped out. The number of story-heavy cassette tapes also jumps up, which I assume was Kojima trying to finish fleshing out the plot in whatever way he could once development ground to a halt.
There is never a good time to listen to these cassette tapes in this game. If you try to play the game while listening to them, you'll keep having radio chatter or idle conversation play over them, and Lord help you if you try to listen to them during infiltrations - being deaf to the world is a massive disadvantage. As much as people complain about the open world being too empty and big, it still isn't big enough to listen to one of these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cassette tapes in peace while driving from outpost to outpost.
As easy as it is to pick on Konami for hobbling the story, I feel some of the blame lies with Kojima himself. I really dislike the /v/-tier opinion that's constantly bleated into the void, that Kojima is a terrible writer and Tomokazu Fukushima was the real hero. But here he ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up, okay? The second act seems solely dedicated to the demythologization of the series, with massively detailed explanations of how everything that seems magical works. Really, Hideo, it was better when a guy was made out of bees just because it was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cool. It didn't have to make sense. And you didn't have to give us such a roundabout explanation for why Quiet has such a skimpy outfit. Just say it's sexy, man. This breaking down of the series' more fantastical elements feels almost like an act of revenge against the playerbase.
'Revenge.' That is the biggest reason I have for believing that The Phantom Pain was only about 40% complete on release. People say Skull Face is a terrible villain, but if you see him as what he was supposed to be - only the villain of Chapter 1, it makes a lot more sense. Revenge is the leitmotif of the first chapter, and having played through every game in the series except for Survive multiple times, I'm certain the plot was supposed to centre upon some three-stages-of-anger theory Kojima read in a psychology book, ending with a more self-actualized Big Boss. What we got does manage to bring the story around full circle to the original Metal Gear, but the journey there clearly isn't what was envisioned. The Metal Gear games generally end on a very poignant note, and to believe that it was supposed to have an epilogue full of repeated missions, scattered bits and pieces and no proper ending feels so hollow. Almost like a...
