Hideo Kojima Game V: A Hideo Kojima Game
(Written and directed by Hideo Kojima)
(Warning: strong language, if you’re that type of person)
…Something Begins.
(written and directed by Hideo Kojima)
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is weird. Indeed, I do love opening with stating the obvious. The 11th game in the series, and the 5th chronologically, it is Hideo Kojima’s swan song, his ending note. It is the game that’s meant to clear away all the confusion, retcons and the general weird that’s in the Metal Gear series. Okay, maybe not end the weird, but clear away some of the confusion that has arisen due to the “make it up as we go along” design approach that this series had. It is meant to be the bridge between the stories of Big Boss and Solid Snake. And in true Kojima style, it’s dumb. Really dumb. And a lot of fun. And dumb. But it’s fun. And dumb. It’s as if someone forced a Tom Clancy novel to fuck a weird anime while Michael Bay was filming it, and this was the end result. But it’s fun. And dumb… and…
Turns out, you’re not reading this critique, you’re actually reading a cooking recipe.
(Written and directed by Hideo Kojima)
I’m the kind of person who will love a game with good story but sub-par mechanics, and hate a game with good mechanics but bad story. That’s why I’ll open the critique of a Metal Gear game with the easiest part(hashtag sarcasm): the story.
Warning: This will contain every possible spoiler you want to avoid. As always(well, that one time before this), I don’t do plain reviews, and instead try to critique the game itself, which requires a discussion of the story as a whole. Skip ahead three subtitles(written and directed by Hideo Kojima) if you haven’t finished the game, including missions 45 and 46. You can spot subtitles easily, because there is a nice picture underneath all of them.
Nine years after the events of Ground Zeroes, in which Big Boss was almost killed by a bomb in the vagina of Paz, he wakes up in a hospital. The game’s prologue, aside from the forced crawling bit, has got to be one of the best openings to a video game I’ve seen. It’s weird and intriguing to just the right level. My only criticism is that there is this 4th wall breaking, where the other Big Boss tells you to “press the stance button to get up” and tells you to “hold down the aim button to aim”. Fourth wall breaking can be done a right way, Kojima of all people should know this(Psycho Mantis boss fight), but this isn’t it. This is just bad. There is a reason for pointing out this minor mistake: it is symptomatic of the problems that plague the rest of the game. Every inch of this game screams that the people making it were trying desperately to create greatness. The game to end all games. A flawless masterpiece. And at times they do achieve something great, but at others, they don’t. They try desperately to dazzle you in the hope that you’ll be in awe of their greatness, but it’s a hit and miss. Take, for example, the aforementioned fourth wall breaking. It’s weird on purpose and it’s supposed to hint at something(TM), but it just doesn’t work. It ends up being jarring, rather than inspired. Nonetheless, this game opens up brilliantly and promises a lot in terms of story. Sadly though, it fails to deliver on it.
The first big problem is that there isn’t all that much of a story there. There are 50 total main missions, 12 of which are higher difficulty duplicates of previous missions, and then there are quite a few which don’t actually add anything to the overall plot (they’re basically glorified side missions). By my reckoning there are no more than 20 missions which are at least tangentially concerned with the main storyline, which would be okay if they were substantial in story content, but a lot of these aren’t. Some consist only of a briefing over the radio at the beginning of the mission and a debrief at the end. You know those famous Metal Gear cutscenes? Well, except for the prologue and a few other missions, they’re missing from the game. A lot of the important story elements are told trough cassette tapes, and it’s jarring. Especially when some of those cassette tape conversations should have happened in the middle of a previous cutscene. That’s not even mentioning the fact that all these should have been their own cutscene: visit someone on Mother Base after a mission and get a bonus conversation which ads to the overall plot(like in a lot of RPGs). But they’re not there. Which is a shame, because what cutscenes are there are meticulously crafted. They’re some of the best I’ve seen in a video game. But, there’s a but. These cutscenes suffer from the very same problem of someone desperately trying to create greatness. And while it succeeds in certain areas, it fails in others. Sometimes a simple interaction between two characters, a conversation for instance, becomes really weird, since the cinematographer wanted to show off and do some really out of place camera movements. Great cinematography is not about being bombastic and swirling around like crazy. It’s about what best fits the particular scene, using the camera to tell half the story, make the point, accentuate what’s important, etc. And while it does get certain scenes right(like Quiet’s farewell mission scenes and other action scenes in particular, seriously, top notch work there), others are just wrong(like a lot of the interrogation scenes). Watching these I found myself wondering if all the effort that was put into individual cutscenes wouldn’t have been better spent on making new ones. New ones which are sorely missed. The transitions between two story elements are often times missing. You end one cutscene and start a new mission and you just sit there and wonder how did you get there. The open world aspect of the game puts another spanner in the works, namely it messes up the pacing badly. Sometimes nothing of import happens for a long time, and other times there are a number of new plot lines which open up all at the same time. Not that the pacing on it’s own, if you look at the main missions as if they were a linear story, doesn’t have it’s own problems. The flow is calm for the great majority of the game, then suddenly, out of nowhere, everything goes bonkers, then it’s calm again for a while, then it goes bonkers again. But I don’t mind this part. Yes, it’s not exactly what’s described as ideal pacing, but I like it when works of art do things a bit unconventionally, so long as it’s not incredibly annoying. And the main missions, on their own, aren’t. But the problem is that if you add the open world into the mix, suddenly the pacing becomes uncomfortable.
All in all the story structure is somewhat of a mess: missing cutscenes, a pacing which is all over the place, weird scenes, etc. All of which constantly made me recoil for a moment to try to get my head focused on the flow again. It pulls you out of the game and you have to force yourself to get immersed in it again. It’s not what I would call particularly engaging. Not that it’s bad all round. It isn’t. There are moments when it does it just right. But the thing is, the bad parts poke you in the eye more. After all, you don’t exactly notice cancer when you don’t have cancer, but if you do, it can become quite obvious. Which brings me to the plot itself. It’s not cancer, but sadly, it is lacking as well.
The prologue sets up a lot of mysteries, but then they don’t know what to do with them. One by one the mysteries get resolved, and in a kind of anti-climactic way I might add. The Man on Fire was one of the more interesting of these, but he ends up… getting crushed by the Metal Gear Sahelanthropus. After which you go to recover his body, he wakes up, grabs Venom Snake, tries to kill him, his face is revealed and he collapses. Tam-tam-taaam… wait, what? He turns out to be Volgin(Jamie Fox from MGS3) motivated by revenge against Big Boss. If I were a kind man, I’d say he realized that Venom Snake is not the real Big Boss and collapsed, but I’m not a kind man and will poke some holes. Why can he move? Shouldn’t he be animated by the Third Child? And if not, why did he collapse? Couldn’t he just went on his way to find the real guy? What’s with the bullets in Snake’s hand(because flashbacks!)? Why did both the face of Volgin and the sort-of-kind-of “real” face of Snake get revealed(his face changes to the one you see in the prologue)(FYI: because we’re artists!)? Why did he summon the flaming horse when he doesn’t want to go anywhere(because explosions! things! happenings! aaaand a flaming unicorn!!)? (As a side note, the giant whale on fire in the prologue worked as weird and surprising, but when you constantly use these over-the-top stunts for no reason except to dazzle the audience, the audience eventually becomes immune and if you do it too much, they eventually become annoyed. You can be over the top all the time and, provided it fits, it won’t become annoying(Mad Max(the movies) comes to mind). This game though, despite how little story there is, manages to take it into annoying territory. End side note.) And so on and so forth. This whole Man on Fire plot line is someone desperately trying to create a mysterious and intriguing plot and just failing. In a good mystery plot line things happen for a reason, even if the audience is not aware of these. But everything fits, and there is no mystery just for the sake of it. Here, every mystery started out as: “Let’s confuse the audience just for the sake of it. They’ll be so bedazzled by our artsy-ness and genius that they won’t even notice that nothing fits and nothing makes any sense and then later blow the lid on the mystery in a nonsensical and anti-climactic way!”. Paz’s appearance is another great example. It tries to be inspired and tell the player directly that she’s gone for good(since a lot of people really liked her character) and that they should let her go, but it ends up being an “oh, for fuck’s sake” plot line from beginning to end: they start out by retcon-ing(but not really) Paz’s death in a weird cutscene, and end with revealing that there was no retcon at all, and you were hallucinating all of it. Sure, it’s nice to reminisce about the good old days, but it could have been handled better. I won’t get into this one further, because there is a lot of meta stuff there that would take quite long to take apart. Instead, let’s talk about a man with a skull for a face.
The main villain’s plan is Joker in the Dark Knight level of convoluted and stupid. Actually, even worse. Skull Face is a Hungarian from Transylvania (yaaay, my people), specifically Szekely. Problem number one: he is anything but a Szekely: he doesn’t have a giant mustache, and he’s not drunk on pálinka 24/7(basically the Hungarian version of Moonshine). But jokes aside, he was tasked by Cipher(the other name for both Zero and the Patriots as an organization, because we needed to complicate this franchise even further) to, first, look after Naked Snake during operation Snake Eater, with his strike force XOF(it’s FOX, but in reverse, get it? Get it?!). Where this strike force made it’s presence felt during MGS3 is not known, but whatever, we needed to add more retcons and after-the-fact insertions to this franchise. During this period he becomes, for reasons, resentful of both Big Boss and Zero, and decides to exact his revenge by eradicating the English language, while constantly foregoing every opportunity he has of killing Big Boss(he doesn’t know that Venom isn’t actually Big Boss). Seriously, Venom Snake is literally being held in the grip of the Metal Gear and Skull Face decides to not finish the job he started in Ground Zeroes easily, but do it the risky way, and make the Skulls try to kill him(it’s the villain getting caught monologuing cliche, except it’s worse) And, oh yeah, he plans to sell some nukes, because reasons. Yes indeed, that makes sense. For some reason he grows to hate the “Lingua Franca”(they really want to drive home that terminology, mentioning it at every available turn, because, see, the makers of this game are like, really smart) of the times, the English language, because his own language was taken away from him as a child? Firstly, how and why? In case anyone missed it, Transylvania(presently a province of Romania) was occupied by the Soviet Union at the time. Well, it wasn’t even occupied by them. There were no soviet troops in Romania. The country was only a vassal of the Soviet Union, not a conquered province of it. The only people capable of taking away a Hungarian’s ability to speak his own language were Romanians, or in extreme cases, Russians, and I’ve yet to hear of anything like that happening. Yes, there was serious ethnic discrimination during that time, but the language itself wasn’t forbidden from being spoken, not by the Soviets, not by the Nazis(they were allied with Hungary during it’s brief recapture of Transylvania, they weren’t subjugating it, so that would make even less sense) and not by the Romanians. It was taught in national schools for crying out loud. So why does he despise the English language, of all languages? Because the Allies bombed the factory his parents were working in? I don’t know. It never made any sense to me. Nor why he hates Big Boss and Zero. But moving on, after MGS3, Skull Face is tasked with looking over the vocal cord parasite research, which Zero intends to use to wipe out every language besides English, because that way the world would be united in a common tongue. Because at one point a Romanian philosopher said, while being wasted on țuică(the Romanian version of Moonshine), that it is not a country that we share, but a language. And so if everyone shared the same language, John Lennon would see his imagination come true. Makes perfect sense. It is actually why no one in the English world hates eachother, and why there has never been a single war, civil or otherwise, between various English-speaking people. Anyway, Zero abandoned his plan even before the events of Ground Zeroes, but Skull Face kept it going. Now, he never intended to use the parasites to fulfill Zero’s plan, he wanted to eliminate the English language. Yet, when Venom Snake arrives in the Devil’s House(not even going to try it’s Afrikaner name), he is still teaching the parasites all languages, except for English. For reasons?Well… for reasons to make the player think that his plan is to eradicate all languages, except English, when actually the twist is to eliminate only the English language. Haha!! Got you there, dear audience, baffle at our genius, which makes no sense. At the time, he already created 3 English strains, one of which was already in Quiet. And at the time, he already took over control of Cipher, from the Cipher(Zero), because after Ground Zeroes, which happened 9 years before the Phantom Pain, he openly declared rebellion against Zero, since he infected him with parasites, which was the reason for his vegetative state later in the series. And after(or before) he eradicated the English language, he plans to sell nukes, which he can disable at will due to parasites, to everyone, because nuclear deterrence? And he wants to do this by showing off that the Russians have a Metal Gear? Apparently he wants the world to be run by chaos, and he thinks the Boss wanted to silence the world(why does he care what the Boss wanted? Wasn’t that Zero’s and Snake’s thing?)? Oh and yeah, he conveniently “explains” his motivations and plans to Venom Snake, while they’re taking a nice relaxing ride. I… just…
I’ll stop there before I suffer an aneurysm. The more I think about Skull Face, his plan, his motivations, the less sense it makes. Instead, I’ll change it up a little bit, and talk about what I liked about the story. The way they handled the alliance between the Third Boy(otherwise known as Tretij Rebenok and later as Psycho Mantis, presumably, obviously), the Man on Fire and Skull Face’s Cipher was great. I was genuinely surprised when it turned out that those two weren’t just foot soldiers for XOF or Cipher, but it was a more complex affair. And it eventually bit Cipher in the ass, when Eli showed up and the Third Child abandoned Volgin for him(although why Eli shows up, well, reasons and convenience: he just happens to sneak aboard the chopper and everyone goes along with it). Psycho Mantis and the surrounding confusion is one the better intrigues of the game: it makes sense, and it reveals and keeps details from the player just the right way. Quiet’s story is another highlight of the game, but more on that later. The ending for Skull Face is again, something that I enjoyed. No big bravado, no boss battle, his plan just backfires on him, and he ends up getting crushed by ruble. And he is finished off later by Huey of all people, which was an unexpected and mildly funny scene. Eli and his relationship with the other children is handled excellently. They’re at the same time afraid of him and in awe of him, and all of it is conveyed perfectly. The Eli story is something that I really liked, so it’s a real shame that it did not come to fruition. But more on that later as well. The parasite outbreak is another highlight of the game. Now this is the reason for Kojima’s reputation in this industry. You can basically mitigate it’s effects by discovering that the parasites are activated by the Kikongo language and quarantining everyone who speaks that language. That’s got to be the most brilliant gameplay/story/whatever mechanic I’ve seen in a long while. Even though it took my some time to realize that these parasites share a really weird common cause, and a lot of my staff just evaporated, I have nothing but praise for this bit of the game. There are a number of other great parts of the story, but sadly, the overall plot is not that remarkable. It does a great job of introducing intrigue and setting up the story, but then a lot of it doesn’t go anywhere. Or it ends with not a bang, but a whimper. Or it confuses you, just because that way it is “artistic” and “deep”. Or it creates twists, just for the sake of it, because, hey, it’s a Metal Gear game.
Speaking of twists, turns out you’re not really playing as Big Boss, you’re playing as the random medic who scooped out one of the bombs from Paz back in Ground Zeroes. Or if you take the other interpretation, you’re playing as you, the people. Oh, how deep, inspired and insightful! You, the player, were Big Boss as well all this time! You’re an important part of the story! It was sooo very deep that no game previously, especially not an Assassin’s Creed game of all games, placed the player directly into the game. It was so deep, that I actually… threw up a little in my mouth. Every other dumb moment in the game made me either smile the smile you smile when a mentally challenged kid does something cute or sigh the sigh you sigh when someone stupid yet full of themselves starts showing off how great he or she(supposedly) is, but this one just made me angry. The way the whole thing was revealed was just atrocious: by replaying the prologue mission. After some time, you just get a new mission, which says “truth” on it. No reason as to why that flashback mission appeared, no connection to the rest of the plot, nothing. Where did this come from, how it fits into the story, when and why did Venom Snake realize that he’s actually not Big Boss, don’t know, who cares(apparently Big Boss casually called him up and told him, but this is revealed after the fact, kind of… it’s more of a you deduce that that’s what’s supposedly happened). Ah, fuck it, we don’t know how to deliver this twist, so we’ll just plop it in randomly. But hey! It’s a twist! And why aren’t you playing as Big Boss? Shouldn’t this have been the game that explains how Big Boss went from idealistic soldier to plain evil? And shouldn’t Big Boss be the soldier? The one who people cloned just to create more perfect, legendary soldiers? What was the whole point of that, if you could just convince someone that they’re actually Big Boss, and they’ll be just as good? It makes no sense. (I’ve said that too many times in this essay already, and I suspect I’ll say it some more). The one and only reason I can think of for this decision(the one reason which isn’t horrible, cause, hoho, there are plenty of very “deep” reasons there), is that Kojima and co. wanted to do away with a pretty big oversight in the first two Metal Gears: the fact that you kill Big Boss twice(and then he still shows up at the end of MGS 4). But instead of clearing up said oversight, they managed to make it even more confusing: Big Boss escapes from the hospital and goes away to build Outer Heaven, while leaving fake Big Boss, Venom Snake, to build up Diamond Dogs and be his front-man, so that he, real Big Boss, could realize his dream of a military state in secret. But it turns out that in the original Metal Gear you actually killed Venom Snake and not Naked Snake. So when and how and why did Big Boss give over control of Outer Heaven to fake Big Boss? And most importantly, when and how and why did either of the two become evil, bad or even just mildly unlikable? Because Big Boss in the first Metal Gears was… were(plural apparently) stereotypical villains. But towards the end of Phantom Pain, fake Big Boss is still somewhat alright, even if they torture a lot of people, and actual Big Boss never makes an appearance outside of the prologue. And whatever happened to Diamond Dogs? Or Mother Base? The parasites only killed a handful of people and the organization kept on going afterwards(parasites, which are the most maguffin MacGuffins I’ve seen in a while, almost eclipsing the nano-machines). And the questions keep on pilling on and on and on and on and… I’m not going to continue. You get the gist. It wouldn’t have even been such a bad thing if the twist wasn’t delivered in such a horrible way, and if the device of twists themselves wasn’t so overused in the game and the franchise as a whole. The problem is not that twists are a core part of the Metal Gear experience, it’s that they go above and beyond that, creating multiple twists within single games, a lot of which have no place there and really don’t make sense(like Skull Face’s plan twist, thing).
Chapter III: Marital Problems
(written and directed by Hideo Kojima)
Warning: Still contains spoilers. Keep scrolling two subtitles(written and directed by Hideo Kojima) if you want to avoid spoilers.
Instead of serving as the bridge between Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and the original Metal Gear, MGS V serves as the bomb that blew up the hypothetical bridge. It creates far more questions than it solves, if it indeed solves any. Some of it can be chalked up to bad decisions with regards to story. Actually a lot of it can be chalked up to it. Kojima talked a lot about how the theme of this game is revenge and the “phantom pain” both the characters and the player(!) experiences. Well, there is revenge, plenty of it, since everyone and their dog is motivated by revenge and nothing else, and there’s also a lot of pain, though not the phantom type: it’s actually the pain the player experiences when they finish the game and the pain the developers experienced when their wallets emptied all of a sudden. Listening to him ramble on about this, my expectation was that Big Boss, out of a quest for revenge, turns to the dark side, and is slowly consumed by it. It would have been the sensible story to tell, since it would have fit in with the overall plot of the series, but nope, screw sensible, we’re artistic and deep. Nothing like that happens, since first, you’re not playing as Big Boss, and second, not even fake Big Boss goes anywhere near the dark side. Not even tangentially. He gets his revenge in a nice clean way. If his fall from grace would have happened, it would have happened here, in chapter 1. Or maybe not. Maybe there’s more… or rather, there should have been more. And that’s the other reason to which the game’s failings can be chalked up to.
By far the greatest problem with this game is that half of it is missing. Chapter 2 is completely barebones. Most of it is made up of higher difficulty versions of Chapter 1 missions and most egregiously, the ending mission is actually a simple, out-of-the-blue replay of the prologue mission. There a number of plot lines which are left wholly unfinished, most importantly the plot line involving Eli(Liquid Snake) and the Third Boy(Psycho Mantis). They just bugger off in the middle of chapter 2 on Sahelanthropus(the ST-84 Metal Gear) with the 5 kids you rescued in tow on a chopper that they hijacked. That’s it. The end. Thanks for watching. Some dedicated people did some digging and found that there was obviously an ending planned for that and there are even unfinished cutscenes present in the game’s files. You can watch it here, if you want to know how that plot line ends (and read the comments while you’re at it. The infatuation some people have for Kojima is beyond words to describe: even when faced with an unfinished game, they still praise the guy up and down). And then some people did some further digging and found that there was an entire chapter which was planned for this game and got cut. Although I wouldn’t take that last bit as a confirmed fact, so far it is merely a rumor. Nevertheless it would explain why this game leaves so much to be desired.
By now everyone and their cat heard about the falling out between daddy Konami and mommy Kojima and sadly, their final child ended up lacking in certain departments as a result. This paragraph doesn’t actually have anything to do with the game itself, it’s just my opinion on the domestic issues surrounding this game(skip ahead to the next subtitle, if you’re not interested). When it came to light that Kojima’s name was being removed from marketing material by Konami and that the studio was being disbanded I was unequivocally on the side of Kojima. After all I have no love whatsoever for Pachinko Madness inc. and Kojima is a veteran and respected creator in the industry, and hurr-durr evil corporations. But after I finished the game, my view of the situation changed a lot. Now, just so that no one thinks I’m shilling for the vile pox that is Konami, here are a some damning things about them. But in the situation of MGS 5, I can understand them somewhat. The way I see it Kojima got it into his head that he wants to create an epic, a masterpiece, a game to dwarf all games. He wants to go out with a bang. And since he’s Kojima, he can do whatever he wants, and he can create a game as big as he wants, even if it costs an insurmountable amount of money. Just by looking at this game, I dread the number of piles of pachinko cash that it took to make it, and half of it isn’t even finished! I can understand why Konami thought that the game would never make back the amount of money it took to make it, if Kojima was allowed to go bonkers. After all, Metal Gear’s target audience isn’t all that big: male, 16–35, likes mildly difficult overly complex stealth-action games, likes complex and intricate plots, doesn’t mind crazy, etc. Then the audience is further shrunk by the fact that any Metal Gear game almost demands knowledge of previous games. And that’s not something you could easily acquire, unless you actually played the games, or at least more a than couple of them. That potential audience is not very big. Making a game of this size and scope, a game this meticulously crafted for so few people is not a safe bet in any way. Kojima’s ambition, frankly, got the better of him, and the game ended up suffering as a result. He bit off more than he could chew: 5 years this game has been in development and it still isn’t finished. That’s too much by any measure. Konami isn’t innocent in this affair by any stretch of the imagination. After all, publisher and developer should have a clear agreed-upon strategy when going into a game, but that was evidently missing here. And I suspect it was Konami who wasted a lot of resources on a frankly sub-par multiplayer mode(more on that later), just to get those lovely and totally-appropriate-in-a-60$-title microtransactions in there. And pulling stunts like cutting off funding late in the development cycle and then erasing the name of the creator and the studio from marketing material is just childish and insane. But Kojima could’ve handled it better as well. Cutting down on insane ambitions is par for the course in game development. Thinking himself immune from that is extremely vain and hopelessly naive. Market forces care very little(they do care… but… very little) how great and majestic you are. Otherwise incompetent nonsense like Candy Crush wouldn’t be raking in billions of pachinko cash(well, it isn’t incompetence per se, it’s more of a very evil competence, but still, it’s creators aren’t exactly geniuses, more like mildly competent sociopaths), while great games, such as Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, while doing alright, not making it’s creators into billionaires by any stretch of the imagination.
Look, I shit on Kojima a lot, but I don’t hate the guy. I actually like him. He makes good and sometimes great games. He is a veteran game developer and a titan of the industry. He introduced a lot of features into gaming, including cutscenes(for better or for worse), and created a lot of gaming’s most memorable scenes, including… a boss fight with a ladder. And as a bonus, he’s wonky and childish in just the right way. But even when that is my opinion of him, I have to say he’s extremely overrated. And it’s gotten to his head. I mean, for fucks sake, he puts credits featuring his name at the beginning and end of every single mission(all 50 of them, even the duplicates, plus there are 4 actual, full credit slides). I don’t know if it’s pure vanity or it’s out of spite for the fact that Konami treats it’s creative talent with downright disdain, but it doesn’t come across as good in either scenario. He needs a bit of tough love every now and then.
Revenge of the Revenge
(written and directed by Hideo “I masturbate to my own reflection in the mirror” Kojima)… because this pun never gets old.
Warning: Still contains spoilers. You know the drill.(write and direct as Hideo Kojima would)
Back to the game itself. The characters in this game aren’t exactly top notch. Putting aside the fact that Big Boss is not Big Boss, his character is, well, not really there. Half the reason I bought this game was to hear Keifer Sutherland yell “damn it” all the time, but he doesn’t say anything during the whole game. In theory, I did not mind the transition from David Hayter all that much, since I like Jack Bauer both as an actor and voice actor, but if he was so expensive that they only afforded to make the guy say 10 sentences, then bring back throat cancer guy. It is just so jarring(another word I appear to use a lot in this essay). There are conversations when he doesn’t say a single word, when he really, really should. Instead he just sits there quietly while everyone else rambles on, or even worse, while there is a really awkward and very long silence. It makes a lot of his interactions with other characters extremely weird. For instance this one time, out of nowhere I might add, because there was no lead up to this(no visual lead up, it is actually because I got Quiet to really like me, yay), he returns with Quiet to Mother Base and they have a nice, romantic dance in the rain. The very next time he returns to base, he’s just sitting there quietly watching Ocelot and Miller torture her for quite a few minutes. Why? Reasons? I don’t know, it’s weird. There is hardly any character development which happens. Venom Snake is the silent, gruff, idealistic soldier who wants to exact revenge on Skull Face in the beginning, and he’s the very same towards the end... except for the fact that he learns he is living a lie(which doesn’t seem to affect him all that much). He has his moments, like mission 43, and the subsequent cutscene, when Snake is forced to execute a bunch of Diamond Dogs and subsequently holds a funeral for them(even though they had to make it weird: he licks the cremated remains and then smears it all over his face), but overall, Punished “Venom” Snake ends up being barely more than a silent protagonist from any Bethesda RPG, a formless placeholder for the player themselves. Which I guess is what they were going for, but nonetheless, it’s a shame, since Big Boss is a pivotal Gear that keeps this Metal franchise moving, and it would have been nice if this game was actually about him.
The rest of the cast doesn’t impress that much either. None of them are bad characters per se, but few are particularly good. Kazuhira is bitter, paranoid and motivated by revenge from beginning to end, wants to see his dream of an independent nation of soldiers come true, and in the very last second of the game he has some character development which explains why he turns against Big Boss(he was basically pissed that Snake had conned him, and went away to build Outer Heaven without him). Nothing stellar, moving on: Ocelot is the ever-present babysitter of fake Snake and that pretty much sums him up, not that I expected anything major from his side, since the important(read: crazy) bits of his story happen later in the series. All in all, he was a decent and somewhat likable character. And he’s the only guy in this entire game whose motivation isn’t revenge. What it actually is, that’s a bit fuzzy(he’s in love with Snake,mhhmm… okay, fine, he wants to see the Patriots gone, which is his motivation throughout the franchise, but that’s something only people who played the other games know, it’s not actually conveyed all that well in this one), but hey, it’s not revenge. Huey is a weird thing. Thoroughly unlikable, but still a good character. What makes him weird is that a lot of his interactions with other people make no sense. It makes no sense why did Snake and co. employ him and accept him on Mother Base, while constantly being suspicious of him and torturing him. Couldn’t they just lock him up somewhere? Somewhere, where he can’t mess with important equipment and cause a second outbreak of the virus? But Huey goes along with it, thinking of himself as one of the Diamond Dogs, while constantly screwing them over. His side is easier to swallow, since he’s quite crazy, but still, it makes little sense. He seems to be motivated by pure batshit instead of anything else, but he wants revenge on someone somewhere along the line, first Skull Face, then presumably Snake, but not really, since he wants to defect back to Cipher towards the end and use the parasites he “field-tested” as a bargaining chip?.. ahm. Sure. Okay. Oh and he builds you an awesome tank, aaaand you do jack with it. That really bugged me. It seemed like there was something nice planned there, but it ended up getting canned like so many other things in this game. All you use that tank for are 3 Dispatch Missions(the ones where you send teams to perform various missions around the globe). Real shame that one, it had a lot of promise for something cool. Skull Face, contrary to how convoluted and dumb his plan is and how nonsensical his origin and motivations are, is actually a fairly decent villain. I’ve already spent a lot of words on him, so I won’t go into his character further. Then there’s Code Talker, who seems to be the resident pompous guy. Classic wise man trope, he’s the instrument by which the creators hit you in the face with all their big, important, deep and inspired metaphors and philosophies. Aside from that, I found his character to be quite good. His dreams and ambitions, his hatred and fears were exploited by Skull Face, and now he’s a man filled with regret(and a lot of exposition and nonsensical “scientific” mumbo jumbo). His penchant for being the mouthpiece for whatever philosophical views the creators have, is the only reason why he did not make the list of great characters in this game.
The only two characters that I found to be really good were Eli and Quiet (and, no, not because of the jiggle physics). Neither of these characters say too much during the game, and, unlike in Snake’s case, it actually fits them. Eli is constantly moping in silence, since he’s resentful of the fact that he’s the inferior clone of Big Boss. He manipulates the other kids to achieve his goal of proving himself better than Big Boss(who he doesn’t know isn’t Big Boss, but I’m not going down that rabbit hole again). And it’s really nice to get a look at how he and Psycho Mantis met. His character actually makes sense in the grander plot of the series, and it leads nicely into the Shadow Moses Incident. All in all, I can give them credit for this one... except they did not actually finish his story line. But I’m in a forgiving mood, so I’ll take the missing scenes into account as well, and go ahead and say: great work on this one. Quiet is the one who tops them all. For the character that says the least during the entire game, she has the best development ark(well, only development ark). The big brouhaha surrounding her design baffled me a bit. Everyone was so preoccupied with her clothing(or lack thereof) that no one noticed she’s a really good character. Yes, indeed, the fanservice is real, and she is certified waifu material. Especially if you go meta and realize that you’re actually playing as you the whole time, which technically means that Quiet is literally in love with the player themselves(yeah, it’s… yeah… it puts the teasing she does directly into the camera while on the ACC, into a different light). But aside from the really weird shower scene(which two parts of my body thought two very different things of), she is the best character in the game. Really, the only one that deserves some actual praise. She goes from amoral assassin in service of Cipher to a parasite-animated super-sniper out for revenge against Big Boss(because of course it’s revenge), to someone who forsakes her ability to speak to not kill anyone, to someone who forsakes her life to save the one she loves(she is infected with the English strain and chooses to speak and activate the parasites, instead of letting Venom Snake die). All the while being a badass(or a really good ass). The one thing that bugged me the whole time, which really, really fucking bugged me, is that, yeah, okay, she can’t speak. Fine. But did she also loose the ability to read and write?! Why can’t she just… you know… write things down?! Like when she discovers someone on the base is infected with a parasite. Don’t go attacking them, write it down and tell the others!!! It is fairly fucking important… gahd…God damn it!! Really stupid. Moving on. The final farewell mission and all it’s cutscenes has to be the best part of the entire game. All in all, if there’s one character that I will remember from this game, it’s her. And, again, for Christ’s sake, it’s not because of the jiggle-physics. I actually don’t enjoy cynical fanservice. It goes like this: if you dangle a pair of boobs in front of me, just for the sake of it, I will enjoy it. And I’ll remember those pair of boobs fondly. You, your game, or the character the boobs were attached to… not so much. Quiet however, manages to impress in spite of being half-part fanservice, not because of it. (And as a side note: when I say she’s fanservice, I’m not having a problem with her outfit, but with the certain camera angles, and most indicatively the shower scene. I don’t have a problem with either naked people or sex scenes in video games, when done right. But that shower scene was a completely different beast. You’re showering with her(while watching in first person mode), while a bunch of Diamond Dogs are watching and cheering and Ocelot is nodding disapprovingly . It’s weird and awkward as all hell, and not even good enough for a proper boner(which I guess describes the Metal Gear series as a whole, perfectly). End side note.)
And with that, story and character discussion is done(finally). It took a bit longer than I expected, but there was just so many things wrong with that part that I felt like I had to go big. But now it’s time to change it up a bit and discuss what’s really good about any one Metal Gear game: the gameplay. And my oh my, it is spectacular (and dumb… but still great).
Into the Great Wide Open
(written and directed by Hideo Kojima)… nope, still not old.
For the last game in the series, the creators have opted to go for the open world design. Now, I like a good open world game, key word being good. This game is, well, unconventional in it’s approach to good. On the one hand, the open world tomfoolery is reminiscent more of Far Cry than truly great open world settings, like the Witcher’s. The most jarring aspect of it has to be that there are no civilians in the game. Not a single one. Both open world areas are populated exclusively by enemy soldiers or animals. The only time you see someone different is when you have a mission or side mission which requires you to save a hostage. But outside of missions, the world doesn’t really feel alive. There are no Afghans in Afghanistan, not even rebel fighters, let alone civilians. There are only Soviet Soldiers and goats. There are also no big cities, not even towns, only small villages and military outposts. The same is true of the African theater. And even though the maps are huge, they only cover a very small geographical area, making the theaters feel exactly the same from end to end. Yes, the two open worlds are different from eachother, but internally they’re monotonous. The entire thing is designed with pure open world tomfoolery in mind, not with a great setting in mind. But on the other hand, the design is downright brilliant from a gameplay standpoint. Every inch of the maps was meticulously crafted to the point that it can easily compete with linear non-openworld games. Most other open world games give absolutely no thought to how the map design affects gameplay, they just create a giant map, and bigger the better. Here the opposite philosophy is felt, especially when infiltrating a settlement. They all have a number of different approaches, defensive positions are placed sensibly and strategically, but there are still a few back entrances. Everything, from building placement to settlement design to where the hidden side paths are placed is excellent. It’s something I don’t often see in an open world game. The one thing about design that’s not that great is that the maps are too small. I know, I said they’re huge, but they’re not enough, because even so, you’ll be revisiting the same places over and over again, even in the main missions, let alone the 160 odd side missions. An already monotonous open world becomes even more boring. In the end, even though I would prefer a memorable, but not so well designed setting over this, and despite having a few flaws in it’s design, it’s one of the better open worlds I’ve seen in games.
Quests design follows the same, great, but with a few flaws, description. There are a number of ways to complete each mission, with stealth-no-kill being, usually, the best option(since that way you can extract soldiers and you don’t risk getting a mouthful of bullets). That’s flaw number one. The game gives you 2 million and 3 tools at your disposal, most of which are of the lethal kind, but it rewards you heavily if you do missions in stealth, while penalizing you for going loud, even though that is actually more difficult. That’s kind of a bummer. But overall, quest design is great. The most indicative of this is mission 9: Back Up, Back Down. You basically have to destroy a number of moving armored vehicles, while working against the clock. It’s timed out well enough so that you can mess it up easily, and only destroy one or two, if you’re not paying attention and you can be quite happy with yourself if you figure out a good strategy. Mine was to ride up behind them, shoot the vehicle which makes them stop to look around, and while they’re searching for me, Fulton them out. Then run to the next vehicle halfway across the map and repeat. But this mission, while indicative of good quest design, is also indicative of a bad habit this game has: optional objectives that you can’t complete in one go. Aside from destroying(or extracting) 7 vehicles, a chopper, and 3 tanks, there are also 6 prisoners you have to find and extract to complete all objectives. The problem is, one of the prisoner dies if you don’t get to him right away. But if you do get to him in time, one of the vehicles will leave the mission area, which means you can’t get all 11 of them. So your only choice is to replay the mission. You’ll be doing that a lot if you actually want to complete all side objectives, since those objectives are only revealed after you completed a mission, and some of them are contradictory, meaning it’s impossible to do them in one go. And some of them are just ridiculous, like pick a specific flower objectives. I don’t like this approach. I have no problem with replaying a mission to get a higher score, but to replay a mission after I S-ranked it on the first try, just because there was a flower I haven’t picked, is incredibly vexing. Another annoyance is that there are credit scenes at the beginning(and end) of a mission. Aside from the regular reminder that Hideo Kojima is the genius behind this game, they often spoil the actual mission: “starring Skull Face and the “Skulls” Parasite Unit”. Oh, gee, thanks. Now I know that Skull Face will be in this one and that there’ll be a boss fight with one of the Skull units. But the most annoying of these are the sunglasses. Whenever someone puts on a sunglass(in a really dramatic fashion), it’ll tell you it’s name and the designer/manufacturer: JF Ray. Why? Because they are selling you shit. Inside the game itself, while in the middle of a mission. I have no words to describe the feeling I felt when viewing these: it’s a combination between psychopathic rage, a facepalm and deep sadness. There are a few more minor bones I can pick here, like some really convenient placements of certain items, like red barrels(which is just a staple of games I really wish would go away, it stopped being funny a while ago) and vehicles(like two targets using a truck you can climb into the back of and listen to their conversations, instead of a smaller, more sensible, given the context, car), and the fact that you make more money the higher your score is(which is on one hand bad because it makes little sense, and on the other hand, great precisely because it urges you to play the game better, and rewards you more for playing better(read: stealthier)), but they don’t impact my assessment of the quest design all that much: missions are a lot of fun. They’re some of the best I’ve seen in a long while, and they have a ton of great little details added into them, like soldiers discussing something relevant, and good, but often not obvious, ways to complete missions easily… in short: they’re great.
Problems arise when we get to what you can actually do while not on a mission. The answer is not a lot. You can run around and fuck about. Well ,actually you kind of have to, if you want to expand your base, get a bigger army and research new weapons and items. The amount of resources it requires to expand platforms is insane. The majority of my time with this game was spent doing busywork(if you’re not participating in FOBs, but more on that later): run from outpost to outpost, put everyone to sleep with darts or CQC, Fulton extract them, collect every single processed material and diamond, then Fulton extract every single weapon, vehicle and resource container. (As a side note: that Fulton extraction gimmick is taken to a wholly different level. You can extract everyone and their favorite horse, and after some time in the brig, they’ll just join you, since you’re the legendary Big Boss. It’s really dumb. First of all, that’s not how the actual system works, at all. But whatever, it’s a vidya gaym. Second, it’s incredibly overused. Or rather you’ll be overusing it, since putting everyone to sleep and extracting them is the best way to get those sweet stealth-no-kill S-ranks(and not making your horn grow to excessive levels). From a gameplay standpoint it’s also not that good, since it makes the supposedly hardest gameplay style(stealth-no-kill) actually one of the easiest. There is no downside to putting people to sleep(like them waking up and telling their friends), since you can just make them go away permanently with a balloon. And it’s less risky than leaving a bunch of dead bodies lying around. And if you don’t have room on your base or you don’t want them on your base, you can just dismiss them without any negative repercussions. But even though it’s dumb, it’s also a lot of fucking fun. End side note.)You can mix it up and do busywork while doing side quests, but those aren’t that great either. They’re merely a “extract this prisoner”, “destroy this armored unit” and etc. kind of very minimalist side activities. There’s no story or uniqueness to either of them(aside from the couple of ‘important’ side quests), they just add to the list of busywork that you have to do. But,then again, I’ve had a great time doing it. Honest. I haven’t had this much fun doing menial busywork in a game ever. And it’s really weird. The one and only busywork that I despised was flower picking. Especially when one time I forgot to engage in it for a while, and I couldn’t use the tranquilizer guns, because they constantly use a lot of Golden Crescent (which are blue). How have developers not realized this yet? No one on planet Earth likes picking flowers all the time, not even botanists. Especially when you have a goddamned army at your beck and call. Seriously, this game and Dragon Age. Why? Why can’t the plebs go out to do the busywork for me? Yeah, technically there are a few dispatch missions which give you flowers, but it’s not an automated process. You still have to constantly micromanage it, and there are far better missions you can send your soldiers on, than flower picking ones. This is one thing that could easily have been automated, much like the resource mining and processing. Bleh…But then again, there are no random loot chests out in the middle of nowhere(these have been replaced by diamonds hidden by soldiers, which is far better) and there are no radio towers! Yay. Overall, the menial tasks here are a lot of fun. I won’t praise it, since the side quests and activities don’t come anywhere near the level of those found in the Witcher 3, but I will say: good job. I still have no idea how they managed to make random busywork so much fun. My best guess is that it’s partly because I’m a sucker for stealth games and it’s partly because the game gives you an incredible amount of tools to fuck about with.
A Swiss Cheese Knife
(written and directed by … okay, we get it, now do shut the fuck up)
The amount of content in this game is baffling, and I don’t quite know how I feel about that. On the one hand I would rather have had a good and complete(!) story, than 1 million extra guns and gadgets I never used, and on the other hand the amount of stuff you can do in this game blows my mind. And on the other hand, I barely used most of the things in the game, since the best cost-benefit-time play style is a combination of sneaking suit, tranq gun, tranq sniper and CQC(or occasionally sleep bomb, if there’s too many armored fellows bunched up in one place) plus one lethal for worst case scenarios. On the other hand, when I had cash and resources to waste, screwing around was a hoot(god, I love that word).
Ultimately I have to give praise to how well the gameplay is crafted. The amount of effort that must have went into creating, polishing and balancing all these items(and they are balanced, mostly), plus creating and polishing an AI that can react and adapt to all of these things, is insane. The whole thing just humbles me. The AI is brilliant. I don’t know the last time I’ve seen an AI which dynamically reacts to what you do. Too many headshots? They wear helmets. Too many tranquilizer rounds? Chest armor. Way too many tranquilizer rounds? Full body armor, baby. Too many infiltrations at night? Lights and night vision googles. Too many sleeping gas? Gas masks. And on and on, it’s just brilliant. And you can even mess it up for them, by sending your units Dispatch Missions to destroy their equipment, preventing them from using certain things. Now that’s the kind of complexity that I like: complexity for a reason(unlike some RPGs and pointless crafting systems). And even without the dynamic aspect of it, the AI is still amazing. It has just the right balance between unpredictable and predictable, which is just my cup of tea: I never really liked stealth games where the AI is fairly simple and completely predictable, nor did I like stealth games where they are entirely unpredictable. This game strikes just the right balance. Though I don’t like it that hold ups and questionings are always successful(provided there is something the soldier can tell you). You never fail any of them. It would have been nice if once in a while the soldier, instead of telling you what you want to hear, shouts out to his friends, making these interrogations a bit risky, but it’s not that big of a deal. In the end, I have nothing but praise for the people who coded the AI and balanced the gameplay, it’s the best I’ve seen in years.
Another great thing added to the game is the RPG-esque leveling of various teams(like Intel, Base Development, etc.) and items. Instead of Snake himself leveling up when he gains X amount XP, the progression is handled by way of your personal army. The better they are, the better your items will be, the better your intel in the field will be, the better your support will be (which mean supply drops and the really awesome, albeit expensive aerial bombardments) etc, depending on which unit you chose to invest in. I like this system far better than the classic RPG progression systems, where you’re prevented from acquiring a skill or equipping or using items, since you haven’t killed that one extra grunt who could give you the necessary 10 XP to level up. Here you can use any items, no matter how advanced, provided you researched them. The one thing I could pick a bone with are the arbitrary numbers assigned to the level of the units. I much prefer if a game informs players of their proficiency a bit more succinctly, like a progression bar, or various colors or proficiency emblems. The numbered system is a bit too “gamey”(and yes, not a great word, but I can’t use anything other to describe it), and it levels up units in stages. Whereas I would prefer if progression is handled dynamically and continuously: if you gain 1 XP, then you’re already 1 XP more experienced than previously, and that already affects gameplay, as opposed to: wait till the XP bar hits the next level for the experience gain to kick in and take effect. But it’s not something that’s a problem with the game, it’s more of a personal pet peeve of mine.
Boss fight deserve their own paragraph, after all it’s a Metal Gear game. Well, they’re alright. There are quite a few of them, some involving the three type of Skulls(mist, armor and camouflage) and the Metal Gear, whose name I’m not writing down again. The Metal Gear boss fight isn’t all that brilliant. It’s a giant thing with an obvious weak point. The missiles also lock on to said weak point and you can finish it off quite easily. If you bring the highest level missile launcher to the “Extreme” difficulty version of the boss fight(mission 50), then you finish the thing off with only 10 hits. That’s not really a lot. Otherwise you have to work on it quite a bit, avoid it’s fairly obvious attacks and that’s it. Not all that impressive. The Skulls are a lot more fun. It took me some time to figure out the best way to beat them(anti-material rifle), and they do swoosh out of the way often. They also have a melee attack to which you have only a very small window to react to. The extreme difficulty sniper Skulls were a particularly difficult fight, since your only choice there was to get into a sniper fight with vanishing, really accurate snipers(if you tried to flank them, they would wreck you with grenades). All in all, boss fights were alright.
The one place where I have to complain is: movement controls and key-binding. Every single action and their fish is bound to the “e” button. A lot of times you really have to fight the controls to get dear Snakey to do what you want him to do, especially when it comes to vehicles. It seems that every time I want Snake to Fulton a vehicle, he enters it. And every time I want him to enter it, he Fultons it. Same with containers. He jumps on top of every one of them when I want to Fulton those. You have to be hyper-vigilant all the time when using the “e” button to avoid these scenarios and it becomes really annoying really fast. There is also no jump button, you can only jump in predefined places. And whooptidoo, it is also bound to the “e” button(shift-e to be precise, but there’s still that “e” there). Also really annoying. Standing up and crawling is also bound to the same button, for some reason or the other. This is by far the most egregious. You can easily screw up missions just because the game messes it up for you and Snake gets up and starts waving “I’m here”, complete with complementary neon signs, instead of hitting the deck. The thing is, you have to press “c” to change stances between standing and crouching and you have to hold down “c” to crawl. But for some reason, there is a minor lag between the various commands that you issue when you have to hold down certain buttons. So if you try to do it too quickly after releasing another button(say “w”), the fact that you’re holding down “c” doesn’t register, it actually registers only as a click, and Snake gets up instead of down. It was a really bad design decision to bind a lot of actions to the same button. Not that movement controls would be too stellar without that really questionable design choice.
Graphically, it’s astounding. While I’ve seen better textures and character models in recent titles(but even those are great, especially D-Dog and Quiet), the effects and the optimization more than make up for it. This game runs perfectly on anything from a potato to a high end PC. The only time I had dips in framerate was when Quiet whooshed past me, or when I was being shot at by a chopper. But otherwise, sweet 60 FPS sailing while maxed out on a GTX 970, while gazing at the beautiful(albeit monotonous) vistas. Oh, and yeah, there was also this minor annoyance with the Keyboard and mouse control prompts: some of them weren’t “translated” from the controller prompts to KBM prompts, but I can understand that, since originally the PC port was to come out later than the console version, but a last minute decision from the Konami overlords forced the developers to double time it. But otherwise, the Fox Engine is truly a masterpiece, so it is with sadness that I report that it’s getting canned, along with the mastermind behind it. Goddammit Konami, really? You spent a tone of money on a brand new engine, it came out to be really good, and now you’re flushing it down the toilet? Ah, fucking Konami…
A Place to Call Home
(written and directed by… just you dare… just you dare say it again, ya twat)
Finally, the two largest portions of the game which got no mention were Mother Base and it’s FOBs. Base building and other customization in this game, like most other gameplay elements of it, is astonishingly complex. You can customize everything, from weapons(which includes a silenced rocket launcher) to your helicopter, to your avatar, to your emblem, to Mother Base’s color, to etc. It’s a really nice feature. Mother Base can’t be customized further than it’s color, all it’s platforms are built in a pre-arranged manner, but that’s not really an issue. You can still customize it indirectly by how many soldiers you recruit, how many weapons you extract(which will be placed in various defensive positions on platforms) and by how many crates show up on the platform(depending on how many resources you collected). Another lovely thing is that you can follow along the development of Mother Base visually. It doesn’t just expand out of the blue at one point, it goes trough various stages of development. If you visit a platform under construction, soldiers will even mention it in casual conversations and if you visit the Command Platform, while under construction, and go the wrong way you’ll get a Looney Tunes scene. But this section isn’t without faults either. One problem is that you have to grind an incredible amount to build up all the platforms to level 4. As I said previously, most of my time with this game was spent grinding for resources and GMP. The automatic mining is incredibly slow, even if you have an extra FOB built. And developing weapons and items, of which there are more than 500 of(what?!) also requires resources and a lot of GMP. This can be somewhat, maybe, sort of, fixed with FOBs, but more on that in the next paragraph. My biggest problem with Mother Base however, is that, even though it’s gigantic, it’s empty and lifeless. There’s nothing you can do on it, aside from a few target practice missions and finding collectibles. There are only three indoors locations: Huey’s lab, Quiet’s cell and Paz’s medical room. That’s it. Where is everyone else? I don’t know(Eli is on the top of the Command Platform, but you can’t get to him, and I once caught a glimpse of Code Talker sunbathing while leaving the base on chopper, but he wasn’t there the next time around). You can’t interact with other important characters on the base(you can’t interact with the aforementioned ones either, you can stare at them, if you so please, but that’s it, except for Paz, to whom you can give pictures to, but she’s actually not even there, so it doesn’t count), you can only go and beat up random soldiers(which never gets old, especially since they thank you for it?). But you never see Miller or Ocelot or any of the other characters, outside of predefined cutscenes. And where does Snake sleep when he gets back? The least they could’ve done is build one indoors location for Snake as his quarters, where you can manage your things, just like in the ACC. It’s really bothersome, that even though I combed through the entire place, I couldn’t find anything worthwhile to do or anything interesting to see(the zoo isn’t novel the second time around, especially since there aren’t any lions in it: really, a whole Sub-Saharan open world, and not a single lion? For shame.). And most annoyingly, even though there’s nothing ever going on on Mother Base, they force you to visit it after every few outings to shower(because if you don’t, you loose health and reflex time, but I didn’t use that particular feature) and raise morale. (And as a side note: visiting Mother Base, for some reason or the other, counts as a mission. Meaning the game won’t auto-save(and there is no manual save) so if you fall off one of the higher platforms and die, you loose all your progression (which can include things like diamonds you picked up while scavenging the base and Target Practice missions you finished). It’s really annoying. End side note). It would’ve been nice if they didn’t compel you to visit home by way of a convoluted and it-gets-really-old-really-fast gimmick, but by way of, as mentioned previously, extra story bits and/or a personal quarters you can visit(and shower there, not outside in a portable makeshift shower, while fully clothed and taking your weapons with you…) and maybe even customize. I would’ve frankly preferred that you could only customize and manage Mother Base(or at least certain features of it) while on Mother Base(or in some sort of a command center or personal quarters on it) and not on the ACC. But since everything(including the extra story bits, by way of cassette tape player) is handled on the ACC, there is actually no good reason to visit your base outside of certain necessary missions. That was a major letdown: build a gigantic and empty base and do not much with it.
Speaking of gigantic, empty, and ultimately pointless: multiplayer. The FOB system in this game is kind of bad, even if you don’t take into the account the amount of cheaters that plague it on PC. First of all, it directly affects your single player experience, even if you don’t engage in it. Since the multiplayer and singleplayer are conjoined, the singleplayer portion had to be balanced with the multiplayer elements in mind. And it shows. If you choose not to build an extra Forward Operating Base, you’ll be grinding for money and resources a lot, and you’ll have a really hard time leveling up your R&D team to research the highest level items. Not to mention that all your teams(intel, support, base development, combat etc.) will be significantly less effective, since they’re all a lot smaller than they could be. Building at least one FOB is almost a requirement. The justification for the multiplayer is also kind of meh. Whenever the single and multiplayer portions of the game are mashed together, developers have to come up with some sort of reason for it to make sense in the context of the story. Here the reason is that the other players are rival PMCs. As far as justifications go, it’s not that bad, but when you actually open up the FOB tab and see that your so-called great rivals are called “xxx_360_no_scoper_xxx” or “i fucked yer mom and she begged for more”, it becomes, well… bad. (As a side note: there is also this very spoilery thing, but I won’t comment on it, since I don’t quite know how I feel about that. End side note.)
The way the system actually works is that there are a number of people whose bases you can invade and steal their resources and staff. In the ideal scenario you would get undetected to the command room of the platform you’re invading, whilst stealing all their weapon placements and resources and then you win. You can only enter this room if the opponent or it’s AI grunts don’t see you(meaning you were stealthy all the way, or you were detected but managed to get away), otherwise, the room is locked. Seems fairly straightforward. However, the system is not what I would call balanced: it favors the defender heavily. First of all, there are no particular downsides to having the maximum available security on all your platforms, since the cost of having this defense is only deducted when someone infiltrates your FOB(successfully or otherwise). But having the best available defense is a deterrent against infiltrations by others, since people would rather invade an easy target than an insanely difficult one(which means you’ll end up spending less, and having a better defense, since you spend more on individual infiltrations of your base, but there are significantly less infiltrations taking place). And hoho, invading a level 4 platform with max security and S rank soldiers guarding it, is indeed insanely difficult. You have to get past 60 odd fully armored(which means tranqs and headshots are out, so if you engage these soldiers in anything but CQC, everyone else will be instantly notified, and engaging in CQC is also risky since the patrols have very few blindspots, and odds are someone else will notice you knocking out a guy) and hyper-vigilant guards, plus cameras, mines, laser detectors and 12 patrolling UAVs. Plus if the defender enters the fray, sporting a Killer Bee(heat-seeking missile launcher), you’re royally screwed. In theory I wouldn’t mind having a multiplayer mode where the odds are in favor of the defender, but this is unbalanced to the point that, after I(and everyone else, mostly at the same time) wised up and put in place the maximum available defense everywhere, barely anyone attempted to invade my FOB. There were only two people who did, one of which happened while I wasn’t playing the game(which is really annoying, since you play a multiplayer match, while not being aware of the fact), but that was dealt with by my AI grunts, and there was another one which I dealt with easily. I’m fairly competent at this game, since I S-ranked all missions, usually with stealth-no-kills, and I have a 100% completion of it, but after trying my hand at invading level 40+ FOBs, I just gave up. It’s not worth it, since you can barely steal anything before you’re killed and making it to the core and “winning” is incredibly difficult. And since the defender gets an enormous bonus for a successful defense, you’re helping them out more(a lot more) than yourself. Even if you make it to the core, if you weren’t fultoning every container you saw, you hardly get any rewards, except for 10 odd staff members from the other guy. So it’s really not something that’s worth doing, except if you like getting killed a lot.
The one thing I could think of that could make this interesting would be to bait people into trying to infiltrate your base. Put in place only a weak defense, and wait for people to try to invade you, then deal with them and enjoy a massive payday. In the beginning of this game’s life cycle, when no one knew what was up with FOBs or how they worked(since the game does a horrible job of explaining the system to you), I got a massive boost to my resources because a lot of people thought I was easy game, and they came running, only to be greeted by a heat-seeking missile or an anti-material rifle. It was a lot more interesting back then, since a lot of people had no idea how the game worked and I could easily go and steal everything from someone who wasn’t paying attention(but since then, people have wised up, and now you get level 60 FOBs that you can’t really do anything with). Remember how I kept saying the grind is real, unless you play FOB missions. Well, this was what I was talking about. You gain an insane amount of resources and GMP if you win defense missions or if you manage to find a noob and steal all their stuff, but even with me winning quite a few of these matches, the grind was still very real. The only way this might be remedied would be to… (roll drums): buy extra FOBs with real money. Yes, indeed, you can build one for free, but you’ll have to buy next one for quite some pachinko cash. Fucking atrocious. They even do this really slimy thing, where they “gift” you a small amount of MB coins(I was gifted 180 to date). Of course, it’s nowhere near enough for you to do anything with(since a new base costs north of a 1000 MB coins, and “speeding up” online troop deployment costs more than 250), it’s actually to make you already invested and more likely to buy those coins with sweet, erotic pachinko money. Really disgusting free-to-play mind trick. Just fucking unacceptable.
Something ends…
(written and directed by me)
I said somewhere in the beginning of this 12,659(so far… gods, this became long) word essay that I will love a game with good story but sub-par mechanics, and hate a game with good mechanics but bad story. And contrary to how much I criticized it’s myriad of failings, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is actually one of the few outliers. I enjoyed it a lot. Even with it’s dumb gimmicks, dumb story, dumb twists… dumb everything, I had an inordinate amount of fun, right up until chapter II. Then things started to fall apart. The already wonky pacing took a turn for the atrocious, the missions have become, well, literal repeats of chapter I missions, the gameplay started to become stale, Mother Base started to become even more boring than it was before, and to add insult the injury, there was that final twist: the replay of the prologue mission.
As I get to the end of this very long thing(whatever this thing is), I can offer no more wisecracks, no more jokes, no more critique, not even anger for the ending this game had, only sadness. I don’t want smaller games, honest. My favorite ones are the big ones, to the point that I rarely bother with the 6–10 hour games, unless a reputable source recommends it to me. And I really do wish that I could see the complete version of Kojima’s ambition, Chapter III included and all that. But what I want matters little. Not everyone has the time to play 168 hours of a game and then write a book about it. At some point too much becomes too much and unchecked ambition becomes a hindrance, not a blessing. Partly I blame Konami for not allowing this game to be finished, but mostly I lay the blame on Kojima and co. I said it before, but I’ll say it again, cutting down on insane ambition is as much of a prerequisite for game development as the ability to code. The original ambition of this game would never have made back it’s money, and it’s even a question whether this handicapped version will. The market just isn’t big enough, which was something Kojima should have been well aware of given the fact that the revenue for previous Metal Gear games have been slowly declining, yet their development costs kept rising. Going multi-platform… I don’t think it was that helpful, since Metal Gear has the longest and most convoluted story of any one franchise in gaming, and that puts off a lot of people who didn’t own all generations of Play Stations. I jumped on the band wagon with Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, and even that took some self-convincing and a lot of research. He really should have planned for a smaller, more concise, but actually finished story and this game could have easily entered the fray with the Witcher 3(and maybe Fallout 4) for the title of Game of the Year, but as it is now? Half finished and lacking in a lot of departments? Sadly, that’s a no.
The Metal Gear franchise goes out not with a bang, but not with a whimper either. The most appropriate metaphor that I could think of, which involves bangs, are fireworks: some of which went off and put on a good show and some of which whimpered away in deep sadness. I was never the biggest fan of Metal Gear games, even though I enjoyed most of them. But Kojima’s dumb, convoluted and often contradictory story put me off . There was just so much stupid(and rarely of the good kind, because there can be beauty in stupidity, but Metal Gear rarely hit that particular note) in the series’ plot that I could never become a genuine fan. Nevertheless I’ve had my share of memories with the franchise, and I’m sad that it’s ending. And I’m even more sad that it ended in this fashion.
That’s it folks(the few of you who managed to make it this far), thanks for watching.
And if you’re not put off by my inflated sense of self-worth(much like a certain Kojima I know) and the love I have for my own thoughts, then, at dawn, look to the East for my signal.. on Twitter.
