Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Review
L’enfant terrible who sold the world
The opening song The Man Who Sold The World, written by David Bowie and originally released in 1970, it’s here proposed in the performance of Midge Ure dated 1982 and immediately introduce the elusive tone of the latest chapter of Hideo Kojima signature saga. L’enfant terrible of the videogame industry, that with this installment is breaking up his long term relationship with Konami, welcome us to a visionary place that is at the same time both familiar and dissonant. Why OUTER HEAVEN is appearing in the opening scene but never cited again along the game? Who is Ishmael? Why in the “future” games there has never been references to the lost arm and iconic corn? Is the song hinting to a doppelgänger, as some Bowie’s critics believe? Who is the “Man Who Sold The World”? Big Boss or Cipher? Or Hideo Kojima himself, that is putting an end to MGS series?
The Phantom Pain is remarkable for several aspects. A refined gameplay literally put the gamer at the center of the action while masterfully crafted cutscenes are one more time demonstrating the cinematic competence of the development team. An extremely sound technical background together with a consistent attention to the series leitmotif of stealth and deception are completing the formula.
In terms of gameplay MGSV is an open world sandbox. This has been previewed with the prequel Ground Zeroes that was demonstrating the potential of enhancing the well tested stealth mechanics with a higher degree of freedom in how to pursue your targets. In doing so, the series do not deviate from its traditional formula: we are not in front of a world to explore, with NPC’s to meet or random events to trigger, the game still being adherent to its usual structure of missions collected by a narrative link.
While this approach to open world games has been criticized by someone, it’s a way to enhance the gameplay without mining the roots of the series, delivering an experience that is consistent with the previous chapters yet fresh due to the adoption of the new mechanics. Being able to plan your moves with such a wide range of possibilities brings to the player a deeper degree of identification, while achieving your tasks in the most creative ways is extremely rewarding. The gameplay is there for the gamer, even more than for progressing the story or earning trophies. If you are enjoying it, you are continuously stimulated to try new ideas and tactics. The additional targets added to each mission after the first completion are working in this direction, being a successful way to drive the player attention towards new solutions and approaches.
This sort of pleasure for gaming is what strikes more from The Phantom Pain, which is a modern incarnation of MGS archetype but without forgetting its “shoot’em up” roots. Basically it’s still just a matter of avoiding the “bullets” (metaphorically, avoiding the enemy “field of view”) and reach the end of the stage, but it allows the player to do it at your own pace and in your own way. Replaying the missions brings that taste of the old school games and coin-op’s, when I was spending days replaying the same stages, striving for perfection for my own amusement.
Another reason for amusement is the welcome introduction of “buddies” to accompany us during our (otherwise) “solo infiltration missions”. The horse is most of all a “vehicle” for fast travel across the wilderness. The dog (a deception for a wolf) it’s a great scout. Quiet (an almost naked silent woman) it’s a dreadful sniper. Besides proving themselves extremely useful in terms of gameplay, both the dog and Quiet can accompany you on the ground as well as on the helicopter (used as a sort of “connecting hub”), giving to the player the illusion of sharing the gaming experience with an imaginary friend.
The gameplay acquires additional flexibility by the managerial section of MGSV in the form of Mother Base construction (and “toys” deployment), as already introduced in Peace Walker and here further developed. Nobody who will play these two games will forget the excitement of “fulton extraction” of soldiers, materials and animals. Being able to transform your enemy resources into your own, weakening the other side while strengthening your base, reminds of Reversi board game and adds to the feeling that your actions do count. Deploying new weapons and tools rewards the player bringing up new ways to face the missions and working again in the direction of building that replayability value of a complex title that never forget that is first-of-all “a game for the gamers”.
This concept is empathized by the story ending, coming after many hours pursuing a convoluted plot that, as usual in MGS saga, delivers a feuilleton cold-war story serving in this case as a narrative deception from the basic and simple plot that indeed is condensed into the prequel Ground Zeroes and the opening and ending scenes of The Phantom Pain.
The first section of the game is following a pretty conventional storytelling approach centered on a triangle between you, Skull Face and Cipher. The Third Boy (aka Psycho Mantis) and the Man on Fire (aka Volgin) are complicating the marvelesque plot, anticipating the iconic enemy of Metal Gear Solid and reviving the antagonist already defeated in Snake Eater. As usual the apex is a fight against a Metal Gear, this time called Sahelanthropus after the name of an extinct bipedal homine species.
But this story is only a pretext to further involve the player into the game dynamics and to dive into a very interesting sub-plot which starts from a quote of Emil Cioran (“It is no nation that we inhabit, but a language”) and develops throughout a complex para-scientific theory involving vocal cord parasites and considerations about the American worldwide hegemony perpetuated by the diffusion of English (the “lingua franca”) as a way to subjugate the minorities, as in the case of a Navajo biologist known as Code Talker (“What do rulers use to bring people together? Language.”) and the Hungarian antagonist Skull Face (“Words can kill. I was invaded by words.”).
Another narrative layer worth to be mentioned is the unconventional love story between Big Boss (Kiefer Sutherland) and Quiet (Stefanie Joosten). There is no dialogue between them, but a growing mutual bond narrated by their reciprocal gazes and enforced by a series of situations where the two silent characters are showing care and tenderness to each other, up to the “quiet exit” where our heroin is forced to abandon Big Boss for his own protection.
From an esthetical standpoint we are first in class, with the gameplay making very good use of the Fox Engine, delivering a photo-realistic rendering of Afghanistan and Africa play zones. The cutscenes are 100% Hideo Kojima distillate (“70% of my body is made of movies”) reminiscent of the works of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino.
Extremely personal and remarkable is the use of audio tapes, already introduced in Peace Walker, which provides an additional literary level to the overall experience, delivering to the interested audience plenty of character-related details and the expected pseudo-philosophical divagations.
But it’s with its clever closing that The Phantom Pain truly standouts. If in Sons of Liberty Hideo Kojima surprised (and partially upset) the expectations of his fans making them play the role of Raiden (instead of the series protagonist Snake), here the Japanese game director let us play tenth of hours in the role of Big Boss just to let us know, in the very end, that Big Boss (Ishmael) is actually far away, building his OUTER HEAVEN, with us having been only its deception set up for his own safety.
This anti-climax is anticipated by a quote from Nietzsche (“There are no facts. There are only interpretations.”) and it’s delivered through a bunch of cutscenes that bring to the mind the David Lynch of the “mirror scene” of Twin Peaks (when special agent Dale Cooper rams his head into the mirror while Bob’s reflection is seen in it) and the identity uncertainty underlying Mulholland Dr., hinting at the ambiguity of the relationship between Snake/Big Boss and the player. It’s a sympathetic farewell from Metal Gear Saga and a successful experiment of metagaming, emphasizing also with the storyline that this is first-of-all “a game for the gamers”.
