Metal Gear Solid V: My 2 cents (Some major spoilers ahead)

[HuntingtheWill]

I'm a huge MGS fan, so, naturally, I was very excited about the release of MGSV: The Phantom Pain.
After I beat the game, however, I never felt so divided about a game ever in my life, my opinion was completely mixed.
I both liked it and disliked it.
Disliked it because of the story, I really didn't like the ending. All this time thinking I was playing as the awesome Big Boss, but turns out it's just the MSF Medic from Ground Zeroes. For some reason, I thought that pretty much everything that you do in the game lost impact for me because you're not playing as Big Boss. Also, I thought other characters were going to appear, like at least Gray Fox, or some mention of him, but no, nothing. And overall, I thought the story wasn't as well-done as previous games.
Gameplay-wise, however, I thought it's the best of the entire series. Just the many different ways you can complete a mission and take down enemies while playing some awesome 80's music, was truly amazing. I had a lot of fun with the game doing that.
There's another thing that disappointed me about the game too, the boss fights. If there's one thing that I love about the MGS series, it's the boss fights, every game before V had some awesome and memorable battles.
MGS 1, you had Foxhound and the final battle against Liquid. Seriously, Foxhound is, without a doubt, one of my favorite boss fights ever, each member was really memorable and there was a lot of variety with the battles because you fought each of them in a different way and had to use different weapons to do so.
MGS 2, Dead Cell, not the same as Foxhound, but I still had fun fighting them, especially the final battle against Solidus.
MGS 3, the Cobra Unit and the final battle against the Boss, I don't think I need to say more.
MGS 4, Beauty & the Beast, as well as the final and incredibly epic battle against Ocelot.
Peace Walker, well, the boss fights weren't my favorite since you mostly fight against AI Metal Gears, although the final battle against, well, Peace Walker was still good because of how high the stakes felt.
MGSV, however, you mostly had the Skulls, and although I did enjoy some of the fights against them, I felt that it lacked variety like in previous games. I did enjoy the fight against Quiet, Liquid and Sahelanthropus, but again, the boss fights in this game lacked variety and they weren't as memorable as in the previous games. But what REALLY disappointed me about this was that there was no epic final boss battle. THAT was one of the things I really looked forward to in MGSV, I expected a sort of CQC fight against Skull Face, kind of like with the Boss, but no, nothing, absolutely NOTHING.
Major disappointment.
But that's just my opinion, what were your thoughts on MGSV: The Phantom Pain?

[Tech614]

MGSV to me was a good game hampered by a non fleshed out story(and unfinished obviously) and lame fetch quests padding the game time.

Had they not have went the open world route and had to put so many resources into what just became a barren land full of lame fetch quests maybe they would have had the time and budget to flesh out the story as well as finish it.

Major reason why I'm skeptical on Kojima's next game with him saying he wants it to be more open the MGSV. There is open world done right(GTA, Witcher 3) and there is open world done horribly wrong(DAI, Farcry) and Kojima only made the version more on the horribly wrong side of things.

Kojima should go back to linear story telling, it's what made him a legend. Not an trash open world with a million fetch quests repeated over and over.

[dope_danny]

It was an unfinished game from a man that was done with this series a decade ago. The gameplay of phantom pain is fantastic but it is simply an unfinished videogame resulting from spats between a developer eager to jump ship to sony -which some recent pt rumours sounds like was something he was in talks for since ground zeroes which was why he snuck in a ps4 exclusive mission where you go around erasing the metal gear brand names from around the base- and a developer eager to make the unfortunate switch into pachinko just as the industry is about to collapse and others like SNK playmore are jumping back into games as a result.

Part of the issue is Hideo Kojima is the Stanely Kubrick of videogames. He is immensely talented and will create a unique vision in all his works - but he is also a man put on a 'can do no wrong' deific pedestal by his audience. In Kubricks case you get fan films like the kaleidoscope of crazy "Room 237" where unbalanced people rant about how continuity errors in arrangements of chairs in a sequence of shots in a scene is really him confessing to faking the moon landing and talking about minotaurs. Because the god king of cinema couldnt make an error, to do so would mean he was a mortal man!
And in Kojimas case there are still people i know that swear mission 51 will unlock when all the nukes are disarmed in FOB's with a religious zeal.

He makes fun experiences, but he didnt want to make metal gear solid 2, let alone every game after that and it shows, this time its just compounded by konami shitting it out before it was finished.

Its fun gameplay, but bittersweet because you always wonder 'what might have been'.

- - - Updated - - -

Major reason why I'm skeptical on Kojima's next game with him saying he wants it to be more open the MGSV. There is open world done right(GTA, Witcher 3) and there is open world done horribly wrong(DAI, Farcry) and Kojima only made the version more on the horribly wrong side of things..

Part of me expects it to be a ruse as he makes "quiet mountain" with del toro, reedus, joosten and ito as rumours and coincidental run ins suggest, but honestly if its legit and he is speaking truthfully for once in a blue moon i expect a snatcher spiritual successor.

[fangless]

Here, it's simple.

MGSV is a good game, but not a good MGS game.


-Characters all feel like generic versions created only within MGSV itself. They don't reflect their previous or future incarnations from other MGS games.
-Story is generic, dealing with misc arms dealers or factories, and well... parasites being the midichlorians of the MGS world.
-Gameplay being interesting as a stand alone non-MGS game, but the adage of "You can approach missions from any way" only stands because each mission is a generic 'kill guy ABC/extract dude XYZ'.
-Plot twist for the sake of a plot twist; does nothing for any other MGS title or the lore in general. I guess is sort of ties up a random plot hole from MG1, which we all were dying to have explained for us...
-"Missions", and the open world. The biggest downer to the game. Great idea for Peace Walker, but awful idea for a standard MGS title. Honestly, if they had stuck with the formula like MGS 1-4 of map segment to map segment, giving us "missions" as the story unfolds such as [Save the President], [Stop Metal Gear] that just dynamically evolve as the plot happens, the game would of been much better off.
-Boss battles. 50/50 on this one. Skulls could of just been regular enemies, but not something we had to replay 3 times. The only interesting fight is Quiet, but even then, we've done the sniper battle thing before. MGS3 probably won't ever be surpassed in terms of interesting boss mechanics, sadly :P
-Mother Base feature should of stayed with Peacewalker. Just like the open world, it was a lot of fluff and 'sounds great on paper' ideas that when you actually try to play it yourself, reveals to you as smoke and mirrors.


I could go on and on. But really, this game was just not up to par with the MGS series, rather, should of just been titled something generic, and sold that way.

[Deleted]

I have to admit that I only played 1 and 2 and the early parts of the one where he's really old, but MGS:TTP is a much, much better game than all of them.

The biggest letdown was the Motherbase though and the way your soldiers "work" for you. I actually expected to be able to call in reinforcements...like actual people that fight, I'm pretty sure they said that this is going to be possible in one of the very early trailers.
Calling in Morpho / Pequod during a fight was actually extremely entertaining.

I liked the artistic style too, the symbols where great but that's something that was always huge in MGS games

[Faroth]

The more I thought on it, the more I liked the story twist because it accomplishes quite a bit in developing how things sort of started to shift with Big Boss and it does resolve the Metal Gear/Metal Gear 2 plot of Big Boss dying/being alive again.

What I like about it is how it does finally shift Big Boss from hero to villain, and hypocrit. He talks about how soldiers are puppets for governments and his whole ideal is to cut those strings, for soldiers to be free and away from the shadow games and the lies their superiors tell them. Yet what has he set up with Phantom Boss? A lie, a shadow game that plays his doppelganger like a puppet while he does his thing. Eventually, he even sends his new recruit, Solid Snake, to infiltrate Outer Heaven and ultimately assassinate his doppelganger. One the one hand, he may have felt Snake would lose, but on the other hand he may have intended him to kill Phantom Boss, thus resulting in him taking full control of the scattered forces, throwing the government off the trail, and establishing Zanzibar Land.

It's also a bit of balance for me, which is completely a personal appreciation.

Solid Snake - Stars in 2 games (MGS, MGS 4) and stars in the intro of MGS2, where people were faked out and play as Raiden for most the game.
Big Boss - Stars in 2 games (MGS3 and Peacewalker) and stars in the intro of MGSV (Ground Zeroes), where people were faked out and play as Phantom Boss for the game.

That said, I think the game does suffer as a MGS game by not having a good flow of narrative as a result of the open world design and lost out on a lot of opportunity for good boss fights. I also feel like Kojima should have focused on the story missions and then added the side missions afterwards so we would at least have the final Metal Gear battle on the Island, though even then, I didn't care quite as much for Phantom Boss vs Li'l Liquid.

[dope_danny]

So i finally got around to playing Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker HD and all of a sudden a lot of the problems MGSV has unrelated to being released unfinished makes sense.

Peace Walker was the original MGS5, but the number was removed during the design period as the direction was so different. Kojima saw kids at the time in japan super into Monster Hunter on the PSP and thought drop in, drop out bite sized gameplay is the future. So we got a Metal Gear solid thats bite sized ops with areas chopped down for fast load times just like Monster hunter, with online and local match making to play co-op, just like Monster Hunter and constant point grinding and weapon upgrading. Again just like Monster Hunter. It even has missions where you fight enemies like Ratholos and jaggi from Monhun.

and then they tried to take all these systems and put them in an open world game. There is a good reason that over 15 years Capcom has not made Monster Hunter an open world game and its very simple: dead air.

I can understand Kojimas thoughts. In the huge, mostly featureless trecks between locations plopped down for missions the player will listen to the tapes right? it avoids the long cutscenes some people hated and allows for players to expand the story at their own pace.

Which might make sense if it wasnt a stealth game and the player defaults to "i need to hear a truck coming up around the bend, so im not going to listen to the tapes right now" which leads to a LOT of riding D horse or simply power jogging around the map not actually playing the game but moving to points where the gameplay proper takes place.

By taking all the successes of Peace Walker and trying to expand on them it only serves to dilute them and ruin what made them work. its why there is no open world monster hunter coming to the west any time soon. Because people want to be playing the game, not walking for ages to get to the gameplay.

My recommendation would simply be to go grab the HD collection and give Peace Walker a whirl. It does the mission and base building of MGSV but in a much better end result.

Plus its just a really fun game unfortunately overlooked by many because Portable Ops was so mediocre.

[Faroth]

Well, the smaller bite sized gameplay of Peace Walker may also have to do with it being a PSP game.

[dope_danny]

Well, the smaller bite sized gameplay of Peace Walker may also have to do with it being a PSP game.

Tell that to Monster Hunter Tri, or the HD version of Peace walker im playing on PS3. Sometimes a system just works one way and not others. Its why things like borderlands still shied away from full open world, freedom doesnt always mean better. Often it just means lacking direction and wasted space/dev time.

[fangless]

Well, the smaller bite sized gameplay of Peace Walker may also have to do with it being a PSP game.

That's what I thought too. I can appreciate PW, but honestly it felt like I was playing some mobile game, not a real Metal Gear. Awful AI (probably to accommodate the originally awful controls), sad 'bosses', the whole R&D thing instead of picking up your guns/items like other games.

I can dig the story and all that, but PW and MGSV just stand out as a departure from the series that we just didn't need.

[tehealadin]

It had its flaws, unfinished, the story wasn't on the same level as the others, but my god it was fun to play, one of the best made games I have ever played.

[Pony Soldier]

I have similar (not as extreme) feelings about MGS 5 as Mass Effect 3. What I'm about to say next is a major spoiler so if you didn't heed OPs warning here's another one.


At the end when it is revealed that you were actually just some random soldier/medic guy it was probably the most disappointing feelings I had since Mass Effect 3. The whole time I was playing the game it was awesome. Here you are as the legendary Snake going around and kicking ass like a ninja Rambo. Then they go and say "Lol no, you're not Snake you're this man. Did you rike it?". So all that badass shit was all done by some random medic guy from Ground Zeroes that you would've thought nothing of. So Snake just goes home and is like "fuck this you deal with it". Was really disappointing and quite annoying everytime I think about it.

Then there's the fact that this game feels half done. The first half of the game was amazing. I had so much fun doing the side missions even despite their repetitiveness. The game play was so fun I actually looked forward to doing them again. Listening to the awesome 80s music made it oh so much more enjoyable too. Dancing With Tears In My Eyes was one of my favorites along with Rebel Yell and Only Time Will Tell. The story missions were fantastic also of course. Then you got to the second half of the game and it was like cut in half like some sort of fucking TV drama show and then all the epicness seems to just fade away. The game went from having story missions with side missions well...on the side to mandatory grinding of of side missions to unlock the story missions. Like they were trying to drag out the story for as long as possible. The game just ran out of juice at this point and became very bland.

Last thing was the fact that before each main mission the game would actually spoil who's going to appear in the mission ruining any sort of surprise along with constantly seeing Hideo as the director. EVERY. FUCKING. MISSION. This was one of the minor issues I had with this game but it was a very annoying one. First time I ever seen a game actually have spoilers within it.

All in all it was generally a great game it just left me feeling betrayed at the end. Like a huge slap in the face or something.

[Deleted]

All in all it was generally a great game it just left me feeling betrayed at the end. Like a huge slap in the ass or something.

I guess the game did a really, really good job then. Consider what happened, what you did, what you thought you are doing.

[Teaon]

the story was unfinished, everyone agrees on that, which resulted in it being bad, which i bet that it isn't bad if kojima had the chance to finish it.


i like the end twist, though everyone was hyped to play the actual big boss, but it does make sense, big boss ( though i love this dude ) is indeed a hypocrite, and i like how miller in the end said to ocelot, "big boss can go to hell" after manipulating him, which explains later why miller was against big boss.

and ocelot is indeed a generic versions created only within MGSV itself, THIS is not the ocelot we have known, NOT at all, a different guy, though i like him, he is just not THE ocelot.

the story needed more cinematics/tapes, and ofcourse to be finished, and not leaving us with unexplained stuff :/

- - - Updated - - -

one more thing

i wanted to play peacewalker, but the moment i heard Hayter voice on Big boss, i immediately turned off the console, i just cannot accept him as Big boss anymore.

Hayter is Solid Snake always has always been, him being the voice of Big boss, is just no to me


only me who feels that way?

[Pony Soldier]

one more thing

i wanted to play peacewalker, but the moment i heard Hayter voice on Big boss, i immediately turned off the console, i just cannot accept him as Big boss anymore.

Hayter is Solid Snake always has always been, him being the voice of Big boss, is just no to me


only me who feels that way?

No definitely not. Kiefer Sutherland is a MUCH better Big Boss than Hayter. I don't think I could look at MGS 3 Snake the same anymore after playing with Kiefer's Big Boss. David Hayter is Solid Snake. Kiefer Sutherland is Big Boss.

[Tech614]

the story was unfinished, everyone agrees on that, which resulted in it being bad, which i bet that it isn't bad if kojima had the chance to finish it.

Yet the game was in development for longer then any MGS game. He had plenty of time to finish it, maybe he should of spent the 5 years finishing the damn story instead of making a useless barren open world with copy pasted fetch quests. Kojima is as much to blame for the final product as Konami is.

[Teaon]

Yet the game was in development for longer then any MGS game. He had plenty of time to finish it, maybe he should of spent the 5 years finishing the damn story instead of making a useless barren open world with copy pasted fetch quests. Kojima is as much to blame for the final product as Konami is.

well as a result, the game is 100+ hours game play, unlike the old mgs's which is like 9 hours with cinematics, 4 hours skipping everything

[Deleted]

Yet the game was in development for longer then any MGS game. He had plenty of time to finish it, maybe he should of spent the 5 years finishing the damn story instead of making a useless barren open world with copy pasted fetch quests. Kojima is as much to blame for the final product as Konami is.

The story was finished, there is more than enough cut game footage.
There is a 20~min long cinematic about the stolen metal gear and kid liquid, which had a really awesome mechanic too it.

[Tech614]

well as a result, the game is 100+ hours game play, unlike the old mgs's which is like 9 hours with cinematics, 4 hours skipping everything

I'll take 15 hours of significance over 10 hours of significance and 90 hours of bloat any day of the week. 9 hours on your part just shows your failed attempt at a point- no MGS game is that short on your first blind run.

MGSV is trash compared to the entire franchise. I don't enjoy Farcry games for a reason and didn't want to play a Far Cry game when buying a MGS game. What is actually MGS about MGSV is GOOD, the problem is that is the vast minority of game content.

- - - Updated - - -

The story was finished, there is more than enough cut game footage.
There is a 20~min long cinematic about the stolen metal gear and kid liquid, which had a really awesome mechanic too it.

Oh look, the guy going to argue semantics.

Being finished on Kojimas note pad is not finished. The game was in development for 5 years, KP couldn't get all the story into the game that's on them. Maybe they shouldn't have focused on a shit amount of bloat trying to attract the Bethesda or Ubisoft gaming fans and the game would have been complete. Maybe they shouldn't have created a useless open world in a game series that didn't need it.

[Pony Soldier]

I guess the game did a really, really good job then. Consider what happened, what you did, what you thought you are doing.

No way. It undermined Snake's image and made him look less badass. He basically ran away into hiding with his tail between his legs. It was like buying a brand new smartphone and when you finally get home to open it up you find out it's some cheap Chinese knockoff.