LogFAQs > #986625705

#13. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015)
Total Points: 16
List Appearances: 10
First Place Votes: 0
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Writeup provided by ctesjbuvf
This was probably one of the best games Ive ever played. I understand the criticism, but man did I have a blast. Total playtime ended up being 198 hours before the platinum trophy popped. There are a few things keeping it from the greatest game ever, most appear to be a direct result of development time, but it had all the potential to be the best. Ending up writing a lot, so I tried to slit it into some sections.

Gameplay
Theres pretty much nothing to hold against it in this regard. Its as smooth as it gets. While you can play through in pretty much any style, but the game rewards you for being as stealthy as possible with the being taking out enemies in CQC and extracting them because theyll never start having measures against that. They start getting night vision googles if you always infiltrate at night, theyll get helmets if you manage to headshot a lot and theyll get wear mask if you use sleeping gas often.
They open world aspect works very well. Playing through the missions, youll almost always have a very linear path ahead of you, but the places are then connected, and you can roam freely outside of them. The size is also good, its not too overwhelming. Peace Walker began using the structure of the game by selecting missions and side-ops while youre choosing what to develop yourself, but it was in this game that they nailed the aspect. I dont care for online play, but its cool that its there.

Pacing and presentation
I have little to criticize in the actual story, which is probably quite controversial, its more the presentation that has issues in my opinion. There are several storylines to follow, while its mostly all great, the pacing is off sometimes. Most missions arent that important for the storyline and the objectives are often a bit out of the blue with the weve found out this person is important, go extract him seeming like filler. Some of the side-ops are more important for the story, not just the ones that are marked as being that. Its great that side-ops dont have ranking though.

I dont mind repeat missions conceptually, from a gameplay perspective theyre fine, its just an extra challenge to get the broken late game equipment. They do however damage the pacing as well and it seems clear that theyre in place of other parts, which they should not be. You could skip them of course, but you cant just play the primary missions since some of them wont show before youve completed a number of other missions, forcing you to do the repeats (or actually repeating earlier missions).
The other issue is the overuse of cassette tapes. Theyre cool sometimes if you find some important recording and of course finding songs from the time is a cool collectible, but way too much important information is given this way and its the biggest flaw in the game. If they had only had the time to animate all those scenes, I would probably put all the other issues behind it, it hurts the presentation a lot to sit and listen to those things instead. Particularly in the beginning endgame where you get a load of reveals at once and might not even realize youre not getting the information otherwise. Graphics are otherwise so beautiful. When I started Ground Zeroes in 2021 I was blown away about how great that was looking and its literally from 2014.