LogFAQs > #895150890

96. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Snake5555555555)


I have a lot of mixed feelings about MGSV. When it wants to be a really good MGS game, it's capable of being one (The mission inside the quarantine tent being the prime example). It just seems like it doesn't always want to be one. Now there were all sorts of behind the scenes issues between Kojima and Konami that probably undermined the full potential of this game, which is a shame, but it doesn't excuse or change the fact that it's just not as good as the other mainline games in the series. Many people laud MGSV's gameplay, and that's certainly warranted. The action and the controls are as good as they've ever been, and there's no shortage of things to do in this game. I actually did complete every mission in MGSV, which took quite a while. The game gives you plenty of options on how to tackle any given objective, and you can basically play it any way you want. Being able to listen to old '80s songs as you traverse the map is pretty rad. There's tons of other stuff to do, like building up your bases, recruiting for MSF, all the weapon customization and development, but that stuff doesn't really appeal to me much.

Here's the thing though: I don't just play MGS for the gameplay. I play it for the story, too, as well as seeing how Kojima often interweaves the two together. While many of the tapes contained some really cool stuff (the ones you unlock after you beat the game in particular are excellent), I wish they didn't feel so disconnected from the game's story. I'm pretty sure there's more dialogue in those tapes than in the cutscenes. Plus, it'd be so great if we could actually see some of these conversations instead of just hearing them. I get why you do it for something like Peace Walker since it was a PSP game, but MGSV is a AAA+ game with a budget to match. You can do more with it. The execution just feels so botched at times. There are some plotlines and sequences that have potential, but nearly all of them fizzle out before the end and feel anticlimactic or lacking in some way. That's to say nothing of the fact that the game itself is blatantly unfinished.

Metal Gear Solid is also a series noted for its complex characters, but you'd never know it from playing Metal Gear Solid V. I'm not sure how many times I heard Ocelot say, "That's a Soviet soldier" or "So this is raven territory," but it was far too many. It breaks the immersion hearing the exact same lines ad infinitum. In MGS3, I can literally spend an hour on the radio as soon as the game begins without ever getting into repeating conversations, and that's not an exaggeration. In MGSV, you're done with all there is to hear for the entire game via the radio within 10 minutes. Punished "Venom" Snake is woefully underdeveloped, which makes him an apt avatar for this game. Now I'm not like Quinton, who didn't get very far into Metal Gear Solid V before he dropped it altogether. I finished what there was to finish, and I enjoyed myself, but Metal Gear Solid is one of my favorite series, so it's hard not to feel a little disappointed in all the ways it fell short of the standard.

Bonus Question: What is your least favorite Metal Gear Solid game?

That's it for tonight.
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