Board 8 > Finally finished everything MGSV had to offer (major spoilers)

(+) Yeah! (+)

I replayed the first four games about a year ago and finally got through this one. This was probably one of the best games Ive ever played, just like the other four. 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 way too much, so I tried to split 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.

The 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 and it seems clear that theyre in place of new stuff instead of being an addition, which they should absolutely 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.

Story
For the actual story parts, Ground Zeroes was a great setup to the story, very cool set piece and should have just been part of the actual game instead. Everyone should play that first, it leaves a very strong impression. Heres to You is s strong theme, great that Kojima could use it properly after changing his MGS4 ending idea where it had made perfect sense. Nothing to put against this part.

I love the whole Venom Snake thing. Its cool that it fixes the issue of how Big Boss survives the original metal gear, even if its still weird he survives the second, but its the psychological aspect of it that really hooked me. Im assuming most players figured out that they werent playing as Big Boss pretty quickly. First part that made me consider it was the Big Boss doesnt have a horn, though that ended up being symbolic more than anything. Then theres some of the dialogue, in particular with Ocelot, that seems off. He feels different. When Eli comes along and DNS tests dont match, its basically confirmed because you know its Liquid, but there are still many questions. What I did not figure out was that it was the medic from Ground Zeroes and it made the obvious reveal have the intended cool affect after all. All those little details of it. You think youre designing your character in the beginning and what youre actually doing is deciding how you used to look. The side story with phantom Paz is a lot stronger because its actually the medic fighting that he failed to save her by only finding one bomb. The realization that Venom Snake was actually a decent man and great soldier being corrupted by a nine-year long coma and then basically hypnotized into believing he was someone else. The whole endgame presentation is so strong and sets up the Solid Snake era very nicely. The Man Who Sold The World is perfect for the story and I love that Kojima incorporated it as well as he did. Big

Overall (tl;dr)
I was hooked the whole way through, tension is there when it needs to be, and I never grew the slightest bit tired of the gameplay in the 198 hours I played. The flaws are obvious and frustrating, but the expectations were through the roof, this was still an absolute blast to play through. If this game just had more development time, so it could have more scenes instead of too many cassette tapes, proper conclusions to some character arcs and better flow using new missions instead of repeats - perhaps the missing conclusions could be instead of the repeat missions for a proper flow - then this game would be in serious contention for the greatest game ever made and its hard to forgive Konami from seemingly standing in the way of that. Ultimately, the game ends up as a solid 9/10, but obviously cant be called perfect.

I love the other Metal Gear entries with high passion too. I have a very hard time ranking them. Other than that MGS3 is on top, I might rank them differently from day to day. MGSV will be the same, its not better than MGS3, but other than that it could rank anywhere. Gameplay is probably best, but its also the most difficult to compare to the others. Glad to finally have had the experience.

Definitely neeeeed to play this someday

Did you ever have a problem doing the side objectives? I've had a few very annoying missions when you have to follow someone for a full conversation. And I don't like collecting the rare animals!

It made my last 20 hours of trophy hunting very annoying! But for about 120-130 hours amazing game.

despite (or perhaps because of) all of the weirdness and wonkiness i think mgs has to be my favorite video game series of all time. even when it was eyeroll-worthy it was at least always trying and always evolving

it's so hard to choose a favorite- they all have strengths and weaknesses- but i'm very glad that i started the series with mgs1 back in the early 2000s

even the worst entries in the series were meaningful. i had a blast playing mgs4 even though it was like 20 hours of cutscene and 10 hours of mediocre gameplay. it hit all the right story and nostalgia beats

pjbasis posted...

trophy hunting

stop hurting yourself!

I mostly enjoyed my time with it but the glaringly obvious problems make me never want to play it again, which I'd never say about the other MGS games.

pjbasis posted...

Did you ever have a problem doing the side objectives? I've had a few very annoying missions when you have to follow someone for a full conversation. And I don't like collecting the rare animals!

Those listening mission tasks were not always very fun, no. I often enjoyed the dialogue, but sometimes they glitched, which obviously was annoying. Shamelessly used a guide for the animals I was missing once I was done with everything else, which didn't add up to that much playtime. I don't really mind it being there, because it could be ignored completely if not for trying to 100%.

Leonhart4 posted...

I mostly enjoyed my time with it but the glaringly obvious problems make me never want to play it again, which I'd never say about the other MGS games.

I can see this. Today, I would not really go back to play the first entry for the gameplay, but the whole experience makes it worth it. I probably wouldn't want to play through all this for the whole story because it's very long, but I could see myself wanting to go play some select missions again or just infiltrating some places because the gameplay is that good and at this point I don't think anything in the genre does it better. In this regard, having missions is very nice.

MGS4 deserves better

I was surprised replaying it how little I enjoyed the actual gameplay too. I used to defend it for the engine and the stealth, but it felt annoyingly tedious and punishing my second time through

Now that seems like an unpopular opinion.

Big Boss is one of the greatest video game characters ever.

That on the other hand, I agree with.