At last, this long series has finally come to an end. I started this series because Ground Zeros and The Phantom Pain caught my interest and after 6 months of playing through the entire series, I've finally reached the point I can experience it.
Since I've already gone over a lot of the game in my thoughts so far and in my Ground Zeros write up, this is going to be more along the lines of a summary then a full write up like the others. I'm also going to say right now that I'm not completely finished with the game. I finished chapter 1, which seems to be the end of the main plot and I'm aware of the major plot points from chapter 2. However, I don't foresee the game suddenly becoming radically different for the remainder of the story missions, so I'm gonna go ahead and post my final thoughts.
Of all the the games in this series, MGSV feels like the most mixed of them. On one hand, it has some really excellent gameplay. The FOX engine is incredibly robust and handles both stealth and combat equally well. A lot of the moment to moment gameplay is incredibly fun and for the first time, the series has wide open maps with no loading screens.
Stealth and Combat both feel nicely balanced with plenty of options for both extreme stealth and going loud. Buddies, such the (in)famous Nude/Mute Sniper, DDog the Dog/Wolf and DWalker, a mini-metal gear, are useful for various types of missions and as you take them out on more missions, new abilities are unlocked for them. While only one of them can be out on a mission at time, they can be swapped out as needed to as the situation warrants.
For much of the first/main chapter, the game works fairly well. After the wonderfully taunt setup Ground Zeros provides, the game flash forwards 9 years from 1975 to 1984, when Snake wakes up in a cyprian hospital from a coma, only to be the object of a rather elaborate but thorough assassination attempt. From there, Snake learns that miller has been captured, MSF has been scattered to the winds and the whole world is out to kill him. It's a great setup, but the game seems to lose it's way over time.
There are a number of missions where you're visibly following a trail to try to ferret out CIPHERs plans and connections in order to strike back at them, with a few rather generic missions that are only really justified because, well, you're running a PMC and it's the kind of contract work you can expect.
The biggest issue that the whole thing feels so uneven. The world is huge and seamless but outside of the main missions and some of the more interesting side missions, there's very little worth doing or seeing. A lot of the same locations are reused over and over again. Opening up the 2nd map in africa helps a little but has the exact same problem as the first map in afghanistan. Pretty and vast but shallow and not interesting.
The Soviets and the PF's in Africa don't feel terribly interesting or unique, but rather being different bad guys who speak different languages(which ceases to be meaningful once you've "recruited" translators for mother base). While there's background provided on both, the fact the Soviets committed war crimes and the African PMC's being bastards themselves is kinda glossed over in gameplay, being only mentioned in the audiotapes. The child soldier enemies in Africa are perhaps the best integration into the game itself, but after a while end up being functionally enemies you are not allowed to kill(which means little once you have access to a scoped tranquilizer rifle).
Coming off the "XOF is trying to murder you and you want revenge for 1975" opening, the game seems like it's going to follow through with this, but XOF/CIPHER is almost nowhere to be found for much of the game, except for those rare cases when Skull Face shows up to say a few words before disappearing into the ether again. One time he has Snake at his Mercy and just walks away for his minions to finish off for no reason at all, while other time Snake has the perfect opportunity to cap Skull Face and fails to take it. The rest of the time, there's hints and rumors that XOF is doing a lot of it's dirty work through Proxies, notably PMCs(or in this game, Private Forces/PFs). here's also the occasional visit from the Skulls, a group of Borg/Zombie supersoldier freaks who are difficult to kill but add almost nothing to the story. They just show up, act as minibosses and you either kill them or get the hell away(which is entirely possible to just run away from them long enough in many situations).
It isn't until the end of chapter 1 where you find out their HQ and that's because Huey was finally persuaded to give up their location. Unfortunately, that's about all you get because mission 30, which looks to be a climax against XOF and Skull Face, ends with a 5 minute monologue from the man himself followed by his Metal Gear(which I shall call Snuffalogus because it's real name is even more annoying to remember and pronounce). The mission after that is a fight against snuffalogous and then XOF/Skull Face is more or less dealt with. It all feels so anti-climatic.
There are other plot threads running till that point, but none of them are terribly compelling. The biggest one involves magical parasites that kill people who speak certain languages but can also give people super powers because SCIENCE REASONS! This is built up for quite a while, but it's so hard to take remotely seriously, despite a lot of tapes trying to handwave it that it's hard to care much. Then there's Eli and creepy floating gas mask child, heavily implied to child liquid snake and psycho mantis, who feel like a distraction and a plot device respectively. Eli is also incredibly obnoxious and makes me really wish I could just off the little bastard(I normally abhor the idea of hurting children. I'd make an exception for him). Sure, it would mess up the future timeline, but that also mean the stupid clone arm thing would never happen either.
Along the same lines, there's a theme about language, which ties into the magical parasite plot and acts as a gameplay puzzle at one point but doesn't quite work as well as it should. Skull Face spends about 5 minutes monologuing about it near the end chapter 1 and by that point it's just tedious(and considering Big Boss just lets him rant, it seems like he feels the same way).
It's hard to define exactly what's wrong with the game other then there doesn't seem to have been any real idea of what they wanted to say ro show with this. I mean, the game cost $85 million and took 5 years to make, and yet it feels like they never finished the damn script. It's like they planned a much, much longer game explaining the Chapter 1/Chapter 2 thing, or maybe it was originally planned that MGSV be episodic which each chapter being released and sold separately. It would explain why the ending of the revenge storyline seems to happen all of a sudden with Huey just suddenly deciding to spill his guts, despite never coming across as someone who was good at holding out under interrogation(and being a shitty weasel of a man as well).
And it turns out very little of it matters at all because aside from Miller, nobody seems to really care much about the revenge thing. Big Boss doesn't bother to say much at all and Ocelot seems like he has other things on his mind. Skull face pretty much says that CIPHER will wipe all of this from the records, which apparently explains why XOF, the Parasites or a lot of this other stuff is never mentioned in any of the other games, despite this game being almost smack dab in the middle of the timeline. Even Mother base apparently just ceases to exist later on, since by canon Big Boss will have his Main Bases at Outer Heaven in South Africa and later Zanzibarland in Central Asia respectively.
Then there's the elephant in the room, being that the character you play 'Big Boss" is actually the medic from the helicopter in Ground Zeros, surgically altered and brainwashed to pass as Big Boss and draw attention away from the real Big Boss. I don't really mind it the twist, since Big Boss is just as much about his reputation then his deeds(and Venom pulls off some amazing shit as well). The real issue is Venom doesn't seem to get to do much in the actual plot. He's often there to witness Miller and Ocelot doing stuff, and the lack of commentary is sorely missed. I mean, I guess it's supposed to make sense that since Venom is a manufactured Big Boss, he wouldn't be the same as the real one, but it also means he doesn't get any real development of his own since he can't fall back the development from Snake Eater and Peace Walker, and thus ends up being just as much as of an empty shell of a bad guy as the villian he becomes in Metal Gear. Like everything else, it feels so unsatisfying and a bit of a wasted opportunity.
This entire game, really, feels like that. Essentially, when it's all said and done, MGSV: The Phantom Pain is basically a big Budget remake of Peace Walker. The gameplay is significantly improved, but the framework is the same. However, for everything else, it feels like TPP borrows a lot from MGS4, from good looking cutscenes that don't really say a whole lot, to a heavy reliance on magical nanomachines/parasites as a plot device. Whereas Peace Walker had a very tight and grounded plot(except for a giant AI tank with the mind of the Boss), TPP feels like it goes on for quite a while without revolving much of anything. And while both games have a final chapter with a lot of filler, Peace Walker made it explicit that the main plot was pretty much done by the time the final chapter started, whereas TPP has lingering plot threads all over the place.
Skull Face's plot(in addition to killing off the english language because world unity?) involves making sure everyone has metal gears/nuclear weapons which would mess up the balance of power("Make the superpowers powerless") which feels like a retread of the same theme pretty much every other game in the series has done at this point. There's something also about being able to turn the nukes on and off at will which sounds suspiciously like the Nanomachine/Guns of the Patriot plot from MGS4(and makes even less sense).
What makes it ever worse, despite the fact the True ending of MGSV connects directly back to Metal Gear, completing the circle, it doesn't really accomplish anything as far as the lore is concerned. It purports to show Snake's journey from Hero to villain, but Peace Walker pretty much already did that, going from "The soldier who saved his world and walked away from his country" at the end of Snake Eater to "The man who would be called Big Boss with a Nuclear Equipped Private Army and a willingness to employ child soldiers" at the end of Peace Walker. There's a couple extra points TPP shows but almost everything else are similar plot points to the previous game, except without the character development.
I'm also annoyed that for all the characters from other games who are in this game, almost all of them feel off. Miller went from being a Snakes rather good natured business and heterosexual life partner to being a humorless jerkass obsessed with revenge. Huey lost any traits that would make him remotely likable, instead being a cowardly traitor who blames everyone else for his own failings. Ocelot is reasonable enough, but that's hard to square with the fact this is the guy who, 20 years prior was juggling revolvers for impromptu Russian Roulette games and 20 years in the future will be attaching liquids arm to his own because reasons(Skull Face apparently took the GIANT HAM duty for this game). If you hadn't played any games in the series before this, you'd probably wonder why you're supposed to care about them. If you had played other games, you'd wonder what happened to all these characters between games to make them so unlikable.
It's really hard to shake the feeling that while you need to understand Peace Walker to appreciate Ground Zeros and to some extent, the first two Metal Gear games, you don't really miss out of much if you skip out on MGSV, since you're ultimately playing the Big Boss who had no development at all, you're not building Outer Heaven from MG and pretty much everything that happens is never referenced again(unless you really cared so much about why Eli hates Big Boss so much).
In the end, it's rather sad that the final game in the Metal Gear series, with such potential, sends up being so unsatisfying. And on that note, my long journey through this series comes to an end.
I do plan on one final post in this thread before it's done, where I rate the series from best to worst as well as briefly go over the entire series now that it's all over and done with.
