Metal Gear Solid V is a game with weight and great significance. It has been, up to its release, a clear final hoorah from Kojima and team. It has been years since a game with such significance is accompanied by headlines of a parent company giving a big middle finger to their developers. But then you must consider that both sides are undoubtedly jaded. Konami has reportedly spent 5 years and 80 million dollars on the project, and Kojima and Team are working around the clock to deliver an experience that ultimately makes their mother company more money than it does them, while also trying to remove the credit of the game to whom it is due. Being so close to launch and the biggest project any of them have undertaken, its only natural that tensions would be high.
Still, it takes pressure to make diamonds. Metal Gear Solid 5 has escaped development and has been released with celebration and accolades. There has never been a stealth or action game like it. What it accomplishes in its presentation and in its moment to moment gameplay isn’t just an achievement. It is a milestone for storytelling and for gaming in general. In a few years time September 2015 will be remembered by gamers and the industry as a turning point in the PS4 and Xbox One life cycle, not just for the benchmarks in next generation technology, but for a new standard of greatness in videogames. It is a game that suggests conversation now, as well as a few years from now, when we can fully understand its impact on the medium. Already, MGS5 has soiled the experience of what would otherwise be considered fantastic AAA titles of the holiday season, because there just isn’t any way this experience is going to be topped.
Afghanistan, the game’s first setting, is a beautiful country. For Veteran MGS players, it presents a battlefield that has never been fought on. For newcomers, it's recognizable and accessible. But no matter where you’re coming from, it feels fresh.The mountains block off wide open areas, every one subtly leading to a choke point that becomes an enemy check point or base. No matter where you’re going in Afghanistan, you’re always headed toward action. That’s one of the great accomplishments in MGSV’s design: there is always something happening right in front of you and everything you take away from the enemy becomes something that you can use against them. I can steal a jeep from them and move around the countryside ala GTA. But once I’m done in Afghanistan I can also ship that jeep out and use it back at my base, and then when I return to the field of battle I can re-deploy it.
The last couple of years have been filled with open world games. And here we have yet another. But what MGSV does different is how the open world continuously directs you and then frees you to play the game how you want. As you travel, you will inevitably travel toward the enemy. The game almost MAKES you infiltrate bases. When you arrive at the base, however, the cuffs come off and you’re free to do as you please, whether you want to play this game like a shooter or a stealth/action thriller is entirely up to you, and both choices are going to work out pretty well for you. Perhaps the finest topping on the cake is that the decision to go loud or quiet is often made on the fly, and can change multiple times throughout the mission. What makes that fun is that the game doesn’t punish you for it, it just asks you to improvise.
When you do improvise, you will find a deep, glorious bucket of variety; the kind you can sink your teeth into. Its very reasonable to expect to do every mission in the game two or three times. And since the missions are varied, with wildly different objectives, all taking place at different bases with different variables and obstacles, the gameplay is a virtuous cycle of creativity, improvisation and fun.
There are kinks in the armor. It should be brought up that the game’s portrayal of the “main” female character is adolescent and unamusing. At every chance, the camera focuses on her feminine body, and has a poor excuse for making her walk around in a slim bikini. For a soldier, she has an awful lot of swing in her hips, and the scenes she stars in limit her to being a caged pole dancer. On the battlefield, she is a worthy foe. Off the battlefield, she is a sex symbol. I really wish that in 2015 we could get passed something as simple as this. But every time she comes up, it is a scene with missed potential. For a game that is so skilled at discussing adult topics, seeing Quiet onscreen just brings me back to high school, when my friends and I gawped at anything that had legs.
The disappointment that the character Quiet carries is a similar downer that you’ll encounter when your expectations for the game’s story are dropped into a mud pit. It begins with Hollywood bravado and then evolves into a sort of nuclear-soup; a by-product of something that was supposed to be powerful and threatening but now just takes up space in a warehouse. Sickening as the thought is, Metal Gear Solid 5 won’t be remembered for it’s story, yet it may be remembered as the greatest Metal Gear Solid game.
The Metal Gear Series has always excelled at storytelling-off the wall as they all may have been. Yet in telling their stories, they also sacrificed good design. After all, people may remember MGS2 fondly, but the fact of the matter is that you couldn’t play the game for ten minutes in any capacity before coming across a cut scene that led to an urgent and mandatory objective. Metal Gear Solid 3 forced a stealthy slog through the forest, transitioning to a pause screen where you equipped some new clothing so you could cross a river and then repeat the process after you’ve crossed said river. Metal Gear Solid 4, as much of a masterpiece as that was, was a movie. Period. They were all excellent games, but They were games that pushed you forward. In doing so, they each killed all the motivation of returning to the story for multiple play-throughs.
The Phantom Pain takes a left turn that no one suspected; it finally embraced that fans weren’t interested in watching Snake anymore-they just wanted to play as him. It comes as perhaps the simplest of all video game design decisions, yet the impact that it has had on this game is astonishing. It’s finally fun to PLAY metal gear. “Play” is the perfect word for it too, because once the story is completed and you’re left with nothing but the ambition for growth, the game becomes a playground that you want to return to every Saturday. You know those monkey bars that you swung on all the time? It was fun to just go across them the way they were intended, but on the second week you started skipping bars. On the third week you were hanging upside down, and on the fourth week you started jumping off of them.
Each base in The Phantom Pain will be revisited multiple times, but each time you come back you’re going to do things just a little bit different-just to shake things up. When you do, you’ll find that the gameplay continues to become deeper and more creative than you originally gave it credit for, even 100 hours in.
The good far outweighs the bad. Mostly because the way fans will remember this game as the best in the series has very little to do with the story. It is the finest culmination of the ideas and gameplay innovations that has characterized Metal Gear Solid in the last 30 years. It is the ultimate realization of the tactical/espionage/action gameplay. Maybe it wasn’t what I wanted; But I think what I wanted wasn’t really what I needed. After all, the real story of the Metal Gear Solid saga ended with 4. We all knew it. When the fifth entry was announced, the last thing on our minds was the story. So it was before we ever played it, and so it will be long after we put it down-but that gameplay-man, that was something special.
