I'm sure this may come as a surprise for some people.Looking at this game and a few others on this list, I feel I have a serious soft spot for really creative and ambitious games that never got finished and were simply pushed out to make some holiday sale window. MGSV is also just as interesting for all of the drama surrounding it's creation and the firing of Kojima as well as Konami basically pissing off their last really loyal overseas fanbase since the company has a better track record of killing off their franchises than even Capcom or Square-Enix. So yeah, there is a lot of emotions and controversies within the game and surrounding it, but for now, that doesn't really matter. The game itself is good, really good in fact.
The plot is a bit more convoluted than previous MGS games, only because in order to get the most emotional impact from this game, you really need to have played all of the Kojima made Big Boss titles. There are call backs to MGS3, but a lot of the story and drama comes from Peace Walker and Ground Zeroes. This next part is going to be a bit spoilery for people who haven't played some of these entries, so you have been forewarned. After his mission in Russia to kill the Boss, Naked Snake received the title of Big Boss but threw it away and left the U.S. government, despite helping Zero to create an organization to steer the country back into the direction that The Boss wanted the world to be. Disenfranchised with politics and homeland, Snake becomes a mercenary and joins up with Kazuhiro "Master" Miller to form the Militaires Sans Fronteires (Military Without Frontiers) in the Central America area and begins dealing with the proxy wars between the U.S., Russians, and the local countries sadly caught in the middle. He takes on a mission in Costa Rica on the behalf of an obvious Russian spy and a local girl named Paz. Here Snake confronts some serious WarGames type shenanigans when he discovers Huey Emmerich (Otocan's dad) and a bisexual fangirl of The Boss known as Dr. Strangelove are building an A.I. Controlled Metal Gear called Peace Walker on the behalf of the asshole politician that setup the Boss in MGS3. Crap happens, robots are destroyed, Snake finally decides he is walking down a different path than the Boss and finally begins to take on his title as Bog Boss. That Paz girl turns out to be an enemy agent working for Cipher, an intelligence branch of the U.S. government led by Zero, who was trying to frame Snake to force him back into the fold. Paz hijacks Metal Gear Zeke but is taken out by Snake and presumed to be dead.
In Ground Zeroes, Huey Emmerich sets up a UN nuclear inspection of the Militaires Sans Fronteires base in order to get the world governments off their back for having a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, the group finds out that Paz is alive and is detained in a military prison in Cuba that is totally not a thinly disguised Guantanomo Bay expy called Camp Omega. Initially Snake and Kaz were going to ignore her, but Chico, a boy the group picked up in Peace Walker who has a very complicated relationship with Paz, decides to go rescue her and gets captured as well. Well known for being a blather mouth, Snake is forced to infiltrate the camp the night before the inspection where he uncovers that the two have been horribly tortured both physically, mentally, and emotionally by a mysterious man with a disfigured face called Skull Face, who is trying to discover the location of Zero and seems to have a grudge against both him and Snake. While the mission is ultimately successful, it turns out the whole thing, including the UN Inspection, was a ruse by Skull Face and his Cipher unit XOF to destroy the base and assassinate Snake and Kaz. Both survive, but Snake falls into a coma.
Nine years later, Snake has finally waken, and is trying to recuperate in a hospital on a small island in the Mediterranean. His memory and mind are fuzzy due to the shrapnel he took in the explosion that put him in the coma, and he lost his left arm as well. Unfortunately, just as he awakens, Cipher discovers his location and sends a hit squad to kill him, at which point Snake receives help from a mysterious figure named Ishmael who may or not be real. The rest of the opening is quite surreal and cinematic. It may actually be one of the coolest sequences in the franchise history to be honest. Eventually Ishmael disappears and Snake is reunited with Revolver Ocelot who helps Snake get back in shape and updates him on what has been happening for the last nine years. Kaz suffered only minor injuries and in Big Boss's memory, formed Diamond Dogs as his new mercenary company for the two of them with the sole goal of burying Cipher and killing Skull Face. Unfortunately, Kaz has been captured in Afghanistan at the height of the Russian conflict, and the newly titled Venom Snake goes in to rescue him. He encounters the Skulls, a paranormal military unit with superhuman abilities that led to Kaz getting captured and connected to Skull Face. Their search for revenge leads them all across Afghanistan and into the heart of Central Africa as well. The two of them have to deal with the changes they have endured through war and torture as well as the way their hatred and need for revenge has begun to warp their morals.
In a lot of ways, MGSV has a lot in common with two controversial MGS titles: MGS2 and MGS4. Like MGS2, the game is separated by two distinct chapters, in this case Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain, with the first chapter being a routine mission that ends up going out of control and resulting in the supposed death of the protagonist, the second half is a bit more of a surreal experience with many elements leading you to really question what you are seeing and discovering how some inconsequential details in one moments is actually a hint towards the games rather trippy non-ending. Both games also have the controversial ending which seem to only raise more questions and leaves you feeling like the story didn't really answer all of the questions. While some people would argue this is due to the game's troubled development, I feel like the game is too polished to feel totally incomplete and I'm pretty sure this was the planned ending all along. The game redoes a few ideas from MGS2, but I feel like Kojima has learned to do a better job of both getting his point across and while still controversial, I feel its safe to say from the little backlash it got, that is was not quite as controversial as MGS2 for fans.
Like MGS4, Phantom Pain introduces a weird contrived science concept to explain away all of the weird trout in the game. I feel like Kojima was purposely trolling the fans like myself who bitched about MGS4's overuse of Nanomachines to explain away most of the plot. It feels almost a bit more satirical in this game but at least has some interesting elements that lead to some of the game's central themes about language, nationality and global control. Sadly, a lot of it kind of gets lost because we have to have a Metal Gear show up, by which I mean a goddamn Gundam. The other element it shares with MGS4 is retconning what you feel you know about the characters. Certain figures from Peace Walker become much more sinister figures in this game, and it's pretty obvious that Kaz himself has become a much darker figure than any of his previous incarnations, but he's not even the real surprise figure. Other figures get painted into being better people than you think, and if you were the type to get annoyed about the bombshell concerning the origins of the Patriots in MGS4, MGSV does a better job of explaining the whole mess in a better way.
For a game with little in terms of story compared to the plot heavy series, MGSV is surprisingly powerful and more or less well told barring a missing episode concerning the end of Eli's story. Heroes become villains, villains turn out to be well intention extremist, and you'll definitely walk away from the experience with different views about several of the important figures in the MGS story. Yet I applaud it for not being as over the top and as fan servicy as MGS4 was, which had a bad habit of answering questions that didn't seem important and trying to to bring back ignored plot elements and haphazardly turn them into over dramatic plot fodder. The story has its fair share of nonsense, but it hits hard with the feels. Quiet for instance, may be one of my favorite female characters in the series despite her whole situation being a thinly veiled half ass excuse for gratuitous fan service. Yet, her story is pretty powerful when taken together and the ending will leave you a bit emotionally drained. I think my only major gripe with the plot is that some of the audio tapes should have been made into cutscenes. I feel some people would appreciate the ending more, had the Truth Tapes been adapted into actual cutscenes shown along with the normal ending. In fact the audio tapes still kind of bother me. I put up with them in PW because I felt the team was cutting corners to fit the whole game on the PSP, but in PP, it feels more like Kojima just giving a middle finger to fans who hated all the cutscenes and codec scenes. My real issue here is that it's hard for me to multitask, so whenever I needed to listen to the tapes, I would have to set the controller down and focus on it, otherwise I would get distracted if I was doing a mission or maintenance on Mother Base and have to restart the whole damn tape to keep my facts straight. My other gripe is that there are certain story/gameplay sequences that are unrepeatable without erasing your old file and starting a new one.
Of course the crown jewel of the game is actually the gameplay, which is largely the reason it's so high on this list. I still find myself hopping this game back in to play around with it, which is a bit of a testament to the game as I rarely do this with MGS titles since I prefer them as a complete package. In fact one of my gripes with Peace Walker besides the game just not meshing well on the PSP was the "pick up and play" framework of the game, but I feel a lot of this has to do with the restrictive controls and dumbed down level design and enemy A.I. that compensated for the systems short comings standing in the way of making it fun for me. It took the series sixteen years since the leap to 3D to finally do it, but MGSV (and Ground Zeroes) has the most user-friendly interface and control scheme in the franchises history outside of the 2D entries. Switching from different weapons and combat styles is pretty damn seamless and while CQC is still a bit too easy for my taste, it has regained a lot of its options from MGS3 that both MGS4 and Peace Walker had removed, so it feels more meaty and useful.
In a lot of ways, disregarding the games adopting open-world gameplay, the core structure of the game is basically Peace Walker's just finally built for console and with a better control scheme. You still capture enemy soldier to convert to your army, and between the usual stealth missions, the game adapts a building sim, where you need to allot soldiers to their proper units to help build up the Diamond Dogs with researchers to help build and arsenal of new weapons and toys to use on missions, combat units you can send out on missions to get more money and supplies, and other fields to help build a well oiled war machine. It's been improved from the original in small ways but some are much appreciated, I like the fact that you can slightly customize your base and even visit it which gives it a more personal touch than the boring text interface of PW.
One of the biggest additions from PW and the series at large is the introduction of Buddies, special people you can bring along on missions to help you out in various ways. There are only four of them, but they actually have quite the impact on the gameplay. It's pretty amusing to feel like a total badass by getting a perfect score on a difficult mission with the help of D-Dog or Quiet, only to jump into the FOB Online missions and find out you are terrible at stealth because you over-rely on your buddy abilities. D-Horse is the game's best transportation with the ability to travel most terrains unhindered, and most enemies ignore the horse, so travel is pretty easy between side mission zones. D-Dog and Quiet are both pretty overpowered with their abilities to mark most enemy soldier in an area for you and their combat abilities. D-Walker is kind of the odd man out, being a bit too cumbersome for real stealth missions, but becomes a godsend on the missions where you need to take down the Skulls thanks to it's fire power. They bring some interesting dynamics to the game and it's super fun to replay missions with different buddies and load outs.
The open world aspect of the game actually meshes incredibly well with MGS's core design. Yet, it's not terribly surprising because the series greatest strength has always been its open ended approach to levels and bosses, with multiple paths to your goal or multiple ways to beat a boss. The open world design simply allows the player to take it to another level as you can approach enemy bases from multiple directions, yet, MGS doesn't forget it's roots and there are several locations and missions associated with them that have a clear cut purposeful design like classical games in the series past. Of anything, the open world aspect simply makes what could have been the more tedious sections have more variety. One of the biggest contributing factors to all this is that the enemy tactics change to counter yours, which is absolutely brilliant. Do a lot of headshots? Enemies will start wearing helmets. Too many night missions, they all suddenly are sporting fashionable Night vision goggles. Love to CQC people, get ready for a shotun in the face. You can actually do missions which will temporarily prevent enemies from having access to these toold and weapons, but you don't have enough units to wipe out all of them at once, so you have to pick and choose which ones are more of an advantage for them, with the exception of Riot Gear, that should always go.
There are also lots of fun little antics in this game, which is usual for the series. While the plot is pretty damn grim and very light on more lighthearted moments, the game makes up for it with wacky stuff in the gameplay department. Snake has a prosthetic arm in this game, so of course being a Japanese game, there is a Rocket Punch option. You can take down soem of the games hardest bosses with ridiculous methods like using ammo drops called in from Mother Base or even using a water gun to stop the Man on Fire. My personal favorite, and where I felt Konmai seriously dropped the ball with the DLC, is the ability to collect several 80s songs and giving you the ability to play them during missions on your walkmen or even have the Helicopter blair it loudly when it comes in for a kill strike or rescue. Nothing is more hilarious than wiping out an enemy base with A-Ha's Take on Me playing and then killing everyone with a chopper strike while its blaring Europe's the Final Countdown. it's silly and glorious all at once. I only wish Konami would have picked up a few more licensed tracks for it because I would have love to have Girls Just Want ot Have Fun blaring while I'm leveling up my female combat soldiers or the awkward moment of traveling with a car of knocked out soldiers across the African savahhna with the Cars Drive playing.
I haven't gotten to the whole FOB stuff, which has it's fair share of shortcomings, but turned out to be a pretty enjoyable online experience where you can invade another players base and steal their resources and soldiers. I'm not a big fan of multiplayer titles as you can tell by the majority of my list consisting of single player experiences, and I lost my competitve drive years ago, so versus stuff doesn't interest me. Like MGS3 before it, despite my love of the main game, I have not bothered with MGO, like ever. I can still get behind the FOB missions because they offer some quirky challenges you can't get in the main game. Overall, I don't have many complaints against the game itself, except for maybe the lack of thrilling boss battles like in the first three games. I mean it's a vast improvement over Peace Walker's copy paste nonsense, but Man on Fire isn't quite the visual and "oh trout" factor of The Fury, Quiet is a fun sniper duel, but she's not quite as challenging as Sniper Wolf and The End, the Skulls are more annoying than fun to battle, and the games Metal Gear... well smurf that thing, I think it might be my least favorite Metal Gear with the possible excpetion of Peace Walker, but I need to replay that game to see how I feel now.
In fact, that might be one of this games strengths is that while I was pretty lukewarm to Peace Walker, the MGSV Duology has made me pretty interested in replaying the game (with the console port to help smooth over the control issues) and while I still hate the circumstances of Ground Zeroes release and felt it should have been part of MGSV proper instead of being ut out to be an expensive demo, I'm still happy I played through it cause it really made this game feel more impactful. Overall, I feel that MGSV is the ending the series deserved, it askes as many questions as it answers and Kojima returned to his ideals concerning MGS2 in regards of making the player feel like part of the experience and leaving them to figure things out for themselves instead of having to sit them down and try to explain it all. If you haven't checked it out, it's a real gem of a game.
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