At time of writing it is September 8th 2015,
exactly one week after Metal Gear Solid
V: The Phantom Pain. I feel it is necessary to declare that writing
anything at this time on a game of this scale is utterly pointless.
For Metal Gear fans this will surely be remembered as a
bizarre and controversial addition to the series.
For the type of person who has a ranked list of the Assassin’s Creed games from best to
worst in their head this will be declared “the best one” and perhaps even “one
of the best games EVER (bro)”.
For everyone else; Metal
Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a game that got perfect or close to
perfect scores from every single person who is paid to review videogames. I
won’t lie, the initial critical response to MGSV is nothing short of embarrassing,
and I expected nothing else. Most review scores make more sense when you
consider them to be grades based on how well the game in question syncs up with
its own marketing. For example:
Metal Gear Solid V:
The Phantom Pain is the newest addition to a long running series that has a
lot of fans and it also features returning characters. It’s an “open world
stealth game”, and the open world is big and has lots of stuff to do in it, and
the stealth gameplay basically works and there’s TONS of content that utilises
it. On top of that it has a heck of a lot of graphics in it, like at least 12
or 13, and a STORY.
All boxes are ticked, of course the game gets perfect 10s.
As a bonus, something on the scale of MGSV has so much stuff in it that every
single sentence in a 1500-2000 word review can be dedicated to explaining a
different feature that the game has. There you have a giant checklist of things
that back up your perfect score without having to actually engage with or challenge
the game whatsoever.
But hey ho, we’re not here to complain about reviews, as
much as I think there’s serious problems with the current psychology of them
they’re more of a symptom than a cause. The point is we’re yet to escape the
chokehold that MGSV hype has on the current discourse. The reviewers say “yes”,
the consumers say “yes”, the Metal Gear fans says “uh, I don’t know what to
think yet…maybe”.
Ultimately Metal Gear
Solid V: The Phantom Pain is an absurdly huge entry into a nearly
30-year-old franchise; an extremely complicated franchise that means a lot to
people for many different reasons. It’s a game dense with thematic, literary
and mechanic elements layered with a near implausible amount of stuff. It’s going to be impossible for
any one person to tackle this game so soon into its lifespan on a level
significantly higher than the reviewers who threw 10s at it and ran away
screaming.
On the other hand, we live in the online age of instant
gratification where any old jerk can throw their opinion in the wind and have
it slam into at least one poor soul’s windshield. This particular jerk
currently doesn’t have a working internet connection and can’t post cryptic
non-spoiler thoughts on Twitter, and I did already pay £10.99 to own this
ridiculous domain name for two years, maybe as well make some memories while
we’re here!
So here we go, Metal
Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. It’s big, it’s sort of brilliant and it’s
sort of an abomination. It might end up being a videogame that is essential for
everyone to play, but only for the saddest reasons imaginable.
Metal Gear Soulid
Is anyone else weirded out by the fact that Metal Gear Solid in general is
celebrated as a “stealth” series?
The series is often talked about and featured on “best
stealth game” lists, dudes who don’t like it bash it on the grounds that “the
stealth actually sucks you NOOBS”, people suckered in by the endless parade of
perfect review scores for The Phantom
Pain tweet things like “should I get MGSV? I haven’t played any of the
others because I don’t like stealth games!”
Maybe it’s because the original Metal Gear is credited for inventing the stealth genre (this isn't true).
Maybe it’s because the original Metal Gear Solid is credited as the most influential 3D stealth
game (this also isn't true).
I replayed the original Metal
Gear Solid earlier this year and it blew my mind how little stealth there
is in that game at all. Seriously, at
least 80% of it is cutscenes, set pieces and boss fights, and most of what’s
left is backtracking through the same areas you know inside and out. Metal Gear Solid 2 had a little more
thought in that department, but quickly turned into a game of “find the radar
map for this area as soon as possible” and then became just as trivial. Metal Gear Solid 3 actually tried to be
a stealth game and slammed its fat wallet bursting with innovation on the
counter with the camouflage system, but this mostly served to slow the game
down and the separation of areas and checkpoint made it easy to run and gun
through most of it. Metal Gear Solid 4 pretended
to be a stealth game for about 5 hours then broke down into the scripted
sequence we all secretly want these games to be.
I know there are people who take pride in beating these
games over and over again and getting every rank, including the one for never
being seen ever or setting off an alert. Quite frankly, those people terrify
me, and their time would probably be better served if it were dedicated to
learning video poker or pachinko, they might get something out of that.
Metal Gear Solid as
a series is a bizarre yet wonderful mix of earnest attempts at tackling
military and geopolitical themes with complete anime nonsense. Its plot is the
lowest possible tier of overcomplicated incoherent garbage that falls apart the
second you think about any of it, but its characters provide a fascinating
mythos that could be potentially explored and re-explored forever. Metal Gear Solid 3 contains the single
greatest moment in interactive storytelling EVER, where the ludic and non-ludic
elements get sewn together beautifully in a way that perfects Telltale’s The Walking Dead method of storytelling
before it was even invented. On the other hand, Metal Gear Solid 4 contains a mechanic where you can pause the game
during boss battles to magically buy guns from a man with a pet monkey who
wanders around in a diaper drinking a can of coke.
All of this is just a portion of the stuff that makes up
“Metal Gear”, there’s a lot to be said for the series both positive and
negative, but no one can deny it’s got some god
damn fire in its belly. Yet some people want to celebrate the game as a
classic based on the parts where you hide in a locker for 30 seconds waiting
for the guy to walk away so you can go to the place to trigger the next
cutscene?
Well good news jerks, whoever you are and if you really
exist, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom
Pain is all stealth all the time. There are now hundreds of stealth
missions for you to sneak your way through where you can Play It Your Way™ ,
even travelling through the open world involves taking paths to avoid enemy
outposts, and what few boss battles there are all involve some form of hiding
where most Metal Gear bosses of the
past were straight up action.
I’ll briefly touch on what I think of the stealth
mechanically I suppose; it’s okay. It’s certainly “good enough” for whatever
that’s worth. There’s a ton of good design into all the enemy outposts and on
missions there’s obviously been a lot of conscious thought put into letting the
player tackle things however they want to, even going so far as to have
changing guard posts for day and night essentially offering the player a choice
of level design. There’s a decent sense of being able to figure out when you’re
visible or not and your spatial relation to the guards…as long as you have them
marked on your radar first which gives you incentive to scout out the situation
before making your approach. It works well at first and feels like a natural
evolution of the “find the computer to unlock your radar” idea from Metal Gear Solid 2, although I have to
admit when I got more used to the game I completely stopped bothering with it.
The enemy AI is still extremely “gamey” and in general still feels like Metal
Gear as opposed to anything resembling realism. “Whose footprints are these”
might have blown minds back in 1998, but guards noticing a choked out colleague
collapsing to the ground but not the choker still standing directly behind them
is too silly to not be funny in 2015. What’s less funny is the kind of bad slow
motion mechanics that are incorporated whenever Snake gets seen or seriously
injured. I say “kind of bad”, they’re perfectly functional, but there’s
something off with a stealth game when the best strategy involved seems to be
getting seen on purpose so the slowdown gives you a free headshot with the tranquillizer dart before the alert goes off. Incidentally, there are some
“EXTREME” versions of missions later into the game where this mechanic is
removed, and there you start to gain an appreciation of how slow, frustrating
and not fun The Phantom Pain would
have turned out to be if it didn't have this cop out built into it.
MGSV does have the best stealth of the series so far, but
again I don’t really play these games for the stealth in the first place so
it’s not a deal maker. This is another part of what is so frustrating about the
reviews for this game, because the question of “is the stealth good this time?” isn't as important as “what has Metal
Gear lost in its ambition for stealth?”
The Open Road
Metal Gear Solid V has
gone all in on being open world, and it’s gone in as hard as you could possibly
imagine.
There’s two huge maps to explore; a desert in Afghanistan
and a jungle in Africa. There’s also a disgustingly and pointlessly huge hub
world called Mother Base that you have to manage, build and gather resources
for as you play. There’s a ludicrous amount of weapons and items to that you
have to order to be developed, despite constantly developing weapons as often
as I possibly could and playing the game for 60 hours I couldn’t ever get the
amount of items to develop to drop below the “99” maximum. This is kind of cool
because every Metal Gear Solid has
contained some mechanical strangeness where you’re given a whole bunch of stuff
to play around with and perhaps find awesome situational uses for, but there’s
just so much here that you barely
know where to start. Every time you complete a couple of side quests the game
immediately replaces them with incredibly similar brand new ones. While you’re
managing all of this in your “Aerial Command Center” the game taunts you by
pasting your “Overall Completion” score on the screen.
At time of writing my overall completion is 51%, if you find
that unimpressive you probably haven’t played the game yet (hey thanks for
reading, watch out for the SPOILERS on the way soon!) It's possible there's major events and scenes in this game I've yet to see as I haven't completed all the EXTREME remixes of past missions and I have no intention to either as this game has taken away enough of my life.
“Gathering resources” for your Mother Base also including
gathering staff, which you do by extracting soldiers you defeat in battle. The
idea of “extracting” enemy soldiers (via knocking them out and sending them
back to base by strapping a balloon to them which you’ve probably seen some
hilarious gifs of) is a bizarre method of deterring a player from killing
enemies, but regardless of whether you kill or kidnap you’re still taking
ownership of someone else’s life. All the soldiers who get sent to Mother Base
also have names and can be assigned roles via the “Staff Management” menu.
There’s no room for arguments about abstraction or metaphors here. You are
literally kidnapping the soldiers you fight in the field, they are “convinced”
to join Mother Base (considering the game contains several interrogation and
torture scenes the word “convinced” is a little sketch) and then they work for
you, inspired by the legend that is BIG BOSS.
I’m sure thinkpieces are on the way if they’ve haven’t
already arrived about how Mother Base is an allegory for capitalism and the
game thematically and mechanically is about constantly wanting MORE. I’m not
going to get deep into that here, since in this time of reflection on MGSV as a
recent thing I’m more interested in overlooking it as a complete work. There’s
no doubt that this game is deliberately designed to be exhausting, stretching
out key plot moments and cutscenes with hours of faffing around in the field
and doing what some people would describe as literal work as you manage your
base navigating through layers of menus. It almost broke me, there was a time
where the story was moving so slowly and Metal
Gear felt so far away that my 14% completion rate staring back at me was
cause for despair.
Not just that but everything is so slow. The game insists that you hop back and forth between the
field and Mother Base and waiting for helicopters to pick you up and drop you
off would be a bathroom break moment every single time if the game didn’t force
you to hit the X button to continue from the loading screen. Travelling across
the open world via horse or vehicle always feels slightly longer than you want
it to be, and Afghanistan especially seems to always have a huge mountain
blocking you from where you want to go so you have to constantly consult the
map to work your way around it. Ammo and weapons drops involve waiting,
dispatching new buddies involve waiting, developing new weapons and bases can
take literal real world hours. Hell, just the fact the core mechanic for
passing missions is stealth involves a lot of waiting in itself.
There’s a part in the story where an epidemic with unknown
symptoms breaks out across the staff at Mother Base, and you’re told you should
send anyone to be quarantined who shows any potential signs. Of course, later
on its revealed there are no clear symptoms whatsoever and trying to determine
who was infected was a pointless exercise, but it’s thrown in there to force
you to look through all your staff and consume the information and be taken
aback by how much stuff you’re supposed to be monitoring and in charge of.
Between the interface, and the sheer amount of missions of
content, and the constant waiting MGSV is trying to overwhelm you
with its sheer size.
Despite there being so much stuff it all feels weirdly
empty. I got a feel and familiarity with specific enemy outposts but not the
terrain itself, basically both Afghanistan and Africa feel like a bunch of
disjointed videogame levels floating in a sandy/swampy void that I have to constantly
travel through if I want to do anything. The game’s beautiful but I don’t enjoy
exploring or hanging out in it, the part of my brain that will happily go
hiking by accident in Grand Theft Auto V for
hours is constantly numbed by the fact there’s always so much work to do and I have to get there now. It’s the kind of game
where after a while I start playing it for the sake of it and start to feel
numb, and that’s when the TV volume goes off and the podcasts and headphones go
on. I cannot begin to explain how much I can’t believe I just wrote that last
sentence about a METAL GEAR game.
*FROM HERE ON OUT THE
SPOILERS ARE GOING TO BE COMING IN HOT AND HEAVY, THIS NEXT LITTLE PART IS
ABOUT A MAIN CAMPAIGN MISSION, SPECIFICALLY EPISODE 18, THE SECTION AFTER THAT
WILL REVEAL HUGE PLOT DETAILS ABOUT SOME MAIN CHARACTERS. THEN THE SECTION
AFTER THAT WILL LITERALLY RUIN THE ENTIRE GAME AND YOU SHOULD NOT EVEN VAGUELY
GLANCE AT IT IF YOU HAVE NOT BEAT THE PHANTOM PAIN YET
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED*
We could talk about how much the jump to open world causes a
shift in soul that threatens to burn MGSV from the inside out for hours, but
there’s one mission in particular that sums up for me how the change to “open
world Play It Your Way™” is openly toxic to Metal
Gear.
In Chapter 18 you are given a relatively simple mission
objective; eliminate six targets for a client in two locations. You’re only
given one of these locations immediately, you go into the enemy camp, identify
which one of the guards is the target, then you either kill him or extract him
to Mother Base. I chose the latter because 1) I want to extract everyone I can
for the perks and 2) I don’t interpret Big Boss as someone who would kill
needlessly.
After you've made your choice the game reveals your second
location, and it’s immediately weird that there would be one target in one
location as a guard, and five targets in the second location. Anyway, you head
over to the second location, it’s a huge dome but the guards are relatively
spread out so it’s not too tough. Personally I went around the edge of the camp
and cleared out/extracted everyone I could find methodically, almost all the
guards were gone by the time I got to the targets.
That’s went the game gives you the gut punch, the “targets”
are five child soldiers who are currently prisoners. Snake points a gun at the
children, they reach through the bars clutching diamonds, offering them in
exchange for their lives. Miller screams at Snake through the radio to do the
job, Snake fires with the camera turned away from the children, then turning
once again to reveal he shot a bucket to make noise for a recording that could
be sent to the client to convince them the job was done. Snake chooses to save
the children.
That’s all well and good, but if you recall, on my
playthrough I chose to extract the other target who was an enemy guard. Once I
did that Miller called me up on the radio to tell me that he trusts my decision
to extract rather than exterminate. With that in mind, why in god’s name was
Miller screaming at Snake to murder children? There’s lots of cases where
Snake/me would choose to interpret a “job” differently and Miller would lie to
the client, what’s got him so hot for child murder all of a sudden?
It gets weirder though, one of the children is injured and
Snake is forced to carry them while the other run ahead. The children have a
set AI path but they will stop or go at Snake’s request. My head is steaming
with rage as the children run out of their cage to the left for their set
piece, as opposed to the right where I so meticulously cleared out the entire
base. We could walk out the front door.
What follows is a transparent use of level design, the kids
run straight for a rock, which clearly leads to a bunch of other rocks in a
path that coils around and zig zags around some enemy guards. Clearly you’re
opposed to give the kids commands to navigate them around these guards. I knew
that, but on the other hand, my brain is in open world Play It Your Way™ mode,
so I opted to tell the kids to wait, put the sick kid down with them and took
out the guards first. Now in this entirely cleared out area, the kids continued
to run across their scripted AI path, including a part where they stumble over
a couple of burned out corpses. I’m not going to lie, it’s pretty hilarious to
watch animated cartoon zig zag their way around an imaginary threat only to
fall into a pile of their burned up friends. (I swear I’m not a psychopath, I
just consider child soldiers stumbling into burned up bodies as an emotional
moment to be extremely manipulative and cheap so I enjoy the fact I
accidentally ruined the attempt).
Don’t you judge me, it’s not my fault, these kinds of sequences where a very specific thing
happens in response to a very specific threat do not work once you give the
player the tools to neutralise them and put them in the mindset to do it. Also,
it’s a really bad and frustrating escort mission in general, I understand that
kids would be scared and perhaps freak out in a tense situation, but on my
playthrough all they ever did was run from complete safety directly into a man
with a gun for no reason. There’s
already at least one article on the internet arguing this level is brilliant
and “one of Metal Gear’s finest
moments”. Maybe it is brilliant if it actually works, but it’s not going to
work for a lot of players because MGSV’s structure undermines its attempts to
build a memorable interactive moment.
Quiet, Skull Face and
Characters You Actually Care About
Going into Metal Gear
Solid V: The Phantom Pain the universally agreed “most worrying part” of it
was going to be Quiet; the horrifically designed, completely silent, basically naked
female sniper. Kojima talked some smack in interviews about how people were too
quick to judge her, and that he was going to make us care about her. I think
it’s fair to say her design is somewhat deliberately antagonistic, an attempt
to score some pre-release heat and backlash so Kojima could prove some kind of
point about something once the game was actually released.
Well let’s go ahead and drop what the REVELATIONS are about
Quiet, bearing in mind that my save file is still at 51% so it’s possible that
there’s some scenes I haven’t seen even though I'm reasonably sure the “plot”
of this game is wrapped up now. Either way, here’s what I understand about her;
she can’t speak because she’s infected with vocal cord parasites that will
breed and spread an epidemic through Mother Base if she talks in English (put
your hand down we don’t have time to explain it (I KNOW that doesn’t make any
sense don’t worry about it (please stop screaming at me))) and she can’t wear
clothes because she breathes through her skin and she would suffocate.
Um.
Mr Kojima, have you got a second? Come over here I have a
couple of feedback notes for you:
1) Your characters are fictional.
2) We, as the audience, understand that your
characters are fictional.
3) The characters you create are, to some extent, a
product of how you see the world.
With that in mind, I'm not entirely sure what you were
trying to prove by thinking backwards to see how you could narratively justify
a character design like Quiet. Taking a character and working backwards is
honestly pretty easy, it’s a well-known improvisational exercise, so it’s hard
to see what your point was supposed to be. Your explanations don’t cover why
Quiet refuses to communicate in any other fashion, or why she has little to no
ability to express any personality whatsoever, nor why she seems to
deliberately style herself as some kind of military themed stripper.
You can try and explain Quiet as some kind of backwards
counter argument against people crying “sexist” against the depiction of female
characters in videogames, but that would imply Kojima doesn't understand or
care that those kinds of arguments are more about the industry that produces
the characters than the characters themselves. Regardless, there’s no escaping
the mental image I have of some poor character designer keeping held back in
the Konami employee work cages with Kojima anxiously jittering behind them
whispering in their ear “dude…*inhales*…the tits need to be like…15 per cent
bigger…”
Let’s just say that the fact Kojima thought he was making
some kind of subversive point about characters and people judgments of them
with Quiet, combined with his already not great track record with female
characters, has filtered him in my mind as one of those people who were bursting with volatile rage at Polygon’s 7.5 out of 10 review for Bayonetta 2.
That’s not to say you can’t enjoy Quiet as a character, I don’t
think there’s much to her but she does a few cool things and has one or two
character moments that could make you care about her. She’s just not exactly a
high point for the series. Then again, she’s probably more interesting than the
villain of this game, Skull Face.
I'm probably horrifically offending someone here but Skull
Face might be the least interesting Metal
Gear villain ever. The Phantom Pain is
weirdly honest about it too, when Skull Face’s plan fails he has a line of
dialogue referring to how he’ll be deleted from history by Cipher, as if the
game is admitting that it’s a midquel set in a bit of the timeline when not
that much of interest happens and it made up a new villain to keep things
together. His backstory is okay I suppose, but he doesn't feel like he belongs,
there’s not a single thing about him where you think “maybe this guy was
planned to be part of the story all along”.
The parade of villains and adversaries brought out for The Phantom Pain seem to be a deliberate
cop out. Quiet doesn't speak, Skull Face isn't interesting, and the rest of the cast contains a 12 year old Liquid Snake, the rotting flesh of Volgin from Metal Gear Solid 3 walking around as a
“The Man On Fire” and an early crappy barely operational version of Metal Gear
Rex both of which are controlled by a young Psycho Mantis from the first Metal Gear Solid. It feels like a joke
at the expense of the player, as if Kojima is saying “you REALLY still want
another Metal Gear after MGS4 where
we tied up every conceivable loose end possible? Okay, here’s what you get!”
And what we got was the ghost of Metal
Gear Solid 3, two made up boring characters and the villains from Metal Gear Solid appearing as children.
The Kojima Moment
It’s worth pointing out at this point that I don’t hate this
game.
However, I do feel somewhat detached from it, as it barely
feels like a Metal Gear game.
I'm not a fan of David Hayter personally, I agree his voice
is “iconic” but it’s mostly iconic due to him performing every single line with
the exact same inflections (slightly
growly gargled voice, with an extra bit of growling for the last 2 or 3
syllables). Still, it’s bizarre to see him gone and replaced with Kiefer
Sutherland, especially when Kiefer Sutherland isn't actually much better. I'm uncertain
whether the change of voice actor was a purposeful attempt to distance us from
Snake since the voice actor went unchanged in the Japanese version.
However, it is off putting how little Snake talks in this
game. I’m in the camp of people who think Metal
Gear cutscenes do often go on a little too long for their own good and it
would be nice if Kojima had an editor (or at least a better one). Still, I couldn't stop noticing how many scenes would play out with Snake just standing
there and doing nothing. In the late game scene where Snake finally confronts
Skull Face, he gets escorted along to visit the Metal Gear, where Skull Face
sits opposite him in a Jeep and explains the plot of the game to him. Once they
arrive the Metal Gear is activated by babby Psycho Mantis and starts attacking
everyone, and in the entirety of these scenes Snake does not say a god damn word.
The cinematic language of Metal Gear is completely changed too, with the pretense to emulate
movies replaced with a TV show “episodic” format and a moving camera so
everything plays out as one long shot. Every mission has opening and closing
credits, which list all the characters that appear under “starring” (which
actually spoils a bunch of missions). It’s a completely different feel, and it
created some sad moments when every now and then I would hear the infamous
exclamation mark alert sound and be reminded that YES this is a Metal Gear game.
I played this game for 60 hours and Revolver Ocelot twirled
his gun once, and it was a little baby
twirl that lasted about 2 seconds, heck I
could have twirled a gun like that.
Of course, this is all setting up the KOJIMA MOMENT, which
is something that’s losing its power a little since I go into all of the
Kojima-directed games expecting one now. Yes, the attempts to exhaust and
overwhelm the player, the dull filler villains and the disconnect from Metal Gear were all absolutely
deliberate.
*SERIOUSLY I KNOW
THERE’S ALREADY BEEN A COUPLE OF SPOILER WARNINGS BUT THIS IS THE BIG ONE, YOU
ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT READ THIS NEXT PART IF YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED EPISODE 46.
OKAY? OKAY.*
The Phantom Pain kicks
off with what Jackson Tyler accurately describes as a Dead Space level. Snake wakes up from his coma nine years after the
events of Ground Zeroes (which blows
by the way). After having his condition and situation explained to him the
doctor insists that plastic surgery must be made to hide Snake’s identity so
that he can leave alive. The game allows you to make an avatar, a name and a
date of birth, but after you’ve done that the doctor is assassinated and MGSV
tells you “NOPE! You’re Snake DEAL WITH IT” (although it later gives you the
option to dispatch as other characters if you feel like it).
From there a tightly scripted sequence of events plays out
as a weak recently woken up Snake is helped out of the hospital being stormed
by soldiers by his neighbouring patient whose face is concealed by bandages. A
whole bunch of action scenes and murder play out as Snake regains strength and
you’re introduced to The Man of Fire and mini-Mantis. Snake and the bandaged
man appear to escape, but their vehicle is attacked and the man in the bandages
appears to have been killed as Revolver Ocelot extracts Snake from the
wreckage.
About 50 hours later, after Skull Face is dead, the dramatic
“We are Diamond Dogs” scene, Liquid has escaped with the Metal Gear and
Otacon’s dad is floating on a raft through the ocean, the game bumbles around
for a little bit offering you more side missions and a few remixes of missions
you’ve already completed albeit on a much harder difficulty. Then your mission
list will be updated with “Episode 46 – TRUTH: The Man Who Sold The World”
where you replay the first mission in the hospital, albeit with some minor
changes:
1) When the doctor shows the patient his face in
the mirror, you don’t see Snake looking back at himself, but instead your
created avatar from the start of the game
2) You’re headed a photo will your name and date of
birth printed on it, the doctor moves his finger to reveal your created avatar
starting next to Snake and Miller
3) At the end of the sequence, the bandaged man has
recovered from the crash and is completely fine, and is having a conversation
with Ocelot
4) The man is revealed to be the true Big Boss, with
the Snake in the crash the one selected to be his replacement.
There you go, there’s the gut punch you waited 50 hours for,
you were never Snake, you were never the true Big Boss. The real Big
Boss was out somewhere else doing cool stuff while you took up all his odd
jobs. In one serve the game pulls out some hard hitting commentary on the
sidequest spewing “open world” game. When you insist on making your own story
in a videogame you take away the creator’s ability to give you one. You cannot
be the real Big Boss you can only be an imitator, the guy who stumbles around a
map following waypoints to clear out minefields while the real thing is off
having real adventures. The game was meant to wear you down, then instead of
giving you an ending it takes away the beginning. The game lays it all out for
you; this wasn't a story worth telling, not one worthy of Big Boss anyway.
It’s worth pointing out that the reveal isn't done in a
flashback or a quick scene, the game forces you to replay the entirety of the
incredibly scripted opening which with the exclusion of some minor changes at
the beginning and the end is exactly
the same. The game wants it to sink it that yes, this is how it really was,
this is how is always was, you were never
Big Boss, and Big Boss is still cooler than you.
After Skull Face is defeated and the Diamond Dogs have got
their revenge, the game keeps stumbling on incoherently and without
destination, as Miller screams at Snake “we need to be bigger! We need more men!”
In the end, Miller finds out the truth too, the real Big Boss has abandoned him
to chase his own dream. Miller wanted more and more, and in the end he was left
with nothing, mirroring the player experience.
They missed an opportunity to have the real Big Boss voiced
by David Hayter in his one scene where he pulls out a cigar (the fake Big Boss
smokes e-cigarettes) and rides off on a motorcycle with a smirk in what is
designed to be the coolest possible image. Then again, a lot of people were
predicting they would pull something like that so maybe they felt that would be
too obvious.
It really is admirable how much faith Metal Gear Solid has always had in its franchise player. Metal Gear Solid 2 knew taking away the
ability to play as Snake would frustrate the player, Metal Gear Solid 3 knew a game about Snake’s predecessor becoming
the world’s greatest soldier would work because that’s what we want him to be, and Metal Gear Solid 4 knew tying the series’ climax into the
unavoidable demise of Snake would give the climax the proper weight (even if it
was too scared to actually pull the trigger). Now with Metal Gear Solid V, we are given so much Snake we can barely take
any more, then it takes it all away so all our work was for nothing.
It’s calculated, it’s confident, it’s kind of brilliant, it’s
also completely, miserably pointless.
Here’s the thing, I'm not going to say I “called” the ending
because I didn't, but I caught on to the joke pretty dang fast though. That “Overall
Completion” prompt on the screen kept taunting me, and all I could think about
it how much I don’t like this kind of game, and how much I wish Metal Gear Solid wasn't this kind of
game. Here’s the thing Mr. Kojima, I already agreed with you on open world
games before I played The Phantom Pain, and
I liked you because I thought you were different. As brilliant as your game
occasionally is, you've put me through another 50 hour triple-A experience that
killed more brain cells than it simulated.
If The Phantom Pain is
a joke, then it’s a prank phone call that goes on long enough to be
prosecutable harassment.
The Sad, Sad, Sad
Conclusion
For the record, Metal
Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has a lot of great stuff in it. There’s some
great level and mission design, there are fun and memorable moments, and as
exhausting as it can be I can’t imagine someone who cares about Metal Gear actually giving up on it. I
can’t say that I didn't have a heck of a good time playing some of it.
When I started writing this piece I asked myself “Do I like
Metal Gear Solid V?” and my answer then was “I don’t know”.
Now that I'm writing the conclusion, my answer is “I don’t
care”.
It’s impossible to separate this game from the drama that
surrounds it, and remove it from context from the industry that it
simultaneously exists within and comments on. Within that context it is a sad,
disappointing and distressing thing.
Konami is dead. Okay, they’re not really dead, but they’re
dead in all the ways that matter. Silent
Hill is dead. Castlevania is
dead. Now with Kojima’s escape to the wild Metal
Gear is dead. Games with these franchise brands attached to them will
probably continue to be made, but all the major talent has jumped shift and
those who remain are suffocating under the terrifying Konami work environment.
Hideo Kojima will almost certainly continue to make
videogames, he loves them too much to stop, but he’ll never make a game
approaching the scale of The Phantom Pain
ever again. As Kojima departs he takes the unique triple-A videogame
blockbuster with him. I'm not a fan of Metal
Gear Solid 4 personally, but there will never be a game like that ever
again, it is its own thing, is it a Metal
Gear game. Maybe the videogames of old died with Metal Gear Solid 4 and no one noticed at the time. We say goodbye
to Metal Gear as it shoves itself
full of side missions, bloated worlds and menus and #content. As intentional as it was, it’s hard to shake the
disappointment that Metal Gear Solid V
exists and it’s essentially a god damn
Ubisoft game.
As things stand the middlecore tier of games that populated
the PlayStation 2 and Wii libraries a decade ago have almost completely died
out. In 2015, your choice is between huge big studio productions and
significantly smaller in scale digital stuff. There’s all kinds of limitations,
struggles and pitfalls with the latter, and the former barely makes money any
more as the industry led push for graphics and hardware have forced the games
to trade in most of their artistic conscience for bling, addition content plans
and micro-transactions. Whether the fact all this stuff is deliberately in The Phantom Pain is some kind of
statement or Konami pushed for it to be in there which fuelled the falling out
and drama doesn't matter. It’s still a damn shame to see Metal Gear consumed by everything it never was during its last
dance. It’s the end of an era, and it’s not a graceful ending either.
That’s what I meant at the start of this piece that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain might
be an essential play for anyone who has an interest in videogame whether they
have good time with it or not. You've got to see how it all ended, man.
Don’t confuse this with some kind of endorsement for auteur
theory, Metal Gear may be a machine
driven by one man’s vision but it’s a product of the hundreds of work hours that a
huge team puts into it, but how many “names” in games do we have left that we
can put on the front of a box in the same way movies do? Sid Meier creates
games for a very specific audience, nobody buys Swery’s games, Shigeru Miyamoto
has been out-shined by his own creations and the kids don’t know who he is. Who
do we have left after that? David
Cage?????
Oof.
Kojima’s final contribution to videogames of this scale was
to spend an absurd amount of Konami’s money creating the bloated Metal Gear all-stealth-all-the-time experience
his detractors claimed they wanted. All the Metal
Gear stuff in it there, and a lot of it is pretty great, but the characters
feel less important, they talk less, exposition usually reserved for the codec
has been buried into cassette tapes which are positioned suspiciously out of
the way on the menus. The Metal Gear moments
you want exist in this game, but they've been diluted and stretched out,
clawing for sunlight under the weight of a huge open world mechanics-focused mission
structure. The Phantom Pain is yet
another entry to throw on the pile of games that will eat entire weeks and
months of people’s lives, with 80% of that playtime to be purged from memory
and any meaning soon after.
Kojima has dived off the top of the Konami skyscraper as it
burns to the ground, flipping off his people below him “this is what you want
games to be right? Well I made Metal Gear
into that now DO YOU LIKE IT?”
And we the people have screamed back to him “YES. OH MY GOD.
YEESSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!”
I have one comment on that, and it’s borrowed from my friend
Veerender Jubbal; videogames are garbage.
Only it’s important to remember it’s not just the games that
are the problem.
