Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

[IamLEAM1983]

This isn't a review, I haven't played long enough to develop a cohesive opinion. It's more of a feverish ramble. Insofar, though?

It's everything it should've been. It's a great continuation, a great evolution and a great introduction to Hideo Kojima's crazy-ass pontificating about the horrors of war. It fixes everything that made me loathe MGS IV, both mechanically and narratively. It's also a great conclusion to the Kojima era of the franchise, and it makes you wonder just how the Hell Konami intends to keep this up without its single auteur designer. I can understand shitting out PES Soccer games and raking in microtransaction profits, but Metal Gear without Kojima's involvement isn't Metal Gear anymore. Considering, The Phantom Pain is probably the last true game in the franchise - and it's the freaking best.

The controls make sense, the environment makes sense, the gameplay systems make sense - Fox Team's finally taken the right parts Western devs like to use and abuse and slapped them onto the franchise's "Stealth or GTFO" core. It's still a stealth game, but you have the option to go Rambo if shit goes down. Or, of course, you can go Rambo from the start and stealth it out if shit gets too heated. It's gotten easier to juggle between the two modes of play.

Let's say you're sick of Side Ops and story missions. You can Skyrim the fuck out of Afghanistan and South Africa and do whatever the fuck you want. The Forward Operating Base system tacks Animal Crossing-esque aspects onto the core game, since you're also managing your own base. Remember in The Dark Knight, when Bats uses a balloon to signal for a plane pickup? You can do that with every piece of equipment, every enemy soldier you can knock out, every plant and every animal. The more you do, the more Mother Base and Outer Heaven take shape.

You need an R&D staff, you need soldiers, you need translators, you need administrators - so killing peeps really means you're shooting yourself in the foot. Me being a SimCity type, I just love being told something like "Here's a fish tank, fill it with fishies on your own." You own this extra-national PMC of Awesomeness and do whatever the fuck you want with it. The crunch of the game just never ends, and it never feels like a grind. I'm always going somewhere.

Story-wise? Eh, it's fine. It's Kojima being Kojima, but through in-game moments as opposed to ginormous cinematics and Plot Diarhrreas. It's much more palatable, and Snake feels a lot less like this unexplainable character whom everyone idolizes even though he knows absolutely nothing. There's a lot of optional audio diaries that give more leeway to Kiefer Sutherland, Troy Baker, Robin Atkin-Downes and the others, and exposition is delivered without the "Snake is an Ignoramus" problem cropping up. No more does he repeat someone's past statements in question form, he's able to make inferrences. Conversations flow. They're usually couched in heavy sociopolitical commentary, but they do flow.

And fuck, man - the soundtrack. Of course, a Reagan-era game is covered in Reagan-era music. David Bowie, Joy Division, New Order, Bruce Springsteen, the early Metallica years... You can even choose your own personal March of the Valkyries-esque battle anthem from the game's playlist of twenty or so songs.

Shooting Soviets south of Pakistan with my chopper's minigun while listening to Europe's The Final Countdown? Oh, yes. Very much yes.