Metal Gear Solid V: Dissociative Disorder (Story analysis + Review)

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watch out this video spoils the ending of almost every Metal Gear game in the series because it's made by a fanboy and it might as well stand as a cautionary tale of how being a fanboy could cause you to like things less but even without being said I just want to start us off by saying that the best way to fail as a critic is to suggest that something's perfect without fully explaining why I have a very complicated mixed opinion about Metal Gear Solid 5 the phantom pain but most mainstream reviewers do not the game achieved Universal critical acclaim averaging a 93 on Metacritic after a number of maxed out review scores it was GameSpot's eleventh perfect ten in the site's 19 year history and after posting a screenshot from a cutscene that wasn't in the game the review states that when it comes to storytelling there's never been a Metal Gear game that's so consistent in tone daring and subject matter and so captivating and presentation the game was reviewed by most mainstream critics at a publisher held review event referred to as a boot camp where reviewers had 40 hours to complete the game there are reports of reviewers at this event using easy modes and ignoring optional content to race to the end of a story as soon as possible in that 40 hour time limit despite an expansive open-world design full of optional content that saw many actual customers myself included playing over 70 80 and maybe even a hundred hours before seeing this story come to a conclusion and if you browse any specialized fan forums right now you'll see opinions vastly differing from those of mainstream reviewers outrage over cut content unfinished story threads repetitive side missions and also confusion over a bait-and-switch twist ending that muddies the continuity of the entire series for the sake of directly acknowledging the players role in it all and we've been there before trying to understand Metal Gear Solid games can be more infuriating than it is rewarding they meticulously explain a chronology that they also playfully disregard it's the same conflict between realism versus mysticism passiveness versus interactivity and pacifism versus violence that can be found in every game and this time we have hype myths theories and legends attempting to stack up to reality a but when it comes to this ending there are no facts only interpretations much like Metal Gear Solid 2 number 5 ends with a fourth-wall break this time were not told to turn off the console but rather given a glimpse at the console the vintage MSX gaming computer that was home to the original Metal Gear games from the late 80s while a second big boss explains that we've been playing as a body double this whole time the implication starting with the players own avatar and birthday being input as well as the weird things the soldiers say on the mother base afterwards and the whole fact that the body double is just some random unremarkable medic is all a shout-out to any random unremarkable fans who helped the series grow and develop all these years the message is that anyone can be this legendary action hero as Big Boss explains it he is you and you are him the legend is yours together the players built it alongside the characters big boss takes your own identity into his it's a reversal of the Metal Gear Solid 2 situation where Ryden throws away the player's control to become his own character but this time the character is now a vector for the player venom is almost a silent protagonist lacking the charisma and charm that we see in even the small glimpses we get of the real boss who still spouse action movie one-liners without missing a hitch on the other hand when venom talks it's mostly with expected unimaginative questions or responses that the player themselves are probably asking and it's all introduced by the reference to David Bowie's man who sold the world which is commonly explained to be a song about a doppelganger it's about schizophrenic sensations Bowie experienced when juggling multiple roles during his early career as the song was made about a year before he began performing as the outlandish character of Ziggy Stardust note that the bathroom in this ending is the same room you see anachronistically before the game's title menu it's just another day in a war without end in outer heaven the table here from this camera angle and the introductory cutscene is full of guns but when venom receives this tape explaining his true identity a time lapse happens when he flips the tape over you might not have noticed it but the emblem on the door changes from time dogs to outer heaven the table full of guns in the intro is nowhere to be seen in the ending instead it now has an old computer on it and the tape is no longer audio but rather data about operation intrude in 3:13 the events of Metal Gear 1 venom is using a data cassette reader and the MSX to get ready for what went down in a videogame from 1987 and this is the closest thing to the missing link the Metal Gear Solid 5 was promised to deliver it was supposed to be a grandiose bombastic wrap up to a 28 year old series a story of men becoming demons a revenge fueled descent into madness with one of the most likable videogame action heroes becoming an 8-bit pixel villain but that's not what we got because as it turns out we weren't that villain all along this isn't that story but really if you look at the previous games in the series they easily serve as their own missing link starting with the moment Big Boss refuses to shake hands at the end of mgs3 to him kidnapping and convincing enemy soldiers to fight for his site and portable ops to that process extending to children in peace Walker it gussied it all up with a T rating in a light-hearted tone but the process of him becoming a charismatic revolutionary future war criminal are already established by ground zeroes in which the background narrative sees him hiding evidence of nuclear weapons before an inspection his stated purposes nuclear deterrence though the story of Peace Walker seems to suggest that deterrence theory is a farce this all happens after he miss remembers how his fight with the boss went down while also singing a lot of hypocritical purple poetry about creating an army Without Borders even though they clearly have their own territorial waters their own anthem their own currency and certainly their own sense of identity that they get defensive about all the while profiting off of small conflicts happening around the world for all intents and purposes he is creating a nation with an army the main difference with his concept is that the nation is the army the big boss we see in Metal Gear one barely has any writing to him at all from a game in 1987 where technological limits and the standards of the time didn't require deep characterization and as it turns out a twist from 28 years later tells us that that big boss was just a body double but three years later in Metal Gear we defeat a thoroughly evil warmongering big boss whose downfall really should not come as any surprise based on what you've been doing in those games and as it turns out that one was the real deal the prequel games might not have felt like a villains origin story because you were seeing it from his perspective and no one believes themselves to be the bad guy after venom flips the tape 10 years pass the official name of outer heaven is finally adopted and Venom's horn grows much much bigger a reference to the game's invisible karma system that makes your horn grow bigger as you kill more enemies venom evidently kills a lot of people in those 10 years and as he's becoming more demonic there's also collaboration between him and the real boss it's unclear when venom receives the man who sold the world tape but when he does he smirks at hearing the news he smashes the mirror image of his future self covered in blood with a big horn and walks back into the fog of the previous 10 years but that future will come to him despite the fact that venom is actually the lesser of two evils and peace walker chico and paths are child soldiers that actually are part of your base management spreadsheets and to be fair paz is not actually a child but big boss and the MSF administration don't know that at the time also in peace walker developing a nuke is mandatory to get the true ending but in phantom pain child soldiers are rescued and kept far away from battle and assembling nukes is entirely optional and discouraged since it gives you a boatload of those negative karma points instead stealing other nukes and disabling them is what's required to unlock yet another ending and when you consider this series as anti-nuke politics then that should easily leave venom standing has the more morally righteous version of Big Boss this cutscene is said to trigger or once a currently unconformity nukes or decommissioned good luck doing that though because the online system rarely allows that to happen I have to drive out this demon inside me build a better future that's what I what we will leave us our legacy the two bosses despite their differences are not in conflict with one another venom knows his true identity yet he's ready for another mission and eventually that other mission comes if one big boss is infiltrated into America's Special Forces to command Foxhound and another is keeping the dream alive at outer heaven then the one at Fox Sound is going to need to maintain his cover by conducting operations against outer heaven but only with weak suicide missions that wouldn't do serious damage like sending in a lone inexperienced rookie that neither expects to actually succeed which is exactly the setup for Metal Gear 1 and this twist reframes the entire series is continuity as being less about the beginning and end of nuclear deterrence or the cold war or even the life and death of big boss but rather about the starting point of his whole arc it's about the beginning and ending of people misinterpreting the bosses will retro actively rewriting the final boss battle of mg 1 to mirror the trigger of big bosses own downfall with him stealing and reshaping the identity of one of his men and then exploiting that man's loyalty to take the fall in a fight against a protege just like the story of mgs3 it reframes the whole 28 year continuity is being one big story about how no one expected the recessive genetic clone of big boss to shatter the Patriots and the conspirators behind them all the while splintering away from the u.s. by forming his own NGO philanthropy which is basically just him an addict on doing what they want on their own terms solid realizes the bosses will without knowing it and without creating any corrupt world controlling conspiracies of his own compare that to the series spanning schemes of the prequel games and you can begin to see why the 1984 references come into play big boss is similar to 1984 s big brother controlling populations by being a charismatic cult of personality that fuels a series of never-ending small conflicts zeroes cipher and later the Patriots are analogous to 1984 zinc sock they're an artificial ideology that controls populations through manipulation of information and language and both of these conspiracies come to pass as the themes of mgs4 and MGS 2 are respectively explored via the war economy and the Patriots and we see these conspiracies begin to be put into action mgs 5's own version of the year of 1984 and all of that is why after a few days of thinking on it I came to terms with this twist it actually helped reverse my opinion of some of these games that I've never been a fan of if you've ever wondered why it's been so much harder for me to drum up the enthusiasm to make a serious video about any Metal Gear games after three it's because the plot and all of them hinges on what looks like a contrivance made for the sake of convenience there's also a good dose of self-hatred running underneath for but it's mostly the inexplicable heel turn made by mgs 3's radio cast that really turned me off from this franchise for a while for the longest time the question of who are the Patriots was burning with so much implausibility that the answer could never be more satisfying than whatever the guesses were and that was kind of the point and then four comes along and tells us that the original Patriots were the comic relief the Cockney British James Bond fan the Godzilla fan the greatest soldier in the world who eats mushrooms to recharge his batteries and a Russian cowboy who meows like a cat and the the token black guy who might have been the only sane person in the group giving a stupid answer to a stupid question was the cherry on top of the failed conclusion that was mgs4 and as silly as it was it's it's still an indulgent spectacle I've always been more interested in seeing how kojima can explain away that one rather than big boss and in five we finally get a glimpse of that explanation from zeroes truth tapes we finally get to hear that cockney likeable James Bond fan not be the nefarious villain he was bewildering Lee slated to be but rather letting his own convoluted plans go out of control it kind of makes big boss's appearance and speech about the guy at the end of four make way more sense than it did back then zeros obsession over spying secrecy and overly complicated underground schemes eventually get the better of him if Big Boss is an analogue for the player then zero is an analogue for Kojima and his plans are blowing up on him yet again we're over ambitious goals couldn't be realized in time in the purported series finale feels like it's wrapping things up one game to early released one year too early despite trying his hardest and having the best of intentions the twist is the closest this series has come to being like Metal Gear Solid 2 and while I think I get it and I want to appreciate the twist somehow I feel like it's not going to get the kind of delayed appreciation mgs2 eventually got reason number one is because of the presentation of it all because the twist happens for literally no reason you get mission 46 in your main ops list after filling a quota of side ups and base upgrades that just make it suddenly appear in this abstract magical video game menu there's no justification behind why venom would suddenly remember the hospital escape differently there's no word when where how or why that revelation happens and is well written and performed and satisfying as zeros truth tapes are their very existence just highlights how disassociated this game story is with its own interface you can break the whole drama up with a simple question of who's holding the microphone who's recording conversations of the most secretive man in the world and how did they get into Venom's walkman we'll never know because the most pivotal moments in this game's plot happened completely outside of its plot hours after it wraps up for no reason the twist is also something we all saw coming it's obvious from the start once you hear Ishmael delivering Kieffer's voice it was even hinted at years ago when the GDC reveal trailer a fan theory about the medic being a double of Big Boss appeared almost as soon as ground zeroes was released when fans heard Kieffer coming from not just venom or Ishmael but also the medic and those who already knew the David Bowie song had yet another reason to see this game's greatest revelation happened minutes after the game even begins the twist also doesn't really hit hard because the game's not thoroughly written to lead up to it the very very beginning is and some minor hints are strewn throughout the first few missions but compare that to the entirety of Metal Gear Solid 2's game where the pacing the character designed the boss battles and even the level layouts were all meticulously designed to lead up to that moment where you hear you're in a Solid Snake simulation and without that dedication to seeing the twist through I have to wonder what purpose mgs fives twist really serves to its story when the prospect of just enjoying the story for what it is is hard to do in the first place it's mostly a predictable plot that feels awkwardly skimpier the padded game length it's about a villain who's up to no good and a hero who has to stop him with a mystical sidekick who helps him out and there's so few twists and turns along the way that I was sure it wasn't over when it tried to trick me into thinking it was over I knew it wasn't over because there was no climax no prison escape sequence no racing any vehicles to a countdown timer no button mashing torture sequences not even any real plot twists no friends become enemies there's no sympathetic side to the villain no fourth wall breaking ghosts when chapter one was over I knew it wasn't over and when chapter two was over I couldn't believe it actually really was over it was a feeling of disbelief an emptiness a feeling for what should be there but what's not what's not there is personality in energy you're not playing as the charismatic big boss here playing a confused brainwashed body double you play as someone who spends cutscenes with a thousand-yard stare never seeming to know what to say dialogue is written in simple sentences that are prolonged with awkward loaded silences find a source of that transmission boss find our man never know and making a vector for the player's own version of big bosses legend venom is ironically less of a fun character much like the returning cast as well we don't get to know how Ocelot and snake became friends which would seem to be important considering how hard they're trying to kill each other before these events and Ocelot himself is also bizarrely underused as a character this guy is a complete and total oddball both before and after this games events but and this one he's a flat monotone encyclopedia and there's no twist behind that no clever writing explaining it his personality is just missing just like a coherent sense of pacing and direction quality has never been a problem for the Metal Gear Solid series until now we're a two-minute song sequence is used to kill time during a car ride the closest analogy is the latter from mgs3 which served as a tone changing intermission but the song in mgs 5 is an interruption it stops a one-sided conversation that resumes immediately after the songs over what's also missing were surprises even without the visibly cut content of episode 51 there's not a lot happening here that you didn't see in even the early trailers the story's attempting to stretch out anywhere from 40 to a hundred hours of gameplay but a lot of that story can already be seen after watching 15 minutes of trailers Kojima has endured criticism for the length of his cutscenes for over 15 years but in this case it just feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater going from too much to too little skips the happy medium in between it hurts because for the first time this is a Metal Gear game where what we saw was mostly what we got this little character development and really little story to uncover but everything would suggest otherwise one random door one of many hides a major game-changing subplot behind it this led to me spending hours searching mother base for something else interesting and it was something that wasn't there with nothing but the nostalgic sounds of synth dub 80s hits in the background it would be beautiful if it wasn't so sad and so time-consuming this is speaking of music even the games orchestral score is missing something I noticed this after replaying Ground Zero shortly afterwards it's missing the emotional punch of Harry gregson-williams who did the music for ground zeroes but only got a production credit in phantom pain and the score is fine it's as great it's okay it's just missing the extra little notch that put the other games past that threshold into excellence what we saw from the trailers may have been what we got but what we were told with words and the trailers and also through Kojima's marketing and twitter channels was not what we got at all words can kill and language can be manipulated and we were promised a return to camp Omega which didn't happen a major planned feature was just missing in action we were promised to feel ashamed of our words and deeds regarding quiet silly costume and that sure doesn't happen so let's get this out of the way I've never cared about the costume I don't think putting a video game character in a bikini is that much of a damnable offense but as it turns out the costume was just the tip of this fanservice iceberg look at that she's coming like 12 inches away from from making butt hold a camera contact and this happens multiple times even by Metal Gear standards that's a little much quiet shoving her butthole into the camera is not a problem of her character flaunting her character's sexuality because her characters role in the story has nothing to do with sex this costume has nothing to do with sex considering the events of the entire story in her art from beginning to end she has no reason to be flaunting herself the real reason she does is because sex and controversy sell games better than well written characters do and the story of this one had to suffer for that because of a piss-poor justification behind why she has to win needs to be wearing almost nothing and it just shows how far down hill Kojima's riding standards have gone since the third game which also stands as an example of how to literally shove boobs in the camera in a way that actually has some reason to be there if written well there doesn't have to be anything shameful about this quiet comes the closest to having a complete character arc the whole cast and then finally after like 80 hours she finally bursts out of captivity and gets a moment of badassery that's all her own but I couldn't stop thinking about how dumb the scene with the shower was and that sure does ruin the mood and then the game ends Ava's scenes had her wearing even less but it was expressly because she wanted to bone snake both for the fun of it and for the sake of her mission and then just look at him wouldn't you what I'm trying to say is that it's way easier to get caught up in the relatable drama of sexual tension between to thoroughly cool individuals who want to crawl all over each other so bad but they can't because they're on the clock versus the alien sci-fi drama of one cool individual wanting to put on clothes but she can't because her lungs are burnt so she uses nanomachines I mean parasites to breathe through her skin and that also folds in to another thing that was promised but not delivered and that is some kind of morality shaking taboo that could cause kojima to leave the industry if he messes it up there are child soldiers that's shocking but they're treated as a kind of Neverland Lord of the Flies situation them being a separate faction from the adults who only really get up to trouble once the adults aren't around the game instantly fails if an ounce of harm comes to them and during the scene where snake heroically leads a band of war orphans away from danger the story is putting him on such a high pedestal that him becoming a demon is already looking like a distant proposition and all fairness the tweets about the taboos were from 2010 there were likely about the content and ground zeroes which was far more extreme but with all the trailers hinting that the child soldiers were connected to snakes downfall I was yet again feeling around for some kind of shock value that was not there and the weirdest thing is that that makes sense by casting a new more heroic version of Big Boss Kojima also casted the players contribution to big bosses Legend and a node two-player involvement we have the most interactive and finely tuned gameplay across the whole series with a switch to more streamlined farcry controls and HUD with stealth mechanics so refined that anything Ubisoft turns out we'll probably never hope to stack up to this the closest thing it feels like to me is actually hitman with each mission beginning a clockwork of AI scripts that the player can throw a wrench - at any moment and despite making a heavy departure towards the slower animation and less abstraction of western-style action games it still retains the fast highly controllable and borderline slapstick comedy play style that is how this series has always done stealth playing with tactics that might as well have been Easter eggs in previous games feels just as fully thought-out and convincingly animated as a more traditional run so while the story is so lukewarm there's simply a lot to love once your hands are on the controller if Kojima standards for writing have gone this far downhill since 3 it's amazing to see the non-linearity and open-ended design of three only improve over time I could spend an hour just playing around with how many different ways there were to enter and exit one section of grozny grad but in this game I found myself spending three hours experimenting with the routes in and out of a tiny little barrack space at the very beginning of the game but really I was experimenting with guard reactions and timings chasing so hard after those s ranks because the scoring system had me dynamically choosing my own difficulty level without me even knowing it Fulton living breathing guards out of a combat zone is a great way to incentivize non-lethal high-level play that doesn't feel like a shoehorned reward instead putting in more effort smoothly and dynamically gives you more of a payout when mgs4 gave players a third person shooter control style there was little reason to play it like a stealth game by the time the final chapters roll around but in five sneaking in and out of a base stealing everything they don't have nailed down and making sure everyone's none the wiser is more than just a cool sticker on a scoring screen it's a long-term investment rewarding you extra money and manpower that unlocks more of the game faster with enough of a sheer volume of unlocks to make faster unlocking worthwhile even if you waste a whole lot of time getting to the end of the story it's a system that openly acknowledges and rewards that silly note rank non-lethal european extreme run I was doing with three last year with enough hidden objectives and unlockables that make me really want to come back and do it all over again but unlike the other games in the series I just don't know if I have the time for a lot of replays with this one there's a truly insane amount of attention put into how it plays which drips right into all the concessions they had to make for fitting this into an open world that's why there's reflex and white guards won't ever see you driving towards them in broad daylight and why collectible flowers are found in diverse clusters near helicopter drop-off points which shows a great dedication to keeping the gameplay fun and flowing but it's important to know that these are attempts at compromising for a more scattershot level design guards are already slower to investigate sightings than pass games and reflex mode especially would have made the previous games too easy but in this one there's such a sheer volume of both sight lines and experimental tactics to worm your way out of them that it works is both the smooth balancing force and yet another tool for the player to exploit and putting flowers in your helicopter drop-off points is great it gives players something to do while waiting for the helicopter because they knew players would be waiting a whole lot for the helicopter and after a hundred and ten hours I sure did get tired of waiting for that helicopter even with the insane amount of attention poured into making the core gameplay satisfying I was still wondering if I was playing the same game as these reviewers glaring flaw has still exist here but it got universal acclaim like why is a fast travel system so bad side ops unlock in tiers of about three or four at a time and they're usually placed at opposite ends of these huge maps and without anything interesting to do on your way to them you really need a fast travel system that is just not there I actually measured how long it takes to call a helicopter down get on it and then ride to another part of the map and this is after getting the advanced helicopter unlocks in the in-game I measured three minutes 10 seconds and and that that just should not be acceptable you can choose out of about half of that by going to the AAC through your pause menu but even chopping that time in half leaves you with about 70 seconds longer than this process should reasonably take well why can't you just press a button to skip the animation if the helicopter is going through a safe area that's ridiculous I had my hopes up that the cardboard box shipments would fill this gap but they're placed so sparsely and under such heavy guard that they don't do the job either side-ops have you generally doing one objective go to a point on the map and make a quota of things go away there's no diversity to your objectives sometimes you make a tank go away sometimes individual soldiers very rarely containers but it's always the same kind of goal and as you figure out effective strategies that means the same kind of gameplay and that very same problem is plaguing the main ops whose objectives boil down to two broad categories either go from A to B or make things a to b disappear and then escape the hot zone with bosses usually falling into category two the extra objectives show a wealth of creative problems to solve and he'll even ground zeros did too with its little audio analysis puzzle but as far as the main ops in phantom pain go it's either move from A to B steal thing A to B or defeat the boss for all the different creative ways there are to play these missions the missions themselves follow a very restrictive and limited formula you do the same thing so many times across such a long time with such little story development occurring per hour that it's impossible not to have some kind of serious pacing problem happened to that story it's about 12 hours of good missions and good scenes stretched out to 112 hours and yet I can go on the game's radar review and read about side ops that are non-essential but highly worthwhile or the gym quiz ition one that managed to avoid the review event entirely but still says it's densely packed but not padded with filler content and meanwhile I'm spending seven minutes driving to destroy the tank unit number eight after destroy the heavy infantry number eight ticking them off of a literal checklist and I'm just thinking in response to these reviews I'm just like what it's it's fine it's it's okay it's still a good game and I'd be lying if I said I didn't giggle my ass off when making this stupid horse boy logo and prancing around the jungle and leopard print chaps pretending to be one of the ball fondlers' that's that's great but so many sandbox games get bloated up with unnecessary filler content and that just comes with the territory but between the problems that causes as well as the need to go through repetitive and thoughtless side-ops the lack of a real fast travel system is stilted online mode that gives an inn for micro transactions and the way your radio messages talk over your cassette tapes and the bullet sponge skulls boss that have no weak points or stealthy strategies to counter them which are half the boss fights in the game and the most glaring flaw a shamefully butchered chapter 2 of conspicuously cut content and replayed missions leaves me absolutely boggled by the naive positivity of these reviews am I just crazy is my opinion that far off the mainstream I still don't get it I get that i'm a huge fan boy you know the huge amount i care about the stupid plot questions are just something that doesn't matter to anyone and that that's just fine that's whatever but even if those reviews are just based on the technical merits of its gameplay alone they still seem weird as good as the gameplay here is it still has real tangible problems that need to be addressed with criticism problems that amount to a game that's not a 10 on 10 masterpiece of the medium that sees kojima stepping off of a venerated pedestal the series he's made has grown into a self contradicting mess every new installment is an excuse to keep a 28 year old story going and those excuses look more far-fetched as it goes on and without more balanced criticism that is what becomes praised as the gold standard for any kind of artist looking to span a story over a long series these reviews were based on 40 hours spent at a publisher held review event paid for and conducted by Konami my review was based on over a hundred and ten hours spent in my house after spending my own 60 dollars and I get this game's purpose I get its aim and can appreciate the effort it made but it's a weak exhausted punch to end this prolonged series with the greatest and biggest Metal Gear game ever it's an honest attempt that in no way could possibly hit as hard as it wants to or satisfy everyone it wants to the energy and enthusiasm has been long gone but the sheer man-hours and resources they put into this are staggering while the core act of sneaking past nearsighted gars has never felt better almost everything that happens in between either takes too long or just misses that same mark the story is all over the place a literal reading about vocal cord parasites and a self-sacrificing sniper even if you included the cut episode 51 would still fail to reach the deliberate pacing and careful characterization of past games in a metaphorical reading about that story about a decoy boss ray of buying all the players heroics still misses the biting confrontational tone of when mgs2 slowly bottled the tension up to the same revelation what's left comes out of nowhere and the message feels right now two weeks after launch kind of patronizing your big boss good job buddy you did good here's here's a gold star and the art section of the collectors edition strategy guide Kojima says that skull faces absence fairly early on in the game will leave players with a lasting phantom pain and the game sure does do that but it only feels intentional in three places first with its big action movie arc involving skull face and his parasite sending too soon second with quiet leaving your team forever despite feeling like an essential part of it and third with the conclusion of passes sub story collecting photos for her gives you something to do through the whole game it's some hope of greater developments eventually coming before you realize that it was all a figment of Venom's imagination but remember that venom is the medic this hallucination of Paz is him trying to will away the guilt of not finding the second bomb it's a subtle and understated layer to a story that climaxes with horrific body horror and genuine sadness it's a real Silent Hill quality moment that just made me sad that Kojima Silent Hill got cancelled Kojima was aiming to break some kind of taboo that would have been so intense that it could cause him to leave the industry and despite that I can't really put my finger on what it might have been here unless it was the literal phantom pain felt by the player it would be if Kojima had deliberately with all intents and purposes aimed to make an experience that could satisfy mainstream audiences while leaving more hardcore fans feeling for something that wasn't there at this point in time it is too easy to chalk up anything underwhelming he does is some kind of fourth wall breaking masterful ruse but between the quotes the misleading words on the trailer is in the misdirection from his own interviews and tweets it's also hard to let that explanation go the phantom pain on the box does indeed reference a feeling that lots of fans are experiencing right now the problem for looking at this game in the future is going to be figuring how much of that was intended versus how much of it was an unfortunate accident

Info

Channel: Super Bunnyhop

Views: 1,634,910

Rating: 4.7935729 out of 5

Keywords: Metal Gear (Video Game Series), Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Video Game), Metal Gear Solid (Video Game), Action-adventure Game (Media Genre), Review

Id: KO4Tusk_V2k

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 34min 23sec (2063 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2015

Reddit Comments

Super Bunnyhop has done thorough analyses of all of the main Metal Gear Solid games, as well as reviews of the older Kojima titles like Metal Gear 1 and 2, as well as Policenauts.

His MGS3 critical close up is a terrific look into the themes and plot elements of the game. It's only 40 minutes long, so give it a watch if you have time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_-jyF987MQ

👍︎︎ 189 👤︎︎ u/GrassWaterDirtHorse 📅︎︎ Sep 21 2015 🗫︎ replies

Just a fair warning: there are HEAVY spoilers to the ending and the entire campaign of Metal Gear Solid V and somewhat the other MGS games.

Anyways, this was one of my favorite Bunnyhop videos and I suggest you all watch his other MGS analysis videos.

👍︎︎ 260 👤︎︎ u/reughdurgem 📅︎︎ Sep 21 2015 🗫︎ replies

Holy shit journalism, I'm always surprised when I actually see it. Sure there are points on either side to disagree with, but you can't say that he didn't put as much info behind his opinion as possible.

👍︎︎ 259 👤︎︎ u/rbozd 📅︎︎ Sep 21 2015 🗫︎ replies

It's really interesting to see how polarized the community is regarding this game. There are a lot of people that absolutely love it, claiming that the gameplay more than makes up for the lackluster story, but there's a very vocal group that rips on it for some pretty valid reasons.

From the small sample of people I've talked to that have been playing it, it seems like the more you're into the Metal Gear series, the less you enjoy it. People that play it for the interesting stealth mechanics and base-building meta game will have a lot more fun than people interested in experiencing the final chapter in the Metal Gear saga. The story and characters don't feel like they're from the same universe, what little story there is is stretched way too thin across the first chapter and very padded out in the second. I think it would have benefited from having a shorter, more focused story and 5-6 smaller maps rather than 2 large ones, but the game is very ambitious and for the most part pulls off the open world gameplay without making it about collecting hidden packages and climbing towers between missions.

👍︎︎ 99 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Sep 21 2015 🗫︎ replies

I think the clearest evidence that mgsV was released half baked is that chapter 2 is heavily padded with harder difficultly versions of missions from chapter 1 and the general lack of motivation provided for the player for most of the game. It doesn't help either that cutscenes and the tapes feel disassociated from the game you are actually playing and lack the detail and depth necessary for a story that has come this far.

What confuses me is Kojima is seemingly a perfectionist yet he has misdirected fans in statements made previously in how the game will fulfill the story link. What I'm waiting for is a 'konami put us under a lot of pressure so that's why the game is structurely poor' statement. Maybe we will have to wait until he is no longer under contract?

👍︎︎ 147 👤︎︎ u/s3snok 📅︎︎ Sep 21 2015 🗫︎ replies

The gameplay is fun (well, for the first chapter, forcing the player to replay missions is awful) and normally that's all that matters to me, but Metal Gear Solid is one of the very few series in which I care about characters/story and this game completely butchered both Big Boss and Ocelot's personalities. (and who cares if it's not Big Boss, you're supposed to think you're playing as Big Boss until the end and if you count Quiet's humming she probably spends more time talking than Venom. What a boring ass character to play as)

Unsurprisingly the only characters with any sort of interesting personality are the ones that kept their old voice actors: Kaz and Huey.

Also, for all the crazy shit that Kojima threw at us over the years, when Skullface started talking about words and also that song came out of nowhere and they stopped and Venom just said nothing, it was the first time ever in a Metal Gear game that I thought "this is shit" (yes, not even fake colonel/S3 program on MGS2 made me think that, cause at least it was a real mind blowing thing).

👍︎︎ 7 👤︎︎ u/RobotPirateMoses 📅︎︎ Sep 22 2015 🗫︎ replies

I agree with bunny that this game didn't deserve the glowing praise it got. (and it was a great game, not a perfect game but great).

But there gets a point when i just can't forgive the final chapters are Spoiler And the fact theres no big 'thing'. By 'thing' i mean the raiden story reveal in MGS2, the eva love story in MGS3. I think MGS V lacked a lot of character development from ANYONE. I think the casette tapes could of at least provided more evolution and explanation on the characters. Spoiler

👍︎︎ 57 👤︎︎ u/dexter30 📅︎︎ Sep 21 2015 🗫︎ replies

Can someone give a kind of spoiler free synopsis of what he says? I love Bunnyhop, but haven't gotten MGS5 yet and was curious about what he thinks of it.

👍︎︎ 12 👤︎︎ u/mattigus 📅︎︎ Sep 21 2015 🗫︎ replies

I really enjoy Bunnyhop but whenever I see everybody fawning over one of his videos I can't help but think about the reaction to his "Don't get hyped over E3" video.

People were very pissed about that one and it's interesting to watch as somebody who doesn't get worked up over a lot of things.

👍︎︎ 21 👤︎︎ u/Capnboob 📅︎︎ Sep 21 2015 🗫︎ replies