Thrik

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

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I just want to say: I fucking love this game. It's got everything I want out of a game, except a great narrative, but I can forgive it, because it's practically perfect in every other way.

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Kojima isn't capable of a great narrative

Depends on what you're looking for.

 

I think it's a hell of a lot of fun. (Barring obvious gross sexual objectification.)

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Kojima isn't capable of a great narrative so I'm actually glad that the unfinished portion of the game appears to be the story.

 

Whether you want to be video game hipster about it or not, you're talking about the guy who's credited by countless people in the industry as, if not introducing the concept of cinematic storytelling to games, revolutionizing it. I know how easy it is to look back on with 2015 glasses and see Metal Gear Solid as no big deal amid the hundred other story-shooters that have come out in the last sigh of the calendar, but that's like saying that Shigeru Miyamoto isn't capable of a great platformer because, eh, what's he done lately?

 

It's also worth pointing out that, in a Kojima game (and for all the criticism he receives about his indulgent use of cutscenes), narrative is gameplay. The failures of the story tie into failures of the game. In spite of the excellent core stealth mechanics, the game is a failure as well. Phantom Pain's lack of appreciable mission progression and character arcs, of moments of Kojima's exceptionalism like fourth wall breaks and discrete and conclusive boss battles, means players are missing out on iconic moments of intertwined story and gameplay for which every previous Metal Gear Solid title is known. I would enjoy listing examples of these but I don't have to, anyone reading this is already remembering some.

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Kojima's not a good storyteller. It's all overblown and poorly written and filled with random gobbledygook.

 

The original MGS tells a decent story because it's lean and reined in. By Sons of Liberty, Kojima was off the rez and just spewing bullshit everywhere.

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Regardless of how you feel about the content or direction of Kojima's stories, I think it's fair to say that nobody has attempted to introduce narrative and cinematic sensibilities to games quite like he has, or at least not on the insane scale he has.

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I would also like to say, I love the narrative design, I just dislike that it kinda fizzles out. I also dislike how many times Code Talker says

"Vocal Chord parasites"

I love Kojima's narrative, how he manages to use incredibly blunt tonal shifts that in most works would put me off, but somehow I find them hilarious in Metal Gear games. I can understand the criticism narrative design, I don't agree with it, as I think the tapes are really effective. Those fucking burger tapes...wtf is that all about, it's great juxtaposed with Code Talker's 10 minute pseudoscientific ramblings.

One criticism I can't stand is that the game play or mission design is boring. If you're finding things boring, you have no goddamn imagination. MGSV is the ultimate Snake simulator, go out and do everything Snake does. Sneak in without being seen, be The Boss and only use Miele combat, set traps or just go in guns blazing riding a horse. Then the emergent narratives and gameplay that come from being caught are perfect. It just shines so much when you're spotted and in a bad position. Hearing that people reset to check point each time they're spotted just confuses me. It's not splinter cell. I made that mistake with older MGS games and it was incredibly detrimental to the experience.

Yeah, I really didn't think I'd like an open world AAA game this much. Especially as open world stealth just sounds dumb, but Kojima got it to work and I think both stealth and open world games are going to have a hard time living up to MGSV. I seriously doubt they can borrow ideas from it since it is much more than just a sum of its parts.

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I've now S-ranked every mission.

You get

A Raiden suit.

Now all I need to do is the mission tasks...that's the super fun part. No need to rush through every mission any more.

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On Kojima's narrative ability, Metal Gear most often reminds me of The Illuminatus! Trilogy...which I'm not sure if that's a compliment or not? 

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He's similar to Christopher Nolan: start with a high concept, define all the proper nouns, root them in a world that's recognizable with fetishy attention to detail on the tech, concoct a labyrinthine plot and, finally, think briefly about how human beings might act and talk and feel in the situations you've dreamed up and lose interest.

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So a funny thing happened. I lost internet access for a few days, meaning I could only play the games that were already on my computer and had launched already. I hadn't started SOMA yet, and other stuff that I might have played would have been best with an internet connection (like Heroes of the Storm or Rocket League). So, I jumped back into Metal Gear. I played one side mission with Quiet as my buddy. I had her shoot everyone. As soon as I extracted the prisoner, mission 46 showed up. In spite of all my complaining (sorry!) I actually beat this game. 

 

I still think the way missions are unlocked is unnecessarily obscure. Like, nothing said "you have to take Quiet out and use her abilities otherwise you can't advance the story," but I'm pretty sure that's what was going on. But I'm still glad I played it. And now I have

a leather jacket for Snake and actual clothes for Quiet.

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One criticism I can't stand is that the game play or mission design is boring. If you're finding things boring, you have no goddamn imagination. MGSV is the ultimate Snake simulator, go out and do everything Snake does. Sneak in without being seen, be The Boss and only use Miele combat, set traps or just go in guns blazing riding a horse.

 

Only complaint I have along those lines is that by mid/late-game, you become so powerful that a lot of stuff becomes trivial and the game really only counters that by throwing more helmets/body armor/Skulls/tanks/etc at you. And those tend to reduce the opportunities for emergent chaos, in my experience. The first half of the game delivered better on that experience, partly because I was still learning the systems, but also due to the more limited toolset leaving more room for surprise and mistakes.

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Only complaint I have along those lines is that by mid/late-game, you become so powerful that a lot of stuff becomes trivial and the game really only counters that by throwing more helmets/body armor/Skulls/tanks/etc at you. And those tend to reduce the opportunities for emergent chaos, in my experience. The first half of the game delivered better on that experience, partly because I was still learning the systems, but also due to the more limited toolset leaving more room for surprise and mistakes.

 

I also think the resource management side of the game is a bit in tension with the "open-world-Snake-simulator" side of things. This might be my own neuroses at work, but I always found myself looking at the amount a deployment would cost when I thought about bringing all the launchers and bombs with me, especially if I thought I could pull the job off with only a tranquilizer pistol. I know you get more money than you need just by doing missions and side-ops, but knowing that taking C4 with me would mean it would take marginally longer to get the next upgrade really kept me from branching out too much.

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Regardless of how you feel about the content or direction of Kojima's stories, I think it's fair to say that nobody has attempted to introduce narrative and cinematic sensibilities to games quite like he has, or at least not on the insane scale he has.

I'm not disputing this, but I'm not sure this is the most efficient way to tell a story within interactive fiction.

 

There's no denying that Metal Gear Solid was a watershed moment for games at large--especially taken within the context of the state of games in 1998. It had a straightforward plot with diverse and interesting characters and inverted the typical power fantasy design that games are wont to employ.

 

But by MGS2 you've got an absolutely nonsensical plot that spends far too much time exploring ideas and then dropping them for something else while introducing concepts that are so alien as to be inscrutable. Even 14 years on I still could not concisely sum up the events of the game for you, let alone even being to explain the concepts of the Patriots (who are all apparently dead), Arsenal Gear, all the triple crosses and so forth. I'm sure some of this is due to translation and cultural differences, as I find a lot of the philosophy in Japanese fiction impenetrable, but that doesn't change the fact that many of story beats Metal Gear diehards take for granted are never communicated to the player in game (or so woefully obfuscated as to appear nonexistent).

 

Between this, the handwaving to explain the supernatural elements, and the purile sexuality of the series, I found myself disenfranchised by the fourth game. If MGS is a masterpiece, MGS 2 is the bloated double-album that followed the breakout hit. Snake Eater manages to strike out on its own, largely due to the fact that it never concerns itself with the acres of bullshit spewed forth in Sons of Liberty. And MGS 4? It suffers from having to follow the stupidity of Sons of Liberty to its illogical conclusion.

 

The Phantom Pain delights me precisely because of how little story intrudes on the player. I don't care about what Kojima has to say--I care about what he and his team have enabled me to say through their engrossing systems.

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But by MGS2 you've got an absolutely nonsensical plot

Just gonna address this in particular. The plot is extremely straightforward and clearly explained by the end of MGS4. Maybe the only thing that's not is how the bosses in MGS3 got their powers. Even Vamp is eventually explained in MGS4.

 

For all the internet screaming about how the plot makes no sense, it seems like very few of those people doing the screaming actually paid attention. The plot may be complicated, but it's actually surprisingly very rarely unclear. The end of MGS2 even has like six backstabs with each character clearly explaining their motivations.

 

Maybe you don't like the story. Fine. But to say it doesn't make sense? Haha, no.

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Ah yes, a story so straightforward that it makes complete sense--as long as you've played its second sequel, released seven years hence.

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Actually, the only thing in MGS2 that doesn't make sense is why Vamp is immortal. That's the only thing that's explained in MGS4 that isn't in MGS2. But, it's fine, because MGS has had seemingly supernatural stuff from the first game, so you just think "oh whatever magic science" like with Fortune.

 

Besides that... why does it matter if you have to play all the games? Would you jump into the third book of Lord of the Rings and expect everything to be hunky dory? Or, to use a video game example, Mass Effect 3? No, you wouldn't. So, why is it such an egregious sin for Metal Gear Solid to do this?

 

Like, I dunno what to tell you, man. I literally just played through MGS2 a little under a month ago. It's insane how crazily willing to explain things every character in the game is (a characteristic of a lot of Japanese fiction, to be sure). Very, very, very little is remained unexplained, and those things are ultimately unimportant to what's actually happening to the characters. 

 

I mean, trust me, I get where you're coming from. When I was a wee lad I thought MGS2 was incredibly convoluted and confusing. But replaying it today? It's... it's not. I don't know what else to tell you other than, it's not.

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So how often do the Skulls show up? I just finished Mission 20 and have done roughly half of the Side Ops, so I'd like to get as close to full completion as I can (maybe not getting all the animals), but those guys fucking suck. I'm playing as close to non-lethal as possible, but because of those guys I have to keep things in my loadouts I otherwise wouldn't consider taking. Right now I go in with distraction items, a silenced tranquilizer sniper rifle, tranq pistol, stun arm, C4 for taking out AA dishes, and a GIANT FUCKING GRENADE LAUNCHER IN CASE OF SKULLS. I'd rather not have that last thing, but the mission where they ambush you when you're jacking a truck got me close to throwing a controller through my TV until I walked away from the game for a night and then came back the next day to try again with that loadout. Now I take it everywhere just in case. Also came in handy last mission when

I had to blow up a water tower on the Man on Fire.

 

Best emergent moment so far: Operation Raven.

I wanted to see if I could shoot a raven out of the air from about 100m out with my tranq pistol. Nailed him, felt super proud of myself, and went to pick up the little unconscious bird as a trophy. As I crest a hill, I realize that he landed in the middle of a heavily guarded base that I had yet to enter in any missions (this happened when I was around mission 6). In order to retrieve a sleeping bird, I then had to infiltrate the base, extract the raven, and slip out as best I could. Things went pretty sideways. Tanks were involved. I got the bird, but about 13 men had to die for me to accomplish this. Good stuff.

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7 times, with 3 of them being repeat missions with harder difficulty.

 

But when you unlock 50 cal sniper rifle they become easy mode so don't worry.

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Skulls mission spoiler:

Next Skull encounter where you will need heavy weapons is mission 29. I went with D-Walker equipped with gatling gun, and found it relatively painless.

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You can run from them in every non-advanced mission they show up in, except one, which they make pretty clear in the mission text.

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I've done every side-op available to me thus far. I've unlocked the first main mission in Africa.

 

You know this game is a whole hell of a lot of fun, maybe the most MECHANICALLY fun of all MGS games, but I'm sad at how little STORY there is to the game so far. Peace Walker had a very similar structure (mission-wise, at least), but still had way more story going on. I like the story. ):

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