Thrik

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

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Oh hey I also found this embarrassingly awkward and atrocious thing:

 

I think this is worse than the Paul McCartney Destiny video by far.

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5 hours ago, Twig said:

Wait hold on I didn't say "good".

Er I forget exact words used, but just that you were positive on it in spite of the terrible aspects.

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I never played Peacewalker, so I can't really speak to it, but otherwise I pretty much agree with everything you've said Syn.  Pretty much every character is awful, and they only get more awful as the game goes on (barring Quiet and maybe Code Talker). 

 

As for my spoilered part, I've finished Mission 35 and done a number of the Priority side ops (there are a lot more Priority ops in the back half than there are in the front half).  Once you cross over to Chapter 2, you start getting 3 missions at a time, 2 are entirely optional remixes of earlier missions and one is a new mission.  I think 35 is just the second of the new missions.  But I'm not sure what all is triggering new cutscenes, as some are definitely just happening from my completing side ops. 

 

On the Skull Face car ride, it struck me as an attempt to recapture the Snake Eater ladder climb from 3, but was just kind of dumb, because instead of just being this thing that happens, it follows the massive exposition dump from Skeletor.  Which feels like that dump only needed to happen because most of the plot is hidden away in cassette tapes, which are very easy to skip.  idk, I laughed at the car ride because it was ridiculous, but not because it was ridiculous in a good way. 

 

There's stuff about Kaz and Ocelot that bug me a lot.  Like, Ocelot doesn't even feel like he should be in the game.  He should play a foil to Kaz's paranoia, but that only happens a couple of times and most of the time he seems totes willing to go along with it.  But I'm guessing some of their behavior is explained by what I'm presuming is the true/secret ending, which I'm just guessing at, but I'd be shocked if I'm wrong.

 

Spoiler

That Big Boss isn't really Big Boss, you're either playing a clone or someone who underwent cosmetic surgery to look like the Boss as a decoy.  Something something parasites probably explain why he has Boss' memories.  I'm assuming that Kaz and Ocelot have some knowledge of this. 

 

Also, Huey is a completely garbage character.  Everything about him is the worst forever.

 

That seems to be the kind of defining thing with MGSV characters, it just makes them all worse than they've ever been.  Maybe that fits with Kojima's generally "war is terrible and makes everything and everyone terrible" themes, but generally the games have had more kindness for the main cast. 

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Humming worked out all right for Glenn Gould, didn't it? I liked the humming. 

 

I don't know how much more I can write about MGS V. I feel like I've written a lot about it, and it feels rather distant from me now. Like most of the Metal Gear games I think I will always file the plot under 'interesting' rather than 'good'. But so, so few games ever make it to either of those.

 

Of course it is also sometimes objectionable and often extremely silly. I think there's a lot to like about Quiet; my problem was that there just wasn't enough of her. I mean, there wasn't enough of any of the characters - but it's her perpetual silence which really feels like a wasted opportunity. 

 

The final canonical Quiet mission is really something extraordinary.

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12 minutes ago, marginalgloss said:

The final canonical Quiet mission is really something extraordinary.

Man, yeah it is.

 

I so desperately wish Kojima had someone who wasn't gross telling him no when it came to how he portrays women visually. I'll pretty much defend most of the MGS stories, but cannot even remotely defend Quiet, or the Beauties in MGS4, or (to a lesser extent, because she is a "femme fatale" trope, although it's definitely been done better...) Eva. Snake staring at Meryl's ass in MGS1. Sniper Wolf's attire when sniping in the biting, snowy cold of Alaska?? The Boss unzipping her top from neck to navel because?????????????

 

It started out fairly "benign" and "of its time" and "tolerable" and has only gotten worse with each successive entry.

 

I love the story of MGS from 1-4. Peace Walker was less good, but still okay. V is... so very sparse and, worse, incomplete, that I put it way at the bottom of the list of my favorite Metal Gear Solids. Although it's probably my favorite game in the series.

 

This is all shit I've said before. In this thread, even. I dunno why I'm repeating myself! I find is frustrating, I guess. Good/bad thing there won't be another MGS game. (Although I actually am interested in Survive - I think it could be really fun to play a multiplayer survival game in the MGSV engine?? Go figure, eh?)

 

I'm very interested in Death Stranding. I desperately hope it features zero women*. What a shitty thing to hope for, right?!

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4 hours ago, Bjorn said:

On the Skull Face car ride, it struck me as an attempt to recapture the Snake Eater ladder climb from 3, but was just kind of dumb, because instead of just being this thing that happens, it follows the massive exposition dump from Skeletor.  Which feels like that dump only needed to happen because most of the plot is hidden away in cassette tapes, which are very easy to skip.  idk, I laughed at the car ride because it was ridiculous, but not because it was ridiculous in a good way.

 

Haha that would make sense if Kojima was trying to channel that. I thought maybe I had hit a bug actually and dialogue stopped or somehow I turned on the cassette player. Then I couldn't understand if the song was coming from the jeep radio or not.


It is weird, they could have just introduced a new character with Troy Baker and not had it be Ocelot and it would have made more sense. Maybe I'm not to any plot twists yet, but so far he's not even in his classic triple agent role. He didn't appear in Peacewalker and was only in a "meanwhile" cutscene at the end of Portable Ops to set up flashback stuff in MGS4 but perhaps they wanted to show that he was always working for Big Boss as said in MGS4. Part of my problem is I sort of don't like to think of the portrayal of Ocelot in MGS4 as him.

 

Even though at the end he says the Liquid thing was all an act.

That and I'll always miss that Liquid was never to return as a villain... or ally.

 

 

Someone did spoil it for me in a (fucking!!!) guide for the key items that Eli was Liquid. They wrote "Eli/Liquid" which was so unnecessary. So I know it's him already, but I'm guess he doesn't shout "brother" a bunch and get theatrical with his world domination and want everyone to join him.

 

I guess I'll find out what you all mean by Huey, because I enjoyed him in Peacewalker.

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2 hours ago, Twig said:

I so desperately wish Kojima had someone who wasn't gross telling him no when it came to how he portrays women visually. I'll pretty much defend most of the MGS stories, but cannot even remotely defend Quiet, or the Beauties in MGS4, or (to a lesser extent, because she is a "femme fatale" trope, although it's definitely been done better...) Eva. Snake staring at Meryl's ass in MGS1. Sniper Wolf's attire when sniping in the biting, snowy cold of Alaska?? The Boss unzipping her top from neck to navel because?????????????

I think the Beauties is when I really noticed the change. I think the camera in MGS4 went fucking crazy on leering at women and never stopped. Like no scene could exist with a female character without it being about the male gaze. The outfits got skimpier too. Metal Gear Acid 2 before that was pretty raunchy with live action videos of Japanese models in bathing suits posing jammed in the extras of an otherwise good game, but I am guessing that wasn't a Kojima decision.

 

Snake checking out Meryl seemed to be pretty standard to me and the rest I just chalk it up to some women just show off a lot of cleavage. With Sniper Wolf it just seemed like the characters were designed without any thought of them being in Alaska considering Liquid and Vulcan Raven never put shirts on. It's when the cleavage became Naomi almost having her boobs fall out every second in MGS4 when it got bad. There was a handful of FPV stuff with Eva though in MGS3.

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3 has a super ridiculous jiggle to Eva's boobs every time the camera snaps back to her (in the HD collection, anyway), but I agree that 4 is when it first got really bad. V just continued that, and made Quiet dress even worse.

 

I'll grant you the shirtless Liquid and Raven, though. :P

 

Then again there are also the photo modes. I think they first showed up in VR Missions? (Which is also secretly the best MGS game. I should really get around to playing Volume some day, since people often compare it to VR Missions. And seriously I fucking loved that game a lot. Sneaking around a level while hiding from a Godzilla-sized guard? Fuck yeah.)

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Oh shit, I forgot about those photo modes. They seem so tame by today's standards. Now I'm remembering how MGS4 also upped the ante on that too. Sheesh. VR Missions was great though, I enjoyed it more than the stuff in MGS2 Substance.

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I would love to now what Kojima does on his games day-to-day.  

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9 hours ago, syntheticgerbil said:

Oh shit, I forgot about those photo modes. They seem so tame by today's standards. Now I'm remembering how MGS4 also upped the ante on that too. Sheesh. VR Missions was great though, I enjoyed it more than the stuff in MGS2 Substance.

Yeah defo the Substance VR stuff was a step down. Still fun, but not nearly as fun.

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I used Cheat Engine last night to knock out a bunch of research instantly.  I realized that between the increasing amount of resources and time, I was likely to be done with this before being able to research all the stuff (not counting the gold, online only resource stuff, which is like weeks of research and crazy amounts of resources). 

 

The economy for research is just kinda fucked, it really pushes you towards having to do FOB invasions to even possibly have enough money to pay for everything, since a lot of the top tier stuff runs upwards of a million GMP to research.  I don't really want to burn a bunch of hours doing invasions just to get the resources and money to play around the top tier of weapons for a little bit. 

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Yeah, that stuff got a lot worse through post-release changes. When it first came out, you could get a few of the top tier weapons without having to dive too much into the invasion stuff. I actually think it had a really good economy at release. You had to make some serious decisions about what toys you wanted and do just enough of the side quests to make them feel valuable, but not monotonous. 

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I got around to finishing the "True Ending" mission last night.  The only thing of significance left to do is the Quiet mission that wraps up her storyline.

 

Thoughts on the "True Ending"


 

Spoiler

 

:fart:  :fart::fart::tfart::tfart::fart:  :fart::fart:

 

like, no shit, I wasn't playing Big Boss this whole time.  Figured that out about 5 minutes into the game.  Here, re-play this 45 minute cutscene you've already seen once so we can tell you the thing you already know, and it's just kind of dumb and pointless, because the person you're playing is just a nameless, random medic.  It's the most underwhelming reveal in a video game I've seen in a long time.  It probably wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't required replaying the hospital scene entirely, with almost no changes except at the beginning and end of it.

 

This game continues to be the best worst good bad game I've ever played.

 

 

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Okay, Jesus fucking Christ. This is going to be long. I finished this last weekend, have the 100% and all. I did all the side ops and tasks and S ranks as I went along. The extreme and total stealth levels included. I know Quiet eventually would leave the game so I wanted to make sure I had her for every mission possible just in case because she made a lot of areas easier assuming not everyone was wearing a helmet or full body armor in the area. Had I not done it that way, that true ending would have taken the wind out of my sails so bad.

 

I don't know what to feel about this game. It's fun, I liked playing it. But as a Metal Gear Solid game, I don't think it has any reason to exist in this series. I would recommend anyone playing the series to just stop at Peacewalker and don't worry about what MGSV is and how it fits in the storyline because ultimately this is a terrible send off for the series. It's incredibly gross, awkward, repetitive, grindy, and whatever we were hoping for the third time now about what truly marks the moment when Big Boss becomes the guy in Metal Gear 1 is still not answered.

 

But I did get stuck in the grind. I had no problem completing guardpost raids over and over without feeling exhausted and led me to purchasing all weapons without any major issue. Technically I still have all those online weapons to unlock but they mostly just seem to be minor improvements on existing weapons and not worth the time grinding FOBs for the resources and money needed. I'm going to keep playing all the events every two weeks until I have everything from those but I'm not sure I'm going to expand all my FOBs either. When i'm done maybe I'll leave my stuff unguarded to help other players.


The motherbase stuff was a missed opportunity. The dispatch missions are an even more simplified version outer ops from Peacewalker where you just click okay instead of getting some high stats dudes. But the stats are mostly erased from this boiled down to a few things each soldier. I'm not actually sure I care though because it's not like I played anyone except Big Boss in either game. In Portable Ops having a lot of high ranking playable soldiers was important but that game was overly complicated and played like dog shit. I guess I mean to say that nothing having to do with motherbase or these soldiers feels alive outside of the cutscenes. Visiting motherbase is a chore. You have to wait for the chopper animation and take a shower and punch some dudes in the face for some hidden morale stats. You can't converse with anyone. There's not much to see beyond a few key points which you should look up online anyway because motherbase becomes a massive empty space of copy and paste assets that only serve the purpose of being reused for FOB stuff. There's no way to visit anyone who is taken to motherbase. You can't see these barracks that these children are taken to. You can't talk to Huey only see him in a room when he waves. Kaz and Ocelot are nowhere to be found. Quiet is only there to play out the same sexy animation on loop over and over. You can't see a mess hall, sleeping quarters, bathrooms, or brig. Even though the environment is now possible to visit, it actually feels less tangible than it did in Peacewalker. In Peacewalker you could only imagine these places from the descriptions in the tapes from various characters about life on motherbase. Now that you can visit it, there's no suspension of disbelief and just feels like someone's incomplete environment.

 

But I'm having a harder and harder time explaining why it would be worth playing the same gameplay loop as much as this game wanted, especially completing the side ops. Things never really change. Once you get past the first half of the game no new area is ever revealed. No new enemies come out. There's really just one boss in this whole game. Maybe you can count the skulls but they get reused so much I'm not sure if they would be considered more than just a souped up strong enemy.

 

Really I can't blame anyone for skipping those hard mode missions later in the game as they were such a cop out. The last thing I wanted to do was go through the tedious tasks of two of those missions and listen to conversations again. Thank goodness I had worthwhile stealth camo developed by then. Total stealth is really just a copy paste with a game over on getting caught as you should probably already be playing like that in the first place. Subsistence was neat but there's only two and the latter one can literally be beaten within two minutes with the same method as used in the first go around. The extreme ones had the potential to be major bullshit because of the overpowered skulls but thank fucking god I figured out you could use the armor with the parasite suit and not lose out on the S Rank. I am not even sure if they are remotely possible without having D-walker upgraded and that armor. Otherwise so many parts are just one hit kills even with Battle Dress.

 

But really even those I didn't mind since I already knew I had the abilities to do them, I am just sour grapes. The main reason I have left this game with an awful taste in my mouth is this:

 

The final mission with Quiet. For whatever reason when you start this mission there is no going back. If the gear you came in with starting the side op is too underpowered it's too bad because you are stuck. You can't go back to helicopter even though you could do so in every other mission in the game. You quit to the main menu, when you start your game you are brought back to the latest checkpoint in the mission. There is only one way to leave and that's if you ride the shipping container out of the mission. If you leave the mission area it just restarts you. This leads me to believe that if this trick works then it just a programmer oversight that you are not allowed to leave this mission. With that and the insane difficulty spike the whole mission is really unfair and seems very poorly designed. Nothing in this game is harder than this mission. No extreme level even comes close.


And if you leave the crate like I did after looking it up, you only get one chance to do so as the crate will no longer be there upon restarting. I put on the battle dress and did not abuse the parasite armor because I did not want to S rank it or anything the first time, I just wanted to see the cutscenes where Big Boss' face was visible. If you wear the parasite suit then you watch the final cutscenes with that stupid mask in the way.

However even that didn't matter because I had to wear the chicken hat I was so fed up from dying so often. I had equipped the upgraded Killer Bee but the game forces you to lose that weapon to a really shitty underpowered rocket launcher after the cutscene. This rocket launcher takes like 8 hits to blow up a tank. Each one uses up all the ammo and you have to wait for a drop. In the mean time I die. The easier and faster way to take out the vehicles was fulton and having Quiet shoot them because for some reason her sniper can blow up a tank in a couple of hits while this rocket launcher can't do shit. However sneaking around tanks usually means I die half the time. I had to basically learn the position and timing of all the tanks and dudes for the whole level to finally beat it. And even then I would often die from the helicopter at the end because at some point in there I have to call in a weapon drop for the same Killer Bee I took into the mission since it homes in on the helicopter. I did attempt a few rounds to destroy the helicopter with the shitty launcher but it would not fire fast enough and the damn thing always moved out of the way too quickly.

 But hey even if I have time to call in the Killer Bee it doesn't always guarantee I'll get one. Sometimes Quiet is already calling in a supply drop so I can't do it until she's done. However she does it so frequently. And sometimes the damn thing gets blown up if I'm being fired at before getting the crate. And sometimes i can't even find enough cover while calling in the drop even when I'm hiding in the back of the palace because the copter will find me. It's just so obnoxious.

So yeah I ended up taking the LITTLE CHICKEN HAT which I didn't even know was a thing until then because I just wanted the shit to be over. I think it made it so almost no one could see anymore or whatever. And so with probably the best ending, cutscenes, and story moment in this entire game, I was stuck with Big Boss wearing a stupid fucking chicken hat the whole time, completely undermining whatever power the fucking thing might have had. I mean that and the camera stopping at Quiet's crotch and boob jiggle on the earlier awesome fight scene.

So great fucking job Kojima or whoever dropped the ball on the design there. Considering the final mission before replaying the hospital prologue was just a bunch of tanks we had seen before, I get the feeling this was the result of running out of money and quickly completing whatever was there.

 

 

And this game started so strong with the hospital part. That was great. What a let down.

 

But really even that would have been forgivable if the story weren't the worst I had ever seen in the whole series. Besides the Quiet ending there was one moment that actually worked for me

 

was when you had to kill all your troops on the zombie part. That was actually a highlight to find out that no one was saveable despite Kaz leading on that you could save some. The guys asking you to kill you while saluting was a nice touch. Of course then the resulting cutscenes are ruined with Keifer voice. Does Keifer sound like a cartoon to pig to you the way he does to me? Such nonsense.


But I don't even know what to think about it at this point. The parasite concept was a cool idea and all but poorly executed. Most of the game's story is only told in the cassette tapes. You even get prompts from characters between missions to say HAY BOSS LISTEN TO THAT TAPE WE HAVE BECAUSE WE DIDN'T MAKE A CUTSCENE FOR THAT IMPORTANT INFO. Then there's just a ton of tapes where every character has a bunch of talking besides Boss. Whatever. I guess it's good Hayter isn't in this bad game, easier to write off now.

 The final Paz cutscene is stupid and gross. All of that was pointless. I guess it's to drive home that this medic is somehow important to the story but really it's just a poor insertion of a character that was never there to begin with. Totally awkward. Skullface is the same. He is mad at Big Boss because he had to "clean up his mess" in all the previous games. There's nothing specific he would have had to do or get mad about leading this supposed XOF force. Plus that completely undermines the cool feeling of the one man mission in the jungle in MGS3. He's mad at Zero because he couldn't use his parasite plan? In what way should any of this require a gang rape or raping an underage boy or all whatever gross shit was in those tapes in Ground Zeroes. Nonsense. The guy wore a stupid mask and was not fun like previous MGS bosses. He just flatly dies under some metal halfway through the game. There was that stupid weak ass car ride I talked about earlier. It was all so pointless. This added nothing to the saga nor did it really resolve much besides saying possibly Zero wasn't THAT bad since it was Skullface doing the really nasty stuff.

But then also pointless was this Big Boss double. Why reveal this? What does it actually add to the saga? I thought maybe at first it was a shitty cop out to explain why Big Boss becomes such a villain because this medic dude is mad and punches a mirror and walks away in demon mode. So we could say, "Hey that wasn't Big Boss being bad, he was never bad! What a nice guy in MGS4!" However the text after the credits betrays this. It says the Big Boss killed in Metal Gear 1 is a doppelganger while meanwhile the real Big Boss was developing Zanzibarland in Metal Gear 2. Zanzibarland is where the child soliders being employed by Big Boss first comes up. He's portrayed as a pretty bad dude there. So still no gap is bridged between the Big Boss series and Metal Gear 1. We get the info that instead of thinking Big Boss never dies as villains never do in Metal Gear 1 it was instead this medic who died. But it doesn't really impact the story in any meaningful way. Besides you find out he escapes death again at the end of Metal Gear 2 after his reveal in MGS4. So we now learn that Big Boss only escaped death at the hands of Solid Snake once instead of twice. Bravo Kojima? Amazing twist!

 

 

And I'm not gonna lie, this story would be mostly redeemed for me as just mediocre and fine enough had it just treated women with respect. Had Paz not had all of these nasty things happen to her and Quiet actually had sensible clothes, it would have been okay. Quiet's story is good, she could have just worn shorts and a less ridiculous bikini top if we really did need that reasoning for her skin. Yet Code Talker is still wearing a fucking suit. I guess that bald head really does wonders for photosynthesis. And Kojima drove it home into disgusting territory by taking ever opportunity to jam that camera into Quiet's breasts or up her ass. When she is tortured let's fucking stop and leer at those boobs for a second. Ugh.

 

Isn't this guy almost 60 now? He's had so many years to evolve past the nasty parts of Policenauts yet here we are. So then when I'm playing this game I start having to field questions from my wife about stereotypes about Japanese men. "Why are Japanese men so gross?" "Why are they so sexist?" "Why do they need to jerk it to everything?" And with how extreme anime is these days with fan service and these camera angles creeping into almost all Japanese media that gets imported here, I don't know how to really say that apparently not all Japanese men are like this. I mean I hear this is just an otaku subculture of catering to a subset of men who carry around body pillows,  but I can't speak first hand. "Vistors of Akihabara." This is mostly what my exposure also reflects so how can I really say different?

 

And I also caught this article:

Quote

Kojima also talked about some of the other big issues in gaming.


He defended the way women have been represented in previous titles, with some gamers critical of "overly sexualised" characters.
"I'm going to have a different approach for the next game," he says.


"What I really want to avoid is, like you see in some games, characters with big breasts with no back story.
"If I make characters that at first glance might look like this then they'll have a deep background story to give a specific reason why."

 

This is a poorly written fluff piece for the BBC so I have no idea what they were getting at there. It could be poor or awkward translation. Is Kojima saying he's going to grow up a little here? Is he saying he has portrayed a lot of female characters wrongly? Or is he justifying that Quiet was a super good story where she wasn't just big boobs? Was he the one ashamed of his words and deeds? I can only hope Death Stranding can be a little bit more respectable.

 

And all these Gamergate types will still defend this behavior from Japanese games all over the place. Reviewers and critics are somehow insensitive and racist towards Japanese culture because we don't respect how they see women in their society. That we are trying to assimilate them into our western norms. Fuck it though, not all culture is created equal. Their media gets sold on a global scale. Japanese have a responsibility to pay attention to the rest of the world if they are to release their games there. Some of these projects are multi million dollar releases so why undermine it with sleaze? I feel like so many Japanese games and cartoons with fanservice are catering to some weird world where porn isn't available at your fingertips and this is all to titillate 12 year old boys who need to be able to get boners without getting in trouble with their parents. Like how when I was in middle school and most of our internet was dial up and our computers were shared family computers where you would get caught so instead you are playing Dead or Alive. Like Jesus fucking Christ can we move on now Japan? This is how the world perceives you. Saying Japan has issues with perversion has been the butt of every joke for decades now.

Anyway, I started Policenauts on my Saturn. I'll complain about that later. I should probably go through this thread now and click all the spoilers too.

 

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Apologies for the double post. I figured it would be easier to go through stuff to reply to this way.

On 10/1/2015 at 1:06 AM, Griddlelol said:

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

  Reveal hidden contents

"Vocal Chord parasites"

 

I know! God I was so sick of that guy's voice acting by the time it was done. I felt like my throat was sore from hearing it.

On 11/4/2015 at 6:17 AM, manny_c44 said:

Another thing I love about MGS1 and Peacewalker was the incorporation of illustration into the game. That's something else that's been missing in the successive console releases. I mean, in Yoji Shinkawa you basically have one of the best concept artists/illustrators in the world.

I guess this is a bit pedantic, but you can credit Ashley Wood and not Shinkawa for the illustration elements of Portable Ops and Peacewalker. I think though however the illustration stuff in Peacewalker was finished by many other artists following his art direction though as it was a big undertaking. I like him as an artist a lot but in recent years I feel like his art has gotten way worse and the subject matter is still robots and naked girls. Oh well. But he did a great job on the official Metal Gear Solid comics for 1 and 2 and they were also turned into motion comics that are also a fun watch. The first one was a PSP game that you could pause and interact with and then they were rereleased with English voice acting on the Metal Gear Solid HD collection, legacy disc only though.

 

I'm surprised how many people in this thread went straight to this game and skipped Peacewalker. The game would make absolutely no sense storywise. But I see not everyone was here for the story, which is fine. I wish these mechanics existed in a game that wasn't this game.

Also I'm surprised how many people here had issue with Mission 16 and the Skulls in general. Once I started Mission 6 and I easily took them all out with the Killer Bee they give you, I realized they weren't so bad at all. I was already following what I knew from Peacewalker about essential weapons so maybe I benefited from that. But if you just keep your missile launchers and grenade launchers upgraded they shouldn't be too difficult by the time Mission 16 happens. The sniper type, just snipe back, it's just the Quiet mission again with four of them. You can also just walk around them which is a good tactic for the S Rank on that mission as it creates parasite mist and you can run out of there with Code Talker for some reason as the guards are all having seizures.

 

But did no one mess with the parasite suit for extreme stuff? I am pretty sure you unlock the suit after Mission 28 and can start developing stuff if you extract skulls. If you replay that mission it's relatively quick and you can extra the armor types in minutes. It takes longer to extract stealth parasites and mist parasites. But both of those restrict you to an A rank. I haven't used mist to be honest so I'm not sure what it does other than maybe just the same as a sandstorm. There parasite stealth camo lasts longer than the normal Phantom Pain stuff but is not as good as the MGS1 camo device from Huey you get after.

Although I actually did not give the armor a shot until I was seething at the extreme version of the truck mission because finally those Skulls were kicking my ass with one hit kills. I just restarted the mission to give the armor stuff a shot since why not and learned that you are invincible as long as it's going. You literally cannot die until it runs out. You can develop the ability to hold more of these pretty easily. Also it is resupplied when you get ammo drops. I guess it's game breaking or cheating or something but it's there and I earned it so why not? The only other element I had to learn was reading some tips online that heavy machine guns work better on skulls than any rocket or grenade launcher. So the D-Walker gattling gun or one of your fully upgraded lethal machine guns are essential if you want to kill them faster.

Also I see a lot of people here did benefit from being always online despite (from what I remember) a lot of people saying upon release to stay offline so your shit doesn't get stolen or become online only resources. It does seem like every time you connect, 90% of your resources will become part of your online pool but this is how you get more stuff. Building extra FOBs and doing online dispatch missions will net you stuff while not even playing. I am glad I avoided all of the connection issues people had early on though so I had an easier time of it. But as it stands now I can't imagine how this game will be anywhere as much fun once Konami takes the servers down. It will become such a grind to develop new resources and you won't be able to sell anything for extra GMP whenever needed. You can't raid fobs, you can't get special online only weapons, you can't develop better versions of weapons. The whole economy of it will be turned around.

On 2/13/2016 at 8:58 AM, marginalgloss said:

The scripting in the missions where you have to overhear enemy conversations is built like a house of cards. If you get seen by ANYONE — even if you’re only glimpsed, like when the white ring appears without an alert — then sometimes the conversations just won’t occur. And there is no way to trigger them again.

Almost all of those were legit bad. I remember the first tedious one being the one with four prisoners and sometimes the guards would just not go and have the conversation or seemed to just stop. You could often restart the checkpoint and it might work again but sometimes they don't even stay in the same place as the last time you started the checkpoint and so you restart the mission.

The one with the arms dealer was agonizing.It's initially obnoxious because there are no checkpoints and most of the mission involves sitting in the back of the truck doing nothing for six minutes. The first time I did the conversations on the normal version of the mission I did not use stealth camo, but used the sneaking suit so no one could hear my footsteps. However if any guard caught anyone asleep or saw you fultoning it, the ability to hear the rest of their conversations was over as the whole team in the area would go on alert.

The big difference when replaying it on total stealth mode was how I finished it. Since the first time I did it, I waited until all conversations were heard and then blew the shit out of the helicopter and tranqed everyone one by one on alert with Quiet. However you can't do that in the second version because game over and start the whole mission again if you get caught. I made the mistake of using the parasite suit camo first time because it lasted longer but if anyone heard footsteps it would fucking send people on alert. Once I got right to the end when the truck parks right before the two guys get on the helicopter and I accidentally nudged the analog stick even though I was in crawl position in the back. The guys in the truck went on high alert and ran away because that counted as a footstep and I could no longer hear the last conversation and I had to restart. I was so so fucking pissed off.

And then the other aspect to that mission task being bullshit with total stealth is when you gotta take out that helicopter in the end. I had to look up how to take them out stealthily because a missile will get you caught even with stealth camo on and it's game over. I had the Serval developed but never used it. So I had to exit and attach the silencer and used that to take out the helicopter without getting caught. Is there any other weapon you can even do this with? I have no idea how you would finish this conversation mission task without taking out the helicopter at the end because they get on the helicopter after the final conversation within 20-30 seconds and that's a very short window of time to get out of that truck and try to aim at them correctly from the ground, especially because it would be too hard to follow them as there's no way to take out many guards ahead of time in that area because the second anyone notices anything remotely suspicious the conversations stop and everyone hides behind something.

 

On 6/18/2017 at 10:54 PM, Bjorn said:

 

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Snake and Ocelot letting Kaz torture Quiet for funsies.  Despite her being an integral part of their ability to defeat Skull Face and cure the parasite in the rest of Mother Base, sure, just torture the shit out of her.  I'd have given anything to put a bullet in Kaz at that point (and quite frankly, after that, she could have been a hundred percent justified in murdering every last one of them). 

 

 

What's really strange about that scene is that Big Boss fails to actually vouch for her despite going on a ton of missions with her beforehand. There's more disconnect with this later as Quiet has proven herself to be trusted as there's a billion times she could have just killed you out in the field yet Kaz narratively seems to ignore this. Also that scene is a perfect display of how wrong the characters are for Kaz and Ocelot. It starts with Ocelot giving the go ahead to a soldier to keep torturing Quiet and he is acting like he'll get something out of her. This makes sense for once as this is more true to the Ocelot in the other MGS games. However once Kaz walks in he gets all pissed and defies all logic of the situation and asks for her to be tortured with the salt water because he's gotta upstate Ocelot. Then Ocelot suddenly gets all morally high and mighty and yells at Kaz that she'll never talk because she's mute and this is all pointless and she should be trusted because she's had so many opportunities to kill Big Boss until now. So like... huh? What the fuck were you just doing before Kaz entered the room, Ocelot? I think that's when former Ocelot exited and Troy Baker good guy Ocelot walked in while the camera was on Kaz. What a clumsy ass scene.

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Great posts synth. I remember feeling overall positive about MGS 5 when I played it in large part because of how fun and engaging most of the gameplay was. But hearing your perspective, it's hard to deny how shitty and inconsistent large parts of that game were.

 

What a weird game. Now that some time has passed since I've played it, I don't feel nearly as positive about my experience as I did initially. I think the gameplay was just so captivating that it kind of pushed the negative stuff to the background. But now that I'm 1.5 years removed from the experience of playing the game, that good gameplay feel has faded quite a bit and most of the memories I am left with are those of a weird and gross story constructed by a total pervert.

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@syntheticgerbil  That was long, but actually pretty cathartic and good to read, because it captures so many of the things that I've thought about this game and wanted to write, but just hadn't had time to sit down and do it.  I'm not sure I'm ever going to finish the Quiet mission.  The last thing I did was the True Ending, and it was just so deflating. 

 

@Zeusthecat  MGSV is probably going to be the strangest disconnect I've ever had with a game, where mechanically I was having as much fun with it as anything I've played in years, but the garbage baggage of the story and characters just slowly eroded and chipped away at any positive feelings I have about the game.

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I would say you should do the Quiet mission just to see some of the best cutscenes in the whole game but it might not be worth it depending on the development of your load out and your amount of patience. I think I read about some safe areas to stay during the mission, but I did not try it myself. It is literally just a fight between 7 tanks, 7 armored cars, and one helicopter all alternating while you sit in that palace SW in Afghanistan. If you are pretty good at handling that sort of thing in the game you will probably be way less frustrated than me.

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On 13/07/2017 at 9:11 AM, syntheticgerbil said:

And then the other aspect to that mission task being bullshit with total stealth is when you gotta take out that helicopter in the end. I had to look up how to take them out stealthily because a missile will get you caught even with stealth camo on and it's game over. I had the Serval developed but never used it. So I had to exit and attach the silencer and used that to take out the helicopter without getting caught. Is there any other weapon you can even do this with? I have no idea how you would finish this conversation mission task without taking out the helicopter at the end because they get on the helicopter after the final conversation within 20-30 seconds and that's a very short window of time to get out of that truck and try to aim at them correctly from the ground, especially because it would be too hard to follow them as there's no way to take out many guards ahead of time in that area because the second anyone notices anything remotely suspicious the conversations stop and everyone hides behind something.

 

It's been a while since I did this but there might be an opportunity to plant C4 on/near the chopper at some stage during the conversations. Or you could book it out of the base and take it out with the CGM from a distance away; I recall having some success shooting it down from the road that runs along a little hill overlooking the base. The nearby guards might get a '!' but as long as they don't actually see you doing it you should be okay. Maybe.

 

You'd have to use stealth camo for both of these, of course, but then the fully upgraded stealth camo and fully upgraded parasite armour suit can be used to solve most of the trickiest problems in this game. That's including the epic final Quiet mission. No need to find anywhere to hide when you can take tank rounds to the chest and survive! It kind of feels like cheating but at this level the systems start to look kind of broken anyway so why not.

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Crap I forgot about C4. I think if I were to do it again, there is an opportunity when you listen in on the first conversation to plant it and not get caught.

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I'm compelled to comment on the new Death Stranding trailer somewhere and this seems as good a place as any.

 

Kojima's cinematic cinematography is so strange. It's probably been commented on a million times in regards to MGS5 but it's still such a jarring and stylized experience to me. It's mostly with out camera cuts, with camera work that can only exist in a CGI reality, in carefully blocked and completely surreal sequences. The single cut makes it seem like it is set in reality, but the completely random sequence of surreal events is in stark contrast to that.

 

The only point of reference I have to compare this specific style of CG cinema is Xavier: Renegade Angel.

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