Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015)

Replaying this game in 2025 is a very different experience.

Back in 2015 I was younger and didn't care much about the messages this game tries to convey, I was there just for the gameplay.

Although Russia already invaded Ukraine in February 2014, it was mostly localized in 2 regions and didn't have a big impact on the entire country, unlike 2022 and onward. Replaying it now, I'm amazed how I shrugged off so much dark stuff in MGS5 back then. But now I understand why I was reluctant about replaying Ground Zeroes now, where they "reward" you for completing a mission with a tape recording or torture. And then in Phantom Pain you encounter Russian soldiers in Afghanistan, with more tapes describing war crimes, followed by child soldiers in Africa.

finished chapter one and i'm gonna call that done for all intents.

overall, i think chapter one is a pretty tight game. something that's quite funny to me however is the tension between the boss encounters and the typical missions. there's always this sort of lumbering motion that snake has combined with a sort of more elegantly moving, yet extremely well telegraphed, boss, and the whole of it i suspect is designed primarily to heighten the tension of snake reloading or snake trying to find cover to hide or whatever. it's such a specific vibe, similar to the way that seeing a stamina bar refill a little too slowly in a souls game mid-battle can be.

finally, it's hard to not see the parallels here structurally between 45 minute tv series and the way that mgs v is set up. each mission is roughly, with replay, about 45 minutes to an hour. the game even pulls the same "when we return" shtick that nier: automata does, except i think from just having done the first chapter two mission, i'm inclined to think that nier pulled off this trick a lot better than mgs v does.

does kojima love tv? it's like he's whacking everyone over the head saying how much he loves tv. hard not to see his thinking about how this game's narrative is structured influenced heavily by prestige action shows of the mid to late 00s like BSG, 24, and Lost. the bsg connection being in my mind cemented by the ham fisted use of Quiet the story goes all over the place, it's just incredibly vibey, and the driving momentum in the game narratively isn't reaching a satisfying resolution as much as it's a "what is going to happen next episode?!" the way small mechanics like base building and FOBs are setup have a nice payoff. i was not feeling the base building in peacewalker, but i liked it here because it felt like it could be fairly handsoff until you really cared to invest time into it.

i'll repeat here that i think playing this game in that 'mission a night' way is probably exactly the way that this game works best. there is a bunch of structural repetition in the game, but the mission structures are a bit diverse and they all have slightly different challenges to the point where it's fun to imagine going back to them and some of them even have very satisfying setups and stage some really great moments. it's incredible seeing how each episode's design is sometimes very really cleverly designed and rewards experimentation and the switch of locale between afghanistan to central africa also does a good job of varying the environment without changing all too much.

really enjoyed my time here, i alternated between playing on my phone with a backbone and hopping on to play on the tv probably about a third of the missions. will probably get me to revisit other mgs titles again.

this isn’t specific to mgsv but it’s something that comes up here and in hitman which is that it’s not often super clear how you’re supposed to Play the game. this can be a good thing because it allows for lots of gameplay styles but i think this is the sort of game where a physical manual would have actually revealed a lot of the nuance of the kinds of gameplay strategies that are possible without spoiling the actual moment when you pull off something you didn’t think the game would allow you to try.

also i think narratively coming into this game knowing roughly the outline of what happens makes me appreciate the way the story is both absolutely bonkers but is always self consistent in the way it chooses to reveal things to you. probably the most interesting thing for me is the question about how much agency snake has, he meets kaz or huey and there’s this really weird tension between how that moment goes down and how you think it would go down given the events of peacewalker or ground zeroes. i’m really intrigued by the choice that was made to keep snake operate “on rails” both narratively and as some missions tighten up, there’s a sense that you’re operating like a mercenary and despite ostensibly running mother base you feel like you’re really just taking orders from ocelot and going back for a shower. whatever power you have always feels tenuous despite the massive power you command.

still having fun!

agree with the takes that quiet has not aged well as fan service, but the structure of the game still holds up as a one and a half episodes a night game in the same way i’d watch a tv show. i think any more than that id start to burn out on the mechanics but at this pace it sort of rattles around my head until i can play again.

still feel like a modern version where climbing is more developed than “can you spy a single crack in the occasional rock” would amp up the fun.

sort of like most souls games, i feel like i just dip into most kojima games for about ten hours and then sort of peace out, but also, like souls games, i can't stop thinking about them either.

with mgs v, i played through a bunch of peacwalker until my ps3 gave up the ghost and then i finally downloaded and finished ground zeroes and then mgs v which i played for about five hours and then put down for some reason.

in between then i revisited mgs, mgs 2, and death stranding and it's hard not to return to mgs v now after all this time and "understand" or "get" kojima as an auteur who, beyond tone and aesthetic, also thinks about gameplay rhythm in a very specific way that is (as scores of others have observed) unique to him and what makes his games so compelling even in spite of their flaws. it's this sort of contrast in mgs v and death stranding: the quiet meditative planning, the sort of long journeys in the empty biomes, the moments of high[y tense action when a stealth section goes south, the just ridiculously absurd product placement that peppers cutscenes. this tempo is just addictive once you roll with it and i don't know of many games that willingly exploit that as part of the actual mission or narrative structure. is the story bonkers and telenovela-esque? yes. do i care? no.

it's nearly impossible for me to not walk through early afghanistan missions and see the echoes in the largely desolate areas in death stranding, a kind of nearly featureless landscape that has enough detail and differentiation that you begin to understand how to read the landscape and how to scope out locations. in my mind these yield "obvious" approaches but i'm always stuck how there are always a few other ways to approach a mission that open up to you once you understand a base, understand the rhythm of the troops, or just have a better sense of how people navigate a base. every mission i complete i immediately want to restart and try in a new way once i complete it even when i don't care what 'score' i got for it.

i think people describe dragon quest games as bedtime games and for me, that's what mgs v has become: a game that i cane play for about an hour right before bed, either retrying a mission, starting a new one, or just going for some other optional part of a mission i played a while ago. only at 8% completion right now, but i can easily see coming back and forth to this game. like other mgs games, it's hard not to imagine what this game could be like if snake could climb everywhere, or had botw/totk style climbing/stamina mechanics. i don't think the game needs to change much, but it's hard not to imagine what a tiny quality of life remaster of this game would look like.

One of the more fascinating little Metal Gear-y details in this game was a special cutscene that’s never been legitimately unlocked, which is triggered by all player-owned nuclear devices on a given platform being disarmed. (There was this whole multiplayer aspect, yeah pretty weird but cool.)

People tried for a while to make it happen but couldn’t get it. Well, as it turns out, the cutscene is impossible to ever trigger legitimately, because Konami never fixed an issue where banned accounts’ nuclear arms were counting toward the total even though they could no longer be disarmed. Nice.

This is definitely a great evolution to the stealth action that MGS is focused on. I dig the concept of the base building combined with the missions. The stealth is pretty good and I like that interrogating and capturing guys is a risk/reward situation.

However, the game is very slow (it is a Kojima game, so that tracks). I have completed 10 missions and haven’t got any big new skills or weapons to make gameplay interesting. This game is also very dated in that the open world is INCREDIBLY EMPTY. There is nothing but military outposts, which gets dull after a while.

Heard great things about the companions you can run missions with but haven’t unlocked them yet. Ran into a game breaking bug that will require me to redo a long mission that I had 99% completed. Not really looking forward to that so may end up shelving.

Completed 71%. The only other Metal Gear game I have played is MGS3, so I have a bit of an unusual perspective for this game. I played this game for free on xbox live games for gold right after Ground Zeroes, and the game dragged on for a very long time. I am glad that it is over, but will also miss it. I followed the tutorials and used the basic starting gear, going pretty much full in on the stealth; scouting, marking, crawling around, hold ups, watching patrols and doing precise timing. Sometimes I use the tranq pistol, sometimes I used a silenced head shot, but rarely did I leave enemies alive to wake up later; I either fultoned them, killed them outright or beat stunned/unconscious enemies until they woke up and then slit their throats. I later got a sniper rifle and had fun with that; it especially came in handy with a suppressor. I used the horse and a jeep to get around and put emphasis on doing side ops first. Eventually I got a Russian APC with rocket launchers and that completely changed the game for me. Never mind sneaking around, I just killed everyone with the cannon. I lost it during the first battle against the giant Metal Gear for some reason even though I was not driving it. I think I had to look online to find out I could repeat side ops to get more, so I did that. I ended up losing a few more APCs for mysterious reasons. They were not destroyed, I guess the game just failed to auto extract them?

I tried to use one to defeat Quiet but it did not work very well; she was just too fast and I should have marked her. She could whittle down the APC over time so it was not like god mode. I ended up checking online the best way to win, and bombed her with knockout gas. Nice and easy. I used Quiet as my buddy for the rest of the game until she left. I hated the boss fights. The Skulls were a huge pain in the ass to fight; I ended up letting Quiet do most of the work while I ran around like mad trying to use bullets, grenades and air strikes to defeat them. Quiet beat 3 of the Skull snipers before going down herself, leaving me to fight the last in a one on one sniper rifle duel. I had a soviet tank by then and tried using it against the snipers, but it did not work so well. The man on fire fight was very annoying and took a few tries to figure out what to do. I tried to ram him into a pool of water with a jeep, but that kept failing. I finally got him by going into the pool and throwing grenades behind him until he fell in face first. I liked the tank better than the APC and later IFV. It was more maneuverable, the explosive shells could kill infantry from further away and it was pretty good against other armor. The only problem is the tank sucks against gunships, so I sometimes had to switch vehicles. It was pretty ridiculous how easy it was to sneak around in a tank and kill everyone without ever being spotted. The final boss fight against the Metal Gear was very hard and for some reason I kept having trouble with Snake wanting to reload the RPG instead of sprinting; I won mostly using the basic RPG, support chopper and a few air strikes. I then thought the game was over and that it was a fitting place to end. Nope chapter 2 started.

I really did not like having to repeat missions, especially the more difficult versions. Total Stealth was pretty much a joke with a tank though I still had to restart a few times. Subsistence was actually quite fun. The Extreme boss fights were not. The Skulls were even worse and it was even more of a frustrating mess of running around like mad trying not to be one shotted while Quiet did most of the work. I lost Quiet from her mission before the Extreme sniper battle and just drove past them in the tank. Screw that fight. My first attempt on the Extreme final boss got him to 50% health and it took several attempts to finally win. By this time I had replaced Quiet with D Walker and used the anti tank missiles for the boss combined with still the basic RPG, the pistol grenade launcher and the 7.2mm assault rifle. Never got a chance to risk any airstrikes. Shortly after getting that very first APC I had stopped going for side ops and only did them if they were near a main mission. After beating all missions I went and methodically completed every side op, which was very tedious. I had the most fun getting into tank vs tank battles as I drove circles around them. Honestly I would rather play an armoured combat vehicle simulator than a stealth game. It was at this point that I stopped using the old soviet tanks and switched to the magloader; it was totally not fair that the enemy magloader one shotted my soviet tank when the stats list the soviet as having better defense. It took an absurd amount of shots to defeat enemy armor too. As much fun as that was, most of the time I would crawl in, snipe the enemy snipers, fulton the armor, then call the support chopper to shoot down the enemy gunship. That was simply the most effective. Sometimes I used D Walker with a gatling gun to shoot down gunships, but it found it to be a bit iffy. I did not bother to do the shooting range side ops at mother base. Last thing I did was the side quest with Paz. I found out I can get Quiet back by repeating her original recruitment mission several times but I won’t bother.

I absolutely loved the cutscenes, cinematography, and core gameplay. What I did not like was how much of my time the game wasted with the helicopter getting on and off, driving around the same areas over and over to go to same places, and all the menu management at Mother Base. I gave up trying to manage the recruits to ensure an optimal distribution. At one point near the end I reached max capacity and had to fire a ton of people. I am missing multiple specialists but have no idea if I have them and they are not properly assigned; in particular the missile guidance guy so I can unlock the better rocket launchers and the damage resistance bionic arm. I kept sending guys out on combat missions and stuck to the relatively easy ones that give money and resources. I also fulton looted everything that was not nailed down and have a ridiculous stock of emplaced weapons and vehicles. My plan was to sell them at a profit, but the combat missions kept me rich. Never got invaded and never invaded anyone. Never tried Metal Gear Online and probably never will.

I did not care about optional mission objectives and ended up with: 1 S, 16 A, 23 B, 7 C, 1 D.

My PF rating is CC. Mother Base is maxed out and the free FOB is about 40% complete. I am not even close to having enough stupid premium currency to buy another FOB.

Hip weapon: Basic MRS 4 carbine at 5* customized with 40 round mag, sniper rifle stock, suppressor, red dot sight, 2X scope, flashlight, laser sight and foregrip.

Back weapon: M2000 sniper rifle at 5*, not customized. Bolt action, suppressed and one shot kill to the torso.

Side weapon: Tranq pistol at 4* with suppressor and customized with laser sight.

I certainly researched other weapons but rarely changed my set up. I used the sneaking suit, all the passive bionic arm upgrades, but never bothered with the secondary arm weapons. I took a full compliment of lethal and non lethal explosives and mines, but cut back on them for just doing side ops at the end to save money. Snake seems to be permanently drenched in blood as the showers seem not to help anymore. I would never want to start a new file and do the grind again, but I can see playing the main story missions again in the future. I don't care about S ratings.

8.0/10