I played it until shortly after getting to the second map area back when it came out, but lost like 10+ hours of progress because of some cloud save fuckery, recently started playing again from the start.
Fuck it’s fun man. I’ve heard it ends disappointingly and is considered “unfinished” (no spoilers please!), but fuck, it’s so fun just running around tranquilising dudes and fultoning tanks. I’ve been progressing the story really slowly because I’ve just been free-roaming with a podcast on, going from outpost to outpost just emptying the place out. I’ve also gotten side tracked going back to get S-ranks on old missions. Even that sting of the MGS theme you get at the mission report screen when you get an S-rank, so great. A lot of nice touches like that.
The controls are so responsive and smooth, it’s really the height of what that series set out to be. And the amount of stupid stuff you can do with weapons and items, and the classic MGS weirdness sprinkled on top, so damn good.
It’s also one of those games that gives you a really satisfying feeling of progression, starting out with lame weapons and slowly developing more powerful and useful stuff, expanding Mother Base and getting bonuses from the various “platforms”, and even just you becoming better as you explore the mechanics and learn the layouts of the maps.
Very, very good game.
Now I know this is definitely not the case, but I love the critique of MGSV that the game itself is the "Phantom Pain." The gameplay is perfect. It's the best stealth action game ever made as far as that goes. But the story is definitely the worst of any of the Metal Gear games. Venom barely speaks, the villain reveals everything to you in an awkward car ride, so many plot points left totally unresolved, the story feels oddly... empty. Like it was taken from us. Why did Kojima make this game? Just for us to suffer? The lack of story, coupled with the promise and perfection of the gameplay, is the phantom pain. We're missing that what was promised to us, knowing it would make things perfect. We learn to suffer, just as Venom and the Diamond Dogs suffered.
As many issues that I have with it for story/unfinished reasons, It's still got the best gameplay, by far, of any stealth game. Which is why so many people were upset with it I guess, it had so much potential and really could've been an all-time great game but stumbled in some areas of plot execution. But damn does it feel good to play.
Gameplay and control wise so many adjectives come to mind - polished, slick, smooth, I could go on. Imagine a remake of the whole series in that engine 🥵
After the revolution we
canmust incorporate that into the new 5 year plan
If you're on PC use SnakeBite to install Infinite Heaven once you've finished the main game. Easily added another hundred hours to my playtime.
My personal mod list that adds flavour and content without breaking the game:
- Infinite Heaven (tweak nearly every aspect of the game to your liking; way too many to list here, but one of my favourite examples is having random parasite unit encounters in free roam)
- Distant Sunlight Shadows (more shadows in the distance, looks great)
- Enable Cloud Shadows (cut feature that was in GZ but not PP, works best with distant sunlight shadows to increase range of cloud shadow draw distance)
- More Animals: Afghanistan (more animals spawned to make the world feel more alive)
- More Animals: Africa (same as above, but for the Angola-Zaire border region)
- Yet Another Weather Mod (improves duration of inclement weather, and increases weather diversity e.g. rain in Afghanistan)
You can grab all these from NexusMods.
The game feels like a fuck you to critics of MGS 4 being endless cutscenes and linear rote gameplay. That Kojima can't make games.
Like Kojima and team said "you want an open world!? You want progression mechanics!?" And built one of the best systematic games ever.
It's also neat is that you can see how Death Stranding comes out of MGS V.
Be sure to listen to the intel tapes. That’s where 90% of the story is, and a lot of them rule
I have some issues with it but I'll admit the gameplay is fucking top notch. I also love the customisation options for Mother Base/your vehicles/the Diamond Dogs, wish it could have been expanded on.
MGS5: TPP is the game that got me OUT of gaming. Literally. I couldn't have been more excited for it, more let down, and more ready to just abandon 'gaming.' The incomplete story is a part of why I disliked it so much, but even the repetitive 'open world' was painful, because it was mostly just empty except for the camps you can attack in a very rinse and repeat fashion.
There are so many carefully-designed touches in the older games which are all lost here. My only wish is that Ground Zeroes ran on the improved TPP game engine so that I could replay that some more. GZ is much more fun to revisit because of how dense and well thought out that small area is. If TPP had that same level of attention to detail that they put into GZ it might've been the GOAT. At least as a big plus I don't waste so much time or money on video games anymore.
