I have, to date, dumped nearly 70 hours into Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. I am currently 57% through the game (it tells you on the title screen) and I have enjoyed every second of it. It is admittedly early to say so, but this game is a strong early contender for best game of the console generation and should go with Bloodborne in a drawer of intense, awesome, action games.
I will not try to summarize the story of Metal Gear Solid up to this point because it is an intensely complex story that rivals any M. Night Shyamalan movie for twists. Suffice it to say you play as Big Boss (AKA: Naked Snake, Venom Snake) after the events of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. Your base blew up, your army was massacred and you crashed in a helicopter and went into a nine year coma.
The fist 20 minutes of the game is possibly the best opening of a game ever. You wake up and your vision is incredibly blurry. Midge Ure’s cover of David Bowie’s classic The Man Who Sold The World plays in the background as your vision slowly comes into focus. After a nurse notices that you are awake, you are told by the doctor that you were in a coma for nine years. The explosion you were in was severe and because of it you have massive amounts of shrapnel in your body, including a piece that looks like a horn in your head, and that you are missing an arm. Finally the doctor is assassinated in front of you and the assassin tries to kill you too.
After your hospital neighbor saves you by setting the assassin on fire, he calls you Ahab and says you can call him Ishmael. What ensues can be described as a chase to catch Big Boss, as three entirely different parties are in the hospital looking for you, including a flaming man and a small floating boy wearing a straight jacket. You finally make it out to find your friend from the last game, who picks you up on a horse and hands you a shotgun. The fiery man make a new appearance, this time on a flaming Pegasus an you have to shot him with a shotgun to get away.
This is amazing, intense and awesome and I have replayed it multiple times just to feel it again.
There is a definite beauty to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Its vast open world gameplay gives it an amazing amount of diversity. Let’s say there’s a mission where I have to take out a guy. I can infiltrate the outpost silently and when I know the guy is alone I can take out my silenced gun and shoot him. Or I can go in guns blazing and massacre the entire base. Or I could take on a sniping place at a ridge just beyond the base and take him out from there. There is a massive amount of creativity that you can use to complete your mission.
I have two major problems with the game. 1: Its story is unfortunately lacking. It seems that when Konami fired Hideo Kojima, the game’s creator, they also took his game and messed with it because the rumor is that the entire ending was cut from the game. What story is there is good, it’s just very sparse and requires listening to hours of tapes to find.
My second problem has to deal with Quiet, the female sniper in the game. When Quiet was first shown I, like most people was surprised by her apparel. For those of you unaware, Quiet wears a bikini and leggings and that’s it. But Mr. Kojima is very good at making things like this turn back on them self. I remember how The Boss looked in MGS 3, but by the end of the game she was more a mother figure than anything else, so I let it slide for then.
Well by now I have played far enough into the game to know why she wears what she wears and I think that it is a stupid shoe-horned way to have a sexy bikini girl in the game.
Beyond that definite controversy the game is amazing. The graphics are gorgeous throughout the two open world areas, Central Africa and Afghanistan. After nearly 30 hours of play in each, the scenery can get a bit stale, but it is undeniable beautiful. I would suggest this game to fans of the series and newcomers alike, just be warned, the story can be impossible to decipher.
To read more from Checkpoint, check out the post Remembering Satoru Iwata.
