Board Thread:Metal Gear Solid V/@comment-109.193.182.64-20150909104238/@comment-42.98.54.133-20150914154951

I only just completed mission 15 (but did a lot of side ops), but had nonetheless watched the key story moments in bits and pieces and most likely in the wrong order. I will try to get things in order, but as you can see how long this is, I hope you don't mind if it feels disorganized.

In terms of story and game play --- I would say, we have two great opening missions and is justified to have the next few missions until meeting Quiet and Huey to be comparatively "pointless", as we are supposed to expand Mother Base at the time. However, after "saving" Huey, we've spent too much time trailing / saving people or destroying targets, which for me are only a longer version of the side ops. E.g. after the first African mission, can we not jump straight to extracting the Walker Gears while completing a side op extracting a translator? The mission which we fight the Skulls next was seemingly there only to give us a reason to fight the Skulls. Then what is the point of saving two Intel team members and trailing yet another person again as a main op? Why not jump to saving the children and then the fire fighting mission? I think side ops should have serve a purpose to supplement the main story rather than being a random 3 minutes mission just to extract a container for example. After that, I have not a 100% idea what is going on, but it looks like we get some of those missions only because Kojima wants more Skulls fight, except for the last few main missions. Weapon developments are not a bad thing, but it feels overly extensive. Would you even NEED to use more than 3 kinds of assault rifles and machine guns? Or would anyone end up using at least 1/3 of the weapons, if not for the sake of trying so? I think the trophy says that you got at least 300 to develop (speaking of weapon, I think MGS1 is still better than the rest that, you get to use all weapons available to you to beat the game). MB itself is pretty satisfying, as we get to touch down on it for the first time. The animal strut is also an interesting one. While I appreciate the highest degree of freedom in game play, I also believe it is why we have a story that is weaker than before -- because Kojima simply can't fit that many conversations in the game if he intends for us to make our own decisions even for developing weapons. With limited classic codec / cassette story-telling and story-less main ops, the majority of the story became a bit too empty. Last but not least (unless it was later added via DLC) cutting out mission 51 where you fight Liquid is just dumb.

An extra point on the boss fight / characters --- The Quiet boss fight would have been better if the story leading up to the battle is more extensive, and it was partly ruined by the fact that two supply drops will stamina kill her (I don't mind this creative way of beating her, but at least it should be adjusted to a reasonable difficulty). Liquid's battle is honestly a bit below expectation compared to the better CQC boss battles in older games. But what I felt most uncomfortable is the rest of the boss battles, except for the MG battle, being a mere Skull fight. For a long time since MGS2, with just a few exceptions, Kojima failed to create a secondary boss character that has character or at least an impact to the story. Swooping The Pain with The Sorrow or The Fury does not matters much to the story at all, The End can even be skipped. Then the FROGS and B and Bs are pretty much inter-changeable, only for Vamp to make the exception. MGSPW takes it a step further by having us fighting tanks, choppers and AIs, and now, we have a bunch of Skulls with almost no background at all.

In terms of characters (also echoing the user above me) --- there is the thing about Venom and Ishmael. Honestly, while I don't mind that much to have Venom as Big Boss, I still find that unnecessary, but as many (including myself) have talked about this elsewhere, I am going to skip this part here. For the character of Big Boss himself, I agree that he should have spoken more often. Quiet is pretty good as a new character especially when she does not have much speaking role to start with. Maybe even better if not for the sexuality distraction. Ocelot is not bad but I was disappointed how infrequently he shows up, and yes, Kaz just doesn't shut up. Huey's dark side was a nice touch, although I correctly guessed Strangelove is Hal's mother back in MGSPW. Skull Face was indeed a fine villain, perhaps better than even MGS1 Liquid. But to my surprise, we don't get to fight him at all, unlike all previous MGS main villain except Coldman. I can appreciate why we don't fight Coldman (who wishes to push for a deterrent by machines), but not Skull Face when he is supposed to be taking revenge and does have the battle skills and a badass look. While that 20 minutes do make Skull Face a deservingly great villain, but -- 20 minutes (perhaps I missed some cassette tapes) out of a game that takes 80 hours just for him to die without a boss fight?! And then the lack of secondary boss character also indirectly harmed the story telling from Skull Face's perspective. That was why MGS1 remains the best story I've ever came across in games as pretty much every character, from as little as Johnny, Mei Ling, Natasha have some stories, while the only one who doesn't, i.e. Decoy Octopus, has a good reason not having it. Of course most importantly, MGS1 told the story also from Liquid and others. The Skull Face scenes were great, but would be even better if he gets more hours of the game or more interaction with Mantis. Ah speaking of Mantis, I don't recall him speaking at all when even Strangelove did (hint me where he did ever speak). Consider his place in MGS1, I am shocked that all he did here was just controlling people or the MG. Shouldn't they allow him more interaction with Skull Face, Ocelot, Big Boss (even though he's a fake), if not a proper boss fight?! There's pretty much nothing telling how became who he would be.

So to conclude, in my opinion, MGSV does have the best and most realistic infiltration game play ever, but has sacrificed story-telling in doing so. Boss battles were more to trouble us than to excite us, and has too little set up prior to it. The Skulls are quite disappointing in particular, after so many poorly written secondary bosses in recent past. Most characters are pretty well, but not without blemishes such as the lack of time to know more about Skull Face, a fight against him, and the lack of story for Mantis. It is really a shame that MGS has to end at a lower than expectation note (at least for the foreseeable future).

