Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Producer: Konami
Release Date: September 1, 2015
Platform: Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS4, PS3, PC
Rating: Mature
Genre: Action-Adventure
Top Gear
Written by Jesse Seilhan
Few franchises have meant more to gamers than Metal Gear Solid. Visionary Hideo Kojima started Solid Snake’s journey back in 1987, which has somehow transcended time, appetites, and control schemes for nearly three decades with all-time classic games, perhaps most famously with the first Metal Gear Solid game in 1998. The subsequent sequels have all been an attempt to recapture what made MGS so great, layering on new gameplay, insane narrative, and a devotion to perfection other developers rarely have time or money to achieve. With Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Kojima is finally stepping away from the franchise that has inspired generations of gamers, by giving them the culmination of more than 30 years worth of work as his last great gift.
While open world games have become the genre of choice in recent years, MGS has never attempted something so spacious, sticking to compact hallways and well designed levels, executing just fine within that scope. But Phantom Pain is the complete opposite, as players have the “entirety” of Afghanistan and other portions of Africa to play with. Various checkpoints are scattered across the land, as are various enemy encampments, from massive fortresses to science facilities, all filled with goodies to steal and enemies to take down. The gameplay is the real highlight, but those that played Ground Zeroes two years ago have essentially already played with the controls. Moving Snake is incredibly smooth, but the amount of choice is the real joy, as players can take on missions in literally dozens of different ways, loaded to the teeth with high explosives or going stealthy for a quiet infiltration.
As for the story, you need to forget what you know about Solid Snake. MGSV takes place in the 1980’s, as his father Big Boss is beginning to build the Outer Heaven empire, a place where wayward soldiers can fight for what they believe in, seperate from any political or national allegiances. This means literally building a base and its staff, farming resources you find in the field and using that to create and fortify a rig in the middle of the ocean, complete with barracks, research & development, training quarters, and more. The staff you use to fill these spaces are also found in the field, which brings us to the greatest new wrinkle in this series: the fulton. Based on real technology, Big Boss is able to attach a balloon to nearly any person or object in the world, extracting them back to headquarters. Highly-skilled soldiers that survive the trip now become part of your military and can be used on their own missions, or apply their unique research in the development of new weapons and tools. Finding key figures is important to not only moving the story along, but to unlocking some of the most powerful and interesting items in the game.
The game has more than 200 missions, which is both a dubious number and term. The main story can’t really be separated and weighed against the other content, as both look, act, and feel the same way. Narrative-focused ones tend to have a cutscene either setting them up or closing them out, but the variety of gameplay during these sections is identical to the over 150 Side Op deployments. These are shorter chunks of gameplay, where Snake has to complete one of a bunch of different acts, like extract a witness, tail a guard, capture a wild animal, or clear mine fields. Everything trains you for the next thing, regardless of what path you went down, and they all go toward researching and funding new weapons, all of which can be modified and used in nearly any situation. Same goes for companions that you can bring out into the field that help eliminate or identify key targets.
After more than 70 hours played, I can safely say this is one of the best video games I have played in years. So many tiny details and aspects of the gameplay are masterful, worth the years it took to put the entire package together. The meta-game is strangely addictive and helps break up the well-designed missions, but part of it lives online and the servers have been down or struggling to stay up since the game’s launch. While some story beats and “gamey” mechanics (like a busted economy and cooldown timers) keep this thing from achieving perfection, its lasting impression is one of true greatness. Few franchises truly evolve, but Phantom Pain proves that given an absurd amount of time, money, and creativity, some experiences can become something truly awesome.