4/5
A few questionable design choices holds Metal Gear Solid V back from being a stellar experience.
I never would have thought that one day I’d complain about the lack of story in a Metal Gear game. But an achingly spare narrative along with tedious progression mechanics prevents Metal Gear Solid V from being the near-perfect game it could have been.
Don’t get me wrong – the stealth action is some of the best you can find in any video game. The inclusion of large, traversable conflict zones, a marking system, a buddy system and dynamic enemy AI are all welcome additions to what will likely be Hideo Kojima’s last Metal Gear game. I was offered many creative problem solving opportunities that kept me engaged in the game, from planning my infiltration, to adapting to unforeseen guard responses on the fly, to sneaking away from danger when things got too hairy. My excitement piqued in the early stages of the game when I was confronted by a world of opportunity as well as some gripping cinematography and storytelling. But by the time I was in the mid to late game, my feelings were very different. Tedium, repetition, and lack of narrative left me feeling disappointed in the lead-up to the ending.
The Phantom Pain takes place after the events of Ground Zeroes. You are Big Boss, legendary super soldier of the Metal Gear world. The year is 1984 and you’ve just awoken from a nine-year coma after an attack that destroyed your private army, lost you an arm and left you with permanent shrapnel in your skull. The game begins with an impressive display of storytelling that blurs the line between what is imagined and what is real. And the prologue of Metal Gear Solid V is more than an exposé of common coma after-effects. Anyone who remembers the trailer from VGA 2012 knows what to expect: an extended allusion to the great American epic revenge tale, Moby Dick. Kojima succeeds in cross-referencing the tale of Captain Ahab with Big Boss’s own quest, without forcing it on his audience in large dumps of information or hiding its impact under a fleeting, cute remark. The Prologue of Metal Gear Solid V offers surprisingly good storytelling for a video game. Unfortunately, it all goes downhill from there.
We know Kojima is a troll. Once famous for creating convoluted messes of stories (which were at least always charming at their core), he has now chosen to withhold many of those much-desired story beats from his audience. Live action codec transmissions have been replaced with pre-recorded cassette tapes, twenty-minute cut-scenes have been trimmed down to two. And remember those info dumps about The Patriots, the ones with graphs and long history lessons? Well, they’re gone. I was hoping to at least hear some great voice work from Keifer Sutherland. Yes, you’ll get a lot of him in the prologue, but not much after that. Forget about the David Hayter dilemma, the real Metal Gear voice actor controversy is about how the new high-budget Hollywood voice actor is a near-mute for most of the game. It’s hard to ignore the feeling that Keifer Sutherland’s talent has been stifled.
I should be clear: this is not a critique of spare storytelling. It is a critique of Metal Gear Solid V’s inability to successfully employ spare storytelling. The frugal narrative style is as legitimate a style as any, and I for one was glad that Kojima tried something new to keep the franchise fresh. But far too much is left in the air. I was puzzled rather than mystified, and left wanting to know more about why characters behaved the way they did and what forces were really at work in the world. And no, it didn’t “all make sense in the end.” Somewhere underneath Kojima’s shell of a narrative there are complex themes begging to be explored. Big Boss is well known as the arch-villain of the Metal Gear universe. Metal Gear Solid V is a story of revenge and the making of a villain, which leaves plenty of room for complex characters and ambiguities between good and evil. Kojima also takes the concept of war into much darker territories than what one might expect from a video game. He explores issues such as torture, child soldier enlistment, massacre and PTSD, all without casting value statements on the subject matter, which is commendably artistic of him. But the story lacks a clear sense of direction and the ending is unsatisfying, not because it’s happy or sad, but because it doesn’t resolve or thoughtfully develop the storylines of the game’s characters. Spare storytelling can be a great way to express much with little. And Metal Gear Solid V is not a game without gravitas. It takes a serious balancing act to keep the player involved while revealing as little story as possible, and Kojima has tipped the scale too far in one direction.
As serious as the subject matter is, Metal Gear Solid V is not without the quirk the series has come to be known for. Carboard boxes are still in the game. In fact, they’ve been revolutionized. Now you can stand up and run in the box. You can lie down in the box. You can pop out of the box and shoot enemy guards. You can even apply decals of busty babes and Soviet soldiers to your cardboard box for added customization. You can hide in porta potties. You can employ a horse as your battlefield “Buddy” and make it poop on the road before enemy convoys arrive. You can collect posters for your cardboard boxes. You can track down the greatest hits of the ‘80s by collecting cassette tapes scattered across the two open-world regions. I appreciated this last feature. There’s nothing quite as exhilarating as sneaking into a Red Army base in Afghanistan for the sole purpose of stealing the Kids in America cassette tape that’s blasting from a boombox next to some radio communications equipment.
The main story missions in the game are distinct and memorable. You’ll be tasked with tracking targets, gathering intel, assassinating (or extracting) people, rescuing prisoners and stealing enemy assets in order to gain the upper hand against Cipher, the faction that sent you into a coma nine years prior. The missions feel organic and subject to the whims of the open world. There was one mission, for example, which required me to tail a high-ranking official en route to meet an arm’s dealer. My objective was to eliminate the arm’s dealer. It was also, however, the first time I had decided to equip some C4. Naturally I felt inclined to use it right away so I placed it along the road that my intel team had marked on my map. When the official and his armored entourage showed up I detonated the C4 and killed them all. Instead of encountering a Mission Failed screen, my intel team informed me that the arms dealer had changed his plans for the night upon learning about the official’s untimely demise. I ended up tracking him down in some far-off area of the map. This is the kind of dynamic gameplay that leaves you feeling satisfied with your manipulation of the environment. As with any open world game, there are also side missions that may or not capture your interest. Although they are usually not story-driven, the side missions offer fun tactical challenges often with as much dynamism as the main story missions. And, of course, there are always those posters and cassette tapes to collect.
The open world treatment is just what Metal Gear needed. Players can sneak behind enemy lines in Afghanistan and the Angola-Zaire border region. Both locations offer different terrain and weather that affects how players might approach the game. Soviet-occupied Afghanistan is quite literally a sandbox of mountains and deserts, forcing players to consider elevation, impassable terrain and sandstorms into their tactical decisions. It’s exciting when a sandstorm strikes and you’re faced with the decision of using the cover of the storm to make a mad dash for your target or to lay back and wait it out lest you get lost in the blowing sand or spotted by guards when the dust settles. Zaire’s jungle-oriented landscape offers rainfall that muffles footsteps, trees that provide cover and marshes for laying prone to track enemy movements. While I can’t help but feel that Zaire isn’t quite as immersive as Afghanistan (the beautiful tessellation and shading on those cliffs gets me every time), it’s nice that Kojima’s team reapplied the same kind of global scale that made Metal Gear Solid 4 such a diverse game. Both Afghanistan and Zaire offer welcome variations between the wilderness sneaking of Metal Gear Solid 3 and the urban stealth of Metal Gear Solid 4, while also including various pieces of history that will appeal to those who wish to understand more about the conflicts in those regions.
The crux of Metal Gear Solid’s stealth system hasn’t changed much over the years. There are still modes of varying escalation that determine how enemy guards will behave towards you. They might enter caution mode if they’re suspicious of your presence in the area. If they find you, they’ll go on high alert to flush you out. Evading them once caught isn’t as simple as running for the hills. Guards will use lights and mortars to flush you out of the surrounding countryside. If you can hide successfully while the guards are in alert mode, they’ll de-escalate into a search and destroy mode by performing sweeps of the area, particularly in your last known position. Not only is this type of AI behaviour smart and realistic, it also creates interesting tactical opportunities that allow you to bait guards into swarming towards one location so that you can access other locations without the overbearing security presence. But be careful not to abuse one method of engagement or the enemy AI will adapt. If you use your tranquilizer gun too often, for example, guards will wear armor and visors that make them impermeable to darts. In short, Metal Gear Solid V has successfully used the open world format to add depth to the engagement between player and AI.
Then there are the progression mechanics. In a world where every game wants to be an RPG, Metal Gear Solid V would have done best to resist the temptation. In order to compete with Cipher, you need to build up Mother Base, a large offshore facility that serves as home for you and your soldiers. In order to do this, you collect GMP by completing missions and collecting resources in the game world. You also need to recruit soldiers to work for you. This is where the Fulton Recovery System comes in.
The fulton recovery system is fast, efficient and funny. You whip an air balloon out of your back pocket, attach it to an item or an unconscious soldier, then watch them launch up into the air, the beginning of their long flight back to Mother Base. It feels great to hunt for high-ranking soldiers in-between and during missions. Yes, you’re basically kidnapping enemy soldiers and forcing them to change sides so they can fight for you. But it provides an incentive for players to employ non-lethal combat strategies, which are much more fun and rewarding than going in guns blazing.
Once you acquire these soldiers, they are divided into several categories (R&D, Support, Intel, etc.) based on their skill levels. The ranking of these different categories, along with the resources you collect on the battlefield, determine which weapons and items you can unlock. You can then Fulton these weapons and items to your location as a kind of express delivery service, letting you adapt to different combat situations with ease.
On paper, the weapon and item upgrade system works. The idea is that you can choose whichever items you wish to invest in without breaking the game by becoming too powerful. It also helps inspire a sense of creativity in problem-solving. Tranq darts are bouncing off the guards’ shields and visors? Well I can research this thing called a “Decoy” which might distract them, allowing me to come up from behind and choke them out. Or maybe I should get the sonar feature for my mechanical arm. It might help me see the guards better so I can slip past without having to deal with them at all.
And so on and so forth. There are many options for strategy that keeps the game interesting and adds to its replay value. But there is at least one particuarly annoying pitfall about the upgrade ladder design in Metal Gear Solid V that can rear its ugly head if you chose to ignore the progression mechanics (and they are easy to ignore).
This happened to me at one point when I was facing The Parasite Unit, a quartet of superhuman soldiers who can zip around the battlefield with great speed. Few things are more adrenaline-killing than realizing mid-boss battle that you never bothered to upgrade your rocket launcher and you need the upgrades for this fight. So you now have to spend 20 minutes reshuffling your employees into different categories that will give you the R&D level you need to build the rocket launcher. But wait, you will probably need to buy two rocket launcher upgrades. This boss is especially tough (there are four of them and only one of you, after all). Each launcher takes twenty-two minutes to research, and you’re not exactly sure if you have enough resources or staff to research the second launcher. You call your chopper to pick you up and fly you to another conflict region, so you can continue “grinding” (as they say in the RPG world) for more resources and manpower. Nevermind The Parasite Unit, you told them you’d be right back. They understand.
It’s easy to overlook the importance of the upgrade system in Metal Gear Solid V. There aren’t many prompts that force you to keep upgrading so you can avoid these types of situations. Something in the vein of “you can’t play this mission until you’re at this development level” would go a long way in saving the player the annoyance of having to put the real game on pause in order to play the staff management simulator that exists as the awkward underlying structure of the game. Call it handholding if you want, but without the right guidance from the game, it’s easy to let these kinds of management mechanics vanish into the background. But even if the game succeeded in helping me avoid such a situation, the RPG elements of Metal Gear Solid V felt far too out of place to give me any real sense of satisfaction from progression. I found the upgrade ladder, staff management and all other base-building mechanics to be the most boring part the game. It’s true that whatever you invest in your base can be used online in Metal Gear Solid V’s Forward Operating Base mode, so there’s that. You can pit yourself against players around the world in a game of attacking and defending. There’s a surprising amount of depth and customization involved, but the more advanced features of this mode are behind a paywall, which makes the whole thing feel exploitative. I imagine few people would buy Metal Gear Solid V solely for its multiplayer. Single Player is, of course, the game’s stronger suit and the bottom line is that it’s fun to use air balloons to steal containers and kidnap sleeping soldiers. But it’s not very fun to manage them all afterwards.
Tedium rises to high levels later in the game, not just from managing Mother Base, but from the repeat missions you are forced to play in order to unlock the grand finale. Here the story is as spare as ever and the only incentive that keeps you going is some vague hope that eventually a cut scene will play that will tie up all the loose threads. You have to spend hours on side missions and story missions you’ve already played in order for the “ending” to trickle through in pieces. It was very frustrating.
I have to admit that when the cutscenes do come, whether they are late in the game or earlier on, they are entertaining to watch. Kojima offers some dramatic cinematography and lighting, in the same impressive real-time rendering we’ve come to expect from the series. The game engine runs at 1080p and 60 frames per second without any hiccups, which makes for a very responsive stealth experience. And there is plenty of stealth to be had. It took me around 60 hours to beat Metal Gear Solid V, and there are dozens more hours for those who wish to play all the side missions and reach 100% completion. If only so many of those hours weren’t lost in tedium, I would have been much happier by the time I finished the game.
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