Tag: the phantom pain

2062: By Request: 100 Reasons You Should Play Metal Gear Solid V

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Continuing with my exercise from the last few days in which I take “requests” from my Twitter followers, today I follow the suggestion of Josh “Musubi Azeyma” Major, a friend whom I originally met through Final Fantasy XIV. Josh requested that I present a hundred reasons why people should play Metal Gear Solid V, because he’s obsessed with it right now and thinks everyone else should be too. So, who am I to argue with that logic?

DISCLAIMER: The only real potential issue with this task is that I haven’t actually played Metal Gear Solid V, nor do I own a copy. Since we have, however, established that it is acceptable for professional journalists to comment negatively about things without putting in a substantial amount of time with them — or in some cases, without even playing them at all — it’s surely fine for some nobody blogger in the wilds of the Internet (albeit one who used to be a professional games journalist) to speak positively about something he has absolutely no experience with whatsoever. So, without further ado, let’s begin.

  1. It’s part of the Metal Gear Solid series, which people have heard of.
  2. Hideo Kojima is a cool dude who posts pictures of Eggs Benedict on Twitter and makes jokes about them jiggling like boobs.
  3. Konami fucked Hideo Kojima up the ass pretty royally towards the end of Metal Gear Solid V’s development, so while buying a copy and enjoying it may support Konami to a certain degree, it also shows your support for Hideo Kojima’s creation.
  4. The graphics are quite pretty.
  5. It’s available on Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, so unless you’re a weirdo who only has a Wii U in the house, you can almost certainly play it.
  6. Quiet has nice tits.
  7. Quiet is pretty badass.
  8. Appreciating Quiet’s feminine wiles pisses off the outrage brigade.
  9. There are guns in this game.
  10. And dogs.
  11. And a horse that you can command to shit whenever you want.
  12. You can attach balloons to bears and send them flying off into the sky.
  13. You can do the same with enemy guards.
  14. There’s apparently some sort of story that’s pretty good.
  15. Something interesting happens in the medical bay or something, everyone keeps yammering on about it without actually saying what it is because spoilers.
  16. Something about cassette tapes.
  17. METAL GEAR?!
  18. It is, I am assured, open world without being directionless.
  19. It does that thing I like where it presents each mission as its own self-contained “episode”, complete with intro and outro credits sequences.
  20. Each mission is apparently pretty tightly focused rather than making use of the open world unnecessarily.
  21. It’s not Splinter Cell.
  22. Revolver Ocelot.
  23. Metal Gear is a Japanese series that it’s apparently still acceptable to like without people calling you a paedophile.
  24. There are achievements and trophies in the game.
  25. If you’re really good at a mission, you get an S-rank and feel all happy.
  26. You can tranquilise people.
  27. You can kill people.
  28. You can sneak up on people.
  29. You can charge in the front door of an enemy base brandishing an assortment of improbable military hardware, then blow everything up with reckless disregard for the “Tactical Espionage” part of the game’s subtitle.
  30. Something about tanks.
  31. Anita Sarkeesian’s puppetmaster Jonathan McIntosh doesn’t like Hideo Kojima for the jokes he makes on Twitter (see #2).
  32. Posting things about Metal Gear Solid online at the time of writing is a sure-fire means of getting those sweet-ass clicks.
  33. There’s a Mother Base that you manage or something.
  34. You can get soldiers and dogs and stuff for your base or something.
  35. Some of it’s a bit like Peace Walker, which I also haven’t played but people seemed to like.
  36. Kojima has dialled back the “I’M MAKING A MOVIE!!” chaos. A bit.
  37. Kiefer Sutherland is like a proper famous actor, innit.
  38. The probably-vain hope that David Hayter will show up at some point in the same, growl “SURPRISE”, snap the neck of KieferSnake, forcing you to play the rest of the game as Snake with his proper voice.
  39. Lid from Hyperdevotion Noire was pretty fit.
  40. You can hide in cardboard boxes.
  41. You can play as people who aren’t Snake if you so desire.
  42. Including women. SHOCK
  43. But Snake has a robot arm or something, so he’s clearly the best.
  44. If you’re playing this game, you are contractually obliged to put the word “Punished” in front of your Twitter name, because it makes you at least 20% cooler to do so.
  45. This coolness quotient increases to 30% if you also scrawl an eyepatch on your avatar using Microsoft Paint.
  46. Hurt me more, Snake
  47. There’s a sweet-ass limited edition PlayStation 4 to tie in with the game’s release, because we all know Metal Gear is a series that belongs on PlayStation.
  48. There’s some sort of online feature, I think.
  49. You’re banned from soliciting relationships with other people through Metal Gear Solid V’s online features, which means you can protect yourself against people who are on the pull through Metal Gear Solid V’s online features.
  50. Who does that?
  51. I anticipate it will be less than a week before someone recreates a scene from this using nothing but Super Mario Maker.
  52. Someone already did the microwave tunnel scene from Metal Gear Solid IV.
  53. This game is longer than Ground Zeroes.
  54. It is also a lot longer than previous Metal Gear games.
  55. My friend Josh claims to have spent over a hundred hours on this game so far.
  56. A lot of stuff is optional, so you can probably whizz through it a bit quicker if you want to.
  57. Something about vagina bombs. (I didn’t play Ground Zeroes either.)
  58. You like Castlevania, don’t you?
  59. There are no navel-gazing codec conversations between Raiden and Rose.
  60. There are, instead, navel-gazing cassette tapes, but you can listen to these while you’re attaching helium balloons to bears.
  61. Metal Gear games usually have good villains. (I have absolutely no idea who the villains are in this.)
  62. Ditto boss fights. (Likewise.)
  63. The old games had good music. This one probably maybe does too.
  64. Ditto voice acting.
  65. You can level up Snake or something.
  66. I think you can possibly maybe level up the other soldiers you collect too.
  67. If Quiet’s boobylicious outfit bothers you that much, she has numerous other costumes, including being completely covered in blood and Sniper Wolf’s somewhat more conservative but still boobylicious outfit.
  68. Apparently there’s some explanation for why Quiet dresses the way she does.
  69. Something about photosynthesis.
  70. Or possibly nanomachines. Son.
  71. That big speech at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2 was kind of cool in how eerily prescient it was.
  72. That means that in roughly ten years’ time, something in Metal Gear Solid V will probably be looked back on and numerous chins stroked thoughtfully.
  73. This installment uses a Roman numeral V instead of the Arabic digit 5, because Roman numerals are, as everyone knows, inherently classier.
  74. The Phantom Pain sounds kind of cool as a subtitle.
  75. Although it’s a bit close to The Phantom Menace for my liking.
  76. Although it looks as if Metal Gear Solid V may well be reclaiming the subtitle structure The Phantom [x] from the damage that Star Wars did to it.
  77. George Lucas had nothing to do with this game.
  78. This game does not feature, at any point, in Disney Infinity.
  79. If you play this game, you can talk about it with your friends rather than just nodding and smiling and pretending to know what they’re blathering on about.
  80. The Steam version might have trading cards or something, I don’t know because the Steam store isn’t working for me right now.
  81. The PC port has to be better than that dogshit effort with the last Batman game.
  82. Hey, it’s a Metal Gear Solid game that you can actually play on PC without dicking around with emulators!
  83. You should still probably play it on PlayStation, preferably on that sweet-ass limited edition console.
  84. If you buy one of those sweet-ass limited edition consoles from me when I’m working, do me a solid and also buy the extended warranty coverage and preorder some other stuff.
  85. The person who hired me for my part-time seasonal retail job is a huuuuge fan of Metal Gear Solid.
  86. I was hired for said job partly because I included the words “nanomachines, son” under the “Skills” section on my CV.
  87. I’m running out of things to write here.
  88. I’m honestly impressed that I’ve made it to 88 without much padding.
  89. If you buy a physical copy of the game you can put it on your shelf alongside all the previous Metal Gear Solid games for a cool display of the series over time.
  90. The uneven sizes of the boxes for Metal Gear Solid over the years — CD-sized PSone cases, DVD-sized PS2 cases, slightly-smaller-than-DVD-sized PS3, PS4 and Xbox One cases — makes for an attractively wibbly-wobbly effect on your shelf.
  91. The hardback strategy guide for Metal Gear Solid V is very pretty indeed, and if you can still find a copy anywhere you often get a free poster with it.
  92. The softback one is still pretty meaty and can probably do some damage to an assailant if you have it to hand when you come under attack.
  93. Even if you have no intention of playing Metal Gear Solid V, tossing the disc case out in front of a passing guard will distract them long enough for you to sneak up behind them and snap their neck.
  94. You probably shouldn’t do that.
  95. Instead, you can indulge such fantasies in the new video game from Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
  96. There’s some sort of kawaii idol girl posters scattered around the place in the game.
  97. Have you considered trying Mad Max as well, which came out the same day? Polygon hated it, which is reason enough to try it.
  98. You should probably also give Until Dawn a go if you have a PlayStation 4, because Sony idiotically released it last week and not at, I don’t know, Halloween.
  99. You can probably edit together some entertaining and silly videos using the next-gen consoles’ video capture facilities and software such as the PS4’s ShareFactory.
  100. If you bugger off and play Metal Gear Solid V, I don’t have to keep writing this, and I can get on with playing Super Mario Maker instead.

2051: In My Stomach

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Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is out this week and… I’m not excited at all.

Me not being excited at the latest big new release is nothing new, of course, but this is Metal Gear we’re talking about. I was a huge fan of both Metal Gear Solid and its sequel Sons of Liberty, but kind of fell off the wagon a bit before Snake Eater came out and have still never even touched Guns of the Patriots despite owning a copy. (I fully intend to play them at some point, I might add; I just haven’t done so yet.)

The Phantom Pain feels a bit different, though. My friend Chris and I have been discussing this recently and trying to pin down exactly what it is that’s bothering us both about it — particularly as we’re both fans of the older Metal Gear Solid games as well as Kojima’s batshit craziness.

I think the best way of summing up my feelings towards The Phantom Pain right now is to simply say that everything I hear about it sounds like almost the exact opposite of what I want from a Metal Gear Solid game. Past games were short, tightly focused, highly linear, well-directed experiences that had the pacing and structure of a (particularly long) movie. They kept you always moving onwards because there weren’t any unnecessary side missions or distractions; sure, there were a few secrets here and there that you could dig up if you wanted to, but for the most part things like Sons of Liberty’s dog tags were largely only there for the completionists; I didn’t care about the stats screen at the end of the game — I just liked enjoying the story, and Kojima’s vision for how that story should be presented.

The Phantom Pain, meanwhile, abandons the tight linearity in favour of an open-world environment and (apparently) upwards of 30 hours of gameplay compared to its predecessors’ 6-10. This set off warning bells as soon as it was first announced, I must confess, and what I’m hearing so far isn’t making me feel much better about it. Open worlds are cool technical achievements when done well, but they also often make for rather drab “gameplay by numbers” as you spend all your time looking for little icons on the map, completing arbitrary objectives and killing the pacing of the story, since open world games never, ever have any sense of urgency about them — they tend to be the very worst examples of “the world needs saving, but Armageddon will wait until you’re good and ready”.

Other things that I’m not a fan of the sound of so far are the microtransactions and the resource-gathering, base-building element. I don’t know much about either, to be honest, and it may well be that neither are particularly intrusive to the gameplay experience as a whole, but I don’t like what I have heard so far. I still believe that microtransactions have absolutely no place in a full-price brand-new triple-A game — if you want to get me to pay extra, provide me with some worthwhile content, not a means of paying to win. As for the resource-gathering element, a friend posted a screenshot on Twitter that looked to all intents and purposes like the message you get when logging into a grind-heavy Facebook or mobile game for the first time each day — yes, it’s a Daily Bonus, with rewards for logging in frequently and so forth. Not exactly what I have in mind when I think of the traditionally single-player, offline, “just you and Kojima” experience that is the previous Metal Gear Solid games, though granted I never delved into Metal Gear Online while it was a thing.

Then there’s the fact that several reviews have mentioned the fact that there’s more gameplay than cutscenes, and that the series’ iconic codec conversations have been replaced by cassette tapes that you can listen to while you’re walking around doing things. To be honest, a lot of things are making it sound more like a Splinter Cell game than a Metal Gear Solid game, and this is enormously offputting — Splinter Cell is one of those series that I respected for what it was doing, but just didn’t enjoy at all, and I always greatly preferred Metal Gear’s distinctly “comic book” approach to military espionage action, with all its supervillains, quasi-supernatural powers and giant walking nuclear warhead-equipped death tanks.

I don’t know. I’m sure I’ll end up playing The Phantom Pain at some point, but that time is not right now; the hype is just too much at the moment, and the things I do hear are offputting. I also want to play Snake Eater and Guns of the Patriots (and possibly Peace Walker) before I play The Phantom Pain, too, so I feel it’s going to be a while before I jump into Kojima’s swansong for Konami — if indeed I ever jump in at all.

We’ll see. I’m keeping half an eye on people’s reactions to the game now it’s in the hands of American players, but unfortunately as I’ve said so far, the things I have heard aren’t making me want to dash out and grab it as soon as it hits store shelves.

I’m also kind of bummed that Until Dawn came out last week and is promptly going to be forgotten about amid Metal Gear Solid mania — why the hell didn’t they hold that one back until Halloween? Who knows why these people do anything?