Peace Walker is my least favourite followed by MSG4 for a variety of reasons across both. MGS4 edges it out by playing better (Act 1 and most of Act 2). Peace Walker just felt weirdly limited, restrictive, and micromanaging for my taste. That and I thought the plot was balls.
My high is torn between MGS and MGS3. MGS3 to me is up there with Resident Evil 4 in how exceptionally brilliant the design, length, content, pacing, and game diversity is. But in the same breath I prefer the overall tone of MGS. MGS2 follows close behind though, and it's a game I've grown to appreciate more as time has passed.
MGSV is a mixed bag for me. When it's good, it's really fucking incredible. Possibly the best stealth in the series. It feels good to play, the game systems are heavily agency driven with a huge breadth of wiggle room for tactics and equipment use. It properly envisions ideas KojiPro played with in MGS3 and MGS4, that being larger, open encounters where you seamlessly flow from the outskirts to the inside of a base. The general openness of this approach, scouting the surrounding area, the leading approach, infiltrating in, and eventually getting out is exhilarating and brilliant. It's a very, very good stealth game.
But I really hate the open world itself (to be fair, I'm still in Afghanistan), which doesn't really play like a proper open world in design coherence with missions and tasks, while also being incredibly dull and boring by its own merits. I'm also not completely sold on Mother Base. Automating tasks is good (in that, you dont need to micromanage staff; click a button and they'll go wherever), but the actual resource collection and multitude of goods to develop seems needlessly obtuse for the kind of game it is. There's like...mother base funds, four or five resources, plant resources, and so on. I personally don't feel acquiring resources and expanding Mother Base is very rewarding. The overall game feedback isn't very satisfying when you're outside of missions. This is the junk handover from Peace Walker that I don't like.
So yeah, I dunno. When it's good it's amazing. When it's bad it's pretty fucking dull. I can see what they were trying to do, and it does come together more often than not, but I also think they made some amateurish mistakes in the overall design of the open world and integration of missions, development, and flow.
