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SPOILER: Metal Gear Solid V Spoiler Thread | Such a lust for conclusion, T-WHHOOOO

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jsnepo said:
I kind of liked the idea of Big Boss having a phantom. It gave me a sort of insight whether the actions of the Big Boss we knew post Ground Zeroes were really his or only by his phantom. This opened up the ending for me.

Then the timeline appeared and ruined everything by answering questions that should have been left in the open for people to fill in.

Still, how the narrative was presented is ridiculous. Chapter 1 is too long with missions not really related or even required to progress the narrative forward.
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I'm starting to resent phantom Big Boss. When I look at him, I feel cheated.

And yeah the narrative was whack, I think I'm gonna replay MGS4 :|
 
I just finished the game . Ending i didn't like which is such a shame as i think thats put a downer on the rest of the game (Mass Effect 3). How does a medic somehow wake up as a legendary soldier who can do all that? The feeling of what you've spent the last 50 hours doing was based on a lie is powerful but not in a good way as it undermines everything you've done as a player.

Controversial ending for sure - hard to tell if its a product of Konami rushing things or Kojima losing it. Rest of game up until this point was fantastic, the mission where you have to purge the quarantine platform was brutal and that hit the sad emotions in a good way.
 
Back up a bit I don't think Kojima ever stopped caring about Metal Gear, so much as his intentions and focus have changed over time. No creator sits stagnantly on the same vision with the same goals for well over a decade, not while they're still creating. They all evolve as artists and the focus for their expression shifts and changes.

One thing to remember with Kojima is that while he's a massive nerd when it comes to films, and obviously heavily inspired by integrating cinema into games, the novelty of this has dissipated significantly over the years. The glorious cinematic beauty of the first two Metal Gear Solids were unlike anything in gaming at the time. That is not the case for today. Storytelling/dialogue flaws aside, I adore the cinematography and face mapping in MGSV's cutscenes, but in the modern industry the "cinematic game" is now commonplace and that novelty of it being a KojiPro only accomplishment has worn off.

Additionally, going by interviews and comments across the years, I feel Kojima was most invested in the story first through the saga accompanying the first three Metal Gear Solids. This is particularly true while Fukushima was co-writing, his absence from every game since absolutely evident. Kojima has stated that he originally didn't intend to extend the story beyond MGS2. And while I don't think that means he didn't give a shit about MGS4, I do think his intent in storytelling changes. MGS4 was very much a love letter (for better or worse) to fans, a response to fans clamouring for the lose ends to be tied up, and the game does exactly that with cutscene density unlike any other game in the industry. With Peace Walker and MGSV I feel Kojima's focus as director shifted more to the stories told through play rather than narrative. He was very vocal about how PW was a response to his son's disinterest in MGS as a series, and how his son and kids in Japan at the time were big on multiplayer Monster Hunter. He wanted to make a game that embraced that similar local multiplayer, portable device culture, along with easily replayable, score driven missions. With MGSV we really heard from him a lot on the open world, the more emergent play and wider play space. A huge focus of dev videos weren't on story, but on the customisation, the buddies, the world itself, and the multitude of approaches one could take on a mission.

A part of me kinda feels that very early on both PW and MGSV started as a blank template vision of game design first that was worked into a suitable "Metal Gear Solid" franchise game. That when it comes to narrative Kojima has already given that his focus in four other MGS titles, and with PW and MGSV, while still full of narrative, he was more interested in other things.
 
Ozium said:
Post-Colonial critical theory is not taboo though, whether or not a person has experienced it. It is studied in parts of academia and is a widely known concept, there is absolutely nothing taboo about it.

It'd be like saying the postmodern philosophy or epistemology discussed in MGS2 is "taboo."

edit: I also liked the stuff about language but at no point in time was I like "omg this is so taboo how can they discuss this?" also the idea of language controlling people isn't new, and is heavily part of the orwell's 1984. where's the taboo?
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Depends on who's dinner table you're at and whether they want to hear all that or not. I'm glad it was more throwing rocks at Goliath as a Japanese developer who crossed lines in the 90's, with what seems like an allegory for being critically silenced in your own medium and series, rather than just killing kids and rape scenes to become a bad guy or whatever.

Really, though, we have a game that had imagery and themes that evoke ethnic cleansing, genocide, involuntary experimentation, child soldiers, and even 80's epidemic hysteria... and we had kids being tortured etc in GZ, but instead of a lot of us feeling like it was something you just don't do in games, it was there and it was handled well even in a borderline sci-fi, fictional tale. To the point that we're wondering where the taboos even were. There's probably blogs and vlogs that see it as taboo but we don't,
 
Star Falcon said:
I just finished the game . Ending i didn't like which is such a shame as i think thats put a downer on the rest of the game (Mass Effect 3). How does a medic somehow wake up as a legendary soldier who can do all that? The feeling of what you've spent the last 50 hours doing was based on a lie is powerful but not in a good way as it undermines everything you've done as a player.

Controversial ending for sure - hard to tell if its a product of Konami rushing things or Kojima losing it. Rest of game up until this point was fantastic, the mission where you have to purge the quarantine platform was brutal and that hit the sad emotions in a good way.
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I felt so bad doing this. I felt dirty. They really nailed it.
 
So uh, why did Chico have an audio jack in his chest? I thought they would've tied it into what happened in the devil's house but nah.
 
EatChildren said:
"Taboo" is a bit hyperbolic, but I think MGSV does approach themes that other games don't. I really can't think of any other game that integrates child soldiers into the gameplay as a system you're forced to manage. And outside of the Eli stuff it's handled decently enough. The commentary on the fucked up lives of child soldiers is in there, and truthful.

Similarly for the language concept, which isn't handled in many games, and really very truthful. Suppression of language is 101 of propaganda and dictators/tyrants. The evolution of language, linguistics, and how it influences our psychology in expression and communication is a study. It's warranted and interesting and I like that the game tried to play with these ideas.

But as always with Kojima/MGS in general the execution, the storytelling itself, is where themes tend to be fumbled, underdeveloped, and cringingly executed. Often undercooked, lacking substance, or poorly integrated through exposition dumps from badly written characters.
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I have read this with Code Talker's voice.
 
Kinda crass but the first thought I had when the epidemic started popping was an analogy to HIV outbreak.

It's the 80's and Africa so... But I'm glad there was more to it.
 
Gvitor said:
Finished mission 45 and the game.

Disclaimer: this will be a long post. I don't know if anyone will care for it, and I'm sure parts of it, if not all, were already discussed, but I just need to vent out. Here it goes.

God, this game has so many problems. Most, if not all of them, comes from it being basically Peace Walker 2 and an open world game.

The Peace Walker structure is awful. I gave it a pass in PW because that was portable. TPP isn't. The TBCs are ridiculous and break the pacing of a game that already has shit pacing to begin with. The PW structure hurts the narrative, hurts immersion and with these stupid TBCs, waste the player's time (going back to ACC then listening to Miller then going back to mission plus loading times). Alas, wasting the player's time is the thing this game does the best.

And that's mostly due to it being open world. I played Mad Max at a friend's house this past weekend. I barely got any time with it, but the overworld there seemed to be a desert with barely anything in it, and it still had more stuff than MGSV. But most of all, it was fun to traverse. Afghanistan and Africa aren't. One is chock-full of mountains blocking the way and the other is a less mountainous, more green version of the first. Transportation is awful, and Pequod almost always leaves you far away from the LZs. Worse than that, before the mission starts you don't even know where the mission is. Sometimes you can deduce from Miller's monologue or from the mission description, but not always. I had to guess the closest LZ. Not that it really mattered, since missions tend to make you traverse the world while in them as well. You can't even fully be safe by choosing DD or Quiet at the start of the mission, because if you end up far away, you'll have to change to another buddy. Or do everything in foot. Hell, you might need to do it even if you do start close to the mission, since as I said, missions have you going around. The "target's predicted route" ones are the worst in that regard.

The story isn't great (more on that later), but the narrative is the worse of the two, in my opinion. Again, that's because it follows PW's structure. It's filled with... well, fillers. To the point of the ridiculous. In the beginning I gave it a pass because the gameplay is great and the level design of the scattered villages and whatnots are good, but the fillers overstayed their welcome for so long that eventually I just wished the game would end. Chapter 2 gets ridiculous with this. All of the main missions (with exception of the last one and the Quiet one, but the latter starts as a side) are fillers. They are even more useless than the ones in Chapter 1, somehow. All of the main story-related missions are side quests or happen in MB. They did that to extend the gameplay time in a game that was already too big for its own good. If it was the reverse, and stuff like "rescue the children" and "get the remains of the man on fire" was Main Missions and the random stuff was side-quest, I (and many others, I'd assume) would skip on them entirely.

That hurts the narrative, the overall story impact (even though it's mostly bad anyway), and the game's pace in general. Speaking of lenghtening the game and forcing stupid missions, the rehashed missions in Chapter 2 are just ridiculous. Your options are either to do them or to do random side-quests, so either they stop being "side" quests or you have to play the game again in hard mode. That is a ridiculous design philosophy and the only excuse I can come up with as to why this ended up this way is that the game was rushed and they had to cut content but keep the same time necessary to end the game. I had no desire to them to the point I'd rather capture legendary brown bears (even though I didn't do most of the side-missions before that point, with the exception of the Paz-related ones). So to end it up the game shoves down my throat an exact replica of the first mission. I didn't skip a single cutscene afraid they'd add stuff to them (like they did at the start), but nope. Almost an hour playing that slow-as-fuck mission again.

Another reason I believe this game is rushed is that some of tapes (a lot of them, actually) feel like they had to be in the game. Instead they're... optional? This is the guy who made us sit through hours of cutscenes in MGS4. Sure, he could've learned some lessons, but this is some change. If some of those tapes were actually cutscenes, and some fillers have been cut, it would help the game lots.

Aaaand, the checkpoints. My god they are broken. I can't seriously tell how they work. They seem to pop up whenever they feel like. Some awful experiences:

1) A filler mission where I had to extract some random prisoner: I checkpointed 100m from the place the prisoner was. I then quickly got there, fultoned him, went to the chopper, but some dudes in Walkers saw me and blasted me out of the sky. The checkpoint then resets to the start of the mission. Worst, when I get back where the dude was, it doesn't checkpoint me 100m from him, and there are already some guys in a vehicle there extracting him.

2) Traitor's caravan: It has a predicted enemy route. I walked that ENTIRE ROUTE and didn't find the goddamn truck. I interrogated several men along the way and they all said "nope, it didn't pass through here". If I had to guess, I spent almost an hour looking for it before Miller finally called and said "hey, it's almost at its destination" and a marker showed up in the map. The problem? It checkpoints when he says it. And I was literally a mile away from the point. I summoned DWalker and rushed to it, but I can BARELY make it in time. The worse: it comes accompanied by 2 tanks. No only that, if you manage to destroy the tanks, when you approach the truck some skulls appear. And there are AWFUL, making you have to fight them with rocket launchers and other heavy weapons. The truck gets destroyed easily in the process, and even if you manage to get them away from it to fight, if you die, the last checkpoint still is the one where Miller called you. A FUCKING MILE AWAY. (eventually I quitted, upgraded the fulton mechanic, went right where the truck starts, fultoned it and ran. No regrets.)

Speaking of awful fights, this game has a lot of them. The only semi-clever boss is Quiet, the other are just meh. But the main problems are the goddamn skulls and tank missions. 29 and 45, specifically. Holy shit. That was bad. That is literally Peace Walker 2, where the enemies/bosses are bullet sponges and you NEED Launchers and most of all, Supply Drops. It ain't fun and it's bad design.

There are a lot of minor points I don't like as well, like the goddamn slopes Snake can't climb, but I won't dwelve into them otherwise this post won't ever end. Ultimately, this game feels rushed in a lot of areas. It's kind of baffling. I was expecting Kojima to go out with a bang, but this was disappointing. Underwhelming, really.

As for the story. The twist didn't surprise me due to pre-release theories and discussions with friends, and I'm not entirely against it, but I think the execution was bad in some regards, mainly because it felt like Big Boss ran away instead of fighting, and left his revenge for Miller and a random. "He was always our best soldier". 4th wall or not, just nope.

And there's no way he went out to build a "nation" bigger than MB and went unnoticed. If that's the case, then why change faces?

The rest of the story seemed like a checklist. "Hey, here's the Eli ending. Now the Huey ending. Now the Quiet ending. Now Venom's ending." It felt disjointed, because, well, it was. Some of them you can even finish the game without seeing. Code Talker didn't even got an ending (aside from the ridiculously fast story facts at the end), but thank god, because that character already is too much in this game and he is just awful.

Also the Paz retcon was ridiculous. I really liked GZ and he managed to go back and ruin part of it, too. And since when is Miller blind?

I had some good times with the game. I loved some missions, like 43, for instance. But mostly I was seeing problems. Some of them, like the enemy sniper, are pretty much spelled out to you. And it hindered my enjoyment a lot. The gameplay is superb and ultimately, this is a game. But it is also a combination of several parts. If you stick 10 hours of unskippable shitty cutscenes in Super Mario Galaxy, it will suck, regardless of how great the gameplay is. The game has to respect your time and be well tight, and MGSV just isn't.
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I agree with everything you said. I couldn't say it better.
 
EatChildren said:
Back up a bit I don't think Kojima ever stopped caring about Metal Gear, so much as his intentions and focus have changed over time. No creator sits stagnantly on the same vision with the same goals for well over a decade, not while they're still creating. They all evolve as artists and the focus for their expression shifts and changes.

One thing to remember with Kojima is that while he's a massive nerd when it comes to films, and obviously heavily inspired by integrating cinema into games, the novelty of this has dissipated significantly over the years. The glorious cinematic beauty of the first two Metal Gear Solids were unlike anything in gaming at the time. That is not the case for today. Storytelling/dialogue flaws aside, I adore the cinematography and face mapping in MGSV's cutscenes, but in the modern industry the "cinematic game" is now commonplace and that novelty of it being a KojiPro only accomplishment has worn off.

Additionally, going by interviews and comments across the years, I feel Kojima was most invested in the story first through the saga accompanying the first three Metal Gear Solids. This is particularly true while Fukushima was co-writing, his absence from every game since absolutely evident. Kojima has stated that he originally didn't intend to extend the story beyond MGS2. And while I don't think that means he didn't give a shit about MGS4, I do think his intent in storytelling changes. MGS4 was very much a love letter (for better or worse) to fans, a response to fans clamouring for the lose ends to be tied up, and the game does exactly that with cutscene density unlike any other game in the industry. With Peace Walker and MGSV I feel Kojima's focus as director shifted more to the stories told through play rather than narrative. He was very vocal about how PW was a response to his son's disinterest in MGS as a series, and how his son and kids in Japan at the time were big on multiplayer Monster Hunter. He wanted to make a game that embraced that similar local multiplayer, portable device culture, along with easily replayable, score driven missions. With MGSV we really heard from him a lot on the open world, the more emergent play and wider play space. A huge focus of dev videos weren't on story, but on the customisation, the buddies, the world itself, and the multitude of approaches one could take on a mission.

A part of me kinda feels that very early on both PW and MGSV started as a blank template vision of game design first that was worked into a suitable "Metal Gear Solid" franchise game. That when it comes to narrative Kojima has already given that his focus in four other MGS titles, and with PW and MGSV, while still full of narrative, he was more interested in other things.
Click to expand...

Thanks, this encapsulates a lot of what I was feeling through my play of the game. Can't really add anything more - you can totally tell Kojima was trying to tell the story through the player and his actions, and it worked. I went blackout after the 2014 trailer, so when I popped this in I was totally surprised, and said to myself "I want to do everything and become a total bad ass, just like Big Boss". All those missions, I was becoming more and more of a bad ass, more and more like Big Boss. And then funnily it turns out that I'm not even who I thought I was :(

I know Kojima still cares about this game, but man, it is just not finished. And I am so sad that we will never get to see Big Boss taken down by Snake, retold by Kojima. I want to play as the legendary Big Boss, but with Kojima gone, I can't :(
 
Gvitor said:
2) Traitor's caravan: It has a predicted enemy route. I walked that ENTIRE ROUTE and didn't find the goddamn truck. I interrogated several men along the way and they all said "nope, it didn't pass through here". If I had to guess, I spent almost an hour looking for it before Miller finally called and said "hey, it's almost at its destination" and a marker showed up in the map. The problem? It checkpoints when he says it. And I was literally a mile away from the point. I summoned DWalker and rushed to it, but I can BARELY make it in time. The worse: it comes accompanied by 2 tanks. No only that, if you manage to destroy the tanks, when you approach the truck some skulls appear. And there are AWFUL, making you have to fight them with rocket launchers and other heavy weapons. The truck gets destroyed easily in the process, and even if you manage to get them away from it to fight, if you die, the last checkpoint still is the one where Miller called you. A FUCKING MILE AWAY. (eventually I quitted, upgraded the fulton mechanic, went right where the truck starts, fultoned it and ran. No regrets.)
Click to expand...
If you approach the truck with a bit of luck and stealth, the Skulls appear, but you can also hijack the tanks. Why would you destroy your most useful weapon?
 
SolVanderlyn said:
What is the deal with Kaz's name though, seriously? McDonnel, Benedict, and Kazuhira are all his first name? I think it was explained at one point but it seemed so superficial, like the writers decided "I no longer like the name McDonnel"
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Kojima renamed him Kaz due to Peace Walker's stupid bullshit where he and Paz both had to have names meaning "Peace" because the concept of subtlety is as foreign to him as the concept of good writing.
 
Henkka said:
So uh, why did Chico have an audio jack in his chest? I thought they would've tied it into what happened in the devil's house but nah.
Click to expand...

If you listen to the Chico cassettes in Ground Zeroes, he was being tortured and I assume Skull Face was using him as a preliminary test subject for the parasite. It isn't an audio jack in the chest, it's headphones like the boys in Devil's House.
 
Xanathus said:
If you listen to the Chico cassettes in Ground Zeroes, he was being tortured and I assume Skull Face was using him as a preliminary test subject for the parasite. It isn't an audio jack in the chest, it's headphones like the boys in Devil's House.
Click to expand...

That actually makes a bit of sense.
 
Xanathus said:
If you listen to the Chico cassettes in Ground Zeroes, he was being tortured and I assume Skull Face was using him as a preliminary test subject for the parasite. It isn't an audio jack in the chest, it's headphones like the boys in Devil's House.
Click to expand...

Nah, his is the jack.

bsOhJX2.png


He then pulls it out of his chest and plugs that piece into the Walkman Skullface throws him, different from the headphone in the throat.

https://youtu.be/6JuR7jnO6Dk?t=2m16s
 
Hasney said:
Steam profiles, pretty much showing that it's going to need something stupid like noone on your format having nukes for it to trigger.
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I see what they're trying to do though. Get players to infiltrate other FOBs and disarm nukes. But there's always going to be someone who has one.
 
Voyevoda said:
Probably the people who have managed to dismantle all nukes in their game.
Click to expand...

Probably friends list that play the game, since it also thanks all Diamond Dogs. There's a shitton of nukes, everyone would have to disarm it.

Broken Joystick said:
I see what they're trying to do though. Get players to infiltrate other FOBs and disarm nukes. But there's always going to be someone who has one.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah, if this was the very start of big online infrastructure like 360 launch, this would seem awesome. Or you can only ever build one nuke ever. In 2015, people should know it would never happen.
 
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