Are we all in agreement that the 'cassettes' idea was a terrible idea implemented fairly poorly?
Yep, I agree with all those points. Before the game came out I thought it was a really great idea, streamlining the flow of storytelling so we could be doing things while having the story develop, and in the early hours it actually does work really well. Catching up on what's been happening in the world, what happened to all your old buddies, what Ocelot's been up to, those tapes are great.
Then you get a few more hours in and the game pretty much goes cold turkey on the tapes. I was
dying for some more story in that endless middle section of Chapter 1, where it's just filler mission after filler mission with actual interesting story-related missions few and far between. Nowhere near enough tapes to last you through all the busywork.
And then you hit the Mother Base epidemic, and all of a sudden it's just tapes, tapes, tapes, as far as the eye can see. The last four missions of Chapter 1 unlock like an hour's worth of tapes each, and the game expects you to listen to them all while also telling you it's time to go and get Skull Face once and for all. Did Kojima really expect people to calmly plough through Code Talker's Wolbachia nightmare right as the mission to infiltrate Skully's lair popped up?
I suppose it's due to the terrible pacing in general, though. If Chapter 1 had delivered its story more naturally, rather than a big intro, thirty hours of nothing and then a giant exposition dump at the very end, it wouldn't have been such a problem. If the parasite outbreak and Code Talker rescue had happened much earlier in the game, for example, there would have been much more time to listen to those tapes and properly understand the story without feeling like you have to cram it all in before the sudden ending.
Of course, the fact that the tapes are constantly drowned out by NPC chatter is just a baffling oversight on the part of the developers. It's bad enough that you hear the same soundbytes from Kaz and Ocelot literally
dozens of times over the course of a regular playthrough, but actually dynamically lowering the cassette tape volume so the NPC chatter can take priority is ludicrous. It should be the other way around.
Also, yeah, while recordings made on Mother Base make sense, magically getting your hands on cassette recordings of conversations that could never feasibly have been recorded is just dumb. I don't know when Kojima decided that the greatest form of storytelling was radio plays, but I feel MGSV loses a lot for it.
