okay, finished the game a few hours ago. as awesome as things were getting around act 3, the reveals at the end nullified everything i felt up to the last 2 acts. in that case, i have no feelings towards this game's story, i'm totally indifferent. and that's not a good thing
i can also see this game getting an honest 8/10, but no lower. the reason is that normally it wouldn't be such a big deal since game stories aren't usually of such importance, but hideo made the story such a huge part of the game that the actual gameplay (while fantastic) boils down to about 6 hours of playtime, out of an 15-20 hour game
even compared to the other mgs games, this one seems to have the shortest amount of play in it. so it's a legitimate reason to complain about the story so much if you don't like it, when a game is so focused on telling it to you. yeah there's mgo, but the core content of the disc is the story taking place throughout various cutscenes; and to me it felt like hideo was trying way too hard to please fans and make all the ends meet at the same time
he definitely could have used a little editing, and especially so near the end, but in the end i felt nothing for the characters in no way; some of them didn't belong, others had boring stories. maybe i shouldn't have finished mgs3 so close to this one's release, or perhaps it wouldn't have made a difference, but i stopped going OMG at the story about halfway through-- and i love this series
considering i won't play this for at least a year again i may sell it (anyone who wants mgs4 for $48 shipped let me know), but i'm glad i saw the series through to the end. it was kind of a neat thing to do