Even keen students of Metal Gear lore are going to struggle to follow this tangled tale. Laden with sentimental sermons and metaphors for the evils of war, struggling under the weight of the resolving the plots of four previous games and the personal destinies of characters as diverse as Raiden, Meryl, Naomi, Vamp and Eva, it is in all honesty a mess. Motivation and consistency fall by the wayside and by the end it's totally unclear who is on which side, or what's at stake. Maybe that's deliberate, but it doesn't work, and the hours of talking-head exposition involved are too steep a price to pay for this muddled closure.