I'm enjoying MGSV quite a bit, but there's also a lot to be conflicted by. What better time to stop and reflect!
Approaching almost 35 hours in (subtract 5 or so for times where I had to leave the game AFK, this tends to bloat my playtimes some), I have around 12% completion. I do not know exactly what that percentage entails specifically, but that's rather daunting to consider when you realize just how little I currently have in my stable. For weapons and technology research trees, I'm still within the first 2 tiers of 5-8 tier long development chains. Mother base is considerably built up, but every addition requires ~2 hours of construction time and a dozen hours of idling for materials to process to be able to begin the next upgrade. It should be noted that I have been taking side-ops as soon as they show up and have spent considerable time wandering Mother Base, so if I decided to not do either of those, I could probably be farther along in the story by now.
I have no other partners except D-Horse, the starting partner, and no sign of getting to use either of the two which currently reside at Mother Base. My chosen playstyle, mostly nonlethal, has been cockblocked by a complete lack of development in weapons that allow me to play that way. I have a single tranq pistol that I started with, and two STUN weapons which are, quite frankly, completely useless without the tranq pistol to extend the duration of their knockout. My next nonlethal weapon won't happen for ~10 or so levels in various MB Teams, and it isn't even silenced which makes it about as useful as a deadly weapon. For comparison, I have 20-30 lethal weapons at my disposal. I've broken down and begun murdering anyone who isn't at least a B-rank in something, but I feel like I'm being penalized for wanting to play a certain way, which goes against the entire idea of MGSV letting you adapt to your playstyle.
Storywise, we're lacking in the Kojima Whack-factor, which is either a positive or a negative depending on what side of that camp you reside in. Cutscenes are slow, infrequent, and Big Boss almost never speaks during them. What makes this unusual is that Big Boss himself speaks plenty in the tapes, and Sutherland does such a fantastic job that it pains me when he never opens his mouth when he's on screen. One of the more baffling parts about the whole game, honestly.
That's not to say it's all bad. This is probably the easiest Metal Gear game to play, the various systems were polished to a high shine over years of development. The little things about traversing a map make the sandbox worth messing around in. Mother Base starts off as a quaint pitstop between story missions, and soon balloons into a metropolis. I find myself using the chopper to get around base just so I can admire the way it's growing, walking around the base and finding the little hidden things they place around for curious players to discover. Kojima's quirky humor is spinkled throughout, from plot points and incidental moments on the field to the little signs tucked around mother base. The game looks pretty fantastic considering it's cross-gen, my eyes being fooled by obvious little tricks here and there.
It's really just a joy to play. Most of the time, I've found that the game had a positive response whenever I asked it "Can I do this?". If the game wasn't as fun to experiment in, it'd probably unravel a lot faster. I enjoy swapping tales with pals about how we managed to approach certain fights, or little silly things that happened which made us feel pretty great. If I were to describe MGSV in as short of a manner as possible, I'd say it's a Metal Gear game for people who hated the other Metal Gear games. And as someone who has loved them since Solid first hit the PS1, that leaves me disappointed in a many ways. But there is a lot to love here, which keeps me going despite some very obvious and grating flaws. The worst flaw of all is how bloated the game has become, especially with the awful F2P style wait systems in place. Those honestly have no place in a title one pays full price for.
Bear in mind that I'm still incredibly early in, so things could very well be subject to change! Also, fun tidbit: In the time it's taken me to get this far in MGSV, I could have completed Saints Row 3 two times in a row.
