(WARNING: The following review contains spoilers for the game being reviewed. It goes without saying; if you do not want spoilers this may not be the review for you.)

Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima’s masterpiece and the thing that propelled him into the cult-like status in the minds of the disillusioned youth of the early to mid-2000s. We were all a bit weird back then, otherwise, we wouldn’t have liked The Black Eyed Peas for a whole five minutes. Nonetheless, one of his games has played on my mind ever since I first played it; recently I’ve returned to it, and I’m still in two argumentative minds over it.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, is both the worst possible example of, “This game director is amazing,” and also part of his best work, sort of. I’m hesitant to praise The Phantom Pain because if you’ve played a bit of it, it is great. Though if you’ve completed it and know the canon, it is dreadful and some of Hideo’s worst work. The gameplay is a drastic difference from others as it is as wide and open as the plains of Africa and Afganistan. Yet, still (almost) focused on stealth. The story is tame, crap, and nonexistent all at the same time. Yet the directing is some of the best in gaming.

I wouldn’t say I’m the most knowledgeable guru of the series, I wouldn’t say I’m a massive fan of it either. That said, I do enjoy the games; the endless nonsensical mess that is the story, and the fact they are usually fun in some way. Nonetheless, they are overwritten drivel, full of female characters with breasts so large and focused on they might as well be the threat themselves. Under any proper criticism, they are just a madman’s drawings on his padded cell. This explains my last three or four years of trying to get my thoughts out on it; I’ve rambled for days, driven myself into madness, and scrawled on my own cell walls too.

It’s not the three grim men growling grimly at each other that bothers me the most, though it’s hard to distinguish them. The gameplay is fine, not much to complain about there. The story is a mess, but it always is. The directing is something I’ll have the most praise for, aside from what I’m about to say. Then there is Quiet. Quiet is the one thing I trip over myself trying to explain, specifically why she’s both useless and amazing; and how “she breathes through her skin,” doesn’t work. Let’s get her skimpy bikini and nonexistent story arc out of the way first.

“She breathes through her skin, and that’s why she needs to wear three pieces of thread around her…” and then words I can’t repeat here. Ok, that’s not the direct quote, but it gets my point across well enough. Quiet is a woman who wears the equivalent to Micky Mouse in just his red shorts; In short, Jane Fonda wore more in Barbarella. The argument is the already mentioned difference in her breathing, which is “like The End” as Ocelot (or the other one) says in a tape. I’ll get to the tapes in a minute. Let’s poke a hole in the theories first.

“…like The End.” She is The End with breasts. Therefore she could have worn something without having idiots on the internet splutter from behind their sponsorship of Kleenex that she breathes through her skin. That’s not justification, that’s a thinly veiled excuse. Well, why does she do so? She has a vocal parasite that attacks her vocal cords and lungs. Wait, if it attacks her lungs as it does to others, how does that explain the shift in her breathing? Answers on a postcard for that one, please. Some state that her organs are not like ours, but that doesn’t make sense and is another excuse for her norks being out.

She wears clothes in the game, and you can upgrade her to get clothes again. You see, if you are wise, Quiet is your “buddy” through the game. A buddy is someone or something you drag through the game world to make stealth easier or using a big tank to listen to that David Bowie LP you bought at the Mother Base gift shop. With your puppy or horse, you can upgrade them to wear some armor and give them abilities.

Quiet has the same upgrade style in her arsenal with the final option in her R&D menu giving her clothes again. There’s a reason I say again. She attacks you in the opening mission in Cyprus, fully clothed, and survives falling out a window due to an explosion of high-grade ethanol dowsing her in flames. In the opening mission, she doesn’t breathe through her skin or have her photosynthesis powers because she’s wearing clothes, is on fire, and drops three floors out a window. No one else wears as little, breathes through their skin, and has these powers in the entire game or canon. That is if The End isn’t a stripper on the side.

That whole segment puts the theory that her organs are different from ours out the window in a flaming ball of ethanol. Then there’s the fact that The End wears moss like a ghillie suit. Even still, the R&D team knocks that problem out on a Friday afternoon with no issues. “But she breaths through her skin…” The same abilities some amphibians have such as frogs and toads; earthworms, salamanders, or she could have had the passive respiration of butterflies. Ok, so she’s much like these things that cover themselves in the dirt, water, and god only knows what of their habitats. It still seems the R&D team fixed that on Friday afternoon.

Let’s move towards her character. She doesn’t have one. Quiet is quiet because she has the vocal parasite which I’ll speak about in the story section, but she’s quiet for another reason. In short, this parasite will kill you and spread if you speak. Therefore she keeps quiet (teehee) because she loves a man… The Boss/Snake. I think that’s trope number one in the big book of “How Not to Write Female Characters;” and that’s her entire character in the overarching story, nothing more and nothing less. The thing is, outside the mystery nonsense she’s amazing and powerful because she’s a super sniper with perfect stealth capabilities.

There’s a reason I say, she’s the wise option for your buddies: she’s overpowered and doesn’t squawk in your ear every minute. I would make reference to all the 70s comedy, and how it was always men talking about their wives “talking too much.” However, the yammering “stay at home wives” in The Phantom Pain are the two grim men; and Snake when he’s home for a shower, a job done with his hand, and a sandwich.

This brings me to the three lead characters, or at least they are meant to be. Ocelot, Miller, and Big Boss all sound like the same angry man trying to do a production of 12 Angry Men with only three marginally different voices. Listening to the tapes of them all talking might as well be the sound of gravel and hatred. None of them really have a character to define them; and when Hideo writes like a bloated whale just excreted across the carpet, it’s hard to tell which one is which. The only way to tell them apart is, the two angry ones yelling at each other are Miller and Ocelot; the quiet one is Venom Snake.

There are segments where the three are torturing everyone that comes from the outside: Quiet, Emerich, and anyone with a pulse. Big Boss, who’s meant to be the righteous and perfect red, white, and blue; with something about fighting Soviets in Afganistan, is just silent through it all. The one that’s meant to be the moral compass (that in the canon later becomes a psycho) is happy to sit silently through it all. Moreover, there is Ocelot, whose entire character is summed up with, “a double-cross is not good enough for me!” Yeah, he’s the moral compass.

With that let’s get to all that can and will be said about Venom Snake/Big Boss/Ahab/The Boss and anything else he wants to call himself. He is nonexistent in this story, he’s there but doesn’t have an input. Again it is the issue with him during the torturing; he stands about watching everything, whereas the Big Boss of before would repeat the last few words/last word as a question. The little he does contribute turns out to be as useful to the story as Skull Face’s Lone Ranger mask. When he does repeat the line as a question it just comes off as a bad episode of 24.

It seems like a good point to jump on the story (literally), it is crap and bloated. The issue is how much it conflicts with the gameplay, but the story is constantly being broken up into chunks and those chunks are within themselves broken up into smaller bits. Let’s take a look the average run time for all the main series: MGS, Sons of Liberty, Snake Eater, and Guns of the Patriots take about 55 to 60 hours. This tiny slither of a story told in two parts, with Ground Zeroes being a demo, takes about 60 hours to complete. You could play the whole series in that time.

However, that’s not the entirety of the story as there are tapes that tell you what to do when you meet The Man on Fire. Consequently, Hideo’s naming practices in this game are next to none. It is in these tapes you’ll find the tidbits such as, “…like The End.” Though there are huge issues with those tapes, aside from The Phantom Pain being partially a stealth game making listening to them impossible, some of them have The Boss doing the most of his talking. If they are important they should be in the game, not for the minute of Snake sitting in a box touching himself.

Though the story is the usual Metal Gear Solid nonsense. There’s some super evil horrible thing, Skull Face, doing something evil and you are the only one able to take them on. The issue is, Skull Face isn’t the villain the game purports him to be. The real villain, which you’ll know if you pay attention to the opening tape over the logos, is Psycho Mantis in the plane crash. Yet, for some mad reason, the game wants me to hate Skull Face for doing practically nothing. Oh no, he blew up an oil rig in a demo; the polar bears will drown anyway.

Let’s put that bit to the side for a minute. The rest of the game focuses around the parasite in a group called “The Skulls.” These are Skull Face’s army brought to the world through an old man nicknamed “Code Talker,” the remains of The End, and magic. I say that because at this moment we have to point out the other flaw with Quiet; The Skulls are the same, but they don’t have their pubis on show. By the end of the game; they are all kitted out in full garb, covering eyes, mouths, toes, and everything in-between. But sure, these super-soldiers also made from the remains of The End don’t breath through their skin.

My ranting aside, the parasite makes no sense. It is the super bio-weapon the villain is trying to get by the end, and the thing our hero is trying to get before them. With that said and how important that makes this parasite sound, it is written with broad strokes. It has to be, once you get into detail on a vocal cord parasite that either kills you or turns you into the Suburban Commando, broad strokes are all you have. It is a nightmare to try to explain that these things have no reasonable explanation. Any vague attempt to try and make sense of them would make them more unbelievable; if you could believe it.

In theory, if you have the English strain of this parasite you will be unable to speak English. The questions that arise from this are instant and poke holes the size of Moby Dick and his genitals. If you have that said strain, how many words could you say before it became fatal? We don’t know and it is never explained, is all that I can say. This raises more questions, such as: if you are English and gain the Japanese strain, could you live a full life if you don’t repeat something from an anime?

The only way it is explained is that these bugs harm you when they start breeding, which only happens when they feel vibrations in your vocal cords. I’m sure your next question is how language effects that, I don’t know. Again, it is broad strokes with only flecks of detail, and what detail is given creates more problems than it solves. Nonetheless, that’s the big tyrannical monster of a super-evil plot device explained as much as possible.

With that, where are the boss battles? You know, the things that prove we’re fighting to stop the world being destroyed by the CIA’s meddling. There’s one metal gear which you fight twice, Quiet is as much of a boss as coming home drunk at 5 AM on a school night, The Man on Fire is a standard 1-1 battle, and Liquid Snake is hardly a fight; just shoot him in the face. Yes, I did just say to shoot a child in the face, but he’s an evil little sod. I don’t feel like I’m locked in a room, naked, with no weapons, and the vampire has a fighter jet (all things that happen in the series).

The thing is, for all that you fight and play for those 60 (or more) hours, the reason you do it would be the conclusion to everything the series was building towards. This is an issue within itself when the threads of the story are not so much tied up; more so that they were cut in twine, a bit of glue is put on each end, with a very large piece of rope put between them to make them longer. There’s no payoff; because everyone already in the series has their conclusions locked in further down the timeline, and those introduced just walk off or die. It is like a lonesome parp of someone farting at a funeral; adding nothing.

Within that jumbled mess of a story, there are some fantastic connecting pieces with the gameplay and narrative ebbing and flowing well. The prologue in the hospital where Big Boss beats Quiet off of Ahab is phenomenal. The tension, subtly, and madness of it all is brilliant and could have carried the game through many hours. However, tight linear storytelling is out, and an open world with nothing in it is back in like the smelly tramp Mirror’s Edge Catalyst was.

To keep things short enough, I think the world maps are just a bit dull. Though Afghanistan is pretty. Having to go to the Arial Command Center (ACC) after almost every mission is boring and adds two load times between maps and Mother Base. Mother Base is just a brick I’d be forced back onto to keep everyone happy and so we could get some of that torturing done. Then what little there is in the open wilds of Africa and Afghanistan replenish if you wander around for long enough. The open worlds are just for padding and travel.

Every now and then, there are bits of the game where it tightens up and feels all warm and nice. Though they are so few and far between, they might as well be their own little games. These linear sections that advance the story and feel like a Metal Gear Solid game. They are the diamonds in the rough; a very mucky and boring rough.

That said, the gameplay is repetitive fun. Mostly stupid and so left field to its open-world drivels, but sneaking up to someone and shooting them is still fun. As for the stupid, I think Hideo saw that one bit at the end of Thunderball and thought the Fulton extraction system was simpler than that. Murderers would kill (funnily enough) for this kidnapping method. Attach a balloon on a small piece of string to a man, get your helicopter that’s hundreds of feet above to pick him up when he’s twelve feet off the ground, and watch him disappear like Houdini. It is hilarious.

Now that I’ve covered just about everything, let’s move my lecture to Hideo’s directing. I love it; I hate parts of it, but we’ll return to Quiet in a minute. While others would cut every three seconds and feature twelve explosions a minute, Hideo went the complete opposite direction with The Phantom Pain. Everything is done in what’s called “the master shot” by simply moving the camera.

There are two scenes in particular I like: the first of which is just a few minutes long; and it is the introduction of The Skulls, Skull Face, and the metal gear. There are maybe three cuts in the whole scene and it is beautifully paced. The second of which is the full-on reveal of Sahelanthropus (the metal gear) with only three cuts and a metal titan with nuclear weapons that looks like a dinosaur that kicks over tanks, stabs a helicopter and chases you down the road. No, I didn’t have a drug-fueled nightmare, that happens and it is so cool.

I love the way the camera always has purpose, making each scene feel important. We’re not just looking through something mounted on a tripod being monitored by a lazy man with a magnificent porn mustache, we’re looking at the action as if we’re there. It turns, moves, and feels sentient. That explains why it is a bit of a perv.

I said we’d come back to Quiet, so let’s talk about THAT scene in the rain. What in the in the living Christ was Hideo thinking? For my editor who hasn’t played the game, Quiet is on the helicopter with Big Boss as they are heading back to Mother Base, and it is raining. Quiet drops from the helicopter, like Mike Tyson hit her; and proceeds to sexually play (rolling and splashing) in the rain and puddles. Stripping down as much as she can when she only wears a bikini, some very well worn leggings, and a pair of boots. It is wholly unnecessary and just pervy.

Quiet isn’t the only one that gets this treatment either. The first proper thing you see clearly as Ahab in the hospital is a nurse’s breasts inches from your nose. It is just a mess when I both have to pat a game on the back for doing some of the best work of any game, and then have to smack it about the place for seeing a pair of breasts and running off like a dog catching a car.

In conclusion: I really like The Phantom Pain for successfully making something of all of its own madness. However, I also hate it for all of the same things. It is messy, unnecessary sexualizing the most powerful character, and a bit stupid. It is like a dog, reliable to get its job done as a game and a bit stupid, but it is hardly a Metal Gear Solid game. You can run in, smack everyone on the bum, and then Fulton them if you like. That’s far from a Metal Gear Solid game.

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Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

$19.99 USD

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• A hilarious Fulton recovery system.
• Some of the best directing in gaming history.
• Quiet is the perfect companion to Snake's CQC.
• The story (at times) is stupid camp fun.

Cons

• A powerful character (and others) is unnecessarily sexualized.
• An unnecessary open world.
• A lack of tying up plot threads.