Genre: Action-Adventure, Stealth
Year: 2015
Developed by: Kojima Productions
Published by: Konami
Platforms: PS3, PS4, PC, XBOX 360, XBOX One
#172
Feeling Like: Metal Gear Unsteady
My highest rated Metal Gear Solid is also the messiest. I enjoyed it enough to put it in my Top 10 of 2015, but after reading my entry from 8 years ago, my thoughts haven’t changed since.
Here’s what I said at the time.
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To call Phantom Pain a mixed bag would be accurate, but nowhere near sufficient. It is, at times, miles ahead of what we’ve seen before. Any open world stealth game (are there any others?) should hand over the keys to Konami. Well, no. Nobody should hand anything to Konami at the moment except a badge of shame.
I feel bad giving them more press (assuming anybody but me will read this) but how you go about treating Hideo Kojima like a fringe employee, insulting their audiences time after time and taking their franchises (Suikoden, Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid, among others) and going home is beyond me.
My God, the third paragraph and I haven’t even mentioned ANY details about the fifth canonical Metal Gear Solid. It’s ridiculous; I never understood the series’ insistence that it obeys real world rules, real world laws, real world politics, FMV of news footage and anchoring their meta in our own world. Then, in a few hours time, lay in front of the player psychic soldiers, flaming horses, vampires and enough contemporary fantasy to make your head spin.
Here’s why Phantom Pain is on the top ten – it has some of the most thrilling sequences I’ve ever played through. The first escape in the hospital. The sniper battle against Quiet. The HoneyBee mission. How much freedom you have approaching each mission. How stealth is an advantage, but not mandatory. How awesome D-Dog is. How technically great it looks. I could go on and on.
I could also go on and on about how much stupid is jammed in here. It’s hard to believe; monotonous missions, a bizarre story structure and those spoiler filled opening credits, played at the start of EVERY MISSION that spoil any potential surprise. There’s more: how boring your base turns out to be, how more does not mean better, how lame it was to get rid of David Hayter, hire Kiefer Sutherland, and barely give him any lines. Huey. The wasted potential on the language plot. Managing your army. Having to go into the helicopter an uncountable number of times. The nonsensical philosophy that every characters spews in every cutscene. For a series that is dedicated to realism, I feel like they’ve never heard another human being talk to each other.
If Phantom Pain cut all the crap I just mentioned, added in a few more levels, had more mission variety and erased all the fat, it would have been my number one. Number eight will have to do.
It’s mildly surprising not to see another game or series take what Phantom Pain did and improve it. It could be that there are so many titles to keep track of that I missed out on another open-world, high profile stealth release but I don’t exactly live under a rock when it comes to video games. There’s so much good here, but so much to improve on it seems like an obvious pitch. It could also be developers are nervous about trying to one-up one of the industry’s all time masters. I get it.
This is a weird one, I feel the same way I did about Skyrim. I can’t say definitively that I enjoyed it – a ridiculous proclamation considering this entry is higher than 327 others on the 500, but I was overwhelmingly compelled to keep playing. The character models and landscapes look more realistic than even some modern games today. The intense stealth gameplay is punctuated by a ton of creative freedom; you can go in guns a blazing, you can take on a base’s guards one by one, you can creative a diversion, you can play non-lethally, you can use various items to distract bored patrols, you can hide bodies, you can extract and recruit them with the cool balloon thing, you can use their own weapons against them, you can use vehicles, repeat missions with different allies and I’m sure there’s more. It’s rare to see a game present this many options and it absolutely kept me playing through to the end, despite my reservations about stealth gameplay as a premise.
There are as many annoyances as there are highlights and I’d never go back and play it again; Quiet’s costume reeks of fan service, the stupid opening credits per mission still drives me nuts and the repetitive areas meant I was fading near the end. But, the core gameplay, graphics, audio and presentation were beautifully cinematic and strange – only Kojima could create something like this.
The 500 