Since the release of Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain or perhaps it's better to say long before it came out there had been a series of controversies that followed it. From the removal of it's prologue to be sold for $30, the prologue being only 2 hours long at most, Kojima Productions closing down, Kojima leaving the company, Silent Hills cancellation, the inclusion of microtransactions and the crutch that all of it lean on the removal of pivotal story content. All of this lead to Kojima's last metal Gear to be remembered for sadly the wrong reasons, and while I don't disagree with the sentiment that the whole thing has impacted The Phantom Pain negatively I however do feel it has been blown out of proportions.
SPOILER WARNING beyond this point there will be spoilers to The Phantom Pain so be warned.
So to address the elephant in the room, yes when you finish The Phantom Pain it will end with the feeling that something is missing, even when I finished the game I couldn't believe I finished it because of it. This feeling is tied into the fact that in chapter 2 the narrative starts focusing on the vocal cord parasites especially the English strain and how it all ties into Eli and his need for revenge. While it didn't have many new missions there was still a good bit of plot happening but as it picked up steam with Eli stealing Sahelanthropus and taking with him the child soldiers. After that scene you expect to chase after Eli and possibly end the game with a final showdown between you & Eli, putting him in his place and setting up his path to becoming Liquid Snake, a mission that sadly never came even after the third set of credits rolled.
It is no secret that there was meant to be a follow up to it to end that story line, nor could you take it as just something is intentionally left open to the player because if you owned the collector's edition you got to see mission 51. Lord of The Flies. Kojima had indeed planned and started making the mission that would see Venom Snake following leads to find Eli and the child soldiers he took with him and putting a stop to his insurrection. The cut scene was fully rendered with some missing effects & facial animation and even had recorded dialog for Eli, Miller & Snake all of which was never seen in the final game.
So without beating around the bush, Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain is an incomplete game yet the way I've seen people react to this it almost feels like Ground Zeroes all over again where people feel like they are missing tons of game and that the experience is not worth it's price. As much as I hate the fact the mission was cut out and will more than likely be sold some day as DLC I still find the way people have reacted to be over the top. Yes the story is unfinished but at the same time the narrative still makes sense by the end (as much sense as any Hideo Kojima game can be). People even find fault at the fact that Kojima never got to do a chapter 3 for the game and feel that the story suffers because of it.
Now I am a big Hideo Kojima fan and a Metal Gear Solid fan, I own the entire Metal Gear Solider series and even bought Rising which was a spin off, but I'm glad there was no chapter 3 to it. Hell I personally find issue that there was a chapter 2 since at the end of Revenge Skull Face is dead, for the majority of the game he had been the driving force as to what you were doing. With him gone chapter 2 obviously had less missions because the major threat was gone and at that point you were just cleaning up the mess he had caused which ties in with Eli.
So in what may sound contradictory the game definitely needed to be longer but it also didn't need to be longer, it needed mission 51 to tie up all lose ends but it didn't need to go on beyond that mission. I obviously don't know what Kojima had planned for chapter 3 Peace, but the fact still remains the game had plenty of hours in it and it only needed that cut mission to be a full experience. Yet it is because this game has had so much negativity following it and a lot of hatred being thrown Konami's way (justified hate not to be confused) that when the community learned of what happened backlash was going to come a knocking yet it because the community was already fueled by their hate for Konami that a simple backlash has become lynch on a game that honestly doesn't deserve it.
MGS V TPP is Kojima's swan song even with the missing mission because it still sets out to do what it wanted which was to give fans a final goodbye and gratitude for our years of devotion. Yes it sucks he couldn't get in that mission in before the game had to be released yet even without it even with the fact the game doesn't sport the franchise's trademarked long cut scenes (which is actually a good thing) it is at the end of the day.
A Hideo Kojima Game.
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While I'm bitter about the Eli mission getting cut I'm more bitter about mission 46 and the big 'twist' ending.
First of all 46 just comes out of nowhere, it makes no sense for it to randomly pop up the way it does (it's very briefly foreshadowed by The Boss AI and Eli's DNA result but they don't happen near enough mission 46's appearance to warrant the random popup) so much is left unexplained with regards to how Venom remembers the truth, where he got the tape and how he feels about it all. Not to mention the fact that the twist was completely unnecessary, everyone was looking forward to seeing Big Boss become evil. Instead we get a retconned excuse as to why BB is able to survive MG1 and appear in MG2 (an excuse that nobody was looking for).
I immediately lost any connection I had to Venom up to that point, he's a nobody (and yes I know he supposed to represent you but that's one 4th wall shatter too many).
It wouldn't be as bad but the 'twist', and most of the game, was spoiled by trailers long before release. The part where Miller says "what about him" in the hospital at the start of mission 46 should never have been shown. The plastic surgery at the beginning of the game SCREAMS that you're not Big Boss. Probably the most obvious one being that Venom, Ishmael and the medic were all voiced by Keifer! Talk about giving it away.
Then you have Venom himself, who barely strings a sentence together, and that can be ok in certain situations, but it's not ok when he's sat across from skull face listening to him speak for a long car ride without uttering a single word. And it's not like we even see Venom go evil, he's a pretty good guy throughout the entire game. Oh he smashes a mirror, so evil.
MGS is my favourite series, this is the first MGS game I've been critical of, but I have to say it how I see it. The ending sucked and I'm hoping this is all some kinda scheme by Kojima and that a real ending will show up somehow, there are some interesting hints about that.
I didn't feel like I got a final goodbye. I felt like I got an incomplete game that was clearly hindered by the internal turmoil between Konami and Kojima. Gameplay is the only saving grace for an otherwise poorly constructed game.
Still its no excusee to why Snake barely talks and why it had to be Kiefer Sutherland FFS! The story is boring and it lacks on delivering variety for missions. I hoped for sone guerrilas or even the diamon dogs themselves to help you in the warzone like in mgs4. And Ocelot was the most boring Ocelot ever! If David Hayter was Snake in this game the tone of the story wouldnt be affected by any of it and probably it would include alot more dialog. MGS games always had good gameplay and V really made it alot better in some cases but taking away the story and fun villans and charisma of the MGS it feels empty. Kojima could make this game alot better in 5 years but instead he got sidetracked with the fox engine and silent Hills (PT) that the whole thing went to #&€% and all we got was a good open world game with RPG and stealth mechanics but barely nothing worthy of a story just an empty shell compared to previous games of the séries.
I really feel like the non-linearity of the game hurt the story presentation in a big way. I don't mind so much the way the missions are set up, just that the story progresses really slowly, and is mostly just a bunch of talking about how some guy did something that will one day affect something else...maybe. Or just Ocelot/Miller wondering what's going on.
The missions where you are directly interacting with the antagonist are rare, and just kind of pop up out of no where near the end of the mission(couple exceptions apply). The rest really are no different than the fetch quests in any standard MMO. This would be fine for all those side op missions(non-important ones), but when it makes up the bulk of the actual story based missions, it makes me wonder if Kojima even really cared about it anymore.
It's disappointing that Snake has almost no input whatsoever, and even more disappointing that his character is so limited throughout the game. He seems like a really capable foot soldier, and not a independent soldier who's out trying to do the right thing fighting some big evil.
For all the hate that Ground Zeroes got, at least it's story was cohesive and paced more in line with a Metal Gear game. I know people bemoaned the extended story presentations of prior games(even before MGS4 TBH), but TPP is just taking the other extreme. But then of course they throw in some random cut-scene that last 10 minutes like when BB and Skullface were in that Jeep. 3 minutes of it was just them sitting there not talking while some music played.
Quite honestly, I doubt the inclusion of more missions would change the story that much, twists or no, so whether it's complete or not doesn't matter except from a consumer stand point.
Eli's point in the story itself was just another antagonist, and his story itself seems to assume that the watcher knows what becomes of him, and because of that, if you do know, then it might be somewhat significant...but for those who only have a cursory remembrance of him, or none at all, most of it is just ho-hum, and at no point have I even begun to be curious about it.
The story is poorly executed...it's as simple as that.
Even if the story weren't poorly executed...it would be meaningless to the overall MGS cannon...at least from the content that was in TPP.
@ZombieGamerMan
This was a good read. Thanks for that. I really do feel the same about the game than you do mostly. It was great, even with it's flaws. Not that it had a lot of it.
Yes the missing mission would have been great, but for someone who has played all Metal Gear Games and one of the Series biggest fans, I would like to thank Kojima for his masterpiece and I love the way he ended the game. Giving his fans the title of Big Boss/Phantom was an awesome moment!
I love this game and I would give my left leg if someone someday could redo the entire series on a brand new engine. I would pay Thousands. Although every MGS game, old or new is special and will be like that forever in my heart.
Kojima you are brilliant and it is not just because I am a fan, but because MGS series was a masterpiece in every way possible in my eyes. The whole series. Sure it had it's flaws here and there, but nothing is perfect, but MGS is as close as a game will get to perfect!!
THANK YOU AGAIN KOJIMA - LOVE, YOUR FAN!