Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, it had so much potential.
The gameplay was the best that the series had ever seen. The visuals were incredible and the open world was a fantastic playground. There was one problem with it all, the story.
A Near Perfect Game
Everybody who played the game has an opinion on the story. The general consensus is that it was the weakest of the entire MGS series, which was well known for their incredible narratives. And I do agree with that to a degree. The Phantom Pain did not compare, narrative-wise, to Snake Eater, which has the greatest narrative ever seen in a video game. The Phantom Pain did have signs of brilliance when it came to its story, the inclusion of MGS villains Physco Mantis and Liquid Snake as children did attract attention because the potential of getting a backstory from two of the most iconic villains in video game history about how they got involved with Big Boss and Foxhound. Quiet and Heuy Emmerich’s stories were also intriguing and hell, I loved the twist ending because I went through a cavalcade of emotions in a space of a few minutes.
But It Had Serious Flaws…
But with all the good that I have laid out when it came to the story of The Phantom Pain, those story points were also the negatives. All of the plot points were hampered either by them not being flesh out, or not resolved at all. It was infuriating that all the story threads that needed to be resolved were summed up by a text crawl at the end of the game and it felt like there was a lot missing to the story. The reason was for this was because of time constraints. Hideo Kojima was forced to put in the third and final chapter of The Phantom Pain, which was meant to tie up the whole narrative together before the big reveal that you were not actually playing as Big Boss was made at the end of the game.
Why Talk About It Now?
This topic has been talked about to death since the release of The Phantom Pain, but why am I talking about it now? It has now been two years since the release of The Phantom Pain and a lot has happened to the MGS series since then. Hideo Kojima is longer an employee of Konami after a very public falling out between the developer and the publisher led to Kojima’s next big project Silent Hills being canceled and his name being taken away from all the promotional material. Kojima has revamped his production company and is working on a new title entitled Death Stranding. Kojima has managed to do a lot in the past two years he stopped working with Konami. His beloved MGS series, however, well that is a different story.
Konami Is The Worst
Konami has taken a step back from console development, looking to do more with mobile titles and gambling machines. With MGS being one the greatest financial successes that they have ever released, (with of course Silent Hill) Konami has been getting everything they possibly can out of The Phantom Pain to ensure that it would remain profitable for a long period of time. They have added multiplayer and mobile game elements, they have done a lot. We have no idea what Konami would do next to ensure the continued financial success of The Phantom Pain. What we do know is that we will probably not going to get the satisfying ending that the series truly deserves. Konami holds the rights to MGS and will not give it back to Kojima because, and to quote Jim Sterling, Konami is the worst. If they decide to commission a brand new entry, they would outsource it to a third party developer, which has proven to be disastrous in the past with games such as the Silent Hill HD Collection.
Saying that there will be a new entry to the MGS franchise on consoles soon, which will be Metal Gear Survive. This will not be the game that MGS deserves because it is a zombie survival game… One of the most story rich franchises with innovative gameplay ever to be implemented into a video game and it is about to be turned into a generic zombie survival shooter. That is the biggest injustice to a video game series I have ever witnessed and it seems like a lot of other people agree as well. The trailer for Metal Gear Survive on YouTube has 44K dislikes to 4k likes. People are more interested in getting the third chapter for The Phantom Pain rather than a gimmick game.
And let us not talk about Snake Eater being remade as a pachinko machine.
RE!
