Even though I finally stopped playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain over a week ago, I still haven't really been able to stop thinking about both the game itself and the franchise as a whole. I've been a Metal Gear fan for about ten years, hopping on the series with Twin Snakes, the GameCube remake of the first Metal Gear Solid. I instantly fell in love with the story, characters and gameplay, and immediately sought out a copy of MGS2 once I finished it, and then MGS3 after that. Over the years I've had my ups and downs with the series, but even at its most dire I've never considered myself a lapsed Metal Gear fan. It's always been a small part of my identity. Due to both personal disappointment and the resolution of the series' plot with MGS4 you would expect to feel a sense of finality with the series, but Peace Walker following shortly afterward never gave me the chance to feel like I could move on from this fandom. With each promise from Kojima that he was working on his final Metal Gear I scoffed, it was obvious that either Konami or himself were forcing him to continue to endlessly direct new Metal gear games. Ironically it was likely a combination of both that caused the series to finally end.

I didn't play Peace Walker at its initial release, (I didn't own a PSP, having bought one for Portable Ops and then selling it after fighting with the controls for several hours) but got around to it when it made its way to consoles via the HD Collection. After playing through and enjoying the hell out of it I was back to being positive about the franchise's future, and quickly became excited about "Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes" which was teased not too long after. I still remember being in LA visiting family when the gameplay demo of Ground Zeroes hit, and ignoring everyone to watch it on my phone the second I found out about it. I followed the "Phantom Pain" excitement, enjoyed the hell out of Metal Gear Rising, revisited the older games countless times and even played through the MSX games and most of the spin-offs for the first time. I bought Ground Zeroes on three different platforms and 100%ed the game on all of them, squeezing a combined 100+ hours out of a game most people chastised for its short length. I was ready and excited for what looked to be the ultimate culmination of both the evolving story and gameplay of the franchise I loved.

And then one day it was finally in my hands. I played through every mission and every side-op, found every optional cutscene I read about, listened to every second of every tape. The story might not have been what was sold to me in the trailers, and it was definitely limp in some spots, but I still loved most of what was there. In spite of a sloppy execution I instantly fell in love with the ending twist, and couldn't stop thinking about its ramifications on the franchise and characters for the rest of the day. I went on to complete all of the side-tasks, S Rank every mission, capture every stupid animal in the game. My completion rating eventually hit 100%, but I continued to unlock things that weren't counted like research items, emblem parts and sound effect tapes. About a week ago I'd exhausted everything to do in the game save for completing my FOB and developing/dismantling a nuke. There was nothing left for me to do but leave the game running at my base as resources accumulated automatically, so I could eventually hit a button and then leave the game running at my base while timers ran down. I still want to do new things, find new content, anything to let me play more Metal Gear Solid V... but there's no more Metal Gear Solid V left to play.

It was only recently that it finally hit me one of my favorite franchises of all time is now over. Over the years I've claimed I would love for Kojima to move on and do something that isn't Metal Gear again, but that was in a world where I felt like Metal Gear would never leave. "The story culminated with MGS4, we don't need more games to fill in the gaps." It's easy to say you don't need something when you're guaranteed it, but entirely different once that thing is actually gone. Since finishing the last mission I've been reading about fan speculation and cut content, trying to link implications from Phantom Pain to other Metal Gear games, and desperately wishing that Konami would announce DLC to add the content that was cut back into the game and give me more gameplay and story to consume. But the reality is none of this matters anymore. Nothing people speculate about will ever be confirmed, there won't be new games that expand upon these connections and create new ones, and the cut content will never be restored, the unfinished plot threads never completed. What caused the split between Konami and Kojima? Was it Konami having unrealistic expectations of game development? Or was it Kojima going overboard and spending far too much money on a single game? Whatever the reason, there's no doubt in my mind that this conflict was a huge factor in Konami's decision to get out of the video game industry, and leaving both Kojima and Metal Gear behind. Konami has gone on record saying there are no plans for story DLC for Phantom Pain, and though they claim Metal Gear games will continue with a new team we all know that's a load of bullshit. Solid, Acid, Rising, none of it will continue, not in any form we want them to at least. The story of Metal Gear is over, the gameplay will never be refined or iterated upon again, and the world will go on without Snakes.

For me, this truth is a much harder one to accept than the one at the end of The Phantom Pain. It's the reason I decided to write this blog post, to hopefully give myself a sense of finality to this fandom I've been a part of for so long. There's no way I can organize my complicated, disjointed feelings about this series into a coherent blog post with a clear purpose and structure, but I had to write something about all of this. Metal Gear has meant too much to me to let it simply pass by without saying anything. For the first time since I entered the world of Metal Gear over a decade ago, the Metal Gear series now lies entirely in the past. There's nothing complicated or hard to understand about this simple fact, and yet even as I write this I still feel this slight lingering sensation. Part of my brain feels like the series is still there, just like it always has been. But at the same time I feel the reality, that I'll never see any of these characters again. And it won't stop hurting.

You feel it too, don't you?