Moosey Gear Solid: The Phantom Blog: Part I. Story Spoiler Free!

This blog has been a long time coming. In terms of how long it's taken me to actually get around to writing it, how long I've been waiting to play this game, and how long I've been writing blogs here at Giant Bomb. You probably don't know, or remember, but one of the first games I wrote about on this blog was Peace Walker, way back in 2010. Granted, back then my blogs were objectively bad. Very short, and didn't have much actual content in them. Basically just nonsense I wrote out to be silly. In fact, I just glanced at some of them, and I wish I could just delete them. Wipe them from the face of the Earth. But, such things are never that easy.

It took years of writing, and thinking about what I wanted these blogs to be before they got to the point where they're at now. Not that I'm saying I'm some amazing, incredible writer, or anything. I still think I'm pretty lousy compared to a lot of people, but I've come a long way. Which, honestly, if after five years of doing something I hadn't shown any improvement, that would be kind of disappointing, if you really stop and think about it.

But that's not what this is about. I'm not good at retrospectives, because in retrospect, I usually end up thinking everything I've done is garbage. This isn't about that, this is about Metal Gear. This is about the culmination of my over a decade long obsession with this series. This is about a game that, having spent almost one hundred hours playing it, I can confidently say is one of my favorite games of all time. This is about a game that is so amazing, incredible, and near perfect in so many ways that when the game screws up, those small moments end up feeling like bigger blemishes than they would in a lesser game.

To be clear, I'm mostly not talking about game play related stuff when I say that, but I'll get to that later. I don't want to begin this with my complaints, especially when those are mostly related to the story, and how some of the characters are handled. Which, I suppose brings me to the topic of spoilers. Having written this blog, and seeing that it is indeed long enough to stand on its own, I can say that I managed to write a story spoiler free blog. Now, I do mention some vague details about a few missions, but not in any of the ones that are really important to the story.

The current plan is that, after I post this, in the next few days I'll write up something full of spoilers, for the entire game. Because if I'm going to write about the story of the game, I'm going to do it right, and discuss as many aspects of it as I have things to say about. But, like I said, that's not this blog, and when I do post that blog, it'll be very clearly marked as being spoiler heavy.

The Phantom Pain is, in many respects, the game that I always wanted MGS to be. Or, at least the game I've wanted it to be since MGS3. That game was still a linear affair, but the slightly bigger, and more open outdoor areas gave me ideas of what stealth games could be. Of a game where you need to perform recon of the area from just outside it before you infiltrated. Of stuff that sounds boring on paper, like being prone on a hill and scoping out the enemy for a substantial amount of time. Trying to figure out their patterns, how many there are, etc. It's the sort of thing that I imagine most people wouldn't want to do, but I really wanted to.

And, to a certain extent, MGSV is that. But also not really. The biggest difference being that, like in Ground Zeroes, you can, and are encouraged to mark enemies. It works the same as in GZ, you just look at an enemy through your scope, or hold R3 to zoom in on them, and they're marked. At which point they appear on the iDroid map, and you can see the markers through walls, buildings, etc. And also like in GZ, if you stay still for a few seconds, you can even see a silhouette of the enemy, to be able to tell which direction they're facing. As you can imagine, that level of info can be crucial if you're waiting for the right moment to sneak up behind someone to grab them and start interrogating them.

With the ability to mark enemies, I end up spending less time scouting out these areas than I did back in the day when I first played MGS3. Which is good and bad. On the one hand, this is a really long game, and spending that time memorizing enemy patterns would only make it longer. But on the other, there is something a little less pure about just letting the game keep track of all of those enemies. Of course, if I had really wanted to, I could have turned enemy markings off. I definitely did a few times in GZ. Conversely, in some of the larger areas, there are so many enemies that I doubt I could keep track of them all. Point being that I'm glad the system is in place, even if it's not exactly what I envisioned all those years ago. It's probably better, really.

Once you get past the recon stage of infiltrating an area in this game, you get to what makes this game so much fun to play. At almost every step of the way, the game gives you tons and tons of options for how you handle what the game throws at you. Which direction you come from, what time of day you move in at, what weapons you use (or don't use!), what type of camo you're wearing (or not wearing!), what buddy you have with you (if any), whether you want to be lethal or nonlethal, and so many more things are all up to you. And any one of them can be the make or break thing for how you deal with a situation. But, for me, this game doesn't really shine until a certain thing happens.

When you screw up. I'm not the first person to say this, and I surely won't be the last, but multitude of ways this game lets you keep going even after mistakes that would be mission ending in other games, is just fantastic. Granted, there are ways to get a game over screen in this game (beyond just dying). If your mission is to rescue a hostage, then that hostage dying will be a game over. Same goes for if a mission requires you recover a specific vehicle. But in a game where you can usually tie a balloon to something to get it out of the hot zone, that's not really that big of an issue. And let me tell you, few things feel as good as sneaking up behind a tank, tying a balloon to it, and watching it float away.

What I think is a bit of a bigger issue, not so much for me as it is some other people that I talked to, is that the missions actually restrict you to specific areas. Meaning that if you go too far outside that area, it's a game over. And in a game that is built around being this big, huge, open thing where you can attack areas from almost any angle, it's a little weird. Granted, usually the game gives you a lot more space than you actually need, but it also leads to a few situations where you're trying to escape, and could very easily just keep running in a direction...except for the arbitrary line in the ground where a mission over happens. I actually ran into that in the very first mission after the prologue. I didn't literally run into it, because I looked at the map, saw that line, and figured, "Well, they probably want me to go in this other direction to introduce this other thing that I could avoid by going this other way."

I totally get that there are cases where they have to gently push you in a certain direction to ensure that specific things happen, for story or set piece reasons. But given the game's attention to detail in just about every other scenario, it'd be nice if these moments had a better reason than they do. In that example, I don't think it'd have been too hard to have there be some tanks waiting down the road, or something like that. Especially given that at that point in the game, unless you're replaying the mission, you're definitely not equipped for fighting tanks (unless there's a rocket launcher to be found somewhere in that area (which there wouldn't need to be because like I said, there weren't tanks)).

But, for the most part, the game has a tremendous number of different ways for missions to play out, all depending on what you do, and when you do it. Want to (minor mission spoilers, I guess) find the prisoner by following his interrogator around the camp? Sure, but if you want, you can totally just tie a balloon to the interrogator, and just get the whole camp out on the search for you, and in that confusion, go find the prisoner. But how would you know where he is? Well, often doing some interrogating yourself will yield the answers you seek. Or you could try rescuing one of the other, easier to find prisoners, and use the info they give you to narrow down the search.

Speaking of interrogating, one of my favorite little quirks about the game is that the language the enemies speak actually matters. This isn't like all the other games, where the enemies either speak English, or it was implied/outright stated that your character could speak Russian and the game was just translating everything for the player. Not so, here. In MGSV, if you want to interrogate the Russians, or understand what they're saying, you need to find an interpretor, and make him work for you. And it's not just Russian, there's also Pashto (which I think is only ever used by prisoners in the game), and Afrikaans and Kikongo for the part of the game in Africa. Also, I think it's great that the game features a lot of spoken dialog in languages like Afrikaans and Kikongo, which, to a dummy American like me, I had had almost no, if any, exposure to throughout my life. I also have no idea how well it's spoken in the game, or if the people speaking it are native speakers, or whatever, but it's still a nice touch.

Got a bit sidetracked there, back to mission stuff. Need to extract a truck that's being flanked by two tanks? You could do what I did, and set up some C4 in the road to blow up the first tank, and try to steal the truck in the confusion. That didn't work, when an enemy unite of elite soldiers popped out to protect the truck. So, I did the first thing I thought of. I got into the other tank (not something you can usually do if there's people in it, mind you), and used it to fight the enemies, while being careful not to blow up the truck (which had happened on my previous attempt, when instead of leaving traps, I tried to sneak into an outpost the truck was sitting at whilst the guards went out for a stretch, or something). But then my tank blew up before I could eliminate all of them, which left me an opening to run over to the truck, tie a Fulton balloon to it, and try to run away before that one remaining soldier got me. He didn't give up the pursuit so easily, and I ended up having to use an explosive barrel or two I found down the road to blow him up (they have some really tough armor).

Or the mission where I had to "take out" a high ranking member of one of the Private Forces (PF, for short, because for whatever reason, this game never uses the term PMC (maybe it hadn't been coined yet?)) while he was giving a tour of an airport to a visiting arms dealer. I won't give a blow by blow of what happened, but just know that it came down to the wire as I tranqed the guy I needed to right before he got on a helicopter to escape, whilst most of the airport was on alert and looking for me. Sadly, I didn't get the arms dealer too, because in a rare moment of disappointment, I couldn't climb into the enemy helicopter and yank him out.

That does remind me of another couple of things that I really love about the game. While I don't think you could actually complete the entire game without killing anyone (pretty sure the using guns tutorial in the prologue requires you shoot and kill a couple enemies), the game has a ton of nonlethal options, both in terms of weapons, and the CQC you have access to. Tranq pistols, tranq sniper rifles, rubber bullets, sleeping gas, and a stun knife equipped dog are just a few of the options at hand. And on top of that, any time a mission objective is to "eliminate" a specific enemy, you can actually just whisk them away on a balloon, at which point Miller fabricates a story in which they were killed for the paying client.

And that brings me to one of the weirder ways in which this game is structured. Namely, that a lot of the missions in the game are framed as just being jobs given to Diamond Dogs to do purely for profit. Now, that isn't entirely the case, and many of them have some little thing about them that is connected, or related to the overarching plot, even if only just a little. Not that that means most of them have cut-scenes, because a whole lot of what's going on in this game is presented through tapes, and through Miller (and occasionally Ocelot, but mostly Miller) talking to you over the radio.

Which is kind of a bummer, given that the cut-scenes in this game are, as they usually are in this series, exceptionally well shot. This game in particular is quite fond on long shots in the cut-scenes, which is not something you see in most films, I assume because it's a lot harder to do continuous shots than it is to just do short, quick cuts. I imagine that's a lot easier to do in a video game where it's all digital (I mean what you see, I realize they motion captured everything they could, plus foley work), and you can more easily stitch things together without the player realizing how the cut-scenes were actually made.

But, if you think of the tapes and quick bits of radio talk as a replacement for the Codec conversations of yore, it's definitely an improvement. If only because you can listen to the tapes at your leisure, and can re-listen to them easily. Though, I was just reading online that apparently listening to a tape too many times can wear it out, and you need to find another to replace it. I don't know if that just means the music tapes (the game's collectibles), or if it includes the story tapes too. I don't even know if it's true or not, but I think it says something about the game that I totally believe it could be true. I would test it out, but I don't want to lose a tape for a song that I like, and I certainly don't want to leave songs I don't like (all but two of the licensed songs in the game) on loop to see if it actually happens.

In grand Metal Gear fashion, MGSV: The Phantom Pain is a WEIRD GAME. I can't remember the last time I played a game that made me think, "WHAT IS THIS GAME," or, "THIS GAME," as many times I as I did during the course of MGSV. There are a lot of things in this game that only Kojima could get into a game of this scale, and magnitude. Some of which, like tapes wearing out, is just minor stuff. But some of it, and really the more memorable things, are things I can't really say without spoiling some major stuff later in the game. So, if you're not looking for spoilers, just know that this game is WEIRD and CRAZY in the ways that Metal Gear usually is, and in some other ways too. It's bizarre.

Speaking of music, though, I do think the game has really good music. Not the licensed music, the original music. There's not really anything in there that I found myself humming, like I have in the past with things like the MGS2 theme, Snake Eater, or the Peace Walker theme. Actually, that's not true, because Sins of the Father is a pretty great song. But just in terms of some good sneaking music? MGSV has some pretty good sneaking music. And when the enemy is on your tail, it ratchets up just enough to let you know they're on your tail. For the most part, it's pretty subtle, but for a game where paying attention to audio cues from your surrounding is really important, it's better for the music to be subtle than to overpower everything else.

But back to a couple things, and how they tie together. I mentioned that the game has tons of nonlethal options, and that a lot of the missions are about Diamond Dogs operating for profit. Both of these tie into the base building aspect of the game. Namely that Miller, being the revenge obsessed loony that he is, couldn't really get Diamond Dogs to be much bigger than an old oil rig and a handful of men in the nine years between Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain. But, once Snake is back, recruitment goes into overdrive.

By which I mean he forcibly ties balloons to every soldier he can, at which point they're sent back to Mother Base and become inexplicably American. Or, I guess, whatever your language of choice is, depending on the version of the game you're playing. I actually don't know if the game has spoken dialog in French, Spanish, etc for countries that aren't English speaking, or Japan. Given this game's overarching themes about language, I'm not sure if that would be a plus or a negative for the game if it did. Now that I think about it, some aspects of this game make a little less sense if you're not playing it in English. Though, that'd only be if, like me, you only ever interpret things literally, and that everyone involved would be speaking some other language, and not English.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The point is, that like Peace Walker, this game incentivizes you to bring back people alive. If you don't, you're missing out on a multitude of upgrades, new weapons, new gadgets, new camouflages, etc. And from different perks that you can get from the other departments of your base, like a support team that will send you supply drops, or an intel team that will let you know when the weather is changes (more important than you might think), or if an enemy vehicle is approaching you. The higher level these teams get, the better they can do their job.

They don't do it any cheaper, though. More so than in Peace Walker, managing resources is definitely a thing in this game. Peace Walker had GMP, but in that game, you allocated GMP to a project until it was done, and then got that GMP back when it finished. You increased your GMP by adding more people to the combat unit. In MGSV, GMP acts like a straight up currency. You get it by completing missions, sending your soldiers out on missions, and by doing other odds and ends like finding diamonds, or rescuing animals (there's an NGO that pays you to do so, and builds a weirdly depressing zoo for you to see the animals midway into the game (the enclosures are too small, and I can't pet the sheep)).

On top of that, there are natural resources that you need to complete a lot of the projects. Fuel, minor metals, common metals, precious metals, and biological resources are all things you'll have to manage in the game. And on top of that, you'll find both processed and unprocessed versions of these things. And even on top of that, there are plants that you need to collect for some of these things too, though at least there aren't processed and unprocessed plants. The processed resources can be used right away, but the unprocessed ones need to be, well, processed by part of your staff. They'll also "mine" for these resources on their own, but not often enough, or with enough success to rely upon that. Which means that a fair amount of time in the field is spent looking for these resources. At first, you're just picking up small cases that carry a hundred or so of the resources. But, eventually the Fulton balloons get upgraded so they can carry cargo containers, and you start getting a lot more.

If all you want to do is some basic R&D upgrades, the resources aren't a huge concern. At no point did I ever run into a situation where I needed more of resource X to complete a project to build a new gun, or upgrade Snake's bionic arm (some of those upgrades are super useful, like faster sprinting (because of course an arm makes you run faster), or a sonar ping that can show where nearby lifeforms are). But, where the resource constraints start to become an issue is in expanding the base. Mother Base doesn't have the capacity to hold everyone, and you need to expand to house more people, or you won't get your departments high enough level to build those upgrades. For the most part, it's not that big of a deal. But, eventually, it starts to become an issue where you need a lot more resources (mostly fuel for base building) than you have, if you want to get every department as big as possible.

And that's where the Forward Operating Bases, and microtransactions come into play. I should say that I've done about as little of that stuff as possible. I built the core of one FOB, which the game gives to you for free, because it increased how many people I could have in every department. Now, I could expand upon that, but the more you expand your FOB, the more enticing of a target it becomes for people to invade and steal your stuff, and your people. The only invasion stuff I've been a part of was to get a Trophy for taking part in one. I invaded some other guy's FOB, just screwed around for a couple minutes because I didn't actually want to steal anything, until he showed up. Then I knocked him out, and thought it'd be funny to throw him off into the ocean. Unfortunately he woke up, knocked me out, and Fulton'd me away.

That stuff is what it is. The servers seem pretty spotty, and they bog down the iDroid and some other things to the point where I don't ever want to actually play the game in Online Mode. At a certain point, it's kind of unacceptable for a big budget game in the year 2015 to be bogged down as much as it is by simple being connected online for that stuff. Which, I guess is why Offline Mode exists, but that doesn't excuse how much slower the menus in Online Mode are. At least on PS4, I can't say if that stuff is true across platforms.

I'm also still not a fan of people coming and taking my things, so it's not something I want to be involved in. And after almost a hundred hours with the game, I've never felt like I had to get involved in any of that stuff, even if I do wish I could hold more people, and had more resources. Because I could go and spend money to get a second FOB, and spend money to make my dispatch missions (or at least the online ones, which take like a day or two of real time to complete (the offline ones take much shorter, but that's all in game time)) finish instantly.

But, I don't think you should do that. I'm really happy that this game is selling well, to show support for all the people at Kojima Productions who poured their hearts and souls into the game for years. I think spending money on microtransactions to get stuff more quickly is just showing Konami that microtransactions of this sort are good, and I don't think we should be giving them that sort of idea. Especially when the only way to get the MB coins (the currency you pay real money for) without paying (because of course everything has a free to play aspect to it these days) is by logging into the servers on a day where the daily login bonus is some number of MB coins. But based on the number they've been giving out on those days, it'll take quite a while before anyone has enough to actually use them for anything.

Then again, I'm pretty sure you can make your first FOB as big as you want (within the four platforms per department limits of the Mother Base) without spending money, so that's fine. I'm not opposed to in game purchases of a small nature, if they're done tastefully. For as much as I rag (jokingly) on Dota 2, I think the all cosmetic nature of that game's stuff is brilliant. Also, Dota 2 is a free game, unlike the full priced MGSV.

Which, I mean, don't take that the wrong way, there's PLENTY of content in MGSV. Not only is there a ton in this game, but if you haven't figured it out, I think almost all of it is incredible. I haven't even gotten to things like the buddy system, or how the different bases and outposts in the game communicate with each other. You alerting some dudes in a tiny camp on the way to a major base might lead to that base being on a higher alert than it would have been if you hadn't been desperate to clear an outpost just to unlock a word for your emblem, or to steal a tape for some song that you hate but want to have it because it's a collectible.

And for the first time in the series, you can have an AI buddy with you at all times. Well, once you're out of the prologue, at least. At first it's just your trusty steed, D-Horse. D-Horse is really only useful for getting between places, but until you can just start missions with a vehicle (something I never really did much of anyway because I got worried I'd lose it, and thus never made use of that stuff), or upgrade Snake's sprinting to almost comical speeds, you really need that horse. But, as you progress through the game, you can get a faithful hound (DD, my favorite), a well meaning, but not especially useful for sneaking (compared to the cost of deployment) robot, and a sniper lady who doesn't wear much clothing (Quiet).

And while I'd like to dedicate a whole paragraph or two to how useful DD is, and how much I just love being able to pet a dog in this game pretty much any time I want (the prompt can be a little finicky), I feel like Quiet is the one more deserving of being written about. Less because I think she's useful in the game (she is, perhaps even to the point of being over powered), but more because of how this game treats women. But... In order to do that properly, I kinda have to get into spoilers. So... Instead I'll get back to DD, and you can read about Quiet in Part II: Spoilers for Days.

DD is the best! Not only is he a cute pup that grows into a still cute but looks like he means business wolf dog with an eye patch, but he's also incredibly useful in the game. Just having him with you, he'll sniff out the locations of enemies, vehicles, gun emplacements, wild animals, and even land mines (well, they're unlicensed Claymore mines, so I dunno if they technically count as land mines, which I always thought had to be embedded in the ground). It's a little weird because some of these things (the mines) only get marked on the map, and the enemies and whatnot only get "provisional markers." They look a little different, and will eventually disappear, unlike the markers Snake (or whoever else you play as, because I forget to mention to can be anyone in your combat unit, unless you put another story character like Ocelot in there) places. But they stay more than long enough for you to be able to mark them yourself, and DD pretty quickly became an vital part of my team.

On top of all that, you can make him do stuff too. Like bark to distract enemies (or draw them in closer), or send him off to bite an enemy's arm, keeping him distracted long enough for you to run up and CQC him. Of course, you can also equip DD with a knife so he can kill enemies, but that replaces the bite option in the buddy commands, so I never used the knife. There is a stun knife too, but you need to get your security team up to level 20 to research that, and I never had enough people in my security team to do that, because security is primarily used for the FOB stuff. It just became the spot that the game auto put people in if they weren't good enough for the other departments.

Of course, you don't just instantly get access to all of a buddy's abilities right off the bat. Instead, you need to spend time with them, and increase your bond with them. Or, as I like to say it, you need to get your S-Link with them up. Getting it to max unlocks some kind of weird things, like being able to change the color of DD's and D-Horse's fur. D-Walker, being a robot, doesn't get an S-Link, but he still tries his hardest, and I appreciate him for it, even if a little mech with dual tranq pistols was never nearly as useful as I think it could have been. I haven't yet gotten Quiet's S-Link up all the way, because, well, having her with me on the helicopter between missions made me really uncomfortable when she was doing things like putting her butt right in Snake's face whilst he was using the iDroid. Again, I can't really get into it without getting to spoilers, but just know that the way this game handles Quiet is really depressing, especially compared to some of the previous games, where Kojima has proven he knows how to write and handle good women characters. Oh well.

There's still so much more I could write about the game itself, but I feel like I'm at the point where I should get to the story stuff. I know I usually try not to get into major spoilers for these blogs, but this is Metal Gear. But, I'm not going to spoil anything here. Instead, I'll just give some brief, spoiler free thoughts.

Overall, I enjoyed most of the story stuff in the game. I think the cut-scenes are done fantastically well, and I think most of the voice acting is really good. I like Kiefer in this game. Really, my only complaint is that I wish he spoke more in the game. That's not to say he's a mute. I think people exaggerate the amount he speaks in the game a bit. It's just more that the situations in which he does and doesn't have much to say are a bit peculiar. There are cut-scenes where he's completely silent, but then tapes where he's having a back and forth conversation with other characters about things like DD that aren't relevant to the overall story. They got him to yell "ROCKET PUNCH" for when he uses the rocket punch, and some other weird lines for things I won't spoil.

And the rocket punch itself is just another thing that I want to write about, but then I'd just be getting off track from what I was talking about, but darn it, I don't care. The rocket punch is a fantastic idea that can be really useful, but also the up and down controls on it aren't inverted, so I can't use it very effectively. So far as I could tell in the options, there isn't any way to invert it, so I just have to either not use it, or try to use it in situations where I don't need to go up or down. Also, I couldn't use it while riding D-Horse, which was a big bummer. Not because I think it'd really be useful on the horse, but more because that sounds like a funny/dumb thing to do. I had some great ideas for using that in a video of random nonsense I did in the game, but obviously I couldn't.

I also didn't really end up having enough footage of me just doing nonsense in the game to put something together, like I have in the past with other games. That's not because this game isn't rife with opportunities to do things like that. It's because, as I alluded to earlier with how I never really used the vehicles in the game, I kinda got too worried about playing the game seriously. And even when I did cut loose and intentionally try to do wacky things to get some good footage, it just didn't seem as good as the hijinks I got up to in games like Far Cry 4.

Actually, before I end this, there's a couple other small things that bugged me in the game that I should mention. The first is that I ran into a fair amount of trouble getting the game's auto-cover system to work. Or rather, I feel like it just doesn't work on a lot of the walls that I tried to take cover behind, and yet there are other situations where Snake gets magnetized into ducking behind things I don't want to. That mainly happened at Mother Base with the railings around areas. For a game that is so well polished in almost every way, having the inconsistent cover felt weird. And more or less just resulted in me using cover less than I would have otherwise as I got deeper into the game.

Speaking of Mother Base, I think Mother Base is kind of disappointing. Yes, it's cool to have a base to run around in, but there's not really anything to do. Sure, you can do target practice drills, and you can practice CQC on your soldiers (after which they thank you, which is always great). Or you can interrogate them to see where they hid diamonds around the base, and go find them for a little extra cash. You can take a shower, to wash off the blood and give yourself some passive bonuses to health and stuff for a few in game days too (also good for removing the Deadly Premonition esque flies that surround you if you get too stinky (apparently the flies will give away your position to the enemies too)).

Speaking of things taken from Deadly Premonition, I think it's pretty funny that the game uses smoking as a means to speed up the flow of time, just like DP. Or, rather, MGSV using vaping as a means to do that. Vaping with an electronic cigar that Snake lights using a holographic fire on his iDroid. And speaking of the passage of time, while I do like that day and night really matter in the game, I also think that time moves a bit too quickly in this game. It can make missions feel bigger, and more substantial when they last so long that day breaks after you started a mission at dusk (or vice versa), but also I think time moves a bit faster than it should. I also think that about pretty much any game with day/night cycles that isn't Deadly Premonition, so take that however you will.

And I got off track again, so back to Mother Base. It's just this big, mostly empty thing out in the middle of the ocean. A lot bigger than it needs to be, too. I don't understand why there's a literal kilometer (or more) between the different departments of the base. There's not really any reason for it. There's nothing to do in these spaces except drive. And even then, you're better off using a cardboard box to fast travel, or call the helicopter if you want a scenic view along the way.

Oh, the cardboard boxes! I've never really been one to base my sneaking around the cardboard boxes in this series, and I still didn't really use them that much in this game. But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how silly they've become. There still really isn't anything in here as silly as the two person box tanks in Peace Walker, but the number of moving parts in MGSV's boxes is really impressive. Being able to pop out of the top to shoot enemies, or out of the side, leaving the box behind as a decoy is pretty neat. Also, you can attach a life sized sticker of a pretty lady (anime or otherwise) to distract enemies. Or a sticker of a soldier saluting, to trick them into thinking you're one of them. Because these battle hardened soldiers can't tell the difference between- Oh, I got off topic again. This is what happens when I'm editing and want to add things in, but forget that might mess up the flow of the blog. Whoops.

Back, again, to Mother Base. I wish there was stuff to do with the other story characters. You see Ocelot there near the beginning, where he teaches you some CQC stuff, and there's a couple characters you can go visit. If, that is, you want to see Huey being angry at a computer whilst working on a thing that the game hypes up but then you can't actually use beyond dispatching it on dispatch missions, or if you want to be pervy and stare at Quiet while she lies down with her bra unstrapped because gosh, the way the game handles her just makes me sad.

I'm not saying this game needs to be Mass Effect, where I can go and talk to any of them at any time, but it'd be nice to have some more interactions at the base. And have some other features, like a proper firing range so I can test out these weapons before taking them into the field. Especially with the gun customization (that is unlocked a lot later in the game than I feel like it should be). It'd be nice to get a feel for how the different parts actually affect the guns before deploying them against actual enemies. MGS4 had that weird firing range thing, and Peace Walker had one too. Just seemed weird that this one doesn't.

Like Peace Walker, the final leg of this game is structured bizarrely. You get to a point where you resolve some amount of the game's plot (not going to say how much), and then instead of opening up new missions every time you finish a mission, you have to start doing side ops to open up the next story thing too. Sometimes that just means a cut-scene at Mother Base, and sometimes that means a new mission (that mostly uses areas you've been too before). There's also missions listed in the mission menu that are just, for lack of a better word, remixes of old missions.

Actually, remix isn't correct, because so far as I know, the enemy placements and things are the same. They're more like modifiers. A couple of them are "Subsistence" missions, where all equipment is OSP (on site procurement). Some are "Extreme," which just means they're harder? And some are "Total Stealth," which means you game over if you get seen. I didn't do any of the Extreme or Total Stealth ones, because that doesn't sound fun to me! I did one of the (two) Subsistence missions, and that was enjoyable and challenging in a fun way. Also, I should say that none of those missions allow you to use Reflex Mode (the slow motion that triggers if you get seen, and is among the many things I forgot to mention) or the Chicken Hat (easy mode (more or less) that activates if you game over). I never used the Chicken Hat, to be clear.

And the last thing I'll touch on before I end this is related to the AI in the game. While the enemies certainly can be really smart, can work together, and can do all sorts of things that make them really fun to engage, there's one thing about them that bugs me. That they don't have any real sense for what should be going on around them in terms of the other enemies. Like, if they see or hear one of their comrades get knocked out, or shot, they'll react. But, let's say you see two enemies standing next to each other, talking. Once they're done, one of them walks away and faces the other direction. You knock out one of them, and Fulton him away without the others noticing (from a good distance, because they can often hear it, even through walls). The other enemy will be none the wiser to what you did, even when he turns around and sees the other guy is gone. This could be a tiny outpost with just three people at it, and he'll never notice or care that he's all alone if you manage to take everyone else away without him noticing. I get why this is from a game play point of view, but you'd think that eventually he'd notice that he was suddenly alone, out in the middle of nowhere, right?

I suppose I shouldn't be asking for that, when the game is usually challenging enough as it is. You know, there's still tons of things I haven't mentioned, but want to. How the enemies keep getting new equipment, but you can send your soldiers out on missions to disrupt the supply of helmets, NVGs, shields, even the goofy decoys they use to trick you. But only for a while, of course. How the game looks really good, and runs at 60 FPS on PS4, and well enough that I never noticed any dips. How the game just has that nebulous "feel" that "feels" just right. How the game has some of the best moments I've ever experienced in any game I've ever played, but are too spoilery to mention here.

Suffice to say, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is one of my favorite games of all time. It's not perfect, and some of the negatives (Quiet) do make me kind of depressed, but then mostly because I feel like the game gets just about everything else right. I totally get why some people don't like the story in the game, and story stuff is almost always subjective, to a certain extent. But the game itself? I struggle to think of games I've enjoyed playing more. Without a doubt, it's easily the best stealth game ever made. It goes above and beyond anything else that I've ever played, both in terms of how you go about doing stuff, and in terms of how all the different systems and moving parts interact with each other.

It's an amazing game. It's also, quite possibly, the first and last time we'll get a game like this one. Sure, there are games similar to this. Far Cry comes to mind (I've seen others mention Far Cry 2 enough times in relation to MGSV that I feel like I should play that at some point), but for as much as I enjoy those games, they aren't this. I don't think Kojima's ever going to have the funding to make another game like this, and I don't think any other developers are going to be able to make a game this big, this polished, and this weird. And that's a bit of a shame. But, on the other hand, if in the long run that holds out as true, then that just makes this game even more special.

You should play this game.

Anyway, thank you for reading this! I've used up more than enough of your time, so I'll keep this short. But I am currently planning on doing another blog just about the story stuff in the game. I will be spoiling just about everything in the game, though, because if I'm going to do that, I'm going all the way with it. So, be warned, don't read that blog if you haven't finished the game.

Thank you again. <3