Genchu knows how politics work. Fear will keep the locals in line, fear of this boom stick!
So when I try to think of any new and exciting media I’ve ingested that I want to blog about, and the answer is METAL GEAR SOLID V. But I’m so enraptured that I’d rather go play it than sit around writing about it. I do want to say some non-spoilery thoughts, though. I Kind of miss the days of Metal Gear games being a one shot, story driven adventure where you play an 8 hour campaign from beginning to end, and it’s all heavily orchestrated wrapped up in a neat package. When did Metal Gear become all about THE GRIND? I mean I’ve sunk maybe thirty hours into MGSV so far, and I’ve gotten practically nowhere. If this were any other Metal Gear game, I’d be on my third or fourth playthrough by now, but instead the game says I’m at 7% completion. That’s because MGSV is structured almost like an MMO in how it drip feeds you progress. In an MMO, if you want cool gear and items, you can craft, farm, hunt, gather, go on raids over and over in hopes of getting rare drops… It’s all crazy time consuming, but it does get you the cool stuff. MGSV is similar in that you can go out, gather, hunt, capture soldiers to recruit, and commandeer weapons and vehicles to expand your Mother Base. You can research new tech, and build new gadgets assuming you’ve stockpiled adequate resources and personnel. You can make a lot of progress unlocking items in the game without progressing the story, normally Metal Gear’s biggest focus, at all, and that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. Granted, MMOs bore me to tears, while doing all these menial tasks in MGSV is like living out an action movie, which I find totally engrossing.
Story-wise, it’s a weird part of the MGS timeline. I mean, all Metal Gears have weird, hyper detailed stories, which is why I love them, but I wonder if MGSV’s is kind of redundant. Admittedly I’m not very far into V’s story, but at the end of Peace Walker, Big Boss basically says “We’re our own nation of soldiers now, we’re not beholden to any government, and we’re nuclear equipped and we’ve got a Metal Gear.” Seems like if they jumped ahead 20 years and had Solid Snake infiltrating Outer Heaven, where Big Boss had holed up after having become disenfranchised with the rest of the world, that’d match up pretty nicely. The deeper MGSV goes into that story between Peace Walker and Metal Gear, the more retconned it all gets, especially if it basically has to end at the same point where Peace Walker ended, with Big Boss creating a nuclear equipped military nation state. MGS4 was a great end to the Solid series, it wrapped everything up beautifully, even including Big Boss at the end, someone who didn’t come off as evil but as a man who’d made decisions in grief that he’d come to regret. Why that person couldn’t have been the person we saw at the end of Peace Walker I’m not sure. I’m not yet convinced we needed a story bridge there. Still, I can’t complain too much since I’m LOVING MGSV’s gameplay, it’s wildly addicting for a long time fan of the series and the stealth game genre. What my dream ending for this game would be , and I doubt this will happen because no game sites have been flipping out about how great the ending is, we’d see Big Boss establish Outer Heaven secretly, and then establish Foxhound in a series of time skips. Then it would jump ahead to 1995, and we’d take control of Solid Snake, voiced by David Hayter, and we’d infiltrate Outer Heaven base as the game credits roll. Oh how I would flip out! Actually, if Konami wants more of my money, just get David Hayter to re-voice of all Big Boss’ lines and release a Hayter voice pack. Keifer Sutherland does a fine job, but there’s just something about Hayter’s performance that really makes me smile when I hear it. He’s kind of the heart of Metal Gear Solid to me, and that heart is missing in this latest and potentially final entry in the Solid series.
Still, it’s a pretty incredible game and anyone on the fence should just take the plunge!
Published on by Alex Kolesar
