knotty, novelistic, sprawling and more than a little exhausting in its sometimes repetitive and always bordering on non-linear structure...if i could give a score to the first like 30ish missions i would probably give this another 5/5, but i have to admit the extremely long time it took me to finish is to the game's detriment, and that's 50% life events but 50% a near-constant gamer fatigue!!

it's all actually encapsulated nicely in the first and final mission; almost exact mirrors with minor differences and of course a new perspective the second go round...the issue is that this novelty applies to the cutscenes and not so much to going up against all the same obstacles...it felt tedious in a way that's surely intended but comes off flat-out unenjoyable rather than reflective or even meditative, as Death Stranding would achieve across my entire playtime

i think a lot of that comes down to the incongruity between incentives and aesthetics; we feel compelled to keep the story moving in the same sense as the prior games, complete the missions and move forward, and yet the open world formatting invites us to linger, challenge ourselves, breath in the environment...but when one does that you start to notice how quickly the novelty of these environments, these copy/paste setups...it lacks that Death Stranding mirage, the way it feels like you're lingering as you're still pushing things forward, that clear distinction between what's optional and what's core to the experience

as much as i want to engage with this directly as is, i can't help but see in its feverish ambition yet numerous failures to reconcile incentive and aesthetic nothing more than a really pretty dry-run for Death Stranding...it makes me appreciate that even more for what it manages to do without ever showing its hand, the tightrope it manages to walk between linearity and open-world sandbox

i don't think MGSV pulls that off anywhere near as well, in fact, i think it could have been better served by a less is more approach, sharing the same density of storytelling as an MGS4 but with its evolved, silky smooth gameplay...it's not that the decision to scatter narrative to the wind bothers me so much as the incongruity between form and function

still, i have been and will be chewing on it for a long time to come...and i do not regret even a second of the year+ i've spent finishing out the Metal Gear series///i feel like it was a great way to clearly understand the strengths and weaknesses of this medium i'm still only sorta familiar with, and i look forward to comparing every single subsequent game i play to its exemplary invention, it certainly casts a wide fucking shadow...the series already takes up more room in my daily thoughts than maybe any body of work period!!

I loved the gameplay of this game and it could have totally worked without the Metal Gear Solid brand. To me it felt like a great action based game with the Metal Gear Solid name slapped over the top of it. It just did not feel like an MGS game. The fact the story did not play out like a typical MGS game, cutscenes could be several missions apart making keeping me engaged with the story hard. I don't like how Ocelot looks and sounds different in every MGS game. The fact they got Kiefer Sutherland to replace David Hayter as Big Boss but he barely speaks anyway.

What i'm still frustrated to hell about is much this game overstayed it's welcome, yeah make it a long game with all the extras for those who want to stay late at the party but I got really frustrated when it gave the "End of Chapter 1" cutscene after 30+ hours in. To get the "True" ending and to complete Chapter 2 you need to repeat missions on a higher difficulty including the slow as hell first mission. This felt like the game was only going to let the player experience the whole game if they proved themselves worthy of it which I think is a massive insult for gamers like me who like to experience the game and not have to master it.

SOOOOOO MUCH FUNNNNNNNNN

BUT THE STORY IS SOOOOOOO DISAPOOOOIIINTTINNNGG

oh whoops I left caps lock on my bad imagine that

Ground Zeroes was an interesting self contained sampler for the big game to come. I'd never played it until recently so it was nice to finally experience it.

The Phantom Pain however... I guess it's no coincidence that I got pretty much to the same point as I did before calling time on the first time I played it. I think the biggest roadblock for me was how many seemingly inconsequential missions there are coupled with the bland open world. Setting it in an arid, brown landscape with little variety soon wore me down. I had been enjoying it for the most part, and I enjoyed the side bit of expanding your base, gathering intel etc, but it was far too repetitive and took way too long. There felt like very little progress in the grand scheme of things, for the amount of time I'd spent with it.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed a lot of what I played, but it I felt like the time and effort going into this could easily have gone on something I enjoy a bit more. And playing Breath of the Wild again recently showed me just how much of chore this game can be. I know it's a lazy comparison, but both are open world games with stealth elements, but one of them utilises that world, the other doesn't.

Every time I almost went to play this again, I decided I would prefer to play anything else. I cannot muster up any further enthusiasm. At least we'll always have Snake Eater.

Metal Gear Solid 5 önceki MGS oyunlarının aksine açık dünya bir yapıya bürünmüş ve bu açık dünyayı tanımlamak için doğru söz şey olacaktır "Açık dünya boş" evet MGS 5in açık dünyası tamamiyle bomboş ancak oyunun yönetmeni olan Hideo Kojima'nın zaten canlı bir açık dünya yapma derdi olmadığını oynarken anlayabiliyorsunuz. MGS 5in açık dünyası sizin isterseniz gizlilik isterseniz one-man army olarak strateji kuracağınız bir yapıya sahip ve siz bir bölgeye girecekken nasıl bir strateji uygulamak istiyorsanız MGS 5 onu sonuna kadar destekliyor. Kısaca açık dünya az önce de söylediğim gibi strateji kuracağınız bir yapıya sahip.

MGS 5te toplamda 50 tane ana görev var ancak oyun hikayesel olarak tam bir şekilde bitmiyor. Maalesef kendi için başlattığı hikayeyi sonlandıramadan oyun son buluyor. Oyunda gördüğümüz karakterlerin neredeyse hiçbirin hikayesi tamamlanamadan oyun bitiyor. Normalde MGS serisi her zaman bir final bossa sahip olmasına rağmen MGS 5te bir final boss dahi yok. MGS'in önceki oyunları daima boss çeşitliliğine sahip olurdu ancak MGS 5 bu konuda da maalesef sınıfta kalıyor. MGS 5'ten kısaca önceki oyunların aksine hikayesel bir şey beklememeniz lazım. Böyle olunca da oyunu yukarıda bahsettiğim şekilde uzun uzun sıkılmayacağınız şekilde oynarsanız aslında hikayeye gerek olmayan bir cevher olduğunu anlayacaksınız MGS 5'in.

Dipnot: MGS 5 en iyi açık dünyalardan birine sahip bir başyapıttır

If Metal Gear Solid 4 proved anything, which I'm not sure it did, it proved that "ending" Metal Gear Solid was not as simple as telling a final story that wraps up the series' plot by blabbing on about each of its characters, and so Metal Gear Solid V decided upon the opposite.
Metal Gear Solid V is a game that refuses to explain itself. Its narrative lies in quietly humming each of the series' personal and political themes. Its grand tricks are found within how rote it feels when you're told, arbitrarily, to "eliminate" a target, how your eyes glaze over as you select every face and name that speaks Kikongo as it slips from feeling like murder to feeling like mechanics. Its soul rests in the moment you see a "Big Boss is watching you" poster and, in contemplating that you disagree with this use of your face, realize that you have become more symbol than man.
This game is "unfinished" because it never can be finished, there is no conclusion to a story about an unescapable status quo that doesn't contradict either the "unescapable" or "status quo" parts of that phrase.
MGS 1, 2, and 4 tell a story of the next generation, how maybe, just maybe, the next generation can do just a little bit better than us, and how maybe that can rub off onto the future generations. Death Stranding tells a story that implores us not to give us hope in our quest to help fix things right here and right now. But this is a story that is desperate and angry about us right here and right now, its suffering heightening Kojima's other works about healing.
Also, the way it plays totally rules. Genuinely one of the best feeling third person video games I've ever played. I enjoy the immediate sensation of hitting the w key on my keyboard in this game more than entire other games that I like, and it offers the most interesting guard AI and alert system in the series.

"Big Boss can go to Hell... I'll make the phantom and his sons stronger to send him there. For that, I'll keep playing my role."

Probably the most theory heavy game out there and, sure, you could say "Well, fans make up the theories to cope for the incomplete story line!! 🤓" But, we're talking about A Hideo Kojima Game here, they are almost made specifically for the fan theories and heavy speculation, given how complex and cryptic this series and Kojima is as a person, half of the fan theories I wouldn't even be surprised if they were actually real, but I digress.

Why I bring up theories is because I feel like they are what complete the game for me, not Konami or Kojima, but the blank spaces that are hinted towards, even in Ground Zeroes, that really makes you think about not just Venom Snake as a character, but the course of events throughout the whole game. There are so many subtle innuendos through the story that if you blink, you almost miss it, in classic Kojima fashion too. But, yeah, sure, Chapter 3 would have been nice, where did Sahelanthropus go? What happened to Eli? To be fair, at least one of these questions can be answered if you have a history with the franchise and where in fact you know that Eli is literally Liquid Snake, I guess you can really make the rest up and come to your own conclusions? Maybe I'm reaching a bit here in an attempt to defend this game for some of it's flaws, but to me, the missing chapter isn't that huge of a deal when you see what it's about, everything else felt like it was somewhat wrapped up and left up for interpretation, so...

But that's what I loved about this game, interpretation and the aforementioned theories, it just makes the game that much more eerie and interesting. For example, I've seen a lot of complaints towards the game's ending twist, people either felt betrayed or thought it was just shock value, where in both cases I can see where those people are coming from, but personally, I think it's one of Kojima's most ambitious twists, up there with Metal Gear Solid 2, and probably one of the most ambitious twists in gaming and to say that it... comes out of nowhere? I really don't understand that take, did we play the same game? Did we not see The Boss' AI pod literally refer to Venom as not Jack??? Why did Volgin back off??? There are SO many subtle references leading up to the twists that any other fan would kind of question themselves about these strange, unexplained occurances, it's like Kojima is almost feeding you the spoilers before you get to them, hiding in plain sight.

In any case, there is one glaring flaw this game does admittely have... where the fuck are the codec calls? Is half of this game's story really told through casette tapes? You will miss out on a lot of things if you don't listen to them, such as Venom literally being responsible for having a village wiped off the face of the map, that's never even mentioned by the characters outside of those tapes, it leads a lot of room for exposition that was needed tremendously, because otherwise, most people wouldn't even understand what the fuck is going on. And, look, I get the reasoning for removing codecs, it does sort of interrupt the flow of gameplay in the older games and to be fair, this game itself has a lot of content already, the story is pretty long, just imagine how much longer it would have been with all those codecs and extended plot exposition? But, it still would have been nice to have a few of the very, very important ones and honestly I see their exclusion more of a "we don't have the budget for this" than "think of the gameplay", very much one of the aspects I agree is incomplete due to either time constraints or Kojima blowing the game's budget on other things.

Gameplay wise, though, this is probably the best in the series. Perfecty blending stealth with action, there is no correct way to go about things (unless absolutely required), you can tackle your objectives with different approaches. Take the classic Metal Gear route or take Venom Snake to his full potential and put that rocket or stun bionic arm to work and fuck their shit up. FOX Engine really was a godsend and it is a shame how hard it is to work with and even moreso that it had to be abandoned, but all these years later, it's aged so well and I'm intrigued to see what they come up with next for the MGS3 Delta remake.

A pretty choppy review, but a revised one in retrospect to how I feel about the game now having played the whole series months later, a new found appreciation for this game and what it's trying to do that just makes it much better.

So i finished this game yesterday and i gotta say that i fucking loved it.My expectations weren't very high and it exceeded those expectations.First of all the gameplay is really good you can get a large variety of weapons and most missions can play out in different ways.The story in this game isn't always there.Most boss fights were decent i guess,Sahelantrophus was great the last skulls encounter was good and others are just decent or fine but still pretty enjoyable.The antagonist was meh he was cool looking but other than that he wasn't special or anything.I really liked the buddies in this game they all felt unique except maybe the horse.My biggest complaint about this game are the repeated missions which are basically the same missions but more difficult,the dead open world and also having to wait when developing something like it's fucking clash of clans.But overall great game.Final rating:9