i'm a big fan of metal gear, and i've played and enjoyed all the experiences i've had in the series so far. peace walker was kind of a small rock that found its way into my socks, since i had played the phantom pain before (a terrible mistake, yes), and the prejudice of it being a portable game also got to me, leaving the game as a low priority target until i felt like it

i have tried to play this game in the past via the ps3 port, and it was already kind of a disappointment then. i remember feeling that the game engine was ported 1:1 with some adaptations for a real controller to balance it out, but it just didn't work well. i've written on my review for the hd edition how i think it'd be a better experience if i played it on an actual portable console, so here we are

playing this on the vita made me glad that i didn't just have a psp, assigning the right stick to the camera was a godsend.
the game suffers from the same issues the hd port has (not something worth noting but hey), i was fighting against the controls more than i was fighting against the enemies of the game. bosses are a big pain in the ass, and good luck doing them non-lethally without previously knowing that 1. all bosses have a set number of regular troops before they run out and 2. you need to deal a certain amount of damage to the tank/helicopter/whatever and fulfill the previous requirement to make the captain pop-out and allow you to shoot him with the tranq gun. you know the rule of three (writing)? that helicopter fight in the main story needs the helicopter deploying reinforcements 4 times before you can aim for the helicopter itself (keep in mind it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to stun/sleep and fulton a single squad while a helicopter shoots rockets at you). because giving the player the illusion that a fight is nearly over is not quite there, you gotta break their expectations! make them think that there's no end!

mother base's progression forces replayability that just isn't there. you sure can repeat the same extracting side op dozens of times to fill up mother base, but if you'll have any sort of fun while doing so is another story
it's hard for me to judge the unlock/upgrade system if i have the phantom pain doing the same system but better lodged into my brain, i bet it was okay at the time? in a sense it makes peace walker a good game to bring with you on a deserted island, i guess
outer ops did not give me any signs that it was contributing to anything in my base besides killing/injuring my soldiers and boosting the morale of the rest
zeke made me discover another shoddy aspect of the game: collecting ai parts
it just didn't ring a bell to me anywhere that i was supposed to not hit the other parts of an ai weapon to get the main zeke parts, since those and the ai boards are kind of given the same hints, but that could just be me being bad at comprehending the game's script while i deal with the annoyance of having to fight a boss in this game

story-wise... *deep breaths*
the temptation to say that it felt "rushed" is strong, but i feel like maybe that isn't the case, i haven't looked into the story of the game's development but it's one case where it did successfully hook me until really close to the ending, where utter disappointment resided
the final non-boss mission (the one where you're fighting the helicopter and a bunch of dudes in nicaragua) felt to me as a naive attempt at what's supposed to be the game's "epic moment", with the right for heavens divide and everything, but it felt more forced than anything else, it certainly wasn't anything special at all, i just wanted it to end
surely the ending will make up for it right....?
that's already past the point where the whole main focus of the game is explained, but let me go back a little to say about the premise. having the boss made into an ai was okay? ish? back when i started i also wanted to know what the heck was going on
i'll ignore hot coldman's name to say that he was an okay villain, bit goofy but everything about him kind of looped back into being an okay depiction of a mad antagonist
strangelove was my favorite character in the entire peace walker cast, but i'm not really sure if she was worth making the story look like a poor fan continuation of 3. i was dumbfounded with the last cutscene thinking "god damn! this is really stupid!" and i didn't believe it ended like that, clutching up to callbacks and references like it was milking the previous game. i'd expand on this but it's just the general feel on how it was directed
but god, how i wish it ended like that. the true ending was the last straw: the only way i could possibly conceivably interpret it would be thinking it was kojima shitposting, and i'd be fine with that, there are some ridiculous jokes in the past entries and all, but they're all non-canon. big shoutout to the "date with paz" mission where it's implied snake has sex with a girl who was deemed underage until she's revealed to be a spy whos 10 years older than she originally was way after that mission. but anyway, making that shitpost of an ending canon is what really made me dislike this game. it's incredibly poor comparing to every other entry in the series (excl. portable ops, haven't played) and you're telling me metal gear solid five continues from this? i would've been better off with just the short summary that ground zeroes provides. at least there'd be no koi no yokushiryoku playing on the scene depicting the final boss, what a laugh that was, jeez

Edit: i felt this review had too much negativity, so i'll list out some things i liked about the game that i didn't mention
- the twist where amanda and her crew storm the base in nicaragua saving snake
- the overall message that the game tried to convey with the whole shiz about deterrence and peace walker sans the stuff related to the boss
- the 2001: a space odyssey references and mentions
- the cutscene artwork, ashley wood is a really good artist
- the references to che guevara, they were fun and it didn't seem unreasonable to jam those in - seeing snake bow before him is slightly humorous

...but those alone weren't worth my 30 hours invested. it's a game i'd watch a playthrough of instead of playing if i had the chance to turn back time and tell myself in the past that it wasn't gonna be worth it

taking the whole creepypasta thing aside (ooo so scaryy.. like C'mon) the environments created are absolutely fantastic. the non-euclidean architecture paired with the eerie-yet-beautiful music ON the field of liminal spaces is just best described as (figurative) aphrodisiacs for my brain, and i'd love to see more stuff focusing on that in the future of vidya. this review may be biased since i got spoiled on the game by fully watching decino's livestream of the wad, but i think i'd come to the same conclusion anyway

not sure if i just realized it in the middle of playing this game and it is also present in the first one, but i feel like the combat has dumbed down a fair bit, with many scenarios having me farming red orbs by getting as many circle prompts and hits as possible, which got repetitive over time
this was more or less fixed in the last stretch, which was pretty awesome, even though it ended on a particularly nasty cliffhanger which spans out into the next generation of consoles, making it uh, kind of hard to continue on with the series if you're not super into it
my final consideration is that this game is more polished than its predecessor, yet it can't live up to it in mostly everything else, even then, it did set a decent opener to 3 so i'm looking forward to that one