For a while, this was my white whale game. I'd come back to it like once a year, restart it, play five hours, get to the Quiet bit, crack up at how utterly ridiculous Quiet running around warzones in a bikini is and then immediately lose track of what was happening and dip out to something else. And so for a long time, I never got why so many people said it was deeply affected by Hideo leaving Konami. Now I've beaten it, ya'll were right. This whole thing is weird as hell, and not in a normal, Hideo is kind of a strange dude sorta way. The gameplay is great, but the whole thing feels like it's sorely missing a huge chunk of... I dunno... something.

I definitely don't hate it. For Kojima, this feels like him listening to feedback about how it isn't always good when the ghosts of a million film students possess his body, and he starts jamming exposition bombs and agonisingly long feature-length cutscenes into every level. It's been said a million times, but he focuses fully on players organically telling their own stories through gameplay in Phantom Pain, and the result becomes the definitive Metal Gear game from an actual video game standpoint. The other games are clunky as hell, but here you actually feel like the giga-chad, badass, elite soldier that every generic masked thug stuck guarding a base would piss themselves seeing in the flesh.

The way you can approach bases with your own tactics and strategies makes the game such a joy to experiment with, and I love how it focuses on improvisation rather than perfection. Everyone has that story where they Infiltrated a high-security base and saved a prisoner, only to be spotted while escaping, forcing them to flip around and take out three dudes with pinpoint precision before they can sound an alarm, and that's a credit to how good this is at facilitating those moments. Everything feels so smooth and intuitive, to the point where if you're sat thinking "Huh, I wonder if I could do that," the chances are you almost certainly can.

But the way Phantom Pain is structured and the actual story itself just feels unfinished. So much is technically happening in its two chapters, but it's so incohesive and strangely placed. At first, I thought that was going to be a cool design decision. Chapter 1 is such a standard Metal Gear story, with a cartoonishly evil villain and a big final boss (which FYI, was dope as hell), so I figured Chapter 2 would be the moment you realise the after-effects of that sort of fight. Everyone on board for this big, patriotic mission is in it for their own gain; they're all villains feeding off Miller and Big Boss' need for revenge. Considering Kojima's best stuff has always been his anti-war storylines, that's an incredibly smart way to wrap up the series, making a point about how conflict only services the powerful's personal agendas. But no, it's really just that the story is a jumbled clump of ideas with nothing tying them together.

There are 38 true story missions, but a good 25 of them are standard base infiltration missions that don't particularly add anything to the story. They recast David Hayter and slotted in Kiefer Sutherland, which is a weird decision, but then they barely give his Big Boss anything to say or really any personality of any kind. There are like a million story threads that are set up, and very few get any actual payoff, and if they do, it's usually in the most uninteresting, vague way possible. So much of this is just stuff happening and silly plot points that, even by Kojima's standards, are just ridiculous and nonsensical. There's no timeline where you can convince me that Quiet needs to be half-naked cause she breathes through her skin; Kojima was just being horny on main.

And the whole thing quickly becomes a chaotic experience. The gameplay is superb, but Big Boss is an absolutely elite character; dare I say it, he's a cooler, more compelling lead than Solid Snake. Considering we know this dude goes on to become an absolute bastard in the years leading up to the first Metal Gear games, this should've been Kojima's magnum opus; a story where we see a disillusioned war hero finally walk the path to hell paved with good intentions. And there are moments here where you see that vision. The quarantine level at the end of the game is some of Kojima's best work; just a haunting setpiece where the Boss is suddenly forced to face the truth that succeeding in your goal doesn't guarantee a happy ending.

But Konami's so desperately busy trying to create "woah, you won't see this coming" swerves that the whole thing quickly becomes an absolute mess. Outside of the true final mission, I don't know how much didn't make the cut, as there are so many plotlines here that get set up and then never talked about again, but what I do know is that you walk away wishing you had a culmination that was just a bit more satisfying. Also, the end twist is silly and I hate that to get it, you have to literally just replay the first mission, which is exceptionally slow. Yes Kojima, the first mission slapped at the beginning, but your grand finale shouldn't just be "yo, do you remember how much that first mission slapped? LET'S PLAY IT AGAIN."