Genuinely the biggest disappointment I've ever felt playing a video game. After seeing all of the absolutely incredible trailers, I bought a PS4 for this game and played it day one. I was really enjoying it at first, but gradually felt my enjoyment drop lower and lower. The game is frontloaded with anything interesting it has to offer and quickly becomes an incredibly shallow experience. Missions are repetitive and tend to be irrelevant to the main story. Several old characters (especially Ocelot) are incredibly out of character, and others (Psycho Mantis and Volgin) have no reason to be there beyond cheap fanservice that contradicts their established stories in other games. The new characters are underdeveloped and flat. Despite what Kojima says, Quiet is characterized fanservice and Skull Face is a generic and boring villain who had no reason to be retroactively inserted in to MGS3's story. Metal Gear Sahelanthropus is absurd considering the fact that it predates REX, RAY, and the primitive TX-55 and D by anywhere from one to two decades. The reveal that Venom Snake is your avatar and that YOU the EPIC GAMER are also Big Boss is ridiculously stupid and the literal antithesis to MGS2's brilliant use of Raiden being a subversion of player representation. The story as a whole is forgettable and raises more questions than it does answers, and then answers questions that were never asked (i.e. "Why did Big Boss survive Metal Gear 1 on the MSX?" Who cares, it was a game from the 80s with a barebones story and the game itself tells you he survived anyway. This question didn't need to be answered because the answer retcons what the original game itself tells you.) The gameplay is admittedly good, but it's all for nothing when the open world is both extremely barren and ironically linear. You have all these options and no reason to ever use most of them.

The game is only so highly received because game journalists told people it was a 10/10. So many people that love this game only love it because it was their first Metal Gear game. Playing the series in order reveals that there's an enormous drop in quality when you get to this entry. Those who do have issues with this game often blame Konami for screwing over Kojima and limiting his budget. Perhaps if the game was actually finished rather than failing to deliver on so many empty promises from prerelease I'd like it a bit more, but what IS there I still dislike. I'm not sure I'd like more of what we got in this game, so while Konami is responsible for the game being unfinished, they're not responsible for what actually made it into the game. This falls on Hideo Kojima. Many people will mindlessly praise him no matter what he makes because they were told to, but lately the man is clearly more interested in hanging out with actors he admires than making a good video game.

He may have made some genuine masterpieces in the past, but despite what his games will literally try to tell you, Kojima is not God.