The flaws are obvious: 108 characters is just too many for one game to handle without feeling overstuffed, though I appreciate the efforts to make them all distinct, even if some end up as one-dimensional comic relief. I wasn't convinced by the best friend's betrayal, with the subsequent parallel narrative only glimpsed in occasional, underwritten cutscenes. The endings are curiously unsatisfying, too - perhaps all a result of a clumsy translation. And yet the game's appeal still shines through. It's uncommonly direct about politics and the devastation of war, and constantly ties it into the gameplay - hearing e.g. a village you regularly visit for items has been destroyed lends the story an extra degree of weight. The evolving home castle is a marvellous location, too. It's full of asides that deepen our relationship to the characters and the ideology of the main mission, culminating in the moving moment where "reinforcements" in a major battle are simply the vendors and NPCs coming to your aid. Not exactly a challenging game, and not quite as emotionally magnificent as something like Final Fantasy VI, but it shares with that one a precision in its 16-bit cutscene direction, revealing all manner of human detail with the smallest changes to its sprites.

So the greatest video game franchise of all time ends on a bit of a whimper. It’s still 90% of the way there, ditching much of the series’ lunatic theatrics for an addictive gameplay loop where war is a fun business. I like how this, like its predecessors, tries to reinvent the wheel, and while it’s similar to the (brilliant) Peace Walker - proceeding like a television show, with regular small-scale crises and a larger threat only occasionally making itself known - the overall trajectory is very different. The unfinished aspects almost help the game’s structure, as the unsatisfying Skull Face defeat gives way to diminishing returns, paranoia, and boredom, at which point the main character’s slide into villainy seems inevitable. It sometimes gets a bit Spec Ops: The Line with its unsubtle messaging - but I don’t hate that game (war games are inherently pro-military, it’s fair to criticise that) and moments like your base soldiers humming the Peace Walker theme before you shoot them are suitably chill-inducing.

That being said, the ending is terrible. It isn’t woven into the dramatic structure, it just happens - you suddenly replay the tedious hospital sequence with a new cutscene at the end. It’s a shame, because there’s something fascinating there about puppetry and identity and power - all key to the Metal Gear experience. There’s something powerful, too, about Quiet, the silent assassin who falls in love with the doppelgänger of the man she’s supposed to kill, whose silence is revealed as irrefutable proof of that. But the character design (and camera angles) are Kojima at his most openly misogynistic. (Thankfully there’s nothing quite as bad this time as Paz’s vagina bomb.) So 90% of the way there - which, as it turns out, is a pretty good game.