Words... can kill

E3 is usually an event that is all about excitement, hype, and entertainment. So imagine how melancholic it was that E3 for me began with a brand new trailer for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. What's so melancholic about it? Well, it's the last trailer by Hideo Kojima... ever.

First thing is first: Wow. Incredible trailer. In my opinion, the best one yet. I didn't think anything would beat the GDC '13 trailer, also dubbed the "Nacho People" trailer. That trailer was fucking awesome and even if the Nuclear trailer was pretty good too, Nacho People holds a special place in my heart.

This shot, found in the new E3 2015 trailer at about 1 minute in, is particularly depressing. Almost sobering, really.

The Kojima Productions logo, sans, er, the "Kojima Productions" part.

The parallels between Big Boss and Hideo Kojima are really interesting, if not coincidental. The story of Big Boss, a man who lost everything only to build it back up, and then Hideo Kojima, a man who built up an incredible career and studio only to lose it because Konami thinks mobile games are the future, or something. The guy who put Konami on the map by making games that few dreamed of and even fewer could actually make.

After all, Hideo Kojima has been telling us since 2008 that there's no place for him.

But it seems with the release of the new MGSV trailer, and with the actual game only a few months away, that statement will finally become true.

Kojima did seem to be aware of this, or at least it appears so, or it's just a cosmic coincidence. But Ground Zeroes featured a mission where you obtain a special gun with a light on it that erases the logos from past Metal Gear games. Erasing all of them will prompt a statement from Kazuhira Miller saying the games may be gone but the memories will remain forever, following a message from Hideo Kojima saying "Thank you for your support!".

In that very same mission you find 2 other logos, one for Kojima Productions and Kojima Productions L.A. but they are missing the FOX found within the logo. The FOX logo is attached to a search light that requires you to get on and aim into the logo boundaries. Once you do this, Kaz asks questions like "Kojima Productions? What are they doing here?" as to imply that he doesn't know who or what that is.

It seems, as best as I can understand it, that Kojima knew far ahead of time and did his best to make these meta references to the fact at least a year before it would even go down. Clever, but sad. And also liberating for him to go out and then do whatever his beautiful and creative heart desires.

The music, titled "Elegia", is from the band The Order. Elegia, latin for "elegy" was written in memory of Ian Curtis, a member of New Order's former band, Joy Division.

Clever and cheeky, just what you'd expect from Kojima. On on hand, it's an incredible song that goes well with the haunting imagery from the trailer. And on the other, a funny reference for Kojima being fired. An elegy for him, if you will.

The trailer itself was on a whole 'nother level. It goes the distance by making everything insane and amazing and confusing and awesome and even more confusing at the same time.

The first and most immediate reaction from me would have to be the facial capture being on point for this trailer. It's looked great in past trailers, sure, but wow you can really see the fucking disdain in Big Boss's face when Miller interrupts him.

Then there's the incredible scenes of the, if I remember right, "Parasite Unit" which look absolutely fucking nuts.

Seriously. I don't even know what to say there. I have no idea what's happening but it's both terrifying and amazing at the same time. It's funny that I see something like this and completely forget that I'm going to be FIGHTING THESE THINGS. Not only that, there's potential that these fuckers are gonna pop out after me in the open world somewhere. That's some crazy shit.

The trailer goes places, places I can't comprehend. Seeing familiar faces, and voices, I didn't think I see again.

Honestly, the most exciting part of the trailer was seeing all of this insane shit going on. Because even though MGS has a pretty major paranormal presence in the series, I can't help but think about how this could all be a crazy delusion from Big Boss due to his fucking brain damage. For all we know, those Parasite Unit people could be normal soldiers coming to kill Big Boss after shooting down his chopper, but the giant piece of shrapnel in his head is making him piece together things from his past, like The Fear and The Sorrow. But of course these guys are most likely just the typical "freak show" enemies you will encounter this time around.

It doesn't hurt that they look fucking. amazing.

Just look at his face! It's like his puppy just got kicked, shot, set on fire, revived by nanomachines and then stomped like Gray Fox at the end of MGS1.

To think, I actually mocked the facial capture at one point. I mean sure, I think it's kind of dumb that we're getting a mostly-mute Big Boss, not because of brain damage or any actual logical reasoning, but because they would rather convey his thoughts, feelings and mood through his face. But still.

Really, the newest trailer just makes me excited. Flat out. So many game trailers will spell shit out pretty explicitly, but the MGSV trailers have made a very good job asking questions, not answering them. So that helps get people excited to get their hands on the game and figure this shit out. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this trailer made us ask a lot of the wrong questions in an attempt to mislead us, because it does seem to hint pretty heavily at certain things.

Like Skullface potentially being a figment of Big Boss's imagination. Or maybe, since fucking ghosts exist in MGS, he's a fucking ghost. But I think that'd be a waste of everyone's time.

Then there's Eli, where it's STRONGLY hinted that he may be Liquid Snake. But it's too simple, you know? You take one look at him and go, oh yeah, of course it's Liquid. There's no mystery. But just once I want a game to really surprise me. Like, really surprise me. Like you play the entire game under the assumption that Eli is Liquid but it turns out he's just little Jimmy Jacobs who one day will start his own auto repair business and strike it big.

But if everything was spelled out all the time, it would get boring. We've got to have trailers that hint and suggest, because for all we know they'll just pull another MGS2 and change some character models so that this character was actually that character. But hey, don't stop there! Shove a giant piece of metal and bone into Big Boss's head and we can skip the trailers and start doing that shit during the actual game.

As per usual, I'm mega hype and can't wait for the game. It's cruel and unfair that these trailers are so good because it makes the wait even harder. I mean there's so many hours I can put into Witcher 3 before I duel everyone in the world and run out of cards to obtain. But hey, maybe MGSV will have it's own collectible card game!

Yo, I'm N7. A Metal Gear superfan. I've got my own website here where I write shit. I love the Giant Bomb community though so I bring it to you through blogs, but really, I just want to strike up some conversations and I know I can get that here. So holla atcha boy. Or not. That's chill, bruh.

You know nothing John Snow.

The hype is unreal. The ending to the #2 trailer were Quiet shoots Boss' Cigar alight. MMMMMMMMM.

Les Enfants Terribles

War has changed. It's an endless series of proxy battles, fought by mobile games.

This game is going to be so fucking good. Quiet Snake or not, the dramatic stuff seems to be so intense that cutscenes for half the game would just wear you down.

I wrote my BA on Kojima's struggles with authorship and how he used Metal Gear Solid 2 to reassert himself as a creator and regain control over MGS. Thus, the possibility of real life context directly influencing the content of The Phantom Pain makes me endlessly excited - sad, but also excited to see what the man's literal swan song is going to be.

The hype is real. This is gonna be a tough two months.

Great write up! I don't really have anything substantive to add, but holy crap am I HYPED BEYOND BELIEF FOR THIS GAME!!

Nice write-up. I might sound like a Kojima fanboy saying this, but the trailer was genius. Only 2 and a half months out from release, and we get a trailer that not only throws most of our ideas of how the game is going to play out in the trash, but also raises about 20 new questions. I am incredibly excited for MGS5 now.
Worth nothing that there is also a gameplay demo being shown at this E3, and that we will get to see it at some undetermined time.

At least someone recognizes the reason for the less-talkative Snake instead of "hahaha Sutherland was to expensive/he wasn't around long enough".

It's probably a little bit of both tbh brer

I like how PAZ IS STILL ALIVE AFTER SHE BLEW UP

It's probably a lot more of "hahaha Sutherland [...]", to be brutally honest. Because, yes, hiring Kiefer was expensive as hell and of course there was never a chance he'd be down for Hayter-levels of dedication - too busy being a superstar and all. But I can live with that. Kaz and Ocelot will make up for it in abundance, I'm sure.

Personally, I think Skull Face is a real dude; he has a scene with Hal in the 2nd trailer which leads me to believe he isn't just in Big Boss' mind.

I love how Kojima reveals those Parasite Unit/crazy cyborg zombie ladies; they pop in like quiet, then he holds the camera on the jiggle just long enough for everyone to roll their eyes and go "great, another Quiet/B&B Unit hyper-sexualization moment" and then BAM! It's a fucking cyborg zombie lady and they all start freaking out and then I started freaking out.

What a wonderful trailer. This game is going to be so good. I'm trying not to get so hyped that I become unreasonable, but holy shit am I failing.

Sorry for the late replies. I pretty much passed out after posting this. E3 does a lot to screw my sleep schedule and mental health. There's just so much hype I can feel...

I was scrubbing through the trailer to get shots for this post when I noticed, that, I could be wrong here, but she doesn't just shoot the cigar... she shoots it with her eyes closed.

Yeah I know. It's even crazier because I never really expected much when I saw those guys in the other trailers. They just looked like guys in power suits jumping around and doing stuff... but to find out that they're actually paranormal individuals is awesome. They've only mentioned and made references to it in past games, even though it should have gone something like "YO THERE'S FUCKING GHOSTS DUDE!?!?!? HOW ARE GHOSTS EVEN REAL!?" but they never do that. Maybe they'll actually bring that up in this game.

That's what Zero called it...

Exactly. As I mentioned in my post, there's some coincedences going around with him having made references to his name/company/history being erased. Konami took it a step further when they erased his names from existing games like the HD Collection and whatnot. But to see how it will reflect in the ultimate Hideo Kojima game will be great. Thankfully Batman and DMC4: RE to help lessen the wait. I'm willing to do anything short of freezing myself to get this goddamn game.

Exactly. With this open world design I don't even understand how any of this stuff will work. I've got literally no idea. How the fuck do you fight a METAL GEAR in an open world environment!? That's insane. Insaaaaaaaaane.

As of this post the gameplay demo should have happened like 3 hours ago. They said they would upload it to youtube later though, so I'm not going to wait around for it to pop up. They said they would be playing 3 missions, 2 side missions and 1 main mission and the demo will last about 45 minutes.

WHAT IF IT WAS BIG BOSS THAT BLEW UP AND PAZ WAS THE ONE IN THE COMA DUDE. DID YOU EVEN THINK OF THAT DUDE.

Yeah, the facial capture stuff is incredible. But Greg Miller actually talked about it on KFG about his time with the game and he says that during missions and cutscenes Big Boss barely speaks, to an unsettling degree. But, there are a lot of tapes and mission briefing that you can listen to where he talks quite a lot.

I don't get it, but then I haven't played the game. So I don't know. I mean Big Boss does have a giant horn sticking out of his brain. I imagine that has something to do with it.

Yeah I can't really stand the hype. I think it's worse that I've played Ground Zeroes and gotten a taste. If I didn't have that I'd have nothing to base my hype off of. And man what about an MGO beta? The game comes out in 2 months, that'd be ample time to boot up a beta!

Quiet Snake, huh?

I just like how a guy in a stealth mission keeps his mouth shut for once. That chatty Horizon lass wouldn't last two seconds in Kojimatown.

@n7: Aww... come on!!

No Kojima quirk? Snake/Big boss not speaking a single line? I believe this game is going to suck as much as ground zeroes did. I hope i'm wrong, but i bet this game gets into the creepy in a bad way like zeroes did. I bet spending all that money on sutherland to speak 5 lines of dialog is the main reason Konami and Kojima are beefing, makes no fucking sense.

To quote some of the previews, Big Boss speaks a bunch, but it's in the briefing tapes and cutscenes mainly. No codec calls. Nine years in coma, brain-damage, trauma and resulting really fucked up hallucinations straight outta the most horrifying archives of erowid trip reports are something I figure would have an effect on his language, he's no longer fluent enough in Russian to understand it reliably for one thing.

To quote some of your parents, we didn't raise you to be so naive that you think they got fewer words out of Sutherland than Bethesda did with Patrick Stewart in Oblivion.

No codec calls? Wtf is this game? It sure aint metal gear :-(

Only Kojima could make a trailer that is completely nonsensical and melodramatic, yet entirely intriguing and exciting. If this is to be his last time doing this sorta thing, it certainly looks like he plans to go out with a bang.

As much as I hated what they did to the codec in MGS4, it just wouldn't make sense here. In a game that is always on the move in giant landscapes where enemies can be at literally any location around you, sitting down in a conversation just wouldn't make sense. The stop-and-go function just can't work.

I'd rather lose the codec and gain access to the immensely huge open world and incredible gameplay features that we have seen so far, definitely.

I guess you could say a... Big Bang...?

I swear I've made this joke before...

A small part of me things Hayter really is doing the voice and it's going to be a surprise in the game. Fits with this whole language and word focused theme that is now being featured in this trailer. I normally wouldn't have any thoughts like this but just because Kojima has purposefully misrepresented his game before.

Anyways,

More I just think this game is trying to be different. As a big fan of the series, excited about that. There's room for Metal Gear to evolve. With some criticism I'm a little annoyed with criticisms of something like the codec. If you have to go back to base a lot, you can have more story there. Also, I think in this day and age that kind of storytelling has been used now in gameplay (things like audio logs on Bioshock). Obviously it's key to what Metal Gear has been but that doesn't mean this game doesn't adjust. I don't really want to be sitting on a Codec screen anymore. They could do a more limited version in the game world. The Codec was originally something that needed to be done technologically. You had to stop gameplay to make it work. It never has really fit with the game world (him chatting away any time he pleases with his finger to his ear has always been joked about, which is fine, but obviously joked about for a reason).

It seems like maybe a little less cutscenes but that can be just as good. Even a big fan of Metal Gear known there has been some bloat.

When we think of Snake's dialogue in past games, how much is him just saying what the other person said? Or just simple questions to get an info dump? Losing some of that isn't so key to getting Snake as a character as people say. The "Metal Gear!?!" joke people do with that response by Snake is representative of a lot of his dialogue when he's just being talked at. The game could do more to develop Snake besides dialogue (hopefully hallucinations and the experiences shown shape what we think of Big Boss as I expect them to). This game now apparently shows his twin sons even so a lot is going to be done with the character. I will be happy if it is shown more and told less. I love Kojima but his storytelling is not perfect, even fans have to see that. This feels like improvement to me.

But people saying this game isn't Metal Gear are crazy. Did they miss the hallucinations? The insect enemy they show here? The skull face guy? Mini metal gears, Fulton recovery, inflatable decoys for Snake. He has a horn! There's a child warlord and a ghostly sniper. This is Metal Gear. It looks like one of the crazier ones yet.

After watching this new trailer and hearing what Jeff said about the game on the podcast I feel like I know less about this game than I did before. Split into episodes? Little story? Little/no voice acting? A big-budget Peace Walker? What the hell is going on?!

Edit: I'm pretty sure the whole monologue in the beginning of the trailer about being taken from their family and forced to fight and change languages at different posts was said almost word-for-word by Frank Jaeger/Null/Gray Fox in an earlier game. Maybe.... Portable Ops? It was some character in that game but I'm pretty sure it was him. Also, how much do you want to bet that Skull Face is actually Hot Coldman from Peace Walker?

I've given up on Hayter at this point. With how they've said Big Boss will talk less, and the overall less cutscenes compared to other MGS games, I don't think it really matters if Hayter is in the game or not. Personally? I'd prefer Hayter. I like Chief Kief, but I prefer the original. But Kojima has a plan with the facial technology and so I put my faith in that.

As for MGS, well, the entire series has been about evolution. If you really look at each game one by one you can see this. Every game establishes a set of rules and then usually the sequel to that game will improve upon them, then the sequel to that will abandon those rules and create new ones. The fundamentals are still there, but the core changes. Like how MGS1 and 2 are still what I like to call "corridor stealth", yet Sons of Liberty gives a breadth of new gameplay mechanics over the first. Same with MGS3 and 4 being similar, yet MGS4 improves upon a lot of the core mechanics like shooting, movement, and general accessibility. MGS4 got a lot of things wrong in my opinion, but the gameplay was not one of them. Peace Walker would then go on to establish the core of what would later become the biggest, most ambitious(E3 buzzword alert) game of them all. And while we haven't seen the fruits of that labor yet, I have no doubts that Kojima's ultimate game and swan song will be everything but same-old-same-old.

This is the part where Imagine Dragons comes on and it goes "Welcome to the new age" over and over and over again.

@stonyman65:

What they mean is, each specific mission/side mission will be presented like an episode from a TV show. You'll have your intro and set up to the mission, and then when you beat the mission you will see credits, like a TV show. Your cast, writer, director, producer, etc, etc. Things like that.

As for the little to no voice acting, they've made Snake a somewhat silent protagonist(And that's Kojima's words directly). They want the player to really identify with Big Boss, and they said that you lose that when/if he speaks. Personally, again, I think it's total BS but hey, sometimes you gotta be a dad.

Anyway. They've put a huge amount of stock into the FOX engine's facial capture capabilities and have hired Kiefer Sutherland to act as the voice and Face of Big Boss(But not the body, that will be preformed by someone else). Because of this technology, they want you to see what Big Boss is thinking instead of the character verbalizing that information. In an example provided by Kojima, instead of asking "Kaz, are you okay?", Big Boss will now ask "Kaz?" with a concerned look on his face.

But, lest ye worry. Everyone who played the game at the preview event said that while Big Boss is virtually mute, he still talks a shit ton in briefings and cassette tapes. And as for the game being otherwise "silent", you have radio contacts Miller and Ocelot(And presumably Huey and everyone else once your base starts picking up) to call for information in the field, just like in GZ and Peace Walker.

Oh and as for the "little story" part of your question, there will be much less cutscenes than in any other MGS game. Kojima is going full force into the gameplay and telling a story where it's in your hands. For example, you can do missions out of order(I don't think they mean story missions because that doesn't make any sense). If you do one mission before another, you could see changes in how it plays out compared to if you did them differently.

If you don't, Kojima's bound to at some point.

As an aside, anyone else wondering what's up with the part of the trailer between 2:27 and 2:45? We see a man have a headphone taken out of his throat, it cuts to Quiet, then we see swollen (infected?) masses on his chest, then it cuts to a lingering shot of a parasite unit's breasts. In any other circumstance I'd think the latter shot was simply a dumb, pervy shot (and it very much could still be that) but I have to wonder if Kojima is trying to imply something there.