I had a sudden itch to play this game again, and where the "mostly" does the work is in the initial scratchin'. Because the economic portion of this game relies on some social gaming era timers, and it does technically feature an online component that (to my mind) always sounded far more wild conceptually than it was in action, leaving this game alone for eight years doesn't mean you get to just start it brand new. Even though I'm not entirely sure why I treated this situation like I was carrying my own personal nuclear football, I had to triple-check I'd backed up by 68% completion save to the Playstation cloud before I had to at least double check I'd deleted it before I could start from the beginning.

Briefly, I'd like to say that I have no qualms with Phantom Pain's introduction. Especially knowing what the rest of the game is, I think it's neat. Neat as it is...god damn. Feel free to forget how limited the early missions are compared to your memory of this game, or more importantly feel free to remember how engrossing you might've found the early hours of this game to be if you (as I) felt so inclined at the time...it sucks that you've got no choice but to crawl through that just to get to the most awkward parts of an incredibly fun game.

What I've really noticed over the first handful of story and side missions, though, is what and what hasn't become arbitrary. I'm open to the premise of this post being entirely nullified by my having played the game before, but again, you've gotta wipe the slate clean to go home again. So I don't think that I started with nearly three million MGSV bucks had anything to do with that. I'm also not sure it bothers me much, because I just want to activate D-Dog and get my fulton to a point I'm not too concerned about who sees me tying soldiers to balloons...

But if this is just how the game is now, it extremely trivializes a lot of what the original game was. It seems like collecting materials is entirely arbitrary. Every time I collect a suitcase full of minerals, I feel like I'm just satisfying nostalgia. The menu starts begging me to refine them into more MGSV bucks. Then I look at a freight container and realize how impossible it'd be for me to become a billionaire. I can't even extract them and they already look like weeds.

The game insists on collecting these, and plants, and animals, and so on, through so much of the early missions and yet, again unless I'm entirely misunderstanding why I started with all this money, the economy is pointless. Which makes the time some items take to develop pointless. Which, sadly, makes me fully uninterested in meandering through any given scenario for an hour or more.

I just want to do the job, like in any other game. I remember MGS V differently.

You still need to collect soldiers to establish and then maximize each aspect of your base, but the moment whatever division hits whatever level whatever thing demands, you just make it. I think I said it before but in case I didn't - that's probably great. But I felt compelled to point this out because I'm not sure I've ever come back to a game I once became so engorged by only to years find a very different feast.

Part of why I'm fascinated by this experience is because of course it should be good that whatever I'm describing means the game is more accessible, and the Mother Base demands rightfully don't let you be the Super (Pseudo) Snake of your dreams right away. And I'm sure there's a shadow lingering over my actions that casts "don't worry about these E-class bozos, it'll get better quickly!" hindsight bolts at me constantly.

But that knowing is as much a part of what's so weird about coming back to this game in 2024 - all of its systems seem absolutely pointless, unless they remind you of what they used to mean.

The entire base building aspect of this game is completely pointless aside of that one mission where you get to, uh, interact with your soldiers. If I were to play this game for the first time I'd tell myself to not worry about it at all, because that side of it frankly ruined the game for me. And I think thematically it doesn't work because aside of your designated buddy, Snake is always on the field by himself. The story expects you to care about your soldiers but it doesn't give any reason to.

I'm fairly certain that you could rather easily beat the game entirely with the starting tranquilizer gun and SMG, aside of the few moments where you need to develop a certain item and a few bossfights where damage matters. The game has a tremendous arsenal of weapons that are mostly identical to each other, and in any case you are being constantly penalized for using lethal force so it feels that the game actively doesn't want you to sue most of its weapons (again, if I played it now I'd ignore that and just played it with lethal force). It's not an RPG so I'm not sure why having +5% damage matters because a headshot or a burst to the chest is lethal either way, and the other features in guns matter even less, so it feels silly to spend millions of credits on these things. The only two upgrades that matter are a silencer and the ability to shoot non-lethal rounds and the game knows this, which is why those upgrades are usually at the very end of a tech tree.

I played its predecessor, Peace Walker, and I was expecting them to build upon the base-building aspect of that game. Instead they made it worse.

Conversely, it would be hard for me to overstate exactly how much I hated that mission of crawling through the hospital. I viscerally despised it down to my bones. The thing is, I don't mind watching huge amounts of game cutscenes, like Xeno series levels of them, but when a game forces the player to engage in the most boring, braindead repetitive interaction imaginable--hold d-pad to crawl really slowly--for friggin' 30 minutes, it makes me want to set my hair on fire. Just make it a cutscene, guys.

Speaking to the larger game experience, I remember really enjoying it when it came out. The stealth-action gameplay itself is genuinely great. But the whole recruitment and base management aspect... yeah. I remember in the endgame I had set myself the task of filling up my base with recruits who were S-rank in at least one category, minimum. I did end up doing that... and as soon as I did complete that arbitrary goal, the bottom fell out on my motivation to play, because it made me realize how little it actually mattered. I'd developed all the weapons and tools I wanted to develop well before that... well, except for the stuff that Konami added later which can only be gotten by paying more money to unlock more bases, paired with doing a lot of online raids to recruit S++ dudes. Which I was never going to do.

Maybe also worth saying that while Metal Gear Scanlon is probably my favorite long-form video series this site ever did, for me the MGSV part of it was the least interesting by far. It's the most fun Metal Gear game to play (IMO), but rather a bore to watch; no more wacky codec conversations, nor enough general Metal Gear nonsense.

Almost a decade on, it is kind of a weird one. I feel sure I'd still enjoy the core gameplay, but as for the rest of it, eh, probably not so much. Also, I remain unashamed of my words and deeds.

@atheistpreacher: To be clear, the "god damn" bit of that quote is planet sized in stature. All I wanted was to start the game from the beginning, both because I had absolutely no handle on the controls anymore and I thought seeing the progression systems in action all these years later would be, at the very least, academically interesting. The intro is so damn long, and I started late enough at night, I didn't even see Mother Base until the following afternoon.

So you're probably right, it couldn't been entirely cinematic. If I had to harbor the flimsiest of guesses, I'd wager that because MGS4 was Playstation-exclusive there was a worry that opening the game with a cutscene the length of a feature film would never work with 5's wider audience, plus several games of the PS4/One era had codified those sorts of Prestige Tour © Tim Rogers set pieces so KJP put their spin on it. But yes, I absolutely agree that of all the studios to do one of those this was likely the worst possible one...especially this far removed from the novelty of the game's dedication to oners, with or without God of War muddying its cinematography further by proving the technique benefits from restraint in video games just as much as in film.

All that being said, and of course the obvious response to the following is "but why is it a game?" when all the intentional obtuseness and heavy-handed visual metaphors are stripped away by the insight of knowing everything that follows, I do think it's a pretty strong statement overall. That feeling of boredom, and wanting to get to "the fun part", clashes mightily with just the intro's questions about identity and purpose, let alone the things you know the game, once you finally get there, will let you do.

I know, I know, I know the more I play this game the more I'm going to become numb to its ham-fists same as I was the first time, but in a time of heightened conflict around the world I've honestly found myself pretty responsive to the numerous ways this game wrestles with self-image and the idea of military deterrence as somehow unmoored from the inevitability of violence; one of this series' great paradoxes has always been the way it uses "covert ops" (as well as, for The Gamers, secret unlocks and in this game mission scores) within broader geopolitical conflicts to try and coerce the player into pacifism while making emphatically clear how much more difficult it is to play these games that way.

But at this point I suppose I'm rambling, I haven't touched the game since I made this post (I know the first Skulls mission is coming, and I dread it) so I don't have anything to add about what I'm actually curious about here, which is whether one of the game's core mechanics is absolutely, comprehensively busted in the wake of years of corporate squabbling and failed monetization initiatives...and once more I'm pretty certain the further I get into this game I'll roll my eyes at all the narrative beats I vaguely remember.

As much as I agree about the intro's tediousness, having thought about it then and expounding on those thoughts now...as poor of a video game beginning as it ultimately is, I'd argue it also succeeds in its own clumsy way, and that how exhaustingly boring and melodramatic it is does a better job making its point than many of the story beats that follow.