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.
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