Preparation for Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops.

As a ardent Metal Gear Solid enthusiast, I of course can't wait for "The Phantom Pain". However, while I have played through "Snake Eater" twice and loved that story, while playing through "Ground Zeroes" I found myself (and likely many others felt the same way) very lost. I know I haven't played "Portable Ops" or "Peace Walker" so I would take it these are essentials before diving into "The Phantom Pain" when it releases?

Peace Walker is the one you should play if you are interested in what happened before Ground Zeroes. I'm not even sure if Portable Ops is canon anymore.

Kojima didn't write Portable Ops' story so Peace Walker barely mentions it, and I would guess the same applies to MGS5.

I have also heard that Portable Ops was ex'd out by Kojima.

Portable Ops is canon, but not very relevant except for the end scenes.

Peace Walker is must play to understand Ground Zeroes and subsequently TPP.

@flstyle: I actually meant to say "The Phantom Pain" in the title of this message just accidentally wrote PO.

So could I feasibly play Peace Walker and skip PO entirely, with little missed?

@mrpilkington: play peace walker. it's just simply the one that matters. kojima doesn't evne care about PO

@mrpilkington: Yeah. Skip Portable Ops and just play Peace Walker.

Play Peace Walker 100%, then maybe play POps if you got time before MGSV drops.

There are a lot of tapes in GZ that will help fill you in on some of PW's story, mainly Paz's role. You could also check out KefkaProduction's Peace Walker movie which will give you all of the story and main gameplay sections in one video, as I didn't have a PSP to play PW on.

I personally found Portable Ops to be enjoyable for what it managed to accomplish on the PSP, but I am super aware of how flawed it is as well. Make sure you play around with the button customization to find the best control scheme you're comfortable with. Also if you find yourself not enjoying PO, just remember to also give Peace Walker a shot which is vastly superior and has actually become my favorite Metal Gear game.

I still think they kind of fucked up by putting important story events in Peace Walker, given that PSP games generally sold like ass outside of Japan. Or at least, they sold like ass relative to how well PS2 (and eventually PS3) games sold.

Also it's still weird to me how so much of Phantom Pain is just Peace Walker But For Big Boys, in terms of having a lot of the same gameplay systems like Fultoning stuff back to your base. It makes me wonder whether Kojima had a lot of the ideas for Phantom Pain back when Peace Walker started development, but for whatever business reasons Konami said "Look, here's the budget for a PSP game, do what you can, also please make it structured like Monster Hunter even though multiple-Snake co-op makes no sense."

@bisonhero: I thought he made Peace Walker for his son who loved Monster Hunter hahaha.