I'm sort of indifferent on the ending. I think that MGSV does the worst job in the series at presenting itself. I'm fine with the twist, at first it kind of felt hollow, but after some contemplation, I get what it was trying to do. A lot of my problem comes in the way the game gives several hours worth of exposition dump on tape and it is up to the audience to either listen to all of that--which is tedious and poorly presented--or filter through it and hope that you get the important bits, and without those bits the whole thing feels a little false.
All in all the ending makes sense and has some thematic similarities with other games in the series, and I'm willing to forgive a lot for that, but it also feels pretty tacked on in a lot of ways. It felt like they opted for the twist, dropped in a few tapes to explain plot holes, found a way to plug it in the series, and that's that. But there are about eighty unaccounted for hours that largely mean nothing grander toward that moment than "you're a decoy." The game is built largely around the theme of language, and the final act pivots into something about "Big Boss is just a name". That bit can easily plug into the idea of inheritance (gene, meme, scene), but it doesn't really coexist in any way with the rest of the narrative that focuses on language. It just kind of becomes two competing themes that don't operate with each other, and in the end the language stuff is sort of secondary.
I think honestly a lot of this could have been solved with a better presentation. I think the answers to the problems are in the game, they just do a really bad job of pacing that stuff and surfacing some of it. All said, I still enjoyed the game, and for the most part I forgive the flaws of the ending--except making me replay the entire fucking tutorial, fuck that trash.
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