Or, more generally, do you like where Kojima took the MGS series over the years?

Prior to the release of MGSV, I said I might not play the game, despite being a fan of the series since 2004/2005. Although I enjoyed the game, it exemplifies much of what has displeased me over the direction the series has taken over the last ten years.

I liked the series more before it went by the tagline “Tactical Espionage Operations”. I don’t want to manage a base and do a bunch of filler missions with forgettable scenarios in needlessly spacious environments. There are so many empty valleys and twisting canyons that are a drag to travel through over and over. I did like some of the open battles, me sneakily flanking the tank patrols and surprising them. But so much time is just spent moving from point A to point B and waiting for the helicopter to land. I’m also sick of having upgrades in pretty much every game now, turning it all into a grind. I want to procure items and supplies on site, like in the old games, and survive in a hostile setting for a night (MGS1), a day (MGS2) or several days (MGS3), instead of being able to leave whenever it gets boring. I would have preferred one big base with surrounding wildlife and outposts in an open world MGS. The mission structure, the micromanagement and all that stuff just drags out the experience.

Dropping the codec conversations and cutscenes in favor of audio logs has hurt the story. I don’t think you need cutscenes or any dialogue to tell stories in games, but the thick narrative of MGS has always depended on them. Listening to tapes from the past isn’t as interesting as engaging in the story and seeing those characters. It’s like a movie with almost no footage. Snake’s silence makes scenes awkward. The opening is too long, involving too much crawling and forced walking, and needing to be repeated later. I dislike where they’ve taken the story over the years. It got more far-fetched and stupid as they released prequel after pointless prequel, featuring better and better tech (like futuristic drones, power suits and cybernetic arms, as well as telling us that Otacon’s optic stealth camo existed forty years before he designed it), making connections between characters (like Otacon’s father working for Big Boss, which, to be fair, isn’t as silly as the relations made by MGS4) and invalidating the first Metal Gears by showing that there were several before, just as threatening, starting with the Shagohod and continuing into the ’70s and ’80s, long before Solid Snake learned about them. Prequels in general blow. As the producer of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back said, prequels box in the story and make the writers back in to material they already covered. I would have preferred a sequel to MGS4, with a new character and new technology. But I know the prequels were inevitable, for Big Boss became a god to fans with MGS3.

The mechanics are worse than in MGS4, in my opinion. I don’t like the automatic cover system, the way it alters the camera slightly and changes Snake’s position with a slow animation every time you go near an object. Despite having so many weapons to choose from, it has less weapon customization than MGS4. It also has fewer CQC options. Why does Snake not have a knife anymore? What kind of a soldier is he? I need to be able to kill unconscious enemies when extracting them is not an option. You have to wake them up again or waste a bullet and possibly degrade your suppressor. The gameplay of the series became less interesting as it transitioned more and more to a third-person shooter. Gunning down a whole base of soldiers is often easier than sneaking deep into dangerous areas, where they can surround you and do more damage when your stealth is blown. The tight, multi-level environments were more geared towards stealth than the open bases and valleys of MGSV. Soldiers are farther spread apart. One change I liked is being able to exchange any gun you see in the environment for the three you see on your person.

I also find the permanent blood on Snake annoying. All the blood is overdone. You kill an enemy or two and Snake is a bloody mess until it rains. You kill enemies continuously and the blood doesn’t wash off anymore. Making him clean and pure again requires so much effort that I resorted to playing as other soldiers. Pacifism in games is illogical. You’re a soldier. It’s what you were trained for. It’s survival.

I still thought it was good in spite of all that, but it’s not a game I can play over and over like the old ones. I may never replay MGSV and Peace Walker.

It's so hard for me to compare the first 4 games to V. I like them for almost opposite reasons. 1-4 I like because of nostalgia; they were very influential on me as a teen. I like the level design and hand crafted instances. The over the top personalities and cutscenes. When I was younger I thought the stories were amazing, but the older I get the more I find them frustrating. I think They could be really special and amazing if Kojima had an editor; someone pushing back and forcing him to hone his thoughts. I think the camera work and cinematography is great throughout the series.

V is just so damn satisfying to play. It might be my favorite game to play period, and that makes up for a lot of my misgivings with the game. I also really like the restrained narrative because I was so tired of Kojima and his exposition dumps. I think there are pros and cons to the open world. While on the one hand you loose a lot of the amazing level design and hand crafted instances from the early entries you get opportunity for creativity. Not only does the open world give you more choice in how you attack but the tech tree does as well. Personally I found the tech tree/base development incentive for recruiting guys extremely satisfying. I would go into missions with the intention of using lethal force just for fun though.

Three is probably my favorite MGS game because it's my first. But I think V is a close second-first depending on the day.

MGS4 is just a bad game.

MGSV is a great (GREAT!) game with a sloppy (but interesting) story.

I love the first three MGS' unconditionally, so I suppose I prefer TEA over TEO, but man was MGSV fun. If it hadn't had any of the baggage of MGS weighing it down I think it would've been enjoyably absurd on its own merits. I agree that the audio tapes were a mistake, they were too easy to ignore in-game and often felt like a distraction from earning more progress towards new gear and story content if you just sat in the helicopter for an hour listening to tapes.

Honestly, to me the downfall of MGS started with 4, and after that it has kind of been a straight slope down. Not that 4 and 5 aren't fun to play, but they lost what I really liked about the first three games especially.

Though, as time goes on I really start to see why. Tomokazu Fukushima is that reason. He wrote all the codecs and basically worked closely with Kojima on all things related to writing on the first three games. The codecs were far and away my favorite aspects of those games, and most of the story I like were told through those. I actually think he was the one that was able to hone and polish Kojimas ideas into something that actually was interesting and had merit. All of MGS 4 just felt so ham-fisted and dumb. And yes, 1-3 are also very dumb games but they still feel way more focused. Its also no secret that Kojima didn't want to make MGS 4, and said so in numerous interviews but basically Konami got really scared about making a game without him and he was basically forced to work on it. Which also shows in how he just tries to basically wrap up every fan question there is. Its almost like someone went on every message board and tried to find what people wondered about the story and then they made up something for every such occasion. Even if that meant changing completely what happened in previous games.

Peace Walker is clearly something completely different, and I don't really count it as a main MGS game. Its really focused on making something akin to Monster Hunter, for the Japanese market where handhelds were still really big and that game is clearly very focused on repeatable coop missions.

MGS V I didn't even finish. I just got so bored of it, it had none of the charm or story that I like about the previous games. Or rather, it has glimpses but to get that you need to wade through so many dull missions that all just have just the most insignificant motivations as to why. The virtually silent protagonist also made me actually mad. Though I really do think that game had a very troubled development, and that the focus lay elsewhere. Konami basically wanted a game that was really fun to play and open world games were really on the rise. They succeed in that aspect, but I maintain that you will probably like MGS V more if you have not played, or don't like the previous games than if you are a big fan of the series. Just for the reason that its something so different in almost every facet of its design.

Story: 2>1>3>4>5>PW
Gameplay: 5>2>1>PW>3>4
Overall: 2>1>5>3>4/PW

The series ran out of good stories to tell but to me, 4 was the series low point gameplay wise. Weird and clunky. No fun to play and did not, and still do not like a ton about the way everything wrapped up. As much as I like 1 & 2, I spent waaaay more time with 5 & PW. Very addictive and fun.

I think the downfall of the story started with MGS3. Kojima was dismayed by the reception of MGS2, so he made the story of MGS3 simpler. It's still a good game story (and the last great game in the series, I think), but I didn't find it as interesting throughout as MGS1 and MGS2's. MGS4's story was a mess and Peace Walker's felt pointless.

Where the older games had better level designs, GZ/TPP had better control and gameplay. If they coupled that with either linear levels, or more interesting levels it'd be a match made in heaven. I definitely loved TPP (weak story aside), but I found Camp Omega more interesting than a lot of the not so fleshed out camps in TPP. The older games are just a bit clunky to play compared to V. That said, 3 is still my favourite game in the series.

Tactical Espionage Action baby!

I recently played through MGS1-MGS5 back to back, and it was eye opening for sure. I think that the core gameplay of MGSV is absolutely astounding, and i have almost 200 hours logged that I would never take back. Having said that, as a Metal Gear, fan, V felt like an absolute death blow to the series that once brought a tear to my eye when i was 10. The story scenes are executed SO WELL, but they either ran out of time, money, or patience along the way, because playing connect-the-audiolog is a far cry from proper storytelling. Sure many of the Codec conversations (MGS2 in particular) are excessively long and elaborate, but that charm was never something I needed to have streamlined.

I've never been able to choose a favorite of the original quadrilogy however, as I don't think any one of them is weak enough to discount. With my level of familiarity with each title playing through all 4 takes no more than 25-30 hours, and the story is so consistently good (and wacky) throughout that I'd consider the Tactical Espionage Action quadilogy to be one self contained experience. I have had tons of fun with TPP and Peace Walker, but I would say that their stories are shallow and unnecessary. Kojima gave us a great bit of lore with Venom Snake, and as someone with a big boss tattoo I can say that all these games are great overall haha.

As far as your gameplay complaints for TPP, to each their own i suppose. Its far from what the series should be, but there isn't an action game out there that I'd rather play right now. I enjoyed taking showers at mother base to get the blood off, but I was usually to obsessed with fultoning everything under the sun to do much killing. I disagree that shootout > stealth however, using your camo index properly and choosing time of day left me clearing 90% of outposts undetected, having a blast in the process.

I don't think Peace Walker and MGS V should be counted together. Granted they both break up the story into bite-sized missions, but they play so completely differently that it's really tough to consider them very similar. Like a lot of people, I think MGS V's gameplay is an utter masterpiece of stealth-action and I would gladly play much, much more of it. Peace Walker, on the other hand, handles like garbage; the controls are bad, the level design is simplistic and linear, and the bosses are such absurd bullet-sponges that you usually need to call in 3-5 resupplies to kill them because you run out of ammo. The game was very clearly made to be a co-op Monster Hunter style affair and is painful to play solo. This is not to mention that PW's story is incoherent, reads like bad fan-fiction (yes, even more so than MGS4), and is conveyed through really ugly, "stylized" motion comics.

I guess for me whether or not the game is broken up into discrete missions isn't really the key divide in the MGS series. I think the emphasis on combat is probably the better indicator. In MGS 1 and 2, full-blown combat sequences (outside of boss fights) were relatively rare, and typically resulted in reinforcements swarming into the area, forcing the player to flee or hide until the alert ends. MGS3 on the whole was much more amenable to being played like an action game, especially in the jungle, where the enemy couldn't send reinforcements. I think that overall it struck the best balance of action and stealth in the series; while serviceable the shooting still felt kind of clunky and there were many points throughout the game which forced you to play stealthily (basically whenever you're in a base or military facility).

With its revamped controls (especially using the shoulder buttons to aim and shoot) MGS4 allowed players to run and gun their way through the whole game. The presence of friendly NPCs fighting the PMC soldiers even seemed to encourage it, as there was unique dialogue for helping them capture territory. I think Kojima's idea of sneaking through an active battlefield, relying on the two opposing sides to distract each other was a really interesting one, but I doubt that many players actually did that rather than just murder the hell out of the PMCs. I think that by adopting standardized shooting controls, MGS4 really lost the stealth/action balance that Snake Eater pulled off so well and is probably the number one game to blame in terms of the shift in gameplay focus in subsequent games.

Action no doubt. Even though the gameplay is in some ways better in phantom pain thats not what i want from MGS.

To me it kinda feels like Kojima doesnt know at all what hes doing and the greatness of his games are down to pure luck and the highly competent coworkers he was handed.

Harry gregson williams is a good example of that. Kojima is paying huge money for an hollywood composer that at best stole the maintheme for mgs 2, the great music you associate with mgs is 99% done by unmentioned and lowly payed workers that get rated the next time kojima find a big name to spend money on.

Weirdly enough Peacewalker is maybe my favorite to play and MGSV is my least favorite. I found the missions structure and base building to be tons of fun, but MGSV's gameplay loop was just not as good. Everything looked the same, the objectives were often repetitive, and the missions were "make your own fun" sandbox gameplay instead of the short and sweet almost memorizable missions of PW. Shame too; I loved Ground Zeroes. Like Drew said upon completing it, 5-10 of those would have made a great MGS5.

I'll agree with that. I thought the automatic cover worked well enough in 2 & 3 and 5 just made it less clunky. Having to hold down a button in 4 was awkward as hell.

I've already replayed much of 5 (got all the S ranks) and I replayed 2 multiple times as well (and did a fuck ton of VR) I agree the story is a mess but this franchise should have ended a long time ago, but the fans (and Konami) have been making Kojima Productions do sequels. I'm glad that he/they (KP) didnt phone it in and actually mixed up the formula.

Each MGS is it's own weird thing and they're all great.

I just don't like auto-cover in general. It slows things down and got me killed in the new MGO a few times. I agree that MGS4 doesn't have the best manual cover system, but at least you have control over it and can move near a wall without having the camera move and your character transition.

The story wouldn't have become such a mess if the writers hadn't obsessed so much about previous events. MGS4 didn't have to explain all the questions (most of which were self-explanatory) about the series and its sequels didn't have to bridge Snake Eater with Metal Gear 1. It would have been better to distance the later games from the original cast, like The Force Awakens (but more gracefully and with more originality). I don't think the series has to be about Snake. I'm one of the people who actually liked Raiden (before MGS4 made him another cyborg ninja).

I Honestly love all of them many people say 4 is bad but i strongly disagree with that because having long cutscenes doesn't make the game bad.

I would say that MGS2 is my least favorite because you play Raiden for 80% of it and hes just not interesting pre mgs 4.

MGSV is my favorite open world game not because of the story but because of the gameplay.

I liked 4 more after replaying it. My main problem with it, aside from the messy story, is that there isn't enough game between the long cutscenes. Only the Middle East (chapter 1) and the beginning of Peru (chapter 2) give you the classic stealth action areas. After that, it becomes pretty sparse. Eastern Europe (chapter 3) was limiting because you had to tail that guy, and chapter 5 (Outer Haven) only had the beginning area on the deck of the ship. I liked the idea of Shadow Moses (chapter 4), Snake against the machines. If they had ever made a sequel, set after 4, it should have featured more robot stealth, mixed with human soldiers.

They did, it's called Metal Gear Rising ;p

MGS V is one of the greatest playing games I've ever had the pleasure to be in control of.

It wasn't the Metal Gear game I wanted.

@boozak: MGR was amazing but no MGS game ;)

@samanthak: I know, i'm still sad that we'll probably never see a sequel.

V was the best gameplay wise and there was something special it could have built upon. I would hope with a sequel they have more dialogue and proper bosses but I think otherwise it was a special game.

But at some point V didn't want to be about Codec conversations and that kind of thing. I like both approaches and I'm glad Kojima evolved his style over time. He has always loved movies and parts of his games like the Codec are not cinematic. I think it makes sense he has evolved this way.

@boozak: Yea me too but it's Konami and Konami is the worst :(.

@rethla: I don't think Harry Gregson-Williams plagiarized anything at all? That's a weird accusation. He arranged the existing MGS theme and made it sound more like a dramatic Hollywood military movie soundtrack. I mean, I'm sure lots of other music people at Konami contributed musical efforts through the years while Williams continues to get primary credit for overseeing the score (or whatever credit he is given in the games, I forget his exact title), but that's hardly plagiarism.

However, TAPPY wrote the MGS theme for MGS1, and eventually it was discovered that the MGS theme has significant similarities to "The Winter Road" by Russian composer Georgy Sviridov. Which is why Konami eventually retired the original MGS theme to avoid further accusations of plagiarism/legal battles with the estates of Russian composers. The music in the new games is kinda meh, and not as memorable as that original MGS theme.

I meant a game, you know, in the same genre and with the same tone.

I don't like Metal Gear Rising or the Bayonetta demo. I'm hoping (the PC demo of) Nier Automata is the game that finally makes me respect Platinum Games. But it's giving me discomforting JRPG vibes.

Also I should say 4 is an awesome game. It is crazy long with cutscenes but it was meant to be the last of that style of game from him I think. The series didn't end, but that was the last one of those. Like I say in my post, that's cool and I respect Kojima for doing it.

Who knows what Death Stranding will be like?

I enjoyed all of it, metal gear solid is one of my all time great franchises