SPOILER WARNING: This blog post is about what I felt like after I finished the story to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Although this blog is an analysis focused on one character, I do talk about and reference a lot of events, plot twists, the ending throughout the game. So yeah, spoilers!

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is a hell of a video game. It is without a doubt the best playing Metal Gear Solid game and I might even say it is one of my favorite playing games period. I've put in over 100 hours so far, which is more than the amount of time it took me to finish the four previous games combined. It is a game I want to go outside and yell about how much fun it is to play. On top of all of that, it is in the context of one of the craziest stories I've ever encountered in my life. The Phantom Pain is without a doubt in my mind the most and best Metal Gear Solid game from top to bottom. Which is why I'm struggling with the fact that I feel empty after I finished the story.

Yes, I am only at 63% completion after spending some like 105 hours with the game, so I can still play the game and do stuff if I want to. Yes, the reveal with Venom Snake is nuts and my head was swirling around yesterday for like 4 hours trying to process that big revelation, and dealing with questions like what does this mean and was this type of reveal called for, but at the end of the day, I think I do like that twist and at best embrace it and at worst live with it and accept it. None of that stuff bothers me. What bothers me isn't actually any of the stuff involving the True Ending (Truth: The Man Who Sold the World). My issue is actually the mission before this. The one with Quiet.

First let me acknowledge, The Phantom Pain is not perfect. There are a few questionable things in both Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain. With seeing the game in it's full context, some of those criticisms have fallen away (Like I don't really feel as disgusted by the vagina bomb anymore). One of the more talked about, questionable elements going to MGSV proper was Quiet. Hideo Kojima at various points said stuff like we will feel ashamed for talking about Quiet's, uh, attire when we learn the full backstory behind her character. Well...her full backstory is Big Boss lit her on fire, large portions of her body were replaced by parasites, so she has to wear less clothes so her skin can breathe and she can get more sunlight for photosynthesis. So, no, she doesn't wear less clothes due to a some Beauty and the Beast Unit like traumatic event or anything else we would feel ashamed of for asking "Hey, why is she only wearing a bra?" She wears less clothes, because she is a super plant lady soldier. Also because Kojima said he wanted to create a character who was hot and to have a good character for people to cosplay as. Not to dwell on too much of that aspect, but I just find it weird this is coming from the same main who created EVA, who unzips her jacket every other scene in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater for no reason, and had an entire squad of villains crawl around in latex suits who moan after you shoot them to death. Like isn't this Kojima's fourth attempt to create somebody super hot? Like he's done this before, so why base an entire character off of this concept? ANYWAY!!!

I guess what I'm getting at is I went into The Phantom Pain with a raised eyebrow towards Quiet. I wasn't outraged over her appearance and I didn't feel uncomfortable or anything like that. At the same time, I wasn't super thrilled to see promotional images with her half naked splattered with blood, and video games certainly don't need to put in breasts in front of me to sell me on their game.

And then I played the game. I was riding on Diamond Horse on my way to rescue Huey Emmerich, and then out of nowhere I went into Reflex Mode. Oh no...She found me! The battle with Quiet is only one of the game's few boss fights, but it was a great moment. I know you can find her earlier in the game if you go and look for her at the power plant, but the reveal with how it happened to me--just running around on my horse in a big open world, and then something surprising like that happened--is one of my more favorite character reveals in the Metal Gear Solid series. It also lead to a great conversation with a friend of mine about how we both fought the boss, something that I feel like only the previous games capitalize on. ("Did you know you could shoot some of the archs and have them fall on top of Quiet?" "Did you know you can summon a supply drop and have it land on top of her?")

Quiet quickly became my favorite Buddy in the game. If you are using Quiet as a Buddy, you are literally charging into battle with a Metal Gear boss backing you up. (How cool is that?!) She was already a legend talked about the Russian soldiers before you even see her, she can snipe jets out of the sky, she can take on just about anybody and win. Quiet is a character who doesn't need to speak and can let her actions speak for her, which I feel makes her a good partner to Big Boss/Venom Snake, who is also someone who can get things done. It feels a little simplistic just to call Quiet a bad ass, but that is the most appropriate descriptive I know. And since I played through large portions of an incredibly long game with her, she grew on me more and more. (We're not talking about her being in the game for a couple of hours. We're talking about her being there for dozens of hours)

Yeah, the game has an upgrade tree where you can paint her body gold or silver. Yeah, in the ACC she "stretches" in front of you. There's still some weird things with her character. Half of it you can shrug off and say "Well, that's Metal Gear", while the other half just feels like they are doing all of this stuff because she is a pretty lady and the young gentlemen love pretty ladies. But at the end of the day, none of that stuff really bothered me. It's still weird and some of that could/should have been taken out of the game though.

With The Phantom Pain my time and enjoyment were both tied to my time with Quiet. Yes, you can use D-Horse for horse stealth and command him to defecate. Yes, D.D. is the game's best radar equivalent and he can jump on enemies with an electric knife and stun them. The other Buddies are fun to play around with, but they always felt like a tool to me. On the other hand, Quiet felt more like a companion. Maybe it's because her character had more development than say D.D. With Quiet, she is one of the more distinct characters who had an arc: from finding her, recruiting her, and her appearance in subsequent cutscenes. Compare her to Huey or Revolver Ocelot, who were established characters with a history, so their story hits the ground running and is only focused on one or two things. I would argue Quiet is one of the few characters who has a more complex narrative, helped by the fact that her story is contained in this one game and everything is backed by the intrigue regarding who she really is. (Wait, isn't she the same person who tried to kill me in the hospital?)

The Phantom Pain is great for many, many reasons, so I don't mean to say this game is good because of her. However, Quiet continued to grow on me, both from a story perspective and running around the open world doing Metal Gear things. I wouldn't say I was exactly surprised by any of this, but I started the game with some reservations in terms of who she was and what impact she was going to have to the overall experience. I mention all of this because I wanted to provide context for where my head was at for what came after I killed Skull Face. One of the interesting things about The Phantom Pain is how characters started to exit the story. Skull Face is dead. Colonel Volgin dies...uh, again. Huey is exiled. Young Liquid Snake and Psycho Mantis literally fly away. And then Quiet leaves.

I assume you have to max out her bond to level 100, but I'm not sure exactly what triggers this mission. At some point, Quiet just leaves and ends up turning herself over to the Russian soldiers in Afghanistan. So you have one last mission to go get her back, where it seems like you have to fight every single last Russian left in the country. The mission started with you trying to bring her back, but in the end she goes into exile. She is forced to speak English in order to save Snake's life. And as a result, she's gone.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is an enormous, crazy game about a ton of different ideas all mixing together. At the core, it always felt like you were building and creating something. You are rebuilding a military base to replace the one that was taken away from you 9 years ago. You are strapping balloons to prisoners, enemies, tanks, shipping containers, and goats to help build your private army. You are researching gadgets, weapons, costumes, and cardboard boxes to help you in the field. You slowly bring in more people and relics from the past Metal Gear Solid games. And then at the very end, you lose someone. I don't want to sound overly dramatic, but dammit that's what I felt after I finished the game's story. I felt like I lost someone.

The next day I played the final mission and got the "True Ending" and learned a lot of crazy things about the two MGSV games, what the hell Major Zero was doing, and a little more about how all of these games connect together. But then I kept going back to Quiet.

First she showed up as M.I.A. on my Staff Management list. But then she was gone; not even listed anymore. I was flying in the ACC after learning everything about Zero, Big Boss, and Venom Snake, and then I panned the camera over and saw all of the photographs of Quiet in my helicopter were gone. I went to her holding cell, and saw all of the graffiti and signs warning people about Quiet were gone. I went down in the cell and saw nothing in there. "Gloria" wasn't playing. I deployed to Africa and saw I couldn't select her from the mission screen. I loaded up earlier missions and saw she was still unavailable there.

To me this is the closest I've felt to a character dying in a video game. Granted, we don't actually see Quiet die, but it's close enough. Characters die in video games all the time, but it rarely packs a punch. I tried to think of the closest example to compare how I feel about Quiet, and the only thing I could think of is Mass Effect 2. The first time I played through the suicide mission, Thane Krios and Zaeed Messani died. I also made the mistake of taking my time before starting the mission, so Kelly Chambers and Gabriella Daniels were also dead. I remember walking through the Normandy and saw a few empty posts and missing crew members. I would go up to the map and Kelly wouldn't be there. I walked down to engineering and when Kenneth Donnelly, the other engineer, saw me, he commented on how Daniels was gone. But at the end of the day, I already finished the story and all of the side missions I cared about, and just did a New Game+. There was no reason for me to keep playing that save and before I knew it I had a save file where all of those people were alive and well. They weren't dead anymore.

The problem with The Phantom Pain is just how fun that game is. This isn't a Mass Effect 2 situation for me, where something big happened, but I was quickly done with the game or able to flip a reset switch on the story. I want to go through the rest of the Side Ops. I want to finish building out Mother Base. I want to research all of the weapons and tools. I want to see how much of that game I can complete before I have to throw in the towel.

The two times I jumped back into The Phantom Pain after "finishing the game", I still go back to Quiet. It's not like I only think about her on Mother Base. I fly away in the helicopter and I only see Venom Snake looking out from Pequod. I don't see her in the ACC. I don't hear her humming when I sneak up to an enemy base. When I go through various menus, I don't see any mention of her equipment, Buddy support options, or the option to deploy her.

So now I run around with D.D. and this game is still insanely fun to play. Everything I said in my opening paragraph is still true. In my opinion, this is still the best Metal Gear Solid game and is one of the best games I have ever played. But then I would randomly remember how she walked away and she isn't coming back. The second chapter of The Phantom Pain is definitely a roller coaster with plenty of unexpected twists that take the game into some dark and interesting places (Especially that damn ending). After I processed everything that happened in this game, that's where my head is at. I'm stuck thinking about how Quiet as a character exited the story like that and also how my favorite Buddy can't be used anymore.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain isn't a perfect game. Hell, it's not even perfect with how it treats Quiet. But at the end of the day, it's still one of the best video games out there and it gave me a feeling no other video game has before. It's one thing to show a character being killed off. There are effective death scenes out there, (I'll admit it, I got teary eyed when Joel mourns over Sarah's death in The Last of Us) but sometimes a character just dies and that's that. It's another thing to show how that character isn't in those people's lives anymore. Honestly, this feeling is making me doubt how much longer I'm going to play this game, despite how much fun I'm having with it.

I doubt a majority of the people will feel the same way I do and there will be plenty of people who will just say, "Who cares, D.D. is the best. Quiet sucks." But that's still what I feel like after finishing this game, and if that isn't impressive I don't know what is.

Edit: Originally the full title of this blog post was, "Character Deaths in Video Games and Why The Ending to MGSV: The Phantom Pain Made Me Feel Empty <Spoilers>". It was changed per the request of a user on the site, who has not finished the game yet. I feel kind of in a weird position since this blog is mainly about Quiet and what it felt like after she walked away, and the game doesn't actually end with somebody dying. Still, I kinda feel bad even giving the perception of spoiling the game for somebody and I can't really say "No, no, nobody dies" or try to justify it to him because that would be an actual spoiler. Obviously not my intention, but I still feel bad about it.

Sorry if anybody else felt that way. :(