The Phantom Pain of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

Back to more ultimately pointless stuff.  Thanks for letting me go personal in the last post...wait a sec.  This is my blog (mostly).  I'll write what I want.

Spoilers for Metal Gear Solid 5 and pretty much the entire Metal Gear Solid franchise.  I'm writing this mostly for people who have never played MGS before and probably never will.  I may get some details wrong in previous games because it has been a while since I've played them and this is one of the hardest stories in all of fiction to understand completely.  

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Is...is this what the subtitle meant by "The Phantom Pain"?  I mean, it can't be right?  I am writing about this game a third time since nearly 15 months after I played it.  Was this....intentional?

Wait.  Let me back up.  

I've played many games since I played MGSV, several of them better than this fucking game, yet I can't stop thinking about it.  I will try to write something else and end up listening to this games 80's  soundtrack while looking at that fucking art work on the Youtube video and fuck this fucking franchise.  There are much better games out there and I've played them yet, this sticks with me so much.  I think it's because I mostly glossed over the ending in my review and haven't really taken the time to exercise my feelings on the conclusion to this franchise.  But why do I care so much?  Well...

I'm a Metal Gear Fanboy.  Metal Gear Solid, the first one on Playstation, basically kick started my love of stealth action games.  After renting the game from Blockbuster, I ended up buying it with allowance money and remember thinking "THIS IS THE MOST EPIC VIDEO GAME STORY OF ALL TIME....but I don't understand any of it."  I originally chalked it up to be being a dumb kid but then the sequels came out and the story just got weirder.  By the time Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots came out, I didn't really care anymore.  I ended up playing the game YEARS later though and I was sucked right back in and was more confused then ever.

MGS4's story is all the other MGS games in a blender and maxed to 11.

Metal Gear Solid 5 is probably the most straight forward story out of any MGS game, which is saying something because it is still melodramatic and convoluted to all hell.  But, it kind of had to be as this game revolves around the single most important character in the entire universe, Big Boss.  MGS5 takes place pretty early in the timeline, after MGS3: Snake Eater, Peace Walker, and directly after Ground Zeroes.*  This means that MGS5 is the "missing link" (it was even advertised this way) to how Big Boss went from the charming, charismatic hero of the early games, to the series main villain.  Basically, it's the story of Darth Vader in the Star Wars Prequels but with...better (??) writing.

*I didn't play Peace Walker because it was only on the PSP and I never owned one.  I also didn't play Ground Zeroes because I didn't want to pay $60 for it, waited for a sale, then just kind of forgot about it.  What kind of fanboy am I?

So, how does MGS5 show how "Men become Monsters"?  How does MGS5 show Big Boss's decent into madness?  How does MGS5 show the hero of Peace Walker turn into a future war criminal?

 By being smug as fuck?

Well, by not doing it.  It doesn't.  At all.  This game is not that story.

The final real story mission is a repeat of the very first mission in the hospital only with Big Boss remembering the details differently.  He also gets an audio tape informing you that the person you are playing isn't actually Big Boss.  You're the medic from Ground Zeroes who has had plastic surgery and brainwashing to believe they are the real Big Boss.  You are Big Boss's body double.  You are his "phantom".  The real Big Boss is absent from most of this game.

HAHAHA fuck me right!?!  Like, what if in the Revenge of the Sith you find out Anakin isn't actually who you think he is and Darth Vader is actually this fucking guy...

I honestly forgot about the eye patch lol.

...only with more meta story like "we all created the legend that is Big Boss."  We did?  He's the fucking villain by the end of the story!  What kind of compliment is that Kojima?  "Big Boss can be anybody"?  Fuck I sure hope not.  Damn this story is bleak suddenly.

But....get this.  This plot twist only exists to fix a plot hole from a game released 29 years ago.  Big Boss is killed in the very original Metal Gear, that here in the states was only on the NES, and then killed again in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.  Yes, these games are fucking canon because yet again, I remind you, Hideo Kojima is a crazy person.  Turns out that first Big Boss wasn't actually him but a body double.  What the fuck is it with this series and clones.*

*For those that don't know.  Solid Snake, the hero of MGS and MGS4, some of MGS2 and 3 as well, is a clone of Big Boss.  So are his brothers, Liquid Snake and Solidus Snake, both villains in the series, which is lacking in soldiers named Snake.  Also, they all look different for whatever reason I don't care.

Now that more time has passed since I finished this game, to be honest, this is the least of the problems with the goal of this story.  I'm...no longer that pissed about the twist.  I still hate it, but if this twist never happened, there are bigger issues here.  If this story is to actually be what the marketing for this game led us to believe, Big Boss's fall to the dark side, then it was a tall order.  In no specific order, the fake Big Boss does the following:

1. Fights a terrorist named Skull Face who is far worse.
2. Can, *optional*, play almost the entire game non-lethal.
3. Saves POW's that are not his own.
4. Fights other terrorist groups around the world in the "dispatch missions".
5. Saves child soldiers.  (yes there are child soldiers in this game I forgot to mention that in the review).
6. And in the multiplayer, can steal nukes, and destroy them (required for another ending).

To be fair, stealing nuclear weapons are usually villain territory

I mean...holy shit.  Most protagonists don't have rap sheets this good. He does what he can to rid the world of nuclear weapons?  He rescues child soldiers?  The fuck does he do to become a demon?

To be fair, the game tries a little.  The meta narrative is pretty fucked.  You build your army, the Diamond Dogs, by capturing prisoners and enemy soldiers, who then sit in your jail until they agree to switch sides.  Why?  How?  I assume torture because Big Boss's inner circle loves to torture.  You even torture Quiet at one point because that inner circle never fully trusts her and she too used to work for the enemy.  

Speaking of Quiet, she's really the only character to get a full story arc.  One of the final story missions is entirely about her and she gets to have a moment so awesome and so hated because that mission was buggy as shit and I died on it like 20 times.  Ignoring the "can't kill the last tank bug", that mission is pretty awesome and she saves fake Big Boss's life by significantly reducing hers.*

*She speaks to save Big Boss.  She is "quiet" because she has a parasite from Skull Face that will kill her if she speaks English.  That is partially why she is mostly naked.  Uh....I know you have questions but just go with it.

Kojima likes weird porn.

The other characters are bland which is really odd for a Metal Gear game.  Skull Face wants to rule the world mostly because he hates Big Boss's boss, Zero, and for no other real reason.  (Zero, by the way....fuck it.  Never mind).  Kazuhira Miller, who is in the inner circle is fine.  He's mostly just an exposition dump and spends roughly 25% of the game hating the shit out of Quiet.  Then there is Revolver Ocelot*, also in the inner circle.  Ocelot is now a walking encyclopedia on MGS lore and a tutorial dude.  The fuck happened to him?  His personality is missing.  Ocelot is a nutjob and one of the weirdest and most extreme characters in the series.  Why is he completely neutered?  Also, why is he good friends with Big Boss, including the real one, when the last time we saw them they were trying to kill each other in MGS3?  (For those that know....yes.  I know, I know.  Zero demanded it but that doesn't explain being BFF's.  They just have to work together).

*Ocelot is the best example of how insane this franchise's story is.  Just for kicks, here is a list of all the organizations Revolver Ocelot has worked for in no particular order.  And yes, many of these organizations where opposed to the others on this list.  Dude wasn't loyal to anybody, except to Big Boss for no reason.

• The Philosophers
• CIA
• KGB
• GRU (that's basically just a different KGB).
• The Patriots
• Diamond Dogs
• FoxHound
• Sons of Big Boss
• Sons of Liberty
• Outer Heaven

So it makes some odd sort of Kojima sense that the Big Boss you play as isn't really Big Boss.  All the characters seem incomplete.  Even Eli (who the game desperately tries to red herring the player by saying his DNA does not match Big Boss's but it wouldn't because your not him so Eli is totally pre-teen Liquid Snake) has a grudge against you for no real reason.  How he knows who his father is (who actually isn't his father) is beyond me.  His kingdom of the flies gets taken away because he and his soldiers were child soldiers or were kind of allied to Skull Face.  So near the end of the game Eli STEALS the Metal Gear and fucks off to Outer Heaven I guess cause we never hear from Eli/Liquid Snake again until then.*

*There was supposed to be one final mission where Big Boss fights Eli in the Metal Gear and destroys it but Eli escapes with pre-teen Psycho Mantis.  This would have been a much better ending.

Not surprised this game found a way to shoehorn in Psycho Mantis.  

So having a body double is the meaning to the subtitle, The Phantom Pain.  But...is it?  Hideo Kojima said himself that the player would feel a lasting phantom pain from Skull Face's absence in the story early on (aaaaaand I can't find the source so, call this "hearsay").  Um...I guess?  Was there some early stuff that happened that I should have thought in hindsight, "Oh!  Did Skull Face do that?  That's amazing!"  Because if there was, I don't have the slightest clue what that could be.  

The phantom pain motif is only felt intentional in a few places.  One is the mission where you have to kill your own soldiers.  They get sick, are put into quarantine, you find a vaccine for those that haven't gotten sick but those already sick are doomed.  You get into the quarantine, it looks like a Raccoon City lab in Resident Evil, some soldiers are going mad murdering people, but most are just regular sick.  Only a few of them are a direct threat.  Some you shoot in their sleep.  Some take it like weird champs.  Others...well some even plead not to kill them.  I'm talking on their knees begging.  It's....a fucked up scene.  And, these are all soldiers you recruited kidnapped to join your cause so it's like actually destroying your inventory, but you know, with, people.  

It's also felt after finishing the last story mission about Quiet.  She leaves your squad...forever.  Also, the Paz sub-story is pretty heart wrenching but I didn't play Ground Zeroes so I dunno.  (Paz is just a figment of Big Boss's imagination in this game.  His lingering guilt over her death, so to speak).  

But what can't, I repeat, CAN NOT be intentional is the Phantom Pain I feel over this game and series as a whole.  This game makes me feel like I'm missing some "ah ha" moment where all this nonsense suddenly comes together.  If this franchise is basically about the life and death of Big Boss, how come I know so little about him?  (Or Zero for that matter?).  This game was supposed to fill in some much needed blanks and it did not deliver.  

Is....is The Phantom Pain a troll move by Kojima?  The meta plot twist of "we are all Big Boss" is a pretty trollish move.  Is Kojima thinking to himself, "Dude.  The fans of this series, I love you guys, but ya'll take this WAY too seriously."  The more I think about it, the more if feels like it is.  Fuck me right?

I still like the game as a whole.  I still like the franchise.  With this games troubled development, part of me can't help but wonder if this phantom pain after playing it is an accident.  Very little of this franchise seems accidental though.  Just the slight idea of the phantom pain I feel for this game might actually be intentional, a. blows my mind because I know I'm not alone and b. is ridiculous.  This is a game where I can make my horse poop on command, distract guards by wearing a cardboard box with a pin-up lady painted on it, and features a Skelator in a suit and cowboy hat who is perfectly fine with everyone calling him Skull Face. This shouldn't happen.

He looks like he should be hunting He-Man in the Wild West.  

There is....one last thing that might be intentional about this and it does hurt.  Everybody knows about the fall out between Kojima and Konami.  While "The Phantom Pain" was MGS5's subtitle for years, what if Kojima knew the end was coming.  It's reported that MGS5 is one of the most expensive games ever made, rumored to have been $80 million.  What if "The Phantom Pain' is knowing a franchise, with a 29 year long running continuity, has come to an end.  Metal Gear will continue to live on as pachinko machines and pachi slots, but the epic series is finally over.  Shitty ending or not, this is what we are left with.

The game actually started with a Nietzsche quote...

Tiny print.  It says, "Facts do no exist, there are only interpretations."

...and so too with the meaning behind The Phantom Pain.  

Or, Kojima is still trolling us.  Fuck me.  This game is for babies.  

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