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Hideo Kojima's name may not be on Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain's marketing, but it's all over the game. Every mission opens with a credits sequence overlaying its intro with Kojima's name popping up at least once once each time. Perhaps it's a jab at Konami, though maybe it's the sort of ego-stroking flourish his employers grew weary of. Regardless of your take on the corporate domestic dispute, the message is clear: with The Phantom Pain we're clearly back in Kojima town.And I, for one, couldn't be happier. Last year Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes gave us a look at how an open-world Metal Gear Solid would work, and so the moment to moment feel of infiltration, scouting and action shouldn't come as a surprise to fans, but its opening hour will. Without going into spoilers, I can say that it's no more interactive than the prologue to The Last of Us, only - in true Kojima form - it's about four times longer than Naughty Dog's harrowing opening.
Limiting the player to camera control and sluggish character movement for such a long time sounds like it would be boring - and indeed it may upon replaying - but it's a testament to Kojima's abilities as a pseudo-filmmaker that this peculiar prologue is never, ever dull. It doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense at first - nor does it 15 hours later, for that matter - but it's intentionally abstract in a way that makes it almost as bewildering for series veterans as it is for newcomers.
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