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There's a lot of reasons to be disappointed in Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain's conclusion. In many ways, the game feels blatantly unfinished with plenty of plot threads left dangling and a twist that's haphazardly introduced when the game's final mission seemingly arbitrarily gets added to your docket. But one reason lots of fans are crying foul of Konami is because The Phantom Pain doesn't concretely complete Snake/Big Boss's arch into infamy.This was supposed to be the story of a good man turning into a villain; Kojima's Revenge of the Sith, in other words. Instead, we spend dozens of hours watching the iconic character face off against a cartoon antagonist named Skull Face with a hilariously Kojima super villain plot (I think after 28 years of Metal Gear Kojima has earned the right for his name to be used as an adjective). If you were new to the series, you might not know that you're supposed to be an anti-hero at all.
This, incidentally, is my favourite aspect of The Phantom Pain's storytelling. You're playing as an insane war criminal, yet the game treats him like a brooding hero. This could be an accident, of course. After all, lots of video games inadvertently romanticise war, a concept succinctly mocked by video game scholar Ian Bogost in a New York Times article from 2010 where he said the theme behind most military shooters is that "war is horrible and badass."
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