Tweet
Metal Gear Solid games have often had a tension running through them - between the player and their purpose in the sublime Sons of Liberty, or between the mechanics and the cinematic pretensions in the ridiculous Guns of the Patriots. Phantom Pain, which still stands with the benefit of a few month's hindsight as the greatest Metal Gear Solid of them all, is riddled with a different kind of tension. It may well be a tension that's existed in the series' past, but it's the first time it's made itself known so explicitly in-game. Metal Gear Solid 5: Phantom Pain is the troubled child of a strained relationship, the rift that so famously opened between creator Hideo Kojima and Konami running a line through its rangy open world. It's a game that soars with ambition, yet has its flight cut short, one that delivers delicious open-ended epic action then falls spectacularly flat in its final moments. It's a project started with the best intentions, but one that was never quite finished. It says much about the quality of what Kojima Productions achieved with its inspired retooling of its series that, despite its many problems, still emerges as an absolute masterpiece.
As a reinvention of Metal Gear Solid as an open world game, it's utterly triumphant. Infiltrating an Afghanistan base under cover of night, you get the sense that it was all building up to this, threads started on Shadow Moses, on Big Shell and in the jungles of Tselinoyarsk all coming together in the perfectly weighted movement of Snake, the assortment of hardware at your disposal and the systems that run impossibly deep. Each game in the series, from 1987's Metal Gear through to 2010's Peace Walker, feels like a step towards this ultimate goal.
Read more…
More...