Metal Gear Solid V - The Phantom Pain: The Definitive Review
[MGS MEME HERE]
It’s easy to drop film critic terminology into any serious discussions of videogames as authored texts, mostly due to our comprehensive failure to develop a specific lexicon for describing videogames as art. Therefore we fall, with an almost unconscious acquiescence, into the language that describes prior media. And hence, we bandy about terms like ‘auteur’ with quite some authority. But in a sense, it fits. Of the true greats, those few who really stand out as singularly artistic directors, one seems to occupy a certain pinnacle - a position where they can lay claim to having been there at the medium’s foundation, worked during its childhood and is still commanding creative control over huge budgets on cutting-edge hardware. And that’s Hideo Kojima. From 8-bit MSX through to PlayStation 5 and Series X, Kojima has most certainly fulfilled the classical auteur criteria. He ably wrangles the videogame to make comment on societal issues, plays with the medium, is an absolutely shameless expert at deploying and perverting references, and consistently expresses a kind of specific techno-fetishism that recurs time and time again in his mechanical designs with a quixotic eye for unseen details. Kojima is, of course, most famous for the Metal Gear games and for good reason - his authorial claim from Metal Gear Solid onward is demonstrably valid. He can claim directing credit across narrative, game design, audio choices and art direction. He is very much a director in a specifically Kubrickian sense, seemingly concerned with the deep mechanics of the medium and perhaps more interested in the visual representation of an unfolding story than the story itself. But Kojima excels in more than just creating a world and unfolding stories within it. He also is a superb game designer and this is demonstrated with thrilling verve in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
The Phantom Pain follows Kojima tradition by offering the kind of laughably bizarre and labyrinthine narratives of previous Metal Gear titles with a huge advance in the series’ generally excellent interactive design. It remains the very best open-world stealth game ever created, nearly nine years after release. Its core gameplay, a development from PlayStation Portable curio Peace Walker, was prototyped and previewed in Ground Zeroes to great effect. Phantom Pain is its beautifully expanded maturation. In many ways, the design is a summation of the entire Metal Gear project. Phantom Pain is an end result some thirty years in the making and yet it’s stricken with a kind of private internal trauma which elevates it far beyond anything that could be consciously planned. The real-world corporate drama between Kojima and Konami management burns a wild scar into the game’s structure. Players facing the demand, for no good reason whatsoever, to repeat most of the game’s story missions pushes a kind of virtual PTSD, forced to relive prior stressful events against their will. According to some, there’s an entire chapter of story missions missing, as evidenced by ghostly fingerprints data-mined out of the game's files. A mystery still not officially explained, it absolutely represents an abstracted kind of traumatic amputation. It’s quite remarkable that a game which plays so directly on the after-effects of warfare should suffer such a weirdly analogous trauma, and so evidently feel the echoes of its own phantom pains. What I find particularly mind-boggling is that no other game making any reference or comment on warfare will ever reach this surreal, absurdist height. But therein lies the remarkable romanticism that fuels the seductive Metal Gear charisma. The Phantom Pain’s personal trauma is an absurdist cherry atop the series’ cake of deliberate and playful surreallality.
Now, given Affectionate Discourse’s fundamentalist stance on gameplay over narrative, the championing of The Phantom Pain might seem a bit odd given Kojima’s fame (or infamy) when it comes to how much he fucking loves a story. But the fascinating thing here is that Hideo made the story - or large parts of it - essentially optional by introducing cutscene skipping as early as the original Metal Gear Solid, meaning that with The Phantom Pain, narrative intrusion is kept to a nice minimum. As you can imagine, I have absolutely no idea about the plots for all the Metal Gear Solid games but on actually paying attention to what unfolds, I struggle to believe that Kojima has ever been entirely serious. Given the degree of sophisticated thinking involved in the interactive designs, I find it easier to read stories like Guns of the Patriots and The Phantom Pain as self-parody, Snake Eater as referential celebration, Sons of Liberty as action tribute or turn-of-the-millennium hyper-prescient, Kurzweilian doomcasting. I really can’t read them as some earnest attempt at cinematic fiction1. They’re too obviously, consciously silly. The games have an inflated pomposity that they’re all too happy to pop all by themselves and deliberately so. In effect, the games are ultimately dark comedies, and the gameplay itself has always enjoyed a strong comedic element2. What I find more fascinating is Kojima’s deployment of reference. Instead of appropriating other media to re-tool as narrative or gameplay content, Kojima seems more interested in using reference as a means of contextualising his ideas or simply introducing that other-media content to players who may not share the same reference base. This is demonstrated quite emphatically with Snake himself. Clearly taken from Escape From New York, right down to the eyepatch, the Snake of the early Metal Gear titles through to Metal Gear Solid can be seen as the same pre-criminal Snake that flew the Gullfire over Leningrad3. Dutiful, reverent of the military chain of command but nonetheless morally independent. Of course, when Raiden meets Snake at Big Shell, Snake calls himself Plissken, making the reference as explicit as possible4. It’s a shamelessness derived not from some wild egotism, but from a deep love of cinema and, I suspect, a desire to simply share. But that lack of shame isn’t confined to the use of reference or delivering outrageously absurd stories with deadly seriousness. It’s in the fundamental disposition of the games themselves. They’re never ashamed of what they are, or of explicitly pointing this out within the formal gameplay and narrative structures.
One hallmark of Hideo Kojima’s qualification as a ‘genius’ is in the clear depth and laterality of his thinking. Metal Gear Solid’s controller port swap to prevent Psycho Mantis from reading Snake’s mind is perhaps the most obvious. It’s breathtakingly superb. To include the external hardware, the bridge to controlling Snake, within the game fiction as a bridge to the player’s perception of their own place and agency within that gameworld is an astonishing concept today, let alone 30 years ago5. Likewise, the breakdowns towards the end of Raiden’s journey in Sons of Liberty, its AI-wigout glitches showing MSX footage, couldn’t be more explicit about revealing and revelling in the artifice of the videogame in play. Metal Gear Solid continually delights in being absurdly unreal in the manner that videogames so commonly simply are by default, only instead of asking us to ignore or forgive that unreality as so many games do, Metal Gear Solid excels at celebrating it. It always amazes me when people accuse Kojima of being a frustrated film director when his games are so happy to exist as videogames6 and his sense for interactive design is so sophisticated that The Phantom Pain remains absolutely peerless in its field. But deeper still, you can look at the run of Metal Gear Solid games and tease out the themes about warfare that exist within the interactive design, and often independently of the narrative content. I’m thinking here of Snake Eater’s play with camouflage, bare-bones survival and its thematic emphasis on hand-to-hand combat, stripping the soldier of all but its corporeal weaponry. Phantom Pain grows into a comment on the economic functions of warfare as the game undergoes a spectacular metamorphosis that utterly ignores the superficial narrative of skull-faced villains and genocidal parasites spun over the top of it all.
Of course, not everything is rosy in Kojima’s Metal Gear universe as one thorny issue looms large as an ever-present constant: his depiction of women. Frequently terrible in a steadfastly traditionalist mode, Kojima’s women often fall into one of two stereotypes - sexualised superheroines or precious victims. Those superheroines exist in the Cameron mode of Sarah Connor or Aliens era Vasquez and Ripley hybrids, with more than a touch of masculine condescension and objectification. I’m always reminded of Olga’s armpit hair as a kind of fetishistic locus that chimes with Julia Roberts daring to expose entirely natural pits on some red carpet or other. The Phantom Pain’s Quiet is a jaw-dropping example, especially given Kojima’s tweets on the subject during a particularly heated era of GamerGate-poisoned gender politicking. But at the same time, and really not wanting to engage in dismissive apologia, I don’t feel I can go too hard on the critique when Kojima comes from a non-Western culture. One has to wonder how much mirroring is happening as opposed to upholding Western patriarchal modes of representation, and without having played Death Stranding I can’t really comment if his stance has improved at all. I would, however, say that someone that’s this seemingly intelligent and seemingly sensitive in so many other ways should really be turning his back on discredited and worn-out stereotypes and should adopt more progressive attitudes. Especially when I think of Peace Walker’s Paz and her journey from freedom fighting secret agent to transactional vessel for sexual violence in Ground Zeroes to literal shattered-doll hypervictim with explosive uterus etc in Phantom Pain, a narrative arc I can offer absolutely no defence for whatsoever, other than perhaps some attempt to traumatise the player with unbelievable tastelessness. Likewise, we can perhaps condemn Kojima’s gentle politics of representation by simple inclusion with topics like cultural genocide and child soldiers in Phantom Pain. Though to be honest, his handling of those seems a bit more nuanced and thoughtful than outright moral sledgehammers like Spec Ops - The Line or Bethesda’s occluded and forced moral dilemmas.
Naturally, you’re probably wondering when I’m going to get to what I really love and most admire about The Phantom Pain and to be perfectly honest, I wrote all of the above to get it out of the way for a clear run to the finish. I’ve already stated that this is the greatest open-world stealth game of all time - and the qualifier here is open-world. Kojima’s arc of design from Metal Gear Solid onward has been one of continual progression. I’d argue there’s a bit of a stall with Guns of the Patriots, where aside Drebin’s gun shop there’s little change over Snake Eater, but there is a definite line of increasing complexity that progressively adds more and more detail to the overall simulation within the family’s sequels. It strikes me as incredibly bold on Kojima’s part that, having already been drawn into reluctantly making a fourth game, he decided to transplant an essentially bite-sized set-piece experience into two open world maps for the series’ crowning achievement. But this remarkably risky endeavour is a colossal success. And of course, it’s successful because of that Kojima quality of deep thinking about the simulation in play. Metal Gear Solid has always rewarded the inquisitive and improvisationally-bold. I remember much hilarity in doing chin-ups or collecting dog tags in Sons of Liberty and we’re all well aware of changing the system clock to bring about The End’s demise in Snake Eater. But when you go FAQ-digging in any Metal Gear Solid, it throws up a wealth of layers of great stuff to discover. If anything, Kojima is a hugely generous game designer, implementing and balancing layers and layers of additional simulation for those with the initiative to find and exploit them. I recall finding out that you can directly affect enemy troops in Snake Eater by blowing up their armouries and food supplies if their map segment has them, something that no other game would even bother to think of. And so, when it comes to the two open-world maps of Phantom Pain, we find that philosophy implemented in full. One of the greatest innovations in a tactical sense was Phantom Pain’s affordance of pre-planning your attack for formal missions. If you knew where it took place, you could go there in advance and not only perform proper recon, but actively sabotage the facilities to make the mission easier. Taking out AA, disabling the alarm and so on. And of course, the game bites back. Too many headshots and soldiers start wearing armoured helmets. Inexplicably, this is still unique to The Phantom Pain. Take one look at the vapid lack of pre-planning in Ubisoft’s combat open-worlders released since Metal Gear Solid V and you have to wonder if Ubisoft just doesn’t care in a way that Kojima always has. But then this idea of pre-affecting mission outcomes isn’t the only mark of innovation and genius in The Phantom Pain. There’s also the Fultons.
In Richard Stanton’s Phantom Pain review on Eurogamer, he mentions the bridge installation in the Afghanistan map as being emblematic of the game’s overall quality. The range of tactical approaches it offers is broad and deep, but one of the great things about it is how you can fully observe it from a couple of vantage points and get a view of every soldier manning the place. I’ll elaborate on the value of this shortly, but what that bridge represents is a perfect mini-arena for tactical stealth action that can be approached in certain missions and in open-world roaming for plenty of reward. The fact that Kojima took the instanced set-piece environments of prior Metal Gear Solid formalism and arrayed them as landmarks within an open world is an obvious, logical expansion but it’s also an absolutely correct one. Both maps are filled with great stealth battlefields for personal challenges and just that alone would make the game one of the best in breed but the magic difference comes when you develop the Fulton Recovery System and the real meat of running a mercenary operation. I particularly loved the background activities of The Phantom Pain, particularly developing Mother Base and running the staffing, doing research, the combat deployments and so on. This metagame, almost totally independent of the formal story, is the greatest shell for open-world stealthing that I have ever seen. It just works so beautifully and once you’ve developed the Fultons, your view of the battlefield changes in a remarkable inversion. Because the Fultons allow you to steal, adversaries suddenly become assets to acquire and this fundamentally alters your approach. It’s a stunningly good idea, particularly in curtailing the bloodthirstier instincts you can develop in a game such as this, particularly in the way that loud and dirty can get jobs done a lot quicker than stealthy and clean approaches. That’s not to ignore Kojima’s deliberate disapproval of murderous players - Snake’s head gains an ever-growing bloody horn the more he kills. But with the Fultons and Mother Base, you have a pragmatic reason to keep people alive. And hence the bridge Richard Stanton mentioned - it was here that I got my first S-rank scientist, which made quite an improvement in my research capabilities. And thus, the metagame absolutely explodes. Each one of those installations is now an opportunity to farm, to improve your base, to grow your mercenary income. You can spend hours just out in the world, hunting for high-rank staff or stealing vehicles. There’s a unique joy in nabbing not just soldiers but the shipping containers of riches they were guarding, or in preserving a tank so it can be Fultoned, then assigning it to a Combat Deployment mission to earn even more money. The interaction here between a player asset - the base and its business - and the open world’s environment and challenges is wonderfully harmonious, particularly given the brilliance of the combat system. With its huge array of arms, explosives, gadgets, the driveable vehicles, the static weaponry, callable artillery7 and even good old QCB, the combat toybox is, once again, the fucking best there is. There’s a great set of side missions to find and kidnap and expert gunsmith that, guess what, ends up with you developing completely bespoke weapons that are fucking great. It’s all such brilliant game design, such valuable content. And that’s before you consider the buddy system (Diamond Doggy forever) or the entire animal conservation sub-game. It’s just so full of possibility and exploration of so many systems and tools, I’m seriously considering restarting from scratch. But then, of course, I’d lose all the progress I’ve made in building an all-female, all-S-rank Combat Deployment team because of course the game lets you play as the soldiers you’ve kidnapped and upgrade their stats. Yes, it really is that good.
If Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain represents anything, it’s the idea that videogames should progress in sophistication and interactive complexity over time. The Metal Gear series demonstrates this so adroitly, with such confidence and generosity that it really does stand out far beyond its peers - and in many ways, beyond the stealth-ops genre. Kojima never let it down, even though his relationship with it has obviously waxed and waned over each iteration and yet, despite its wounds and unsatisfactory conclusion for the whole Metal Gear saga, The Phantom Pain is a triumph of 21st-century videogame design and production. Another aspect to think about is that by writing ludicrous action film plots that manage to reference plenty of real-world seriousness, Kojima gets you thinking by mere association. It’s as if his wild, fanciful narratives are some distraction for the ego, allowing the id to really get to grips with ideas about combat, duty, warfare, militarisation, politics, power and so on. For example, the generational dread of nuclear armageddon that haunts the Metal Gear series comes to a kind of solution in Phantom Pain’s disarmament event8, something that was probably never going to happen organically but nonetheless was in there as an appeal to hope. It’s implemented as an idea, as something to work towards, should all the players care enough to make it happen. Again, I just don’t think there’s anybody else working in the top-line AAA space that thinks like that at all, yet alone implement such redundancy into the game. It has a full cutscene, so that feature absolutely carries a monetary cost and yet Kojima deemed it necessary to include. For my sins, I’ve not played Death Stranding. I have a sealed PlayStation 4 copy on my shelf, awaiting a crippling back injury or possible terminal diagnosis before I give it a go. I have a reverent sense of needing to give it all the time it deserves. It seems fitting somehow, with its post-apocalyptic setting and sense of windswept isolation while making links between sanctuaries. But again, whoever expected anyone to take the idea of a walking simulator so seriously and deliver something so visually poignant and beautiful in the process? I’m really quite serious when I think of Hideo Kojima as videogaming’s Kubrick. The similarities are so strong - the remarkable technical accomplishments, the odd interfacing with humanity, the theming and deeper intellectual stirring he inspires without demanding or broadcasting it, the peerless dedication to detailed craft, the obsessional perfectionism, the appalling treatment of women9. Despite that major blot on the record, Hideo Kojima, perhaps more than anyone, represents the best that the videogame industry can offer. His work really is that good in my opinion. I mean, anyone who can make a game called Ground Zeroes and set in the actual Guantanamo Bay and yet never reference 9/11 or Iraq, or the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, is definitely saying something about those topics without having to rely on the obtuse literalism we find elsewhere in videogames trying to make serious statements10. Instead, it’s in the bolts driven into Chico’s ankles. The body horror alone is enough, but the political intent is much more forceful in Kojima’s microcosmic interrogation of politically-mandated inhumanity. And all as a fucking preview prologue for big fancy-ass blockbuster game, nonetheless! I really can’t wait to see what Hideo’s next game will be. To return to the stealth genre but completely free of the Metal Gear Solid baggage is tantalising in the extreme. But still it’s The Phantom Pain I have the most fondest emotions for. Much more than the nostalgic pangs from Metal Gear Solid and its immediate PlayStation 2 sequels. To reduce all this to one line, if you love videogames for the way they play instead of the stories they tell then of all the Metal Gears, the Phantom Pain is much more than the last. It’s the best of us.
[21]
I knew a narrative designer that flatly refused to talk about Kojima and Metal Gear Solid stories because it all just enraged him so much.
I mean, the cardboard boxes, right? It's always been played for laughs - and wonderfully so. There's always a superb eye for slapstick, which is perhaps both the most universal and purest form of comedy.
Kojima did, in fact, (ghost)write a column about how much he loved Escape From New York and the impact Russell and Carpenter's Snake Plissken had on a teenage Hideo.
More interestingly, rather than placing Lee Van Cleef as Snake's boss into the MGS universe, Kojima instead directly references Richard Crenna's Colonel Trautman from Rambo to provide an avatar for Snake’s commanding officer, Roy Campbell (also a Colonel). The reasoning is clear - Trautman is almost a parental, guiding, caring figure for John Rambo rather than Van Cleef's pragmatic taskmaster. Van Cleef doesn't go to waste, of course. Ocelot recalls a lot of Van Cleef iconography and by Phantom Pain, has morphed into a hybrid of Lee Van Cleef and John Carpenter himself!
Something I meant to add as a proper paragraph and forgot about was the genius move of making Snake a different person in nearly every post-MGS game. This playing with identity not only genius-steals from James Bond but also frees Kojima to construct narratives for the player as he sees fit, being much less bound to series history.
I think the most emphatic demonstration for this is, of course, the ‘!’ and its attendant sound effect. Nothing could be more artificial and videogame-esque. An overlay of simulation over a purported reality. No wonder it’s such a wonderfully reductive, minimalist symbol of the entire series.
Very easy for forget about, but astonishingly useful. It costs you mission ratings to use (as well as money) but when you have to kidnap one dude out of a crowd of 15, bombarding the lot with sleeping gas shells with a single phone call is blissful shit. As was dealing with desperately annoying story mission enemies with a few rounds of high-explosive.
Players were able to develop nuclear weapons for their Mother Base and the adversarial FOB invasion multiplayer allowed you to steal said nuclear warheads. Kojima implemented an achievement that would only be awarded if all players deleted their nuclear weapons. It was, farcically, accidentally triggered and reversed by Konami and then eventually activated by a hacker, apparently?!?!?
Lolita is fucking icky, I feel bad for Nicole Kidman's exploitation but oh my god how the fuck do you justify what he did to Shelley Duvall?
One last footnote to add is that Kojima fills the Metal Gear Solids with so much content without explicit explanation that they’re an absolute joy to close read. There’s an incredible textural richness in each one that you can opine on all manner of themes, symbols, inferences etc. Pretension overload for pseuds of all flavours. A rare and terribly valuable delight.