Suskie's Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain review

I mostly agree. I mean I absolutely love the game, but I'm kinda surprised by the extremely positive reviews when Chapter 2 detracted so much from the game. I spent 35+ hours on chapter 1 and then there was like 7 hours of padding before the finales for Quiet and "The Truth." There's like what 3-4 new missions that heavily reused assets from previous chapters and you're forced to either spam Side Ops or play through extremely difficult variants of older missions to progress. And then good god Quiet's mission was horribly frustrating and the final mission forces you to essentially replay a tutorial. It's frustrating because this more than likely Konami's fault and not Kojima's. If MGSV had 6-12 more months of development, it probably would have been the best game of this gen. Also it would have been nice if 90% of the story wasn't told through audio logs.

I don't really care for the story in these games. I just want to Fulton soldiers and develop state-of-the-art cardboard box technology.

You never have to play the hard rehash missions. They are 100% optional.

If you don't do at least 1 hard mission, you have to do 3 Side Ops to trigger the next story mission in Chapter 2 each time. It feels forced either way.

Doing three Side Ops in place of a "Hard Mode" mission doesn't seem unreasonable. Sounds kind of like the Radiant Quest system in some of the Skyrim quest lines. It also sounds similar to final chapter of Peace Walker, where you had to complete two Main or Extra Ops to trigger the next plot mission.

The game, to my knowledge, doesn't specify how to unlock the final story missions, which is the point I was making in my review -- it's bad enough that the plot ends so poorly, but to hide what feels like a half dozen non-endings behind increasingly vague prerequisites totally hampers the pacing.

Genj, I do wonder somewhat how many early reviewers were burdened with time constraints, since I've heard reports that Konami's "review event" consisted of four eight-hour sessions. And yeah, if I'd had to write a review after 32 hours (compared to the over a hundred I've currently logged), I'd be screaming GOTY, too.

Just finally got around to reading this. Certainly a review that dives deep into the inner workings of its mechanics, and does so without losing focus. That prisoner search mission was also one of the more memorable moments in my playthrough, simply because I poked through every corner and sometimes panicking just to find said person. As for Eli, he was an "Oh, neat!" moment at first, but quickly became an annoyance when the game kept focusing on him later on. It felt too much like fanservice. The wrong kind. Really cool read.