This is my least favorite of all the numbered MGS games. I wrote a rather long piece about it last year.
I liked the series more before it went by the tagline "Tactical Espionage Operations". I don't want to manage a base and do a bunch of filler missions with forgettable scenarios in needlessly spacious environments. There are so many empty valleys and twisting canyons that are a drag to travel through over and over. I did like some of the open battles, me sneakily flanking the tank patrols and surprising them. But so much time is just spent moving from point A to point B and waiting for the helicopter to land. I'm also sick of having upgrades in pretty much every game now, turning it all into a grind. I want to procure items and supplies on site, like in the old games, and survive in a hostile setting for a night (MGS1), a day (MGS2) or several days (MGS3), instead of being able to leave whenever it gets boring. I would have preferred one big base with surrounding wildlife and outposts in an open world MGS. The mission structure, the micromanagement and all that stuff just drags out the experience. There's no reason the upgrades should take so long to finish processing.
The mechanics are worse than in MGS4, in my opinion. I don't like the automatic cover system, the way it alters the camera slightly and changes Snake's position with a slow animation every time you go near an object. Despite having so many weapons to choose from, it has less weapon customization than MGS4. It also has fewer CQC options. Why does Snake not have a knife anymore? What kind of a soldier is he? I need to be able to kill unconscious enemies when extracting them is not an option. You have to wake them up again or waste a bullet and possibly degrade your suppressor. The gameplay of the series became less interesting as it transitioned more and more to a third-person shooter. Gunning down a whole base of soldiers is often easier than sneaking deep into dangerous areas, where they can surround you and do more damage when your stealth is blown. The tight, multi-level environments were more geared towards stealth than the open bases and valleys of MGSV. Soldiers are farther spread apart. One change I liked is being able to exchange any gun you see in the environment for the three you see on your person.
I also find the permanent blood on Snake annoying. All the blood is overdone. You kill an enemy or two and Snake is a bloody mess until it rains. You kill enemies continuously and the blood doesn't wash off anymore. Making him clean and pure again requires so much effort that I resorted to playing as other soldiers. Pacifism in games is illogical. You're a soldier. It's what you were trained for. It's survival.
The lack of bosses also hurts the game a lot.
Dropping the codec conversations and cutscenes in favor of audio logs has hurt the story. I don't think you need cutscenes or any dialogue to tell stories in games, but the thick narrative of MGS has always depended on them. Listening to tapes from the past isn't as interesting as engaging in the story and seeing those characters. I don't want to be doing that when I'm playing the game. It's like a movie with almost no footage. Snake's silence makes scenes awkward. The opening is too long, involving too much crawling and forced walking, and needing to be repeated later.
I dislike where they've taken the story over the years. They took the mysticism out of Big Boss's character and made The Boss less special by bringing her back in the form of a futuristic AI. It got more far-fetched and stupid as they released prequel after pointless prequel, featuring better and better tech (like futuristic drones, power suits, holograms and cybernetic arms, as well as telling us that Otacon's optic stealth camo existed forty years before he designed it), making connections between characters (like Otacon's father working for Big Boss, which, to be fair, isn't as silly as the explanations and relations made by MGS4) and invalidating the first Metal Gears by showing that there were several before, just as threatening and even more advanced, starting with the Shagohod and continuing into the '70s and '80s, long before Solid Snake learned about them. But at least the Shagohod was technologically inferior. Prequels in general blow. As the producer of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back said, prequels box in the story and make the writers back in to material they already covered. I would have preferred a sequel to MGS4, with a new character and new technology. MGS3 ended perfectly. There was no reason to continue Big Boss's story. Sequels would have been a better use of Kojima Productions' remaining time than prequels that retcon the fuck out of the series and make the old games less legitimate. But I know the prequels were inevitable, for Big Boss became a god to fans with MGS3.
So yeah, MGS4 should have had a sequel instead of another prequel. And Metal Gear Rising isn't that sequel. It's not an MGS game. Etsu Tamari had no prior writing credits, from what I can find. Hire someone with experience to write the sequel, MGS5. Cyborg Raiden is also a bad character, which is where more of the problems with Rising come from. A stealth sequel wouldn't be about him, since he's more of an action character now. I don't even remember the story of MGR. The MGS4 sequel could have been about a group exploiting the power vacuum created by the defeat of the Patriots. It's silly to think the world will remain at peace. Removing the Patriots and having no plan in place for afterwards would create chaos, especially with all those PMCs no longer being controlled and drugged. The sequel would have featured human as well as robotic opponents, similar to the ones in the Shadow Moses chapter of MGS4.
I still thought it was good in spite of all that, but it's not a game I can play over and over like the old ones. I may never replay MGSV and Peace Walker.
Tactical Espionage Operations < Tactical Espionage Action
