Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain is the last Metal Gear game made by Kojima and his production team. This game has been subject to many divided reviews from fans, with the main criticisms being the story, the lack of chapter 3 or the empty open world. I will go into detail on this.
(SPOILER WARNING) The Story and characters - So 9 years after Ground Zeroes, Snake wakes up in a hospital in Cyprus with a lost arm and a piece of shrapnel in his head. A few hours later, a female agent who would later on be known as Quiet, would attack the doctors and try to kill Snake, only to be saved by a mysterious person. They escape the hospital and Ocelot saves Snake and at that point is where the story unfolds. Personally, I think the story in this game is ok at best. While it's not a great story later on down the line, it does have it's epic/emotional moments. These include when Quiet beats the shit out of the soldiers, Huey killing Skullface and shouting "REVENGE!!", Quiet's entry into Mother Base, Quiet leaving after Mission 45 and the infamous meme cutscenes in Mission 30 consisting of the awkward jeep ride and when Skullface shouts "Such a lust for revenge... WHOOOOOOOOOO?!" This game also introduces my all-time favourite Metal Gear character: Quiet (thanks Stefanie Joosten!)
One thing I didn't like about certain characters is that Skullface deteriorated from a potentially epic villain in Ground Zeroes to a meme-tier character in this game. Also, I didn't like how Ocelot was made the voice of reason in this game when he's a sadist in the other games, but I can't fault the VA for this. Also Chapter 2 in general for me was a mess
The gameplay - The gameplay is one of the highlights of this game. The controls are amazing as well as the re-addition of fultoning allows for me to unleash my inner Fulton crazy self. There's a shit ton of weapons and items I can develop and use them in missions as well as the addition of buddies who while they make the game easier, also make the game a lot of fun. I cannot begin to gush at how amazing this game plays. This for me in terms of controls is how a Metal Gear game should play. I mean 4 and Peace Walker were close, but this game nails it.
Like Peace Walker, TPP allows you to create items and weapons to use on missions. The only difference is that these take place in real time instead of during missions. Same goes for making more FOBs and expanding Mother Base. To speed up the process for making these, you can use an in-game currency called MB Coins. You can purchase more via micro-transactions, but I don't do that as I don't support that in a game. I kinda like this, as I can just develop a couple of items over time while I'm playing the game.
The missions - To be honest with you, most of the missions I feel get repetitive in terms of the objective after a while. It's mostly pick up X object, extract this prisoner, eliminate that person and so on. And don't get me started on Chapter 2. That whole "recycling previous missions on a higher difficulty to extend time" idea was dumb. There were only like 5 or 6 missions that did anything to the story, with the rest being pointless distractions. Getting S ranks on missions feels a little easier as all you have to do for the most part is go fast like its a Sonic game, but some missions were either difficult for me or I couldn't be asked to do so. Some of the missions were fun, like Mission 21 because of how EZ it was and any mission which required me to blow shit up for some extra GMP or to protect Quiet.
Also might I add that I'm not a fan of the empty open world in this game. While it was good for Metal Gear to try the open world aspect, it kinda fell flat with the fact that there's nothing to it besides some animals and a few guard posts.
The boss fights (or the lack thereof) are a complete joke compared to previous Metal Gear games, which was disappointing. Even the Mario games had more complicated and tougher boss fights. I didn't like most of them apart from Quiet and Salehanthropus, because ya know, fighting a giant Gundam-like robot was awesome!
Metal Gear Online 3 - So MGO3 has been getting a lot of negativity since its release for not living up to MGO1 and 2's standards. Coming from a person who never played MGO3, at first I thought it was pretty bad for my first MGO game experience. I played the new update and I can say it got a little better but not fully up to scratch. But I predict by the time Konami fully get this up to scratch, it'll be too late for them. MGO3 leaves a lot to be desired. Laggy matches, people teleporting everywhere and CQCing me and a lack of content is the biggest issues with this installment of MGO.
Now let's talk about the unfinished content stuff in this game. So it was said last year that some data miners found a Chapter 3 along with unreleased footage was found in this game. This was a main subject of controversy because it shows that the game was unfinished upon release. I honestly do not care about Chapter 3. I was pretty satisfied with the ending of Chapter 2, despite how abrupt it was. I doubt Konami will release Chapter 3 and even if they did, I honestly wouldn't play it.
Here is said mission shown in this link: Metal Gear Solid V - Mission 51
Overall, I loved The Phantom Pain from beginning to end, despite it's shortcomings. Kojima and the production team deserve a round of applause for giving us the last epic title in the Metal Gear franchise, before Konami take over and do god knows whatever to it. Probably make an "erotic violence" pachinko machine out of it lol.
