Metal Gear Solid V is a stellar game, with top-notch stealth action and a malleable world that leads to all sorts of memorable moments. Too bad the ending is such a mess.
As I explained in my review — which you can read here — the latest Metal Gear Solid is saddled with incomprehensible characters and an unsatisfying, unfinished story. But it’s not just that. The game’s finale is truly absurd, even by Metal Gear standards, and the more you think about it, the less it makes sense.
Spoilers incoming. Now’s your chance to bail if you don’t want to read about the ending.
SPOILER WARNING: DON’T SCROLL PAST THE DOG UNLESS YOU’VE BEATEN METAL GEAR SOLID V
In true Kojima style, Metal Gear Solid V ends with a mindblowing twist: Turns out you weren’t actually playing as Big Boss! As the opening hospital scene hinted, your character was just a decoy, installed as leader of Mother Base to protect the real Big Boss, who got to ride off on a motorbike and do peyote in New Mexico for a while. Somehow, thanks to plastic surgery and, uh, nanomachines?, Zero and Miller were able to transform that random medic from Ground Zeroes into someone with the face, build, memories, and skills of the world’s most legendary soldier.
Scrutinised in a vacuum, this twist is kind of neat — turns out the “legend” of Big Boss had always trumped the man himself — but the harder you think, the more it unravels, leading to all sorts of questions with no clear answers. For example: If Zero can use hypnotherapy to transform a random medic into a supersoldier on par with Big Boss, why didn’t he do it to other people? Why even bother with the Les Enfants Terribles cloning project? And how exactly does hypnotherapy infuse someone with all of someone’s memories?
Speaking of unanswered questions: Why do we never get to see the after-effects of Venom Snake’s big revelation? Why does Ocelot feel like such a different person in MGSV? Why is Miller so evil? Why is Skull Face’s motivation so flimsy, and just what was he doing behind-the-scenes during Operation Snake Eater? What was up with Snake not saying a word during that giant monologue/musical interlude? What happened to the Camp Omega return that Kojima promised last year? What’s the deal with the Third Child? Is he really Psycho Mantis? Where did Eli and Sahelanthropus go? (Oh, right, that part wasn’t finished.)
But forget about all that for a few minutes. Let’s talk about the biggest problem with Metal Gear Solid V‘s ending.
If you have completed The Phantom Pain, you will no doubt remember Mission 43. It’s the one called ‘Shining Lights, Even In Death.’ In this mission, you find out that there’s been a new outbreak of deadly vocal parasites at Mother Base, and that the victims have been quarantined. You — Venom Snake — have to go into the medical platform and figure out what’s happening. As you explore the quarantine zone — which is scary and evocative in all the best ways — you gradually realise that you’re going to have to kill anyone who’s infected. You’re going to have to murder your own troops.
As you proceed, you’re given a pair of night-vision goggles that can detect infections in soldiers, giving you the hope that maybe some of them aren’t actually infected. This, of course, is Kojima fucking with you: Every single one of them is infected. You have to shoot them all, one by one, cringing as the game tells you you’re losing points because your goddamn soldiers are dying. Occasionally their names pop up, reminding you that you recruited and may have even used these men and women in the field, and now you have to murder them. It’s the best mission in the game and it makes for one serious punch in the gut.
Metal Gear Solid V was always supposed to be the missing link in the series, the game that explains how Big Boss transformed from the heroic, idealistic soldier of MGS3 to the big bad villain of the first Metal Gear. As I played through Mission 43, it felt like I was watching that evolution. Here, punctuated by Huey’s screams of disbelief, we got to watch Big Boss transform from inspiring leader to cold-blooded murderer. It was a harrowing experience that, like the microwave hallway of Metal Gear Solid 4, worked best because I was playing it.
Then… well, then it turns out Huey — the only person who dared call out Snake for killing his own soldiers — actually caused the epidemic in the first place, which throws off his whole moral high ground thing. Snake does all the right things: He turns the dead troops’ ashes into diamonds, exiles Huey, and finds out that oh yeah, he’s not actually Big Boss. And then the game ends.
Turns out that while we thought we were experiencing Big Boss’s revenge-driven evolution from noble soldier to misguided villain, we were actually watching someone else entirely, which seriously cheapens the emotional effects of Mission 43 and just about everything else you do in The Phantom Pain. All those uncomfortable torture scenes and terrible decisions, like building a big, loyalty-free army and bringing a Metal Gear back to Mother Base? They had nothing to do with Big Boss.
And besides, the more you think about it, the more you realise that Ocelot and Miller were the real dicks in The Phantom Pain, torturing everyone and trying to convince Snake to murder the likes of Quiet and Huey. Venom Snake was actually… kind of a nice guy. We see him get angry and break a mirror after his whole identity crisis deal, but we never see the effects of that revelation, and we never really see him turn all that evil.
So. When the game ends, we’re greeted with a big timeline explaining that in the first Metal Gear, the villain was actually Venom, aka Phantom Big Boss. But it’s never made clear just how or why he became that villain, building weapons of mass destruction in hopes of dominating the world. (Big Boss in the first Metal Gear, you may remember, was pretty damn evil.)
In the second Metal Gear, the bad guy was Real Big Boss. Also evil. And because we know nothing about where he went or what he did while Venom was building Mother Base, his motivations also remain unclear. In cassette tapes, both Big Boss and Zero talk about realising The Boss’s vision of a nation of soldiers without borders, but it remains ambiguous how that vision translated to “let’s build nukes and murder people and maybe take over the world!”
It’s all very messy and muddled, even by Metal Gear Solid standards, and it’s cheapened by a twist that seems to exist only to shock people. Not that it did a very good job there — The Phantom Pain‘s trailers have been full of spoilers; the prologue signals pretty heavily that Ishmael is the real Big Boss; and fans had predicted Venom’s true identity since they discovered that Kiefer Sutherland voiced the medic in Ground Zeroes. Hell, the reveal trailer for Metal Gear Solid V opened with Kaz in the hospital asking, “What about him?”
Even if Chapter 2 of The Phantom Pain didn’t feel so incomplete, and even if it didn’t seem like we were missing half the story here, the Phantom Big Boss twist would still cheapen everything we did in the game. Which is too bad, because the gameplay is so excellent that I’d thoroughly recommend Metal Gear Solid V to just about anyone. And I was really looking forward to seeing how Big Boss became Big Boss. Instead, much like Kojima’s relationship with Konami, it seems like Metal Gear Solid will end on a sour note.
Comments
18 responses to “Why Metal Gear Solid V’s Ending Is So Disappointing”
And this is why the first and second Metal Gear need some sort of re-envisioning for the modern day, to finish the story properly instead of being a confused mess.
But it won’t happen. *sigh*
DUDE. 9/11 Conspiracies for this!!
Upd: Granted, I am a conspiracy nut. But, for a franchise 28 years in the making, with the game being called “The Phantom Pain”, feeling ‘half-released’ – being helmed by Hideo Kojima no less, I’m inclined to believe that there is something else we’re missing that is going to be revealed 9/11 American time. What we’re experiencing as Consumers is essentially a form of Phantom Pain.
Direct Quoted from a top post on /r/metalgearsolid :
The deep and gripping sensation that they can feel something, even though it isn’t there. Taking advantage of that which only videogames as a medium can do – patching – made it possible for Kojima to simulate a phantom pain in his audience.It could happen. I am *hopeful*. I am also prepared to embrace that this is just a huge monstrosity of tinfoil as of tomorrow.
Edit: @weresmurf & @terrywrist, please read this. Hopefully it makes more sense than the tinfoil I’ve pieced together.
https://www.reddit.com/r/metalgearsolid/comments/3kbjuq/spoilerish_somethings_coming_on_911/
I want to believe.
Turns out it was a very convincing troll. 🙁
We were played like a damn fiddle.
Yah – RIP tinfoil :3 Oh well the theorizing was fun while it lasted.
Couldn’t agree more. The article hits it on the head.
The gameplay is absolutely fantastic, but the manner of storytelling is a huge letdown. That and the game (from a story perspective) feels so gapingly incomplete.
Is it okay to spoil the ending in a headline? Obviously not spoiling it content wise but now setting up the expectation for a disappointing ending for players not yet at the end? Oh well I guess if I really cared I would stay off the internet
If I was a huge fan of the overall story/lore, personally I’d sort of prefer to expect a letdown than be blind-sided by it.
I finished the story before reading this article and while I’ve never been hugely invested in MG story/lore thankfully, I can absolutely see how those who are would be seriously let down by this.
Yeah, i agree with this article. All though i think this MGS is the best in terms of game-play, it was by far the weakest and most disappointing in terms of story. I was left rather annoyed by the fact that the twist was called by the fans 2 years ago and as mentioned above, no real closure on the events that occurred in the game.
I have a mega fanboy of the series, but let down by the story of this game.
Game play is awesome, well crafted and refined. I’m 90 hours in a still loving it.
Before I read on is this article talking about the story up to the point of the first credit roll (when you defeat Sahalanthroupus and Skull Face, before it says chapter 2), because if not I may have ruined it for my self by reading the first sentence…
The article is talking about the whole story, Chapter 2 included.
If you’re talking about the very first sentence in the article you haven’t spoiled anything. But if you read the first sentence after the picture of the dog, you’ve definitely ruined the surprise unfortunately.
Actually makes sense as to why Hayter didn’t perform the voice for Snake.
for someone new coming into the series im glad there is so little story, the actual game is great without all the weird ass story
Personally, I don’t think ‘taking over the world’ counts as evil in and of itself.
The cassette tapes that I’ve listened to through to mission 22, with Kaz and Ocelot and Boss all talking about the state of the world he’s woken up to, you really get a sense that Snake starts thinking that something needs to change. And maybe he can be the one to do it.
Killing people? De rigeur for these guys, they’ve been doing it for world goverments their entire damn lives, so what about that makes you the bad guy? Nukes? A tool, that other nations have, too. Nations with borders.
It is NOT a stretch to see all the evils of the world and riding high on the back of empowerment and achievement, thinking that maybe you could do a better job.