Westwardhile it's difficult to argue confrontingMetal Gear Solid v: The Phantom Hurting'sstrengths from a pure game design perspective, it is still a game that a lot of veteranMetallic Gearfans harbour very complicated feelings towards. The hand of mastermind Hideo Kojima is clear to see in a lot of whatThe Phantom Paindoes, even when information technology'southward actively trying to ready itself apart from its precursors, merely for many fans of the series, the game feels like a betrayal of everything the legendary franchise has always stood for. WhileMetal Gear Solidgames accept never shied away from taking risks from a game design standpoint, and have always featured best in form gameplay, their focus, kickoff and foremost, has ever been on story and storytelling.

WithMetal Gear Solid 5, Hideo Kojima and his team at Kojima Productions set out to exercise something different, and while the excellence of how the gameplaysis evidence of the fact that they definitely had the right idea, one look at the concluding product in its totality also tells us that they couldn't quite execute that thought the mode they had hoped they would. "Unfinished" is a give-and-take that is used to describe games quite commonly (unfortunately plenty), but rarely does that clarification ring as true as it does forMetal Gear Solid five-because it's not unfinished because of technical issues, neither considering of a lack of polish, nor considering of half-formed ideas. No, it is unfinished because it literally feels like half a game- like it had so much more to say, so much more than to testify, but midway through, it merely… stopped.

So what happened? How is it that Hideo Kojima and Konami, the ii of whom had collectively created i of the nearly legendary and astoundingly consequent franchises ever, a franchise that had a reputation for ever having a stunning clarity of vision and doing everything in its power to make that vision a reality- how is it that Kojima and Konami concluded a franchise such every bit that on such a disappointing annotation?The Phantom Painis, unquestionably, an excellent game, but it'due south one that has crippling flaws, the kind that even its staunchest defenders would not –couldnot – contend against. But how did we become here- what the hell happened toMetal Gear Solid 5?

It's very tempting to answer a question like that with but one word- Konami. Konami happened toMetal Gear Solid 5. And while information technology would exist foolish to argue with the arraign that the now widely disliked corporation shares for the land ofThe Phantom Hurting, and really, the current state ofMetal Gearin general, it would also exist a picayune reductive to do so. Surely, Konami is very, very responsible for the botched development process of the finalMetal Geargame fabricated by Hide Kojima- but how, exactly? That is a question the answer to which is intrinsically tied with the mess that was Hideo Kojima's acrimonious departure from the publisher.

While the exact details of how and why Kojima left Konami haven't become known even more than three years since their divide, it'due south no secret that the evolution ofThe Phantom Painwas at to the lowest degree partially responsible for information technology. Of form, it's become clearer in the concluding few years that the direction Konami wanted to head in as a business – andhasbeen heading in – wasn't something that Kojima agreed with, merely it also doesn't take a genius to figure out that issues surroundingMetal Gear Solid five'due southevolution must have strained the relationship between the two parties also. Hideo Kojima's trend for taking his sweet fourth dimension with developing his games is something that we all know very well about- and while we, as gamers, ultimately appreciate the time he takes, since that results in the first-class products that he and his studio put out, Konami, as a corporation, would manifestly not have exist too pleased with that. Equally a business, they want a more than frequent output of their best and most profitable products, and withThe Phantom Hurting, from Konami's perspective, Kojima was merely taking too much time.

But of course, information technology'southward not as elementary as that. For Konami, even more egregious than the corporeality of fourth dimension Kojima Productions was taking with the game'due south development was how much money they were spending on information technology.The Phantom Painis a game that had a evolution budget of over $80 million past the time it was washed, a effigy that is past no means a small-scale one in and of itself, but if Kojima had had his mode, and had been given gratis rein to do everything that he wanted to do inThe Phantom Hurting, that number could have gone a lot higher. But it didn't- wanting to release the game later on a long development cycle, and not wanting to spend whatsoever more money on it than the large sum they had already invested, Konami cut short the development ofMetal Gear Solid 5.

And that was, in and so many ways, the root of so many problems. The criticism that is levelled atThe Phantom Hurting most often is that information technology's incomplete, something I mentioned earlier every bit well, and looking at its development, it becomes easy to see justwhyit is unfinished. A vast bulk of Chapter 2 sees us returning to locations that nosotros've already visited, and having to play through missions that nosotros have already played- even without the noesis of what went on behind the scenes during the game'south evolution, the most logical assumption would have been that the developers had to do a copy-paste job, to put it crudely, to fill out the game, butwithsaid knowledge, that much becomes painfully obvious.

The being of Episode 51 has also become well known by now – an episode that would accept been cardinal to the game's story but wasn't even included in the last product – while it also didn't take dataminers long later on the game'due south release to notice that original plans for the game had also included an unabridged third chapter, titled "Peace", also. A significant portion of content was cut fromThe Phantom Paindue to time constraints, and due to Konami's growing dissatisfaction with how much they were having to invest in its evolution. But in the absence of all that content, what nosotros were left with was an incomplete story that was never fully told- sure, fans tin can connect the dots nigh what happened betweenThe Phantom Painand the firstMetallic Gear, as many obviously accept, simply if the game had been allowed to tell that story itself, all the criticisms about it not having a satisfying conclusion, and nearly non tying up a large number of narrative arcs, would have rung hollow. We also shouldn't forget the fact that Kojima Productions likewise had to bide by Konami's mandate of puttingThe Phantom Painon last gen platforms besides, and for having parity beyond all versions- for a game releasing in 2015, when the PS4 and the Xbox Ane were 2 years one-time, it made very little sense for information technology to take to be cross-generation, and having to work with such restrictions must surely have crippled a swell many ambitions.

Beyond the blame that Konami shares for the troubled development ofMetallic Gear Solid 5, though, nosotros also need to await at the vision that Kojima himself had for the game. Cut content and being released in an unfinished country are of class some of the biggest bug people have with the game, but something else thatMetallic Gearfans often bring up is how differentThe Phantom Pain feels to what came before information technology.Metal Gearis past no means the first franchise to have radically reinvented itself, and nor will it be the terminal- the likes ofThe Legend of Zelda, Resident Evil,and more recently,God of Warhave all successfully reinvented themselves, but while those franchises managed to do so while retaining the essence of their identities, that wasn't and so much the case withThe Phantom Pain. While previousMetal Geargames were all about the story, with a heavy focus on storytelling through long, expository cutscenes and oodles of rich dialogue, withMetal Gear Solid 5, Kojima went for the verbal opposite- focusing almost entirely on the gameplay aspects of the game, delegating some of the almost important bits of storytelling to things such as cassette tapes, and completely de-emphasizing the focus on cutscenes that the franchise had become synonymous with.

Something else that stung for a large portion of the series' fanbase was the removal of David Hayter, a homo who had become nearly as synonymous with the series equally Kojima was himself, having provided the vocalisation for Solid Snake and Naked Serpent for as long equally the series had had vocalisation interim. Replacing him with Kiefer Sutherland seemed almost cursing to hardcore fans of the series, and that dissatisfaction was only exacerbated past how criminally underused even Sutherland's vocalization and performance were throughout the entirety of the game. There'due south no guarantee, then, that even without any constraints and with total freedom to make the game he wanted to make, Kojima would have delivered something withThe Phantom Hurtingthat would not take been divisive among the fanbase. But then again, it would have at to the lowest degree been a consummate game, so those issues would have been much easier to swallow.

Sadly, nosotros'll never really know either way. With Kojima Productions now independent of Konami and hard at work onDeath Stranding, they're never going dorsum toMetallic Gear. Even if weexercisemiraculously meet a properMetal Gearsequel in the future, it won't exist function of Kojima's vision, and it won't be a culmination of his ambitions.The Phantom Painvolition, sadly, always remain unfinished, and for all its greatness in terms of systemic-based emergent gameplay in an open world surround, it'll remain a ghostly and half-formed part of the franchise's larger narrative. That almost gives its name greater meaning- though non, I'm certain, in the way Kojima and Konami would have imagined.