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me as to parts of what went wrong with this game.
I loved it, blazed through nearly all of it back in September, but I only JUST finished all the main story missions last week. I also did all the Side Ops (I may be a sadist, but this game is dope). For whatever reason, I still find myself logging in and letting the game run just to let new items develop (I have 150 hours in this game and have sold a ton of precious metals to keep my wallet full and...MAN, the weapons get complex way, way after you're likely done with the main game) and thinking about this game a lot.
Mission 45 is bizarre because it was designed for a weapon that was removed from the game and yet the mission itself was never re-tooled to compensate for that.
As you said and I read several times in those comment sections, what initially seemed like a smart move backfired on the game for several reasons. Firstly, it's distracting to play the game while listening to those tapes, even the inconsequential ones. You feel like you're missing something one way or the other.
Secondly, the tapes are so fragmented and Snake so far removed from those conversations that they are a slog to listen through. It doesn't help that Kaz and Ocelot are essentially the same character in this game, one is just angry and the other isn't. They also repeat the same ideas over and over and over thanks to how broken up they are (seriously, it makes no sense for an interrogation of one character to span over 7 sections that only contain, like, 9 tapes).
Lastly, looking up the leaked footage of Mission 51 makes it painfully clear that this team struggled with two massive issues:
First and foremost, they had never made a non-linear game before, something Japanese developers already struggle with, and too many of their old habits locked into the basic structure of the game. It never made sense to roam the map from mission to mission, it was always more sensible to jump back to the ACC than call in a chopper or ride your horse across the plains.
Secondly, they just didn't have time to get all the story into the game due to spending so much time getting the game into the game. Like I said earlier, they left a mission in the game that not only is fairly convoluted to access but once you learn what it was meant to be, it's painfully obvious the mission should have been cut. Unfortunately it contains one of the game's three (possibly four if you include the mission that was actually cut) dramatic conclusions so losing it probably never made sense to the story people.
The real shame of it all is MGS V is likely still the best game of 2015 despite all the changes for the worse that occurred to favor the FOB and online portions of the game as well as all the flaws that became more apparent both with the perspective of time and watching another dude play the game without engaging the stealth or base development at all because he just wanted more Metal Gear shenanigans. You don't get the story you want regardless but if that's all you wanted, the many vaguely free-to-play elements of the game's fundamental design can quickly become cumbersome.
Somewhere hidden in the DNA of this game is the best MGS and possibly the best last game in a series ever. But unfortunately it just couldn't be that, not with these developers and this publisher.
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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz
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