Fieldnotes is a weekly column where I drop into a new (or old) game and report back with raw notes, sharp takes, unfiltered, and sometimes unhinged thoughts. This week, I revisit Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and its setup game, Ground Zeroes.
This past month, I’ve had the opportunity to play and review Konami’s ground-up remake of one of the most beloved games in the Metal Gear series, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. After playing it to completion and being reminded of how great the Golden Age of Metal Gear was, naturally I felt inclined to revisit the entry with the best gameplay in the series: Metal Gear Solid V.
Now I was faced with two difficult choices. I still have the PS4 collector’s edition with the steelbook packaging and everything. Do I play the PS4 copy on my PS5, or start afresh on PC and enjoy the higher graphical fidelity? In the end I went with the latter, and for just $42, I got to revisit Ground Zeroes before jumping into The Phantom Pain.
Zeroes Dark Thirty
As impressive as the graphics were in Delta, I was still blown away by how good Ground Zeroes looked right off the bat. For a game that’s over 10 years old now, Ground Zeroes still looks incredible. The long takes, the rain effects, all the cool little camera tricks… This is Hideo Kojima unchained.
Even going all the way back to MGS2, you could tell that Kojima very much wanted his games to feel like films. Not movies, mind you. But films. He wanted a little bit of that shaky cam thing going on. He wanted to implement cool cinematography tricks that would make his cutscenes feel like they came straight out of a movie. But because of the technical limitations of the older consoles, the games could come off as a little campy. By the time we got to the PS4, though, the technology had improved so much that that was no longer an issue.
With Ground Zeroes, it felt like Kojima was finally, truly free to be the director he always wanted to be. The dramatic credits roll-in, the music cues, the voiceovers, and the music shift when Snake’s Foxhound patch comes into view. Oh, and the lens flares. God forbid I forget to mention all the goddamn lens flares.
MGS V marked a radical departure from the rest of the series, particularly with the change in Snake’s voice actor. Gone was David Hayter‘s iconic gravelly voice, and replacing him was Hollywood actor Kiefer Sutherland, who lends Snake a much more grounded and less cartoonish tone. I was a huge Kiefer hater when the change was announced, but now, seeing what Kojima was going for, I can understand the switch. Hayter’s voice just doesn’t fit this grittier, bloodier version of Metal Gear.
To me, the MGS series was always about striking a fine line between the comical and the emotional. No matter how grim things got, the game never made you feel bad because it was, ultimately, a very video game-y game. How long can you really stay sad about Emma’s death when you have Otacon crying about being in love with his stepsister while Vamp does backflips in the background? Not very long.
With MGS V, though, there’s a complete tonal shift. Now, you have Chico listening to tapes of Paz getting tortured. You get shots of his ankles with nails in them. And who could forget the harrowing helicopter scene where the Mother Base medic has to dig into Paz’s stomach without anesthetic to get a bomb out of her? It’s pretty gruesome stuff and not at all the kind of thing you’d expect to find in a Metal Gear game.
Still the Best Stealth Gameplay in the Business
Once I finally got used to that tonal shift, though, I was once again reminded of just how great Ground Zeroes could feel and play. The previous three games in the series had already made huge strides towards refining that tactical stealth gameplay, but Ground Zeroes takes it to a whole other level.
Going from walking upright to laying prone and crawling on the ground feels smoother than it ever has, and being able to bring up your binoculars with just one press of a button makes things very convenient. Just in terms of controls, Ground Zeroes (and MGS V as a whole) feels like the culmination of all the lessons Kojima and Konami have learned over the past 20 years, and it shows.
Then you have the environments themselves. Ground Zeroes was notorious for being a very short game with only one locale to explore, but oh, what a glorious level it is. The game is set in a black site but it’s filled with so many possibilities. There are vehicles you can drive, searchlights to destroy, artillery weapons to use… There are so many ways to complete your mission and I’ll never not be impressed with the way the AI reacts to you and how the game as a whole responds to how you interact with your environment.
Why Are We Still Here?
I thoroughly enjoyed my little one-hour romp in Ground Zeroes and when I rolled credits, I was excited to immediately jump into The Phantom Pain… only to be hit with what has to be one of the worst intros to a Metal Gear game, ever.
You see, The Phantom Pain picks up directly after the events of Ground Zeroes. Mother Base is destroyed. Snake is in a coma from the helicopter explosion after we find out Paz had a second bomb inside her. The coma lasts for six years, and The Phantom Pain begins when Snake wakes up.
The entire intro is just a mishmash of weird ideas meant to tutorialize you and set you up for the game. When you wake up and the hospital gets attacked, you’re saved by a fellow patient named Ishmael, whose head is entirely wrapped up in bandages. From there, Snake must slowly regain control of his sleeping body as he tries to escape, and the process is painful. You have him basically floundering around for the first five minutes, only able to crawl on the floor slowly while Ishmael annoyingly beckons you to follow him. Look man, I’ve been in a coma for nine years. Why don’t you come give me a hand, hmm Ishmael?
Even after you’re finally given the ability to crouch-walk, the game still insists on funneling you through a very slow and arduous walking simulator sequence. It’s clear that The Phantom Pain wants to show you how impressive everything is. The fire! The NPC density! The cool enemies that disappear at will! But when you’re just watching this from the perspective of a character who’s less alive than a vegetable, it’s frustrating and all I wanted was for the game to get on with it already.
The tonal shifts also persist here, as The Phantom Pain‘s intro sequence feels more like a horrific terrorist attack more than anything else. The military brutality is on full display here, but even that gets undercut by the appearance of a young Psycho Mantis and the return of Volgin as a man on fire. These two characters are meant to be scary, but it ended up not working for me just because of how big the tonal shift was. The Metal Gear series has always had these silly little paranormal elements, yes, but not straight up sci-fi technobabble with flaming whales and unicorns. Was this an early concept test for Death Stranding or something?
Anyway, the painful tutorial continues, made worse by the fact that Snake is eventually able to walk faster than Ishmael, but god forbid you walk too fast because only Ishmael can guide you to the right path. Walk too far ahead of him and you might end up walking into an enemy ambush you never could’ve seen coming, die, then start over from the last checkpoint. Ugh.
Eventually the slow walking finally ends and Snake is given a gun. The gunplay feels good of course, and everything ends with Ocelot picking you up with a horse, and you get a little fight with Volgin on horseback as he chases after you on his flaming unicorn. This is ridiculous, even by MGS standards, and the intro left me feeling thoroughly unimpressed.
Thankfully, the worst is behind me now. After the tutorial ends, you’re treated to a lovely montage of Snake getting used to his new bionic arm as he sails across the world to Afghanistan to save Kazuhira Miller. You even get the iconic “whoa-ho”s from Donna Burke’s Sins of the Father, and who could resist watching Snake take those giant puffs out of a tasty cigar?
My next mission is to rescue Kaz and I’m excited. Despite my hangups with this game, I remember having the most fun with the stealth gameplay than I ever did in any MGS game. I’m excited for what is basically better Peace Walker, with the ability to kidnap enemy soldiers and recruit them into the Diamond Dogs. I’m excited to recruit DD the best doggo. I’m excited to meet Quiet again and talk about how awful her design is. So yeah, stay tuned for that, I suppose.
