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03/01 - Halo 3: ODST (Master Chief Collection)
06/01 - Halo 3 (Master Chief Collection)
09/01 - Hotshot Racing
25/01 - Halo 4 (Master Chief Collection)
29/01 - Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
03/02 - Heavenly Sword
05/02 - Need for Speed: Carbon (Battle Royale)
09/02 - Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
20/02 - ICO
24/02 -
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker HD
I'm kind of conflicted on this one. There were some parts I liked, others I didn't. That's been true for basically every game in this series, but this one feels like something of a shift in a different direction that I didn't really click with that much. Some things that I didn't like the idea of at first ended up working better than I thought, while other things that I found intriguing earlier on I ran out of patience for before the end.
I liked the story quite a bit, especially towards the end. It was kind of a hard sell nearer the start. With this being back in the prequel era it again isn't really looking forward to the hypothetical development of society. It also doesn't really have a particularly compelling villain either. It had me starting to question whether this story needed to be told. But later on it actually gets in to some more serious discussions about the nature of nuclear deterrence that I thought was done really well. It also brings up topics of human responsibility and the errors of trying to dodge that by shifting responsibility on to machines, when those machines are just an extension of human reasoning and assumptions too. So it's fitting that you also get to see the birth of the first true Metal Gear in this game too. It's kind of surprising really that it took this long for the series to really delve in to these topics, given how core they are to the thing these games are named after. I was unsure what to make of how much it reminisces about The Boss, worried it was leaning too hard on that story instead of its own. But it makes it work, by turning that in to Snake and others trying to work out what to make of her legacy. The piano cover of the Snake Eater theme is also a nice touch.
There did seem to be a bit of a retcon with this that I'm not sure I'm on board with. Snake spends a lot of the game trying to work out what The Boss' true motivations were for her actions in MGS3, but I swear he was told in that game's ending through that audio tape that he listens to. I went back to check that ending, and it's kind of ambiguous whether he was supposed to have heard that bit or not, but I'm leaning more towards that he was in fact meant to know. Maybe he just didn't want to believe it.
I didn't care much for the gameplay in general. While it definitely plays much better than Portable Ops, and benefits from the streamlined MGS4-like controls, it still wasn't free from a lot of its own aggravations. I really disliked most of the boss fights. Especially the ones where you need to take out an armoured vehicle and its escort squad. The later AI mech battles at least don't have the problem of having to deal with loads of repeatedly respawning enemies shooting you from all sides. But they have their own issues, usually down to specific annoying attacks they each have. I'm definitely not a fan of switching items/weapons not pausing the game, or not having the ability to carry more than two firearms at a time.
All the mechanics to do with building up Mother Base and doing all the tech and weapons research got pretty tiring after a while too. I can see that it's supposed to be getting across the idea of what it's like to run a PMC like this, but as it went on it started feeling pretty tedious, and like I was just doing a bunch of busywork to watch an arbitrary number go up. It also starts feeling pretty grindy with how it pushes you in to doing the mostly boring side content, or even repeating stuff, in order to fulfil certain requirements. This ended up being the longest I've played any game in the series by quite a margin, but not because I wanted to. Felt like a lot of that time wasn't really necessary or enjoyable.
So far I've only done the normal ending. I figured that's enough to call it complete. I am intending on at least trying to go for the secret one though. I think I have some of the requirements for it already, and I'm thinking of it more as bonus content anyway. It feels like everything meaningful this game was trying to go for has been covered already. I also doubt I'm getting to MGSV any time soon either, as I don't have access to it right now. I'm also somewhat unsure if it's even worth it. It seems like that game doubles down on a lot of the things I didn't care for here, and is a huge time sink on top of that. Not to mention how supposedly unfinished the story is. So this may be the end of my journey in to the MGS series. At least for the foreseeable future. I have been thinking about revisiting Metal Gear Rising for a while now though...
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28/02 Edit: Finished secret ending
Had some extra thoughts on this section, and the game in general. I didn't really like this part mostly, but it wasn't as bad as I expected in some ways. It does require a significant amount of grinding, and a lot of the main missions feel like a waste of time. But it at least doesn't require much from your base building, and when it does require you to grind missions it counts already completed missions too, so you aren't forced in to anything in particular. A couple of the side missions it unlocks at this stage were kind of fun, like one where you need to hold up enemy guards with a banana. It makes sense in the story why the main missions feel like a time wasting wild goose chase too. The twist at the very end was pretty interesting, and it helps connect MGS4 to this game a bit, but it also comes with a tedious boss fight and some unnecessary objectification of Paz. You can at least make the boss a bit easier for yourself in a way that I appreciated was possible. This whole section feels like the post-credit twists from previous games, except it's playable, and extremely drawn out.
I had some more thoughts on the point about whether Snake should have known the stuff brought up in the MGS3 ending. I discovered in this game the tapes that play at the ending of 3 are actually in here as well, and you can listen to the whole thing through again. I'm not sure exactly when these were unlocked, probably at the main ending, but it shows that Snake had access to all of these tapes probably since they were first seen in the MGS3 ending. He definitely must have heard what they said before the events of this game. So I guess the only explanation is that he just couldn't bring himself to believe it.
I was also thinking about the changing design trends of this series again, and how it's not really true that this is where the shift happens. As I already knew before playing this, Portable Ops was the first to introduce this resource management stuff. So much of PW is extremely similar to PO concept, just executed much better. While it's still not something I'm crazy about, it at least beats the awful implementation PO had. It's rather strange actually, that this direction that the series went so hard with in later entries originally came from a largely maligned and neglected spin-off. One that is questionable in the canon and that Kojima had little to do with and later try to almost disown. Although even in light of that, small mentions of the events of PO show up in PW, so it's not like it's totally stricken from the record. It's in an odd position.