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> As a long time MGS fan I can tell you that MGS5 was an unfinished mess.

I wouldn't say it was an unfinished mess. It was remarkably polished and bug-free for a modern 5-platform AAA game. If it had ended with Chapter 1 I think everyone would have been happy with the content and length of the game. Chapter 2 provides closure for a couple story lines and evokes the "Phantom Pain" of the title - you've achieved your revenge, but now what? Life goes on, it is not happily ever after. The repeated missions are "bonus" content that you are not required to do to unlock anything.

> I feel that the game really failed to convince me that any decision I made was particularly evil.

Maybe I'm just a Kojima apologist, but to me this is the genius of the game. You don't think you did anything evil - and it's true, the game doesn't let you do overtly, blatantly obviously evil things like killing the child soldiers or detonating your nukes against civilians (or anyone for that matter). But look at it from an outside perspective - you're building a nuclear-armed mercenary army out of kidnapped soldiers who get thrown in the brig and interrogated / brainwashed by Ocelot. An army that will hire itself out to the highest bidder. Look at the role of real-life PMCs in Africa like Executive Outcomes or Sandline International, or more recently the role of Blackwater in Iraq. Imagine if they had nukes.

Everything you do in the game makes sense and is justified when looked at while you're doing it, but you end up building this giant army that in reality would be a tool of neo-colonialist oppression used to ensure the smooth extraction of raw materials from Africa by multinational corporations.

The game does not actually force you to replay old missions. You just have to complete certain side missions to progress in lieu of them. That confused me as well though - but I never had to complete any of those repeat missions and I completed the game. The game did not do a good job making that clear, however.

I would not call MGS5 an unfinished mess. I would call it unfinished, but that fact doesn't detract from it as one of the most innovative games I have ever played. I have never had the opportunity to truly "be" a character in a game before. When you're playing every mission in MGS5 - you are Snake.

You decide how every single objective is accomplished. Every mission can be played in a variety of varied ways. The fact that each mission felt so fluid and organic is a testament to the tremendous engineering and ingenuity that went into designing it.

Oh, but how I pine for the final chapter that could have been!

I was happy with the lack of cutscenes. MGS4's narrative basically collapsed under it's own weight in a (misguided, IMO) attempt to explain everything, which is a shame because the short gameplay segments in-between the cutscenes were quite fun.

I think splitting the prologue mission off from the main game and releasing it as it's own game hurt TPP. The core game mechanics are polished and fun in MGSV, so I'm happy with that. It was obviously released in an incomplete state, but it looks like that wasn't Kojima's fault. Maybe in a few years he'll be able to do a "director's cut" of it.

The cutscenes are there, sort of, and entirely optional. They are presented as cassette tapes (quite a few in fact) obtained throughout the game that tell the whole story.

I think that balancing plot and gameplay segments has been a problem with the series as far back as the second entry - I seem to recall there being a half-hour long, unskippable cinematic fairly early on in that game. And the plot itself is kind of a mess, which sapped a lot of my motivation to commit to the series.

At least MGS2 only has epic cutscenes at the beginning or end of each "chapter". That's actually bearable compared to MGS4.

MGS2 is my favorite entry in the series. It certainly had the most ambitious plot (about information control, and how being a soldier in a game is nothing like being a real soldier.), the mixed reaction to which made Kojima dial it back for all of the subsequent games.

It also has incredible production values, being one of the best looking games on the PS2 while holding an almost-solid 60FPS.

The series certainly has it's ups and downs, but on the whole I enjoy it. The worst parts are a silly science fiction-themed soap opera, but the best parts are some of the most compelling and exciting gaming I've ever experienced.

The only evil elements that I'm fully aware of is killing and developing a nuke. It seems way underdeveloped and not much of the game.

My first play through I played stealth and captured quite a few people for my base. If I didn't want the person then I just left them be, I only killed when I had to for survival or if required. For instance, I know of no way to capture a helicopter, so for those elimination missions you had no choice but to kill the pilots. My second play-through my style is to leave no one alive whenever I enter a mission, otherwise I avoid contact. I'm not even halfway through the story and the debris in my head signifying my demon level has lengthened quite a bit. Otherwise, I haven't noticed that much of a difference between the two sessions. Advanced equipment for the enemy has appeared sooner than before, but it's still way too easy. I wish there was a way to increase the difficulty from the beginning.