Unpopular opinion regarding the Metal Gear Solid saga: Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain are together the most beautiful chapter in the saga and perhaps in the known gaming world. The missing Liquid Snake mission and the change of tone (however perfectly contextualized) will not make me change my mind. Ladies and gentlemen, what we see from the beginning of Ground Zeroes – and here begin the heavy spoilers – are the falsified memories of Venom, there is nothing of the real Big Boss. This alone is enough to change the perspective on the beauty of this title.
Many agree that it is the weakest title in the saga. But often they do so precisely because they erroneously see the unfolding of the events narrated by MGSV as revolving around a member of Big Boss’s biological lineage, that is, his “sons” tightly linked to the Les Enfants Terribles project. What we witness and play instead revolves around a broken character, almost mute, “forced” to fit into the story, used by unscrupulous characters (Kaz, Cipher, Ocelot), broken (physically!) and with a huge shard in his brain causing him hallucinations and continuous memory distortion. The perspective is therefore that of an unreliable narrator, something that many have never fully understood (probably not even Konami itself). And when this singular and fascinating aspect becomes clearer, the curious narrative approach of this work by Hideo Kojima becomes gameplay, with Venom’s mind forced to relive/replay the missions at a higher difficulty, to once again encounter his ghosts (Paz) in a non-existent room on the map.
I am of the opinion that we have never really seen Big Boss in any of the Metal Gear Solid V chapters, probably even the prologue (Ground Zeroes) does not tell anything but the distorted memory of the event, experienced by Venom himself, destroyed. The tragedy of this character is thus fragmented into a curious sequence of “episodes” like a TV series (another brilliant intuition), and everything culminates in a missed epilogue, almost as if to represent in narrative form what Venom is missing, a limb, a part of his being, which he feels and will still feel the pain. And so, with the ultimate identification of the player in a character we had no idea existed before the advent of this fifth (sixth) main chapter of the saga, we witness the masterful closure of a perfect, bitter, and destructive circle, which in the meantime has given us dozens and dozens of hours of perfect gameplay that still sets an example today for triple-A titles like Indiana Jones and the Ancient Circle, which clumsily implement unfun and easily breakable stealth mechanics, leading to miserable results, compared to those of a title from a couple of generations ago.
