Overview
If it wasn’t obvious already… SPOILERS GALLORE! So it’s safe for you turn back if you havent finished TPP yet or still planning to play the previous MG games at some point.
The PAIN!
MGS V goes full house with gameplay as main star. It goes as far by slashing away those long-winded cutscenes and instead replacing them with albeit shorter ones and casette tapes.
The story telling is jilted and as such, it features possibly the worst storyline in the franchise.
Blame Kojima or Konami? We are looking at a whole, removed Chapter 3, a few game features like addtion of Guard Dogs and a more active Motherbase. No much is it?
It actually is.
This new found freedom to not participate in a large part of the story, paired with a surprising amount of subtlety for a Kojima story, has lead to quite a bit of misunderstanding among fans.
For that reason, I am about to address some of the most common misunderstandings and complaints about the story of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. This guide is diving into just about every single spoiler in the game here, so reader beware.
#1.The Man On Fire’s story was a mere plot device.
There’s no other way of putting it, The Man on Fire you encounter is indeed Volgin from MGS3 Snake Eater. Plain and Simple.
Volgin was the electricity wielding enemy who burned to death while being struck by lightning during the events of Snake Eater.
………Right……
The Man on FIre story, however is not his own but contributes to The Third Son’s plot. Crazy, right?
See, Volgin was hell bent on his sheer desire for revenge on Big Boss by the end of MGS3. We’ve seen normal trained soldiers survive a lot worse but Volgin’s a f*cking Superhuman so that isn’t unbelievable in Kojima’s world. Unfortunately for him though, his body was stuck with his charred immobile body, deep in coma with his impotent rage.
As anything that goes in Metal Gear, this aligns stars for Volgin. His body was in transport along with The Third Son (whom we all know as Psycho Mantis).
Psycho Mantis is then overwhelmed by the extreme hatred emanating, feeding on the rage of Volgin due to his proximity, he used his telekinetic powers to move the super human’s useless body in order to allow him to pursue his revenge and create more hatred.
Volgin was just a tool for Mantis to get more hatred to gorge himself on. Need proof?
- At several points in the story, Volgin becomes completely immobile or disappears when in the presence of someone that’s exuding more hatred than himself.
- Throughout the story, Volgin is at Skull Face’s beck and call because Mantis is feeding on the XOF leader’s greater hatred.
Volgin wants revenge on one man, but Skull Face wants revenge on a scale the size of nations, willing to kill one third of the world’s population. That’s how Skull Face controls Sahelanthropous as well. - At the Devil’s House, Volgin is temporarily immobilized when Mantis becomes enthralled by Shabani’s anger at his suffering, and this is later repeated when Volgin comes face to face with Venom Snake in Mission 30. Volgin is just steps away when Eli arrives in the chopper with the Diamond Dogs crew, and he again becomes immobile as Mantis turns on Skull Face and Volgin in order to feed on Eli’s “lust for revenge.” After this point, Volgin is nearly useless to Mantis and is marched to his seeming death.
- The last time we see Volgin in action is when Venom Snake is sent to extract his corpse, which to his surprise isn’t quite dead. Even after being crushed, his desire for revenge lets him cling to life, and he finally gets his hands on Big Boss, only to give up and finally die…?
#2.The drop on Punished “Venom” Snake
Venom Snake isn’t the real Big Boss. When Volgin gets close and realizes this, his desire for revenge disappears and he finally dies.
“Not fair guys. NOT FAIR! “
Consider these facts.
- The version of The Man Who Sold The World that plays in the opening is the 1982 cover by Midge Ure, NOT the original by David Bowie. See there? The Phantom!
Leave it to Kojima to drop hints to the big twist from the start of the game and tie said hints to 1980’s music trivia. - Ishmael’s voice and comments about talking to himself. He sounds like Big Boss, he acts like Big Boss, but is he a figment of Ahab’s imagination or is he real? He dispatched Quiet in a blaze of not-glory and exhibited several Big Boss staple moves, and if you get Ishmael killed, it results in a Time Paradox, hinting at his true identity.
- If you murder a Mother Base comrade or flee from a mission you’ll be scolded by Ocelot:
“I guess you weren’t the Big Boss we were hoping for…”
Thus the hint that you’re not the real Big Boss, you’re a stand in.
- Venom Snake can’t speak Russian. Ocelot tries to explain saying it could be due to his shrapnel horn impacting the language centers of his brain.it is a commonly held belief that the left frontal cortex is responsible for language processing. Venom Snake’s horn is on the right. Besides that, language is not encapsulated, meaning Venom Snake likely wouldn’t process English if his brain trauma were bad enough to forget speaking Russian at a native level.
- The Mammal A.I. pod recognizes that Venom Snake isn’t Naked Snake. Venom also doesn’t have a PTSD episode like the real Big Boss likely would have. In fact, Venom doesn’t respond to anything mentioned about the events of MGS3.
- The most damning evidence is that Eli, better known as Liquid Snake, is not genetically related to Venom Snake. We know he’s Liquid, and we know Liquid is in fact a clone of Big Boss, so that only leaves one option. Also, When Eli asks to see his father, Ocelot tells him that he’s not there even though Venom is on base.
- Finally, at night you can see Venom’s real face in the window’s reflection on the ACC.
(While in third person POV, zoom in to the pane nearest to Snake and you can see a pretty faint reflection)
#3.The whole dynamic between Snake and Zero
Zero had a falling out with Snake, and tried to use Paz and Zeke to force him into cooperating with Cipher during the evenets of Peacewalker, but never did he want his best friend to actually die.
Zero had nothing to do with the XOF attack on Mother Base. In fact, the attack on Mother Base was an act of aggression towards Zero.
It turns out that Cipher had grown a little too big, and a little unwieldy over the years.
Skull Face hated Zero for what he made him into. He gleaned a lot of information from Paz’s interrogation at the Cuban black site, and In an effort to draw out Zero, Skull Face attacked Big Boss.
When Zero came out of hiding to do damage control and whisk Big Boss to safety, Skull Face was finally able to locate him.
Being posted in Africa gave Skull Face the perfect weapon with which to strike back at Zero. In Africa, he would re-open the cipher research into the vocal cord parasite and made Code Talker work for him to eradicate English. It would be the perfect way to destroy Zero’s legacy and strip him of everything he held dear.
Zero put himself at risk and went to great lengths to protect the man he regarded as his best friend, even visiting him in the Cyprus hospital. Big Boss would never learn of this and thought Zero hated or feared him up until the end, but it was Zero’s friendship with and sacrifice for Big Boss that ultimately put him into the vegetative state Big Boss discovered him in at the end of MGS4.
Let’s scour the Truth tapes. Skullface found out Major Zero’s hideout location after interrogating Paz during the events of Ground Zeroes. It’s from here he carried out a silent attack on Zero, by poisoning him and sending him into paralysis. When Zero found out Big Boss’ comatic situation, he consulted with Revolver Ocelot and devised the Decoy Snake masterplan.
It’s very obvious from this point that Major Zero was the mastermind behind Venom Snake’s existence, and relied on Ocelot to keep it a secret..all to save his beloved friend, Big Boss.
#4.Skullface!
Skull Face stole the scene whenever he was around. He’s delightfully evil in his pursuit of revenge, but many think his end was anticlimactic. He was crushed under a tower by Sahelanthropous after Mantis ditched him for Eli.
Skull Face begs Venom Snake to kill him, only for Venom and Miller to team up and remove his limbs via gunfire. In the end he’s killed by Huey, which only serves to highlight that miserable coward’s true nature.
That normally would be a lackluster ending for any villain, let alone a MGS villain. Liquid Snake, Solidus Snake, and Volgin all got their big showdowns, why not Skull Face?
Because Skull Face isn’t a Captain Zod type villain that fights the hero face-to-face with sheer muscle.
Spoiler, Big Boss would have wiped the damn floor with Skull Face, and so would Venom, Ocelot, and probaby half of Mother Base. Skull Face is a scrawny linguist with a crippling physical deformity and an air for the pretentious.
He’s the evil mastermind class of enemy, a Lex Luthor sort of fellow to carry on the Superman analogy.
On top of that, the effects of Skull Face’s actions are felt long after his death, culminating in arguably the most emotionally distressing moment of the series.
His role was to embody the Phantom Pain and to illustrate how revenge failed to fix anything for anyone in the entire series. To that end he filled his role perfectly.
#5. Parasites, son
Parasites were the inspiration for the nanomachine viruses and super soldiers of the future.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain sets the precedence for several plot points explored in the titles that come after it chronologically.
In a conversation between Zero and Skull Face on one of the cassettes, we learn that the vocal cord parasites were of interest to Cipher only until they began making advancements in mapping the human genome and understanding DNA.
The vocal cord parasites were too unreliable and could result in massive, unintentional deaths when used in biological warfare, a fear that proved to be reasonable as seen in Bwala ya Masa.
The idea of a biological weapon that could target specific individuals eventually became perfected in the form of the DNA-based, nanomachine virus Fox Die, which was far more precise and reliable. Consider these:
- Nanomachines would also recreate some of the Skull’s powers, as seen by Vamp and the totally canon Senator Armstrong.
These gentlemen had the pleasure of battling Jack the Ripper.
- Optical Camo was another advancement derived from the abilities displayed by the parasites that Cipher had been researching. So if the parasites seemed like nanomachines, that’s because the nanomachines were engineered from data and ideas obtained from researching those parasites.
Additionally, Venom Snake is the assumed precursor to Raiden, a soldier who was groomed into the Big Boss of his era through mentally training an experienced soldier. Phantom Big Boss was proof that the concept could work. He wasn’t tied to Big Boss genetically, and while he was a great soldier at MSF, he became good enough to take up the mantle of Big Boss through the power of implanted self-efficacy alone.
However, the Solid Snake Simulation was a ruse. The Patriots already knew that it was possible to create a new Snake in this manner, as Cipher had done so before, so the idea was passed along as misinformation to cover up their true objective: Selection for Societal Sanity, research into controlling responses to situations and the filtering out of undesirable aspects of society. Guess where this started? With Cipher’s research into the vocal cord parasite.
#6. Paz is still dead.
Paz is in fact dead. Many people who captured all of the former Mother Base soldiers simply missed the last picture in the hallway and never saw the proper ending.
Stahp! You are DEAD! ALREADY!
Basically, Venom Snake went to an abandoned hallway and hallucinated all of the Paz related events due to his head tauma and guilt over failing to find the second bomb in Paz.
He was the field medic on the job, so it was his responsibility.
Failing to find that bomb lead to the deaths of Paz and Chico, Big Boss’s nine-year coma, and let Cipher become the de facto dominant world power. That’s a gigantic weight for one man to bear alone, and the events of his hallucination end up providing him the solace needed to continue shouldering that burden.
If you actually thought Paz was still alive and that the explosion was triggered by an RPG, perhaps you didn’t pay attention to the opening.
The doctor explains that the explosion shot fragments of human bone and teeth throughout Venom Snake’s body, literally carrying that burden of guilt within himself. (In case you were dozing, It’s a Hideo Kojima game)
#7.Big Boss was already a Demon
“WHOA, WAIT A SECOND! Where was the real Big Boss when the Phantom Boss was busy fultoning goats and staring at Quiet’s assets?”
Let’s clear this thing away first.
Yes. You did play as Big Boss in Ground Zeroes. The real one. Mkay?
Now most of the theorists will argue that Big Boss’ descent into villainy was apparent right after the events of MGS3 and also followed in Peacewalker.
Recall these:
- In MGS 3, he is forced to kill the love of his life, The Boss, gets commended by USA, earns the title Big Boss. He never asked for any of these, gets extremely disheartened and leaves the country.
He vows to create a Private military organisation, free of boundaries and restrictions. An army without a nation.
Militaires Sans Frontieres or MSF.
Consider getting some tissues when this plays out. - In Peacewalker, as a result of the actions of the Boss’ A.I. , Snake realizes that the boss put down her weapon while they fought, and feels betrayed by her. When this happens he abandons the boss’ Will and decides to….. “execute his own plan” for how the world should be.
But, when Paz steals ZEKE while working for Cipher and the destruction of MSF in GZ, he makes revenge his topmost priority. - Big Boss is already “evil” by this point in the sense that he has antagonized the entire world (and if everyone is your enemy then you are “evil” by some standards) and has abandoned The Boss’ will.
One of Paz’s tapes in PW makes it clear that he doesn’t know how to live in peace, that war is the only thing he knows.Cut forward to 1975. Big Boss and Kaz (secretely involved with Cipher) receive a distress call from Amanda about Chico’s disappearance. Thus begins Ground Zeroes.
At the final moments of Ground Zeroes, the suspicious Medic in the helicopter( who eventually becomes Venom in TPP) failed to find the second bomb inside Paz. During the explosion it was the Medic who pushed Big Boss out of the way and took most of the damage.If there’s one thing anyone can infer from here, the Medic was extremely loyal to BB. The medic was ready to die for Big Boss. He jumped in front of the explosion because it’s what he wanted.
Hell! Big Boss could’ve asked the medic to become his phantom and he would’ve agreed, probably would’ve been honored to do it.So begins the Prologue sequence in the Cyprus hospital. BB keeps his cover intact as Ahab and fends off the attack on Venom, successfully dispatching XOF pawn Quiet and getting themeselves out of the raided building. Ocelot arrives right on time (Remember as of time being, only he, Major Zero and now Big Boss were aware of the Decoy Snake plan) and gets Big Boss out of the Greece territory, having arranged his getaway from the very beginning.
What does BB do now? Where does he go? Big Boss gets busy building the real Outer Heaven and keeping in sync with exploits of Venom Snake.
Fast forward to events of Metal Gear 1(MSX), Operation Intrude N313!
Big Boss sends any potential meddling soldiers to….. the Decoy Outer Heaven or Diamond Dogs’ base of operations where Venom Snake gets to dispatch them.Enter Solid Snake, receiver of the recessive gene from Big Boss during Les Enfants Terribles project.
When he was sent by Foxhound to infiltrate Diamond Dogs, he did just that and killed Venom Snake.Recall what Venom said: “This isn’t the last time we meet, I’m still alive”.
It’s from here that things become very clear.
Big Boss made somebody who was loyal to him, Venom Snake, go through everything that the real Boss was supposed to face. Once BB realised Venom was “done” for him, he let him die at the hands of Solid Snake. Yeah he did intend it to be other way around, but he could have done SOMETHING to get Venom out of there. He didn’t. Just about explains how Venom was more of a means to get to the end.Big Boss was never evil, rather a regular soldier who went through great trials, which for the better, forced him to make tough choices for the good of himself and his men.
Here is a guy who was very much involved in The War economy, which is why he seems as a demon.The point of TPP’s (current?) ending where the real BB rides his way to sunset and Venom smashes his mirror reflection is the embodiment of the fact they no longer are devils but rather necessary evils of the world.
Finally, in the “Truth” tapes, BB says something about wanting to see Venom one last time. He cared about the Medic but he put his mission (his goal?) before his own personal feelings.Shoutout to Mushy93 for pointing this out.
Concluding Notes.
Very rarely is an open-world game able to present a cohesive narrative without sacrificing some freedoms. You either have a well told, linear story, or you have a looser story that facilitates freedom. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain experimented with a different method of storytelling by making it on-demand and available during game play.
This means players have to find the story themselves. For people who enjoy combing over tapes while hunting for resources and doing prep work for their next mission, this is awesome.
For example, I enjoyed listening to Ocelot’s early game briefings while scouting for high ranked troops in Angola-Zaire border. Before, I’d have to stop and sit in a menu while I listened to a codec call, so I found The Phantom Pain’s design to be more entertaining in general.
Freedom can be great or boring…depending on how you approach it.
Unfortunately, some people find this overwhelming, there are tons of cassettes to pour over, and not all of them are directly relevant to the story. Even those that are aren’t always cleanly labeled with the yellow, story-denoting indicator.
Furthermore, some people may not like playing while listening to the cassettes, instead preferring to listen to them while sitting in the ACC. Which is understandable considering there just aren’t enough buttons to quick pause the tape on the field when someone interrupts your listening.
To each their own, but I can see how someone would have vast stretches of game play without any story to break up the vastness of the open world.
While Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’s story is undeniably incomplete, it is far from the worst in the franchise. An MGS game normally takes the controller out of your hands for long stretches of time while it holds your head under the torrent of information it regurgitates onto you. This one reverses that trend and tells you to grip your controller throughout, allowing you to enjoy the best game play ever put into code while you pick and choose how much story to indulge in, on your own terms.
So, what do you think about MGS V’s overall narrative strength, apart from the confirmed missing Chapter 3 Peace….. and Guard Dogs? Do you think there were any supposed loopholes?
Thanks