When MGS V came out, most people didn't quite know what to make of it. Let me give you a bit of context: MGS V's release was overshadowed by the news that Kojima would leave his long time publisher Konami, and it wasn't difficult to deduce that it was probably on less than amicable terms. This escalating tension between Kojima and his publisher clearly left its mark on MGS V's development.
Metal Gear Solid has, effectively, had two main plotlines. Solid Snake's, encompassing MGS 1, 2 and 4, set in a near future, soft Cyberpunk setting where the military industrial complex has become an all powerful, self propagating system that has pervaded every layer of society. A dystopia based on post Cold War American hegemony and War on Terror era militarism. The other one, consisting of MGS 3, Peace Walker and V, following Solid Snake's father, Big Boss, cataloguing the rise of that very same military industrial complex over multiple decades of an alternate history Cold War.
Where MGS3 was following Big Boss, then still using the moniker Naked Snake, on a mission behind enemy lines in the Soviet Union, Peace Walker and V see him as the leader of a private militia. Big Boss and his rogue military, at that point known as "Outer Heaven" served as the antagonists of the original 2D Metal Gear games, which is why his trilogy is sometimes characterized as a villain origin story and the lack of direct on screen character development of Big Boss often used as a major criticism against MGS V. But let me be real here for a second. I don't want to invoke the, at this point rather tiresome, buzzword of "media literacy" but if you've played the entire series and are, by the end of V, still wondering how the fearless war hero from Peace Walker who abandoned his corrupt nation to dedicate his life to the liberation of soldiers from the political machinations of their countries, challenged the hegemony of the two global super powers and provided food and shelter to war orphans on his home base where he taught them to use weapons to defend themselves turned into the megalomaniacal warlord of Metal Gear 1 and 2 who was operating a rogue militia threatening war on the entire free world and training child soldiers to die for him on the battlefield, you should perhaps consider playing them again and paying attention this time.
Now, starting off with its prologue Ground Zeroes, MGS V sees Big Boss' injured in an attack on his mercenary base slash independent nation by a shady Intelligence Agency named XOF, putting him in a coma. 8 years later, a man who is reasonably sure he is Big Boss wakes up in a hospital in Cyprus as it's raided by the very same agency, narrowly escaping and with a hunch that he should rebuild his army and take revenge on XOF. Now, the plot deals with him trying to track down XOF and uncovering an evil plot by its leader Skull Face. A plot that is indeed, as is often brought up, somewhat thin for a game that is really quite long. As it progresses it does eventually include the quirky Metal Gear-isms one has come to expect, among them undead super soldiers, giant mechs, deadly microorganisms that kill people by language, psychic children and ancient Native American nuclear scientists. The actual substance in terms of dense political commentary is, however, pushed to the background, easy to miss and even easier to just gloss over.
MGS V, you see, is a game about mercenary work. Especially early on, many of the missions you take on barely relate to the overarching plot at all. It's very easy to dismiss the work you take on for much of the game as filler content. As a matter of fact I did so too, on my first playthrough. As you infiltrate various military installations to free prisoners, take out targets, extract ressources or destroy infrastructure, the game doesn't exactly go out of its way to elaborate on the why of it all. Where most open world games would have a short cutscene before every mission to contextualize what you're doing and why you're doing it, most of MGS V's operations get a short, optional briefing that might very well go in one ear and out the other and perhaps some audio tapes, more or less replacing the earlier games Codec calls.
If you do, however, pay attention you will find that there is more to MGS V's writing than meets the eye on first glance. I'd actually argue that while V might have one of the weakest plots in the series, it has some of its strongest writing. What MGS V expects you to do, is pull put your corkboard, put on your tinfoil hat and pay attention to who it is you're doing those jobs for, what it is you're actually doing and when you're getting contradictory information and what that implies. If you bother to do that, you will find that beyond the face value plot, there is a rather dense web of conspiracy and obfuscation going on in the background that you might barely notice at all on a regular playthrough.
In other words, while it is easy to dismiss MGS V as underwritten or the product of a team that hadn't quite figured out how to balance narrative and gameplay in an open world game, I think a lot of that is the result of it just taking a different approach to the previous Metal Gear games. The story isn't in the foreground the way it was in MGS 1 - 4, the cinematics and setpieces are spread farther apart while the dynamic stealth gameplay now makes up most of the game, but its still there. You just have to actively look for it. All of which, to me, suggests that Kojima was trying to make a point here. By emphasizing gameplay the way he did, by hiding details where player is likely to gloss over them, by expecting the player himself to notice when he's being lied to by his clients or his handlers and by expecting them to find connections without getting them spoonfed, it ties into the themes of information warfare and brainwashing that the plot deals with, even on the surface level and creates a sort of game within the game, a jigsaw puzzle of information the player is meant to piece together if they want something approaching approaching the whole picture.
Which, of course, doesn't mean that the rough development didn't take a toll on the game or that there aren't some aspects where the teams inexperience with this kind of game really shows. There are some plot threads that get no proper resolution. There is an epilogue to one in particular that didn't make it into the game due to time and budget reasons, which had its unfinished cinematics and story boards released on YouTube. There are some mechanics that feel half baked (Despite being set in active war zones, you never get any NPC's fighting each other). There are a couple of late game audio tapes that were clearly meant to be cutscenes before time and budget ran out. The Side Missions are for the most part just repetitive filler.
I'm not by any means saying Metal Gear Solid V is a game that lives up to all of its ambitions or succeeds on every level. But what it does show is that Kojima and his team were aware that they had to do things differently after MGS 4 and that they were ready to take risks and experiment. I know that more than a few people consider it a disappointment and I absolutely get that but I feel like it deserves being engaged with on its own terms. By all means, the story of Metal Gear was over after 4 and even Big Boss' character arc had basically come full circle. MGS V worked with the fact that there was little to add in terms of plot by making the fact that the character drama playing out in the foreground is primarily a distraction from the sinister machinations playing out just under the surface one of its core messages and expecting the player to actually look beneath that surface. That might have been what Kojima meant when he wrote that was doing something so risky with MGS V that he might have to retire if he fails. I don't think he failed and I'm quite glad he didn't have to retire.
