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+--- Thread: Phantom Pain (/showthread.php?tid=6893)
Phantom Pain - Dark Jaguar - 7th September 2015
Well, I got it day 1 (the box even says so). So far, I'm having a blast. It's classic Kojima.
In fact, I'm pretty sure Ground Zeroes is Big Boss stuck in a coma dream for years waiting to "wake up" for Phantom Pain, because Kojima is that sort of crazy.
He's also the sort of crazy that let me build a NATURE PRESERVE on my off-shore military installation, because now I have to collect all the animals of Afghanistan. I'm using all the military tech of the 80's, such as a walkman playing The Final Countdown while I use predator style invisibility to give people free balloon rides.
Phantom Pain - Dark Jaguar - 10th September 2015
Now of course that fulton system is ridiculous, there's no way that...
0_0 Well then...
Phantom Pain - Dark Jaguar - 22nd September 2015
So far the game is amazing, as is expected. Just like in Peace Walker, I'm fultoning everything. I don't care that I keep going over my limit, it's my strategy!
Supply delivery is a viable anti-sniper method.
Grenades can't break windows, but sleeping gas goes through walls.
So does electricity.
ROCKET PUUUUNCH!
I spin snake right round baby...
Quiet, what is your DEAL exactly? The End seemed to manage clothing well enough.
Parasites are the new nanomachines.
D. Walker and me, fighting a metal gear that can stand upright (basically a Gundam) before Rex was invented, because awesome. Best. Fight. Ever.
50% game complete. There's more!
Paz, what is your deal? Can someone give her some scrubs or something? Yeah, I can see the scar.
Ocelot is SO going to betray us. It's that chronic backstabber syndrome, he can't help it.
Balloon + materials crate + C4 = blown up helicopter
Extracted every soldier but my target from a base. Found out there was a hidden objective to take him out at 100 meters. Dragged his unconscious body out to the middle of the desert, kicked him awake, watched his utterly terrified reaction as he looked around and then called for help that wouldn't come (since I destroyed the radio transmitter), then he broke into a mad panic dash, then I tranqued him out again the moment my display showed he was 100 meters away.
Soldiers like the abuse. Thrown gun clip to the face = "thank you for that boss".
Smoke grenade in a jeep = PERFECT STEALTH DRIVING!
This is the sort of game design that says "let's give them a lot of toys and AI behaviors and let them play around however they like". I approve.
I have 15 minutes to destroy a bunch of tanks before they cross the border. Drove a jeep and cut off the tank convoy, then ditched the jeep (which went careening into a mine field, best vehicle abandonment ever) to briefly sneak past some distracted guards, then set up a bunch of road blocks in the form of a horse, another air dropped jeep, and a bunch of electric stun mines. Gave a bunch of tanks free balloon rides.
Game of the year.
Phantom Pain - Dark Jaguar - 23rd September 2015
Ocelot as Quiet makes for a much more entertaining scene. Also, frankly this fits Ocelot's character.
Phantom Pain - A Black Falcon - 25th September 2015
It's kind of annoying how obsessed the gaming parts of the internet have been with this game recently. Hopefully it passes... I mean, I'm sure it's a perfectly decent game, I just have no plans of playing it, it doesn't look like something I'd find interesting for long.
Phantom Pain - Dark Jaguar - 25th September 2015
Annoyed by fads huh? Sounds like you should... let it go!
Here, have a dozen more articles about Phantom Pain.
http://kotaku.com/my-quest-to-kidnap-every-guard-in-metal-gear-solid-v-g-1733071798
I'm tired, so I just put in 3.
Phantom Pain - Dark Jaguar - 2nd October 2015
Wow, that was some ride...
This game was absolutely amazing. It's got issues, but I'm in agreement with both the critical and public reception in that the game is amazing in spite of those issues.
In terms of ridiculously over the top acting and story telling, this game's got it all. I love it, and I love how in spite of how over the top it gets, it still gets me invested in the story. In spite of? No, largely BECAUSE of how over the top it is. It's just Kojima's style, and you best either get on board, or get outta the way. *sunglasses* The story is as convoluted as ever, answering questions in the most elaborate ways possible, and Mr. Bossman wouldn't settle for much less! Kojima also simply does far better camera work than anyone else in the game industry, most likely because he's made out of 80% movies.
In fact, ABF, one thing you should understand is just how liberal Kojima is. The whole Metal Gear series is a criticism of the American war machine by way of "celebrating" it. Just about all these mighty action characters are constantly having conversations on everything from the military industrial complex to poorly kept nuclear weapons to comparing the steady expansion of the English language and it's erasing of other languages to ethnic cleansing. This game covers themes of language dominance, parasitism, child soldiers, the ethicality of torture, where exactly to draw the line in how far you go in pursuit of justice, and so on. The things Kojima covers in Metal Gear games go far beyond anything Tom Clancy games cover and WAY beyond the average American summer blockbuster.
Notably, this game has really toned down the sheer length of cinematics from MGS4. Peace Walker also toned it down, but this game goes further. In fact, Snake rarely speaks unless absolutely necessary. Kojima appears to finally be learning to "show, don't tell", using Snake's expressions and actions to tell us what he's thinking. Don't misunderstand. Fairly lengthy cinematics are still in the game, but they're really toned down and rarely do the "you get to control the character for 3 minutes and then back to another 10 minute cut scene" that previous games had been guilty of.
The characters are all interesting. One thing to note is this game is not just a sequel to Ground Zeroes, but both as a package are more or less a direct sequel to Peace Walker. Yes, more of a sequel to Peace Walker than a sequel to Snake Eater. If you want to have a good footing on what's going on, you'll really need to play or at least read a synopsis of both Snake Eater and Peace Walker. While previous Metal Gear games have done a good job of providing this sort of backstory right on the menu, this one lacks it. Considering the nature of Ground Zeroes as more or less the first chapter of Phantom Pain sliced out and sold independently, you basically need to buy both of them. Ground Zeroes actually does provide a synopsis, but it's oddly lacking here. I say all of this to say that a LOT of the characters are returning directly from Peace Walker, such as Huey (Hal's father) who asked you to stop his creation back in the previous game, and Paz, a triple agent posing as an innocent student.
One notable issue is Quiet. The sad thing is, Quiet's story is actually pretty well written, but nothing Kojima could have written really explains her ridiculous default outfit. Now, about midway through the game I did unlock a really nice looking professional outfit for her, but every time there was a cinematic involving her it would switch right back to that default nonsense. She "breathes" through her skin, that's the "excuse", but it's a lazy one that didn't need to be there. There are many places where the cinematic direction seems to have been handed off to Michael Bay, and well, it's not good. Mind you, this isn't exactly a new problem with Kojima. It's just at it's most extreme in this particular game. (Sniper Wolf got the sexualized costume treatment in MGS 1, and her costume is a notable improvement for Quiet in this game). However, if one can look past that (and for some people, that will understandably be a big "if"), then the game still stands apart. Her character is still very interesting, and the relationship with Big Boss is... complex to put it mildly. Heck, Snake's relationship with most of his soldiers is complicated, since you are directly recruiting them from the field and many of them have committed some terrible atrocities before joining your crew. Snake's philosophy seems to be about making them forget their past and their hate and move forward, so when Snake lets in some really sketchy and suspicious people, it's justifiable in that sense since EVERYONE on his base has that sort of background.
That said, some of the characters coming off of Peace Walker had a hell of a change of characterization here. Huey in particular got the most of it, considering he was idealistic and cowardly but otherwise pretty harmless in Peace Walker. They've added all sorts of new layers that really seem like a critique of your average shut-in nerd and the sorts of things they might actually be capable of without admitting it to themselves. Huey makes me SICK now. However, his "captors" don't get off unscathed. They spend a large portion of the time torturing Huey for information (not really a spoiler, that's in the trailer), and it's presented in a very questionable light (as torture should be). Instead of Kiefer Sutherland (Snake's new voice, and there's actually a legitimate storyline reason that he's got a new voice) being portrayed as the victim when he tortures for justice, now he's actually coming across as someone slowly becoming a monster as he lets it go on (and Huey's not the only one, again that's also shown in the trailers). All in all, it does some very interesting things with how people are characterized. Animals too. There's a very "circle of life" moment early on with the dog.
The science is Metal Gear science. Mostly accurate codec conversations, combined with extremely unlikely implementation of it in the story. That means extremely detailed descriptions of how a sniper rifle mechanism works and the basic mechanics and "slight" stealth advantage of a silencer, proceeding directly into movie physics silencing on a sniper rifle. Also, sometimes you use a wormhole. Listening to the taped recordings gives a lot of backstory and explanations that would otherwise be missing due to the far shorter cinematics this time around. Again, this is the sort of thing Peace Walker was doing. All in all, the technology seems like the sort of thing 80's movies were convinced was right around the corner (like Johnny 5 and the other military kill bots). This makes sense, since the game is set in the 80's.
The fact it's set in the 80's really sets an interesting stage. From it's treatment of Russia's invasion of Afghanistan (serving both as a criticism of America's modern invasion and as a reminder that Russia has been trying to expand their territory for a good long while before the Ukraine). It also wraps the storyline into a decade by decade narrative, and even goes full circle on the development of the series, ending in the same decade the first Metal Gear game came out. It's a strangely nostalgic thing, as I grew up in the 80s, and I kept thinking about what "I" was doing as a kid while all these fictional events were going on. The choices in music are also very good, though I get the strong impression Kojima wanted more but wasn't able to get the licenses due to Konami tightening the purse strings.
As in all the Metal Gear games, this one's got loads of paranormal goings on. They don't take center stage, but they also won't be ignored. The Man on Fire in particular is an interesting villian, though frankly underutilized. In a moment that now reminds me of Star Fox Adventures, there's a big build up to what I think is going to be a final boss fight with him that only, like him, fizzles out and dies. Disappointing... Again, I get the impression that boss battle was cut for time.
A Kojima standard, entire gameplay systems were done PURELY for 5 minute moments. The opening of the game involves you waking up from a coma in a surprisingly realistic way (in fits and spurts over the course of weeks). In particular, there's a crazy detailed gameplay system right in the opening that suddenly gets cast aside in an instant that doesn't come up again until the very end of the game. There's loads of hints about one of the game's biggest secrets, and they only really crystallize when the game makes that reveal. It seemed simultaneously ridiculous and perfect once I found out. Another late-game chapter had one of the most emotionally impactful moment in the entire series. Let's just say you get attached to all those soldiers you forcibly recruit and bad things happen. Not the bad thing you're thinking of, an even worse bigger bad thing (after the first bad thing). For someone like me who loves playing stealth games with zero kills (in this game meaning I've fultoned basically everyone I ever saw back to base), it really made me feel the feelings.
The gameplay is what kept me going. It just... never got old. To put that in perspective, I had JUST beaten Arkham Knight a couple months ago, and finally got around to playing through Peace Walker on and off throughout the year finishing it all up about a week before Phantom Pain dropped (I knew from Ground Zeroes that there was no way I'd be able to go back to those old mechanics if I waited until after Phantom Pain to play Peace Walker). Frankly, this game modernizes stealth entirely. Games like Thief and Splinter Cell have been competing with Metal Gear for years, and they made great jumps ahead of Metal Gear's mechanics for a good long while before MGS4 finally caught up with modern controls and gameplay systems. Phantom Pain surpasses all of that to change the whole genre though. The next Splinter Cell is going to have a lot of work to catch up to this, and it's about time they were put on their back foot. One of the biggest overall control enhancements is simply how silky smooth Snake now transitions from one stance to the next, from one skill to another. In past Metal Gear games, even in 4, everything felt far more clunky. To crouch you'd stand still, hit the crouch butten, and then "jerk" into a crouched position, and moving from crouch instantly made you crawl. Getting up from a crawl was itself a clunky chore. Splinter Cell got things smoother, but a whole lot of mechanisms were still rather stiff like pushing against a wall and so on.
Phantom Pain makes all of that better. When walking, pressing crouch doesn't stutter at all, you just do it while moving. Holding crouch, even while dashing at top running speed, just smoothly transitions you straight to the ground while even maintaining your forward movement (though obviously you slow down). You can even quick dive straight to the ground in another very smooth animation. Gone is the extremely awkward "roll attack" of past games. The "quick dive" just flows out of pretty much any state you might be in. You can press against a wall just by pushing into it, with no button press. Snake just automatically assumes the appropriate stance, and pressing away is all you need to push off of it. Climbing ladders and low ledges DOES require a button press, but again Snake just flows directly into it. In fact, you can just hold down the "action" button and he'll just automatically climb or mount over anything in his path if he's able to. There are some iffy bits of terrain that confuse this new control system, but they're pretty few and probably would have been ironed out had development been allowed to do so. The weapon controls are again smoother than they've ever been. You can grab someone, guide them around a bit, and then take aim while still holding them. (Note that if you use him as a hostage to keep people from shooting at you, that's a war crime, but it works.) Basically, if you have one hand free, you can use your one handed weapon, and if you have two, you can use your two handed weapon, in pretty much any possible stance you might be in. Actions like grabbing someone, swapping weapons, and attaching a balloon to someone are also very very smooth. Driving works just fine. They opt for something closer to arcade controls than other open world games, but it works in Metal Gear's favor. You can ride in pretty much anything you find, except helicopters (well, you can ride in your own as a passenger, but you know what I mean). Along with this general theme of "smoothness" you've got your hilariously named iDroid. Basically, at any point you have full control over your base and remote missions, even when you're hiding inside a dumpster. It won't pause the game, but that makes sense since you can do things like call in air deliveries (and air strikes) to any location you point to on the map. Ah yes, then there's the marking system. Look at someone for a second or so and they are "marked". Your network of spies and your iDroid will keep track of that target for... ever. It does kinda feel like cheating, but the game is designed entirely around the assumption you're using it, so it doesn't really trivialize challenges as much as you think. You still need to spot them in advance to do it so guards still surprise you.
Along with this "smoothness" is the L button menu. This has all the "command" options, and again they can be done basically no matter what else you are doing. So, climb a ladder while simultaneously barking an order at your dog to bark and cause a distraction. It's all good. You can interrogate soldiers this way as well. You don't need to actually be "holding" them to do this, just use the L menu if you happen to be behind them and you can ask questions or order them to lie down on the ground (though some are a bit less cooperative than others).
One additional note. This game has ditched the stamina meter (run forever) and even the health meter. Your health works like modern shooters, in that if you can just get some cover and hide for a bit, Snake will activate his healing factor and walk off pretty much anything. There are some more extreme injuries you can sustain, similar to Snake Eater, but instead of a complicated menu, just press the action button in a safe spot and Snake basically just grunts and either pops joints back into place or sprays himself down with a painful-looking first aid spray he seems to have borrowed from Resident Evil, thus recovering from the more debilitating injuries.
One additional additional note. There's destructable environments now. It's not as well developed as it could be, but you can drive straight through a chain link fence or set some C4 on a guard tower to bring the whole thing down.
Now we get to the open world. Actually, this game has two "open worlds", one in Afghanistan and the other in central Africa. In terms of sheer size, neither one is breaking any records, but what it lacks in scope it makes up for in focus. Practically every single rock and shrub has been placed for a purpose. You can see this every time you try to sneak around a sniper and note the positions of said rocks and shrubs to find a good sneaking path. The two locations are even designed with their actual nature in mind. Afghanistan is a range of hills and valleys, forcing you to go along a lot of canyon paths to reach a destination (though with many hidden mountain paths to allow sneaking around in the same way the Mujahideen snuck around the Russians back in the 80's). Central Africa is, as you might imagine, much flatter, so you can much more easily cut across large plains to avoid the roads entirely, though African PFs also tend to set up mechanized units in those empty areas. Each village shows this same attention to detail, so while they might have a lot in common, there are often unique building models used in exactly one location to make sure things don't get too repetitive. You'll run across a number of horrors along the way as well. Both locations are active war zones, and as a result you won't run into villagers. It's all enemy forces out there, and animals.
About those animals. At a certain point a wildlife protection group hires you to save as many animals from those active war zones as you can. They even all have encyclopedia entries about their habitat and life style. This goes for plants as well. Your medical unit needs raw supplies so you can actually just go out and pick them right off the land. There's a separate platform placed far from your military base that functions as a temporary zoo for all the animals you fulton out (yes, including sheep). Yes, sometimes you'll be perfectly aware of a military presence and have the perfect path, only to have to turn around to avoid having to deal with a wild brown bear.
Then there's all the little details that make a Kojima game feel so "complete" as an experience. There's a whole mechanic in place for climbing vertical wall cracks, which is something you'll do maybe 5 times during the entire game. There's a physics system in place for accurately bumping into random trash, which exists SOLELY as something that can alert guards if you aren't careful and knock over a bucket or something. The various animals actually have paths they take as well as the guards, and when guards run into animals interesting things can occur (such as a driver honking and yelling to get a donkey out of the road, or jackals attacking a walking patrol). You can place C4 or a sleeping gas mine (depending on your play style) and let them go up to a tent full of other soldiers to take them all out at once. If you use a sniper rifle during the day, keep track of the sun's position as the glint off the glass on your scope might give away your position. Soldiers will still track your foot prints, though they've learned since the old days and will break off of an endless circle of them rather than get stuck in that loop you built. Soldiers get smarter over the course of the game and will adapt to how you take them out, equipping helmets to handle head shots (though you can still aim for the face), shotguns to handle close range types, mines to handle paths you like to sneak through, gas masks to handle sleeping gas, and so on. The game gives you so many tools and lets you have fun with it. Toss a smoke grenade into a jeep and drive it into a base for a "stealthy" entrance that confuses everyone there. Call in a supply drop on someone's head (I took out a boss that way). Have your horse poop in the road to spin out an oncoming jeep and hold up the temporarily stunned soldiers. Jump out of a car going at full speed (you actually tuck and roll on the ground if you do this) and let it coast into a mine field using the distraction to go around and invade a base from the other side. Park a tank in the middle of the road to stall a convoy. Climb in the back of a truck and fire at a tank ahead of the truck to get both to stop and let you fulton them out as they try to find the source of the gunfire. If you can imagine a combination, it'll probably work. They clearly designed this game with the idea that instead of trying to find and fix all the "exploits" players could come up with, they'd instead just LET the players find the exploits so long as it meant greater creative possibilities for them. Heck, lure some wolves to an outpost and throw a bait bottle at a guard's face if you want. The details go even further, with the way certain menus will have entirely hidden mechanisms that show up out of the blue purely for a single story line driven moment before vanishing entirely when the story is done with it. Those music tapes you pick up? Try using the external speaker function on your iDroid. Lost wandering soldiers from Peace Walker can be subdued by the calming tunes of a song from back then. A rather awful recording from a soldier with digestive issues can be played inside a porto potty when guards are searching for you to make them skip the bathroom and look somewhere else.
I have covered a LOT here, but it's time to get to the bad. The main bad, other than Quiet's costume design, is that this game is incomplete. Even with ALL the details and just how rich the experience is, it's still very clear there was meant to be so much more. In fact, the sheer attention to detail in this game makes those parts without that insane detail stand out when in most other games it would just be accepted for what it is. As an example, it seems very clear they had actually intended for MORE animals in the game. There's a LOT of wild canine species in the game, but basically NO feline species. I didn't get eaten by lions even once in Africa. The fact you can gather plants is nice, but there's 7 different kinds of plants total. As I said, you can't fulton or hijack enemy helicopters, or even take them out with anything other than a missile. (Though destroying a helicopter doesn't add to your kill count, so I guess these are drones.) I expect that Kojima originally intended either a Peace Walker style method of being able to goad a pilot's head out the window so you could tranq it or maybe a special non-lethal missile that just shorted out the helicopter's electrical systems. You can turn the head lights on and off in a jeep, but you can't honk it's horn like the enemy can to get goats and other animals to clear a path (or just to lure soldiers to your position). There's destructable environments, but it's weirdly limited, in that you can bomb down a guard tower, but can't destroy a porto potty (though you can smash the door down). Whole boss battles are missing. In fact, there's basically only two real ones. One major storyline moment with you riding with your enemy in a jeep just sorta... stops all talking while a song plays in the background, and I get the impression some visuals were supposed to accompany that rather than you staring directly into his eyes for an uncomfortably long period of time. After this, the "second chapter" of the game feels very shoddily put together, with a large number of the "main" missions in it literally being "hard mode" versions of previous story missions, and almost no narrative thread connecting the new story missions (though those missions are well done when the come). At this point, the game has three endings (all of which I thought were really good, though Skull Face's end was a little underwhelming (though I liked the Breaking Bad reference tossed in there)), and that STILL wasn't enough to resolve all the dangling plot threads. There's a super secret 4th ending that was CUT entirely from the game. An incomplete video version of that mission is included on the collector's edition Bluray (which I fortunately have). It's a well-written mission that wraps up those remaining plot threads nicely enough. There's a number of diehard defenders trying to say "no, that mission was actually cut for artistic reasons" but I don't buy it. It's just such a perfect wrap up and sets up future events with Eli so well that I can't imagine it was cut for any reason other than Konami forcing Kojima to wrap things up.
Along with this incompleteness, the biggest theme song of the game is "The Man Who Sold the World" at the very beginning. It's actually a cover rather than the original version, but it's a great cover. However, I am STRONGLY suspecting that Kojima intended to also license the David Bowie original to play during the credits of one of the endings instead of replaying the cover. This is due to the nature of that particular ending's big reveal and how thematically perfect going into the "real" version from the cover song would be.
Along those lines, for the first time in the Metal Gear series all the military guns go by fake names instead of their actual names. In Goldeneye and Perfect Dark I didn't care, but in the detail oriented Metal Gear it's rather noticeable that my custom modified tranq sniper rifle is no longer called a Mosin Nagant. Now, I'm tempted to once again blame Konami for this, but there's a legitimate moral reason why Kojima just might have decided not to pay for the license, and that comes down to how the money paying for those licensing rights would just go towards the production of more guns, and again Kojima is a very liberal minded person (his classic Japanese sexism aside) so he might have finally decided it wasn't worth that detail.
All in all, I can't call this a perfect game due to just how incomplete things are, especially in chapter 2, and yet I can't help but also think this is one of the best games I've played in years outside of a Nintendo console. Heck, 2015 in general has been a great year for gaming, which is a nice upswing from the rather dismal 2014 (again, Nintendo excluded). Even in it's incomplete form, it's got far more going on than, say, the latest Batman game (and I enjoyed Arkham Knight quite a bit).
Now, I know most of you don't have a next gen console yet, but I also know most of you have a last gen console or two lying around, and thanks to yet another forced decision by Konami that possibly hurt the game, you can get the full game with slightly worse graphics on your 360s, so really you've got no excuse. Pick it up. It'll probably be the last money you ever give to Konami.
Phantom Pain - A Black Falcon - 19th October 2015
Well, now Kojima has officially left Konami, and Konami shut down Kojima Productions: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/hideo-kojima-has-left-konami-and-kojima-production/1100-6431536/
Because making $180 million in a few days, or something like that, isn't something Konami wants to do anymore. Konami now only makes mobile games and PES, that's it.
... How far Konami has fallen in only a few years... pretty sad, really. I know game development now is expensive, but just giving up entirely for no reason other than "Mobile is the future!"? That's just awful.
Now, there are other reasons to dislike Konami, as Jim Sterling has detailed before, but now they don't matter much do they, now that Konami barely even makes games anymore...
Phantom Pain - Dark Jaguar - 20th October 2015
Here's the funny thing. Konami is claiming that Kojima's only on vacation.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/10/its-ok-everyone-kojima-hasnt-left-konami-hes-just-on-vacation/
From what I understand, a recently massively popular pay to play mobile game (only in Japan) made Konami a huge amount of money, and as a result the lead on that project ended up in charge of the whole shebang. There was some sort of huge internal restructuring, and well, here we are.
Mind you, Konami has always had an issue spending money they didn't think they needed to. Just look at the NES manuals, for example. They didn't even TRY to translate them. They appear to have got the nearest stoner to make up whatever made them laugh the most and stick that in the manual. In the case of Metal Gear, a dialog-heavy game, it's additionally ridiculous because the in-game text doesn't match up at all with whatever the manual is saying.
Phantom Pain - A Black Falcon - 22nd October 2015
Yeah, "vacation". I agree with the speculation that this isn't a vacation he is likely to return from still as an employee of Konami. :p The 'using up his vacation time before he leaves' speculation is plausible, if that is indeed true.
Phantom Pain - Sacred Jellybean - 6th December 2015
I've had my eye on this game since it was released (kind of unavoidable). Since I finally beat Bloodborne, I picked this up immediately. Only $45 on the Playstation Network, ho yeah!
I'm only past the first chapter and maybe a couple checkpoints into the next mission. Impressions so far: holy cut-scenes Batman. From the hospital to escaping by horse, there must have been 90% cinematics and 10% gameplay. I lost count of how many times the character blacked out. Or the flow of the game was interrupted by that big ol' Flamer and the strait-jacket ghost. Every time I thought the chase scene was over, lol nope, you're under pursuit again, now watch another protracted cut-scene. DJ said above that this game actuall CUTS DOWN on the cinematics, so holy shit-balls, I don't know if I'd have the patience for Ground Zeros or Snake-eater. I mean, if the story is just some silly action mashup, what reason is there to pay attention to it? I'd skip the cut-scenes, but I don't want to miss anything... which makes no sense, granted, but my compulsive nature won't allow it.
Now that I got to the first desert level with Revolver Ocelot, I'm having a bit more fun. I love the stealth elements, crawling everywhere. It makes me want to go back to the original, which I never completed. I still have my GameCube, and I could probably find Twin Snakes for cheap.
Phantom Pain - Dark Jaguar - 6th December 2015
Ground Zeroes has the fewest cut scenes of any game, so don't worry on that account.