“The Phantom’s Pain—A Metal Gear Solid V Narrative Analysis”, Matt Lakeman2020-01-22 (literary criticism, ethics)⁠:

When I first finished Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, like so many other players, I was disappointed. MGSV was supposed to be the “Missing Link” in the Metal Gear canon. It was that game that would reveal the bridge between the heroic Big Boss of MGS 3, Portable Ops, and Peace Walker, and the grand historical villain of Metal Gear 1 and 2. As expressed by numerous launch trailers and Hideo Kojima tweets, MGSV was going to be a tale of Big Boss’s fall into darkness, driven by an insatiable lust for revenge, a consummate anger lit by his enemies which would scorch his soul until nothing was left but a power-hungry mad man who would threaten the world with nuclear war for the sake of his deluded ambitions. Instead we got an incredibly weird twist which did little more than retcon patch a largely ignored plot hole in one of the least-played Metal Gear games. We found out that the final boss of Metal Gear 1 was not Big Boss, but a body double, who through surgery and hypnotherapy was made into almost an exact copy of the legendary soldier. Again, like most other players, when I first finished the game I thought this was a neat trick, a typically crazy, convoluted, but seductively entertaining twist from one of my favorite storytellers of all time. But of course… it was also a major let down.

…It wasn’t until I had put over 200 hours into my save file and replayed the entire game for a second time that the impact of Metal Gear Solid V’s story really hit me. Not only does MGSV do exactly what it was advertised to do—reveal the descent of Big Boss from hero to villain—but it does so in a subtle and narratively ambitious manner at a depth not seen in any video game since Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.

MGSV is the story of Big Boss’s fall from grace, but it’s also so much more than that. MGSV may very well be Kojima’s magnum opus. The game distills all of the Metal Gear series’ most important thematic elements into a relatively simple story with a deceptively small scale. The reason the vast majority of players didn’t realize this is because, well, Kojima can be too subtle for his own good…MGSV really is about Big Boss becoming a horrible monster worthy of every conceivable condemnation. But that story is the bedrock layer hidden beneath a million other narrative layers designed to confuse and manipulate the player, in exactly the same way Big Boss and Zero’s whole Phantom Snake project was designed to confuse and manipulate Venom Snake.