I played and reviewed MGSV:TPP. The game's great and can be very addicting, the single player campaign took me more than 150 hours just to finish all missions. You'll get your money's worth in this game while most games with the same price only gives short gameplay time. But there are stuff that makes The Phantom Pain not perfect.
This contains major spoilers, don't read this if you haven't played and completed the game.
The story (maybe the whole game itself) feels rushed and unfinished. Chapter 1 offers good balance between story and missions. Chapter 2 have more short cutscenes than main missions and where most problems are obvious. Chapter 2, when it comes to story is much better than Chapter 1 but it's lacking in the end. After playing through Chapter 2, suddenly the ending, the real one, pops up with a huge twist which I saw coming. The twist is that you're playing as the body-double of Big Boss which I accepted easily because if you played MGS2 you will be greeted by a name and date of birth entry and what do you know, you're not Solid Snake, but "Mind Controlled" Raiden for the rest of the game. Same in MGSV:TPP but with added custom avatar (the plastic surgery), and Ishmael saying "You're talking to yourself". This made me think that I'm not Big Boss, but hey this make me (us players) as Big Boss, because the game make me/us feel like the boss.
Back to Chapter 2, There some build-up going on in the Mother Base. Eli, and his fellow child soldiers are planning an uprising against Venom Snake. They took Sahelanthropus with the help of Tretij Rebenok and Huey Emmerich. This case contributes to Huey's banishment from the Mother Base. So what happened to Eli and Sahelanthropus? That is explained in the collector's edition of the game where the bonus disc contains the footage of "Mission 51". It's just a cutscene that's incomplete and unplayable. I think this mission was cut due to time constraints and Kojima Productions is meeting the deadline to release the game. The Konami vs. Kojima drama might also play a part on this.
Now Chapter 2 unlocks more main missions but some are just recycled but harder versions of the previous missions. This should have been a selectable mode like in Ground Zeroes where you can switch the mission Normal or Hard. If you count the "real" main missions there are 40 of them, 10 are recycled.
There's a Chapter 3 labeled "Peace" too and this might wrap up the game. It's revealed after someone dug up some files from the game's PC version.
Kojima also promised that you will revisit Camp Omega (the prison camp in Ground Zeroes), I don't know if it's a flashback mission or an actual revisit on the prison camp but that didn't happen. There are also scenes during the trailers that didn't show up in the game.
The story I think is around 70% to 90% complete. I think Konami rushed Kojima Productions so that they won't complete the game and release the unfinished content later as playable DLC. I cant complain with the core gameplay because it's really great, but still there are some issues.
Some boss fights in this game are not memorable. You will fight Quiet, Man on Fire, Eli and Sahelanthropus in this game. The Skulls are minor bosses, to be honest they scared me at first and I don't want to fight them until I was forced to in Mission 29. Kojima is good at scaring people in a different way. My favorite boss fight is against the Man on Fire, because it's optional to fight this boss and you'll still get an S-rank on the mission, but if you want to fight him, prepare a strategy because this fight is methodical (there are different ways to defeat him) and can be hard if you're not prepared.
I was disappointed with the third and fourth encounter with the Man on Fire because I thought I will be fighting him again. In the third encounter, he got ran over by the Sahelanthropus' moving platform. Next is that when I'm about to retrieve his body, I thought that I would be fighting him in Volgin's form (Venom Snake's hallucination) that I expect he'll switch back and forth from lightning to fire as he fights... but they're just all cutscenes.
Now about Tretij Rebenok himself, we don't have a chance to fight one-on-one against this young Psycho Mantis and here I am expecting that I will be having a 4th wall-breaking conversation and boss fight with him. In the story he is just obsessed or in trance (he can't control himself) because of the vengeful energy coming from the Man on Fire, Eli, Skull Face and Venom Snake himself. We didn't even have a chance to fight against both him and Eli riding Sahelanthropus.
On a positive note, the game have lots of memorable missions and scenes. I just can't believe there are lots of questions left unanswered.
There are lots of Side Ops in the game. They're fun but can be repetitive if you didn't balance the main and side missions. Believe it or not Ground Zeroes have fun Extra Ops missions like defending Hideo while you're on the chopper as he escapes and evades the enemy. And the Deja Vu mission where you find and scout the targets you saw in the pictures given to you and recreate a classic scene from MGS1.
There should be a Combat Unit specific Side Ops missions, because MGS:PW have them. I remember having a Side Ops mission in MGS:PW where you have to stop the enemy soldiers from going from out of the base as Snake fights Peace Walker for the first time. Also making the game better is a co-op mode where you can have another player as your buddy. Another good idea is have Venom Snake assist your random combat unit during their mission or vice versa.
Now there are some glitches in the game. I mentioned a few in my review like random floating objects and some targets didn't spawn during a Side Op mission. The most notable glitch is Quiet's game-breaking glitch where it halts your progress. This happens if you use Quiet in Mission 29 or Mission 42. Don't worry, this has been fixed but it's still worth mentioning.
This bug is annoying and prevents us from achieving a 100% completion and that's the "-" (blank) ranking bug in Mission 4: C2W. This happens if you (unintentionally) pre-emptively destroy the communications radio on the East Communications post during free roam then proceeding to do the Mission 4, giving you "-" ranking. After this, replaying this mission to get an S-rank is impossible, because even if you achieve any ranking in Mission 4, the result is still the "-" rank in the Mission list locking the "Grand Master Cetrificate (Standard)" Key Item and the Raiden costume, this also locks the two trophies, the S-ranking related trophy and the Platinum Trophy. I can't believe this bug went unchecked by Konami. This bug happened on my playthrough and I don't want to restart the game because I already spent 150+ hours playing it... that's annoying especially if you finally S-ranked all the missions after suffering lots of retries and screw-ups. I hope they'll fix this ASAP.
Some weird stuff that randomly happened during my playthrough is the missing sound effects and graphical effects. I encountered the missing sounds while playing the Target Practice Side Op in Mother Base, there should have been a chime sound after hitting a target, but in my case there's no chime sound. Another anomaly is the communications radio not exploding after destroying it. This would be fine if the enemy guards still noticed/heard the thing being destroyed, but they didn't, the radio "explodes" and nobody heard it. It doesn't even have the bursting to flames effect. Another glitch is funny that makes some parts of the world night on the field during daytime.
These are the imperfections that I noticed in the game and I just threw in some rumors and speculations along the way. I didn't tackle all of them in detail, like the Battle Gear being just a huge toy on display (you cant use that on the field as a buddy/tank or as a support attack). But like I said, the core gameplay, the open world and sandbox stealth, is great and much better than the past MGS games, because there are lots to do in it. If you found out any flaws that I didn't mention, you can point them out in the comments section.
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