MGSV was a notoriously incomplete game, at least according to fan interpretation. Playing, it's impossible not to read the wreckage of Mother Base as a metaphor for the franchise. It's also a purgatory for Metal Gear itself. Its framing may be derivative, but that seems less a problem here and more of a feature: Metal Gear Survive takes the art and design of its predecessor and attempts to make a complete game out of it. In a bizarre twist, some of these soldiers, along with some of Mother Base itself, are pulled through an interdimensional wormhole into the wasteland world of Dite (the Dante's Inferno reference is both intentional and thoroughly overexplained, in true Metal Gear fashion), whose inhabitants have been turned into monsters by some unknown, crystalline parasite. But where The Phantom Pain follows Big Boss, Survive's first and perhaps most interesting gesture is to focus instead on the soldiers under his command. Even using some of the same footage, it details the carnage that led to the death of Big Boss' mercenary army and the massive industrial structure that housed it.
Metal Gear Survive begins precisely where Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain does: with the destruction of Mother Base. If Metal Gear Solid V is about destruction and revenge, Metal Gear Survive, built out of re-contextualized art assets and design ideas from its immediate predecessor, is about the wreckage: the wreckage left behind by the end of the Konami/Kojima Productions relationship, and the wreckage of Metal Gear Solid V itself. Metal Gear, like Big Boss's Mother Base, had fallen apart. After Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain shipped in 2015, Hideo Kojima left Konami, taking an unknown number of Kojima Productions staff with him to start an independent company.
It began to segway away from traditional major game development, putting a wedge between Konami and Kojima Productions, its former flagship studio. Much of this tale isn't known, but the gaming press has scraped it together from the aftermath: at some point during Metal Gear Solid V's development, Konami, its publisher, changed directions, moving toward mobile games and Japanese gambling machines as a quicker, easier way to turn its franchises into profitability. Metal Gear Solid V is the story of that quest, but it also tells the story of its own storied creation. When he awakens, he concerns himself with rebuilding, and revenge. The destruction nearly kills Big Boss, the villain-protagonist of the game, putting him in a coma for years. This building, an off-shore platform designed as the home for a mercenary army, falls into fire and rubble, collapsing into the ocean as enemy guns and bombs tear it asunder.
#Mgsv ocean of games series
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, the last Metal Gear game helmed by series creator Hideo Kojima, begins with the destruction of a military base.