I’m Afraid It’s Been… 10 Years: A Phantom Pain Retrospective

This is a feature excerpt from Unwinnable Monthly #188. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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At the end of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, protagonist Raiden has just had his entire life pulled apart piece by piece and now finds himself in the streets of Manhattan outside Federal Hall. He stands like a river stone – a flow of New Yorkers glide in an out of frame around him. Enshrouded by haze and slow-motion effects, they leave trails like time-lapse light photography. It’s surreal and strange, it captures the feeling of dissociating in a crowd, or joining a busy street after a quiet, intimate gathering. Before long, previous series protagonist Solid Snake appears and waxes philosophic at Raiden for a few minutes to give you, the player, the lowdown on What This Was All About. Then, Raiden removes the dog tags from his neck, and Snake asks, “anyone you know?” at which point the camera zooms in to show the name the player entered at the beginning of the game. “Never heard of ‘em,” Raiden says, before hurling the dog tags away. For a game oft remembered for the protagonist bait and switch or the nearly 13-minute monologue by an AI that predicted much of our modern information landscape, this is arguably its most important moment. The game ejects the player from the driver’s seat. Raiden isn’t us anymore, he’s no longer weighed down by our desires or expectations. He is free to become his own person. We’re no longer the star. The game’s over, it’s time to go outside.

It’s difficult to believe from a starfucker like Hideo Kojima, but he really wants his players to be center stage. The game director, who intended to cast film celebrities as early as 2004’s Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, is known to try to squeeze as many Hollywood names into his games as he can. With 2019’s Death Stranding, all bets were off. The cast of the game, buoyed by the always excellent design of Yoji Shinkawa, is less a collection of characters and more a who’s-who of Kojima’s gang of famous film festival buddies. It’s hard to look at this display case of celebrity skin and think “this guy really wants this to be about me,” but it’s undeniable – it’s a case he’s been trying to make since at least 2001. He tried to make it again in 2015 and it nearly spelled the end of his career.

When Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was fully announced in 2013, it felt like Kojima firing on all cylinders, a veritable videogame rock star returning to the public eye to deliver a juggernaut. The last decade or so saw Kojima growing increasingly tired and frustrated with the Metal Gear Solid series (his depiction of an old, exhausted Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots seems like an exploration of these feelings), to trying to hand over the reins (Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops) to a begrudging return with a new formula (Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker). It’s hard to call anything in a Metal Gear Solid game “safe”, but relatively speaking, the media campaign leading up to The Phantom Pain was anything but. I have a vague recollection of a social media post begging Kojima fans to not treat him like The Riddler, and while I agree with this sentiment I forgive some for assuming the man is some sort of mad eccentric. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was originally announced as a project under half of its name (eschewing the Metal Gear Solid) by a fake studio and a fake bandage-wrapped creative director, after all.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is about as maximalist as its media campaign. Kojima’s trademark kitchen-sink mechanical approach is turned up to eleven. Players once again take the role of Big Boss/Naked Snake (his long-time English voice actor David Hayter infamously replaced, somewhat unceremoniously, with Keifer Sutherland). The level of possible systemic interaction in the game’s free-form stealth sandbox is staggering, even by contemporary standards. In the famous The Final Hours of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty by Geoff Keighly, Kojima was quoted as saying “This is my Metal Gear and I can destroy it if I want to.” The Phantom Pain in many ways feels like a destruction. The game is tonally and structurally a far-cry from the many entries that came before it. Gone are the long, philosophical codec calls, the political debates set to archival footage, the long-winded melodrama smothered in ’80s machismo. The Phantom Pain is violent and cruel and mostly quiet. Many series characters return, but they’re scowling, raging facsimiles of their previous incarnations. The gang’s all here but the vibes are bad. Everything about the narrative feels decidedly off, even when the gameplay is the best it’s ever been. This leads to a sort of hypnogogic juxtaposition of familiar faces, characters feeling like they’re someone else wearing a mask.

And how appropriate – buried some fifty-plus hours into the game (several times longer than any other entry in the series by orders of magnitude), an unceremonious addition to the mission list appears: “The Truth.” Long after the game has rolled credits, Kojima’s team has one more trick up their sleeve. The Truth, painfully, requires the player to navigate through the entirety of the game’s hour-long opening with one change: the player is revealed to not be protagonist Big Boss at all, but the “avatar” they created at the beginning of the game. The entire time, they’ve not been playing as a known character, but his double, a phantom. It was you, wearing his face. It’s an incredibly simple metatextual statement that still feels like a haymaker.  We, logically, understand that we are not the protagonists we embody, but Kojima begs to differ.

Kojima’s studio’s approach to design often aligns players by placing the “game-y” aspects front and center. When a character explains how to answer the codec in Metal Gear Solid, they tell Snake directly to “press the select button”. When Snake arms himself with a pistol, he doesn’t pull it out of his holster, he holds R2 and navigates the weapon menu to select the SOCOM, because he and the player are the same person. It’s true that Kojima likes to antagonize (he once advised filmmaker Jordan Vogt-Roberts to “betray his audience”), but I doubt that the infamous protagonist bait-and-switch in Metal Gear Solid 2 was an act of malice or something truly intended to frustrate and alienate. Kojima’s games may not always give players what they want, but they’re rarely directly antagonistic. Just like the final piece of The Phantom Pain is not intended to be a trick. It’s the same lesson as Metal Gear Solid 2 but delivered gentler. You may look like Big Boss while you engage with this, but it’s you. It’s always been you.

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Ryan Wagahoff is a Brooklyn-based games enthusiast, arcade fabricator, and writer.