! Starting with Ground Zeroes, being the equivalent of the Tanker and the Virtuos Mission. The game starts nicely with both responsive controls and camera, the mission can be disorienting if you never played or watched the secret ending of Peace Walker, but you can play it even without context i guess. As you progress in Camp Omega you will soon discover new mechanics like the Reflex mode, that is pretty broken but given the open area it's fine until you get used to the controls. Getting to Chico and other prisoners is not that difficult and you can blast through it with either luck or skill, and while doing so you can experiment a lot with the guards in the area to have fun in your own way. Rescuing Chico (and other prisoners if you want), is even easier but part of the story so it's not a big deal. What comes after is really interesting, having to listen to a tape to understand where Paz is being held prisoner, it's the first time in the MGS series that there is something so innovative and great to play, even if it's easy but that's secondary. Not long after you can reach her and save the day with another new mechanic of carrying people on your back, despite making hilarious and unrealistic scenarios like running for the whole camp as long as you wish without a second to catch a breath. After that the finale of the mission kicks in and Mother Base gets destroyed and the main plot of MGSV starts seeking revenge.
! So far Ground Zeroes provided a new useful mechanic and an unprecedented one, the closest we ever came to that in the past was hearing Naomi calling Snake in Act 2 despite it turning out to be a trap set up by the Frogs. MGSV starts with a lot of emphasis on cutscenes and exposition like older Metal Gears, but something is already completely different from the others. In previous titles you would always start by infiltrating the enemy base while getting some intel on it and getting to know your support team, here instead you start by being injured, barely knowing anyone and escaping the place rather than infiltrating it. After the massive cutscene at the beginning some events start to unfold, and when you get control of Medic it's kinda silly to have instructions on screen telling you how to move and such, especially after having played Ground Zeroes since it's also part of the MGSV Experience, but Raiden received the same treatment in MGS2. As you escape the hospital you will slowly gain access to your character, with a lot of scripted scenes that slow down tremendously the pace of the intro, by also showing how incompetent the soldiers sent to kill you are. They either slowly search one dude at a time through beds or by moving extremely slowly in corridors. In the end you will manage to escape thanks to Snake but then more soldiers show up near the exit and in a hilarious moment you will triumph over them while being naked against 6-7 of them fully armed. Volgin will then appear near the exit but you can easily skip the encounter so whatever. The visuals of his appearances are nice and well made and threatening and all, too bad he can't say a word to his previous enemy or to Medic.
! After this really long escape from the hospital there is another one by car, that will end with you meeting Ocelot and escaping again by horse while shooting Volgin that is somehow able to do all king of magic tricks like he alredy did in MGS3.
! The game then after some cutscenes will truly start in Afghanistan, and almost everything that the prologue taught you is already completely different, since now you have a horse, the melee attack, tranquilizer guns, and all kind of ways to play the map unlike the intro. Here is arguably the best moment of MGSV on a psychological level, even if this first mission is on a smaller scale than Camp Omega and for later missions of Phantom Pain, this is where the game truly begins and every kind of excitement and hope begins to spark in the mind. The mission in itself is really easy but just playing around while knowing that this time there will be a lot more to play is really satisfying, despite a questionable time limit and how the enemies dispatched some of their weaker guards while keeping Miller prisoner. Even after you save him, and with the Skull unit introduction, they won't be a dangerous threat in your rescue mission, so i wonder why the enemy let you have your way so easily on a story standpoint.
! Some time after that the game truly begins even for its other half, with the Mother Base re introduction after the Peace Walker one. This time fully explorable and with soldiers roaming around, despite having all the menus still on the iDroid. The base itself is kinda empty at the start, and will be like that forever. Even if you expand it to its full potential it will just grow in size but not in content inside it. There is very little to do for such a giga enormous place, with also poor transportation methods. And speaking of poor methods to move around, since you will return to MB, you will have to return to Afghanistan and Africa later on to do every mission, and here starts the enormous problem of loading times. It's not fun to just wait around while doing nothing at the beginning and at the end of every mission just because of the chopper, especially when Peace Walker showed Snake attaching a Fulton to himself to leave the area and then back at the menus in a couple of seconds. Here instead you have to call the chopper each time, that coupled with the other two sequences involved of waiting in the chopper make for some of the most tedious and unpleasant moments in the whole game.
! After the first mission, and after the Mother Base re introduction, the options open up even more, but if you already played Peace Walker all of this will feel the same already. From Side Ops to weapons and staff members of the base, to the cassette tapes it all feel the same for better or worse. Starting from the Side Ops, in MGSV sadly they are not as diverse and imaginative as some of the Peace Walker ones, that ranged from generic ones of defeating enemies or rescuing people, to take silly photos of enemies while doing silly actions, or taking photos of Ghosts, or even escaping from Ghosts, and even managing to bring back to life those Ghosts by returning their souls in their bodies and then even fultoning them to your base. You could also scare enemies with only a banana as long as you approached them from behind carefully, or you could defeat the main bosses of the game at insane level of difficulties, or even do some Monster Hunter missions against the Rathalos, Tigrex and a Metal Gear Rex monster. Lastly there were also dates with Paz and Kaz, that could go either fine, in hilarious ways, or dangerous ones. Then after these kind of missions, MGSV sadly only have the generic ones from Peace Walker, just on bigger scale. The management of staff members and weapons/items is also more or less the same, just like how you recruit new people, with the only difference that now you can't do it indoors or with a ceiling blocking the way, and with sandstorms the probability of extraction will decrease. This is to make the whole thing more realistic i suppose, but the game in many aspects clearly doesn't care of being realistic, so it's a questionable choice. Other enemis can also react to their comrades being taken away unlike Peace Walker, but this is a benefit for you lots of times, since it gives you time to shoot the enemy while it's distracted, again, questionable choice.
! Another thing you can do from the menus and that is borrowed from Peace Walker is dispatching units of yours to fight battles offscreen and get rewards from it. Nothing spectacular, and it's usually just free resources given to you with almost no risks involved until some of the final missions of this kind. It's worth mentioning that through the whole game Huey will come up with the Battle Gear, and since you won't be able to use it on your own, you can only send it to these kind of missions making it questionable why there was so much emphasis put on it if you can't use it freely, with even a 3D model in the base.
The cassettes mentioned before make also a re appearance, but this time they are much worse than Peace Walker. In MGSV sadly they are just monologues of geo political boring events, with little to no dialogue or character development or any kind of of diversity in it. Compared to the ones in PW ranging from: funny, sad, deep, informative and instructive. You would get hilarious tapes of Snake believing in Santa, the name of Cecile Cosima Caminades being a somewhat reference to "Kojima kami nandesu" (him being God), the cardboard box as a tank, Cecile talking about french food and then ragequitting when Macarons show up and Miller contradicts her, or when she talks about Picasso and Snake also gets called out by Cecile. Or you would get sad tapes about The Boss life, Strangelove and her past with The Boss and herself, Huey and the relationship with his father before and after the Manhattan Project, Kaz and his past as a kid and in the JSDF, to Amanda and her fight for the revolution in Costa Rica. Then there would be the super informative ones about Peace, history of Costa Rica and Somoza and other tyrants, or about legendaries monsters of folklore mentioned by Chico /that will then lead to the Monster Hunter missions), Strangelove also will talk about AI in depth, or about 2001: Space Odyssey. Each of them will always have a lot to say about a multitude of arguments, while also carrying a lot of personality with them, while also making conversations with Snake, while in MGSV there is almost nothing of that, and it gets even dumber with the cassettes of Zero's truth, when you wonder why in the world would he have a microphone to register them and why those cassettes will end up with Medic. The best cassette is arguably the one explaining how Ocelot got the "Shalashaska" epithet, and very few others explaining barely a confusionary and poor and stupid plot for the game. The cassette in Ground Zeroes that you had to hear to locate Paz was great, so having none of that is really disappointing and sad.
! Lastly (still talking about menus functions), there is the expansion of Mother Base, that unlike the PW one that would gradually expand as you did mission, this time will grow by waiting many hours of our own world, as if we weren't already waiting a lot with all the chopper moments. You also have to spend a lot of resources to improve the platforms, but for the most part they are always so easy to get, and the game also provides you with materials given freely to you, so in this aspect the game plays by itself at times.
! After all this said about the menus, it's time to come back to the other half of the game, by playing the main missions. Since the Side Ops are already estabilished as filler ones with very repetitive nature, i was hoping that the story ones would have always been "story" ones, with also lots of diversity in them, and always something memorable in them, like in all the previous Metal Gears, where you will remember more or less each moment of the game. But this time it's not like that, the story is lacking, the characters are lacking, the diversity is lacking and the environments are lacking most of the times. But luckily, for all these flaws there is the gameplay that offers the most in terms of movement, precision, decision making and all kind of stuff that lets you play the way you want it. Even if the outposts are not that many, and the objectives are very similar every time, it's still great and fun to play them like you want. Like previous games there is always the stealth approach or the Rambo one, or even a mix of the two by escaping after shooting sections, or vice versa. You can turn off the lights and even cause all kind of havoc without getting detected, and it's funny to see the enemy freak out while not knowing where you are. It's also weird and funny how you can get a hold of an enemy and ask him intel on other enemies, but he can either accept or refuse while saying many times that he won't tell you anything, and then you can ask him for other kind of intel and he will tell you stuff anyway and viceversa. What's not funny is that the only way to kill an enemy with the knife is that you have to hold them from behind and then stab them to kill them. You can't knife them to death while they're on the ground, or while you're standing in front of them while they're shooting at you, there is no other way unless you hold them first. It's stupid and doesn't make any sense, if you are free to play the way you want, and Medic always have this knife with him, there is no reason why you couldn't equip the knife and stab people with them, since it's a useful way to kill without wasting bullets or by depleting the suppressors or without making any noise with other guns. Many times it would be useful to kill them right away but if you let the hold go while they're sleeping they will fall on the ground, and then the only way to stab them will be by waking them up, then waiting for them to get up, then you will have to grab them again, and only then you will be able to stab their hearts out. Why has it to be this convoluted and unpractical, when you could have played your way in the first place? Especially since the melee attack that you perform while crawling is an uneffective sweep with your fist, when a knife stab would have been more useful, or there could have been a prompt to stab while they were on the ground unconscious. When you get detected is important to have full control of the situation, but enemies knocked out can easily wake up and join the fray, and with that there will be another enemy around. If you want to kill one of them while knocked out, while the enemy is searching you, you can't make any noise or anything that will waste your time and let the enemy approach to you, but instead you have to waste your time in order to kill a potential threat just because you can't kill them while they're unconscious in a simple and fast way. It's also very strange how the enemy most of the time won't wake up a sleeping companion next to him in alert mode, while in previous games it was always the case, but here tranquilizing him will mean that the enemy won't bother to wake him up.
Another thing that bugs me, is that how the enemy vision is super poor while you're not detected, but when it's alert phase they will notice you even through a sandstorm while you were prone to the ground with a pyramid on top of you. It happend plenty of times that i was in plain daylight, and they couldn't see me even if i was right in front of them, but when in alert phase their senses become suddenly super human.
As a side note it's sad that you can't make the enemy dance while you point a gun at them like in previous games, and you can't search for items in them since they carry only a gun.
! Despite all of this, it's still fun and rewarding and great and awesome to play story missions, since they're not that long, and give a sense of making progress fast, while also being replayable to do all the side objectives and striking for the S rank.
! I noticed though, that just like with the intro of Shadow Moses, with Rassvet and with the first 2 Acts of MGS4, the most fun you have with the core gameplay is generally in the first hours, when the game drops you with all of what it can offer you in terms of gameplay: from the introduction of which kind of guards you will face, to how you can approach to the mission objectives and so on. MGSV though provides some kind of diversity with buddies that will do your work for you (again, questionable if it's correct for the game to play itself), but the D-Walker provides more fun different gameplay than any other buddy, since outclasses the horse and it's an active buddy that you can control phisically and rewarding through your efforts and decisions, instead of the game telling you everything and killing enemies with effortless methods. Aside from the buddies, the weapons and items don't have that much diversity in them, generally a tranquilizer gun can carry you through the whole game, and having a sniper with a suppressor is basically the same thing but even more powerful. So while the D-Walker provides with something original and fun, the improvements of the guns are not as useful or fun, because there aren't bosses like the previous games that will require this kind of diversity to defeat them. In fact, the Skulls are some of the worst bosses in the whole series, being the bullet sponges that they are with outclassed mechanics by previous bosses in the series, coupled with their personality or backstory or anything else totally lacking. Sahelantropus is not much better since you can defeat it by unleashing every bullet possible on it with little to no repercussion, and Volgin manages to defeat himself by shooting a water tank onto him. So in the end all the attention given to unlock and customize weapons is more for a sense of completion rather than usefulness for the whole game.
Speaking about bosses outside of the ways of defeat them though, i wonder why a series staple of defeating a giant mechanical beast, followed by a 1 on 1 with bare hands was forgotten or not included in this game, when even Metal Gear Rising does this. MGS4 bosses were pathetic besides the Ray and Ocelot, but Peace Walker provided great giant mechs that even without a personality where fun to fight with lots of diversity in the approach and in their attacks and so on, so it's very disheartening that the bosses provided by MGSV are the lowest point in the series, especially since there isn't even a final boss to have a proper climax. Every game always had one, and there could have been a melee fight with Skull Face at least, to see if he was competent in something, seeing what utter disappointment he was in every other thing he did (besides kinda killing Zero offscreen but that's a whole another problem).
After years of trailers hyping Skull Face, and even Ocelot hyping him in game, with also his unique design and all, i expected something out of him, not a Vamp kind of character where nothing goes his way, despite him having many occasions where he could have killed you but chose not to. It's also mind boggling stupid how that jeep ride is even in the game, followed by the walk with him, where the whole time you just wait for the gameplay to kick in again, since there were very few moments in the game of moments where the control is taken away from you, and makes no sense to do so now with a lame sequence like this, and all i know is that these were the farthest from the best 10 minutes of my life. Since the whole first chapter is dedicated to seek revenge against him, it's pitiful that this guy is so weak and pathetic that you wonder how he even managed to destroy Mother Base in the first place in Ground Zeroes. If anything he made it so Huey of all characters, had a bit of character dropped in him, even if it made him unlikeable and terrible, at least is something worth talking about, since every other character from Miller, to Quiet and Ocelot are just a shell of their former characters (even Volgin after all the hype in the beginning, he will the disappear again in a very forgettable way).
! After Skull Face death however chapter 2 starts titled with "Race", but i still wonder what it has do to with race. The chapter is mostly rehashed missions with increased difficulty, so there is nothing to say about it, but if anything the extreme modes should have been an option for all story missions at least, not just an imposed mode for some of them near the end of the game. The few story missions of chapter 2 are just like the ones in chapter 1 but worse, since you no longer have any objective in the story at that point, so you will play it just to end it or for completion.
! The final twist of you being Medic was already speculated after Ground Zeroes came out, and it's stilly in the first place that Medic had the same voice of Snake, but whatever. Now there are 2 Big Bosses, despite Solidus saying that the world needs only one Big Boss, and instead of Solid Snake defeating his father two times he just killed two different persons.
! The game is over, at least for the story portion of it, since there is still plenty to do for completion, but that is up for the player, and many tasks like cacthing up every animal to fill the pokédex can be very frustrating and time consuming and stupid, especially with the invisible animals, but can be fun when you hunt bears or some rare animals as long as they're visible. At least the animal capture gives some usefulness to the "open world" feature of the game, but overall it still remains a giant landmass with nothing it for the most part, just a huge waste of space and forgettable places that all look the same. You can also play the online but that is another atrocious mode that is better not to talk about, since many times you will get punished for actions of others that you could not prevent and you will then have to play more just to repair those damages out of your control.
! Another thing that really bugged me is why they removed the health bar and the timer for the alert phases, since now you can't tell how much health you actually have or how much longer will the alert phase last. So many times it became a guessing game, i didn't know if i could take more hits or not, and that ended up in me dying when a health bar could have prevented that, or even having rations like in previous games to choose wether to continue fighting or choose to hide, since the game wants you to have it your way, but when it comes to health management it clearly doesn't. The alert phase, and the caution one also provided for some of the best soundtracks in the series, while now the whole soundtrack feels flat and bland without any emotion behind it, and i really wonder why they didn't provide a better composer to avoid this problem.
! The last thing that i can say, is that i feel very frustrated and disappointed by the marketing behind this game, since they pushed a lot for the story and the themes behind it, like "pain for pain", "retaliation breeds retaliation", "men become demons" and so on, but then there was nothing of it. Mostly because a selling point of every MGS game was also its story so you were buying it for that too, just like with this one given the trailers. But sadly MGSV has nothing that resembles a good plot or any memorable moment like the previous games had, and when even
managed to have a better story with better moments than a MGS game directed by Kojima, you know something is not right. Or also how one of the main reasons to buy MGS4 was because you thought it was the last of the series (with also you know, beating the shit out of Ocelot with themes of every game previosuly playing in the background), and it was the ending that you couldn't miss, so you bought it also because the last entry in every series is something that should be treasured anyway, but then PW came out and this too, so whatever. Also, the massive cut content and unfinished nature of the game that almost everyone knows about.