Metal Gear Solid 5 Phantom Pain Heroism

[Jonathon Burnside]

Manthis mission really gutted me. So I went into this not knowing what to expect and boy was it one of the most effecting things in the game at least to me. I went in and didn't shoot anyone. Then you get to the end with the guy with the goggles and becomes clearly apparent you have no choice.

So you start doing the ugly deed of shooting your own men and you're quickly met with the realization that these aren't just some random stand in soldiers. They are YOUR men your actual men and women you've spent the entire game recruiting. There was just something about the cold soulless voice of the iDroid repeating the "Staff Member Died" combined with the macabre visuals that made me feel actually kind of awful pulling the trigger. Even double checking some people because I wanted to make absolutely sure. Some begged you not to shoot them. Then others saluted you as they stared down your gun barrel knowing their fate. And then afterwards all of them are listed as "Shot" or "Suicide" in your KIA tab in your Staff management menu. This game might not have as much story as previous games but boy at least I am finding the moments it does have to be extremely effective.

Mate when you go in the room and there's like 15 of them and they're all there just fucking saluting you? I had to pause the game and take a little break. Then I came back and just smashed through it headshot each quick as I could to get that shit out of the way. I mean, what a fucking mission but at the same time fuck off Kojima bro please.

Its definitely one of the coolest missions of the game. It would be even better if you actually had stuff to do in mother base and there was more interactions with the staff. The room where everyone was saluting you was great.

But yeah, for as dark and heart-wrenching as that mission is, especially when they start saluting you as you do it while a warbled version of the Peace Walker theme is playing, it's still one of the most memorable moments in any game that I've ever played. I was brought to the verge of tears.

The room at the bottom where they're all there and they just salute you and are ready to die. I literally just stood there, teary eyed. I didn't want to do it. I just stood there and looked at them all to appreciate them one last time. Then I pulled the trigger on each one. Painful and effective.

I feel like this is a brilliant moment in the game everyone is so overlooking because they're to busy talking about the ending or Quiet's breasts or cut content. Fucking amazing moment. This game has a handful of "most memorable moments in games" and this might be the best. Painful.

It was pretty fantastic, and Snake's speech at the end was perfect. Loved the delivery with the "you'll always be diamonds" line. Honestly, MGSV probably has some of the strongest purely emotional moments in the series. In terms of the cutscenes, I think it might actually be the best directed/edited of the bunch. Much more subtlety and talking through actions and expressions instead of just using endless exposition.

Part of what makes that whole episode and the cutscenes before, during, and after so impactful for me is the music. The music in this game is fucking incredible. It's got a bit of that 80s synth twinge, but it's also at points bombastic, mournful, solemn, joyful, and many other adjectives. This is probably the best a Metal Gear has ever sounded.

It was a cool mission but the way it just came out of left field kinda ruined it for me. I had spent the 6 hours before that doing random side ops taking outposts and hadn't been at mother base in ages. Then all of the sudden the game said, "time for things to happen I guess."

This mission gave me chills and, as others have said, Snake's speech at the end is perfect. I love me some David Hayter, but I think this was the scene that made me sure that replacing him with Kiefer for this game was the right move.

Definitely a good mission as far as atmosphere, but i really wish there was an option to save everybody. I also didn't like they forced me to change my loadout and outfit(i guess because of cutscenes?).

i actually failed the mission first though, because i shot the first dude i saw in the head because they told me to kill everyone with symptoms lol. I thought having your heroism go down was a nice touch as well, making the consequences not just story related actually added to the emotion to me. Had to kill a couple of S rank's to :-(

Definitely the best mission of the second half as it has been a huge let down for me so far, hopefully the next "real" mission is just as good. I don't even feel like doing these rehash missions at all.

I agree. It had the Bioshock problem of only having one plot-satisfying gameplay option. But still a very fun (maybe not the right word) mission. I loved the expectation of "Oh, cool! Kojima threw a zombie hunting level into the game" being gradually twisted into "Oh, crap. I don't want to shoot these people."

Just finished this mission last night, and it really fucked me up bad. I've been playing games all my life but I cannot recall a single game or even sequence in a game that made literal tears roll down my cheeks. I can't quite put it into words as to why, but I'm sure it has something to do with loyalty. The room with the 12 or so people all humming the Peace Walker scene with the mourning scene right after is such an impactful sequence. It really goes to show how far games have actually come that they can do this kind of thing and pull it off.

i honestly felt no connection with any of them. at least in peace walker you have a boot camp and you can train with your soldiers. here MB was so empty of life the mission didn't have the effect it wanted to have on me.

when you saw the guy run past with the gun at the start that made me assume it was going to go full zombie on me. I was thinking "oh F**K I need to shoot all these guys before they mutate and attack me". In my mind I was shooting them in self defence. As a consequence I lost all empathy for them.

Wish there were more enclosed environments like in that mission. It sounds petty considering the scope and achievement of masking an open world stealth game but it definitely felt more effective and metal gear solid to me. More surveillance cameras and tight hallways to try and sneak past like the tanker in mgs2. Definitely agree the i-droid informing you when each member of staff is murdered was cold and a chilling touch.

The Peace Walker music / saluting scene was powerful, and I definitely didn't want to shoot anyone, but it wasn't as gut wrenching as I've read for others. Probably because they were just random people I hadn't ever met before (aside from strapping a balloon to them).

The part when they salute you and say "we'll trust what the Boss decides" is probably one of the most fucked up moments in a game ever. Also, as a veteran, the part when they turn their dead comrades ashes into diamonds brought a tear to my eye. I don't know if that makes me less of a man, but it reminded me of my friends in the 10th Mtn who fell. Anyway, MGSV is easily one of the best games in recent memory. Such a good game on so many levels. Just when I thought I would never play a military shooter again, MGSV proves me wrong..

I thought it was probably the single best moment in the game in terms of execution. They always have 1 female in there, and since there are so few of them I had just bumped into that particular female soldier on the base (gave her a quick CQC slam right into a wall for good morale!) before she showed up in the mission so it actually did kind of feel personal.

Many games meticulously recreate the weapons and settings, down to recording the sound of the real world guns firing - but completely gloss over when writing the people involved. I think the fact that the characters here are all flawed helps make them more human. Making the player do it themselves, instead of using a big cutscene has a powerful effect.

There are a lot of problems with the story in this game but this moment was some of the most effective melodrama I've got out of any game. And that even after failing the mission by shooting the first infected scientist you see (like the guy above me said, the game tells you to, so I thought they are making me do it on my own will).The part with the diamonds was another super melodramatic but also effective things I got out of it. The fact you have to do it yourself and that it treats it the same way as if you shot them in any other situation worked amazingly for me.

Same here - at that point, they were just nameless, faceless numbers to me. I had well over 1,000 staff members by that point in the game, and probably could only name 5 of them. I didn't see names when I was putting them down, only A+, A, and so on. Easily replaced with some routine extractions during my next couple of missions.

It's brutal how in this mission like all others headshots are king, don't make them suffer any longer then they have to, but if you still have the light on your weapon they'll put their hand up to keep the light out of their eyes. Probably the most effective moment was the one dude who was not just willing to die. "So you are here to kill us!" After that you almost wonder if there's a reason the game gives you two weapons with a silencer option. I tried and it changes nothing. He still says it.

I shot each of them in the knee until they died, couldn't help myself giggle thinking about that awesome Skyrim meme about taking an arrow to the knee. More memes like that please. There is no cake, remember that one LOL. But yeah, brutal stuff, I didn't laugh nearly as much my usual self during this mission.

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