Say what you want to say about Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain’s gameplay, there is no doubt it’s the series’ pinnacle as far as stealth-action-adventure genre goes. But according to many players (including yours truly), the plot is a pretty mediocre affair. It’s a great story for a non-Metal Gear game but for a Metal Gear game it’s nothing but disappointing.
Regardless, Hideo Kojima is no longer a part of the franchise. His work is done and he has no other message to give via the Metal Gear series. Does this mean Metal Gear is over? Well, according to Kenji Yano who is a close friend of Hideo Kojima and a Japanese editor believes the series is done with. There will no Metal Gear games in the future. But thematically speaking, the series will continue to live on since we all know what happens after the events of The Phantom Pain.
Before I quote Yano, please note there are spoilers ahead. Speaking to Famitsu he stated, “As a commercial product and as a physical thing, Metal Gear is definitely over. But in a way it isn’t. At the start of Moby-Dick, the narrator, Ishmael, states that Captain Ahab’s story is spun by (it’s a stage production put on by) the three Fates – Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis. Ishmael laments that they have made him the narrator, given him the “shabby part of a whaling voyage” in order to have him tell Ahab’s story. But at the end of the book, Melville gives Ishmael an extraordinary role to fulfill. After the rest of the crew of the Pequod have died, including Ahab himself, he has Ishmael say, “… I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman, when that bowsman assumed the vacant post…”
Okay. That makes a lot of sense but the problem is none of this was explained in the game. In fact we don’t even know whether The Phantom Pain is real or not given the confusing quote at the end of the story: “There are no facts, only interpretations.”
So there you have it. According to Yano, Metal Gear is dead but Konami seems to think otherwise.