The purpose and direction of the story that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain chooses to follow has been a heated point of debate for two years now. Where fans were expecting a story about the fall of former legend Big Boss, we got something rather different, and as per Hideo Kojima, the point of the entire game, and to an extent, the Metal Gear series as a whole, is creating power for yourselves and then letting it go.
How? This comes in the form of nuclear weapons. “As the player progresses through the game they feel their desire for revenge, and their sense of “justice,” that has been a common thread through the series, begin to waver,” Hideo Kojima writes in a piece on Rolling Stone. Hideo Kojima says that in the game’s story, players build up their nuclear arsenal for the purpose of revenge and justice, but soon, through the online metagame, the goal shifts to total disarmament for all players.
Hideo Kojima says that through this objective, he wanted players to be able to take a stand against nuclear weapons and, in turn, against war in general. “As far as I know, this goal hasn’t been achieved yet,” he wrote, “but if we can’t disarm ourselves in the real world, at least the fictional game world offers mankind, the creators of nuclear weapons, the unparalleled “experience” of making the conscious choice to create a nuclear free world. Through this experience, players will come to understand what it really means to take a stand against war and nuclear weapons. Players feel the need to acquire nuclear weapons, but then players across the globe choose to disarm themselves. This experience and its process is the chief aim of Metal Gear.”
It’s definitely an interesting concept, and while there will be people who will argue that this was not what they were looking for in what may well be the last true Metal Gear game, there’s no denying that in the end it made for one hell of an experience. You should read the entire piece through the link above, there’s a lot of interesting stuff about everything from Metal Gear to Death Stranding in there.