Hiku said:
colafitte said:
Well, when i meant the score MGS 4 received was fair..., i meant it was fair in 2008 when it launched, when it was rated. MGS 4 is my least favorite main MGS game too. MGS 4 had an interesting story, a funny villain and gorgeous moments, fantastic audiovisuals at the time and it was pure nostalgia for fans that played and loved the saga. It was what it was, good and bad, but mostly good. |
Well what I experienced from the game, coupled with what people in my circle told me they felt about it, did not line up with the reviews. But it wasn't until MGSV reviews that I got the impression reviewers had reservations against properly criticizing the games.
The issues I had with MGSV were commonly not expressed in reviews I read. They mainly just complained about how the end felt unfinished. Fastforward a few years though, and as I listen to podcast from some gaming publications, I started hearing my issues with the game echoed quite frequently. They even laugh about it, like it's an inside joke. But then when I checked the reviews from the same publication/person, those things were not mentioned.
Perhaps it didn't dawn on them until later. That happens. Especially after you talk about it with other people.
But I felt like some of those things were very obvious and should have been addressed from the start.
colafitte said:
As for MGS V. Ocelot acts the way it does in MGS V because he is not 18 years old anymore like he was in MGS 3. He is close to 40 right now. You have to take into account that in MGS1, MGS2, MGS3 and MGS4 he was a double and triple agent at time doing an act. in MGS V he probably is the most honest version of him, a matured and more calmed version of a Snake fanboy, that like to interrogate people in its free time....XD. |
I wouldn't have found it strange that he changed personality between MGS3 and V, if it weren't for how he went back to being eccentric again in MGS1.
Being a double agent has nothing to do with acting like he's a hoteheaded eccentric when he's actually calm and rational. If anything, it should have made him look more suspicious to Liquid, how he went from mellow and level headed, to that.
And he was a double agent in MGSV as well. (He was working for someone else.) But again, he played a very small and insignificant role in MGSV, which is a wasted opportunity. Why would you have him on the team, and then not partner up with him in the field, even once?
He even rode all the way out on the battlfield with Snake, for some inexplicable reason, and then just left.
colafitte said:
As for Quiet and that puddle. By the time you have that scene, you must have played a lot of missions together to reach that affinity level. Quiet and Snake had already a good chemistry since they met in that duel in Afghanistan, so i don't see the problem here. The subtle relation between both during the game was one of the best things of the game in my opinion, and it made their last mission a sad one. |
I sure did spend time with her on missions. But since Quiet doesn't talk, we had 0 conversations. Have you ever seen Snake do anything like that? It seemed pretty awkward. So I would want more than just some off screen character development to swallow a scene like that.
By the end of the game though, their final mission felt appropriate and well written.
colafitte said:
Despite all of that, an awful story has not avoided multitude of games to have 90+ metacritic countless times (i see Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, etc as examples), so because of that MGS V should not be penalised either too. |
I can't say much about Bayonetta because I didn't play much of it. But DMC essentially invented the genre, and had that going for it. And the story, while extremely cheesy, also had its charm with some memorable one liners from Dante. A characteristic Capcom doubled down on with subsequent games (with the exception of DMC2), and turned it up to 11.
If DMC1 tried to have a well written story, and DMC4 and V messed it up, it should get penalized for it. But they instead went for the over-the-top cheesy angle. So bad that it's good.
Though for me the gameplay wasn't really there either for MGS4. While in 5 it was mainly just the story, but at the point where it really stood out.
Btw, funny you mentioned DMC and story. Because when DMC2 came out my friend told me how the story was bad. And I told him "Who cares? I don't play DMC for the story". And then I played the game and realized I actually missed the story. Even though it's less significant in non-story driven games, it can still be a notable factor to spice things up. And so any time it becomes relevant, I think back on this example.
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As for the 1st point, the fact that most reviewers didn't talk about the shortcomings about MGS V and its "unfinished ending" (i'm one of the few people that considers the game has an actual ending, not maybe for Liquid's and Psycho Mantis arc, but for everything else, just that the endings were made abruptly) tells more about those reviewers than the actual game, and the game should not be extra penalysed for that. And that's been my main critic about gaming journalism the last few years. 90% of them are just glorified average gamers that don't have the talent or criteria to actually make an optical, objective analysed review of each main point of a game. Most of them only say vague and generic comments that not explain nothing concrete about the game, and when a game comes that's so different from the usual structure like Death Stranding is, is when you see how awful and useless they are.
I've just saw, just before posting this, the SkillUp review about Death Stranding, a guy who doesn't give a score, who needs to explain things to make you understand his point of view, and his review is sooooooooo much more well done than the Easy Allies, IGN, Game Informer, Gamespot ones....but he and people like him are mostly the minority here, because then, you can find too, youtubers that are going to trash the game after playing a couple of hours because it's fun to do and because they can't or just don't want to actually analyse the game, because they want the clicks, the likes and number of views. We live in a cynical and superficial world and in the end, you have to trust yourself more than anyone of those guys, and now is more easy than ever because almost every game can be watched or played with more accesability before actually buying it.
For the 2nd point about Ocelot. Look, if he is acting in some way or another, calm or eccentric, and you don't know in the end how to feel about it, then it's Ocelot doing its job perfectly because he, doing one or thing or another, is a way to never know what is really going behind his mind, that's his job. He does what he considers is necessary to doing his job, that has been his character since the original MGS. As for Liquid seeing Ocelot from calm to crazy, since he was a kid to adult..., well i could explain that easily saying that from Liquid's perspective, war had a toll in Ocelot and he became more a more crazy about it, which would make sense in that world. He didn't knew how he was in MGS 3 either...As for him not been in the battelfield with you..., well Ocelot never was a soldier, he always was counter intelligence guy, a classical spy, KGB style. There was no sense to put Ocelot in the battelfied alongside you.
As for the last point. What i am trying to say, is that some games were never penalysed in the score because of a bad story when everything else was sensational. If MGS V would have had a great story alongside everything else, then maybe the game would've been a 96-98 metacritic game, we will never know. As for you not liking MGS 4 gameplay either, that's a legitimate opinion too. I'm not that fond about MGS 4 gameplay either, but i have memory, and when i played this game in 2008 when it launched it was an experience like no other at the time. Despite its shortcomings in some aspects from gameplay, story and characters, most people back then, like me, loved the production values, the scope of the game, the ambition and the memorable interactive story moments. There was no game that was remotely similar to MGS 4 in 2008. It was a different videogaming industry...., way less cynical, less politically correct, less full of trolls and haters. During 2007-2010 there were lots of games that received very high scores that probably, with 2019 mentality would not had received. Halo 3 received a 94, Mass Effect 2 received a 96, LittleBigPlanet received a 95, Bioshock received a 96, Fallout 3 received a 93, and GTA IV received an incredible 98. Standars were way different back then....
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