The 100% Accurate Chronological Storyline of Metal Gear (From Memory) [PART 3] - Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes & The Phantom Pain

Hopefully the next one won’t take so long to make, but then again, the next game I have to cover is MGSV, so, uh

Well. Guess it’s been a little longer than I expected. If you haven’t read my previous posts covering Metal Gear Solid 3 and Peace Walker, I’d recommend checking them out, but basically the idea of these posts is that I’m going to try my best to recap the plot of the Metal Gear series (almost) entirely from memory, having not played or experienced a whole lot of them for a few years. I’ll occasionally look up the odd name here and there, but generally I try to rely exclusively on my memory for the broad strokes. (Just as a note, I believe there were other games between Peace Walker and MGSV that are debatably canon. I haven’t played all of those, so let’s just say they’re non-canon and move on I guess.)

So, MGSV. Arguably the most ambitious Metal Gear project, and arguably the most contentious game story-wise. The story starts, as a matter of fact, in Ground Zeroes, which was sort of a prologue game to tide people over during the game proper’s extremely long dev cycle. Set a year or two after the epilogue of Peace Walker, the crew at Mother Base is preparing for a nuclear inspection crew from America to arrive, when Snake receives intel that Chico and Paz are being held captive at a nearby installation.

The two are being held hostage by a group led by a man named Skullface (he’s called Skullface because his face looks like a skull, you see). Shortly before Snake arrives, Skullface orders his men to scrub all evidence as to who they are and what their ultimate mission is– Skullface works for an organization called XOF, the clandestine cleanup crew for Snake’s FOX organization. After FOX successfully carries out their missions, XOF is typically sent in covertly to cover up FOX’s traces, a role Skullface greatly resents.

As is tradition, Snake sneaks into the facility, rescues Chico and Paz plus a handful of other prisoners, and makes his retreat. Snake and his crew return to Mother Base, where they learn that the inspection was a smokescreen for a military invasion, and the base is moments away from total destruction. After barely escaping back to their helicopter, Snake’s men realize that Paz has been operated on, and a bomb has been planted in her body. They attempt to remove it, waking Paz in the process, who informs them that there were, in fact, two bombs. With no time left to remove the second, Paz instead jumps from the helicopter, only for the bomb to detonate moments later, sending Snake’s helicopter careening into another helicopter.

Snake just barely survives the incident, though he is rendered comatose, having suffered severe brain trauma and the loss of his right arm. He finally comes to nine years later, in a hospital in Cyprus. Shortly after, a team of mercenaries is sent in to eliminate him. One of the assassins chokes out the doctor watching over Snake, but is stopped just short of killing Snake when the neighboring patient, who goes by Ishmael, throws a bottle of acetone at her and ignites it. The two then try to make their way to safety, evading armed soldiers, a yong boy in a straitjacket with bizarre psychokinetic powers, a man who’s just on fire all the time, and also a giant flying whale.

Metal Gear Solid is a serious, grounded story about political intrigue and the spectre nuclear annihilation. It also has giant flying whales sometimes, as a treat.

After escaping the hospital, Snake is found by Ocelot, who has begun developing a new Mother Base while Snake was out of commission. The two make their way to a former Soviet stronghold in Afghanistan, where Snake’s first mission is to seek out and rescue Kazuhira Miller, who has been taken captive. With the main three back in action once more, Mother Base is able to resume operations, though most of the men who once served under Snake are now missing.

As Snake continues to build up Mother Base again, he encounters Skullface and his faction again, including a sniper named Quiet, who…

…Dear god I have to explain Quiet now, huh

Okay, so. There was a character in Metal Gear Solid 3 named The End. The End was a legendary sniper, an elderly man who challenged Snake to a prolonged sniper duel that tested both soldiers’ abilities to their absolute limits. As explained in MGS3, one of The End’s unique abilities that makes him so dangerous is that he had the ability to photosynthesize to gather energy, meaning that he could camp out at a single vantage point for days on end, not needing to move an inch for sustenance.

And so in Metal Gear Solid V, it’s explained that Quiet has the same condition as The End. For context, Quiet is practically naked with most of her clothing being torn up to the point of nonexistence, a character design that was highly criticized in the lead-up to MGSV’s release. In response to the criticism, Kojima tweeted that players “would be ashamed of their words and deeds” when the learned the explanation for Quiet’s appearance.

There’s just one tiny little problem with that explanation, though:

…I don’t having bare skin is much of a concern if this guy can sustain himself for days when covered head-to-toe in a heavy jacket with only his head and hands exposed.

Oh yeah, almost forgot to mention, Quiet can’t speak. It’s also never directly stated as far as I can remember, but Quiet is meant to be the same hired hand that attempted to kill Snake at the hospital before getting torched and defenestrated ¹ . Anyway, after defeating Quiet, Snake apprehends her, and she’s brought to Mother Base as a POW. More about that later.

They also later find Huey, who has been forced into working on a new weapon for Skullface called Metal Gear Sahelanthropus. While attempting to rescue (or kidnap, depending on your point of view) Huey, Snake also finds the Boss AI pod, recovered from the wreckage of Peace Walker and barely functioning. On further investigation, the Mother Base crew discover Strangelove’s lifeless body stored inside the pod, as well as an audio recording which seems to suggest Huey knowingly and deliberately left her to die in there after she became trapped inside. As they also suspect Huey to be behind the attack on Mother Base nine years ago, Ocelot, Miller, and Snake are naturally very wary to work with Huey again, but decide that his expertise is too critical not to make use of.

In one of Snake’s excursions he also discovers a disturbing scene – row after row of patients, mostly children, lying in hospital beds with headphones placed directly into open wounds in their necks, playing back endlessly looping broadcasts, in hundreds of languages. Before he can investigate further, the man on fire from before (he’s called the Man on Fire because he’s a man and he’s on fire, you see), barely managing to escape.

Okay, I’ve gotta be honest here: there’s a lot of stuff that happens in this game, and the open world nature makes it hard to remember what order everything happens in. But, anyway, as Snake’s ongoing campaign continues, he rescues other notable prisoners from Skullface, including a pack of child soldiers led by an adolescent named Eli, who also refers to himself as the White Mamba. With no means of returning the children to their homes and no idea what else to do with them, Snake and the others reluctantly bring them back to Mother Base where they set up a makeshift nursery for them.

One of the more prominent figures Snake rescues is Code Talker, a Navajo biologist specializing in bacterial parasites. After agreeing to continue working for Snake instead, he reveals that his expertise was used by Skullface to genetically engineer a new bacteria species called metallic archaea, which feeds on certain metals, with the goal being to develop a cheaper and easier method of refining yellowcake into uranium. Snake quickly realizes that they must be using this to circumvent the black market and obtain uranium for Sahelanthropus directly.

Soon enough Snake is ready to take on Skullface directly, and infiltrates his base for their final confrontation. There, Skullface reveals himself as the leader of XOF, as well as the true purpose of the two psychically gifted soldiers he’s been sending after Snake (Man on Fire and the child in the straitjacket, a.k.a. Psycho Mantis): In order for Sahelanthropus to reach its true potential, he needed to find a psychically trained individual with enough unfocused rage to take direct control of the machine, and the two of them are his best candidates. However, Psycho Mantis proves to be more powerful than anticipated, causing Sahelanthropus to go berserk and attack everyone in sight.

Wait, hold on, I’m getting ahead of myself. So, before Sahelanthropus goes berserk, Skullface takes Snake on an obnoxiously long ride out to Sahelanthropus’ location, during which he explains his mission and manifesto. Basically, this is where MGSV begins to go into maximum Kojima mode, and it never really goes back. He tells Snake that he views the English language itself as a parasite by way of colonialist expansion erasing the culture of occupied territory, including their languages and all the oral history and context attached to them. He then explains that he’s been working on a weapon to surpass Metal Gear: not Sahelanthropus, but something entirely new, which he believes will act as a deterrent against the English language, much in the same way as a nuclear deterrent.

Okay, cool. So, Sahelanthropus attacks. Snake takes it down. Bet you never saw that one coming. Snake and Miller have Skullface dead to rights at this point, but they decide to let him live with his failure. …For about ten seconds, that is, before Huey decides to kill Skullface himself, as revenge for the extended captivity and torture. With their mission done for now, the three head back to Mother Base to figure out what exactly happens next for them.

As an aside, I should probably mention some of the other stuff that happens throughout this game. (Again, due to it being open world, some of this stuff can happen basically at any point throughout the game, or not at all if the player skips it.) At one point, Snake returns to Mother Base to learn that, to his shock, Paz somehow survived the explosion, and has been brought to Mother Base as part of her recovery. She’s still suffering serious head trauma, both mentally, and physically in the form of intense migraines and amnesia. From time to time Snake checks in on her recovery progress, only to find that she never quite heals. Eventually, Snake is forced to realize the truth: the entire experience was a hallucination in his own mind, born out of a combination of his own trauma, as well as the injury he suffered in the form of metal shards embedded in his cerebral cortex. (Incidentally, this also causes an effect in which Snake will periodically become unable to perceive the color red, an effect which is simulated for the player as well.)

In addition, throughout much of the game Snake and company struggle with an organization called Cipher, led by Snake’s former mission commander Major Zero. Cipher has been supporting XOF in their campaign to destroy Mother Base, and were responsible for Paz’s theft of Metal Gear ZEKE previously. The conflict between the two powers stems from differing interpretations of The Boss’s will, which Zero interprets as a drive to remove national boundaries and subject all of humanity to a unified control system, under which there will be no need for conflict. Snake, on the other hand, was inspired to create a new nation existing outside of defined borders, where like-minded individuals from anywhere in the world can join his cause, and fight a war they feel is justified, rather than fighting for a nation they have no loyalty towards.

Back to the main story, after defeating Skullface, Snake returns to Mother Base once more, only to find that an unknown parasitic infection has spread, and a quarantine zone has been established to contain the infected. Snake enters the quarantine facility to determine who is infected and who can be spared, as he is forced to euthanize each of the infected. Ultimately he’s forced to put down everyone who was quarantined, and just in time– several of the infected were being driven by a sudden urge to break quarantine and escape into the outside, where their bodies would eventually be eaten by crows, who then would go on to spread their disease beyond the base. Ultimately it’s determined that Huey was at fault for the outbreak. I don’t remember how exactly, but it just kinda tracks, doesn’t it?

After ending the crisis, Snake attempts to determine the infection vector by examining the biographies of the infected. After studying their profiles for some time, he ultimately realizes that the single factor all of the infected share was language: specifically, they each spoke Kikongo. At this point, Snake finally learns Skullface’s true motive: he’s been developing a new strain of parasites which can spread as a virus, and which is trained to prime itself after the carrier speaks the language the parasites are attuned to. Later on, the staff at Mother Base become aware that they have been exposed to an English strain of the parasite, and those who are known to be infected are forced to stop speaking the affected languages, including Quiet– she is capable of speech, but as she was the first carrier of the English strain and can only speak English, she’s taken a vow of silence ² to prevent the parasites from spreading.

At this point the narrative has become real open-ended. Some of the things that happen include:

• Mother Base collectively decides they’re just done with Huey, and exile him in a dinky little raft, not before damaging his prosthetic legs.
• Miller becomes obsessed with creating the perfect cheeseburger for Code Talker, bringing on the best and the brightest of Mother Base’s R&D department to crack the code.
• Snake begins making periodic excursions to hostile forward operating bases, sometimes to steal their nuclear arsenal, other times to destroy it entirely.
  • Fun fact: There exists a cutscene which is intended to play only when all the players connected to the internet manage to deplete the total nuclear arsenal across the entire playerbase. However, due to a glitch, this cutscene was accidentally triggered on some platforms where the nuclear arsenals were far from being depleted.
• Quiet gains Snake’s trust, and begins joining him on missions to provide combat support.
• Snake gets a dog. He’s called D-Dog and he’s a very good boy. He can knife enemy soldiers.
• Eli is just a general pain for the base and constantly acts out.

At one point, Quiet joins Snake on an excursion that leads to the two of them being forced to hold out at an abandoned mansion, against an onslaught of hostile forces. Afterwards, Snake, greatly weakened by the fight, is bitten by a venomous snake (ha) while attempting to exfiltrate. To make matters worse, a sandstorm is kicked up, making it impossible for the helicopter pilot to locate the two. Quiet is forced to reluctantly pick up Snake’s walkie talkie and guide the pilot down, meaning that her English language parasites are now active. In order to protect the others, Quiet disappears after this, presumably to die alone in the desert.

And that’s pretty much where the game ends! …Sort of. The thing is, Metal Gear Solid V was never truly finished. Dataminers quickly realized that there was one last unfinished mission, which would take place in an entirely new location with unique cutscenes and everything. Unfortunately MGSV’s production was notoriously rushed, and the developers never had time to finish this last mission. To make matters worse, not long after Konami decided to axe virtually the entirety of Kojima’s team as well as Kojima himself, meaning that MGSV could never be truly finished.

It’s a shame, because the intended final mission could’ve been a really solid coda for the game, as well as connecting it to later entries in a more tangible way.

This mission would start with Eli and Psycho Mantis teaming up to steal Sahelanthropus from Mother Base and bringing the other child soldiers to a remote island, where Eli set himself up as the leader of this sort of Lord of the Flies style society. Snake arrives shortly after to put a stop to it and reclaim Sahelanthropus, only to find that other factions have arrived as well, looking to take Sahelanthropus for themselves. While taking out the enemy combatants, Snake begins to feel the effects of his brain injury making him unable to distinguish the color red, and in his confusion accidentally shoots Eli, being unable to tell his outfit apart from the others. Sahelanthropus is more or less destroyed during the encounter, and Psycho Mantis uses his psychic magic powers to heal Eli, as well remove his vocal chord parasites.

Okay, at this point I guess all that’s really left to cover is the ending proper. One of the lategame missions serves as essentially the “end of the story” lore dump, kicking off a series of cutscenes which give a ton of revelations about the story as it’s been shown to the player.

To start, it’s revealed that Eli is a clone of Snake, as part of a secretive genetic project known as Les Enfants Terribles. There was a second son created in this project as well, but his whereabouts are unknown.

The greater revelation is to do with Snake himself. The man who has been referred to as Snake (or Venom Snake, or Big Boss) throughout the game is not, in fact, the true Big Boss. The true Big Boss did not become comatose following the helicopter crash, but used the accident as cover to remove himself from the public eye. The surgeon who was with him on the helicopter is actually the man who fell into the coma, and during that period he was given extensive cosmetic surgery as well as I think some form of mind altering to turn him into a passable duplicate of Big Boss, who would be known as Venom Snake from then on.

When Venom Snake finally discovered the truth, he was naturally furious, but ultimately had no choice but to continue serving as Big Boss’s phantom. Eventually his version of Mother Base evolved into the paramilitary nation Outer Heaven, which he continued to rule as a means of protecting the true Big Boss.

Ocelot and Miller fundamentally disagreed about this plot to engineer a second Big Boss, ultimately agreeing that, while they would continue to maintain a friendly rapport in public, eventually they both knew one of them would kill the other.

…Alright, I think that about covers everything. There’s undoubtedly so, so much more I’m forgetting. Frankly, I didn’t think there was this much to cover, but here I am over 3,000 words later.

So, next I guess would be the MSX games? I’ll be honest, I’ve never played those. Maybe I’ll do a real quick half-writeup on them just to maintain continuity.

Here’s hoping the next page won’t take quite as long.

¹ Defenestrated is a fun word.

² Unlike the Poopsmith, Quiet will not break her vow of silence to commemorate two hundred Sbemails. She’s also not voiced by John Linnell, so overall a disappointment on every level.

Comments