
Completing Side Ops can be critical if your aim is to make Big Boss' life slightly easier. Players are given a slew of missions, some listed as primary story objectives and others as optional Side Ops. The structure of missions in The Phantom Pain is similar to previous games in the series, specifically Peace Walker and Ground Zeroes. A gun-for-hire in the region, Big Boss helps locals fend off the 1980s-era Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by eliminating their commanding officers, destroying their equipment and generally sowing dissent through the desert. It's a massive play area, engulfed in sand, riddled with wildlife and terrorized by the Soviet army.īig Boss - back to form and outfitted with an intricate mechanical arm that can be used as a weapon - quickly establishes himself, alongside familiar franchise characters Revolver Ocelot and Kazuhira Miller, as the leader of a new private military corporation known as the Diamond Dogs.
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Imagine a series of large installations, like the one found in Ground Zeroes, surrounded by desert and you'll have an idea of how the map in The Phantom Pain works. His powerful persona returns after the intro (and after some time has passed) as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain leads players to an open-world region of Afghanistan. It illustrates how far the soldier has fallen from an all-powerful military leader to a weak man struggling to evade danger.

He struggles to reactivate his long dormant muscles, spending the majority of the introduction on his belly.

Acting as both a reminder of Big Boss's ordeal and a tutorial, the game's protagonist awakens gaunt and feeble after a nine-year coma. Somewhere between 1984, where The Phantom Pain begins, and 1995, where we meet a rookie soldier named Snake (a genetically-altered clone of the Boss) in the MSX title Metal Gear, Big Boss becomes the franchise's primary villain.įor two days, with a preview build of The Phantom Pain in hand, I tried to uncover the Big Boss' secrets and attempt to learn how a good soldier can go bad.

Big Boss' physical transformation leads to changes in his motivation as well.
