10 Video Games That Only Got Started At The End

Now, nobody's going to tell you that Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was a bad or boring game from a gameplay perspective, because it honestly represents some of the most creative and well-oiled third-person action gameplay of all time.

But fans of the franchise were just as interested in the story as they were the gameplay, so it was hugely disappointing that MGSV ultimately featured just a fraction of the OTT cinematics and deep lore players were expecting.

Cutscenes are infuriatingly infrequent throughout the game's repetitive series of missions, and as note-perfect as the core mechanics might be, after a while fans were desperately craving one of those classically epic, hour-long exposition dump cutscenes.

Yet the end of the main story finally starts to ramp up with that expected Metal Gear Solid bombast, as after defeating the final boss Sahelanthropus, Eli (aka young Liquid Snake) steals it and flees to parts unknown.

Furthermore, players who continue to dig further will eventually discover that Venom Snake was in fact a doppelganger of Big Boss all along.

And then, the game just ends, literally just as it was reaching its juicy climax.

It's been well-documented at this point that Hideo Kojima originally planned for an expansive third act in which Snake pursues Eli to an island for a final battle, and it's been speculated he may have also been planning more for that explosive Venom twist. But alas, an impatient Konami pushed the game out of the door before it was done.

There's perhaps no better recent example of brilliant gameplay being totally undermined by a disappointing story, because Metal Gear Solid places such a singular, over-the-odds emphasis on its plot compared to 99% of other games.