1. It's Not Finished
As I mentioned in the intro, Metal Gear should always strive to be the biggest example of artistic freedom in the medium. Kojima proved you can have your cake and eat it too (nanomachines would simulate the taste, or there'd be a clone, you know how it goes), yet for Phantom Pain the game's ENDING was cut out. You could argue the final sendoff was the Venom Snake/Medic twist, and that'd be great if we'd leant more on the ideology of establishing the Boss outside of one of Kaz's cassettes saying people will always follow what he represents, but the reality is there's an entire other mission stuffed with integral plot elements that you'll have to watch on Youtube instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B4JIHh5Jqk It's pretty damn disgusting to be honest. You have this major falling out between Kojima and Konami, where the latter elects to remove his name from the game itself and all the promotional materials, and then just to make sure they get the last laugh, the final shipped product's plot explanation mission is cut out. You can see in the above video, the cutscene was pretty much good to go despite some facial animation, and it's just ridiculous the one thing that directly ties Phantom Pain to MGS 1 remains on the cutting room floor. Without this final battle between Boss and Sahelanthropus, the main game's canon leaves Liquid, Mantis and the kids to run away with the biggest, most ludicrously advanced Metal Gear yet. The entire point of confronting soon-to-be Liquid was to establish his motives and prevent the world from seeing Sahelanthropus, thereby kickstarting the development of more mechs around the world - which was the entire point of REX's plans leaking at the close of MGS 1. It's a gaping hole in the canon, and one that'll never get closed up, all things considered. Instead, we end on the whole "There were two of you all along" twist, leave Boss' descent to madness utterly ignored, and let a group of angry kids essentially sit on a world-enslaving superpower as Venom Snake goes back to work. We're left to assume Liquid and co. simply sat on their plans for a good 20 years before Shadow Moses, despite being in possession of an even better mech than REX could ever be. It's madness, and marks the first time Kojima had control of his baby wrestled away from him - the results being this hastily cobbled-together ending, rather than the one he intended and we deserved. How have you found MGS V's story vs. gameplay ratio? Did you like the ending, and what would you change, if anything? Let us know in the comments!