Those of you who know me (and those of you who used to read the blog) will know that I may have mentioned that I am a fan of the Metal Gear Solid series (I might have made passing comment once or twice or three hundred times), so by that logic, you must believe that I loved the hell out of the most recent entry to the series: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Well, not particularly, and that's my own fault (well, and Konami's).
What am I going on about? Well, simply put, it was my excitement that ruined it for me. I've been excited about video games in the past, quite a lot of the time in fact, but due to a number of factors, The Phantom Pain was a whole new level of excitement. I mean, I'd been waiting for this game for years. Any morsel of tasty information and I was all over it like it was a five course meal. A trailer would drop, I would drop everything to watch it, a new screenshot would arrive and I'd stare at it longingly and lustfully (have you seen Snake's grizzled man face? Oh my what a man), and when the release date finally dropped after years of no hints and it turned out to be essentially on my birthday? Good lord I was turned into hype goop.
I knew the game was going to play good, I had played the prequel Ground Zeroes, but with all the new features! Open world! Base building! Sheep abduction! This was it, this was going to be my game of the year, nay, my game of the century.
And all those trailers! Trailers fit for kings! The game seemed so dark and dramatic! We were finally going to see how Big Boss went from lovable mercenary to maniacal mercenary! This was it, no game was ever going to be as good as this game, it couldn't possibly happen.
All this was how I felt all the way leading up to launch. Can you see the problem? How can anything possibly live up to that kind of hype? In my head, this was going to be the greatest thing for me since the oxygen keeping me alive. It was already too late, even if it had been the most incredible game ever, it couldn't have been better than how it was in my head.
So the game eventually came out. I started playing it, I was loving every second of it! But then I started to get bored. Missions were repeated, story wasn't constant, snake never seemed to get any eviler. "Oh but once it gets into the final act, then the darkness will begin" I thought. It started to, we started to see a bit of snake's darker side... and then the game just ended. I beat a level, watched a cut scene, went through the credits, and then I was dropped back into my helicopter just like the end of any old mission. Huh. Well there goes years of hype.
While thinking back, I can see that a lot of elements of the game could actually be seen as bad rather than not as good as I personally hyped it up to be, but it still had so many incredible things. It played amazing! The mechanics were incredible! It felt so good and rewarding doing anything! But it wasn't good enough, not for me.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing. "Ugh it's not what I wanted 0/10." I can see how incredible it was, but the hype lasted so so so long and my excitement was so so so huge, that it was bound to fail my expectations.
I remember talking to someone about it when I finished it, and I recall saying that, in some ways, I kind of wished it never came out. That way, it would have remained this perfect, almost mythical game that was better than anything else ever. Why? Because it's over. All that hype, and I've finally finished it. You know when you've been watching a tv series and you're so excited for the final season to come out so you can find out how it ends, only for it to end and for you to realise that that big part of your life, that thing that you'd wish the week away just so you could finally see the next episode, is over? That's exactly how this is for me. Sure, you can rewatch stuff, but you know what's going to happen, it's never going to be the same again. All those years are over. It made me so very sad when I finished the game. The Phantom Pain was supposed to be my game of the forever, instead, it wasn't even my game of the year. It really hurts man.
Maybe it isn't all hype though, I mean I can still go back to the original Metal Gear Solid or the third one or the fourth one and have an absolute blast, so maybe it's more to do with it not feeling too much like a Metal Gear Solid game? It could be a combination of the two. Either way, I've never been the same since finishing it.
So is hype a bad thing? Not necessarily, just make sure it isn't too excessive. It is a hell of a drug after all, trust me, I'm the biggest hype addict there is.
-Chris
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