Players will often be told to kill or extract some target or destroy something, and almost none of the targets end up being characters. They are random warlords or officers that Snake has to deal with. Speaking of Snake, he hardly says anything. For all the money that Konami and Kojima must have spent hiring Kiefer Sutherland to voice Snake, they do not make much use of him as Snake remains a mostly silent protagonist until a situation arises where he must intervene.
There is also the fact that the game was not exactly finished. The final mission, mission 51, was cut from the game, and it only exists as a 30% finished cutscene on a blu-ray disc in the collector’s edition of the game. Many players feel cheated by this because they bought what was supposed to resolve all the plots and bring Big Boss’ story full circle, and instead they got an incomplete ending that leaves more questions than answers. It is clear from the mission footage that it was meant to be added into the game, and players fear that they may be cheated again by seeing a finished version of mission 51 as DLC somewhere down the line.
The tragedy of The Phantom Pain is that Kojima gave players what they had been begging for for years: a Metal Gear game that has more gameplay than story. Many players did not care for Hideo Kojima’s cinematic approach to storytelling with previous Metal Gear Solid games having very long cutscenes. With The Phantom Pain, players got a lot of gameplay, but at the cost of a story that could not be told in Kojima’s traditional brand of storytelling.
