Perhaps a little surprisingly, this is only the second time a Metal Gear Solid game has made it's way into my collection, following Metal Gear Solid 2 from the HD Collection on the Playstation 3 a whole 6 and a half years ago.
The completion of which was actually roughly round about the same time I first started MGS5. If I recall, it was my intention at one stage to add all of these trophy lists to my collection, and there are a fair amount of them in existence.
However, and I don't think I ever officially concluded this, but I'll take this opportunity to do so now. I won't be going back retrospectively to grab any of them at this point. That includes MGS3 and Peace Walker from the same HD Collection I got the MGS2 Platinum from, as well as MGS4, which was released without trophies, and then later patched to include them.
I do still have Metal Gear Rising : Revengeance in the backlog, but to suggest MGS5 has completely burnt me out would be a great understatement, and has very easily influenced this decision to leave the untouched MGS titles exactly that way.
The Phantom Pain follows on events directly from the aftermath of Ground Zeroes (an MGS title I never actually played), where Snake awakens from a 9 year coma with the primary goal being to seek revenge for an attack that left Snake almost dead, and his forces decimated. This turns out to be at the hands of a Cipher group called XOF, headed up by Skull Face, the main protagonist of the game.
Skull Face's motive is driven by carrying out Cipher's goal to unite the world by destroying all non-American cultures through creating a vocal strain parasite capable of killing non-English speaking people by attaching to their vocal cords, and distributing this across the world in order to wipe out large groups on mass. Snake's mission not only becomes one of personal revenge, but also part of a wider mission to prevent the spread of this virus intent on wiping out the majority of the World's population.
This trophy list is large in size, clocking in at 43 trophies, including the Platinum, and this has to be one of the most labour-intensive games I've ever completed.
Not only is there alot of content within this list that encourages you to explore practically every single element of the game, but this longevity extends to levels of repetition that eclipses the majority of the games in my collection, and it all adds up to an overall package that, despite containing it's challenges, is mostly drive by time investment, and ends up being one of the longest Platinum trophies I've ever earned.
The most important thing to note about this game, compared to previous MGS titles I've played, is the direction. The Phantom Pain is a open-world sandbox MGS game, and although this wasn't the first game to take the MGS series down this path, and away from it's very linear roots, this was certainly the first MGS title I played from this perspective, and the game translates well across to this model.
The game still has a focal main story, which is spread across a series of 50 missions, taking place across 2 main locations (Afghanistan, and then later, Angola-Zaire), and this mode is where the vast majority of the trophies in this list are centred around.
The "Elite" trophy, awarded for Completing all missions with a S rank, is a staple favourite requirement from MGS games, and working towards this as you go through the game should be the primary focus.
Obtaining an S Rank requires a score of over 130,000 at the end of the level, with points awarded for a numerous variety of actions. However, the best results come through either time or stealth bonuses. Completing the levels quickly and/or without triggering combat alerts, reflex time or killing enemies are the best 2 ways to maximise points, but this is difficult to achieve initially, when you're exploring missions for the first time and don't have the relevant level of background knowledge in order to succeed, so the majority of my maiden playthrough was purely for casual purposes. I did find that, time became less relevant as long as I maintained maximum stealth, so this ended up being my uniform approach throughout the game, and this at least meant I came out of a small handful of levels with a first time S-Rank, but it wasn't many, and the majority required me to re-visit them to earn this trophy.
Once you've completed the 31 main story missions, you'll unlock 19 additional missions, which for the most part are direct copies of the original 31, but with an added condition, such as Extreme difficulty, where enemies deal way more damage, or Total Stealth, where any triggered alert instantly ends the mission. This is where some of the aforementioned repetition really hurts the game, because you end up re-visiting so many of these levels and their variants, the tedium starts to set in big time, and this extends into other tasks within the trophy list.
This is also the main reason why this Platinum took so long for me, and it may be important to point out that, I completely understand that there are guides out there that can show you how to beat a level within 5/6 minutes in order to achieve an S-Rank, which would have significantly helped the progress here, but as someone who's always wanted to not use a guide for certain things, this is something I didn't want to entertain. It therefore would take me well over an hour to beat a certain mission to S-Rank by just simply tackling it in my own way without any guidance. I appreciate it would have saved me alot of time off the overall completion, but I wasn't interested in shortcuts unless I could figure them out myself. If it took me over an hour to beat a level, but I managed to do so with perfect stealth and it still got me the S-Rank, then the question of whether I could have done it quicker was irrelevant to me.
What I will add though, was the fact that, there were a small handful of occasions where I would spend well over an hour trying to earn an S-Rank on a particular mission, only to complete it and find out I was way too slow, which negatively impacted the amount of points to the extent where it was perhaps only enough for an A-Rank, or I would get spotted by a random solider towards the end of a mission and lose my stealth points, which would have exactly the same level of impact. Though this thankfully didn't happen that often, it was the most frustrating part of trying to S-Rank some of these missions, and if it looked like there was a faster way to complete them, it did become quickly apparent as the missions unfolded in front of me, so it was never difficult to spot opportunities when they presented themselves.
Overall, it was a good challenge, and figuring out different ways to beat these missions with an S-Rank was a fun task which kept things fresh for as long as possible, though the inevitability of tedium through playing some of these levels multiple times did eventually kick in. However, the sense of reward for putting time into carefully beating a level, achieving the S-Rank for it and being able to do that without any guidance was great.
On top of this, there are also 10 trophies, which is around a quarter of this list, awarded for beating specific missions for the first time, so natural progression is awarded regulary within this list. You'll also be awarded for completing each of the 50 missions once.
The "Executed" trophy, awarded for Completing all mission tasks, is the next step beyond achieving S-Rank for every mission.
Each of the 50 missions within the story contains a number of optional objectives, varying anywhere between 2 to 8, adding an extra layer of replayability onto these story missions. Again, some of them will come naturally as you play through the story and focus on achieving those S-Rank ratings, but you can guarantee a fair amount of re-work here as you go back over these levels again purely for the purpose of this exercise.
The vast majority of these are not that difficult, and act merely as a checkbox exercise solely for the purpose of padding the depth of this game further, though some of them are reasonably challenging and make you tackle certain levels from a different angle to what you may have chosen to do when going for the S-Rank on them.
This was the point where the game started to wain on me on a little bit. Going for S-Rank was fine. I'd taken a long break from the game, so it felt fairly fresh, and I was taking the challenge in my stride. To then have to go back through all these missions again, just to fulfil some secondary objectives that I cared less about, was a bit dull. Some of these objectives are also structured in such as a way that you can't beat them all in just 1 additional playthrough of the mission, and will have no choice but to play them over a few times. There are also some that require you to play through large portions of the mission, just to reach the point of being able to fulfil the objective, and if you miss out, you'll have to play through from the beginning again. This is mostly regarding, but not limited to, the objectives that require you to listen to a final conversation between 2 people, which will require you to spend 15-20 minutes building up to that by following someone around the map and listening to all pre-requisite conversations. Nowhere near as fulfilling of a task.
Also, those 19 post-story missions, most of which are copies of the previous 31? The copied variants also have the exact same mission tasks, so the repetition really starts to hit you hard when you realise you're literally doing the same things over and over, to the extent to which I was desperately trying to find reasons to still be enthusiastic about this game, whilst progressing through this task.
Once this trophy has been unlocked, you will at least be done with the Story mode, though this is where you'll spend the vast majority of your time with this list anyway. However, the grind isn't quite over just yet.
The "Achieved" trophy, awarded for Completing all SIDE OPS, requires you to venture into the Side Ops mode. Separate to the Story, the Side Ops is a series of individual challenges contained within certain areas of the main story mission space, and requires you to fulfil a small handful of tasks across a total range of 157 Side Ops.
They'll require you to rescue prisoners, eliminate tank/heavy infantry units, clear areas infested with land mines and extract highly-skilled soldiers, amongst a few other things. Some of these tasks are duplicated as much as 20 times, and the novelty wears out pretty quickly as you realise this is yet another task purely for the benefit of padding depth to this game. Across the 157 Side Ops, there are around 7/8 different types in total, and even though I used these Side Ops to break away briefly from the monotony of replaying Story missions, the reprieve was just as brief, due to the staleness of this mode itself. They're effectively segregated versions of regular gameplay elements that already exist as part of the core game - Destroying tanks, extracting soldiers, rescuing prisoners, they all make up things you do as part of the main story anyway, so just to see these already existing gameplay elements stripped away into a completely separate mode and just labelled "Side Ops" is lazy and, if not for the fact necessary for the Platinum trophy, pointless too.
These Side Ops aren't particularly difficult, and they can beaten fairly quickly, but there's still a great volume of them, and they add to a trophy list that really didn't need to suffer any more from mindless repetition that offered little extra reward. I suppose you could liken them to the VR Missions in MGS2, though there are thankfully a hell of lot less Side Ops to tackle, which is something at least.
That pretty much covers the core of this list and going through these 3 trophies is the predominant focus of this game. Once you've covered off the Story mode to S-Rank, along with the mission tasks, as well as completed all Side Ops, there isn't much else to go into in regards to other game modes, however the list does cover alot of elements of the RPG angle to this game which are important to mention.
You'll need to Develop 300 weapons, fully upgrade Mother Base and reach level 50 with all staff units and when you're working towards any of those tasks, for which trophies are also awarded, there are 2 elements to consider.
The first one is resources. Developing weapons and base upgrades costs resources, which are naturally farmed over time or instantly whilst out and about in the open world completing missions. Once you have the resources, then they require development time to complete upgrades, so it's really important to always be conscious of this at all times. If you're not developing weapons or upgrading the base/staff in the background whilst playing the game, you're potentially burning time, and the last thing you want with a game of this length, is inefficiency when it comes to time management.
You don't want to reach the conclusion of this game and realise you still need to develop loads of weapons or Mother Base upgrades because you forgot to do them as you went along. They don't require any effort, but for a game that already takes a long time to beat, you really don't want to be wasting extra time at the end just waiting for upgrades to complete when you really should have been doing this in the background as you played through the game, so I feel this is a really important nugget of information to reveal. Always have something on the go at all times.
The "Deterrence" trophy, awarded for Developing a nuclear weapon, also fits within this criteria, and possibly even more so, given the fact that a nuclear weapon takes 24 hours of real time to develop. However, that's not why this is mentioned in this instance.
Once you have gathered the resources to create a nuclear weapon, and confirm the start of the process, you will be deducted 50,000 Heroism points, which will have a direct consequence on the "Hero" trophy, which is awarded for obtaining the codename "Hero", achieved at amassing 150,000 Heroism points.
It isn't exactly a deal-breaker, but it makes more sense to reach the title of "Hero" before you create the nuclear weapon, otherwise you risk having to clawback 50,000 heroism points for beginning the nuclear weapon process, which could unnecessarily prolong this task.
Onto the most important point of this Platinum. I know I've slightly mentioned the fact that this game takes a long time to complete, without actually quantifying this with a certain number, but truth be told, such length becomes a blur and I don't actually know how accurate my final total is. Going purely off the records screen on the main menu, I spent a whopping 269 hours on this game, and whilst I personally find it hard to believe I've spent that much time going after this Platinum, I have no justifiable reason to disbelieve it.
The main story isn't exactly short, and obtaining an S-Rank on all 50 story missions, as well as going after the secondary mission objectives, with the Side Ops on top, I can see how it builds up when you piece it all together as a larger picture, and whilst I haven't really mentioned any of it, there are a fair handful of trophies that require you to spend some reasonable time on extra-curricular content, such as capturing all 47 species of wildlife, and finding all Blueprints, Key Items and Invoices throughout the game world.
I would say 269 hours grants this game the title of my lengthiest Platinum ever, and even though I wouldn't say the challenge of the game is that high, that sort of length has to count for something, and as I mentioned at the top of this piece, this game did completely drain me when all was said and done.
As someone who has believed since day 1 that length is always a factor in Platinum difficulty ratings, this is where the majority of the score for this game comes from, and I was pushing through some fairly intense tedium barriers by the end of this game. I appreciate it could, and will, be shorter for some people, but the insistence for me to complete this list with my own approach to S-Rank and mission objectives will have no doubt been the main contributor to a higher completion time. There is at least a mark or two for some of the S-Rank requirements of certain missions that are a little bit tougher, as well as some challenging secondary mission objectives to go through, but persistence was certainly the order of the day.
Notable Trophies -
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| Elite - Complete all missions with an S-Rank. Executed - Complete all mission tasks. Achieved - Complete all SIDE OPS. Deterrence - Develop a nuclear weapon. |
Hardest Trophy -
Elite Complete all missions with an S-Rank
