Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes is the latest game belonging to the franchise which pioneered the now popular stealth genre, laying the foundation for later games like Splinter Cell, Thief, and Assassin’s Creed.
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Story & Themes
The story of the Metal Gear Solid games centers around Solid Snake, an infiltration specialist cloned from Big Boss, the best soldier the world has ever known. Snake is expected to carry out missions from his superiors without question, but throughout the series he begins to contemplate his origins, his purpose, his role, and his fate. His missions typically involve stopping the production of a constantly evolving line of mobile nuclear weapons platforms known as Metal Gears, but along the way he finds that these missions are not nearly as straightforward as they seem.
The Metal Gear games intricately intertwine real history with the supernatural and wild conspiracies , mixing mythological archetypes with near-future military realism: Shadowy puppet-masters controlling world events? Check. Artificially intelligent supercomputers controlling the global flow of information and all the weaponry of the U.S. right under our noses? Yup. The games also are bizarrely fantastical, oftentimes breaking the fourth wall. One instance has you switching the port that your controller is plugged in to, in order to thwart a mind-reading enemy. Another has a character mention the packaging the game was physically sold in, where a code necessary to proceed can be found. Yet another has a character mention the storage capacity of the medium (Blu-Ray) that the game, and by extension himself, is contained on. Thinking outside the box is a common theme in this series.
Save Points
Players can call a specific character on their radio to save the game at any time, except for during a cutscene.
Heads Up!
Violence Since this series more or less centers around weapons and warfare, there is of course a fair amount of blood; a few scenes feature lots of blood, though the violence generally doesn't go as far as dismemberment or mutilation.
Most of the games in this series allow the player to successfully complete the game without a single kill. The ultimate goal of the stealth-based game is to infiltrate without leaving any trace of your presence, so it's usually best to just sneak by enemies without being noticed. In situations where you are forced to incapacitate enemies, including bosses, you have the option to tranquilize them and slip by while they are unconscious.
Scary Imagery There is more than one occasion where characters must endure physical torture.
Sex & Nudity There is controversy over the scantily-clad-ness of a character in the latest entry in the series (essentially a female sniper in thong-type bikini).
Strong Language Occasional crude language, but not excessive.
Substance Use Solid Snake is a smoker and can be seen smoking in cutscenes. Cigarettes are also incorporated into the gameplay; Snake uses the smoke to detect infrared lasers in front of his face, though using this technique causes players' health bars to slowly decrease. Players can avoid smoking by finding and using infrared goggles to detect otherwise invisible beams. There is some abuse of alcohol shown in the game.
Online Community
MGS5 has an online player vs. player mode unrelated to the main story.
Conversation Starters
- Do you find killing a genetic clone of a super-soldier easier than killing a unique individual? Why might this be?
- Is the added challenge of accomplishing a mission without killing anyone worth the trouble?
- Do you think it's plausible that shadow elements such as the Patriots control world events in real life?
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