Brendan v. Tsutsumizaki & Sokukawa

 

I did it. God help me, I did it.

Rather than go through the entire process of obtaining 100% completion in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, I want to talk about Mission 47: "[Total Stealth] The War Economy." This is a retread of Mission 21 (just like Ground Zeroes, The Phantom Pain is padded to hell and back), with the twist that if anyone spots you, you instantly fail the mission. Simply completing the mission, or even obtaining the S-rank, isn't too difficult. Trying to complete all of the bonus objectives, on the other hand....

Fortunately, TPP lists its level designers during each deployment, so it is to Yota Tsutsumizaki and Takuya Sokukawa that I say What the hell?! Let's start with the worst of the bunch. You need to eavesdrop on all four conversations between the commander and the arms dealer. Eavesdropping is a terrible mechanic that should have been removed from the game entirely. It requires the player to maintain a close distance from the NPCs to listen in on their conversation. As mentioned above, getting spotted will fail the mission, but if anything spooks the AI, they'll go into alert mode and cancel their conversation. Indeed, they will sometimes decide not to talk for no reason at all! To add insult to injury, there are no notifications for partial completion of an eavesdropping objective. It's possible for you to overhear a conversation, but not be close enough for it to officially "count," and the game will give you no notice that this has happened until you hear the last conversation and mysteriously don't have the objective completed! Mission 47 takes the cake, however: listening in on all the required conversations takes twenty minutes, and there are no mid-mission checkpoints! If anything goes wrong at the end, you'll need to redo the entire twenty-minute ordeal.

Oh, and things will go wrong. After hearing all of the conversations, you'll need to extract the targets, take out a helicopter and grab the blueprint it drops, extract the shipping containers in the south hangar, and exfiltrate without ever being spotted. This doesn't sound too infuriating, and it wouldn't be in a game with perfectly predictable AI, but the AI in TPP is easily perturbed and guards will randomly deviate from their usual routes and stumble into you at the worst possible moments. Every time this happens, have fun spending the next twenty minutes eavesdropping again! This. Is. Maddening. The saddest part is that this could have been a challenging and fun mission if only the eavesdropping was removed. I wouldn't mind having to restart a dozen times if it took two minutes instead of twenty. Why, oh why was eavesdropping a thing?

Dropping eaves. Not even once.