All spoilers on this page are unmarked, per wiki policy. You Have Been Warned!
As the Grand Finale to the Metal Gear series, you're damn right there's gonna be tons of awesome moments.
- Who's the Boss? YOU ARE!
- As shown in all the trailers, Big Boss is finally fed up. He's sick of being betrayed, exploited, and hurt by the world that, despite him saving it countless times, hates and reviles him and his men. He's done watching his men being brutally murdered. He's embracing the darkside, building his own nation, and crafting his own personal phantom to take revenge on everyone who ruined his life.
- The scene near the end of the E3 2013 trailer, which shows Big Boss helping Kazuhira Miller, whom he had just saved from Afghanistan, who is now missing his right arm and left foot. Combined with the trailer's theme "Sins of the Father", this makes for an incredibly powerful scene.
- Fulton Bombs. If you strap C4 or other weaponry to an object being fultoned, you can make a surface to air explosive.
- From TGS 2014 gameplay trailer, you (Big Boss) can have Quiet shoot your hand grenade in mid-air to defeat a helicopter!
- The reveal that the fully grown D.D. the wolf dog sports his own badass eyepatch to match Big Boss'.
- From the co-op multiplayer trailer we have Snake rampaging around on a Mini-Mecha, some new features, such as a Fulton sentry turret, and Ocelot striding through smoking wreckage, firing his revolvers.
- You can infiltrate other players' bases and steal all their shit.
- The fact that you can tackle missions in any way you see fit. This video shows four different, yet equally effective, ways to take out an enemy commander with methods ranging from sneaking in and capturing him alive to going in guns blazing from the helicopter's minigun to using a Rocket Punch Missile Cam to blow him up to strapping C-4 to one of his Mooks and then blowing him up once he reached the commander. The possibilities are endless.
- Similarly, using the gameplay mechanics within the open world to just create new and exciting action and stealth setpieces. Like perching atop a high clifftop or building, biding your time waiting for an enemy soldier to pass you in his patrol down on the ground. Then pouncing down onto him, using the force of your fall to tackle him to the ground and then completing the knockout with a finishing combo. Or just roaming through an enemy compound in stealth, transitioning from slow but steady movement to rapid hunting. Always blending in with the environment, always silent, always looking for the perfect moment of opportunity, always five steps ahead of the enemy force. If you're as good as the Boss, that is.
- Any time you S-Rank a mission. Miller is, appropriately, very impressed by how well you did.Miller: Mission complete... and how! They're gonna tell stories about this one, Boss.Miller: Mission complete. Amazing! That right there is why you're the best, Boss. The one and only.
- There's also any time you achieve the hidden "No Traces" bonus. One of the biggest strengths Venom Snake has is a wide arsenal of weapons to choose from. By achieving the "No Traces" bonus, he proves he doesn't need any of them.
- Achieving the optional objectives provides yet another opportunity for Awesome, as you go above and beyond the standard mission objectives to rescue prisoners, steal blueprints, destroy gunships, and clear out enemy outposts.
- The GamesCom 2015 trailer shows us another example of Quiet's Improbable Aiming Skills. This time, she's Sniping the Cockpit of a fighter jet. And succeeds. The slow-motion shot shows she put the bullet right through the pilot's eye.
- The launch trailer has given us our first real look at Metal Gear Sahelanthropus. Fittingly for its name, it looks like the missing link between Peace Walker and REX at first. Except if takes it a step further by transforming into a bipedal Humongous Mecha, stands (on bidpedal supports) 50 foot high, has weapons coming out of various areas of its form (with what appears to be a railgun attached to its crotch) and its primary weapon is a sort of gigantic whip that hardens into a nanosword, which is used to sprout tectonic shifts of land, destroying whatever is in its path. Utterly bad ass. It also bears a very similar look/design to a certain abandoned series's main attraction, well played Mr. Kojima, well played.
- Ishmael is a walking talking CMOA. Feats of his utter badassery include, setting Quiet on fire with a lighter, facing down the "Man on Fire" without any fear or hesitation, gunning down XOF soldiers left and right, and pulling off a Big Damn Heroes moment saving Ahab by ramming the above mentioned "Man on Fire" with an ambulance that he stole. Fitting, since he's the real Big Boss.
- Ocelot's Big Damn Heroes moment. Dramatically pulling up on a horse as Venom Snake blindly tries to run down the road, he picks him up and manages to flee from The Man On Fire on horseback despite the monster burning down half a forest and only being held back by timed shotgun blasts from Snake.
- A villanous one for sure, but the SKULLS, AKA the Parasite Unit toe a fine line between terrifying and badass:
- Miller's description of his first encounter with them paints an eerie picture: a mysterious mist obscuring the AO, and Miller sending out a scout to investigate... only to have chunks of his body rain from the sky. From there, the Skulls wipe out the entire squad, only sparing Kaz by mistake to hand him over to the Soviets.
- Venom Snake's first encounter takes place shortly after rescuing Kaz from Da Wialo Kallai. He calls in Pequod for an evac, but a strange gas covers the area, preventing the chopper from landing. Miller realizes what this means... and then the SKULLS appear in the mist, eyes glowing green as they leap through the air towards you. From there, you have to race on D-Horse as fast as you can to the new evac site, with the SKULLS in hot pursuit. All the while, they keep pace with your horse, and even run ahead in order to fire on you. A powerful introduction to one of the game's most dangerous enemies. (You actually CAN avoid encountering them when they're first introduced, but you must make sure that Miller is still on D-Horse, make sure that most, three, of the Mist Skulls slowly shamble onto the bridge and then, when they're about half-way across the bridge, sneak by them via crawling/rolling away from them on the right side of the lower area. If done correctly, you can gain some distance to make sure they won't detect you and then use D-Horse's very handy Offscreen Teleportation ability to warp him and Miller to your location, thus leaving you to avoid alerting them completely. Take That! linear plotline!)
- The next encounter takes place during the early-game mission "Where Do the Bees Sleep?" After being held up by Skull Face and what is later revealed to be Metal Gear Sahelanthropus, you are faced with not only the Skulls, but zombified Soviet soldiers killed fighting them. As the Skulls encroach with machetes, Ocelot radios in with advice, encouraging you to use the mission item, a portable rocket launcher called the Honey Bee, to home in on them and neutralize them. Yes, the Skulls are so dangerous you're encouraged to use a GOVERNMENT SECRET WEAPON to take them out.
- As a fight between two Mother Base soldiers escalates with knives coming into play, Big Boss intervenes by grabbing the soldier's hand holding the knife and plunging it into his (Boss's) own shoulder, as the soldier falls back, speechless:
- Snake and Ocelot's overall reaction after the situation is under control makes this scene even more badass. Ocelot casually takes the knife out of Snake's shoulder and then proceeds to assign scrubbing duty to the two soldiers, only to be stopped by Snake who scolds the two that their CQC is sloppy and tells them that before they go to the brig, he expects them at his quarters so he can retrain them. Yes, at Mother Base, two people pulling a knife on each other is treated as a childish spat with Big Boss and Ocelot being disappointed parents.
- The first time Big Boss defeats the Skulls in combat during the Honey Bee mission. Despite being outnumbered and having no supernatural powers, Big Boss prevails because he's just that good of a soldier. After Big Boss eliminates the skulls, Miller can't believe what just happened, and comments "You really are a living legend!"
- Know what's even more awesome? With the knowledge of The Reveal, you realize that you aren't Big Boss. You're YOU.
- Once the Combat Unit is established on Mother Base, it's possible to send out Diamond Dog soldiers in place of Snake. Although many of them are weaker than Snake (and none of them have the bionic arm or access to the bandannas), they are still capable of performing some of the same feats as Snake, including:
- Lifting several full-grown men and slamming them into the ground in quick succession.
- Punching people's helmets off their heads. This includes the helmets of soldiers wearing riot suits.
- Blocking Skull machetes with bare hands before then stabbing The Skulls with their own weapons.
- Surviving multiple gunshots and explosives, as well as attacks from The Skulls.
- Cleaning out outposts without being spotted.
- Completing any of the missions that Snake can undertake. These missions include taking down super-powered snipers, destroying armored units single-handedly, and even destroying Metal Gear Sahelanthropus.
- Stealing dozens of soldiers, weapon emplacements, resources, and vehicles.
- Eli is certainly not a pushover just because he's a kid: you can repeatedly slam and punch him around in his fight and he'll just get back up and keep coming for more while trying to catch you off-guard and hit you with surprise attacks. This makes it one of the few cases in the game where CQC isn't just an instant 'I win' button, forcing the player into pursuit and counter extensively - against what the cast ostensibly think is only a kid, at that. But that's to be expected considering he's The Determinator of the series, Liquid Snake.
- After taking in the child soldiers, Snake initially wants to keep them as such to get new recruits. Kaz immediately rejects that, and in the process one of the kids grabs Snake's rifle. Despite missing an arm and being reliant on a cane and prosthetic leg to walk, Kaz effortlessly disarms him and clears the rifle.
- Quiet is not someone you want to mess with. At one point in the game, she's captured by some Soviet soldiers, and put in a prison jumpsuit - as established in her introduction, clothes suffocate her and severely weaken her. She looks pale, sickly, feeble, and helpless, and at one point tries to pathetically crawl away from the soldiers to escape. One of them proceeds to drag her to a water container and sinks her head in, attempting to drown her. He seemingly succeeds and proceeds to unzip her pants to rape her corpse. Unknown to him, Quiet breathes through her skin and as soon as her pants come off, she gets part of her strength back. What follows is without a doubt the most visceral, violent, and brutal sequence in the whole game, maybe even the whole franchise (and yes that includes Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance). And considering the already high amount of violence displayed elsewhere in this game, that's really saying something. Words can't really properly describe the whole sequence. It has to be seen to be believed. Not that they didn't deserve it mind you. Snake even tries to help her, but she'll have none of it, and dispatches over a dozen armed men by herself, with nothing but her bare hands, later a knife, and near the end a point-blank headshot with a 50cal sniper. Don't. Fuck. With. Quiet.
- Even before this moment she proves her awesomeness in this cutscene. Although it's already been proven that she's a crack shot with a sniper rifle, it gets even better. Ocelot gives her a handgun and she successfully shoots in between the spinning blades of a helicopter. That is how good of a shot she is.
- Even before this moment she proves her awesomeness in this cutscene
- There's a cutscene aboard Mother Base where Quiet attacks a soldier with a knife (we later learn that the man was carrying the vocal cord parasite and Quiet was trying to silence him so he couldn't spread it). This quickly leads to a couple of other Mother Base soldiers attempting to stop her, but Quiet easily sends them flying before she continues her attack on her original target. Suddenly Venom Snake shows up and pulls Quiet off of the guy. Quiet turns and attacks Snake, but he easily subdues her. Even though Quiet has supernatural speed and strength, not even *she* is a match for Snake in hand-to-hand combat.
- The Pay Evil unto Evil revenge the Diamond Dogs take on Huey. Despite leaving him alive and unharmed, they purposely send him out on a leaky boat which can't take the weight of his precious robotic legs and force him to dump them in the ocean.
- And before that, we have Huey's trial for his crimes presided over by the Diamond Dogs. In a superb double-act, Ocelot and Kaz efficiently demolish Huey's protestations of innocence, leaving him a pathetically protesting wreck and the Mother Base personnel clamoring for his death.
- Even Skull Face gets in on the act, quite ruthlessly tossing Huey down a set of stairs and chewing him out for his complete and utter lack of loyalty to anyone when he finds out that Huey is planning on crawling back to Big Boss. Not only that, but Skull Face's team are able to complete the work on Sahelanthropus' fully-upright bipedal mode without him, and have been able to use it as such since the game begins.
- The Laser-Guided Karma delivered unto Skull Face. Already dying from Sahelenthropus' attack and pinned beneath a rubble, he's loomed over by Snake and Kaz, whom he begs to just kill him. Snake picks up Skull Face's own rifle and, after hesitating for a moment, is helped by Kaz in blowing off the same limbs he's deprived them of, before Kaz bitterly tells Skull Face to finish the job himself. Of course, it's Huey who actually does the deed, and creepily gloats about it immediately afterwards.
- Even before this, the fact that the normally inflappable Skull Face is utterly taken aback by Mantis turning against him and taking over Sahelanthropus gives a rather satisfying tinge to the ensuing Villainous Breakdown.
- In Mission 45 Quiet and Venom Snake manage to defeat an entire Soviet mechanized unit by themselves. The Soviets had no idea that they were going against a couple of the most dangerous soldiers in the world. Bullying a Dragon indeed.
- When you call in a support helicopter to a landing zone, that helicopter will leave the landing zone to defend you if you get in a gunfight. It does this without needing to be asked.Pequod: Pequod coming in hot! Find cover!
- There is a hidden ending available if you successfully dispose of nuclear weapons in FOBs, as in ALL of them in known online space!! Since the ending is nigh-impossible to get unless every single MGSV player across the world banded together (hell, Kojima even said that it's "Something that can only be done in video games", as if expecting the goal never to be reached or taken down a few seconds later), those who have seen it so far are either hacked the game files or watched it second-hand. If you are impatient, you can watch it from some of the YouTubers. Kojima's ultimate in storytelling.
- Then people in MGS subreddit gets in on it!
- On July 27, 2020, the PlayStation 3 players have actually managed to disarm all nuclear weapons in that version of the game. However, Konami has since announced that they did not truly accomplish this because one player caused "improper conduct" that caused the cutscene to trigger.
- Then people in MGS subreddit gets in on it!
- Ocelot's interrogation of Huey in one of the cassette tapes has him delivering one hell of a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Huey. In the tape, Huey finally lets it slip that he attempted to have Hal (his son who would later become Otacon) pilot Sahelanthropus. The disgust in even Ocelot's voice is very obvious and the verbal beatdown he delivers is very satisfying. Hear it here.Ocelot: (Mockingly) You're still happy now. Changing your lies to suit the listener, and getting by on slipping through the cracks. Building layer upon layer of convenient stories until nothing means anything to you anymore. You're happy all the time, because you don't even notice you're doing it. Think hard. Who are you really? You're not a victim, and you're not the silent majority. You're a perpetrator. And a petty hypocrite. The real world doesn't make you suffer. It's the other way around!
- Skull Face gets an Offscreen Moment of Awesome in his backstory. It's implied that he assassinated Josef Stalin.
- Skull Face in general, for just being so infinitely confident. Big Boss approaches him with a gun drawn? He turns toward him and boasts. His men crowd around to shield him? He pushes them aside and looks Big Boss dead in the eye. And that's not even getting into the casual way he got the upper hand on Zero, a man who had planned for almost everything and still lost his edge against Big Boss' darker half.
- Despite not even appearing in the game, Solid Snake's reputation as the biggest badass in the series feels truer than ever when you stop and consider that he eventually kills every single surviving named character in this game (with the exception of Kaz, Huey, and Code Talker), at the very least, if not more (including the remaining Diamond Dogs personnel who go on to join Outer Heaven and Zanzibarland.)
- During the True Ending of the game, if you listen closely, you'll hear the brief sounds of rapid gunfire, then silence and a series of slow, echoing gunshots in the background during the beginning. Just who are they coming from? A few hours ago, a rookie operative was deliberately sent on a suicide mission, with nothing but his clothes and his cigarettes. And as you stare into the mirror, this rookie with only his Green Beret experience, special training, ingenuity and suppressed Beretta M9 to rely on is blasting his way through Outer Heaven and everything you can deploy to kill him - your beloved men, your elite squad of professional killers, even your precious giant mech - just to get to you, so he can take you down with his RPG-7. His name is Solid Snake, and he's winning.
- That Kaz will go on to become a trainer for Foxhound after the events of this game; he goes from being a broken man filled with nothing but a desire for revenge, to a highly well-respected and beloved tutor. He made a promise to train Solid Snake and help him defeat Big Boss, and he actually did it - to the point where Solid Snake would not be the man he is in the first Metal Gear Solid without him.
- The battle with Metal Gear Sahelanthropus. Throughout the entire game, as you further descend into villainy, you find out more about just how strong and dangerous this thing is. When you finally face it, it is a long and grueling battle, culminating in an absolutely heart-stopping Reflex Mode QTE where you have to shoot Tretij Rebenok as Sahelanthropus prepares to UTTERLY ERASE YOU WITH ITS RAILGUN AT POINT-BLANK RANGE! The entire fight also is amazingly atmospheric; not only does this fight truly capture the feeling of being an ordinary soldier against the mechanical demons that are Metal Gears, but it also creates a feeling of a final act of heroism from a man-turned-demon. And to top it all off, with the knowledge of The Reveal, you realize it wasn't Big Boss who defeated the biggest and most threatening Metal Gear in the series. YOU DID, AS IN YOU, THE PLAYER, creating the very foundation of the legend that is Big Boss. What better way to end the series than defeating the strongest of the titular Metal Gears?
- All in all, each final boss for all four characters in the series tops every boss before them. Old Snake and his fistfight with Liquid Ocelot, Naked Snake versus Metal Gear ZEKE/Paz, Raiden going against Metal Gear Excelsus and Senator Armstrong, and finally, Venom Snake fighting Sahelanthropus. Each of them face not only a very dangerous enemy, but an army's worth of soldiers and giant mechs, and they all end up winning anyway. Just goes to show that no matter who you play as, when you reach the end of their character arc, it will go out on a high note.
- And overall, it leads to a hidden and heartwarming aesop when you realize that in the end, all of them were normal men (Save Raiden in Metal Gear Rising). They were pure humans, no supernatural powers, no extremely powerful robots, no crazy skill that lets them manipulate nature; they're just human beings against all of it, human beings that decided to pick up weapons to fight for what they think is right. Even after seeing the depths of human depravity in this series, we see just what one or two men with willpower, training and a weapon can do, both good, and bad. Pretty awesome to realize at the end of the day, you're always just a normal human being against the most dangerous things the world has to offer, and you always come out on top.
- Furthermore, throughout the fight, Miller keeps calling in support to ensure your survival and victory. Run out of rockets? No prob, Miller will call in a supply drop automatically. He might also send an attack chopper in to run interference, giving you some room to breathe and get a few shots in. It's not just Snake versus Sahelanthropus, but the Diamond Dogs fighting against insurmountable odds!
