These mechanics became so reviled over the years that no amount of CODEC calls to the Colonel could ever help you.
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Metal Gear / Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
- Nearly every single door in the original Metal Gear requires a specific keycard in order to enter. There are a total of eight different numbered keycards in the game, and they are not universal, as you need to have the specific keycard currently selected in your item slot in order to open a door. This isn't much of an issue early on in the game, but as you make progress and get more keycards, it can become quite cumbersome to have to constantly go in and out of your inventory to test which keycard opens up each and every door, especially in certain situations such as opening locked doors in an area where you need the gas mask on to avoid taking constant damage, and the probability of getting it right the first time slowly decreases.
- The original Metal Gear 1 also had the rank system, as indicated directly under the Life Meter. There are a total of twenty-five P.O.W.s scattered throughout Outer Heaven, and every five P.O.W.s you rescue, your rank goes up by one star, which increases your maximum health and allows you to carry more rations as well as ammo for all of your weapons. If you kill a P.O.W., your rank is immediately decreased by one star. At certain points relatively late in the game, you need to call Jennifer on your transceiver. However, she is very high-class, and will only answer if your rank is four stars, the maximum you can have. If you kill a single P.O.W., you're permanently stuck, as Jennifer is the only way to open two doors with items behind them that are both required to finish the game.note If you happened to save your game after killing a P.O.W., you have no choice but to start the entire game over from scratch.
Metal Gear Solid / The Twin Snakes
- Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes had the ridiculous concept of, when giving you instructions, not telling you what buttons to actually press. Save for the very first explanation of how to open the Codec menu, rather than tell you to press the A button to climb a ladder, they tell you to push the "action button". It renders the (often forced) tutorials completely pointless because, without looking through the manual to see what the game insisted on calling the buttons (thus making the in-game tutorials even more pointless), it amounts to telling you to "do the thing to make the thing happen": thanks, Colonel, care to tell the class which button is the "action button" now?
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
- The sword gameplay in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty didn't work very well to begin with — just Raiden making short, awkward-looking slices which had only a passing relationship to how you manipulated the right analog stick. Especially annoying since it was introduced very late in the game, giving you about one minute to practice before an hour of shooting giant robots/cutscene and then final boss swordfight.
- The swimming controls are weird, unintuitive and rather squirrely to get a grasp of. And then the game throws you into sections where they have sea mines ready to take chunks off of your health bar if you mess up — and then an Escort Mission of guiding someone back through these areas, with their own oxygen meter that is noticeably smaller than yours to boot. This was so infamous that numerous gaming news outlets at the time called attention to and lambasted these sequences above all else, regardless of their thoughts on the rest of the game; they were more controversial to some than Raiden himself.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
- In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, it can get a little irritating having to pause the game and flick through the various menus every couple of seconds:
- For many people, the CURE mechanic was highly annoying. The concept itself was alright; if Snake suffers a serious injury (broken limbs, burns, gunshot wounds, etc.) you go into the CURE screen and select the appropriate items to heal your wound, or else face a lowered healthbar. This rapidly gets annoying during the late-game boss fights, who usually give Snake a serious injury with every hit, forcing the player to constantly pause and go through the CURE screen if they want any chance in winning the fight.
- The camouflage system is annoying for the same reason, as you need to constantly pause the game to change camo outfits in order to max out your Camo Index and maintain your stealth. As you travel through a range of environments, this becomes tedious after awhile - Tiger Stripe clothes with Splitter face paint are good for a lot of areas, but it'll only go so far. In a reversal to the stamina/psyche gauge issue, MGS4 fixed this with its Octocamo - just hold still for a second on the ground or against a wall to automatically blend in, with the menu restricted to specific camo patterns you like or joke outfits.
- The bag is very annoying. Snake can only a carry a limited amount of objects to change freely. Whenever you need something else you need to pause to go into the menu and swap out items. To make matters worse, carrying too many items at once causes his stamina to drain more quickly.
- The CQC. Try not killing a soldier accidentally during an interrogation. The difference between holding a man in your grasp and slitting his throat is simply a few ounces of pressure on the circle button.
- A holdover from Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. When getting up from prone, Snake will get on his knees. In order to stand up, the player must press X again. Many a time, simply trying to walk too soon will result in Snake going back into the prone position again. This is why later games lets you crouch-walk and the 3DS version gives this feature.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
- In theory, the psyche and stress gauge should have been a great addition to the franchise, building off how MGS3 handled the stamina gauge. In practice, however, the gauge was criticized for depleting (psyche) and increasing (stress) too quickly. Minor comments in a cutscene, like a side character making a light jab at Snake's age or health, would cause the gauge to lower by one full quarter, making it come across as if Snake was particularly thin-skinned or couldn't handle jokes (not the best perception for a tactical agent with thirty years' experience involved in an operation spanning multiple countries). The rationalization for the gauge (it promotes regeneration of Snake's health) seems particularly incongruous with its stated function in most cutscenes, where unless you mash X immediately after the forced drain or are lucky to have it happen in a cutscene where you later get a secret L1 view of a woman's breasts, Snake will often begin at a disadvantage due to an ill-timed comment.
- Every single time a cutscene plays where Snake draws a gun, it will be his Operator pistol or M4 assault rifle. This in and of itself isn't anything new, but it doesn't play well with cutscenes that transition into gameplay like at the start of a boss fight, since he'll still have the Operator or M4 out regardless of what weapon you actually had equipped. If you didn't even have it on you at the time, expect whatever weapon you actually wanted to use to have been switched out for it. Given the sheer amount of cutscenes in the game, this will infuriate players who simply don't want to use the blasted Operator and have to keep unequipping it every five seconds. Keep in mind too that the Operator and M4 assault rifle are both starting weapons and, while they're useful throughout the game, they're quickly outclassed by other weapons: the Five-Seven found as early as Act 1 outclasses the Operator in every single conceivable aspect beyond the ability to go silent, and the M14 EBR purchased the moment you meet Drebin not only outclasses the M4 but is a borderline Game-Breaker for being a powerful sniper rifle that can double as an assault rifle. Even at its least disruptive, the system ends up taking your five weapon slots and paring it down to three weapon slots for what you actually want to use and two dedicated to the Operator and M4 so they won't replace a gun you like every fifteen minutes.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
- Quiet being removed as a Buddy. After you unlock this buddy and progress the story enough, and finish Mission 41, a chain of events begins that is irreversible (and results in Quiet leaving Mother Base, being captured and having to be rescued by Snake before disappearing into the desert). This can't be changed unless one of two unapparent methods are used. The first is to keep said buddy's Bond at 90% or lower, or use a Butterfly (front) part in your emblem. It's highly unlikely that most players have done either of those two things by that point in the story, and once it occurs, there's no way to reload a save to before she disappears. To say this has angered some players is an understatement. Even worse, one of the buddy's unlockable outfits (Sniper Wolf) is only accessible by completing Mission 40, three missions before said buddy disappears.
- Said buddy being removed was addressed in an eventual patch, after modders were able to reintroduce Quiet and her missing photos in the FOB back into the PC version by changing a couple lines of code. After you lose said buddy in Mission 45, you must go back and replay Mission 11 ("Cloaked in Silence") seven times, upon which the game arbitrarily changes the mission name to "[Reunion] Cloaked in Silence" and you get the buddy back permanently afterwards, with no in-story explanation of why said buddy went back to their original recruitment spot, nor why Big Boss decided to put her pictures up in the FOB again. If you haven't read the patch notes, then you have no way of knowing how to do this, and even if you do, it's incredibly boring because you've likely already played the mission at least twice beforehand (the normal and "Extreme" versions).
- Deployment costs. At early stages of the game, it makes sense that there is a limiting factor associated with Snake deploying to the field (and it makes sense for certain expenditures, like calling in air support or supply drops). However, it starts getting ridiculous once the player starts getting higher-level items and weapons. Deployment costs can easily balloon to 200,000 GMP or more per sortie, and if the player doesn't understand the submenus (you can change the quality of gear you carry to lower ranks), they can quickly find themselves in the red. It becomes even more absurd with some of the FOB-exclusive weapons - why would it cost 50,000 GMP to take a pistol that fires sleeping gas rounds into the field? Even more ridiculous is that the GMP is spent regardless of whether you actually use the item; taking a missile launcher into the field and bringing it back with all its ammo is just as expensive as if you fired it dry.
- Building new weapons and expanding Mother Base happens in real time. The higher the weapon level or additional piece of the base, the longer it takes. For weapons, it starts with 18 minutes, then doubles nearly every level, except the last which is only three hours or so. Level four of your base also takes a little over three hours. What makes this even worse, is how strict the clock is. It only runs when the game is running. You cannot commission the development of new weapons, items and bases, turn the game off and have the console's Internet or internal time count. Also, make sure you are not on the loading screen. If you forgot to press the "Continue Game" button between loads and left the game, you are out of luck. If you didn't change your console's control settings, the system will stop the game after a period of inactivity. This is all annoying enough, but the game really pushes it when it comes to expanding the FOB bases and developing "Gold" level weapons. They take absurdly long times to finish, sometimes more than 24 hours and remember they have the strict game requirements listed above. You can finish them instantly....if you have enough Mother Base Coins and the cost means you either have played every day to acquire a lot of them or you paid real money for them. The Dispatch Missions you send your soldiers on also have the same annoying time rules as well.
- The Annoying Video Game Helper moments brought on by comments from Miller and Ocelot, which happen each and every single time you either Fulton someone, encounter an enemy gunship or steal a cargo container. "You're going to extract him?" "Subject onboard, leave the rest to us." "He's coming too? Roger that." "Boss, get down! The enemy sniper. Stay low and crawl along the ground." Whether it's the first or 500th time, they'll still say the exact same lines. Notably, there are audio mods for the PC version of the game that eliminate these comments entirely.
- Similarly, the voice of the iDroid can really grate, as she chimes in whenever Ocelot and Miller don't. For example, something as simple as setting a waypoint and going to it will get you a few lines from her: "Marker placed. You have arrived at your destination". After you upgrade your binoculars to scan enemies and check their traits, after every single one she'll go "scan complete", for all 25 or so enemies you scan in a base.
- The Forward Operating Base (FOB) system.
- On the surface, it's a compelling way to increase rivalry and competitiveness between players and their factions, competing to see who can steal the most resources and stop the most infiltrations. In single-player mode, it's incredibly annoying - FOB invasion prompts can pop up in the middle of a mission, forcing you to scuttle your progress and go defend it yourself unless you have allies who handle the job for you.
- Even if you don't want to make one in the first place, the game hounds you to build an FOB. The only way to avoid this is to refuse the online Terms of Service agreement every time it appears, and play the game offline indefinitely. It can even be raided if you built one and you're playing offline.
- It doesn't help that the only way to get some of the higher-grade weapons, outfits and items (not to mention a boatload of additional costumes for Snake) is through the FOB mode, with no apparent way to access it offline... that is, unless you use a mod for the PC version, which unlocks all of the online items for offline usage.
- There's an entire (hidden) ending tied to this mode
, which not only has an obscure means of being obtained (it is believed that this is only unlocked when every player has disposed of all nukes, something which would be nigh-impossible to do because there would always be players who would fight to keep their nukes), but it also has a key story point - Venom Snake coming to terms with looking like the real Big Boss and accepting his fate. In a hilariously ironic twist, the hidden ending was unlocked in the PC version of the game more than three years after the fact... due to an integer overflow in the game's code that reset the number of owned nukes back to zero, inadvertently caused by hackers creating so many nukes that it caused the piece of coding to reset. - An update to the system broke it entirely. Along with making it so that night invasions result in all of the troops wearing Night Vision Goggles (making it unfeasible for anyone attacking a high-level base), Konami integrated a form of "insurance service" (paid for with real-life money) to the mode. Thus, players who would normally get cleaned out by other players can pay to have their resources remain on base, while the attacker gains duplicates of anything they take. Some players have accused this of being a real-life protection racket instituted in a virtual product by Konami.
- One of the more notable cutscenes in the game (Venom witnessing Diamond Dogs recruits fighting in the rain, teaching them a lesson about being brothers-in-arms and stabbing himself to prove a point) is tied to whether the player's GMP (money) is at a negative level. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that the player will ever view this cutscene, as the game repeatedly stresses not going into the red, and at later stages, you'll be earning so much money that viewing this cutscene is virtually impossible.
Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops
- You can send enemy soldiers you've recruited instead of Snake to blend in among their former comrades. Great! Not so fast. Jonathan, a foot soldier, is ignored by those dressed like him. But other types, like an officer or scientist, will raise the alarm if they see him. Even though he's dressed like soldiers that are most definitely supposed to be there, and seeing one of them shouldn't be a surprise. There's no reason they should know he's gone over to Snake's side, either. If anything, you'd expect the foot soldiers, who he spent the most time with, to be most likely to notice something's wrong.
- On a related note, Jonathan can run past an enemy, who will ignore him. Then if they end up on opposite sides of a cargo container or some such, the enemy will react to hearing unexplained footsteps. If he comes round the corner and sees Jonathan, ostensibly one of his comrades who he just ignored running past him, he'll sound the alarm.
- They'll also sound the alarm if you bump into them. Really, the situations in which they'll sound the alarm make the whole infiltration mechanic almost useless.
- Portable Ops was the first game in the series where the player could capture enemy soldiers and recruit them; however, unlike Peace Walker and MGSV, you don't have any Fulton balloons. Instead, you have to drag every soldier back to your truck, which can take minutes at a time and only increases your chance of getting spotted. You can also drop the soldier off with one of your partners, but they all spawn right next to the truck by default, so in order to actually make use of this, you have to run to one of the pre-determined hiding spots, switch to another character, and then run all the way back to where you were. So it doesn't actually save any time, it just makes things even more tedious.
