Video Game / Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

This page may contain unmarked spoilers from Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, as well as Late Arrival Spoilers from previous installments in the franchise. Read at your own discretion.

In Outer Heaven... Men Become Demons.

"It is no nation we inhabit, but a language. Make no mistake; our native language is our true fatherland."

— Emil Cioran, Romanian philosopher

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is the main portion of the Metal Gear Solid V storyline, set nine years after the events of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. The Phantom Pain was released worldwide on September 1, 2015.

The year is 1984. It's been nine years since Big Boss's legendary mercenary outfit, Militaires Sans Frontières, was laid to waste by the American black-ops group Cipher and their elite XOF Unit, with the man himself left comatose, brain-damaged, and horribly disfigured. Nonetheless, word has begun to spread that "V has come to."

After narrowly escaping an XOF attack on the hospital he is being held in, the newly christened "Venom Snake" takes command of a new mercenary unit, Diamond Dogs, founded by fellow MSF survivor Kazuhira Miller and GRU agent Revolver Ocelot. His mission? Take revenge on Cipher and XOF, no matter the cost. Standing in Snake's way are the Soviet army stationed in Afghanistan, various African PMCs in Cipher's employ, and XOF themselves, along with a mysterious new weapon that may surpass even Metal Gear...

The Phantom Pain also ties several multiplayer functions into the single-player. Players can invade the Mother Base of others and steal supplies, while the invaded players can defend themselves and their base from their foes. The Metal Gear Online competitive multiplayer mode returns as well, developed by Konami Los Angeles.

Unmarked spoilers for previous games in the series ahead. Avoid or read at your own risk.

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"You're face...to face...with the Man Who Troped the World'':

#-E

• 100% Heroism Rating: Quite literally, upon reaching 150,000 Heroism. When you do so, Ocelot informs you that you have earned the respect of other private forces, and the player is rewarded with the title of "Hero". This enables you to infiltrate nuclear-equipped FOBs and steal their nuke(s), then dispose of them via the Resource sub-menu. This not only removes the protection a nuke would give them, but also boosts your Heroism even more if you dispose of enough nukes.
• Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene: Quiet dancing in the rain with Venom Snake.
• Action Girl: Just like in Peace Walker, female Diamond Dogs recruits can be assigned to the Combat Unit, sent out as part of a strike team, or even used as playable characters in missions. Notable mentions are the non-randomly generated recruits Laughing Wallaby, who bears a striking resemblance to Laughing Octopus from Metal Gear Solid 4 and can be recruited in Mission 14: Lingua Franca as an optional side objective, and Flaming Buffalo, who joins Mother Base after you finish Act I and who has a very high S+ combat rating, greater than even Big Boss' A++, as well as the extended reflex time perk.
• Actually a Doombot:
  • An item, Active Decoy, lets Snake throw a disc that, once placed, pops out a life-sized balloon resembling himself. The balloon also talks, which will attract nearby guards who will immediately attack the balloon until it pops. They will still fall for this even if it's deployed right in front of them. The enemy can use these against you and it takes a special upgrade to allow your marking system to tell the difference.
  • The ending of the game reveals that the player character himself was this all along. The real Big Boss has been in hiding, while the player character was merely a soldier who believed himself to be Big Boss, thanks to implanted memories. Plastic surgery helped a lot.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Previews of MGSV showing FOB missions featured two other private forces, Roughneck Raven and Stubborn Sheep, as rivals against Diamond Dogs. These are presumably organizations planned for special online events.
• A.K.A.-47: Like Ground Zeroes before it, all the military hardware used by Diamond Dogs and their various enemy forces are fictional, not just firearms^note the firearms all mix-and-match design cues from various real life firearms, but none of them is a direct copy of a real life firearm. This includes the Honey Bee, which is obviously meant to be a stand-in for the Stinger, and Ocelot's revolver of choice, the Tornado-6, which replaces the Colt S.A.A. from previous games.
  • In December of 2022, a mod was created for the PC to replace virtually all weapons with their closest real-life counterparts.
• Allohistorical Allusion:
  • The "Metallic Archaea (1)" cassette reveals that the reason South Africa went full-speed ahead with its nuke program in 1975 was because they saw MSF did it first and if some tiny private army could do it, a sovereign country could too.
  • The "Truth Records" tape also reveals that the 1977 New York blackout was caused by the order of Zero, so he could cover his tracks in a desperate escape from America after he was attacked by Skull Face and infected with a parasite.
  • Certain locales in Afghanistan are described as in one way or another related to the country's pre-Communist past, meant to herald a bright new age for the nation. There's a tinge of bitter irony however in how Miller and Ocelot go on to note how the past decades utterly betrayed those promises.
  • One of the conversations that can be overhead between guards in Afghanistan details a guard's cousin being sent to work with nuclear reactors in a closed city in Ukraine and how they are some of the safest in the world, referencing the infamous Chernobyl disaster that would take place two years later in 1986.
• Amazon Brigade: Much like in Peace Walker before it, it's possible to fill your entire base with women, with the exception of Miller, Ocelot, Code Talker, Huey, Venom Snake, Hideo, Ziang Tan, and Silent Basilisk. It is, however, very time-consuming; in order to effectively get that many women, you have to keep grinding the few Prisoner Extraction missions that have female prisoners (Like 02 and 03) and repeat the Main Story missions that feature female prisoners (like 09 and 14) since, once again much like in Peace Walker, women are only found as prisoners or as volunteers. ^note Not helping matters is that you can't get the highest-ranking staff except on FOB missions and PF point exchanges, which almost always feature male personnel.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes:
  • Like in Peace Walker, Snake can wear a variety of fatigues in different camo patterns, as well as new versions of his sneaking suit and battle dress throughout the course of the game.
  • Snake's sneaking suit from Ground Zeroes can be carried over by transferring save data from said game, along with the low-polygon version of Solid Snake from MGS1 unlocked from the "Deja Vu" mission. The MGS1 Ninja and MGR Raiden costumes (with their increased sprinting speed) are also in the game, but these are much harder to unlock, requiring the player to S-rank every non-repeat mission.
  • Clearing every "hard mode" mission will unlock a silver skin and prosthetic for Snake. S-ranking them will unlock a gold skin to go along with the golden prosthetic unlocked from having a 100% completion rate from Ground Zeroes.
  • A handful of bonus skins can also be unlocked for all of Snake's buddies, including blood-splattered, silver and gold skins for Quiet, as well as the "Gray XOF" uniform she wears during the prologue and a Sniper Wolf outfit.
  • Completing Episode 29 allows the Mother Base staff to develop the Parasite Suit, which allows the player to mimic some of The Skulls' powers. Likewise, completing Episode 46 unlocks the Diamond Dogs leather jacket worn by the real Big Boss.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • Venom Snake loses his left hand early in the game.
  • Miller loses his right arm and left foot from his time as a captive in Afghanistan.
  • Skull Face ends up losing the same limbs as Miller after being shot several times at close range.
• Anachronism Stew:
  • Huey names his new Metal Gear project after Sahelanthropus, which inspired his decision to make a Metal Gear that walks upright. Sahelanthropus Tchadensis wasn't discovered until 2002. The game Hand Waves this by explaining that Sahelanthropus was actually discovered earlier than that, but its existence was covered up by Cipher as part of their information control scheme. Not to mention the slew of modern technology present during the time period. Such as the bipedal walkers, cyborg prosthetics, Metal Gear Sahelanthropus itself, advanced firearms and what is essentially a holographic smartphone with insanely advanced capabilities.
  • The HP-48 Krokodil, the player's support helicopter in Ground Zeroes (and sadly not a selectable option in Phantom Pain, relegated to appearing only as an enemy) is based largely on an Mi-28 Havoc attack helicopter (with the troop bay of an Mi-24 Hind). The Mi-28 had its first flight in 1982, but appears in the fleet of Big Boss's MSF in 1975 and in active service with the Soviet Army and various PFs in 1984.
  • With that being said, a lot of the technology (Computers, Machinery, etc) are on par with what people had at the time. And as stated by a lot of people, military technology is decades ahead of commercial.
  • "The Final Countdown", the helicopter song of choice for many players, was actually released in 1986, two years after the game takes place, not to mention that many of the other licensed songs in the game would not have feasibly been available to Soviet soldiers serving in Afghanistan, at least not until after Gorbachev began the Perestroika in late 1985.
  • The game features "Take On Me" by A-Ha, which was recorded and released in the same year that the game is set: 1984. The problem? The version used in the game is the re-recording from 1985.
  • As well as a 1999 remaster of "Rebel Yell"
  • The worst is The Cure's "Friday I'm in Love", which isn't even from the same decade.
  • In the Mother Base, there are posters for Idol Paz with an artwork that's more reminiscent of 2000's and onwards instead of the one appropriate for the era.
• And I Must Scream: The vocal cord parasites are engineered to make speaking your native tongue fatal. Quiet is, well, quiet because she has the English strain of the parasites.
• Angry Guard Dog: Averted; there are no guard dogs present in the final version of the game but despite this when soldiers are conducting a search during a FOB infiltration, they will sometimes make statements that implied that a guard dog was supposed to be present among the search party.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • As you progress through the game, you’ll likely upgrade the ACC to become much stronger and better outfitted with guns and better plating to withstand heavy enemy fire. Because deploying it in the field to exfiltrate takes a lot of time (for the helicopter to travel in and out of the hotzone) and money (as deploying it in the field causes it to automatically spend some GMP from your budget that dramatically increases depending on its level of upgrades), the game allows you to warp to the ACC instantly and for free during Free Roam by pressing a menu tab the pause menu. This makes it useful to warp there and redeploy on the other side of the map, though that’ll still cost money since you’re out on a sortie.
  • Enemy deaths by friendly fire (i.e. you tranq an enemy just as they're about to throw a grenade and they end up blowing themselves up as a result) don't count against you for purposes of the mission ranking. Likewise, combat against bosses and the Skulls also generally doesn't count against you for purposes of the mission ranking for things like kills or detections.
  • In "Blood Runs Deep", otherwise a mercilessly stressful mission, it's almost impossible to evac via chopper without getting detected and fired upon by the enemy base on the other side of the hill. Fortunately, this doesn't count as a combat alert for the purposes of this specific mission.
  • If you reload a checkpoint, any enemies you marked prior to reloading will remain marked. After all, the player already knows their general location, so having to re-mark them would just waste their time.
  • If you're approaching enemy soldiers that you haven't marked, an ominous audio cue plays to alert you of the danger.
• Anti Poop-Socking: It wouldn't be a Hideo Kojima game otherwise. A downplayed instance of this occurs when you go too long without showering, and Ocelot gently, politely reminds you of the importance of personal hygiene and taking breaks by throwing a bucket of water at you upon your next visit to Mother Base. The player is never addressed directly, but the message comes through loud and clear: "You've been playing the game too much."
• Anyone Can Die: With a few exceptions (Hideo, Zhiang Tan, and Silent Basilisk) any of your Mother Base personnel who aren't main characters can die, either as casualties from Dispatch missions, being killed during a FOB invasion, dying in the field during certain missions (most notably Mission 27 and Mission 28), being killed during one of the two vocal cord parasite outbreaks, etc. This includes Mauve Shirt characters like Malak or the Viscount. You can mark about 10% of your total MB staff as "under direct contract", which prevents them from being lost due to the more common causes of staff death, which is helpful to use on particularly skilled staff.
• Applied Phlebotinum: The one for The Phantom Pain is parasites. The Skulls are parasite zombies, while other strains of the parasite hide in the vocal cords and kill their host when they speak a certain language.
• Arbitrary Mission Restriction: The Landing Zones. Where, exactly, the helicopter can drop you off varies wildly between the story missions and the Wide-Open Sandbox mode, to the effect that the same area may have dozens of available landing options in free roam but only one or two during missions, without even so much as a "too many enemies in the area right now" Hand Wave.
• Arc Number: In addition to Zero himself and his Cipher organization, one of the Private Forces that Diamond Dogs faces in Africa are named Zero Risk Security, while X.O.F.'s base of operations in Afghanistan is named OKB Zero.
• Arc Words:
  • "V has come to," a phrase which started showing up all the way back in the VGA 2012 teaser. Even the iDroid gets in on it during the prologue. This is a code phrase for Miller, telling him that Snake has woken up.
  • "In Outer Heaven, men become demons."
  • "A weapon to surpass Metal Gear." What this weapon is is never explicitly stated, but suggested to be the vocal cord parasites — particularly the English strain, due to its potential to not only devestate the human population, but cripple world governments by robbing the world of its dominant language.
• Artificial Brilliance: These guards and patrols are some of the toughest to sneak past in the series yet. They'll learn to ignore you tossing magazines to distract them, can hear their allies collapsing nearby and see at farther ranges than even Ground Zeroes, and will adapt to your tactics the more you play the game just so that it becomes harder and harder to have a single efficient playstyle. Sniping from afar and they hear your gunshots? They'll drop mortars on your general location. Infiltrating at night? They'll start equipping flashlights and night vision goggles, while larger outposts and groups will fire flares into the sky to make you more visible. Constantly going for headshots? They'll start wearing helmets. That said...
• Artificial Stupidity: They also have their own quirks, like forgetting where their own landmines may be, an entire camp coming to check out a flaming vehicle about to explode, not hearing someone collapse nearby at random, and other cases.
  • Sometimes they'll see you and, so long as you're not standing, leave their post from 70 meters away to wander right up to you until they finally spot you.
  • The troops in Walkers also seem to have extremely strange AI due to being in vehicles that are more mobile than they're adapted for.
  • Turning off the power will cause a guard to come by to check on it. If you take that guard out after he radios back but before he fixes them, they'll just give up on having lights. If you take him out after he turns the lights back on, you can turn them off again to repeat the process with another guard with no added suspicion. Likewise, when checking to see which guard is closest to turn the lights back on, they won't notice that half their force has suddenly gone missing.
  • If an enemy accidentally kills one of their own (such as using a vehicle), they will automatically blame you despite how well hidden you were.
• Artistic License – Biology: Venom Snake regains his entire muscle mass in around 13 days, the length of time it takes to travel down the Suez Canal from Cyprus to Afghanistan. He was a skinny invalid who could barely walk upon escaping the hospital. Even a protein heavy diet and extreme weight lifting will not accomplish such muscle gain that quickly. Hand-waved by the doctor saying they kept him in shape with massages and electro-stimulation treatments during his nine-year coma.
  • A wolfdog like DD would be one of the worst breeds to take on covert missions that require total obedience to the solider. Wolfdogs are much harder to control, due to being part wild animal, and they are also more aggresive and unpredictable. In modern military, the most widely used breeds are German Shepards and Belgian Malinios.
• Artistic License – History:
  • Snake only interacts with a single unified Mujahideen group while in Afghanistan, so the game assumes that the Islamic Unity of Afghanistan Mujahideen was formed in 1981. Historians can't agree whether the seven mujahideen parties merged in 1981 or 1985, which would have made the merger a year earlier than in real life.
  • Likewise, the large numbers of South African mercenaries operating in Africa was clearly inspired by PMCs like Executive Outcomes, but such groups only started popping up when the apartheid regime started slashing its personnel, around 1989.
• Artistic License – Linguistics: Despite being made up of veterans of the British and Rhodesian special forces, the Rogue Coyote PF uses the same Afrikaans dialogue as the other two PFs. While Afrikaans was spoken to a degree in Rhodesia, it was only spoken by a minority of the population, and English was the main language spoken by White Rhodesians, who make up the majority of the PF, and obviously would be the language spoken by the British members.
• Artistic License – Pharmacology: Ishmael gave Big Boss a dose of digoxin to get him back on his feet after waking up from his decade-long coma. Digoxin is an antiarrhythmic drug used to treat atrial fibrillation and heart failure, not for leg numbness or as an energy booster. Furthermore, digoxin is highly toxic even in small doses and thus, is usually used in conjunction with another medication to counteract its side effects In fact, one of the side effects of digoxin is muscle weakness, meaning it would have made Snake's leg even weaker.
• Assassination Attempt:
  • The game opens with one on Big Boss, having just awoken from a nine year coma, courtesy of a fully equipped military kill squad. One assassin in particular is set on fire while choking Boss to death; she comes back later with impeccable aim, supernatural speed and a score to settle with the Boss. Needless to say, she joins his team after they fight.
  • A frequent mission template in the game involves eliminating enemy commanders for whoever hired the hit. Generally, they want the commander assassinated, but Miller often advises recruiting them to Mother Base so as not to waste good talent. Missions that follow this include Episode 3: "A Hero's Way," Episode 7: "Red Brass," Episode 8: "Occupation Forces," Episode 19: "On The Trail," Episode 21: "The War Economy," Episode 22: "Retake the Platform," Episode 26: "Hunting Down," Episode 41: "Proxy War Without End," and most significantly, Episode 30: "Skull Face."
    • Episode 18: "Blood Runs Deep" appears to function like the above mission; Venom Snake has been hired to eliminate six rebel soldiers that are currently imprisoned to make sure they don't leak any information to the enemy. It turns out five of them are child soldiers, so Snake goes against the mission in order to bring them safely to Mother Base.
• Asshole Victim:
  • All the mistreatment Huey receives turns out to be very much deserved when you find out all the moral lines he's been crossing in the interval.
  • Skull Face's XOF team. If you're one of those people who hated what they did in the prologue, episode 30 will be very therapeutic for you and will let you go in guns blazing on them if you so choose.
• Assist Character: Snake can call on allies to deploy near him and provide support/cover fire. If the circumstances allow it, Snake can also use context-specific commands to direct his allies to do particular things, such as Quiet sniping things you throw. There are four "buddies" in total:
  • D-Horse, which is, well, a horse, but one that can be used as relatively stealthy fast transport around the word, capable of traversing all terrain types unlike other vehicles like the Jeeps. Snake can hang off the saddle to hide from enemies as he passes, load a hostage on the horse's back, store extra equipment or even command the horse to poop, which is so slippery even enemy jeeps can spin out if they hit it. D-Horse is also very fragile, and will often pass out or flat out die if he's shot more than a few times. On his own, guards only see it as a wild horse and ignore it. You can even leave D-Horse on the road as a distraction as armored vehicles will stop to honk their horn until D-Horse gets out of the way.
  • D-Dog, a puppy raised to be a bomb-sniffing attack hound. DD is your #1 stealth infiltration buddy, following you around discreetly and marking enemies, prisoners and items nearby, even through walls. He can be upgraded to carry a knife that he can pull out to kill enemies silently with, or a stun knife for those in a more merciful mood. He can also distract enemies either by barking, or by rushing to them and biting them for a bit before retreating. D-Dog doesn't, however, have any ranged abilities, and he's even more fragile than D-Horse. Like D-Horse, guards will only think of him as a wild animal and try to shoo him away with no alarm if they happen to see him while you're hiding.
  • Quiet (if you spare her, anyway) is a difficult-to-use but extremely powerful support sniper capable of turning invisible and whizzing around the battlefield at high speed, and can eventually learn to do a lot of trick shots. She can cover you, assassinate targets that you mark, kill/tranquilize people that spot you, and be a useful distraction. She can also attract a lot of attention, and constantly hums; if any enemies are close by, they'll hear her and come over. It is quite possible for her to liberate guard posts on her own, but the greatest (and most fun) advantage in using her is placing her and Snake in different firing locations around a base, and then switching up when the enemies try to hide behind cover.
  • D-Walker, a Mini-Mecha with a rudimentary AI, this is your #1 Assault Buddy if you want to use brute force on a mission. He's somewhat of a combination of the 3 other buddies and mixing a bit of all their strengths, but is also comes with his own weaknesses. You can climb on top of him and use him as a transport like the horse (though he's neither as silent, nor all terrain, nor allows you to hide from enemies while riding him), he will scan and mark enemy units like the dog (Though not items or plants) and can provide cover fire during a battle like Quiet (but not with her ridiculous precision and skill). His unique ability is that by climbing on top of him, you can choose to use a variety of interchangeable light and heavy weapons which can be mounted on him before each mission, such as a minigun to mow down the enemy forces with complete abandon with, guided missiles with which to take down tanks, or just a pair of rapid firing tranquilizer pistols. Enemies will recognize it as a threat so if you leave it alone carelessly, don't be surprised to find a group of guards openly attacking it by the time you get back. All of this is balanced by its high deployment cost: around 11,000 GMP depending on upgrades.
• Asymmetric Multiplayer: After clearing a few missions of the Angola-Zaire border region campaign, players are introduced to Forward Operating Bases, the game's online multiplayer component. Players can construct additional FOBs similar to Mother Base to store more materials for more advanced R&D, but these facilities are always open to possible invasion from other players and might result in loss of personnel or materials. During an FOB invasion, the attacker and defender have differing experiences:
  • The attacking player's gameplay loop is essentially the same as in single player, albeit with variable difficulty depending on how well equipped the defender's troops are, as well as the possibility of dealing with the defender themselves if they're online. The main objective is to infiltrate the HQ of the enemy FOB within the time limit, with the attacker being rewarded some of the FOB's personnel and resources. That being said, the attacker is given free reign to do whatever they want — they can focus solely on Fultoning everything out and then retreat, engage only in PVP, or if they're feeling particularly sadistic, simply blow up everything and everyone in sight with no regard to stealth.
  • The defending player's gameplay loop solely focuses on hindering the attacker, either by incapacitating them (lethally or otherwise), or preventing the attacker from reaching the FOB's HQ until the end of the mission's time limit. They have infinite respawns and the FOB's personnel and ordnance at their disposal. If the defender or their troops spot the attacking player, their presence is made known to the other party immediately. Spotting the attacker at least once also opens up the opportunity for the defender to take revenge by invading the attacker's FOB, although this is entirely optional. Lastly, if the defender's weapons R&D is high enough, they can pre-emptively place a small amount of traps and cameras anywhere they choose, supplementing the more predictable emplacements automatically generated by the game.
• Attack Its Weak Point: How you deal damage to Sahelanthropus. Miller and Ocelot react enthusiastically when you hit the sweet spot at the right time.
• Attempted Rape: In Episode 45 a Soviet soldier removes Quiet's pants and we hear the sound of a zipper, implying that he is about to rape her. His plan backfires big time; by exposing her legs to the open air she was able to breathe through her skin and regain her strength. She then proceeds to take down an entire squad of Soviet soldiers by herself, including an axe kick straight down on her attempted rapist's groin with a sickening crunch. Also note that she spent about 3/4 of that fight unable to use her hands. This woman is badass incarnate.
• Author Appeal: Sums up why Quiet is designed the way she is. Word of God even stated he did this so people would cosplay her.
• Automatic New Game: The first time the game is booted up, it immediately heads into the opening cutscene. It plays for awhile, then cuts to a special title screen showing Snake's hospital bed - used only for the opening - where the player can adjust a few settings before advancing. Notably, the game only has one save file per user, so anyone starting a new game won't miss out on it.
• Award-Bait Song: In Metal Gear tradition, "Sins of the Father" and "Quiet's Theme" are definitely this.
• Awesome, but Impractical: A lot of the higher-end weapons and support aren't worth it:
  • Fire support, at least in Main Ops. It's expensive and cripples your rating for the mission, and it can be awkward to use...but who wouldn't want their chopper flying in, gunning down everything in sight while Ride Of The Valkyries plays?
  • Weather changing. A neat trick that lets you set the weather to whatever you want, but it costs a lot of GMP and the artificial weather doesn't last any longer than normal weather. While it can be strategically beneficial in certain circumstances, more often than not, it's just a waste. Plus it kills your rating, like the fire support above.
  • The Stealth Camo P.P. is once again this. Sure, an Invisibility Cloak is cool, but it's expensive, only lasts a short while, you only start off with two (half the number most consumables do), and it caps your ranking at an A. Later upgrades increase the battery life and holding capacity, but it's still only good for sprinting through guarded areas and taking out guards undeterred, as it will wear off instantly if you're attacked. However, if you invest into it far enough, you can develop the actual Stealth Camo, which not only has a maximized battery life, but also comes as a single item, which means it has infinite uses as long as you keep recharging the battery. Still useless for S Ranking, but makes most Side OPS an utter joke.
  • The Parasite Suit. It allows you to use three abilities of the SKULLS: Mist^note Wrap the area in concealing mist, Camo^note Renders you invisible to the naked eye, and Armor^note Gives you rock-like armor, making you extremely resilient to damage and stops all knockback, but requires special cartridges that don't last too long and require Parasites to deploy, which can only be acquired from the relevant SKULLS. Since SKULLS are hard to acquire as is and come in so few quantity, using the Parasite Suit repeatedly takes too much maintenance to be useful long-term. And as with the rest of the stuff on this list, it caps your ranking at an A. As of a patch, using the suit itself, or the Mist/Armor parasite cartridges, no longer caps your ranking. They still won't be forgiving you for using the Camo cartridge, however.
  • Note that none of this applies to Side Ops, which aren't ranked. As long as you're willing to deal with the expenses, feel free to call in all the artillery strikes, sleep gas strikes, and chopper assaults you want!
  • The Hand of Jehuty. While it's really cool to have a teleport stun weapon that allows free takedowns and is all but a Zone of the Enders Shout-Out, it has a terribly short range, which means that unless the enemy is across a way that is inconvenient to directly traverse, you're better off just rushing your target and slamming them. The Grade 7 upgrade ups the range however.
  • The Burkov TB (Tranquilizer Bullet). Likely the first semi-automatic tranquilizer pistol acquired, it is incredibly useful. However, its semiautomatic nature means it is very easy to go hog-wild with rounds, and it cannot be developed further once acquired, meaning it does not benefit from the unbreakable suppressor or the armor piercing rounds the WU S.Pistol can choose from at Level 5. In addition, its iron sights are extremely chunky, making aiming a lot more difficult than the WU's thinner iron sights, making it hard to engage enemies at range. If these flaws can be overlooked, it can be an effective tool if used right. The Burkov HS Grade 7 added later in an update rectifies most of these issues, with an infinite suppressor, thinner iron sights and more powerful tranquilizer.
  • D-Walker can be this in anything but a straight firefight. Its equipment is far more expensive than D.D. or Quiet's and, in order to be any way useful, ammo rack upgrades must be purchased as well. Also, in driving mode, it handles worse than a three-wheeled shopping trolley and can't aim farther up, meaning a battle with a chopper using the D-Walker is near impossible. That said, D-Walker's Gatling Gun is useful in boss battles.
  • The Adamska Special DLC pistol. A custom AM-D114 variant, it comes with ornate engravings and greater stopping power than the regular version's starting level. However, it can't be upgraded, fitted with a suppressor or customized by the master gunsmith and is quickly eclipsed by better pistols, including the regular AM-D114. The description lampshades this by asking if the engravings give a tactical advantage.
  • Post-release patches have been steadily adding in Grade 7 and Grade 8 weapons and items to develop. On the one hand, players get access to absurdly powerful weapons, such as an underbarrel tranquilizer pistol with infinite suppressor and very high stamina damage, a non-lethal shotgun that can knock out with one shot to anywhere on the body even at thirty meters (averting the Short-Range Shotgun problem some other shotguns in the game have), a grenade launcher with a twenty-round drum magazine, battle armor that can resist lead walls of light machine gun fire, a silenced anti-tank rifle... the list goes on. On the other hand, these things get progressively more expensive to develop and deploy, making them more suitable to use only against FOBs that have equally overpowered equipment. The Grade 7 battle armor also prevents players from S ranking missions. Most of the higher grade weapons require staff levels of 110 and higher, the Grade 8 LRS-46 requires an R&D level of 125, all but guaranteeing those who want such weapons will have to shell out for a third or fourth FOB in order to reach that level, and have enormous stockpiles of resources (upwards of 50,000 precious metals, 1.6 million GMP and 300,000 common metal for some guns) to develop them.
  • In addition to this, almost all the equipment obtained from FOB events can zig zag this. While the fatigues obtained have no deployment cost while used in single player, using them in FOB mode prevents you from obtaining event points due to a bug.
  • The AM A-114 riot pistol. Available as an FOB event reward, this pistol fires a round that releases sleeping gas in the vicinity of its target, putting them to sleep instantaneously without the whole downside of enemies diving away from gas grenades. It even bypasses the tricky issue of riot suits, which the WU is useless against. Sounds great, right? Its magazine capacity is only a measly two rounds and you can only carry six extra rounds for its first level, rising to eight and ten for its upgrades. So, either be prepared to use the infinity bandana or call in a lot of ammo drops if you intend to make regular use of this one.
  • The Falkenburg Fulton Launcher. While its Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker counterpart was an absolute Game-Breaker, this version now requires a direct hit for the Fulton extraction to take effect and only extracts a single soldier per shot. While, if your aim is good enough, you can still use it to extract soldiers from a ridiculous distance, it's still noisy.
• Bag of Spilling: Played with. Big Boss and Kaz lose Mother Base and MSF, but Big Boss doesn't lose his skills or physical form. Even his replacement is stated to have received muscle therapy and treatments while unconscious to ensure that he's still physically fit and able upon waking up, and at best is instructed to bulk up his arm to fit his prosthetic replacement.
• Bait-and-Switch: Once you first learn of the Applied Phlebotinum, it looks like Skull Face's plan is to wipe out every language except English, thus stripping everyone in the world of their identity like his was from him, as payback for having his national language and culture wiped off the face of the planet. In actuality, though, it's the complete opposite; he wants to wipe English out as a language, partially out of his hatred of the language, but mainly to fulfill one-half of his plan. The other half was to provide cheap, easy-to-make nuke-armed Metal Gears (that he would ultimately still hold the keys to) and sell them to every nation on Earth; with every nation big-or-small holding a nuclear option, and with the "global" common language dead, the world would be locked in an endless nuclear stalemate - and if anyone got the idea to pull the trigger, Skull Face would be able to use his override to prevent a M.A.D. scenario. Deterrence through everyone becoming a nuclear power - just like Hot Coldman wanted.
• Bears Are Bad News: Bears can be spotted wandering the wilds of Afghanistan. Like many animals, they can be tranquilized or killed, and in the case of the former, Fultoned back to base, but don't expect it to go down easy.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game: The Parasite Suit allows the player to temporarily use the same abilities as the SKULLS by installing specially-designed cartridges filled with parasites to give its wearer a particular power. However, using the Camo cartridges negates S-ranking, though the Mist and Armor cartridges, however, do not.
• Being Evil Sucks: From a purely gameplay standpoint, it's a lot harder to become the bad guy than to be good. There are many more acts that decrease Demon Points/give Heroism than add Demon Points, and they're generally a lot easier to accomplish. Furthermore, unless you get a Nuke, acquiring Demon Points takes much more time than just getting Heroism or losing Demon Points.
• Believing Their Own Lies: In the nine years since Ground Zeroes, Huey seems to have deluded himself into believing that he really didn't know that the "nuclear inspection" he arranged for MSF during Ground Zeroes was actually a Trojan Horse operation run by XOF. Taken to ludicrous extremes when he continues to adamantly insist that Strangelove was Driven to Suicide even in the face of solid evidence that he locked her up in the Peace Walker A.I. pod to suffocate. Ocelot even lampshades this on a cassette tape, remarking that the hardest man to break is "the kind that's fooling himself."
• Big Bad: Skull Face, who wants to use Metal Gear Sahelanthropus as a scare tactic to incite a worldwide race for nukes, which he will provide, but he has ultimate control over those nukes. With everyone afraid of nukes, he will release a parasite that kills anyone who speaks English, thereby halting cultural and linguistic imperialism through English. In Chapter 2, the closest there is to a Big Bad is Huey, who releases a mutated form of parasite on Mother Base and indirectly leads to Quiet's supposed death.
• Bilingual Bonus: Every foreign language in the game is accurately spoken. Players fluent in Russian, for example, will be able to understand guards even if Snake hasn't acquired a translator.
• Blamed for Being Railroaded: Most of the player character's allies are too understanding to call him out when he has to make a tough call, but the Jerkass Huey Emmerich will always make sure to vilify the protagonist, even in situations like Episode 43 where the player character has only one option: kill every single one of his soldiers stationed on the Quarantine platform. Since the whole thing turns out to be Huey's fault, his criticism of you comes across rather flatly. Even as you exile him from the station, he still blames you for everything even though he was lucky you didn't let everyone else kill him.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: The collector's edition of the game features gold plated versions of the WU Silent Pistol and the MRS-4 Assault Carbine.
  • You can have a lot of things colored in gold, including your helicopter, vehicles, D-Walker, and even Snake and Quiet. Equipping an all-gold ensemble in Japanese versions of the game will cause Snake to speak in an Kansai accent and make corresponding quips.
• Blood-Splattered Warrior:
  • Snake can be covered head to toes in blood in gameplay if you get wounded during a mission and has to shower to get it off. If he doesn't, he starts to stink, which causes flies to buzz around him and makes him easier to detect. You can also get blood splattered on you if you inflict brutal enough wounds at point blank range.
  • Can be exaggerated if you transform into Demon Snake, who is permanently covered in blood, and that blood can never be washed off via showers or rain.
  • Quiet gets a outfit that makes her look like she's covered in blood as well.
• Bonus Feature Failure: Some of the S-Rank restricting items... arguably aren't worth the penalty.
  • Mistranslation led people playing in English to believe that the Cyborg Ninja skin, and later on the Raiden costume fall to this trope. English version of the description of each says that it locks out S-Rank. Given that their only ability is to allow one to sprint super-fast^*Raiden skin increases sprinting speed by 50% of the standard speed, while the Cyborg Ninja skin does by 30%, and its protection and stealth capability are equivalent to a fatigue on an inappropriate terrain, it would have been an epic fail if it was rank-restricting as its English description suggests. Bonus points for the fact that Raiden skin can only be obtained with S-Ranking all the mainstream missions, and it is very easy to boost one's sprint speed by 20% with other outfits.^*+Mobility 3 upgrade of Snake, or the skill "Athlete"
• Book Ends:
  • Although it remains to be seen if this is the last Metal Gear game, with Kojima's involvement at an end, he begins and ends the franchise the way he started it: with a character being briefed on Operation Intrude N313, Solid Snake's mission to infiltrate Outer Heaven. Venom Snake has received the mission details from Big Boss as he begins to prepare for the events of Metal Gear 1.
  • Focusing only the Metal Gear Solid games, both MGS1 and MGSV have the Final Boss being Liquid Snake piloting a Metal Gear (with Psycho Mantis' help in 5).
  • Not to mention MGS4 and MGSV have an ending where a significant person in Big Boss's life shares a final smoke with him before parting permanently.
  • Huey's involvement with Diamond Dogs starts and ends with the AI Pod. When Venom Snake enters the building where Cipher is holding Huey, Snake stumbles upon the AI Pod, which is the same one based on The Boss. As it tries to recognize him, Huey greets his old friend and adds "It's just a machine." Later, when the scientist is put on trial on suspicion for various crimes he has committed against MSF and Diamond Dogs, Miller intends to use the AI Pod as evidence against Huey. The latter tries to discredit the presented evidence by saying that it's just a machine, and shouldn't be listened to. The AI pod promptly proves him wrong as it turns out to be critical evidence to get him exiled from Mother Base.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • You'll more or less prioritize tranquilizer and rubber bullet guns above all other guns, as the game rewards sparing lives and extracting soldiers, like Peace Walker before it. The WU Silent Pistol, S1000 Air Shotgun, Riot SMG, UN-ARC NL and Burkov TB will be your go-to for close range combat, while the Renov-ICKX TP outfitted with a suppressor will pretty much take out whole guard posts by itself.
  • Like the M-16 and M4 in previous games, the starter MRS-4 will be players' staple lethal weapon until they develop more powerful rifles.
  • For a long while, D-Horse will be your go-to method of traversing the open world quickly, as vehicles aren't at all stealthy nor are they all-terrain like D-Horse. Until you develop alternate methods of fast travel, like D-Walker, D-Horse will be the only good way to travel.
  • For vehicles, the APE T-41 LV and ZAAZ jeeps are excellent for getting around, being fast, dependable, fairly stealthy and cheap to deploy. They can also carry D-Dog, something the other vehicles cannot do.
  • For stealth infiltrations, D-Dog is the only decent option unless you've been using Quiet from the get-go. Despite having low durability, he doesn't generally attract attention, and marks guards, plants, animals, directional mines, and most helpfully, prisoners, within a 100 meter radius. Developing his suits also increases his usefulness even further, such as giving him the ability to neutralize guards with a Stun Knife, or if you find the First Aid Manual, the ability to Fulton guards directly.
  • The series staple cardboard box. It's cheap to develop and deploy, lets you hide right in front of enemies, gives you camouflage at a distance, and has a surprisingly wide variety of uses outside stealth. Plus if enemies see it moving they like to get in close to check it out for easy CQC knockouts.
  • As always, Empty Magazines. Sure, you COULD carefully sneak around and choke out every guard from behind...or you could simply lure them into a secluded alcove with their back to you one at a time. Unlimited use, costs nothing, and one of the most efficient ways of taking out lone guards. However, the enemy WILL wise up if you keep doing it (or get caught doing it), and it won't work as well if multiple enemies come to investigate. However, if you're quick enough and your aim is good, you can huck one at a guard's face just as they're about to spot you for a quick ranged knock-out without wasting ammo, or suppressor uses.
  • Here's a fun tactic; find outpost power supply. Turn off power. Plant Sleep Mine (or if you're cheap, just tranq/CQC the investigating guard, but AFTER he reports in.) Hide. Watch as the guard sent to investigate passes out. Fulton/kill/hide/whatever. Turn the power back on. Repeat from step 1 until entire outpost is cleared. Incredibly dull, but reliable and (relatively) risk-free (and ongoing proof that The Guards Must Be Crazy.)
  • There are several times when directly fultoning a unit is inadvisable, such as the wounded and a few plot targets. You can simply put that unit in a vehicle and fulton it and, so long as nothing else gets in the way, it'll be a 100% clean capture when fultoning the unit themselves wouldn't be.
    • From there the cargo 2 upgrade that lets you capture heavy things has a lot of niche uses that are actually really handy (such as instant extraction if snake on a purified materials container or careful removal of heavy combat vehicles.)
• Boss-Altering Consequence: The water pistol is normally only used as a mere distraction or to short-circuit machines. However, it can also be used to damage the Man on Fire due to being, well, on fire.
• Bottomless Magazines:
  • Once again, the Infinity Bandana, which gives the player unlimited ammunition while equipped^note Not to be confused with the Bandana, which is a completely separate item that decreases the odds that Snake will take a critical injury.
  • Literally with empty magazines. Snake can throw as many as he wants in the game.
  • The Water Pistol, the only gun that naturally has infinite ammo. It's just water, after all. Very useful water.
• Brand X: Venom Snake's pocket computer is not an iPhone or an Android — it's an iDroid.
• Breakout Character: Quiet has become very popular with many fans due to her tragic story, sexy design, implied romance with Venom Snake, and the fact that she's very useful during missions, bordering on being a Game-Breaker. She leaves after completing Episode 45, which can only be avoided by either not maxing her Bond or equipping the Butterfly Emblem. Players who were not expecting this were upset, and fan reaction eventually prompted Konami to add the ability to bring back Quiet (non-canonically) by playing Episode 11 seven times.
• Breather Episode: "The Hamburgers of Kazuhira Miller" series of tapes is far less serious than any of the other tapes, centering around Miller's quest to develop the perfect burger for Code Talker.
• Bridal Carry: Venom Snake carries Quiet like this three times.
• Broken Record: The Hybrid Pod, the new home of The Boss's AI after Strangelove recovered Peace Walker's AI Pods from Lake Nicaragua. After recovering it from Huey's lab, it can be found on the top level of the R&D Platform, 1st Deck, endlessly repeating the same words The Boss said to Snake prior to her death.
• Brown Note:
  • The vocal cord parasites. When the owner speaks words they reproduce, a process that is completely fatal. Different strains of the parasite "recognize" different languages, and only reproduce when that language is spoken. In other words, the parasite turns entire languages into Brown Notes. Skull Face's ultimate plan is to spread a vocal cord parasite keyed to English, ending the world's lingua franca.
  • Huey subverts this by creating a strain that activates without the need for speech...and Code Talker's cure doesn't work on it. He uses Mother Base as the testing ground. Just one more reason to hate the bastard.
• Bullet Hole Spelling: If Quiet is still alive and on the Mother Base, on the day of player's birthday a cutscene will play where Quiet shoots holes on several crates of cigars that spell HBD (Happy Birth Day) to help celebrate.
• Bullet Time: Reflex Mode from Ground Zeroes returns, which allows you to slow time to neutralize a guard who spotted you before they can sound the alarm. Disabling this option nets you a guaranteed No Reflex bonus. You can also be subject to this in FOB Invasions if your intruder has the option enabled, but you can counteract it by investing in Anti-Reflex, which reduces the amount of time an intruder gets in Reflex Mode.
• Burial at Sea: This is what Diamond Dogs arranges to do with the victims of the second vocal cord parasite outbreak on Mother Base. Snake reconsiders at the last moment, however, and instead has their ashes converted into diamonds as a means of immortalizing them.
• Bus Crash: In addition to Chico dying in the helicopter crash at the end of Ground Zeroes, Strangelove died saving her son Hal, aka Otacon from becoming a guinea pig for Cipher and his own father. With Strangelove's corpse discovered inside the recovered AI Pod.
• But Thou Must!:
  • There are ways you can prevent (or rather, put off) Quiet's Plotline Death, but in doing so, you won't be able to get 100% until you allow it to happen.
  • Players who've read spoilers or are on their second playthrough can dismiss every Kikongo speaker from Mother Base before the first outbreak starts. However the game will simply start giving them volunteers with Kikongo.
• Canine Companion: D.D., a wolf-pup that Venom can Fulton back to Mother Base so that he can eventually be trained as an attack dog that can accompany him on missions.
• Call-Back:
  • Venom gets a left hand version of Zadornov's prosthetic right arm from Peace Walker. You can even upgrade it later on to use a Rocket Punch (in knockout or lethal forms), similar to the one that Zadornov attempts on Snake.
  • During the prologue when Ahab has his elbow twisted, Ishmael helps him painfully snap it back into place and tells him he should learn how to do that himself. Naked Snake set his own elbow (again painfully) after The Boss twisted it around at the end of the Virtuous Mission. This moment doubles as foreshadowing, since at the end it's revealed that Ishmael is actually Big Boss. That's why he knows how to set his elbow back and Ahab doesn't.
  • At one point during a training session, Ocelot catches one of the Diamond Dog soldiers using a elaborately engraved semi-automatic pistol with the ineffective grip he initially utilized in his first meeting with Naked Snake. He chides the soldier, referencing the advice Snake gave him back in MGS3 about firearms.
  • "You're pretty good!", said by Ishmael to Snake, who should be more than familiar with that phrase. It's a clue to Ishmael's true identity. Ocelot also repeats the phrase near the end of the game.
  • Serving as a sort of Book Ends to the revenge arc of Miller and Snake: immediately after Snake defeats Sahelanthropus, the DD chopper holding Miller descends, with Miller reaching out his hand to Snake—in about the very same fashion he reaches out to Big Boss when Mother Base fell nine years ago. They began losing everything to Skull Face; they end restored, victorious and about to pass judgment on Skull Face.
  • When the player defeats Quiet, the scene plays out just like when Snake defeated The Boss, right down to the unseen button prompt. Only this time the player's choice does affect the outcome of the scene rather than delaying the inevitable, allowing Quiet's life to be spared.
  • Skull Face's death is curiously similar to the scene where Quiet's life can be taken, though there is none of the simple tragedy and heartbreak of The Boss's or even Quiet's death; the camera lingers above Snake with Skull Face's own rifle extended toward him, before it pans back around and Miller assists Snake in blowing off Skull Face's limbs. The scene is an eerie mirror of The Boss's death, fitting given Skull Face's actions have condemned the world to both the Patriots and their coldly logical, vicious war economy in contrast with The Boss's inspiring, tragic death.
  • Huey's first scene involves him arguing with Skull Face over something he built, and then being thrown down a flight of stairs, similar to his first scene in Peace Walker.
  • One of the photographs that the doctor shows to Ahab in the alternate version of the prologue in Episode 46 has a signature from "Vic Boss", which was the nickname given to Big Boss by the MSF crew.
• Call-Forward:
  • The method that Ishmael uses to defeat the assassin in the hospital by using an accelerant and a lighter he has on hand is possibly an ironic reference to how his own son, Solid Snake, eventually defeated him in Metal Gear 2.
  • Ocelot has grown a mustache and started wearing a duster, referencing his outfit in the chronologically later Metal Gear Solid.
  • What else should Eli say in his "boss fight" but "Not yet, Snake! It's not over yet," something he says when by the time he's grown into Liquid Snake in Metal Gear Solid 1.
  • In Metal Gear 2, it's mentioned off-hand that Big Boss might have gotten cybernetic implants between games. In The Phantom Pain, he actually does get a robotic arm to replace his amputated one.
  • The D-Walker and Walker Gears are miniature mechs very similar in concept to the Metal Gear Gs that were planned to appear as enemy mechs in Metal Gear 2, which in turn were miniaturized non-nuclear equipped versions of the Metal Gear D from that game. The codename for repeatedly using D-Walker in missions is "Ostrich", which was the nickname given to the Metal Gear Gs.
  • More subtle than the others, but Paz's "final message" is one to Guns of the Patriots. As Big Boss' dying words to Solid Snake to let go and "live," implying that Paz had that much of an impact on Big Boss as well as on Venom.
  • "There's no such thing as magic or the supernatural" is said by a Mother Base crew in a conversation with another soldier over the nature of Quiet's powers.
  • "This is raven's territory" remarks Ocelot when the player spots a raven in his Int-Scope.
  • Sahelanthropus, the actual Metal Gear in this entry, combines aspects of Metal Gear REX and RAY, further highlighting its being a "missing link." Its alternate name, the ST-84, is also a throwback to the TX-55 from the very first game.
  • If the player shoots Ocelot with tranquilizer darts several times when he's present in Mother Base, he will start uttering the same Japanese train stations chanted by the Cyborg Ninja in MGS1 and the A.I. Colonel in MGS2.
  • The Triumph motorcycle that Ocelot gives to "the Man Who Sold the World" at the end of Episode 46 has the same license plate as Eva's bike in MGS4, which was 3B71 0512. A comparison can be seen here.
  • A good deal of Ocelot's comments harken to MGS1, MGS2 and MGS4, such as his musings on how anyone can be Big Boss and his use of self-hypnosis. Which foreshadows Venom's true identity.
  • If you played MGS1, a boy wearing a gas mask and floating up into the ceiling in front of an elevator should seem like an oddly familiar visual. That's because Tretij Rebenok did the same thing 21 years later as Psycho Mantis.
  • Similarly, if you played MGS1 and paid attention to Naomi's explanation of how Psycho Mantis became a killer, then you'll understand what's really happening with the Floating Boy and the foreshadowing much faster.
  • Once you find out Huey used his own son - a toddler-aged Otacon - to test pilot Sahelanthropus, Metal Gear REX's design in MGS1 makes a lot more sense.
• Cassandra Truth: While dismissing Miller's conviction that Quiet is a spy, Ocelot rhetorically says "What if I'm a spy? Or you?" The truth ending reveals Ocelot actually is a spy planted by the real Big Boss.
• Central Theme: How the cycle of revenge and acting on it affects those around you. The prominent characters in the story, Venom Snake, Kaz, Quiet, Eli, Skull Face, and the real Big Boss have nothing but revenge on their minds. Venom, Quiet, and the real Big Boss are perfectly reasonable when they sought to act on it. Kaz and Eli are becoming more and more unhinged as the plot goes on, and Skull Face is so warped that he plans to use his Metal Gear and parasites to rid the world of English as a language. Even prisoner-specific missions involves extracting them, and in post-missions, they even want to have their hand in revenge.
• Character Select Forcing:
  • More like weapon select forcing, but the battle with Sahelanthropus outright expects you to go in with a rocket launcher of some description. While the fight IS technically winnable with fire support and the vehicles placed around, the former caps you at a A-Rank and the latter tend to die/rust quickly. If you want to have a reasonable chance of winning, and ESPECIALLY if you want to S-Rank, better start developing those launchers!
  • Inversely in missions you're expected to "fight" child soldiers don't even think about bringing anything remotely lethal lest you cripple yourself or want to get Kaz or Ocelot pissed at you in the game over screen.
• Chekhov's Gun: At the beginning of the game, the doctor asks you to recall your name and birthday, which is manually inputted by the player. He then tells you to design a new face for Snake, so as to hide his identity from his pursuers. Regardless of what face you settle with, Snake still looks like, well, Snake, for the ensuing escape. The final mission reveals that you, as in, the avatar you designed, is who you've been playing as the entire game, and that you have had plastic surgery done to your face to make you look like Big Boss, so that the real Big Boss can leave a free man. Also, when Ocelot hands the true Big Boss a new identity, that of the MSF medic that was in the chopper crash nine years ago, the name and birthday that you told the doctor are included, alongside a photo of the face you designed.
• Child Soldiers: Many African ones are shown, complete with blood diamonds. Chico can be considered one, and this is implied to be the case with Eli given he grows up to become Liquid Snake. They currently provide the page image. Yes, you fight them, no, you can't kill them, instant game over if you do.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder:
  • Averted with Ocelot in this game, given that he's genuinely loyal to Big Boss to the point of hypnotizing himself into believing that Venom Snake is Big Boss, all so the real one can escape from Cipher's gaze.
  • Played straight with Huey, who pretty much caused the destruction of MSF and joined Cipher, only to later betray them for Mother Base... and then proceeds to betray them again.
• Collective Identity: The true ending reveals that Ishmael is the real Big Boss, and Venom was a Body Double the whole time. However, the real Big Boss leaves a message saying that Venom is as much Big Boss as he is, and that they made their legend together.
• Colorblind Confusion: Due to the shrapnel in his skull pressing on his optic nerve, serious injuries will leave Snake unable to distinguish between the colors red and white, as first demonstrated during the prologue. This would have played an important role during the cut "Kingdom of the Flies" mission. After defeating the Eli-controlled Sahelanthropus, an interactive cutscene would play where Snake would have to gun down a group of XOF soldiers (clad in white hazmat suits) before they could get to Eli (who has a red hazmat suit). However, Snake ends up wounded by a grenade explosion during the action and unable to distinguish between Eli's red suit and the XOF's white suits, causing him to shoot Eli by accident.
• Continuing is Painful: If you get a Game Over, any GMP spent on-site between then and the last checkpoint is gone forever^note Since any new development requests are reversed, however, any GMP spent there is refunded. This doesn't sound too bad initially, but if you wind up dying repeatedly in a mission where you have to spend a lot of GMP, you may see your resources dwindling after some time.
  • Checkpoints can be VERY schizophrenic. Occasionally, they're perfectly fine, with a loss only taking you back a few minutes at most. At worst (I'm looking at you, War Economy!) they can essentially force you to restart the entire mission, even if you'd already completed the objectives and were less than a minute from extraction.^*The reason for this is that most checkpoints are only triggered by crossing certain areas of the game's world, which can mean certain missions where there are very few of those triggers have few checkpoints in general.
• Contrived Coincidence: Skullface's final defeat only comes about because Eli just so happens to sneak aboard the Diamond Dog helicopter during mission 30. His hatred for Snake allows him to steal the control of Psycho Mantis away from Skullface, which in turn enables him to hijack Sahelanthropus and go on a rampage in the XOF base, rescuing Snake from XOF's custody in the process. Had it not been for that, Snake would have certainly been killed by either the Man on Fire or the surrounding XOF soldiers, with nothing left stopping Skullface's plan. In a way, the rest of the series only happens because a kid decides to sneak aboard a plane during a random mission that he has no idea would lead him to a psychic whose mind he can sway.
• Controllable Helplessness:
  • During the siege on the hospital, Snake can barely crawl after nine years in a coma.
  • In gameplay terms, this can happen with critical injuries or being knocked unconscious. In the case of the former, an injured torso prevents you from regenerating health, an injured leg slows your movement dramatically, and an injured arm prevents you from shooting or using CQC. The only way to fix any of these is with a short "first-aid" animation that leaves you vulnerable for several seconds. Having his happen in combat is tantamount to death, unless that critical injury is to the torso, turning you into a Glass Cannon with permanent bullet-time until you treat it.
  • Being knocked unconscious leaves you flat on the ground with no senses, and the only way to recover is with rapid Button Mashing. It's not TOO hard to recover from, but especially in FOBs, this is potentially devastating.
• Cool Bike: The bike (a customized Triumph Bonneville) that Ocelot has at the end of Episode 46. It's the same one Eva rides in MGS4.
• Cool, but Inefficient: Sahelanthropus is the first Metal Gear to be designed to walk upright and comes with a railgun. Unfortunately, Huey is unable to get it to work under its own power and Skull Face only succeeds by using Psycho Mantis to control it.
• Cover Version: For the game's soundtrack, Donna Burke recorded cover versions of "The Best is Yet to Come", "Can't Say Goodbye to Yesterday", "Snake Eater" and "Love Theme". There's also two versions of "Quiet's Theme", the original version from the E3 2013 trailer by Burke, which is a One-Woman Wail, and a version by Stefanie Joosten with actual lyrics.
• Create Your Own Villain: The player's choices affect Snake's relationship with the rest of the world, and depending on how you approach things you can build a few or more rivalries for yourself.
• Cyborg: By the 1980s, cybernetic technology has started to make leaps and bounds: Snake gets a mechanical left arm after the prologue in the same style as Zadornov's in Peace Walker, and Huey, previously wheelchair bound, can now stand and walk with the assistance of cybernetic leg braces.
• Cruel Mercy: Upon learning of the full extent of what Huey had done, instead of shooting him on the spot Venom decides to toss him off Mother Base on a life raft with a box of supplies, though said life raft is flimsy enough that Huey's forced to throw off his robotic legs. He explains to a stunned Miller that this is so Huey can't hide from his own demons forever. Even if it takes decades before those sins catch up to him.
• Cut and Paste Environments: Forward Operating Bases are constructed exactly like the main Mother Base, with very few changes to the actual layout.
• Cuteness Proximity: The Mother Base soldiers develop this toward the infant DD. You may sometimes overhear them talking about wanting to feel his paw pads.
  Soldier: [saluting, straight-faced] Boss! Thanks for saving that cute little puppy!
• Cutscene Power to the Max: Quiet is able to snipe the cockpit of a moving fighter plane while riding a helicopter under fire, but when deployed as a buddy, she... can miss running soldiers.
• Cutting the Knot: Very possible given the open-ended nature of the gameplay, and Miller will often compliment the player on their lateral thinking if they do so. Don't feel like taking on a tank convoy with explosives? Simply set up some decoys and use the opening to Fulton them one by one to your home base. Don't want to sneak through the heavily fortified airport to take out one specific target? Get a good vantage point, wait for the target to make his rounds, and blow him to bits.
• Cycle of Hurting: Guards with shotguns will be the bane of your existence if you're going in guns blazing, as if you're discovered, they can stunlock you to death. Not helped by the fact that they have fair range and accuracy, so if there isn't cover nearby, don't expect to leave alive.
• Cycle of Revenge: Can happen with FOB mode. If your base is invaded, a wormhole opens, allowing you to invade the base belonging to whoever invaded you. However, when you do this, they can strike back at you, which allows you to strike back at them and so on.
• Dark Reprise:
  • The soundtrack not only incorporates motifs from Peace Walker and Guns of the Patriots, but gives them a more ominous if at times melancholy undertone.
  • Also returning from Peace Walker is Koi no Yokushiryoku/Love Deterrence, albeit as a much slower and more solemn reprise.
• Darker and Edgier: To the other past games. The series wasn't exactly known for being bright and cheery before, but this game has a higher theme on being a Child Soldier and even more focus on the horrors of war. There's also a gory scene where Paz has hallucinations of having a bomb in her stomach which is coming out of her body but ends up being Dead All Along. Big Boss also gives in to his demons for no reason other than revenge. The torture sequences are even worse here than they were in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. The only other games that come close are Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and the other 5th game in the franchise which is a prologue to this one.
• Dead All Along: Paz is dead the entire game, despite being seen in Hallucinations.
• Decoy Backstory: The game depicts Big Boss expanding his legend by taking on missions in Afghanistan and Central Africa under the code name Venom Snake. The Truth Ending, however, reveals that Venom isn't Big Boss at all, but a body double implanted with his memories; the real deal was in fact the mysterious figure named Ishmael who helped him out during the prologue. Thus, while Venom Snake's exploits make a significant contribution to the legend of Big Boss, they're not a legitimate part of his backstory.
• Defeat Equals Friendship: Fulton Recovery Balloons return.
• Degraded Boss: Played with. The female Skulls are recurring enemies that are theoretically downgraded Skin Swaps of Quiet, but also have strengths and weaknesses wholly unique to them (they have less health than Quiet and a more prominent Laser Sight making them easier to spot; on the other hand, they make no noise, always travel in packs, can dodge the Easy Level Trick that worked on Quiet, and their rifles hurt just as badly if you're spotted).
• Determinator: Nothing will stop Snake and the Diamond Dogs from getting revenge against XOF, and if all the homages to Moby-Dick are of any indication, this is a very, very bad thing.
  Miller: Cipher sent us to hell - but we're going even deeper - take back everything that we've lost!
• Developer's Foresight:
  • If you take over three in-game days to reach Kaz (possible by using the Phantom Cigar a lot), Snake will find Kaz dead. What is shocking is that you don't get the game over when time runs out. Instead players need to reach Kaz's location to get the cutscene. Cue the "Time Paradox" Game Over.
  • If you destroy the comms at the target outpost before starting the mission "C2W" (which involves destroying said comms), Ocelot will interrupt Miller's briefing to tell him that the comms are already destroyed. A very confused Miller simply says "Mission Complete" and instantly ends the mission with a success (you won't get a rank though).
  • Active Decoy will pop out a balloon model of Snake. If thrown directly near a guard, the pop will blast him away, allowing players to do things like throw guards off cliffs with your decoy.
  • Using the Stun Arm while listening to tapes causes audible static feedback.
  • The Water Pistol has a surprising amount of detail put into it for a Joke Item.
    • Enemies shot by it will be startled.
    • Squirting it at electronics will cause them to short-circuit.
    • Clothes will be realistically stained at the point you strike them.
    • Miller has a unique reaction if you try to use it on the Man On Fire.
    • It's semi-transparent, just like many real-life water pistols.
    • It can stun the Skulls.
  • Some guards dive on top of a grenade to prevent damage to other nearby guards, even if the grenade is non-lethal.
  • If a knocked out enemy lands face first in a body of water, they will eventually die from drowning.
  • You're not allowed to use lethal weapons while on Mother Base. But if you somehow manage to kill one of your own troops, you'll get a Non-Standard Game Over where Miller shouts "Boss, have you lost your mind?!".
  • Using the cardboard box in either a pool of water or rain will cause it to gradually weaken and finally fall apart.
  • The game accounts for the possibility of you trying to fulton the Man on Fire if he's stunned; Ocelot will remark that bringing him would make for good research. However, Tretij will pop the balloon every time and will teleport if you attempt to shoot him.
    • If you're persistent, you can drive off Tretij with enough gunfire and actually Fulton the Man On Fire; however he cuts the strings midflight and the battle ends.
  • During the Quiet battle you can knock her out using supply drops. If you do so, the game actually rewards you bonus points for using non-weapon tactics.
  • If you knock out an enemy and place him on a bed, the other guards will assume he's asleep and ignore him.
  • A recording from Code Talker reveals that "the one that covers" (the parasite that gives Quiet and the Skulls their powers), when exposed to water, will temporarily abandon all other processes in its eagerness to absorb the water. This not only explains Quiet's "rain dance" cutscene, but it applies to actual gameplay as well. If you possess weather control and you call in rain while battling Quiet or the Skulls, they will briefly enter a trance-like state where they won't attack you, as demonstrated by this video. You can also shoot Quiet and the Skulls with the water pistol to very briefly stun them, but it doesn't last nearly as long as when it rains.
  • When ordered to scout ahead or move to a sniping position, Quiet will turn invisible and dash to the location at an extremely high speed. If she happens to collide with an enemy along the way, the enemy will be knocked unconscious.
  • If you throw a smoke grenade under a helicopter or have Pequod land over an active one, the downdraft from the rotors will accurately blow the smoke away.
  • If Snake takes a lot of hits without dying over the course of a mission, thus losing a lot of blood, he'll be in the midst of a blood transfusion the next time he's sat in the ACC between missions.
  • Blowing up your own helicopters gives you a loss of heroism and GMP, but blow up the one that picks you up at the end of mission 29 will end the mission due to a time paradox because Ocelot is in that helicopter.
  • Replaying Phantom Limbs means players often have access to the Fulton system despite Miller being the target of the operation. As such Ocelot has his own set of lines when you Fulton an enemy despite at that point in the story you aren't supposed to have access to it.
  • If a low-alert guard investigating a sound comes across D-Dog, they'll assume that he was the cause and return to their post.
  • During "The White Mamba", Snake will talk to Eli in either English or Kikongo depending on whether you've recruited the Kikongo interpreter beforehand.
• Diegetic Character Creation: Purposefully subverted, as you're asked to determine how Venom Snake should look after having cosmetic surgery done to hide his identity, but XOF's attack on the hospital prevents it from actually happening. The ending reveals that Venom is actually a soldier who had implanted memories to make him think he was Big Boss all along, and by creating a character at the beginning you were determining how he looked before he got cosmetic surgery applied to make him look like the Boss.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage:
  • The latter half of the theme tune to Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is recycled as the track for the "Sortie Prep" menu. You can also acquire it as a cassette tape.
  • Played for Drama during "Shining Lights, Even In Death." The infected soldiers who have pledged that they live and die by your order hum the main theme of Peace Walker while saluting you. The voices die out one by one while you shoot them.
  • If you know where to look, you can find a cassette tape of "Snake Eater" in Africa.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Quiet. Finicky, complicated and dangerous, yet also extremely powerful, disturbingly accurate and very, very useful.
  • Before you get tranquilizer sniper rifles, landing long-range headshots with the Wu tranq pistol. You have to account for aim sway, bullet drop, and projectile variation, making for extremely difficult shots, but if you pull it off, not only does it silently and instantly knock out an enemy at long range (and it's sleep, not KO, so they won't trigger an alert when they wake up), you also get a score bonus for a "tactical takedown" (which you ALSO get for cqc takedowns or a headshot with any weapon beyond its effective range.)
• Disability Immunity: In Mission 6: "Where Do the Bees Sleep?", it's possible to rescue a mute Mujahadeen fighter from the Soviets, said fighter is apparently the Sole Survivor of the local Hamid fighters who were mysteriously wiped out recently. If rescued, he'll join Diamond Dogs as "Silent Basilisk". It later turns out that being mute protected him from being wiped out by the vocal cord parasites; he'll also prove immune during both vocal cord parasite outbreaks at Mother Base.
• Disappointed by the Motive: Venom Snake and his buddies find out that Huey Emmerich murdered Dr. Strangelove, the reason: she was against their son, Hal, being a test subject in his mad experiments. Needless to say, many people who knew what Huey has done were outraged.
• Disposable Decoy Doppelgänger: The game features a "Decoy" item, an inflatable of a gun-wielding soldier that can be placed to distract enemies. This is a tactic that can be appropriated by enemies, who may also use balloon statues to trick you, the player, into thinking a fortification is more armed than it actually is. Decoys on both sides of the war can be upgraded to have slightly more animation, speak in canned voice lines, or even electrocute people trying to pop it with a knife.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Ditching the Books seen in every other title, The Phantom Pain reimagines this with posters that you can stick on cardboard boxes that allows the box to unfold and reveal a pinup girl when Snake stands or becomes prone. Of course, every guard who notices the box immediately comes to stare at the pinup girl regardless of the fact that it's plastered on a cardboard box. Guards who come close can then be immediately CQC'd for a quick knockout.
• Distant Finale: The true ending shows a surreal version of events that will take place years later in 1995, shortly before the events of Metal Gear.
• Dog Stereotype: It's a bit hard to tell that the dog in the Diamond Dogs logo is a doberman pinscher since it doesn't have the cropped ears common to the breed. With that in mind though one realizes how much the rank and file soldier of DD fit the hyper aggressive loyalty of a stereotypical doberman.
• Doing In the Wizard: Somewhat. It's established that The End and possibly other members of the Cobras got their powers from Parasites. (Code Talker and Quiet use The End's parasites for respiratory and infiltration purposes. Code Talker also mentions how The Fear's parasites metabolized his fear into adrenaline and The Pain's parasites secreted insect pheromones.) However, some unexplained supernatural elements remain, such as The Sorrow and Tretij Rebenok's psychic abilities. Ocelot is convinced that there is a rational and scientific method to deconstruct and harness these powers, but that by the time they do the future's common sense will be incomprehensible to the people of the 1980's.
• Double Tap: In the hospital section of the game, Snake and Ishmael lie down on the floor to hide among patients murdered by XOF soldiers. Then, the soldiers arrive and shoot the bodies one by one to confirm their death. The only reason Snake and Ishmael survive is because the sudden appearance of the Man of Fire.
• Downloadable Content:
  • The Day One and Collector's Edition both include voucher codes for various in-game items such as firearms, cardboard boxes, ballistic shields and fatigues. Additionally players who registered their copy of Ground Zeroes into the KonamiCore website can receive a download code for two exclusive Mother Base staff members with FOX tattoos on their faces, while the Day One Edition on Steam offers similar pair but with MSF tattoos.
  • MGS3-themed costumes were released on October 20th, which consists of three of Naked Snake's outfits from that game along with Eva's jumpsuit and The Boss's sneaking suit. The set also includes armors for D-Horse.
• The Dreaded: Over the course of the game, you can listen in on several enemy soldiers who have clearly caught wind of you and your actions. In Afghanistan, a group of officers discuss how it's possible that a single operative is taking out so many of their men, and two soldiers in Africa discuss a rumor that Big Boss has returned, worried that they are going to be contracted to fight you. Many of the PMCs adopt tactics specifically to thwart yours after making a name for yourself, and smaller PMCs specifically seek the Diamond Dogs out for the legendary name.
  • It's taken further if Venom Snake has his Karma Meter in the negatives, where the "horn" from the debris now resembles a demon's horn and he is permanently covered in blood - certain soldiers will freak out on sight, frantically reporting to HQ that they just saw a literal demon.
• Dying as Yourself: The Man On Fire is a hulking, fiery, demonic-looking figure who never utters a sound that isn't a roar of rage; it's stated that whatever he is, he's effectively mindless and being led only by the masked boy and his hatred of Snake. In his very final scene, after the masked boy is no longer in the picture and the Man On Fire is just an inert corpse again, Snake attempts to capture him...only for him to flare back to life and come after him. However, once he seemingly has Snake cornered, he backs off. Volgin, realizing that the Snake he was chasing isn't the same person who killed him in Groznyj Grad, lets go of his hate, the only thing that was driving him any further, finally dying peacefully. This is indicated by him, during his final moments before collapsing, reverting from his demonic appearance to his original, human one as Volgin.
• Dynamic Difficulty: Enemies are able to take note of the player's tactics and adapt accordingly. This encourages the player to use variety in their tactics and avoid sticking to a single method for the whole game. For example:
  • If you constantly go for headshots, enemies will start wearing helmets that makes most headshots bounce off harmlessly (while alerting the enemy.)
  • Conversely, go for body shots, and they'll start grabbing body armor and riot shields.
  • Later on, if you've been consistently using low-caliber weapons or tranqs, they'll start donning riot suits, which will blunt all but the heaviest of guns.
  • Stick to CQC, and they'll start toting shotguns. They'll do the same if you go for direct brute force assaults, as shotguns can knock you flat on your ass over and over.
  • A fan of night infiltrations? They'll bring flashlights, allowing them to investigate the darker hiding spots more effectively. Later on they'll trade the flashlights for Night Vision, which lets them see just as well as if it were day.
  • If you manage to go completely undetected yourself, but the enemy consistently notices missing resources or acts of sabotage, they'll start planting landmines on unguarded or out-of-the-way backdoor routes, or deploying surveillance cameras.
    • Take out or disable the cameras a lot, and they'll start deploying armed, bulletproof ones.
  • Overusing the Active Decoy will lead to them deploying decoys in surprising places, which even your Analyzer can be fooled by. What's more, they can become more elaborate just like yours, going from stock-still inflatables to having their own idle animations and even voice clips.
  • If you tend to pick them off from a distance, they'll start deploying mortars to bombard your general location. What's more, they can learn to adapt to your movements; if you always follow up sniping with closing in to short range, they'll learn to move their barrages steadily closer.
  • If guards repeatedly catch you Fultoning, they'll start to expect it and rather than reacting with surprise, will start shooting them down as soon as they see them. If you still keep it up, they'll start deploying snipers to watch clusters of resources or patrols to catch you in the act.
  • Constant usage of Sleeping Gas (in the form of grenades, mines, or fire support) will make the enemy start to don gas masks to become immune to it.
  • Overuse of the empty magazines will eventually have the guards ignore them.
  • Constant holding will make the enemy commit fake surrender and slash you with their knives. Keep that up still and they'll eventually start an alert phase automatically even if you do hold them up successfully. ^note Knocking an enemy on the ground and holding them up will prevent any of the former from triggering, though.
  • Notably, there are dispatch missions to counter every single one of these; in addition to being middle-to-low difficulty, they net you a small pocket of resources and temporarily prevent the enemy from implementing that particular measure. While you'll never be able to completely shut down ALL of them, you can at least keep your least favorite couple suppressed if you pay attention.
• Easy Level Trick:
  • Episode 16 can be a colossal pain, as you first have to keep pace with and take out a military convoy in order to capture the cargo truck they're escorting. When you catch the truck, it triggers a thoroughly-unexpected fight against the Skulls, who have learned some new tricks since you last saw them. Players who manage to be prepared for the convoy will almost certainly be thrown off and subsequently struggle with the spoilered bit. Or, you can just take D-Walker and the Fulton Ballista, and Fulton the truck from a distance. If you keep your distance, you'll win the mission instantly.
  • When being tasked to extract the child soldiers from the mine, the trip to the chopper can be cut out altogether by tranquilizing the kids, placing them in jeeps and Fultoning them there.
  • Quiet can be taken out very easily by dropping two Supply Drops on her head, each of which drains half of her stamina.
  • The Wandering Mother Base Soldier Side Ops can be completed without much fuss by playing Koi no Yokushiryoku over the iDroid's speakers. The otherwise insane soldiers will recognize the music and stop attacking you, allowing you to knock them out and Fulton them without effort. A similar trick can be done with the cardboard box, simply walking up to them while in the standard crouch for the box will cause them to act the same as if you'd been playing Love Deterrence.
  • The battle against the Skulls at Nova Braga airport is very difficult, especially considering that this particular unit of Skulls is the armored variant. There are two easy ways to get through:
    • The difficulty can be alleviated by climbing up onto the hangar, as it's one of the few places they won't follow you and the building's roof can shield the player from their thrown boulders. They can still make the boulders shoot up through the roof, but this is easy enough to dodge.
    • Alternately, by going into the enclosed area behind the terminal and standing at one end or another, the player can drastically limit their maneuverability and not have to worry about the zombified regular soldiers. And then all you need to worry about is keeping an eye on the CQC prompt to stab their knives through their stupid faces and/or chests until they're out of armor, at which point you stop speaking softly and unload with any big stick you see fit. Try an LMG and some variant of shotgun, including the revolver. If they dodge away, that probably means the other Skulls are about to make a slow, highly telegraphed attack.
  • Struggling with the Subsistence recycle of C2W? Destroy the comm outpost's anti-air radar beforehand, deploy directly to the outpost in the helicopter, and shred the three transmitters with the helicopter's mounted machine gun.
  • Infiltrating OKB-Zero is a Marathon Level if you're attempting to sneak past the entire XOF unit. Deploy with D-Walker and a shield, set D-Walker to driving mode and charge right past them all. You can score an S Rank on Episode 30 based solely on completion time if you drive straight to the goal instead of bothering with stealth.
  • Once you get the Infinity Bandana, pretty much everything can devolve to the strategy of:
    1. Equip effective weapons and armor
    2. Spam Acceleramin
• Easy-Mode Mockery: Variant. If you die in the same area three times consecutively, the Chicken Hat will become available (much like the Corpse Camo from Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots) which will make enemies notice Snake more slowly, but will cap his final ranking for a mission at A. If you happen to fail three times WITH the Chicken Hat, the game will award the Lil' Chicken Hat which makes enemies completely ignore Snake but drop player scores to 0.
  • Likewise, there are a variety of items that break the game's difficulty into pieces, but they all also cap you at A-Rank.
• Embarrassing Hospital Gown: In the intro sequence, as Snake makes his escape from the hospital alongside Ishmael, the latter is, due to being undercover as a patient, only dressed in a gown and precious little else. Since Snake's only way of moving at this point is crawling on his belly, due to being severely physically weakened from his years-long coma, Ishmael sneaks ahead of him and looks out for threats. Due to the resulting camera angle, Ishmael's butt is full display through the opening in his cown at several point, lending quite a bit of Bathos to an otherwise tense scene.
• Empathic Environment: The Skulls only appear in the middle of a strange, gloomy mist. This is to supplement their parasites' need for water, which they require to subsist.
• End of an Age: The game takes place during the final stretch of the Cold War, just before the Patriots truly make their presence felt on the global stage.
• The Ending Changes Everything: The true ending. It establishes that Venom Snake is a body-double of Big Boss.
• The '80s: The main story is set in 1984, a year chosen as a nod to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, as well as to have each Big Boss game take place in a different decade.^note Metal Gear Solid 3 was set in 1964 and Peace Walker in 1974. You can also hear a lot of the decade's musical influence on the soundtrack and unlock musical tapes from this era.
• Elite Mooks:
  • Heavy infantry. Armed to the teeth with powerful on-hand weapons, full-head helmets, body armor, and the rest of the works. Tranquilizing them is virtually useless, so if you intend on taking them alive, expect the general strategy to boil down to "sneak up and choke out".^note Heavy infantry are also vulnerable to other forms of CQC (such as strikes, throws, and the knife), certain high-caliber/piercing weapons, copious amounts of non-piercing bullets, explosives, smoke, Knockout Gas, and the Lv.4 Stun Arm (which summons a lightning strike to stun anything within a 45 meter radius.
  • The Security Team can be this at higher levels. The guards' Ranks translate into a variety of stats, including alertness, willingness to observe a threat, and accuracy with gunfire. E Rank guards can be potentially as bad as or even worse than Soviet or PF guards, while anyone B/A Rank or higher has a very good chance of spotting you and are absolutely terrifying crack shots. If you do get spotted, don't expect to leave with just a few bullets to the arm.
  • XOF Private Forces: OKB Zero and Zero Risk Security are better equipped and trained compared to other forces and you'll always encounter them in permanent Alert status. XOF troopers are always equipped with medium armor, while ZRS mercs deploy in multiple squads comprised entirely of Heavy Infantry in your second major encounter against them in Mission 35.
  • Rogue Coyote troops are supposedly composed of Elite Mooks from former special forces groups such as the S.A.S., Selous Scouts, and 32 Battalion, though in gameplay they're not noticeably any more skilled than regular Soviet or CFA troops.
• Equipment Upgrade: Snake's prosthetic arm can be swapped out with other arms that perform different functions, such as a yellow arm that shocks an enemy into submission like the Stun Rod from Peace Walker.
  • The Int-Scope (Snake's new binoculars) can be upgraded with an Analyzer to scan an enemy's stats, just like the Analyzer from Peace Walker.
  • Weapons can be upgraded with six different grades of development. They can also be customized with different barrels, muzzles, stocks, and grips.
  • The vehicles can be upgraded too, particularly the helicopter.
  • Equipment for your buddies can be upgraded as well.
• Escort Mission:
  • Inverted in the hospital level. The player controls a vulnerable Snake as he is being escorted by the bandaged "Ishmael".
  • Some missions involve carrying a target who cannot be extracted by Fulton balloon to a chopper to extract them.
  • A straighter example occurs when Snake eventually has to escort a group of five children out of an enemy camp. Because they are children, they cannot be extracted by Fulton balloon, as it would kill them. As a result, Snake must guide the children to an LZ about 150m~ away, neutralizing guards along the way. Unfortunately, the children can easily run into a guard if you don't tell them to stop, and if any kid dies (which may happen, they're kids), it's a Non-Standard Game Over. Not to mention that guards will start pursuing you if you take too long.^note You can, however, tranquilize the children, place 3 of them into a jeep, and then either fulton the jeep or call for a new one (which automatically fultons the old one), and they can be fultoned just fine. There's also an upgrade later on that gives you the ability to fulton Children.
• Establishing Character Moment: In the opening mission, after "Ahab"/Venom Snake recovers enough to move around normally, he eventually gets a silenced pistol with lethal ammo. Once you get to the main entrance of the hospital enemy troops move in to secure the area. You then have to take out the forces before you can leave. You're still too weak to melee them and knock them out. You have to go lethal to complete that section in defiance with every MGS game before it aside from 1, where going non-lethal was a viable answer that reflected well on the player. Here, killing is just fine, as long as you're not sadistic about it.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • In general, a character betraying the side they're on tends to end up being reviled by everyone.
  • Skull Face might be a monster but he respects loyalty and when he finds that the Dirty Coward Huey has tried to cut a deal, he shoves him down a flight of stairs.
  • Miller might have taken a level in Jerkass, but even he doesn't hold back in expressing his disgust with what Huey did to his wife and tried to do with his son. Also he will absolutely NOT accept Snake's suggestion of adding the recently rescued Child Soldiers to the staff on Diamond Dogs, instead insisting that they are given education, and a life beyond just being a gun for hire. Also, the Diamond Dogs were originally assigned to murder the child soldiers, but nobody on the team is having any of that.
  • When Miller finds out that the Viscount sold out his personnel for actions that he did himself and requested that only he be rescued when the Afrikaners caught on and captured all of them, Miller decides that he deserves extra persuasion.
  • Despite the depths Miller, Snake, Ocelot and the Diamond Dogs in general go in pursuing their revenge all are in agreement that what Huey had been doing was far beyond the pale.
• Every Scar Has a Story: The shrapnel-horn on Snake's head in The Phantom Pain comes from the explosion that occurs at the end of Ground Zeroes.
• Everything Trying to Kill You:
  • In the open gameworld, everything in the map is hostile to you except for prisoners and herbivore animals. If it holds a gun, it will attack you on sight. If it has fangs or claws, it will attack you on sight as well.
  • Also Discussed by Ishmael:
    Ishmael: The bad news is the world wants you dead.
  • And by Ocelot:
    Ocelot: It's not just them; the whole world wants you dead.
  • This is the only reason that Episode 45 ends on such a downer; the venomous snake, in complete defiance of nature, slithers towards a large, wounded, frantic man, in the middle of a raging sandstorm, where one of its brethren was just violently shot dead less than a minute ago. There's absolutely no justification for why the snake would so determinedly beeline for and attack Snake, but it has to happen for Quiet to die.
• Evil Versus Evil: The conflict between XOF and the Diamond Dogs seems to be one where both sides are clearly in the wrong, unlike previous entries in the series, where the good guys and bad guys were somewhat more clear. The Diamond Dogs are supposed to be A Lighter Shade of Black, but that doesn't make what they do any less reprehensible. Indeed several of the missions and side-ops taken by Diamond Dogs are straight up assassinations and kidnappings, and other unethical operations. They draw a line on infanticide however.

F-J

• Face Death with Dignity: When a second outbreak of vocal cord parasites ravages Mother Base, Big Boss takes it upon himself to enter the quarantine zone and deal with the situation. While most of the infected have lost their minds, some, realizing what Big Boss must do to contain the outbreak, stand at attention and salute him as he prepares to Mercy Kill them.
• Face–Heel Turn: The Phantom Pain shows Big Boss' final steps from well-meaning anti-hero to the Big Bad of the first game.
• Fake Longevity:
  • Played with with the main missions in Chapter 2. Like in Peace Walker, The Phantom Pain is divided into multiple chapters, each consisting of a set of story missions. Whereas PW featured five chapters consisting of 33 entirely unique missions (with only the Zadornov missions dragging out a bit), TPP has two chapters of 51 missions, with Chapter 2 consisting almost entirely of recycled missions with various arbitrary difficulty modifiers added in. While Subsistence is a substantive change from the norm, and Perfect Stealth is challenging for those who aren't used to it (but enforces a playstyle a fair amount of players will have adopted anyway), Extreme turns enemy capabilities up to eleven, ensuring that a single mistake will get you spotted and killed. Unless you abuse the S-Rank disabling items and abilities, these missions are challenging enough...let alone S-Ranking them. While there are still plot missions in between, for some these filler missions can really make the postgame drag. Granted, you're not forced to finish those missions to get to the True Ending, but the game never tells you this.
  • Played straight as an arrow with the mission objectives themselves. Some of the optional objectives (which are necessary for 100% Completion) can only be completed with abilities and upgrades you couldn't possibly have your first time doing the mission. And even if you have the right abilities, most of the optional objectives are shaded out in your interface with "????" until you either stumble into completing them by accident or finish the mission once, even in the aforementioned recycled missions. If you want the coveted 100% Completion, you have to play the main missions multiple times, not because the optional objectives are necessarily difficult (some of them are quite easy, in fact) but because the game just didn't bother to explain them to you the first time around.
• Failed a Spot Check: In Episode 45, Snake is so focused on Quiet when he comes to cut her loose that he fails to notice the three soldiers nearby who are about to open fire. Given that Snake is missing his right eye and the soldiers showed up to his right, they were likely outside his peripheral vision.
• Fan Disservice:
  • A hot bikini clad mute sniper girl? Nice. Said hot bikini clad mute sniper girl being tortured with electric rods? Not nice.
    • Not to mention the entire reason she has to wear such revealing attire: in the prologue, she was set on fire TWICE. If not for the parasites put in her, she would have died from the horrific burns, which affected even her lungs. This led to her needing Parasite Therapy, which now has her breathing through her skin. To put any heavy clothing on Quiet would be agonizingly painful for her, akin to putting a plastic bag on someone's head.
    • In mission 45, we get to see her drowned and almost raped. Her pale skin, blue lips, dead, lifeless eyes-oh, and her shirt fell open so you can also see her boobs. This is what you wanted, right?
  • The Skulls come in both male and female form. Both wear very little and the females have Jiggle Physics. However, the fact that they are all bald and appear to be cybernetically enhanced corpses makes their appearance horrific.
• Fantastic Drug:
  • Averted in the hospital sequence. When Ahab first wakes up from his coma, Ishmael injects him with digoxin to get him back on his feet, but it doesn't work as well as he hoped, leaving Ahab to literally crawl after him.
  • Played straight with Noctocyanin and Acceleramin. The former tags enemies in the local vicinity, while the latter artificially induces a Reflex Mode.
• Fast-Forward Mechanic: Smoking Snake's Phantom Cigar can accelerate time.
• Fictional Counterpart: The real life firearms that had appeared in prior games have been replaced by fictional ones. For example, Colt guns become Arms Material, Smith & Wesson becomes Windurger, FN becomes UN and so on. The models are combinations of several Real Life firearms. The D114 pistol, for example, substitutes for the M1911A1, but takes elements from it, the Browning Hi-Power and the CZ-75 amongst others.
• Flawed Prototype: Sahelanthropus is a dual mode unit designed to walk like a human being. However, Huey has yet to get it to actually work and expresses shock that Skull Face gets it moving. It turns out that it still doesn't work and Skull Face has been using Psycho Mantis to manipulate it into moving using his Psychic Powers.
• Foil:
  • Skull Face and Code Talker. They come from similar backgrounds but have different stances on everything. Skull Face lost his home and was disfigured by invading military, then taught by his captors to speak a different language and rewrite his entire personality. He seeks to rip the world apart as revenge for corrupting the little Hungarian boy into a mass-murdering sociopath with the parasite known as English, and has no qualms with killing anyone in his way - Hungary is saved for last. For someone who hates invading cultures, he sure hams it out in English. Meanwhile, Code Talker was abducted at a young age and taught how to be an American. His home village has slowly died from oppression, the final insult being the uranium mines in the Dine homeland that suddenly became more precious than gold; the villagers are underequipped and have to deal with the fallout from constant uranium mining, if they aren't strongarmed into doing the mining themselves. Code Talker puts his people first above everything, but deep down he's an American citizen who doesn't want any culture to face genocide, even English. He even likes burgers with chemical additives and works with genetically-modified parasites as a form of nature. Skull Face has a negative view on invasive cultures while Code Talker has a positive (if mostly conservative) view on adapting cultures.
  • Huey ends up being one for his son, Otacon. They're both intelligent, vocal, idealistic and occasionally hammy tech geeks with a cowardly side, a passion for robotics, and a loathing of violence; likewise they both eventually end up being manipulated by villains to develop superweapons. However, whereas Otacon eventually overcomes his cowardice, mistakes and naivete, and genuinely feels remorse for his actions and wants to atone, Huey vehemently denies any wrongdoing on his part, changes sides when the guilt becomes too much (then blames the chaos and destruction as a result of his actions on his former allies) without bothering to change his behavior, goes into outright denial when forced to confront any consequences of his actions, and is more than willing to throw aside loyalty, love, and even family if it furthers his own ends or saves his own skin. Even further, though both claim to hate violence, Otacon never kills a single person throughout the series—Huey indirectly murders Strangelove and goes out of his way to gleefully execute Skull Face.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Downplayed. Venom Snake initially wakes up after nine years in a coma to find himself in The '80s. But thanks to Ocelot filling him in on current events, the nature of Diamond Dogs' operations and the fact that Venom doesn't go to any major hubs of pop culture, he manages to get by.
• Five Rounds Rapid: Subverted. When Sahelanthropus is awakened for a second time and turned against Skull Face, his XOF troops initially attack it with small arms but eventually call in a platoon of tanks and attack helicopters to try and stop it.
• Fling a Light into the Future: Strangelove buries the key to defeating the Patriot A.I.s deep inside their code. It takes a few decades, but it pays off in the fourth game.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Much of the game's foreshadowing points towards the fact that Venom Snake is not Big Boss.
    • Ishmael sharing Snake's voice actor is not a coincidence.
    • After the assassin dispatches the doctor, she tells her radio contact that the “other patient” saw her face, then goes to kill you. You’re the “other” one. She’s there for Ishmael because he’s the real Big Boss.
    • Soon after the silent assassin is attacked by Ishmael, there are rose petals on-screen. The petals are of great significance to The Boss after Snake Eater.
    • The codenames "Ahab and Ishmael" themselves heavily foreshadow the later events of the game before the player gets to fire a shot. Ishmael is the first-person narrator in Moby Dick, and the story is about Ahab's struggles to get revenge on the titular whale. But it's not Ahab's story: it's Ishmael's story, starring Ahab. Just like MGSV's is Big Boss' story, starring Venom Snake.
    • Ishmael's body movement in general during the hospital escape sequence is pretty similar to the way Big Boss moves in Ground Zeroes.
    • When the player dies in this game, they get a mission failed screen. Ishmael gets the Time Paradox screen from Big Boss's first.
    • When Ishmael and Ahab are escaping from the hospital, The Man on Fire ignores Ahab and stares right at Ishmael. The Man On Fire is fueled by vengeance against Snake.
    • Ocelot's subtitle of "A Rival Living A Lie" takes on a double meaning when it's revealed that he hypnotized himself to believe that Venom Snake really is Big Boss.
    • Much of Ocelot's dialogue during the escape from Cyprus blatantly foreshadows the fact that Ishmael exists and got away.
    • Ocelot's repeated Info Dump regarding the background information on the previous games serves the useful purpose of reinforcing the memory alteration the man who became Venom Snake received over 9 years, to ensure that he maintains his new identity as Big Boss.
    • Snake tucks his pants into his boots while wearing fatigues, despite having his pants over his boots before Outer Heaven was destroyed.
    • Similarly, Snake's eyepatch has three straps surrounding it, despite having two straps made for him by his previous team.
    • The reflection in ACC's window when playing as Snake shows the avatar you customized instead of Snake himself.
    • The CQC style of Venom Snake is based on pure overwhelming force, as seen in his haymakers, stomps, and flurries of powerful blows, instead of the lightning fast strikes and grapples from previous games. His facing CQC combo is 6 hits instead of the classic three, and his rear combo is four hits if you include spinning his target around before the final punch, which no Snake did before.
    • Even though Snake knew Russian in Snake Eater, the player still needs to extract an interpreter before they can pass on intel from Russian soldiers to Kaz back at the base. Because of the brain damage, of course.
    • Upon encountering the A.I. Pod, it appears to recognize Venom at first, but then senses that something isn't right. "It's not you... is it?" This is another hint to this Snake's true identity. A few seconds later, Huey looks right at Venom Snake and goes "Are you...Snake?" Both incidents could be explained by the fact Snake is "officially" dead, but they're both more accurate than the speakers realize.
    • Mission 22's opponent, Mosquito, became a competing mercenary (even building his own PF, also with initials "M.S.F.") because he believed Big Boss himself orchestrated the XOF attack on Mother Base to save himself, setting up his soldiers to die. The Reveal that Venom Snake is separate from Big Boss essentially means Big Boss did set up his loyal followers to die to protect himself, just not in cahoots with XOF or Cipher/Zero.
    • When Ocelot and Kaz perform a DNA test on Eli to see if he's part of the Les Enfants Terribles project, Kaz says results come up negative. This mean that either Eli really isn't a young Liquid Snake, or Venom isn't actually the real Big Boss. The true ending proves it's the latter.
    • When the Man On Fire finally gets its hands on Venom, it looks momentarily surprised, then simply lets him go and keels over. This only makes sense if you know that Venom isn't the man that killed the Man in life and therefore isn't the target of its revenge.
    • At the beginning of Episode 46, there's a flashback set shortly after the events of Ground Zeroes that shows Snake in a Colombian hospital attempting to be revived. They manage to get his heart started again, but unfortunately it puts him in a coma. Miller then asks "what about him?" and nods towards the camera. While this may seem confusing, it's eventually revealed that the camera shots in that scene are actually in the first-person and are from the Medic's perspective. During the same scene, when the opening credits are shown, there are separate billings for Big Boss and Punished "Venom" Snake.
  • There's also some foreshadowing to the fact that Paz is a hallucination:
    • After Venom Snake has visited Paz's room in Mother Base more than once, the player can overhear a conversation between two crew members where they talk about seeing Snake by himself in an empty construction site. This is a hint of Paz's true nature as a hallucination in Venom's mind.
  • In the first cutscene at the start of the Paz sidequests, Venom Snake's flashback of the final scene aboard the helicopter in Ground Zeroes clearly has two Big Bosses shown instead of one during the Anachronic Order moments, which also foreshadows the Venom Snake reveal. Furthermore, the medic's face is covered with a balaclava. When the rocket hits, he shields Snake in a nearly-identical pose. You know, doubling it.
    • There's also a big hint in the first cutscene of that sidequest, as the book on Costa Rican history Paz is reading is authored by Zadornov's Paper-Thin Disguise, Ramón Gálvez Mena.
    • In these sequences,Ocelot says Paz's trauma caused some sort of amnesia and disassociative disorder. He's describing what happened to the Medic.
  • When you initially encounter Huey in Afghanistan during his rescue mission, the hangar where he's working has no guards inside. Granted, the base you have to infiltrate has probably the largest concentration of Soviet soldiers in the entire Afghanistan map, but doesn't it seem a little convenient that a guy supposedly forced to work for Skull Face doesn't have an armed guard at all times?
  • During Episode 43, someone wrote "mehr licht" ("more light") in blood on the floor of one of the isolation rooms. This hints that the parasites within them are trying to drive them to go outdoors.
  • Venom mentions to Kaz when they have captured Quiet that eventually they will kill her but insists on "pulling the trigger himself". He eventually does kill Quiet himself, although not in the manner he expected. Venom gets bitten by a snake, and is dying, forcing Quiet to call Pequod, she initially tries Navajo but Pequod doesn't understand her, so she has to speak English. Venom (unintentionally) killed her by making her speak English to save his life, triggering the parasites.
• Follow the Leader: In-Universe example. Big Boss and Miller managing to turn MSF, a small private mercenary company into a nuclear superpower inspired the rise of PFs (Private Forces). According to Miller, a couple of PFs were founded by surviving members of MSF wanting to mirror Big Boss's success.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Tretij Rebenok's appearance changes from scene to scene, briefly. He's a shell filled with the thoughts of whoever's will fills him the most from moment to moment. His sleeves light on fire when he summons the Man on Fire, he sometimes has Skull Face's domino mask over his own when Skull Face controls him, at one point he's got Venom's horn, and when he's working for Eli he's got the same ribbon tied to his left shoulder. Where this REALLY qualifies for this trope is when Snake is in the Devil's House and Rebenok briefly pauses his assault on Snake to pay attention to the dying Shabani; for a moment, he's wearing Shabani's necklace, then it's gone again the moment Rebenok resumes his attack.
  • When you start the game up on a fresh save, if you glance to the left side where Ishmael would be you might be able to vaguely make out a shadow against the curtain until the nurse comes in. Camera hacking shows that he's genuinely standing there, keeping tabs on Snake while he wakes up.
• Game Mod: Surprisingly for a Metal Gear game, and no official support, the game has a sizable modding community, from reshades, all the way to complete gameplay overhauls. One of the most commonly used types being a way to change the chopper's music.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Normally, between missions you're free to do any other function of the game, such as free roam, send your combat unit out on deployment, etc. When Mother Base is quarantined due to parasitic infection, you're still free to free-roam and do whatever you want, but your people will continue to die until you find a cure. Moreover, you cannot continue deploying your combat unit, since all non-mission-critical personnel are confined to Mother Base.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • After establishing the Combat Unit, you're given the option to play as any Diamond Dogs soldiers assigned to it in addition to Snake himself. However, unlike Peace Walker, where dialogue with the Codec support crew changed accordingly when the player controlled an MSF soldier, other characters will still treat the player as if they were controlling Snake, even yelling his name at the Game Over screen. Even the opening credits will still list Snake in the cast roll, regardless of whether the player is actually controlling him or some Diamond Dog soldier. During certain gameplay-to-cutscene transitions, the screen will turn black and replace the player's character model with that of Snake's before switching back to the DD soldier when resuming back to gameplay.
  • You can develop and give Quiet actual clothes, namely the XOF Unit gear and a Sniper Wolf cosplay, despite the fact that in-story, she'll suffocate if she puts on any sort of clothing beyond her standard stripperific gear^note Her XOF outfit is, however, handwaved as being custom tailored to work with her respiratory system. This is especially egregious in [EXTREME] Cloaked In Silence, where she's straight up wearing the Sniper Wolf outfit over her standard gear, even though she should be dying before you even get there.
  • Episodes 28-31 are meant to take place back-to-back, but you still return to the ACC after each mission and can roam around doing side-ops.
• Game-Breaking Bug: The launch copies of the game have a bug that can corrupt your save file if you bring Quiet into Episode 29 or 42. The Version 1.03 patch released on 9/14/2015 fixes this issue.
• Gangsta Style: The XOF troops in the Prologue all hold their SMGs in this style. Justified, however, in that they're wearing hazard masks which would prevent them from lining up the sights normally.
• Gas Mask Mooks: The XOF unit tend to wear gas masks. Justified in that they are protected from the vocal cord parasites this way.
• Gatling Good: One of the Pequod chopper's upgrades is a mounted minigun that Snake can make use of during infiltration or extraction. You can also use the one mounted on D-Walker.
• Gratuitous English: The back of Eli's jacket which, has a picture of a pig's head with the phrase "Never Be Game Over" (for some reason).
• Ground Punch: The Active Sonar upgrade for Snake's prosthetic arm allows him to punch the ground, emitting a shockwave that temporarily reveals nearby living things.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • In order to keep Quiet from leaving Diamond Dogs, you must obtain and wear the Butterfly Emblem. However, this fact is never explained in game, and can only be found in the official strategy guide.
  • In earlier versions of the game, the box quick travel system was not explained or even mentioned in game (or even in the manual). Not only were Drop-off Points not initially marked on the map, but in the AO, the game also expects you to know that you need to collect a Drop-off Point's Invoice before you can use it. Later versions of the game downplay this slightly by giving you a tutorial the first time you collect a Drop-off Point Invoice, but there's still no indication that you should do so unless you stumble across one.
  • The correct route for the R&D Platform Target Practice is extremely obtuse. The first time you try it, it'll more or less look like the targets are spread out in a completely random fashion.
  • Did you know that tapping the Action Button speeds up lock-picking? None of the loading screen hints mention this, and you get no tutorial the first time you do it.
  • The entire sub-plot with Paz in the Medical Platform is easy to miss out on. The game never gives you much incentive to explore Mother Base outside trying out the various target practices and collecting scattered rough diamonds, and it doesn't even show up as a side-op like Quiet's recruitment or the construction of Battle Gear.
  • Several of the prisoners with unique skills are completely obtuse, especially two in Backup, Back Down. While their basic existence is hinted at by the mission info screen, there's no indication that they are escaped prisoners wandering in locations you have no reason to be during the mission, and will eventually be executed by a quad of soldiers if no intervention is taken to prevent it. Since they're escaped, you can't learn about them from interrogations like usual - and since the entire mission is tightly timed and requires focusing constantly on hunting APCs in order to get a decent score unless taken care of, not to mention that other radioed targets literally get in the way of the next APC targets, you're unlikely to wander and discover them by accident.
• Gun Porn: The sheer number of guns in the game is ridiculous. And they come in several varieties; pistols, revolvers, shotguns, revolver shotguns, assault rifles, submachineguns, sniper rifles, grenade launchers, machineguns, rocket launchers, handheld grenade pistols, fulton launchers. Recruiting the master gunsmith unlocks the option to customise guns, allowing the player to create an unholy variety of frankenguns for different purposes. Want an assault rifle with a tranquiliser gun attached underneath? A silenced machinegun? A sniper rifle with a 100 round drum magazine? Go nuts.
• Hallucinations: The subplot of Paz's survival is later revealed to be just Venom's hallucination.
• Hand Cannon: Several can be developed. It's telling when a .44 Magnum revolver falls in at the lower end of this trope. Shotgun revolvers and grenade launcher pistols can be used by the player. There's also Skull Face's Mare's Leg, which is a sawed-off lever-action rifle.
• Hate Sink: It's surprising that Huey takes so much levels of Jerkass compared to the previous game that he's actually closer to this trope than Skull Face.
• Hard Mode Filler: 12 of the 19 missions in Chapter 2 are repeats of previous missions from Chapter 1 with additional conditions indicated by their labels such as "Extreme" (complete the mission in an increased difficulty with no buddies), "Subsistence" (no initial loudout, all weapons must be procured on-site) and "Total Stealth" (game over if discovered). While they're numbered like regular missions, they're not required to unlock the True Ending (as noted by the fact that they're marked as white rather than yellow when they're first listed on the iDroid).
• Heavily Armored Mook: Enemies will begin wearing body armor in response to increased opposition from Snake as the game goes on. Regular enemy body armor consists of a steel helmet and bulletproof vest which increases their durability and protects against headshots, though their face and limbs are still vulnerable. Heavy Infantry wield light machine guns and wear full Tachanka-style heavy armor suits which almost completely cover their head and body, giving them impressive damage resistance, letting them soak almost 2 full mags of assault rifle fire before dropping and even letting them survive a direct hand grenade hit. They're also completely immune to tranquilizer rounds and can't be one-shot by anything short of a rocket launcher while their armor is intact, making CQC your only stealth option against them. Heavy Infantry generally don't appear in regular missions, and are usually only the target of specific Side Ops, until about halfway through the game.
• He Who Must Not Be Named: The Red Band trailer is conspicuously mysterious regarding some of the forces opposing Snake. When it gets to the part where everyone's name is revealed with a descriptive subtitle, some of the bad guys — an armored figure in flames (The Man on Fire), a young boy in a gas mask (Tretij Rebenok), and some agile bald techno-ninjas (the Skulls) —do not have a name given at all, just a subtitle that says "Those Who 'Do Not Exist'."
• Held Gaze: Happens between Venom Snake and Quiet at the end of the rain dance cutscene.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Invoked as part of the finale's Wham Shot.
  Back of Picture: Get well soon, [player name]!

  —"Vic" Boss
• Heroes Love Dogs: Snake can rescue a wolf pup who lost his mother. Said pup is adopted into the Diamond Dogs and christened D-Dog, or DD for short. Once DD is all grown up, he even gets an eyepatch, just like his new papa!
• Heroic Sacrifice: If you throw a grenade at a group of enemies, sometimes one of them will jump on top of the grenade to save his comrades.
• Hook Hand: What Snake initially has in place of a left hand after waking up from the coma.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: In several moments.
  • The Man on Fire. You encounter him several times in the game, and in every single one of those times you gotta flee. Only during your final encounter with him in is side-op can he finally be killed.
  • Sahelanthropus. Your first encounter with it is exclusively a hide and seek affair. You can't hurt it or beat it in any way, and must flee to the landing zone.
• Hope Spot:
  • Visit a certain room on the Medical Platform, marked by a blue light. Surprise! There's Paz! A flashback seems to reveal that Snake in fact had the Medic recheck Paz, and they disposed of the second bomb, the helicopter instead being destabilized by an XOF rocket. Miller and Ocelot explain that she has no memory of being anything other than an average high school girl. As time goes on, and Snake brings her photographs, however, minor discrepancies begin to appear. And when he brings her the final photograph, it's revealed that she was Dead All Along, and simply a hallucination brought about by Venom Snake's guilt over not finding the second bomb after all. However, Venom Snake does get some closure, as the hallucination of Paz helps him to move on, and to carry her memory in his heart.
  • Episode 43 has one man seemingly uninfected with the parasite, just one among dozens Snake wouldn't have to Mercy Kill... but nope, turns out he's been infected too. It just makes the entire ordeal even harder on you than it has been.
  • Episode 45: After a brutal Hold the Line against waves of enemy troops, armored vehicles, tanks, and a gunship, Snake is wounded, leading to a tense sneaking session through a thick sandstorm littered with enemies, and with the player critically injured and having lost their weaponry. One wrong move is death. Finally, they reach the LZ, Pequod's inbound... and Snake is bitten by a venomous snake, leaving him unconscious and on the verge of death, leaving Quiet with no choice but to...well, the mission's called "A Quiet Exit."
• Horned Humanoid: After getting a piece of shrapnel lodged in his forehead in just the right way, Snake becomes one of a sort. As the player's Demon score increases, the shrapnel "horn" becomes larger and more pronounced.
• Horseback Heroism:
  • Ocelot extracts Snake with seconds to spare and manages to outrun The Man On Fire who begins causing a colossal forest fire in his attempt to hunt them down.
  • You can also do this for POWs if you have D-Horse and you want to carry them out.
• How We Got Here: The opening scene is set in "just another day in a war without end: Outer Heaven", in a room with a cassette tape labeled "From the Man Who Sold the World", amidst sounds of explosions and gunfire. In the true end, we hear the tape: it's the real Big Boss's final message to the player character, being played during the events of Metal Gear, making the entirety of The Phantom Pain a flashback episode.
• Humiliation Conga: What Huey suffers. And it's incredibly satisfying. The most satisfying part of it is at the end where he's forced to keep the boat he's on afloat by dumping his precious robotic legs overboard, crippling him once more.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Zigzagged. Unlike past games, when it comes to weapons Snake no longer carries a limitless amount of them on his person. Instead, the actual amount of firearms he can carry has been reduced to realistic proportions, One shoulder-mounted heavy weapon (Which can be a Sniper Rifle, Heavy Machinegun, Rocket Launcher, or Riot Shield), one hip-holstered primary weapon (A choice between an Assault Rifle, Grenade Launcher or Shotgun) and one sub weapon (Pistol, or Submachinegun). However, he can still carry an improbable amount of support items all at once.^note  The Phantom Cigar, the ever-present Cardboard Box (Multiple varieties of them) Active Decoys (3 varieties of them), limitless supply of empty magazines to throw, multiple types of grenades (Smoke, Flare, Frag, Stun, Gas, Incendiary, etc), C4 explosive, Night-Vision Goggles, Claymore Mines, Electromagnetic Mines, Cages for capturing animals Combat Knife, Lockpicks, multiple dozens of Fulton Recovery Balloons, Portable Walkman, Int-Scope binoculars, three different types of pills (Pentazemin, Acceleramin and Noctocyanin) Stealth Camo, three varieties of Parasite Vials for the Parasite Suit and ohhh so much more. Snake can still swap gear just like Old Snake in Metal Gear Solid 4, but it costs GMP to deploy and isn't instant. Somewhat subverted in that deploying with this much gear tends to be very taxing on your resources, and equally taxing when requesting resupplies of ammo and suppressors, thus encouraging players to only bring what they really need.
• Hypocrite: By the end of the game, Big Boss has firmly cemented himself as one. That is to say, the original Big Boss, and not Venom Snake. After defecting from the Patriots for cloning him without his consent for the purpose of making the ultimate soldier, he does the exact same thing to one of his own men by means of robbing him of his past identity in order to turn him into a body double. Through this, he goes back on his beliefs about letting soldiers live for themselves and he instead becomes the kind of manipulator that he started his private military to get away from.
• I Call It "Vera": Quiet can either carry standard rifle "Wicked Butterfly", non-lethal rifle "Guilty Butterfly", or high-powered lethal rifle "Sinful Butterfly".
• I Surrender, Suckers: On high Stealth preparedness, enemy soldiers can pretend to surrender when held up, only to quickly pull out their knife to slash you, triggering an alert phase. At even higher preparedness, they may simply yell to get the attention of their allies. This can be countered by attacking the soldier or stepping out of their melee range before they can retaliate, and there's several tell-tale signs that someone is fake surrendering; if marked, the marker over their head won't change from red to light blue, they won't audibly plead for their life, and they'll slowly lower their hands if they're about to go for their knife.
• Idiot Ball: Firmly held by most of the DD team in early Chapter 2, during the scene where they interrogate Quiet over her having the English strain of the vocal cord parasites. Ocelot holds it until the end, waiting until Quiet is in danger of dying to bring up that, after over twenty missions with her on base, it's a little late to start torturing her; Snake to a lesser extent, when he comes in and does nothing to stop them in spite of most likely having maxed out bond with her by this point; and Miller, acting stupider than anyone in the entire series, when he asks her to give the name of the person who infected her, stating that "it isn't English." The world may never know what he planned to do if she said any of the only three people known to have held the samples, all of whom are known to her only by codenames composed entirely of English words.
• Ignore the Fanservice: If Quiet's buddy bond score is high enough, she will begin posing seductively in front of Snake while in the Airborne Command Center. Snake, however, never visibly reacts to it.
• Impeded Communication: Most large outposts and military installations have communications equipment that the player can destroy (typically with explosives, though they can be shorted out in a more stealthy fashion with the Water Pistol). While this doesn't disable communication between units in the outpost, it prevents the outpost from raising the alert level of, or requesting reinforcements from, other nearby outposts if the player is spotted, at least until the equipment is repaired several in-game days later.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Quiet is perfectly capable of sniping an airborne grenade into a helicopter to blow it up. And in her recruitment cutscene, she saves Snake's life by taking out an incoming fighter jet by sniping the pilot. While sitting in a moving chopper, while the jet was performing evasive maneuvers under gatling gun fire.
• Improbably Quick Coma Recovery: Handwaved through an explanation, but when Snake comes out of a nine-year Coma at the start of the game, he only needs about twenty minutes to recover and be back in fighting shape.
• Insistent Terminology: The scientist who built Venom Snake's prosthetic arm repeatedly insists that there is a distinction between his field, bionics, and robotics, as most people seem to conflate the two fields.
• Instant-Win Condition: Episode 22 ends as soon as you eliminate Mosquito, the commander of the PF that has taken over Mother Base. However, given the circumstances, you are strongly encouraged to Take Your Time and complete as many objectives as possible before triggering it.
• Interface Spoiler: EVERY mission in the game has opening "credits" that showcase who will be showing up. Among other things, this will conveniently tell you when you can expect a run-in with the Skulls. They even list vehicles that appear in the mission, which will reveal the existence or presence of Humongous Mecha before you encounter them, even in missions where they're nowhere in the briefing and are supposed to be a surprise.
• In-Universe Game Clock: Players have the option of starting a mission ASAP, at 6am or 6pm. The Phantom Cigar allows for time to skip should players decide to go a day or night infiltration.
• Ironic Echo:
  • Skull Face's true plan is in essence a twisted version of the Boss' will, using the language of nukes, Metal Gears and parasites to make the world whole.
    Skull Face: The chain of retaliation will be what truly binds this world together!
  • Also, early on in the game, Ocelot is shown commenting on the impractical engravings on a gun owned by a Diamond Dog recruit - almost exactly mirroring what Snake said to Ocelot during Virtuous Mission, almost 20 years prior. It's a subtle way to show just how much more badass Ocelot had become since then.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Miller subjects Huey and Quiet to some pretty horrific torture, believing that the former is a coward and a traitor who sold MSF out and will try and sell Diamond Dogs out at the nearest opportunity, and the latter as a infiltrator who was sent specifically to kill everyone in Mother Base from the inside. He ends up empty-handed, but he was right about one thing: everything. Both are loyal to Skull Face, at least for a time
  • Huey himself arguably. While it's more a case of Never My Fault, it's hard to dispute his point that having a nuclear-equipped private mercenary army was not a good idea and was always likely to attract unwanted attention.
• Just a Machine: Huey says this of the AI Pod recovered from Peace Walker; however it turns out to be a little bit smarter than he gave it credit for...
• Justified Tutorial: Considering Snake has been in a coma for nine years by the beginning of The Phantom Pain, and is thrown directly into a life-or death situation with no rehabilitation or physiotherapy, it's understandable that he needs to get used to his body again, and does not have the muscle mass necessary to engage in any sort of combat whatsoever.

K-O

• Kangaroo Court: In Chapter 2, Huey is subject to a drumhead trial, where he is forced to answer for his crimes against Diamond Dogs: causing a new outbreak of vocal cord parasites, conspiring with Skull Face to destroy Militaires Sans Frontières, helping Eli steal Sahalanthropus and escape with it, attempting to use his son as a pilot for Sahalanthropus, and murdering the mother of his son, Dr. Strangelove, when she protested. Of these charges, the only one with hard evidence was the murder charge, as the AI Pod recovered from his laboratory in Afghanistan had recordings of her final moments after she was trapped in the Pod's airtight core (which also contained her corpse). Miller declares Huey "Guilty, all counts!", and the other Diamond Dogs call for his death. Big Boss, however, declares that the Diamond Dogs do not have the authority to execute their prisoners. Instead, he forces Huey into exile, kicking him out on a raft unable to support the weight of his prosthetic leg braces and forcing Huey to throw them into the sea to keep from sinking.
• Karma Meter: Heroism is still present, and the game now introduces its antithesis, the unspoken "Demon Points". The former is increased by doing heroic actions, such as clearing outposts, finishing Main OPS and Side OPS, and succeeding in Dispatch Missions. If you have higher Heroism, you'll get higher quality volunteers, and at 150,000 Heroism, you'll gain the "Hero" status, which lets you infiltrate nuclear-armed FOBs. Conversely, Demon Points are accumulated when you do morally wrong actions, such as killing soldiers, destroying your own chopper, or using fire damage to kill soldiers, friendly troops, or prisoners. At certain thresholds, the shrapnel in Snake's head will extend in length to that of a horn, and eventually, Snake will become completely covered with blood that's impossible to shower off.
• Keystone Army:
  • Averted. Skull Face's death does nothing to stop the XOF - and Cipher in general from continuing its operations in time becoming incorporated into the Patriots' system.
  • Played straight with Militaires Sans Frontières: after Big Boss's apparent death, all of the surviving troops left and scattered across the world. Miller's attempts to recruit old MSF troops back into Diamond Dogs fell flat before Big Boss returned to the fold: none of them were willing to follow anyone from MSF except for Big Boss.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • The Petrol Bomb, which is essentially a glorified Molotov Cocktail, will ignite the ground it lands at and set enemies aflame, quickly killing them.
  • You can equip D-Walker with a flamethrower.
  • The Man on Fire.
• Killed Off for Real: Averted. Kojima originally stated a dead buddy would be dead for good, but in the game, buddies are simply fultoned out in critical condition if they take too much damage, and can actually be instantly re-summoned to the battlefield (as long as you have the GMP to request them being dropped off.)
  • Quiet dies at the end of Mission 45, being removed both from your roster and from whatever plot you have yet to finish. You can get her back on your roster via an Easter Egg, but story-wise, she's this.
  • Paz really did die at the end of Ground Zeroes; her appearance in Phantom Pain is just a hallucination. Taking it one level deeper, the "phantom" of Paz also "dies" for real after showing her the last photograph, though she at least gets to leave you a proper goodbye (via cassette tape) this time.
  • Strangelove, between Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain...and at Huey's hands, no less (albeit indirectly.)
• Kleptomaniac Hero: The game encourages you to steal anything that isn't nailed down from enemy outposts. Upgrading the Fulton Recovery System sufficiently allows you to steal the stuff that IS nailed down.
• Language Equals Thought: A major theme of the game. Skull Face explains that he lost his mother tongue, and he changed when he learned different languages. The game is set in 1984, a reference to the novel and it's Newspeak. Snake has to capture interpreters in order to understand Enemy Chatter, and quite a bit of said chatter is about languages. Finally, the game's Applied Phlebotinum is a parasite that can turn entire languages into Brown Notes. Skull Face's Evil Plan is to use the parasites to kill off the English language.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • The surreal second ending, where Venom realizes he used to be the "avatar" you created at the start of the game, punches through a mirror into another world where there is an un-mirrored version of himself wearing his very first uniform, and he receives a tape detailing the 1995 Metal Gear 1 mission while still apparently in 1984^note As the scene appears between two timelines that end and start in 1984 respectively, and Venom is still on Mother Base, with brown hair, and wearing the same Diamond Dogs uniform you last equipped him with.; You the player are Big Boss's phantom, and you will continue his legacy by playing the other games in the series, even if the original creators have now left.
  • Kaz's speech at the beginning of the game is both a lamentation from the character as to why he and Big Boss survived and their soldiers didn't and commentary from the creators pondering the reason behind the existence of the game in question. In Guns of the Patriots the story ended, wrapped up with every threat dealt with and with the main cast either dead or with their stories concluded, in Snake Eater and Peace Walker the origins of Big Boss and the Patriots were revealed. This leaves the Phantom Pain without anything relevant to tell and indeed, what it does contribute to the story is very minimal (how Big Boss survived the first game, wether Zero hated Big Boss or not, how did Zero lost control over the Patriots and how Liquid and Psycho Mantis met). Tragically none of the characters in the game get much in the end, most of their stories end in failure, with the obvious exception of Ocelot, and are ultimately left, as Kaz blunty put it, "there just to suffer".
• Leave Behind a Pistol: In the cut mission "Kingdom of the Flies", Snake does this to Eli after destroying Sahelanthropus and leaving him on the island about to be napalmed to destroy the vocal parasite. Eli first aims it at Snake, but can't go through with it, and almost shoots himself before Tretij removes the parasite from him.
• Leave the Camera Running: Venom Snake and Skull Face share a very uncomfortable long jeep ride at one point. Thankfully, the game treats it like a cutscene despite it being a fully interactive setpiece, so it can be skipped on repeat playthroughs.
• Lethal Joke Item: The Water Pistol has far more tactical uses than initially presented. If you fire it at the ground near a guard, the guard will go investigate, but the shot won't leave a trace. If you shoot it in a guard's face, they'll become disoriented for a few seconds, enough time to KO them with a good throw. If you shoot it at sensitive electronics like the power supply, they'll short-circuit, but without the usual sounds of gunfire. If you shoot it at the campfires at night, they'll go out, allowing you more darkness to sneak through. If you use it against The Man on Fire, you can temporarily subdue him with about 80 water shots. It also lets you perform hold-ups, as it looks like a real gun. The icing on the cake? It has infinite ammo, being water and all, allowing you to do all of these things without stopping for a supply drop. It also happens to be one of the only weaknesses of the Skulls. The parasites covering their body consume so much water that splashing them with it will put them into a euphoric state in which they can't do anything but focus on drinking.
• Losing the Team Spirit: It's revealed on one of the cassette tapes that during the nine-year Time Skip between Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain, Miller tried to recruit some MSF survivors into Diamond Dogs, but they all refused to return simply because Big Boss wasn't there.
• Lost in Translation: Snake yells "haidara!" when he uses the Hand of Jehuty. This was Ken Marinaris' battle cry in Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner... except it was never used in the English dub of the game. The battle cry was also one of the multiplayer phrase that could be used in Peace Walker.
• Loyal Animal Companion: Snake can take a horse and a badass wolf into battle with him.
• Made of Explodium: It turns out that this particular Metal Gear doesn't have a nuke. It is a nuke. Its armor is made of depleted uranium and it's armed with metallic archaea that would break down and enrich it into weapons-grade uranium. While it's very deadly in regular combat it has one hell of a potential self-destruct.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Quiet is all about this trope. When she's first obtained, she's by far the most useless of all the buddies. (With the exception of the supplies she kindly marks on your map which can also be noticed visually when you look around the guard post/outpost she was issued to scout ahead for, as she stashes them in well-placed locations when told to scout a far-reaching enemy guard post/outpost to refill your current loadout of equipment/items with no fear of gouging through your own hard-earned resources to do it as a supply drop normally eats through said resources, unlike Quiet's supply stashes which don't) She's hard to use, has to be manually deployed and repositioned, is slow to attack, uses an unsuppressed and lethal sniper that broadcasts her location (and sometimes yours) to everyone in the vicinity, and has a nasty tendency to shoot indiscriminately to anyone that discovers you, even high-stat soldiers you were trying to extract alive. Take the time to raise your bond with her, however, and not only do you unlock the "Cover Me" command, but also unlock her silenced tranq sniper. Once she has these two together, she can basically play the game for you. Just deploy her to a vantage spot overlooking whatever village or outpost you plan to attack, issue the Cover Me command and watch her mercilessly tranq every living soul in just under 2 minutes. This comic sums it all up.◊
  • The Stun Arm. It's a replacement for your prosthetic arm that uses a kinetically-charged internal battery to power a high-voltage electrical shock. At Grades 2 and 3, the Stun Arm is all but useless beyond taking out personnel in non-armored vehicles or bears, and even then it requires you to be within CQC range of the target, has an audible discharge noise when released that attracts guards, and once used, takes an excruciatingly long time to recharge the battery. However, at Grade 4, it gets the very lengthy Level 3 charge. While this eats the entire battery charge at once and takes significant time to charge (in lieu of ten seconds), activating it causes Snake to shout and call a lightning strike that instantly neutralizes any guard standing within 45 meters of Snake, regardless of any armor or obstacles such as ceilings and walls. Its stun time, normally pitifully short, also gets a massive upgrade at Level 3, lasting even longer than a KO punch. While its charge time makes it Too Awesome to Use in most cases, standing in just the right place allows you to take out entire swaths of guards and capture outposts in one fell swoop.
  • While all of the other buddies have abilities that they gain with an increase in bond level, D-Walker requires significant financial investment before it can be useful as anything but a walking minigun turret.
• Manly Tears: If the game is played on the player's birthday, the Diamond Dogs will throw a surprise birthday party for Snake. When this happens, Snake is so touched that he actually tears up a little.
• Meaningful Background Event: Although you can't see what the hell is happening outside, the opening and the True Ending has the sound of gunfire in the background. This is when the troops of Outer Heaven noticed that Solid Snake showed up.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The Diamond Dogs. TPP is set in 1984. Anyone who knows anything about David Bowie will immediately pick up the connection.
    "This ain't Rock and Roll, This is Genocide!"
    • Another layer to the name (which is confirmed by Kojima) is the reference to blood diamonds. Diamond Dogs = mercenaries (dogs of war) who are paid for by diamonds, directly or indirectly.
  • The meaning behind Code Talker's name is twofold. First, it refers to the fact that he helped the US create the code talker's codebook in World War II. However, it actually refers to the fact that he was forced to encode different languages into the vocal cord parasites by feeding them other languages.
• Meaningful Rename: Snake goes by the new codename of "Venom Snake" after he wakes up from the coma and decides to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Microtransactions:
  • You can purchase MB Coins with real money if acquiring Login Bonuses to get them feels too slow. MB Coins can then be used to purchase new FOBs, relocate existing FOBs, or instantly finish Online Dispatch Missions.
  • You can buy FOB Insurance if you don't like intruders pinching your belongings. Having FOB Insurance prevents you from losing staff or resources to intruders, and instead gives an identical supply to the intruder if they stole any.
• Mini-Mecha: The D-Walker, a heavily armed Buddy that Snake can utilize to detect and exterminate foes. Enemies can also acquire Walker Gears, which aren't nearly as nice as D-Walker but are just as efficient at killing their enemies. In other words, you.
• Mind Screw:
  • The prologue mission has the player get plastic surgery to become their avatar, only to end up looking just like Snake, then they half-crawl through a hospital being invaded by a SWAT team, only for a man made of fire lead by a flying child with a gas mask to barge in, kill everyone, throw a tank, and chase the player with his fiery, winged horse. At the very end of the mission, you even spot a fiery whale he creates! The true ending, which is gained by playing an alternate cut of the mission, serves as its Mind Screwdriver.
  • One that note: Paz, in the med room. She's alive! Then you show her some pictures and then she tears out the bomb in her body before it explodes. Then you wake up and try to catch a Butterfly of Death and Rebirth that isn't there. Then you listen to Paz's tapes, and in the last one she tells you you're dreaming everything up.
• Mini-Mecha: Militaries around the world have started using Walker Gears, infantry-scale bipedal walking tanks. After you rescue Emmerich, you can get one of your own, nicknamed "D-Walker", to take into battle with you.
• Misaimed Fandom: In-Universe, when Snake can overhear two Soviet soldiers discuss how one got his hands on a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and though he can only read a little of the English, it seems to be a Utopian novel about how communism has eventually been adopted globally. The other soldier reminds him that as the author was an Englishmen, the communists are probably not supposed to be the good guys. (Both of them are wrong since they can't read the book; while Orwell was staunchly anti-Soviet Union, he was a socialist himself, and 1984 isn't specifically about either.)
• Moby Schtick: There are a lot of Moby-Dick references: Ahab, Ishmael, a giant whale on fire. Interestingly, Big Boss's quest for revenge actually succeeds, since they kill Skull Face. Things only get real bad after that happens, partly because the real Big Boss' need for revenge means he never learns the truth about Zero.
• Monty Haul: OKB Zero is this in spades for players looking to farm resource containers or goodies. Besides having a whopping eight(!) resource containers scattered throughout the base (the highest of any base besides the nearby Afghanistan Central Base Camp), the place is rife with Walker Gears, tanks and mounted weapons, which can all be extracted and sold for a very tidy profit. Even after attempts to Nerf farming in the game, OKB still stands as the king of the roost, and for good reason.
• Mood Dissonance: The E3 2013 trailer triumphantly proclaims "Snake is Back" with "Sins of the Father" playing at the background while cutting to a scene of Snake putting Chico in a stranglehold and gunning down a group of caged African peasants. Subverted in a case of Never Trust a Trailer due to the scenes taking place out of context. Snake putting Chico in a stranglehold was to calm him down and prevent the guards from hearing them. He's there to save him, not kill him. The scene of him shooting towards a group of caged African children was also taken out of context. Snake was sent to assassinate them, he chooses to rescue them and fake their deaths.
• Mook Horror Show: In Episode 45, we finally see Quiet really cut loose. She slaughters an entire section all by herself.
• Mundane Made Awesome:
  • The showstopper "Sins Of The Father" was expected to play at an extremely climactic moment in the story, similarly to how Peace Walker's "Heaven's Divide" played at the end of the last mission before the Final Boss of the main campaign. Instead, it plays... during a car ride where nothing else happens for two minutes straight while Venom Snake awkwardly stares at his fellow passenger.
  • Setting a song for your helicopter to play results in it playing literally any time it does anything, meaning you can rock out to Rebel Yell as you do such exciting things as casually board your chopper after a stealth mission or arrive at Mother Base for a shower.
• Mundane Utility: So, you're part of the Diamond Dogs R&D department and you've managed to make a wormhole-based Portal Network. How do you use this amazing technology? Why, by upgrading the Fulton Recovery System so you can use it indoors, of course!
• Mutually Assured Destruction: The point of developing nukes in Chapter 2. They can't be used, but as long as you're holding onto one, no one short of players possessing the "Hero" status is capable of infiltrating your FOB, ever. However, developing a nuke deals a massive blow to your Heroism, clocking in at a -50,000 Heroism deduction, and if you haven't already acquired Demon Snake, it instantly transforms Snake into Demon Snake. Conversely, disposing of ten enemy nukes makes your Heroism skyrocket, banking +30,000 Heroism and dropping your Demon Points by -30,000.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Muted in Miller, upon discovering that the epidemic of vocal cord parasites in Africa exploded as a result of the Diamond Dogs' shutting down Cipher and SANR's shady control of the leaking oil field - your first mission there. It turns out that Cipher was trying to prevent the spread of the parasites, albeit to cover up their own twisted schemes, and that the heroes' meddling doomed scores of innocent people. As he puts two and two together you can hear Miller seething in quiet, furious guilt, especially as Ocelot eggs him on.
• Mystical 108: During the prologue, Snake learns that the explosion and ensuing helicopter crash that put him into a coma nine years prior caused 108 pieces of debris to become embedded in his body.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The Phantom Cigar has the opposite effect that Solid Snake's cigarettes had in the very first Metal Gear. Whereas the Phantom Cigar causes time to move faster, the cigarettes in the original Metal Gear extended the time limit during Outer Heaven's self-destruct sequence.
  • Once again, you can mail yourself as a cardboard box as a method of transportation.
  • Many of the clothing items you can unlock are direct references to previous games:
    • Defeating Quiet in Extreme Mode unlocks her Sniper Wolf costume.
    • The Cyborg Ninja and Raiden costumes (which are carry-overs from Ground Zeroes) give players improved sprint speed.
    • The Bandana and Infinity Bandana are both references to The Boss. The description for the Bandana even mentions that it was dredged out of Lake Nicaragua, the same lake where Peace Walker drowned itself, and where Snake threw the Bandana after rejecting The Boss's second sacrifice.
    • D-Dog, when his buddy bond is maxed out, can be customized to look like the wolfdog from the FOXHOUND logo, and can even carry a knife/stun knife in his mouth when ordered to attack an armed soldier whilst wearing his sneaking suit.
  • The Decoys can be seen as a throwback to the mannequins in Zanzibar Building dressed as enemy soldiers in Metal Gear 2.
  • Enemy soldiers in Areas of Operation cannot be interrogated without an interpreter. This is also a throwback to Metal Gear 2 when Snake needed Natasha/Gustava's help to communicate with Dr. Marv, since Marv only spoke in Czech.
  • One tape that Snake can find in Afghanistan is labeled "Recorded in the Toilet" by "Soldier with Stomachache", featuring a Soviet soldier with a very bad case of the runs. Two characters featured in the series have also had similar bowel complications: Johnny Sasaki from the original Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, and his grandfather Johnny in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Could this be Johnny Sasaki's father?
  • The words that the player can use for their unit's emblem are mostly based on names of characters, items, places and organizations that appeared throughout the mainline series, which even include the names of enemy bosses from the MSX2 versions of the first two Metal Gear games such as Shoot Gunner and Black Color (as opposed to the retconned names used in the mobile phone/Subsistence ports). Most of these are unlocked by simply capturing outposts and enemy bases in areas of operations, but some require the player to achieve special tasks within the game. For example, all the Cobra-related words (i.e. Joy, Fury, Sorrow, ect.) are unlocked when the player has achieved Hero status in Chapter 2.
  • Subsistence missions in Chapter 2 are a throwback to the earlier games in the series prior to MGS4, disabling Reflex Mode, the ability to call in support helicopters, fire support, and supply drops, and forcing the player to find everything through On-Site Procurement.
  • Some of the camoflage patterns available for Snake's fatigues have the logos of the various organizations he worked for (FOX, MSF or Diamond Dogs) subliminally drawn on them. The APD camo in particular has sprite rips of Solid Snake crawling and a few Zanzibar Land soldiers from Metal Gear 2.
  • If key story characters like Miller, Ocelot, or Huey or Ishmael die during a mission, the Game Over screen will read "TIME PARADOX" instead of "MISSION FAILED". The same thing happened in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater in the event of a Game Over, where the text "SNAKE IS DEAD" would change to read "TIME PARADOX" after a few minutes (or "OCELOT IS DEAD", if the player kills Ocelot during the prologue, where Campbell chews them out for screwing with history).
• Necessary Drawback: Everything costs money, even basic combat necessities like showing up and deploying with weapons. Fulton recovery requires a modest amount of GMP for every attempt and resources, raw or unprocessed, need to be harvested in the field before your base's economy sets itself up. All the best weapons and items in the game cost additional resources to be used. D-Walker, in particular, is a gigantic money sink. In short, to use the best toys, be prepared to pay for 'em.
• Nerf: While it took over a year and a half, the Falkenburg recoiless rifle loaded with Fulton rounds was finally patched into the game. It's significantly less useful than the Carl Gustav Fulton from Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker; For the Fulton extraction to take effect, a direct hit on the soldier being extracted is now required and only one soldier can be extracted at a time, as opposed to entire groups of soldiers in one go. In short, it's gone from Game-Breaker to Awesome, but Impractical.
• Never Trust a Trailer:
  • Many of the trailers feature scenes that never appeared in the final game. The GDC 2013 trailer in particular ends with a shot of Venom Snake wearing a leather jacket and smoking a cigar before riding off in his bike. The scene actually occurs at the end of Episode 46 in the final game, but with the real Big Boss instead of Venom.
  • A scene shown in the E3 2013 trailer depicts a prisoner being tortured by U.S. Marines in Camp Omega before he is executed. This scene never shows up in Ground Zeroes, but the same animation patterns are used in Episode 6, in which a group of Soviet soldiers are interrogating a Mujaheddin rebel for the location of the Honey Bee.
  • In the E3 2015 trailer, Code Talker ominously states "Skullface wants to become a nuclear power." Besides being obviously spliced together using pieces of different lines, it's outright misleading about the villain's motivations.
  • The game's press heavily emphasizes that this game will set Big Boss on his road for a Protagonist Journey to Villain. This does not happen with your player character Venom Snake, who doesn't have many dark moments at all himself, and instead is this regarding others who abandon him anyway and turn good (Miller in particular). While Big Boss does do this, it's nearly entirely off screen and only comes up in cassette tapes, a single cutscene, and The Stinger.
  • One trailer implied that Snake and Skull Face would end up working together. Instead, this scene depicts Snake having being captured by Skull Face.
• New Old West: Evoked: Snake hooks up with Ocelot, who is by now in full cowboy mode, and the two of them ride horses into Afghanistan, with a rugged, rocky terrain often seen in many a Western movie.
  • Skull Face's outfit in the game along with his level-action rifle makes him resemble an authority figure from a western film.
• Nintendo Hard: Infiltrating high rank FOBs with any number of guards of 18 or higher is an incredibly daunting task, especially if you intend on not getting seen. Doubly so if the defender decides to make an appearance, as he/she has a much wider range of weaponry and isn't hampered by guard AI handicaps such as lowered accuracy.
• No "Arc" in "Archery": Averted; the game has bullet drop, which mainly affects sniper rifles at distances of over around 150 meters. Unlike most other games with similar mechanics, there's no feedback to tell you where the bullets are actually landing, giving you nothing to adjust your aim based off of if you miss. 8x scopes and above have a bullet drop reticle, but it's not entirely accurate.
• No Cutscene Inventory Inertia: Regardless of what the player brings with them, Snake will always use the MRS-4 carbine and AM-D114 pistol in cutscenes. In mission 45, Quiet will toss Snake a GROM-11, even if he's carrying something better.
• No Ending: While Chapter 1 does have a proper finale, Chapter 2 doesn't really have an ending. The game wraps up with a few different, unrelated missions that, while climactic in themselves, don't really have much to do with the rest of the plot and have little buildup. Most notable with the true final mission, Mission 46: Truth. It is simply an extended flashback to the opening that could have conceivably happened at any point in the game.
• Non-Standard Game Over: There are several instances of this:
  • If Ishmael gets killed during the prologue. This nets you a "Time Paradox" screen, since Ishmael is the real Big Boss.
  • Obviously, any time an escortee dies, it's Game Over. Optional prisoners don't count against this, but a prisoner's death, regardless of cause, severely hurts your Heroism rating.
  • While the very first mission doesn't have a visible time limit, if the player takes too long to reach Miller's whereabouts (or abuses the Phantom Cigar too much), he will already be dead by the time Snake gets there, triggering an automatic mission failure.
  • Killing your own Mother Base staff or any Child Soldiers nets you a Game Over screen, along with a scathing What the Hell, Hero? from Ocelot or Miller, respectively.
  • Killing Eli in Mission 23. Like Ishmael, this gets a "Time Paradox" screen, because Eli would grow up to become Liquid Snake.
• Non-Indicative Difficulty:
  • More-skilled and -prepared enemy soldiers will react differently to the players' actions than lesser soldiers, such as by investigating disturbances more closely. However, the more paranoid soldiers can end up being easier to sneak past than the lazier ones, since they will more readily move to look for the sources of strange noises, and spend more time looking. Lazy ones, however, may simply ignore the noises and stay where they are, which could be right where the player needs to go.
  • The "hard" version of the Skulls Attack FOB event ends up being significantly easier than the normal version, because it allows the player to bring items and equipment up to grade 6, while the normal version only allows up to grade 5. In particular, the CGM rocket launcher, the best weapon against the Skulls, gets much stronger when going from grade 5 to grade 6; while it takes careful aiming and a little bit of luck to defeat all the Skulls with the grade 5 CGM before it runs out of ammo, the grade 6 has more ammo and deals so much more damage per shot that the player actually has to be careful not to kill all the Skulls too quickly before they finish all the optional objectives for the maximum point payout.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: One of the African missions involves rescuing a British man known only as 'The Viscount' and optionally three other British prisoners from Afrikaners who treat them inordinately harshly due to the actions of the British Empire. Despite their nationality being so important to the mission's story, all four of the prisoners speak with pronounced American accents, and one of them can't even pronounce 'Viscount' correctly (It's Vie-count, not Viz-count).
• Nuclear Weapons Taboo: This being Metal Gear, this is all but given, seeing as how various characters react to Skull Face's ultimate plans over the course of the story. Also, for the first time, you can build your own Nuke, which protects your FOB from all but the most Heroic of players, but also comes with a hefty Demon Points penalty, which is roughly equivalent to "bad karma". Not to mention the eradication of all player-controlled Nukes on a server is paramount to unlocking the secret third ending.
• Old Save Bonus: Bonuses from Ground Zeroes can be imported into a new game of The Phantom Pain.
  • Completing the former game on any difficulty unlocks the Ground Zeroes version of the Sneaking Suit and a Gold Bionic Arm variant (unlocked once the Bionics Specialist is rescued) in the latter.
  • Completing "Deja Vu" unlocks a PS1-era Solid Snake outfit.
  • Any prisoner or unique soldier rescued during Ground Zeroes (21 in total) will appear as a "Special Volunteer" in Phantom Pain, along with unique dialogue from Kaz mentioning that they want to join Diamond Dogs.
• On-Site Procurement: Subsistence Mode missions require Snake to drop into enemy territory with nothing but the outfit on his back. Anything he wants to use must be poached off soldiers and guard posts. Furthermore, any weapons taken from enemies will only have a single magazine of ammunition, or in the case of rocket launchers, a single shot, meaning that the player will need to be thrifty with their ammo if they are going to use it or be good with stealth and CQC.
• One Name Only: Every former MSF member (namely Mosquito from Episode 22 and all the soldiers extracted from "Wandering Mother Base Soldier" side-ops) who join Diamond Dogs will only have a one word animal codename - just like the soldiers in Peace Walker - instead of the usual two all the DD crew will have. The first letter of each of the 13 wandering soldiers^*Kodomo Dragon, Jackal, Parrot, Falcon, Ostrich, Raven, Eagle Ray, Viper, Elephant, Rat in particular form a secret message KJP FOREVER.
• The Oner: Nearly every single cutscene is made without jump cuts, and often go out of their way to make it so that the camera doesn't make any "impossible movements" like moving through a door (the "cameraman" simply "quickens their pace" to move through the door before it closes). Combined with the use of Shaky Cam, it creates a feeling that there's a cameraman right beside every single event, filming it as it happens.
• Once More, with Clarity:
  • Episode 30 ends with the Third Child mysteriously switching allegiances, causing the Man on Fire to walk under the wheels of Sahelanthropus' transport platform, and assuming control of Sahelanthropus to attack everything on sight. The subsequent episode starts just before this and shows the Third Child making contact with Eli, who happens to be on board the nearby Diamond Dogs support chopper, revealing that the ensuing chaos was because he managed to take control of the Third Child.
  • The final mission, "Truth - The Man Who Sold the World", is a repeat of the hospital escape from the beginning of the game, minus the fight with the Man on Fire. However, two things are changed: First, it's revealed that Ahab is actually the MSF medic who operated on Paz in Ground Zeroes, whose face was changed so that he would become Venom, Big Boss's Body Double. Second, it shows where Ishmael went after the ambulance crash: he, revealed to be the true Big Boss, met with Ocelot prior to Ahab regaining consciousness, and was given the identity of the medic so that he could escape to America as discreetly as possible.
  • The reveal that Paz is alive after seemingly being killed at the end of Ground Zeroes is accompanied by a replay of the game's ending cutscene that shows some extra details explaining her survival — namely, the second bomb inside her was actually discovered and disposed of, and the explosion right after she jumped out of the support helicopter was from a RPG fired from the nearby XOF chopper. Subverted in that Paz really was killed, and these details are Snake's rationalization towards how the hallucinatory Paz could be the real deal.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • Headshots with most guns will take a target down instantly, assuming they're not wearing a helmet.
  • Snake and D-Dog's CQC throat slit is an instant kill, regardless of circumstances.
  • Bears and wild dogs show up ingame, and if they knock you down, they can go for an instant kill on you; you can fight off the dogs with Quick Time Events, but if a bear manages to knock you off your feet, you're as good as dead.
  • Late in the game, in Chapter 2, many of the repeat missions feature enemies with the unique ability to deliver these; one hit, anywhere, with any weapon, kills you, no questions asked.
• One-Hit Polykill: A sniper rifle with a high enough penetration can potentially pierce multiple guards simultaneously and kill them all, especially if you land headshots. Due to how accuracy is graded, it's possible to get an accuracy rating of higher than 100% by doing this.
• Optional Party Member: It's entirely possible to finish the game without recruiting D-Dog or Quiet. D-Dog can be missed completely if you don't pick him up in Mission 4 (though you can replay the mission and get him at any time), and if you execute Quiet after defeating her in Mission 11, she actually dies.
• Origin Story:
  • An incredibly significant instance, acting as the final part in Big Boss' Start of Darkness. As an added series twist, The Phantom Pain is actually the origin story of the Big Boss from Metal Gear, who is revealed to be a separate entity in the ending: the Player Character is actually the Medic from the conclusion of Ground Zeroes. Grievously injured shielding Big Boss from Paz's detonation, he awoke without any memory and was made into doppelgänger "Venom Snake" as a protective measure for Big Boss. Following the hospital escape, Big Boss takes the medic's identity, doing so to create Outer Haven under the radar whilst everyone was looking at Venom Snake and Diamond Dogs. As such, Venom Snake is the "Big Boss" killed in the finale of Metal Gear 1, with the real Big Boss acting as the final boss in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and secondary antagonist in the Solid games.
  • This game also serves as an origin for Liquid Snake and Psycho Mantis, as well as the start of their partnership (expanded on in deleted content).
• Or Was It a Dream?: Snake keeps wondering during his escape form the hospital if he's hallucinating or actually being haunted by demons of his past. Given what he sees, it's hard to blame him.
• Our Wormholes Are Different: Eventually, you can develop a replacement for the Fulton Recovery System, the Wormhole Teleportation System. This generates a wormhole above whatever you're transporting and pulls it in, taking it to Mother Base in a snap. Not only is it immune to gunfire, it can also be used indoors, unlike the Fulton balloons.
• Out of the Inferno: Ahab and Ishmael get caught in an explosion, only for them to encounter a ghostly Volgin walking out of the inferno.
• Outside-the-Box Tactic:
  • In Episode 11, Quiet can be defeated with two Supply Drops. This is facilitated by the fact that she basically sits still most of the time, ensuring that she'll almost always get hit. The box also deals half her Stamina in STN Damage. Contrary to popular belief, this works on Extreme difficulty, but she'll need to be distracted in some way for it to work, as she'll dodge otherwise
  • Depending on your playstyle, the iDroid's speaker attachment can be this. Normally, it attracts enemies to your position when you play music, which is generally unwanted. However, if you acquire extra tapes, you can use them in a variety of unusual ways. For example, the "Afghan Lullaby" tape causes Soviet guards to fall asleep on the spot. "Love Deterrence" pacifies normally aggressive wandering Mother Base soldiers. One tape even has a recording of a soldier taking a dump on the toilet, and playing it while hiding inside a port-a-potty makes it so guards will never look for you there, even if they're searching for you.
    • You can acquire both Soviet and African tapes for "Enemy Defeated." Playing it during a Combat Alert while out of sight will cause the guards to think they killed you and call off the alert.
  • Another easy way to get the wandering Mother Base soldiers? Walk in front of them in a cardboard box. They'll immediately recognize that it's Big Boss and let you Fulton them without argument.
  • Normally children cannot be extracted through Fulton until the player has unlocked the required upgrade, which only becomes available after completing the "Eli's Challenge" side-op very late in Chapter 1. However, if you already have the cargo upgrade (which becomes available much earlier), you can just knock the kids unconscious and place them on a 4WD (which can hold up to three passengers), extracting them by proxy. On top of that, the wormhole upgrade has most of the regular fulton upgrades, meaning that you can circumvent the child upgrade.
  • The game and in-game challenges encourages this. Need to knock out Eli? Literally get the drop on him by landing on his head or, better yet, simply use the Grade 4 Stun Arm's unique "Lightning Call" near the area he's in without him noticing you or not in his line of sight and he's out like a light, always works without fail. Destroy armored vehicles so the guerrillas can initiate their offensive? Extract them. Need to find a specific prisoner? Extract the interpreter and make him squeal. Trying to defeat the Skulls without them noticing you? Use sleeping gas.

P-T

• Pacifist Run: Although not as enforced due to kills not penalizing in this installment, finishing a mission without killing anyone grants a small score bonus, and doing so without getting spotted nets a massive score bonus. For the first time since MGS2, a complete pacifist run is no longer possible. There are a few missions where the player will have to kill enemies.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • One box front unfolds into a cardboard cutout of a saluting soldier, which suspicious guards will automatically mistake for one of their own, salute back, and go on their merry way.
  • If you consistently get a game over at the same part of the game, you can opt to have Snake wear the Chicken Hat. Like the Crocodile Cap before it, having Snake wear it will cause guards at a distance mistake you for a chicken. This is, of course, at the expense of your sense of accomplishment and Snake's otherwise-badass look.
• Permanently Missable Content: Averted as stated above with all four buddies, only having them fultoned out if they're seriously injured. Quiet will eventually leave Diamond Dogs once Episode 45 is unlocked, and after the mission ends, she leaves Diamond Dogs, removing access to her unique skills or equipment for the rest of the game unless the player decides to reset their save file. Note that this only occurs if you max out her bond. If you avoid doing that, the content won't be missed. You can also still do that and not permanently miss the content by equipping the Butterfly Emblem at all times. The Version 1.06 patch added the ability to recover the missable content by replaying Episode 11 seven times. On the seventh replay, the mission will be tagged "Reunion" and the content will be recovered for any future replays.
• Pet the Dog: Almost literally: Snake and Ocelot's reactions to D.D. the wolfdog qualify as this, quite clearly caring for the animal. See Canine Companion above.
• Phantom Limb Pain: This installment gets its subtitle from this phenomena. Appropriately, one of the plot points is Venom Snake dealing with the loss of his arm after the events of Ground Zeroes, including such pains (as well as getting used to a prosthetic).
• Playable Epilogue: The main plot actually wraps up with Episode 31. This begins "Chapter 2", which consists of more difficult versions of existing missions as well as individual epilogues for many of the characters. This culminates in the True Ending...which still isn't the last mission. It might as well be though, since the missions after that are just more repeats.
• Playing Both Sides: Officially speaking Miller is supporting the Afghan Mujahideen and Ocelot is an operative of the Soviet Union during the Afghan War, however both are working together and are only playing a part in order to help hide Big Boss's location during his 9-year coma. They are exploiting the fact that they are visible because of this to have Cipher focus on them, instead of Cipher trying to locate Big Boss.
• Player Mooks: Much like in Peace Walker, the player can control other Diamond Dogs operatives in addition to Snake himself. Unlike their MSF counterparts, who usually wore masks during gameplay (except when they wore tuxedos or swimsuits) and only had individual faces for their portraits, DD soldiers can be played unmasked.
• Poor Communication Kills: Numerous things would not happened had anyone actually tried to prevent certain events from happening.
  • If Big Boss had sought after Zero and talked it out, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots would go very differently. Boss probably wouldn't have hold an unjustified grudge that went on for 30 years then euthanize him in 2014 without realizing that Zero still cared for him.
  • Had Big Boss explained to Kaz here why he had to cut him off, Kaz wouldn't side with Solid Snake in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.
  • Had Venom Snake talked to Eli, he wouldn't hold a very massive grudge against him in Metal Gear Solid.
  • The 45th mission contains a strange inversion, thanks to the game's "languages can be made to function like viruses" theme: Quiet and Snake are grievously wounded, and the helicopter pilot can't find them in a sandstorm. Quiet is infected with the unstable English-strain language parasites which will kill them if they communicate in English, but since they share no common tongue with the helicopter pilot other than English, and Snake is incapacitated from poison, the only option left is to explain their exact location in English, activating the kill-switch.
• Posthumous Character:
  • Dr. Strangelove, who was killed by Huey Emmerich sometime between six months and a year before Snake wakes up from his coma. Her voice actor is still listed prominently in the opening credits, the corpse becomes a critical part of a late-game cutscene, and you hear a lot of her in collectible tapes.
  • In another more literal sense, The Man on Fire is Colonel Volgin who has come been reanimated thanks to Tretij Rebenok.
  • Also, Paz. She appears to have survived her Heroic Sacrifice from Ground Zeroes (complete with a modified flashback to explain what "really" happened), but that was just a hallucination, and she really did die.
• P.O.V. Cam: Parts of the opening when Snake is recovering in the hospital is filmed from his perspective. The general cutscenes also evoke this vibe with the camera often placed at a position where a man could be (e.g. sitting inside a helicopter) instead of always flying around, in a pretty drastic departure from the cutscene style of previous games in addition to the use of The Oner.
  • The POV Cam-like style was deliberately used to conceal an actual POV Cam during The Reveal, where the nature that the scene is from a character's perspective is not revealed at first, and only revealed when everybody acknowledges the person at the camera's position and looks at the camera, revealing that the camera is in fact the vision of another character.
• Precision F-Strike: Courtesy of Miller when Venom Snake is trapped in the Devil's House with the Man on Fire in hot pursuit.

  Miller: Boss! Get the fuck out of there!!

• Primal Fear: Being helpless and unable to move properly, losing parts of your body, and being relentlessly hunted are all common themes in nightmares.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain. Played with and ultimately subverted. As this isn't the story about how Big Boss becomes a villain, which many were lead to believe. It's the story about how an unknown Medic becomes the fake Big Boss, Venom Snake, while the real Big Boss goes into hiding. However, he does turn out to be the Big Boss whom Solid Snake kills in the original Metal Gear.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Female combat unit characters play exactly the same as male ones; the only exception is that the female variant of the sneaking suit (based on the one used by The Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3) costs significantly less GMP than the male version to deploy on missions.
• Put on a Bus:
  • Amanda stayed behind in Nicaragua, which has finally reached the liberation she sought, and where she's seen as a national hero. She doesn't play any role in the events of Phantom Pain although she's noted to be sad that Chico couldn't be there to see the fruits of their struggle. Miller also indicates she still occasionally supports Diamond Dogs by calling in favors with the new Nicaraguan government to send some intel their way every now and then.
  • It's stated that Cecile went back to her home country after the events of the previous game. Outside of that, she isn't mentioned at all.
• Putting the Band Back Together: It's possible to find former MSF staff in the wilderness to reintegrate into Diamond Dogs. And one way to win them back is playing "Love Deterrence" on the iDroid.
• Puzzle Boss: The Man on Fire, at The Devil's House. As he's invulnerable to damage and will return any damage you attempt to do to him, you need to exploit his one weakness. Miller gives you some hints toward the solution, but it's up to you to figure out a solution:
  • The main method to defeat him is to knock over the water towers and coolers when he's nearby to cool him off long enough to allow Snake to call in an helicopter and exfiltrate.
  • One way is to defeat him is to use a shotgun or the nearby gas tanks to knock him into the pool.
  • If the player brought along their water gun, they can pump eighty shots into the Man to put out his fires and get enough time to cleanly exfiltrate. Or just try (and fail) to fulton him, which still extracts him from the zone.
  • If the player brought along their Shock Arm, they can charge it up to level three and let it rip, properly defeating the Man on Fire, with no chance of him recovering.
  • The king of them all: On the right side of the Devil's House is a cliff with a river at the bottom. If you hijack a nearby jeep, it's possible to ram the Man On Fire off the cliff into the waters below. It is every bit as satisfying as it sounds.
• Rage Against the Reflection: Snake will punch the mirror in the shower room if you watch the Secret Ending, revealing another Venom Snake on the other side. At least he does it with his prosthetic left hand so as not to damage his remaining organic arm.
• Railroading: Unless you're using unconventional tactics (such as calling a supply drop of a jeep, tranqing the child soldiers, and then Fultoning them out in the jeep), the main mission "Blood Runs Deep" forces you to escort a group of captured Child Soldiers out of an enemy base via an extremely linear creek bed filled with unavoidable enemy outposts. You're all but forced to shoot your way out due to the enemy placement and deliberately unruly AI of your charges.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Miller (red) and Ocelot (blue) can come across as this whenever they share Mission Control duties, especially when it comes to deciding whether or not to kill Quiet after her Boss Battle.
• Reality Has No Subtitles: The shrapnel in Snake's head seems to have cost him his ability to speak and understand Russian. Until you acquire an interpreter for each of the four languages^note Russian, Pashto, Afrikaans, Kikongo those languages will not have subtitles and attempts to interrogate enemies speaking them will fail.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: The name Code Talker seems to be derided as silly Gratuitous English, but it's a real codename dating back to the Second World War.
• Red Sky, Take Warning: Sahelanthropus can toss an archaea charge that turns the sky an extremely deep red. This disables all vehicles in the area and makes it difficult to see far distances, but Night Vison Goggles help with this immensely.
• Retraux: The unlockable Solid Snake and Cyborg Ninja costumes are based on their low-polygon character models from MGS1.
  • "A Phantom Pain", one of the game's main themes, is done in the style of a 1980s song à la David Bowie and a-ha.
• Relationship Values: The more missions you do with a buddy, the higher your "bond" rating with them becomes. Increasing your bond score with a buddy unlocks additional skills and equipment for them. In order to unlock Episode 45, you need to have a maxed-out bond score with Quiet.
• The Reveal: You're not playing as Big Boss. You're the medic with his appearance and memories.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Snake and Diamond Dogs' motivations are very much about vengeance. Depending on how one plays the game, this can also be literal with a lot of blood spilled.
• Rocket Punch: Two alternate forms of Snake's prosthetic arm gives it a rocket and a mounted camera, allowing him to fire it at enemies. One deals STN Damage on hit, while the other deals lethal damage on hit. Snake even calls his rocket punch on occasion.
  Snake: Rocket... Puuuuunch!
• Rubber-Band A.I.: The Revenge System will cause the enemy AI to respond more effectively to strategies the player uses successfully against them in the past; for instance, if you frequently complete missions using stealth, the enemy will deploy more anti-stealth countermeasures and react with faster alarms to suspicious events, while if you eliminiate many of them in combat they will carry better combat gear. Preparedness decays as missions are completed.
• Rule of Cool: The Level 3 Stun Arm. Takes forever to charge up, consumes your Stun Arm's entire battery gauge (which also takes a lengthy amount of time to charge/recharge), but you get to call a freaking lightning strike that is effective on all normal non-boss foes outside of armored vehicles. This includes Eli as well.
• Save Scumming: Can be used to a much greater extent than in Ground Zeroes. While restarting from a checkpoint still forfeits your "No Restarts" bonus, you are no longer penalized for multiple restarts. If the area ahead is difficult and you're gunning for the huge "Perfect Stealth, No Kills" bonus, then feel free to restart as many times as necessary.
• Schizo Tech: Par the course for a Metal Gear game, the level of tech displayed in TPP for the time (1984) is ridiculous. Bipedal infantry size walkers, advanced helicopter gunship/transports, weaponized parasites and metal eating bacteria, wormhole technology all appear alongside typical 1980s equipment. Special mention has to go the iDroid, whose capabilities in 1984 even far outclass devices 30 years on, being able to: to project a holographic, rotatable map of areas with real-time information updating, being able to project a holographic flame to light the Phantom Cigar, interface with tape players to play audio logs and music tapes, connect to and manage the capabilities of an offshore private military company hundreds of miles away seamlessly, authorize weapons development projects with zero lag time, scan paper documents and intel in their entirety line by line and upload the entire information to its memory and transmit if necessary, and be rugged enough to handle infiltration missions in rough terrain and weahter, all in a device the size of a large walkie-talkie.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • Played with in Episode 6. Your objective is to secure a Super Prototype rocket launcher, the Honey Bee, with the ammo intact. Once you've acquired it, Miller calls you to remind you not to use it under any circumstances, and will yell at you if you do so anyway. However, a few minutes later when Big Boss is surrounded, Ocelot concedes that using the Honey Bee is probably the best way of clearing a path to escape. However, not using the Honey Bee earns you the "Beekeeper" achievement and gets you the full reward at the end.
  • If you get the bright idea to use the Water Pistol against The Man on Fire, Miller will call you to tell you that it's insufficient for defeating him. However, you can defeat The Man on Fire with the Water Pistol if you're persistent enough.
• Self-Deprecation: Hideo Kojima may be egotistical enough to place himself inside his own game as a badass side-character, but let it never be said that he isn't capable of some self-depreciation: "The Hamburgers of Kazuhira Miller" is a series of cassette tapes that brilliantly parody the series' own writing, especially its propensity for navel-gazing, roundabout conversations. It shows what would happen if the characters were to take their normal, ridiculously serious, philosophical tone, and use it to speak about a less lofty concept than usual... Fast food. Taken to Refuge in Audacity levels with the last tape, which includes such gems as Miller excitedly explaining how his cheap, chemical-filled burgers will lead to world peace and an awestruck Code Talker referring to them as a true "ethnic liberator".
• Sequence Breaking: It's possible to destroy the Soviet comm center in free roam before players are given the mission to do so. So when players later start Episode 4, Ocelot will cut off Miller's briefing in the chopper and the mission complete screen will come up.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Effectively turned Ground Zeroes into one. Chico died in the helicopter crash at the end of the game and Paz turns out to be a hallucination, and that she really did die, which rendered the entire rescue mission for both of them a sad waste of time.
• Shadow Archetype: When his motivations came to light after you defeat Mosquito (the villain of Mission 22), he is essentially shown to be one to Venom Snake and the entire Diamond Dogs operation. Losing MSF and Mother Base in 1975 led him to believe Big Boss was to, and thus chose to build his own PF to strike back at the person he believed is at fault. Kaz, seemingly portrayed as not seeing the irony, characterizes him as misinformed in his revenge. Later on, Kaz realizing the truth that Big Boss is out there with his own separate plans from him makes him react just about as badly.
• Shaky Cam: Used liberally in The Oner cutscenes, giving the impression that the cutscenes are filmed on a handheld camera by a physical cameraman, which hits hard when the HUGE Metal Gear Sahelanthropus shows up and the "cameraman" is awestruck and forced to the ground, unable to take in the whole scale of Sahelanthropus and only able to film it at a Dutch Angle and zoom in with shaking hands.
• Shock and Awe: An electrical stun weapon is available again in this game, this time in the form of an upgrade for Snake's prosthetic arm.
• Shoot Out the Lock: With a powerful enough rifle, Venom Snake can do this to open locked doors instead of lockpicking them.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Enemies armed with shotguns can and will fuck up your day if you've been using a lot of CQC. One blast will knock you off your feet, leaving you vulnerable. The Diamond Dogs can develop a plethora of different shotguns, including a shotgun revolver and and auto shotgun. Use of a shotgun to knock him into a pool of water is one strategy that is effective against The Man On Fire.
• Shout-Out:
  • The game has numerous Moby-Dick references.
    • The bandaged man in the hospital level tells Snake to "Call me Ishmael."
    • Snake is referred to as "Ahab" during the prologue.
    • Snake hallucinates a giant white whale covered in flames flying through the sky.
    • The ship that Snake and Ocelot use to leave Cyprus is a former whaling vessel.
    • Snake's support chopper is now codenamed "Pequod" after Captain Ahab's ship.
    • The support chopper Miller rides in during the battle against Sahelanthropus is codenamed "Queequeg", after one of Ahab's crewmen.
    • The name "Eli" can be short for either, Eliab, the eldest brother of the biblical King David (a hint of Eli's true identity as the future Liquid Snake) , or Elijah, a prophet who predicts doom for Ahab's crew.
  • "Diamond Dogs" was named after a 1974 David Bowie concept album.
    • Perfectly timed, too.
    • The casette tape Snake listens to at the end of Episode 46, is labelled "The Man Who Sold The World", a reference to a David Bowie song. A cover version performed by Midge Ure serves as the game's opening theme.
    • "Just nod, if you can hear me."
  • "On your feet, soldier. The whole place is coming down." — a reference to the words spoken to Solid Snake by Gray Fox in IDW's graphic novel adaptation of the original Metal Gear Solid, as opposed to the commonly referenced 2008 video game Call of Duty: World at War (in which Keifer Sutherland voiced Corporal Roebuck).
  • The 2014 Tokyo Game Show demo showed off an Active Decoy based on Lisa, the monster from the demo for another Kojima project, Silent Hills.
    • In the actual game, on the way to investigate the Devil's House, you can find a radio that plays audio clips from P.T.
  • Snake holding D.D. up is one to The Lion King (1994).
  • At one point during the E3 2015 trailer, Eli can be seen with a conch shell on his hip, staring down at a maggot-infested pig's head. It even works on another level since "Lord of the Flies" is a literal translation of Beelzebub, a Hebrew and Arabic name for the devil.
    • In addition, in the cut Episode 51 mission, Eli tries to build an island society ruled by children just like in Lord of the Flies. However, just like in the novel, Eli's dreams of a child utopia are doomed to fail.
  • Using the Bionic Arm for certain actions such as punching or the radar plays the Signature Sound Effect from The Six Million Dollar Man.
  • Using the Rocket Arm or Blast Arm will sometimes have Snake shout "Rocket Punch!", a reference to Mazinger Z.
  • The Afghanistan sections in particular bear more than a passing resemblance to movies like Rambo III and The Living Daylights, both of which take place during the Soviet occupation of that nation.
  • References to Nineteen Eighty-Four are everywhere, including the year that the game takes place in, "Big Boss Is Watching You" posters, and the room that Ocelot tortures people in being called "Room 101".
  • The iconic Moai returns once again, this time as an emblem part, along Otenko and Nero, as well as Jehuty and Anubis.
  • One of the bionic arms Snake can obtain is called "The Hand of Jehuty".
  • The emblem codewords can form various combinations. While many of them are Metal Gear related, some others are random phrases. Players can invoke shout outs through various combinations. Possible combinations include Rogue Trooper, Joy Division and Oldboy (2003).
  • Ocelot refers to Quiet as "our silent assassin''.
  • Three of Quiet's outfits allow her to be covered in gold, silver or black paint. The fact that she breathes through her skin could also very well be a reference to Goldfinger, where it's an actual plot point.
  • Snake's prosthetic arm, like Zardonov's, is inspired by Dr. No.
  • Snake has a Rage Against the Reflection moment that looks a lot like the album cover of Black Flag's Damaged.
  • The game allows you to set Ride of the Valkyries as your helicopter arrival music, just like in Apocalypse Now.
• Shown Their Work:
  • Jay Tavare, Code Talker's voice/motion capture actor, claims that his character speaks in a complex dialect of Navajo. It's worthy of noting that Tavare is Native American himself, implying the use of the language is just that multifaceted.
  • It actually is possible to make synthetic diamonds from ashes.
  • Mark Serrels posted an article on Kotaku explaining why Snake has the most impressive (read: realistic) climbing technique in video game history, and that contemporaries like Uncharted and Assassin's Creed get this very wrong. The writer praises the following: Snake puts a lot of focus on footwork rather than his upper body strength, he uses his knees to propel his body upward, he hugs his torso against the wall so he doesn't fall, and Snake is seen shaking his hand to ease the fatigue in it making note most games don't showcase how lactic acid tires out the muscles.^note Though it should be noted that the Special Forces make it a point to teach their troops how to transverse virtually any terrain, and proper mountain climbing technique is something a fully trained elite would be expected to know how to pull off; as Snake is a former Green Beret, and the student of The Boss, he would be educated enough to know the proper way to climb. In fact, his infiltration of Camp Omega was similarly realistic in terms of style.
  • As Venom Snake choppers out of Afghanistan after Episode 11, there's a Cut Scene where Pequod is menaced by an enemy jet, recognizable as an American-made F-4 Phantom II. This jet saw a lot of service in Vietnam... but was also sold to foreign nations, including Iran.
• "Shut Up!" Gunshot: During Huey Emmerich's trial, Ocelot fires his revolver into the ceiling to silence the crowd of Diamond Dogs soldiers who are yelling for him to be executed.
• Skippable Boss:
  • Every Skull encounter except for the final one in Mission 29 can be skipped by either avoiding them or running away, rather than having to fight them.
  • It's possible to use a tranquilizer rifle to neutralize Eli/White Mamba from a distance without having to fight him in his throne room, skipping the boss fight with him entirely. There's even an optional mission objective to do so.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Thanks to the cassette tapes you can find throughout the game, you can invoke this yourself, conducting dangerous stealth missions or killing soldiers to 80s songs like "Take on Me", "You Spin Me Round", "Only Time Will Tell" or "Too Shy".
• Soviet Superscience:
  • Sahelanthropus, the Metal Gear mech in this entry, is Soviet in design, though it's implied that Huey had a hand in its construction. Likewise, the Man on Fire (aka, Volgin's corpse) is also the result of Soviet experimentation.
  • Venom Snake's prosthetic arm, itself mirroring Zardonov's from Peace Walker, is revealed to be Soviet engineering and part of a burgeoning field of cybernetics that foreshadows the cyborgs seen later on in the timeline.
• Spanner in the Works: Skull Face's plans are ultimately ruined by Tretij Rebenok's rampage on Eli's behalf. It still requires Big Boss to destroy Sahelanthropus and finish off Skull Face, though.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: If Snake spares Quiet instead of killing her, she will gradually fall in love with him during her stay at Mother Base. It's implied that Snake may have feelings for her as well, but Quiet is forced to leave after saving Snake's life because she spoke English and activated the vocal cord parasite. According to a comment made by Kojima, Snake and Quiet are destined to be Together in Death.
• Stealth Pun: Digoxin, the drug that Ishmael injects into Snake, comes from a type of plant known as Foxgloves. FOX is the organization that Snake worked for during Metal Gear Solid 3, as well as the game engine that Metal Gear Solid V was developed on.
• Still Wearing the Old Colors:
  • You can invoke this by deploying Venom Snake with the same Sneaking Suit from Peace Walker and Ground Zeroes, which feature the FOX Unit and MSF's logo on the shoulder, even though Big Boss had left the unit and the United States military years ago.
  • Within The Phantom Pain proper, the game's particular Sneaking Suit becomes a double example, as in addition to the FOX Unit logo on one shoulder, it also has the MSF logo, even though in the aftermath of Ground Zeroes the MSF Mother Base is destroyed and the force disbanded. The upgraded Sneaking Suits, however, notably swap it out for the proper Diamond Dogs logo.
• The Stinger: Explains why Miller sold Big Boss out, joining FOXHOUND and helping Solid Snake take him down in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. Really, getting abandoned by his best friend, who went on to become a full-blown terrorist, and left with a Body Double drove Kaz off the deep end. Also, it's implied that Revolver Ocelot was the one who killed him.
• Story to Gameplay Ratio: The Phantom Pain is noted for being one of the most gameplay-focused mainline Metal Gear titles; the first 40 minutes or so of the game are one big interactive cutscene, but after that is a huge amount of open-world gameplay, with much fewer cutscene interruptions than previous Metal Gear Solid games (many plot points are delivered via radio or optional cassette tapes instead). This is a sharp contrast to Metal Gear Solid 4, which had short gameplay segments frequently interrupted by long cutscenes, some of them over an hour in length.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: This being Metal Gear, any instance of realistic outcome sticks out.
  • After being in a coma for nearly a decade, Snake is unable to stand at all, let alone walk, as his he suffered from muscle atrophy. Even with a dose of digoxin, he is still not 100% revitalized, not to mention that it took some time for the drug to take effect.
  • During the hospital escape, Snake and Ishmael attempt to hide from the soldiers by hiding among the dead. Even before Ishmael's IV fluid leaked, which gave away their positions, the soldiers are double tapping the bodies to confirm their kills.
  • Snake needs to shower off every once in a while, not only to relieve himself of stress, but also to keep himself clean. Going without a shower for too long has detrimental effects, including making you detectable by stench, or just grossing your crew out.
  • Mixed in with a bit of foreshadowing, Ishmael shows a distinctive grunt while fighting off Quiet, revealing himself for a brief moment to be Big Boss. As it's difficult to keep up a false voice when fighting for one's own life.
  • In Ground Zeroes Paz had suffered torture, just been operated on under awful conditions, and fell from a helicopter into the ocean as the helicopter was blown up by a rocket. Turning up alive wasn't a case of being absurdly tough, lucky, and being saved by landing in the water that one might expect from Metal Gear games but rather Snake hallucinating that the second bomb had been discovered in time and that she could have survived all of the harsh conditions long enough to be rescued.
• Tap on the Head: In addition to the usual CQC takedowns, you can knock an enemy out by shooting them in the head with rubber bullets, and they'll be just fine when they wake up. In Real Life, a rubber bullet to the head often results in severe head trauma or death.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Word of God confirms that this is the relationship between Miller and Ocelot, and in fact the entirety of Diamond Dogs; all of them cooperate only because of Snake's presence, and the entire organization would collapse without him.
• Theme Song Reveal: The Real Song Theme Tune for Venom Snake, "The Man Who Sold the World", which hints at the events that unfold. Specifically, it's actually massive foreshadowing for the ending twist: the song is about meeting with a villainous doppelgänger, and only plays during the parts when the real Big Boss crosses paths with Venom Snake. Acting like a leitmotif for the real Big Boss, it's only heard during the hospital sequence when he's present as Ishmael, and in ending after he sends Venom a debriefing tape labelled "from The Man Who Sold the World." Also, it's a cover version, not the original.
  Who knows? Not me.
  We never lost control.
  You're face to face
  with The Man Who Sold The World.
• Timed Mission:
  • In "Phantom Limbs", when Ocelot says that Miller has three days, tops, before the Soviets dispose of him, he is not kidding. You have exactly three in-game days to rescue and extract Miller before being slapped with a Time Paradox and being forced to start the mission all over again.
  • "Backup, Back Down" tasks you with destroying or extracting as many Soviet armored vehicles as you can before the timer runs out. You technically only need to destroy/extract one of the vehicles to avoid failing the mission, but you're paid extra GMP for taking out more of them.
  • "Cursed Legacy" requires you to extract two containers containing Code Talker's research before enemy extraction choppers come to pick them up.
• Time Skip:
  • While Ground Zeroes is set six months after the events of Peace Walker, The Phantom Pain is set nine years later in 1984, just a decade before the events of the first Metal Gear.
  • There's a time skip of about 10 days between Snake's hospital escape and the mission to rescue Miller. This is both to facilitate Snake's physical rehabilitation after escaping from the hospital as well as getting used to his new cyborg arm.
  • There's also an unspecified time skip between missions, given that you rescue D.D. as a pup after Episode 4, but is later a full grown adult by Episode 12, implying that at least several months have gone by since then.
  • Another time skip takes place in the true ending, set in 1995, during the events of the first Metal Gear itself.
• Title Drop: Two notable instances. One occurs in one of the cassette tapes recorded during Snake and Ocelot's initial journey to Afghanistan, where the latter explains to the former how he's experiencing phantom pain in his missing arm, while the other happens during Miller's speech to Diamond Dogs in Chapter 2, in which he mentions how Skull Face's actions have left them suffering from a metaphorical phantom pain which lingers on despite his death.
• To Be Continued: Episode 28 ends on a cliffhanger, complete with the words "To Be Continued" appearing on the screen.
• Too Dumb to Live: During the hospital escape, there's a man who's understandably scared. His response to this fear is to grab onto an emaciated coma patient who can barely move under his own power and wail "Help me! I don't want to die!" This is probably what brought him to the attention of the soldier who shoots him.
• Took a Level in Badass: Prior installments primarily featured the cardboard box as a viable method of stealth, with later adding the ability to shoot secondary weapons through the handle holes. The Phantom Pain gives the cardboard box (and Snake) a slew of new functions. Such as being able to pop out the top to shoot enemies, use CQC on enemies that get close enough to Fulton them away, dive out the side in case guards come to check the box, attach posters to the box to distract guards, place it in the middle of the road to temporarily block traffic and if you sprint while using the box and press the dive button, you can do a powerslide on the box, which serves as a quick method of transportation if you are on a steep enough hill. Also in previous games, when equipping the box, you could only move in crouch mode, while this time you can move in prone, crouch, and stand mode, as well as sprint in the box.
• Too Awesome to Use: The Parasite Suit. Mimic the powers of the Skulls! Except... not really. The Mist obscures your vision as much as the enemies, it even works against both enemy vehicles and enemy choppers, reducing their line of sight to an absolutely puny 10 meters and as long as the Mist effect remains active and you keep away from the 10 meter vision they have for ground-based enemies (as enemy choppers are, quite literally, blind as a bat during the mist effect) and you yourself can easily see through the mist with Grade 4 or higher NVG, thus allowing you to execute scenarios that would normally result in causing a Combat Alert Phase to occur. The Invisibility is functionally identical to the cheaper, and far easier to use, Stealth Camo, and Armor lets one survive non-pitfall heights that would normally kill you from that height as well as provide a very sturdy sheet of armor around you for the duration of it being active. You can even survive shots from both Extreme variants of both Quiet and the Skull Snipers that would normally kill you in one hit when they successfully hit you with their sniper rifles. Unfortunately, each has limited uses, compared to the raw, free defense increase of the Battle Dress. Oh, and in order to use any of these, you need to gather individual Parasite ingredients belonging to each category, which can only be obtained by extracting Skulls from replays of their respective fights during Main Missions. Make sure you kill only three so that you can extract them before killing the final, fourth Skull, so that way you'll have more than enough time to extract all four of them successfully before they manage to flee. And the best part about this? With the exception of the Camo Parasite Cartridges, both the Armor and Mist effects do not negate S-Ranking on missions, no bullshit. All-in-all, these abilities are VERY useful when used correctly and used sparingly to avoid wasting your resources calling in a supply drop for more of a specific parasite cartridge. Sadly, it can't be used in FOBs...
• Took A Level In Jerk Ass:
  • Huey. He's become a positively loathsome Evil Cripple suffering from a horrendous case of the Never My Fault trope.
  • Miller somewhat, as well. Compared to Ocelot acting as the more level-headed Mission Control, Miller is more aggressive; whenever Ocelot is encouraging you to take a nonlethal or passive approach, Miller is usually the one taking the genocide route. It all plays into the Revenge Before Reason aspect of the characters' shifts.
• Tranquil Fury: In The Stinger, Miller finally finds out Big Boss's long-term plan: the legendary soldier is in hiding and is building Outer Heaven without any input from his former friends whereas the man Miller knows as "Venom Snake" is actually a decoy. The one who delivers these news is not even the real Big Boss, but rather Ocelot. Miller, who earlier lost two of his limbs and almost his life, feels utterly betrayed and speaks with venomous hatred in his voice as he vows to send Big Boss to hell.
• A Twinkle in the Sky: Supply drops you call appear as this to tell you where they're coming from.

U-Z

• Unstable Equilibrium: If a player spends GMP on supply drops, airstrikes, or an expensive loadout, it's gone for good – even upon reverting to a checkpoint, restarting the mission, or returning to the ACC. This can lead to a situation where a struggling player goes further and further into debt after every death – it's possible to lose money after completing a mission because the support costs were so high. Then, of course, any new money will automatically go towards the deficit instead of upgrading weapons, meaning the player is less prepared for the next mission, and so on. Of course, good players will consistently get the most GMP to buy the weapons they don't really need.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Averted. You can swap your weapons out with whatever the enemy is using, though there's really little need to do so unless you're seriously low on GMP, as your own weapons will generally outclass theirs, and in many cases take the same ammo. The only exception is Skull Face's Mare's Leg, which the player only gets to use in a cutscene.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Guards will immediately take notice of whatever bullet flies past them and hits a wall, but when confronted with a flying prosthetic arm, they won't even bat an eye.
• Useless Useful Stealth: A rather large departure from the traditional Metal Gear formula; due to the game rewarding different play styles, you can still score high by killing as many people as possible, being accurate, and finishing quickly as opposed to being stealthy.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: OKB Zero serves as this for Chapter One. A huge Soviet base built into the ruins of an imposing medieval castle, it's been commandeered and occupied by XOF to use as a base from which to activate Metal Gear Sahelanthropus. What keeps it from being a Disc-One Final Dungeon is that Chapter Two consists largely of Remixed Levels and side content, thus making OKB Zero one of the last "new" areas the player gets to visit.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Killing enemy soldiers lowers your mission score.
• Villain Song: "Sins of the Father" can be considered one for Snake and his allies.
• Visual Pun: The mission area in Episode 18 is shaped like a diamond.
• Warp Whistle: The game lets you teleport miles across Afghanistan, the Angola-Zaire border, or his sprawling Mother Base by hiding in a cardboard box on delivery platforms. There's a brief black screen with the sounds of a delivery truck picking up a box and dropping it off, and boom, Snake will be smack dab in the middle of a secret Soviet base or a blood diamond mine with no one any the wiser.
• Weather-Control Machine: Your Support Team can basically be this if they're high enough level so that they gain the ability to manually change the weather.
• Weather of War: The weather changes in real-time, which can change how you approach certain situations. The iDroid allows you to see the local forecast so you can plan ahead, though it isn't always right.
• Welcome to Corneria: Kaz and Ocelot tend to repeat phrases based on things Venom Snake sees or does. Kaz, for example, says "He's coming too? Roger that." or "You're going to extract him?" every time Snake Fultons an enemy soldier.
• Welcome to Hell: In the opening of The Phantom Pain, Snake wonders to himself if he's in hell after waking up from a nine year coma with a prosthetic left arm.
• Wham Line:
  • A comparatively minor example, but during Quiet's interrogation:
    Ocelot: It doesn't matter why she's here. She works for you now. She's in love with the legend.
    Miller: What makes you so sure?
    Ocelot: I was the same way once.
  • In Episode 46:
    Operator: [referring to Big Boss] Well, he's stabilized, but it took too long. He's in a coma.
    Miller: [gesturing at the player's POV] What about him!?
    Operator: Oh. He took some shrapnel... to the head.
  • In the same episode, the opening credit serves as one.
    STARRING
    Big Boss
    [...]
    Punished "Venom" Snake
• Wham Shot: The photograph during the final story mission shows the player and Big Boss in a group photo.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Near the end of the game, Eli and the child soldiers steal Metal Gear Sahelanthropus and fly away, and their actions afterwards are only briefly addressed by a Wall of Text in the true ending. However, there was originally a mission planned that would have explained their whereabouts - the Collector's Edition bonus disc shows an unfinished/unimplemented mission where Snake and Diamond Dogs would have assaulted Eli's base on a remote African island, destroying Sahelanthropus, most of the child soldiers dying and Eli being rescued by Mantis when Snake leaves him to die.
• What the Hell, Player?: Harming D-Dog when you first come across him in Afghanistan will cause Miller to call you out for it. Killing child soldiers or any Diamond Dogs staff on Mother Base likewise elicits harsh reprimanding from either Miller or Ocelot as well as a game over.
• Whip Sword: Sahelanthropus is equipped with an archaea whip that can also straighten itself into a sword-like implement.
• Whole Costume Reference:
  • Tretij Rebenok looks suspiciously like Psycho Mantis, while Eli wears an outfit similar to what Liquid Snake later wears. Justified Trope as they are the same characters.
  • Venom's standard fatigues with its scarf resembles what The Boss wore during Operation Snake Eater, complete with ponytail and scarf, while the shirtless version of the fatigues also makes him look a bit more like a male counterpart to Quiet. The new Diamond Dogs sneaking suit resembles the one that would later be worn by Solid Snake in Shadow Moses, while the new Battle Dress is very similar to the ones worn by Solidus Snake's hi-tech soldiers in the Big Shell.
  • The leather jacket resembles a Spear Counterpart of EVA's attire when she leaves Snake at the end of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.
  • Skull Face wears a rather wild west inspired outfit with a Stetson hat, cowboy boots and domino mask, making him resemble a twisted version of The Lone Ranger.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The opening of the game is basically a very literal interpretation to the lyrics to "Diamond Dogs" by David Bowie, which mention "Pull[ing] you out of the oxygen tent" (Snake has just awakened from a coma), "Crawling down the alley on your hands and knees" (Snake can't even walk until some digoxin takes effect to help him), "your silicone hump and a ten-inch stump" (Snake's left arm is amputated, leaving a stump), and "The elevator's broke, so he slides down a rope" (The Floating Boy destroys the elevators that Snake and Ishmael intended to use, leaving them to find another route out of the hospital). Notably, "Diamond Dogs" was originally intended to play in the opening, but this was changed in development.
  • Hal's childhood, to a lesser extent, is similar to the events of a certain influencial mecha anime. His abusive/distant father forced him to pilot an experimental mecha, although unlike EVA-01, Sahelanthropus doesn't contain a soul, rather it's The Mammal Pod that houses Strangelove's body.
• Winged Unicorn: The hospital level features a setpiece where a horse with a horn and wings made of fire chases after Snake. Later in the game, you can also develop the Furicorn armor for D-Horse, which makes him look aesthetically similar to the Man on Fire's horse.
• You Can Barely Stand: In the first level, Snake literally has to crawl his way through the hospital.
• You Have Researched Breathing:
  • After being mysteriously absent in Ground Zeroes, knocking on walls to attract guard attention has returned, now accomplished with Snake shaking his robotic limb.
  • As in Peace Walker, you can upgrade cardboard boxes, and actually need to research them in the first place in the tutorial. Lampshaded by Ocelot, who is a bit baffled by this but says he was told you would want to research them first.
• You Will Not Evade Me: One of the custom forms of Snake's prosthetic arm is the Hand of Jehuty, a device that can be fired at enemies. If it makes contact with them, it teleports the target to your position.
• Zeerust: Deliberately invoked. Some of the technologies that will appear in-game are projects from The '80s that were either prototypes or concepts that for one reason or another never made it to production. The game itself will have a 20 Minutes into the Future feel from a 1980s point of view.
• Zombie Gait: The Mist Skulls, when activated, lurch around at high speed, making the already-unnatural Zombie Gait into something even more unsettling.

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A Hideo Kojima Game

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