Metal Gear Solid V is not just a masterpiece, it’s also creator Hideo Kojima’s farewell to the series

When Hideo Kojima was a young boy, his parents introduced a daily ritual. Each evening, the family would sit down to watch a movie together. Kojima wasn’t allowed to go to bed till the film had finished, even if it contained sex scenes. His experience was, he has says, the “opposite” of how it is for most children. Those kids had to finish their cauliflower. Kojima had to finish his Coppola.

This childhood ritual seeded in Kojima a deep love of cinema, which can be seen running throughout the Metal Gear series of military-themed video games that he’s directed over the past three decades. These expansive games of khaki-coloured hide-and-seek are routinely interrupted by an overabundance of exposition-laden cutscenes, which has led some to suggest that their creator is just a frustrated film director. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain – for the PlayStation 3 and 4, and Xbox 360 and Xbox One – puts an end to all that talk. This is a sumptuous, deluxe, groundbreaking game, and proof positive that Kojima is the master of the medium.

The year is 1984 and you are Big Boss, the leader of a private military contractor, primarily working in Afghanistan and Zaire, taking on freelance assignments to rescue prisoners of war from the Russians, for example, or blow up strategic military assets. You work without moral judgment. “The world calls for wet-work,” says one of your company’s co-founders, early in the game. “And we answer. No greater good. No just cause.”

Big Boss, like some kind of special forces Mary Poppins, carries a bottomless bag of tools and toys, and is supported by an increasingly competent team back home.

Metal Gear Solid’s familiar rhythms of commando-crawling through the tall grass, ducking behind walls, luring guards with careful taps and whistles, and popping off tranquiliser darts are all present. Veterans of last year’s Ground Zeroes amuse-bouche will also recognise the pleasingly clutter-free screen and the now essential “reflex mode”, which triggers a few seconds of slow motion the instant you’re spotted by a guard, offering a moment’s grace in which you can attempt to incapacitate your captor. Less familiar is the vast playpen in which you operate, traversed either on foot, by horse or other means, and filled with things to do.