MGS V: The Phantom Pain (Chapter 2)

So... I think I've "beat" MGS V: Phantom Pain. It's hard to be sure, considering:
- Each mission is framed with credits like a TV episode
- Missions after "Chapter 1" consist of a handful of new story missions and a bunch of redone earlier missions with increased difficulty in several ways
- The story doesn't have a clean ending. The metal gear fight at the end of Chapter 1 is really the closest thing to one, wrapping up some of the main plot threads while leaving a ton of others dangling.

But, I guess "The Man Who Sold The World" is essentially what passes for a final mission in the game, with a few story-important things that can be done before or after. That missions lays out the biggest reveal of the game and ties things (a little bit anyway) into the early mythos of Metal Gear. In itself, it's not as dissatisfying as some rumors led me to belief, but it is MGS-levels of unnecessary complexity.

I also finished out Quiet's story. There's... so much good and so much bad there. No amount of awkward justification can truly overcome the simple fact that the character's visual design is meant to be sexy fan service. The reason given just doesn't hold up when you consider other examples and can't explain away the camera angles and character poses.
Yet... I really find I like the character. Her silence is maddening, because I really wished to know more about why she was willing to switch sides. She's tactically useful on missions and she's an unparalleled badass in cut scenes. There seems a genuine respect between Quiet and Snake, but the lack of dialogue between them makes it unclear. Watching her departure is tragic...

The game has made me wonder (not for the first time) if there's some degree of cultural influence involved that I don't grok. I feel like there are a lot of Japanese sci-fi stories, including MGS and several anime I've seen, that take the sci-fi/mystery concept and run with it so hard they forget that answers are part of mysteries. I wonder if that's more a cultural storytelling norm there. But then, it's not like the US has never done that either, I suppose, so maybe I'm looking for patterns that aren't there.
Mystery adds a certain charm and draws the audience in, certainly, but some storytellers seem compelled to keep piling upon it rather than offering resolution. That reaches a point where things just become silly. The MGS series has often felt like it simply embraced that. The end result (if this is truly the final installment) is a mess of a story, yet it was a pretty fun ride.

The game itself remains excellent, even if the story is a convoluted mess of fake-outs and origin stories. It would have been nice if things could have been tied together better - and there are rumors that the game was originally meant to be three chapters, which could have wrapped up a lot more story, instead of what is essentially one and a half.