Imagine a series of large installations, like the one found in Ground Zeroes, surrounded by desert and you'll have an idea of how the map in The Phantom Pain works. His powerful persona returns after the intro (and after some time has passed) as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain leads players to an open-world region of Afghanistan. It illustrates how far the soldier has fallen from an all-powerful military leader to a weak man struggling to evade danger. He struggles to reactivate his long dormant muscles, spending the majority of the introduction on his belly. Acting as both a reminder of Big Boss's ordeal and a tutorial, the game's protagonist awakens gaunt and feeble after a nine-year coma. Somewhere between 1984, where The Phantom Pain begins, and 1995, where we meet a rookie soldier named Snake (a genetically-altered clone of the Boss) in the MSX title Metal Gear, Big Boss becomes the franchise's primary villain.įor two days, with a preview build of The Phantom Pain in hand, I tried to uncover the Big Boss' secrets and attempt to learn how a good soldier can go bad.
Big Boss' physical transformation leads to changes in his motivation as well.