Question: Where does Ground Zeroes rank in the MGS series?

[Departed]

I've replayed Ground Zeroes several times over the years. Camp Omega is a brilliantly designed map that gives you plenty of ways in and out and has a solid "procure on site" feel to it. The mood it captures is pretty brooding and ominous and it has some neat tricks under its sleeve. But in spite of that, it still ranks at the bottom for me among MGS games. That doesn't make it bad, but it's very much a piece to a larger whole. On its own, it's a really fun mission with two other missions I enjoy, namely the missions where you kill Glaz and Palitz and the mission where you blow up the anti-air guns. There's nothing in GZ beyond those three missions that I want to come back to and for as well designed as Camp Omega may be, it's not so well designed that the game didn't get stale having all its missions in one environment for me.

I've heard a lot of people say that they were disappointed that nothing in MGSV compared to Camp Omega, but I never really agreed with that. I felt like Phantom Pain's outposts all adopted Camp Omega's design philosophy brilliantly, just on a much smaller scale which I personally prefer, since I like missions I can be done with a lot sooner. I also just appreciated the variety of settings we got in the fuller game, and enjoyed its mission variety a little more. For me, the best levels are still OKB Zero, Lufwa Valley and the R&D Platform for mission 22.

What would've helped GZ a lot is if more of the island was used for the side missions and if the game had featured at least one boss fight. Something to give a change in scenery and to have one open-ended boss encounter that's fun to come back to again and again. I think had GZ been priced like DLC for MGSV, I'd view it a lot more favorably, but for as replayable as the game is, nothing justifies even its current asking price, since it's just one mission repurposed a few times and with a few different set pieces. The fact that something like RE4Make's Separate Ways exists for $9.99 and features what is essentially an entire game with six really good fights hammers home how overpriced GZ truly was.

It's not bad by any means, and truly is an amazing stealth action experience, but it's not nearly enough for what it asks, and even just as a part of MGSV, I don't even consider it the best in show, given for all of its mission types, there was a mission in Phantom Pain that I liked more. GZ was a rescue mission and my favorite rescue mission was still Code Talker, since I like Lufwa Valley better, and that mission had way more open ended alternate scenarios, and featured a fun boss encounter. My favorite assassination mission was still War Economy or Retake The Platform since the former gave you way more Hitman-esque opportunities for creative kills and the latter is just one of my favorite missions in MGSV period. For sabotage missions, I enjoyed Red Brass more because having an entire mountainside to plot out an an ambush on a convoy feels immensely gratifying and guerilla. And for the alternative missions, I preferred the boss missions like White Mamba or Voices over the others in GZ since I really liked those fights and the gimmick missions in GZ are cute novelties but have diminishing returns once you know all the tricks.

So in the end, it still ranks at the bottom for me, but it ranks in the bottom of a series where I maintain that there are no bad Metal Gear games and GZ is one of them. Overpriced, but still a benchmark in quality for stealth action game design and the best opening mission to any game I've ever played. Definitely a better opening to MGSV than Awakening was.