What is Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain?

Ground Zeroes, released in March 2014, is a compact rescue mission on a rain soaked black site, Camp Omega, set months after Peace Walker. It introduced the Fox Engine's open infiltration: one map, many routes, no cutscene walls between play and story. Its brevity at full price was controversial, but as a demo of the new engine's feel it was unmatched, and its ending, the destruction of Mother Base, is the hinge of the whole Big Boss arc.

The Phantom Pain followed in September 2015, the last Metal Gear directed by Hideo Kojima, whose departure from Konami is covered on its own page in this shelf. Big Boss wakes from a nine year coma, builds Diamond Dogs on a new Mother Base, and hunts the organization behind his fall across two open world maps. The systems, buddy companions, base invasions, weather, and freeform infiltration, are the series' mechanical summit, built for a hundred hours of improvisation.

The story's unfinished edges are part of its record: a concluding mission's content surfaced only in partial form in the collector's edition's bonus materials, and the game's themes of language, revenge and identity are carried as much by cassette tapes as by cutscenes. The twist about who the player has been controlling recontextualizes the entire series timeline, which is why this game, for all its gaps, is argued about more than any other entry.

The physical releases span the split: Ground Zeroes as a budget priced disc across two console generations, The Phantom Pain in standard, SteelBook and collector's editions, the Western collector's package including a half scale replica of Snake's prosthetic arm, and the later Definitive Experience bundling both parts with the online mode's extras. Japanese editions again followed their own store bonus patterns.

Guides matched the scale: the official Phantom Pain guides in Japan and the West are among the largest single game books of their generation, mapping two open worlds and a base economy, while Ground Zeroes received slimmer treatment in keeping with its size. The pair of books on a shelf is the two part release made visible.