The Metal Gear game that is controversial due to it being not being directed by Hideo Kojima and it's place in the canon of the series or is it canon? I've dabbled in superhero comics and many long running franchises in different mediums, canon in a lot of them tends to be fickle in the long run. Metal Gear itself is a series with many retcons over the years so it's better not to get hung up over it. With that said, I did play it on PSP over a decade ago, what turned me away were the controls and the lack of voice acting during the "codec" calls and the reading needed to be done. That and Peace Walker was considered to be Portable Ops but much improved on top of the former being on the MGS HD collection with improved controls. I ultimately just ended up watching a cutscenes movie compliation of PO. In recent years, I did start to get obessesed over portable spin offs and I decided to give PO a proper go from start to finish.
As a whole, PO is just an okay game. It's easy to see where Peace Walker and Phantom Pain would improve upon this in terms of gameplay. This isn't even a case where this is a "non canon" portable Metal Gear that does certain things better than the main canon series like Ghost Babel was. In terms of gameplay, everything in PO is done better in PW and TPP. One improvement is that there is no grinding for the "true" ending like in those two games. In PO, you beat Gene and its done and due to that PO despite not being something I consider good doesn't overstay it's welcome at least.
The best things about Portable Ops is the music and story. The ambient sneaking music does a good job at getting the player in the mood. The story is pretty decent. I'm not an MGS story super fan but it's rather impressive how many voiced cinematics they snuck in considering it was on a UMD and for a portable system like the PSP. The comic art is well drawn if some of the shots can be awkward with the lack of backgrounds drawn for some them and it can just look like the characters are in a void empty space. Not all of the cutscenes are like this but some of them can be.
Gene and Cunningham are decent villains. You surprisingly know them more than majority of the villains in MGS3. Gene is also an interesting mirror reflection of what Naked Snake would become later in the series much like God of War's Persphone or Star Wars' Count Dooku. He even does more villainous things than the Boss does outside of beat up Snake or tell him to go back. He managed to make Snake scream and get him angry. The whole prophecy with Elisa is a little a weird with the whole destiny thing but I can overlook it since it takes more than a destiny reveal to ruin a story for me. Roy Campbell being my favorite character in the series didn't even need to be there since he had barely anything to do outside of being Snake's advisor. You could've had anyone or Kaz Miller since the latter would pop up in later games in the Big Boss timeline.
This is where the praise ends, if you play Metal Gear for the story, you might get your fill with PO especially if you disliked TPP's excuse plot.
Gameplay side of things is not so good. Not bad but also not good and much of the potential frustration could've been alleviated with right stick controls and save states on PPSSPP.
Stealth is much like MGS3 and much like the issues I had with that, guard sightlines are inconsistent. Sure you get a radar of sorts giving vague locations on where guards are but it doesn't include sightlines so there's a good chance that you could get caught and not have any idea where the guard saw you. Sometimes, they will investigate, other times it will be a full on alert. This was never an issue with the "fixed camera" MGS games since the soliton radar showed the player where guards were and if you were in their sightlines or not. TPP would have detection arrows that gave a better idea of enemy awareness to the player.
To add to this, both long and close range tactics to take out guards are unreliable. Knocking out guards with the tranq gun can be a game in of itself due to the game's aim sensitivity in first person. CQC is heavily nerfed too. CQC slam is not the powerhouse it once was. You need to press the CQC button multiple times for the slam animation to activate and if it works you need to slam than one or two more times to take them down. Sneaking up on them can also be a game of chance too since it could lead to an alert due to the grab animation not always working.
The recruitment system which is what the game is based around is tedious and also half baked. Much has been said on dragging guards to the truck but if you do this early game and actively recruit every guard you find in early levels, you are set. The thing you need to use the recruits for is the "spy" unit. Just reassign the same recruits in the spy unit on certain levels and use the day waiting feature and then you can get past much of the game. Only issue is that you can do it 3 times but just load up a level and abort mission and it resets.
This is also how you bring health and stamina back since it doesn't refill automatically inbetween missions. Stamina only matters on the final boss since Gene's mind control attack can quickly drain the stamina bar and can cause a game over.
The bosses are challenging because they have hitscan attacks that you have to tank while also being damage sponges except Null. With the Null fights, you can't shoot in third person with default controls and hit him while he reloads.
Overall, PO is okay with it's story and brevity being what saves it. Peace Walker and Phantom Pain are better in terms of gameplay but this was an interesting first attempt to what the later Big Boss games would do.
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