Having played Portable Ops (fine), Peace Walker (fine), and Acid 1 and 2 (FUCK YEAH): 5 was still mostly nonsense.

All you get from PW/PO (since PW largely felt like a redo of PO):

1. This random lesbian was in love with The Boss but ended up fucking Huey and is Otacon’s mom. And somehow that is the least problematic portion of her arc.
2. Paz is basically the jailbait version of EVA in that she is a spy who betrays you but also everyone wants to fuck her. And don’t ask how old she is because nobody wants to know that.
3. Chico is your loveable sidekick that you never really gave a shit about but he is like 12
4. Big Boss has either stopped or started using Big Boss as a title for the umpteenth time because we can’t play as someone not called “Snake” and has something that may or may not be Outer Heaven built on an oil rig.

A friend summed it up perfectly: Ground Zeroes works a LOT better if you pretend that Peace Walker didn’t exist and this is just “the adventures of Naked Snake”. Similar to how we never really know what Solid and Otacon did as an NGO before they became international terrorists in MGS2.