I just beat the game yesterday and I was very disappointed by the lack of actual gameplay. It took me 17 hours to beat it and in a fit of hyperbole, suggested to my friends that there was less than 5 hours of gameplay. It was probably more like 6-7.

I love the metal gear series, I've been playing since nintendo. I expected this game to be story heavy, and I expected it to have more story than gameplay, but I wanted more gameplay than I got. Couldn't they have just extended the time I got to spend in the areas a little longer?

It's strange to me that they spent so much time developing the gameplay mechanincs (shooting is totally different and you have more sneaking stuff to do) and yet never really let the player use those mechanics.

It's also strange that the game got such high marks. The lack of adequate gameplay alone docks it huge marks in my book. What's there is amazing. Why wasn't I allowed to play it?

The high scores it's getting bring up another problem I have discovered. This is not a new idea. After playing through this long conclusion to the series, one thing hit me about videogames: while it is a platform conducive to complex stories and characters, the writing for videogames just sucks. Nothing in this game made me think. "wow that was well written," like reading a good book or watching a good movie. What I got was "war has changed, war has changed, proxy proxy proxy proxy, war has changed, war has changed." The "war has changed" theme, started at the beginning, was a great idea and I was thinking "hmm this might end up being well written." But then they repeated it forever and ruined any subtlety they had going. Also, what was with saying proxy so much? There are other words for that you know.

The writing isn't absolute trash though, it's functional and adequate. But functional and adequate are not nearly good enough. I keep hearing stories about people tearing up about the ending. I never got teary-eyed. Maybe they are more attached to the other games than I am? No I just bought a PS3 only for MGS4 on Friday. In fact the MG series has been driving my console buying habits for the last 10 or more years.

I don't know why they cried, but it definitely wasn't the writing. Even I felt some sadness because of the concept of what was happening, but the writing, the dialogue etc. made me angry and a lot of the time brought me out of the experience.

My point is that this game would have gotten high marks in my book if it was so well written that I didn't care that I didn't really get a gaming experience out of it. But that is not the case. Don't get me wrong, I liked the game (except for the short gameplay), and I liked the way the story ended. I just wish I didn't have to sit through a lot of that bad writing to get to the end.

That's all.