Warriors Orochi mentioned. You are my new best friend.
I always thought WW was a spin-off of WL, which as you said, is a spin-off of ML… which is… my head hurts.
I find it funny how games that are technically sequels are now their own spinoff series like Yoshi's Island being Mario World 2 ad Wario Land being Super Mario Land 3.
The PSP version was a bestseller in Japan, and the HD version sold around 1 million copies in 2015. If what Wikipedia says is true, then the game did pretty well for a graphically updated PSP release. I assume they decided to focus on other, more profitable projects in their opinion, such as FF16 and FF7R. Honestly, I don't know; I'm just guessing.
Isn't Donkey Kong Country a spin off too?
the tomb raider and deus ex reboots sold about 10 million units each, and were considered failures by square enix. ff13 took three games to reach the same amount. there's no true telling what their standards are for success and failure.
it's canon. it is mentioned in peace walker, though kaz is kind of low level insulting the game when he refers to the event.
I was planning to play that one someday but it's obvious that it was a test ground for Peace Walker.
it definitely plays weird. it primarily uses snake eaters control scheme but with a couple of tweaks. and the game tries to emphasize recruiting random soldiers and npcs, but i don't recall it impacting game play too much. been a few years since i played it. i think you could play as a nurse and run around armed with machine guns. somecallmejohnny has a review about the game and he noticed some striking similarities to met gear: ghost babel for the gbc. it comes off a bit as a stealth remake almost.
So... Pokémon but in MGS?
i'd say peace walker and phantom pain match that far better. you get soldiers with all sorts of different stats and abilities. and there's an interesting bit of plot that happens in peace walker and carries over to phantom pain. if you want, i could tell you about it. it's partially a spoiler, but rather unique in nature.
Which makes me think that Konami could've made an actually great Metal Gear spinoff involving the soldiers that isn't Survive...
we ignore survive. it never happened. the game itself makes it a self-contained nonsensical spin off.
If you don't ignore Survive you get a pretty fun co-op survival game that builds off of MGSV's stellar gameplay in subtle ways. It isn't perfect and the story is nonsense, but it's fun and it goes for dirt cheap these days.
I'd totally take MGR as canon (and it doesn't even contradict the main MGS series nor retcons anything big anyway).
I think the issue goes beyond that:
you have a point, but i like having good stories with mgs. survive doesn't have any substantive story to go with the good game play.
rising is canon to the timeline. it does take place a few years later than the rest of the games, and doesn't rely heavily on the previous games for the story. it's a pretty good start point to jump into the series. it was one of the first games i played in the series after mgs1.
