I think a lot of people love later MGS games, and that's fine, but as someone who loved MGS 1&2, the series was never the same for me after that.
3 is a great game, but I felt it was lacking the intimacy of setting that 1 & 2 had.
I hated 4. It was just not good. The gameplay felt like a dumbing down of MGS3's more linear level design/method of progression. Just a corridor stealth game that had fake open areas. As for the story, well, the less said the better.
Peace Walker felt too mission-based, and the sense of tension was lost, but it definitely felt like an evolution of the MGS3 formula that was heading in a better direction. At this point I'd stopped caring about the plot.
I didn't even finish MGSV. The game felt like it wasn't valuing my time in any meaningful way. A shame because, mechanically, it feels like the most realised vision of what Kojima wanted MGS3 to be. But the mission design was terrible, and why bother following the story when nobody bothered to finish it?
Also, MGSV marked the end of the series' memorable boss battles, which had been on the decline into cookie-cutter template bosses starting with MGS4, through to boring robots with Peace Walker, to basically non-entities with MGSV.
I think the series has changed, and so it should, but on the way it lost a lot of what made me love it. That's a big shame.
