Watch the whole Metal Gear Solid saga before The Phantom Pain hits
Metal Gear Solid is a huge series. Get on board without spending 100+ hours staring at last-gen graphics.
Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain may well be the very last entry in the series, and as such it's expected to tie up a great many loose ends in the circular saga.
It'll probably be an enjoyable story even if you've played any of the others, of course, and if you feel confused at any point you can just chalk it up as the appropriate reaction to one of Hideo Kojima's epics.
But if you did want to catch up before what's likely to be one of 2015's hottest releases, you could do worse than this playlist of KefkaProduction's marvellous Metal Gear Movie series.
Presented in release order, the series covers Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2 before launching into the Metal Gear Solid series that blew up the franchise back in the PSOne era and is still going strong today. Even hardcore fans could probably benefit from a refresher - especially if they skipped Portable Ops, Peace Walker or the original two Metal Gear games. Spin-off Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance isn't included, which is fine as it's probably non-canonical.
The 28 hours of footage here presented is only a fraction of the time you'd have to spend playing through the series to get the same result. Hey, if you think about how much time you've spent on Netflix watching American dramas, it doesn't seem so daunting. The first video is embedded below.
Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain releases on September 1 for PlayStation 3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. The PC version follows two weeks later.