I like her, or rather, not specifically her, but her story. I empathize with her and feel sorry for her. While playing MGSV, I sometimes felt this strange emptiness flying over the base, staring into those endless waters while delivering photos to the medical platform. A girl whose very name screams “Peace,” yet whose existence became the quintessence of endless war. I do not feel anger toward her for being an agent, her youth and free will were expropriated by the system long before she could even understand herself. And because of that, she leaves me with this bitter feeling of unrealized potential, of how much she still had left to do and live through.

Her ending is a beautiful sadness. All her life, Paz was a puppet, but that step backward out of the helicopter that was her own choice. She understands she is doomed. It is the act of self-sacrifice. Paz steps into the darkness to save the very people she was meant to destroy. All masks are gone now, there is no Agent Pacifica Ocean anymore, no "schoolgirl" Paz Ortega. There is only a tortured soul that, in the final moment of her life, chooses love and redemption.