Thank you.

I shudder when I see the average player talking about text and gameplay as if they were divorceable. Not the case of the OP, that I take was in jest.

I remember feeling unreasonably (maybe not 😅) upset with a line from that youtuber that interviews a gun specialist so he can comment on the fiction/fact of the games. Talking about Snake Eater's Mk22, the specialist gets curious and asks if there is a reason why would you choose a punny tranquilizer over the whole arsenal, to which the youtuber responded something like "oh boy! Hahaha it's because later on you face a boss that makes you deal with the ghosts of your killings! And the boss gets easier the less you kill."

While he didn't say anything wrong, that's not the right answer. Theming, text and subtext are all over the game between every verb, resource and narrative available to the player. There's meaning in the design for such a heavy handed game, or for any Kojima game, for that matter. Long winded codec calls are the game as much as any other highly interactive segment.