T w e n t y S i d e d
Hideo Kojima has made lots of games and most of those games are absolute bangers. Metal Gear Solid 1 and 3 are seen as masterpieces by many. I personally love 2, 4, and 5 as well but their receptions were a bit more mixed. Regardless I think it’s safe to say that the Metal Gear franchise as a whole has a home in the heart of many gamers. At least those of us of a certain age.
One quick note I should make is that I haven’t played Snatcher or Policenauts. I’ve heard good things but I’m writing about the bigger more widely released titles.
Kojima’s games are all a bit quirky. His main villains tend to scenery munch like a soap opera antagonist. They also have some of the simultaneously lamest and best names ever created like “Shoot Gunman.” His protagonists and antagonists both tend to have super powers of some sort, though they’re explained to be technological advancements or biological anomalies. In Metal Gear there’s nanomachines that grant various enhancements as well as supernatural abilities like those of Psycho Mantis and his father, the Sorrow. In Death Stranding there’s future tech that is more diverse than NANO MACHINES SON, but also contains the DOOMS mutations that are mostly biological in origin. Basically he creates anime baddies and paints them with a coat of “kind of close to reality” paint and ships them out. The crazy thing is that it works.
Revolver Ocelot is genuinely one of the best written characters of all time. Depending on what you believe he’s either an incredible anti-hero or one of very few incredibly anti-villain. Snake is a whitebread Heroman™ but on multiple occasions he has shown true courage and conviction when it mattered. Big Boss is an onion of a man, not unlike Shrek. Layers upon layers of depth to his thoughts, plans, and motivations. Big Boss’s actions during Metal Gear Solid 3 are without a doubt heroic and tragic but he veers of the path of righteousness because of the siren call of “peace” by force. Higgs might be a silly lil’ edgelord but you believe in his conviction and he presents as a clear primary threat in a world that is rife with literal monsters. And Sam is a psychologically and physically scarred man with the world’s fate thrust upon his shoulders. Basically, Kojima has a good idea of what it is that makes up a good character.
The stories he tells with those characters are quite lauded too. Even games that fans tend to think of as weaker entries like Metal Gear Solid 2 have stories that people enjoyed and appreciated. Death Stranding 1 and 2 are more divisive but it’s my article and I’ve decided that those games are good. Which all makes it even more of a shame that his hands got swatted away from the Silent Hill franchise when Konami decided that they were more interested in pachinko machines than game production. Like, I know Kojima is a pompous dickhead but he made good video games. Please let him bully a bunch of overworked, underpaid staff into pushing a game to triple its budget and 2 years past its deadline. It would benefit me and that’s all I care about. >:(
The mad man makes beautiful products and I look forward to their release every time. I know that I’m bound to be disappointed at some point in the future, but for the time being I have a creator in video games that I can count on for a good time. Like Nicholas Cage and Tim Curry in movies. Maybe they fit the part, maybe not. No matter what, it’s going to be a fun watch.
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
Netscape 1997
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
Game at the Bottom
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
Who Broke the In-Game Economy?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
I’ve never played a Metal Gear Solid. This isn’t an intentional snub; I’ve just never sought them out.
But didn’t one of the MGS games have a woman who wore almost no clothes, with the ridiculous reason given that she breathed through her skin? She also was incapable of talking for some reason?
I remember reading an article that discussed this character and how deeply sexist it all was. Yuck.
That would be 5. I’ve never played them either but I’m moderately familiar with the series, including some remakes. The Metal Gear games have traded (at times, to be fair) in both horrible female character tropes and female warrior badasses. But more overwhelmingly, weirdness. Ethan is certainly correct in pointing out how deep and well-written several main characters and villains are. Kojima also implements some deep concepts (biting, even; at times) supported by the writing, at least once he starts getting some free reign. But at a certain level, like the first couple of layers of the iceberg, a lot of things seem more bizarre in my opinion.
Very interesting, because I genuinely despise the Metal Gear Solid games. Hate them with a passion.
It’s hard to define. I think it’s that I’ve never seen storyteling that seems so…hostile towards the player’s actions, to making basic sense, and even to it’s own internal logic. Dead characters constantly come back to life no explaination. People have weird superpowers or conditions* for ill-explained reasons, or just no reason, then they die, then they’re back with something else now!
That thing that was established earlier in the game isn’t true and never was, you fool! It was all a trick! Until suddenly it is true again, and always was! Why did you think it wasn’t true!
(Fun fact: this fake-notfake-fake again story beat can actually happen *in the same cutscene*, so you just sit and watch the game contradict itself.)
Which is annoying, to be sure, but the thing that really gets me is that there is so much story. Another game might have these same elements, but be quick about it – Metal Gear Solid, however, has abominably long cutscenes full of pretentious dialogue, nonsense rambling and contradictions. Over a third of a game’s runtime can be these god damned cutscenes.
The most memorable example (which I’ve used before) is from the second game, where you have to rescue a chacacter’s sister from captivity and escort to safety. Naturally, if she dies or gets captured, it’s game over. At the end of the section there’s a robocop-style shooting challenge: a boss character that you’ve already killed jumps out of literal nowhere and holds a knife to her throat. You have to use a sniper rifle and shoot him while he’s using her as a shield – take too long and he kills her, game over.
So you do this and it’s then revealed that he stabbed her anyway, somewhere else AND SHE DIES, because f**k you, player. Failure Was Forbidden Until It Was Mandatory, and now we’re going to have a 20-minute cutscene saying goodbye and giving her brother a parrot named after her.
Anyway. Its fascinating, because people genuinely love this series and I just don’t get it – especially praising the story, of all things. I feel a bit like someone reading a load of 5-star reviews for a restaurant that serves dog turds. Did I miss something? Am I crazy? What?
*there’s actually a cutscene where Quiet (the mostly-naked ‘breathes through her skin’ woman Leslee mentioned above, yes, that is the character’s name) starts playfighting with another character and they’re splashing water on each other. So…you’re drowning her? For fun? Oh no, she’s fine, because ‘she breathes through her skin’ was a fig-leaf excuse and a stupid idea to begin with.
EDIT: this wasn’t supposed to be a reply to Leslee. Curse you WordPress
That reminds me that I own Zone of the Enders 1 and 2 for several years and never played them. A demo a demo of ZOE1 on … eh … PS2? I remember as fun, though.
The only Kojima game I’ve played (to my knowledge) was the first Death Stranding and I will say the game is beautiful, the music is excellent, most of the mechanics are good and traversal gave me probably the most kinaesthetic feel in video games. I also think a lot of the story beats were great, the way the setting is obviously “weird” and pitches things at the player every now and then to prevent them from feeling too familiar and keep them just a touch off balance was for a long time very good… but then it kinda lost me as it started ramping up towards the finale. Not in the sense that I did not understand what the story was doing, more in the sense that it started taking such creative liberties with science and common sense that it somewhat pulled me out of the experience.
Having said that I have seen people describe Death Stranding in particular as “this is what happens when there is absolutely nobody around to reign Kojima in”. No idea how much truth there is to it but I am not against trying another game at some point in the future.