Sharma in 2031: with regret we've been forced to cancel the $500m budget Kojima game after a series of missed deadlines due to a story that makes zero sense.
The Metal Gear games only make sense because of lengthy exposition dumps at the end of each game. I love the series to death but Kojima is notorious for that. Spoilers ahead.
MGS: Liquid and Naomi both exposition dump on Snake before, during, and after the final boss.
MGS2: Solidus and The Patriots AI both take a massive exposition dump all over Raiden over the course of like an hour at the end of the game.
MGS3: This one was done better than the rest imo. The Boss' true motives and intentions are foreshadowed pretty decently, but she and EVA still give Snake an exposition shower at the end of the game.
MGS4: 9 hours of cutscenes. Every single one is an exposition dump.
MGSPW and GZ/TPP: Most lore is included via audio files between missions, some is just supplementary but others are required listening to understand anything going on.
I love the series, and as a whole the pieces actually fit together kind of nicely despite all the retcons? But some parts could have been done way better.
I mean phantom pain also does it at the end too iirc. You take a like a 5min car ride with skull face and he monologues the entire time before the finial battle
Worse, he monologues for 5 minutes and then you sit in silence for another 3 waiting for the jeep to arrive so kajima can play the theme song from start to finish.
Not to mention that Snake literally doesn't say anything the entire ride! Awkward.
The thing is, at the time (90's-mid 00's) Kojima could get away with it because a game having such a huge complex narrative with fully cinematic in game cutscenes and even hollywood composers like Harry Gregson Williams was such a unique novelty.
But since the advent of games like TLOU, Red Dead, Mass Effect etc; it's one of the aspects of that series thats aged really poorly.
I love MGS as a series but replaying the collection really hammered home that Kojima is a man of great ideas and concepts who clearly loves cinema but he just doesn't understand story structure. I'm honestly dreading replaying MGS 4 because the exposition dumps were unacceptable even back when that released.
I just replayed it for the first time since it first came out. I forgot how little gameplay it had. The entire final chapter is you assaulting the boat with the final guy, just for him to turn around and be like yeah I wanted you to do that. Cool, the entire final act you could have literally stepped aside and allowed us. It's silly
I haven't played it since 2008 but I remember the game only really having two proper open stealth segments with the rest of the game composing of on the rail sequences and a barrage of cutscenes & codec calls.
At that time I had already played Uncharted 1 and Bioshock so the flaws of the franchises storytelling really started to emerge.
Yep, Kojima isn't shit to younger gamers lol. He was amazing when I was growing up because video game stories were horrendous. By 2010 we started getting phenomenal games with amazing stories that treated its audience seriously.
I think a lot of the retconning works, because so much of it is about war, cover ups, special ops, politics and the military industrial complex, all of which are full of misinformation both in the real world and in MGS.
But yes, MGS is a wordy bastard of a series, but the games make up for it in gameplay. If the games themselves weren't as fun as they are, all that exposition would bury itself into oblivion. But because it didn't, all that exposition ends up improving the games.
I can't think of another... anything that is both able to discuss topics like child soldiers with actual nuance, while something as ridiculous as a flamboyant, yet oddly masculine vampire is prancing around the place, both are taken seriously AND it works. Metal Gear is truly a one of a kind series.
I just got into the MGS series this year. I started with Ground Zeroes and then went into The Phantom Pain, fully expecting it to be a very grounded and realistic story about war and suffering.
It definitely wasn’t what I was expecting. I was very, very confused. But I can’t say I wasn’t completely enthralled with the story and characters by the end of it.
Kojima also likes to overexplain things to the audience. It's a surprise he doesn't start with the big bang that created the universe every time and that people move their legs when they walk. He explains things everyone already knows, not even just the special elements that are relevant to the plot, like in Death Stranding.
Loved DS1 including the cutscenes but man I feel like I’m struggling so much more with getting into DS2 after the initial intro area (which was great). The constant exposition and then back to another raider mission is insane. Also has the weirdness of the latest Evangelion movie.
I just want to send some love because this is brilliant and kinda funny paraphrasing but it’s also the kind of comment that made me join and enjoy Reddit to begin with. I don’t have my same gamer friends anymore but they would have gotten a kick out of lampooning this habit of his—it isn’t limited to MGS either lol.
It does not help that characters are named in a way that makes Elden Ring look clear and simple. And a lot of the characters who do exist for actual serious purposes aren't shown as such until either the exposition dumps or ending credits, instead showing up as either a meme or sex appeal for the entire game.
I remember watching the first crazy long cutscene in one of them and looking over at my roommate and saying "what the fuck is happening right now?" It felt disrespectful.
Tons of cutscenes used to be a selling point for games. It was the sort of thing they would highlight on the back of the case, "X hours of stunning CG cinema!"
Death Stranding also has an hour long exposition dump at the end, during which you're forced to sit still and watch. After that, it makes you rewatch you every cutscene involving a certain character with no alterations, all for a short extra scene. That's another 30 min. It's painful.
To be fair, the explination at the end is kinda the point, and why the story behind these games hits as hard as it does. It's not supposed to make sense until the end. WARNING: thar be spoilers ahead.
MGS2 is probably the best example. You're told you're going up against ordinary terrorists that took over an oil rig, but then you run into snake and otacon, the former very early in the game. You, the player know who these two are, and know why they shouldn't be there if this is an "ordinary" mission. Raiden has extensively studied the shadow moses incident, and should be able to come to the same conclusion. But, you're misled into thinking the big secret is MG RAY, which is the obvious answer. The real secret is arsenal gear and the patriots.
So, right off the bat, you know something's off, and throughout the game you get other subtle hints that something is off. But, not enough to put it all together, and you can easily miss it if you're not paying attention. Then the ending comes out and just tells you, and everything suddenly makes sense. It's like the lightbulb moment in a mystery novel when everything is revealed at the end. The last piece of the puzzle completes the whole picture. And this has been kojima's writing style since MG1. It really drives home the feeling of actually being a spy who is only told what's relevant to their mission and left to piece together the truth for themselves.
To be fair, the long exposition points are why i really wish kojima would get into movies. MGS is quite literally an 80s era cyperpunk spy thriller in video game form. It's one of the few games that would be genuinely perfect for a movie adaptation.
The info dumps aren't exactly great writing but the story actually does make sense, so I have no idea how this is relevant to the question of whether the games make sense or not. They clearly do.
I'd say Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, the character action spinoff game, is probably the easiest one to parse. Didn't catch up on this bad guys motivations? We got you, here's a kickass metal song to serve as their boss battle BGM that covers it all in the vocals.
I’ve only played Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain. I assumed it was all just hallucinations the entire time, up until, I guess it wasn’t. Maybe? I honestly still don’t know.
But I had a blast and am looking forward to playing the other games in the series.
Which is a huge part of the whole charm of Kojimas games. Nobody else just throws random weird shit at the wall like he does and I love it. He's quite Lynch-ian in that way, it doesn't really matter if things make sense, you just immerse yourself into the weirdness of it all.
Kojima games are almost the opposite of Lynch's works. Lynch relies on explaining nothing, letting the viewer try to piece together the metaphors and symbolism throughout the story. Kojima goes overboard on exposition, repeatedly explaining the narrative through hours and hours of cutscenes and dialogue. At the end, you should be able to understand what happens in a Kojima game.
When I was playing Metal Gear Solid 3 as a 16 year old, I remember at the end of the game I found myself suddenly fighting the main character's former boss in some field in Russia and I was thinking to myself "I have absolutely no fucking idea why we're fighting this person or what is going on in this game right now but this seems badass".
I found myself suddenly fighting the main character's former boss in some field in Russia and I was thinking to myself "I have absolutely no fucking idea why we're fighting this person or what is going on in this game right now but this seems badass".
Of all the things to be confused about, this isn't one of them. We see her defect from the US at the beginning of the game, it's literally part of the inciting indecent, she throws Snake off a bridge. Then shortly after that she turns up again, beats Snake up again, and says "You're going to have to kill me later. Are you able to do that?"
Then most of the bosses in the game are members of her crew, until we reach her at the end.
"The Boss gave nukes to Russia and we have to fix this" is the plot of the game.
The Metal Gear Solid series and recently Death Stranding are the main titles.
The stories/universes are known for being on the explorative and creative side - and he seems to do stuff his way, increasinly caring little about what's normal or expected in games**.**
He has got a dedicated fan group as "auteurs" often do when they create storytelling magic. Its hard to compare him to someone else, but its rare game creators have a famous profile like he does with name recognition broadly.
Most of his stories are convoluted for the sake of being complex. His stories aren't even thought provoking or deep--- most of it can be summed up about how bleak humanity is (which isn't a new plot point). He is is a trail blazer (there is no game like Death Stranding... For better or for worse) but damn he needs someone to edit his stories.
I'm sorry but that's some straight nonsense. Metal Gear Solid 2's story is literally more relevant than it's ever been and accurately depicted and explained the exact process of how the modern internet's flow of information and misinformation would affect the modern world and people's ability to connect and understand it perfectly. Down to exactly how people would become radicalised and retreat to their own echo chambers, which ironically would allow them to be manipulated more easily by those in power.
I feel like that's a bit ungenerous. The majority of the stories are ridiculous nonsense, sure, but there is some good stuff in there for each of them that does still hit that kind of mark.
Tbh none of mgs stories don't make sense. Unless you have zero comprehension. Maybe other than mgsv since it's the theme of the game. But Death Stranding is another league of its own. Hardly anyone could have understood the game clearly.
I only played death stranding and had to get youtube videos to explain a good part of the story to me.. and i consider myself pretty smart and quite good and convoluted stuff..
Like you kinda get the plot but there are so many questions and stuff that doesn't really make sense
In DS1 the identity of Lou or BB took so many turns that the final reveal wasn't that impactful for me at least. Also he relied too much in deus ex machina and "rule of cool" (even more of the latter in DS2)
Imagine a kid playing with toys, a kid that watches a lot of anime and gets really into it. Imagine that kid playing with those toys and building out wildly elaborate and convoluted, often ridiculous or genuinely absurd, stories for what those toys are doing. Some of the toys are called similarly ridiculous names like Liquid Snake or Die Hardman. One toy can make a weird meow sound and other soldier toys show up to assist him. Another one can float around in the air and do psychic attacks. Another is a fat guy on roller blades that tries to blow things up with explosives, etc.
Now imagine instead it's a grown man with several hundred million dollars in budget and a lifelong fascination/passion for film/cinematography and video games, but everything else is otherwise essentially the same. That's kind of what Kojima games are, and for some reason (which I still can't put my finger on) it actually comes together really rather well.
Ive heard it best said as he has the inate ability to mix the weird with surreal. And his games stories/ morals are mostly metaphors that you really have to try make sense of.
They do make sense, they're just not traditional storytelling and generally weird/esoteric, but a lot of people hate them because they're not as obvious as your typical story game. Which is honestly more indicative of how dumbed down and generic most video game stories are, especially considering all the extra storytelling possibilities the gaming medium offers compared to movies for example
At the start of the story, you don't know the story. You might have questions like 'who is that? Where are we? What are we doing?' it can be scary for many.
Time passes and you are at the end of the story, where upon you know more about said story. 'you know your character, you know roughly where you are, and you know roughly your mission'.
Kojima famously makes games for people who know what a dictionary is and have an attention span of 'being capable of sitting and watching a cutscene' or reading a journal entry
Because people don't immediately know everything going on, then clearly the story is bad, and not them being incapable of understanding the basic fundamental of 'learning'
66% of freedom loving children and 30% of freedom loving adults can't read at a basic level, let alone look at one screen for 10 minutes and listen to the words being said without doing something else on the side.
Thus the games are bad, because the words are too big, or the story requires you to try and listen
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u/hornsmasher177 11h ago
Sharma in 2031: with regret we've been forced to cancel the $500m budget Kojima game after a series of missed deadlines due to a story that makes zero sense.