Metal Gear

[umami's milk]

I like V.
I don’t like him explained as a stand-in for the player, that’s silly.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

There's a thin line between tragic hero and villain, and from what we know of his backstory from the earlier games a talented writer could have made Big Boss be on both sides at once, especially as he tries to deal with the guilt of killing The Boss and the realization that she gave up everything for her country only to be shat on by them in the end, and that people like him are used by governments and then thrown away. Kojima is not that writer.

It's why I have such a faggy hatred of Kojima, because I feel like everything I've ever thought about Big Boss was magnitudes better than anything he ever wrote.

After MGS3, I figured Big Boss created Outer Heaven to fight the Patriots (Philosophers) for what they had done to The Boss. That the man literally became the devil himself in order to get revenge.

Then MGS4 comes out and it's like "Oh no, Big Boss was part of the Patriots, but then he got mad and fought them cause he disagreed." and I'm kind of like...okay, I guess that works. Maybe Big Boss and Outer Heaven work as "the guns of the Patriots", but then he realizes what a monster they've created and uses Outer Heaven to rebel against them. In essence it's similar to Snake who was a "hero" to the world doing bad shit, until he fought against the Patriots and became a "villain" to the world.

Peace Walker came out and I was okay with what they did there. Where Big Boss decides to discard the Boss will and fight for himself. It kind of takes us back to the Big Boss from before MGS3.

Then MGS V comes out and it just shits all over everything. Big Boss wasn't that great, it was all a lie, Skullface was wiping his ass the whole time, some random medic is just as good as this guy that was so great that the US government spent who knows how much to clone him. Not even getting into the whole stealing someones identity thing to hide from the government but then he's going to reveal himself to work for the government anyways, and nobody is going to question why there is this other Big Boss running around South Africa at the same time, but then when they kill that guy they assume they are the same...all because we need to explain why he blows up in a fucking 8 bit game from the 80's...

So fucking retarded.

 

[Ricardo Canitrot]

yeah kojima is a fucking hack. remove all the shit in 4, the entire peace walker and 5 and you end with metal gear solid 1. big boss was a evil dude who died thinking he was doing a good thing. its not a novel idea but its better than everything kojimbo has written since 3.
also for the life of me cant remember a thing skull face did except blowing mother base and eating a shotgun in 5. what the fuck is that.

 

[umami's milk]

I don’t want to jump to conclusions here but I think some of you don’t like Hideo Kojima…

For the record I think a lot of the stunts he’s pulled are dumb but when he’s good, he’s great. Better to have a laugh at him than to sneed eternally.

If you’re not having fun, then leave. Splinter Cell is right there.

 

[30+GameOvers]

I don't really buy the whole "But he was just as good as Big Boss!" criticism. Remember, Raiden is also just as good as Snake and he's a greenhorn compared to him, same goes with the MSF Avatar in Survive/Your recruits you get to control in both PW and V if you count them, and that's not even going into Portable Ops where quite literally any random soldier can be as good as the Boss(including the characters he has easily beaten before that you can unlock, like Ocelot). Gameplay/story segregation, Big Boss isn't special because he can sneak but due to his sheer accomplishments aka main protagonist syndrome.
It's been a while since I played MGS5 but I remember it all wrapped up pretty well, I don't see the issue with story or characters not making sense. If anything, 4 dropped the ball by ruining the character of Big Boss right at the very end, because the devs were too pussified to actually have Snake pull the trigger/have him and Otacon be arrested like they originally planned. What we got feels like a hidden ending you would get for 100% completion or something. Remember those goofy joke cutscenes/movies you could unlock in MGS3? Something like that, except it's canon.

 

[Kheapathic]

I don’t want to jump to conclusions here but I think some of you don’t like Hideo Kojima…

For the record I think a lot of the stunts he’s pulled are dumb but when he’s good, he’s great. Better to have a laugh at him than to sneed eternally.

If you’re not having fun, then leave. Splinter Cell is right there.

I like Kojima insomuch he has ideas and likes to try to implement them, some work some don't, that's part of the process; but when it comes to storytelling, he needs a tard wrangler, possibly a team of them. And I'll say the team he managed to assemble (all the familiar names you see from MGS1 - 5 + Zone of the Enders), fucking amazing people... they're just led by someone who can't stop talking.

 

[Aunt Carol]

I like Kojima insomuch he has ideas and likes to try to implement them, some work some don't, that's part of the process; but when it comes to storytelling, he needs a tard wrangler, possibly a team of them.

I like David Lynch and would say the same thing about him.

This is the whole problem with auteurs: when they get enough fame or funding that they can overrule their wranglers, the resulting project ends up having niche appeal.

You have the early years when they were using their autistic focus to fight to get their ~vision~ to the screen, while being required to take notes from higher-ups and focus groups, The middle years where they get freedom to be gloriously fuckin' weird but they remember to take into consideration that the audience doesn't live in their head.

And then it metastasizes into the "of course, sir" years where nobody can overrule the auteur, the product gets goofy, and they're accused of coasting except for a small but increasingly-rabid segment of their audience who have the specific brain miscalibration to be on this specific auteur's wavelength. (And a few contrarians who don't, but like to have an excuse to argue.)

 

[skykiii]

the story really needed the moment of big boss turning evil but kojima was too far up his own ass to do that. instead he did shit like peace walker and mgs5. since metal gear 1 people talk about him like a legendary figure and it would have been cool to see that he wasnt. mgs5 played with that concept but the execution was dogshit.

Kojima is not that writer.

It's why I have such a faggy hatred of Kojima, because I feel like everything I've ever thought about Big Boss was magnitudes better than anything he ever wrote.

I find it kinda sad so many here are blaming Kojima when by all accounts Kojima didn't even want to do more MGS games after 3 (and really wanted to stop at 2).

If anyone is to blame here, its Konami being greedy and fans sending death threats despite Kojima clearly being ready to leave the entire project in other people's hands.... and probably Japanese conformist culture as a whole bears some responsibility as well.

As much as I don't like Kojima's post-MGS3 games I did notice that Peace Walker at least seems to low-key be saying that, as a major theme is Big Boss having to temper his vision because of economic reality, with Kaz being the voice of reason on that front.

...................

Like I said, I low-key think Kojima was trying to sink the series, and was blindsided that his retarded ideas kept getting accepted. The moment I said "fuck you" to Peace Walker was this moment where it literally told me I could not do a story mission because I needed to grind up my base's tech level some more. It still surprises me that to this day I have never seen another person call bullshit on this, or on the boss fights, or on so many other bad design elements.... and for that matter, having played MGS3 again I'm remembering all my problems with that as well.

And one thing that always bothered me about the MGS fandom is that they seem to judge games based solely on whether Kojima was involved. I'm still stunned that Portable Ops is somehow the bad game but Peace Walker isn't, or how they continue to go after Snake's Revenge even though that one was actually not a bad game by NES standards. You just know if Snake's Revenge was exactly the same game but was labeled "A Hideo Kojima game" they would be praising it.

EDIT: Just making this clear, when I said "the MGS fandom" above I'm talking about just... on reddit, on websites, online in general. Not kiwis. Have to note this cuz I just had a slap-fight elsewhere that started because someone assumed I was talking about them.

 

[skykiii]

I don't really buy the whole "But he was just as good as Big Boss!" criticism. Remember, Raiden is also just as good as Snake and he's a greenhorn compared to him, same goes with the MSF Avatar in Survive/Your recruits you get to control in both PW and V if you count them, and that's not even going into Portable Ops where quite literally any random soldier can be as good as the Boss(including the characters he has easily beaten before that you can unlock, like Ocelot). Gameplay/story segregation, Big Boss isn't special because he can sneak but due to his sheer accomplishments aka main protagonist syndrome.

This kind of parallels something that happens in reality. Most great heroes are functionally no better than anyone else in the same position, its just some people get to be legends afterwards.

This is one reason I always liked one of the Spoony One's ideas for a Terminator shock reveal, where it turned out John Connor never really existed but was just a name that random acts of heroism would get credited to as a morale booster for the humans fighting Skynet.

I once heard it said that the only difference between Albert Einstein and 90% of humanity is that Einstein actually got a chance to show the world how brilliant he was due to being in the right place at the right time, and there's probably hundreds of people who could just as easily be Einsteins if they had the same life opportunities or amount of money. By the same token, any idiot could be the man who killed George Washington if they just happened to get the drop on him at an unlucky moment. Its why classism is a flawed concept.

 

[30+GameOvers]

I find it kinda sad so many here are blaming Kojima when by all accounts Kojima didn't even want to do more MGS games after 3 (and really wanted to stop at 2).

If anyone is to blame here, its Konami being greedy and fans sending death threats despite Kojima clearly being ready to leave the entire project in other people's hands.... and probably Japanese conformist culture as a whole bears some responsibility as well.

That's the tragedy of it: He was cursed by his own success, so to speak. I can actually understand the man just fucking about and seeing what kind of crazy shit he could get away with after 4, since he knew it would sell anyways and that Konami would greenlight everything...until MGS5, where apparently their patience ran thin.
It's painfully obvious that the theme of MGS4 is to let go and move on, from Snake being an old man to the rest of the cast having their own lives now and the world itself being unrecognizable from MGS2, you have the sense of finality to the game, almost as if NO OTHER GAME WOULD EVER BE MADE AFTER THIS. This was also the game where Kojima wanted to have someone take over for him as director, passing the torch so to speak, but that ended quickly after some death threats were send to him. He was forced to make this game at gunpoint, so to speak. Then Konami got the bright idea of simply making prequels to get around the ending for 4, infinite money machine!

At the end of the day, I think the franchise is fine and most of Kojima ideas weren't awful, or at least were salvaged by his tardwranglers. By the time it got really bad, he was already on his way out of the company. Still, as lacking in character as Survive was, it wasn't completely awful(definitely overhated), which shows you don't really need Kojima to make a Metal Gear game. Problem lies with Konami itself, and Metal Gear isn't the only IP that suffered because of them. If I have any problem with the franchise as a whole, it would be that too many games feel like tech demos that only get off the ground towards the end, if they ever do. Survive, 5, Ground Zeroes is literally a 40$ demo, Peace Walker, 4 is just a tech demo for the PS3, and to an extent even MGS2. I wish there would have been a game that combined the tight focus of the earlier games but kept the sandbox and variety of playstyles/weapon loadouts of the later games. 5 really felt like it was at the cusp of something, right until Konami pulled the plug.

 

[skykiii]

It's painfully obvious that the theme of MGS4 is to let go and move on,

There's this conversation I often see happen around Mother/Earthbound fans... the idea that if Mother 4 ever happens, it should be a fan game (or at least be helmed by a big name fan).

Now, in the context of Mother I don't know if I agree... Mother fans already have their own economy of "inspired' games that range in quality from "pretty good" to "fucking awful," but all seem to miss the point... though in best-case scenarios they have their own point that makes up for them misunderstanding Mother itself.

With Metal Gear though, I sometimes have a similar line of thought. A lot of MGS fans these days tend to have read articles like the afformentioned MetaGearSolid one, and understand not just the series but some of the speculative rationale behind Kojima's decisions and what the games are "really" about. In that sense, I think MGS fans might make something truly worthy of the original three... (although right there, I then have to worry that the fangames would all be exclusively based on Snake Eater and not the two games whose gameplay I actually didn't find miserable).

Heck, I could write the story. An angle I want to go with (one that's a theme of my posts whenever I post in Deep Thoughts) is that reality is kinda malleable and you can't really trust the truth of anything you didn't experience first-hand. Actually my brain is already turning over ideas so maybe I'll sperg more fanfic concepts later.

 

[30+GameOvers]

The only game we really need at this point is either a WW2 game that sets up the franchise or a proper sequel to MGS2, one that takes place in a world similar to ours filled with propaganda, bullshit proxy wars and the beginning of what would become nanomachine obsessed cyborg PMCs that litter both 4 and Rising. Make it in the same vein as the original trilogy, ie a tight narrative driven game but give the players a much bigger world to explore. For all it's praise, the actual arenas of MGS3 were still just corridors and rooms, just with some fancy foliage to give you the illusion that you're really in a jungle. Go full ham and let the players explore the entire facility/wilderness to the fullest.
There comes a point where the franchise should just lie down and rest, no need to make constant sequels. I think the best example of that would be Dead Rising: 3 solved EVERYTHING, the zombie virus was cured, all the plot threads were successfully resolved and all the bad guys were dead...then Dead Rising 4 happens and the entire game studio(and the franchise) dies out of cringe. Sometimes it's best to just let the games take a fucking break.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

I find it kinda sad so many here are blaming Kojima

Who else should get the blame? He's the writer/director of the games.

If he really felt that strongly about not making Metal Gear games he could have just quit. It isn't like he *couldn't* have found work, by the time MGS3 was out Kojima was being talked about on the same level of Miyamoto ffs.

 

[skykiii]

If he really felt that strongly about not making Metal Gear games he could have just quit.

I'm not so sure. Even here in America, someone who quits over a project he doesn't like rarely ever goes on to do anything else, and this would probably be worse in Japan with its cultural quirks.

Heck, Kojima himself is an example: What games was he involved in after he left Konami? Death Stranding and.... as far as I know, that's it.

The only game we really need at this point is either a WW2 game that sets up the franchise or a proper sequel to MGS2,

Honestly I'd rather see the latter, but in a different way.

Like I said I don't know how much fanfic idea spitballing I should do, but ultimately I want to follow up on what the ending of MGS2 said--"you have a choice, you don't have to be someone you're not"--and take it a bit farther. Like I said I'm sort of into the idea of reality being malleable and you not always needing to believe what you're told, so I'm already envisioning a game where....

... Well, here's an example: maybe MGS3 itself is a game that exists in the Metal Gear universe, and have someone question how much of the game is "reality." I would still have paranormal elements though, because I hate the idea someone would use this to say "oh well clearly there were no ghosts."

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

What games was he involved in after he left Konami? Death Stranding and.... as far as I know, that's it.

Death Stranding, Death Stranding 2, OD and he's claimed his studio is working on some kind of thing with Columbia Pictures, as well as a Death Stranding film...

Considering almost all games take 5+ years of development time now, so how many games would you expect someone like Kojima who was notorious for taking forever even back in the day to have produced in 8 years?

 

[skykiii]

Death Stranding, Death Stranding 2, OD and he's claimed his studio is working on some kind of thing with Columbia Pictures, as well as a Death Stranding film...

... Okay, I'll admit I'm shocked: I did not know Death Stranding was a series. I was somehow under the impression Kojima had made the one game then vanished.

 

[Lone MacReady II]

MGS3 remake looks pretty hopeful. It honestly makes me wonder how sh2 remake was fucked up so bad in comparison. I guess Konami doesn’t really care much about silent hill though. Anyway, I like how it’s very 1:1 and looks really pretty. Also keeping the old voices is a plus.

I would argue, Koji bullshit (warrented or unwarrented) aside - Silent Hill has been a poisoned well for a decade longer than Metal Gear. And MG will push units, whereas SH has gotten lower and lower sales ever since the 1st game. This generation is also likely too mongoloid-tier to even understand the key references in things like old silent hill, like David Lynch and Jacob's ladder.

There's a thin line between tragic hero and villain, and from what we know of his backstory from the earlier games a talented writer could have made Big Boss be on both sides at once, especially as he tries to deal with the guilt of killing The Boss and the realization that she gave up everything for her country only to be shat on by them in the end, and that people like him are used by governments and then thrown away, and that sooner or later he'll be in the same position The Boss was. Kojima is not that writer.

That's what I don't get, The Boss wasn't "shit on" by her government - she was a Patriot who sacrificed herself to prevent nuclear war. People for some reason think the State MADE her do it, but you can't make the Boss do anything she doesn't want to. What everyone else and Snake don't understand is that she was the hero of MGS3 BECAUSE she self-sacrificed. The original plan wasn't to kill her off, the plan was to get Volgin's cash and America would be #1 again - until Volgin nuked his own nation because he is crazy. This fucked up the entire plan, and in order to prevent nuclear war the Boss played her role to prevent the world from being destroyed. The "plan" was revised. The entire conceit of the franchise post 3 is that everyone misinterpreted her will. The philosophers were not the patriots. The Boss was for America 100% as a soldier, because that is the duty of a soldier - loyalty to the end, in her own words. Snake is the biggest retard for either not realizing this or worse - getting butt hurt about it, which he did. Having those kinds of feelings for your comrades was, as the Boss put it, "The greatest sin a soldier can commit". Rant over.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

That's what I don't get, The Boss wasn't "shit on" by her government - she was a Patriot who sacrificed herself to prevent nuclear war.

I mean, originally yeah, but didn't Peace Walker set it up that Hot Coldman and the CIA set her up because they didn't like her influence?

It's been a while so maybe I'm not remembering it right, but I thought it was established that the USA wanted her dead.

 

[30+GameOvers]

I mean, originally yeah, but didn't Peace Walker set it up that Hot Coldman and the CIA set her up because they didn't like her influence?

It's been a while so maybe I'm not remembering it right, but I thought it was established that the USA wanted her dead.

You would be correct, something about the space program. This makes her a sap in Snake's eyes as she was sacrificing everything for a nation that didn't appreciate her, and that made him double down on his independent mercenary nation state idea by the end of the game.

 

[Ricardo Canitrot]

the new mgs guy said that delta is a proof of concept to show the public and konami that there is still life in the IP. starting from 3, then doing mg1 and mg2 you have a pretty fucking solid (heh) base to make more games. kojima legit got retarded after 4 and his stories are getting worse and worse.