Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes

So my infamous review of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is perhaps one of the most glorious things I've ever written. I've shown it to quite a few MGS fans over the years and the reaction usually is something like "I CAN'T READ THIS" or "I am not even going to TOUCH THIS". It is MGS fan kryptonite, a review so scathing that cuts so deeply that they know that, were they to truly look at it with a truthful eye, they would have to renounce their affection for the series. 

It comes as little surprise then that a long-time fan bought me a copy of the new 'Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes' game that's recently seen release on Steam. So I've gone ahead and played that... all 2 hours of it... and am now ready to draw my sword against my old adversary once again.

Don't get me wrong:
The game works well and is a perfectly functional port. And the gameplay is adequate, even if the game is a criminally short two hours. The controls are tight (I used a PS2 controller for it and my only complaint is that I don't like aiming with the right control stick) and the guard's AI is interesting but flawed enough to give you lots of room for error.

But the problem, of course, is that Hideo Kojima wrote it. So let us discuss that at some length.

1) Kojima has no idea what kind of story he wants to write.

There are certain writers who give away their interests when they write. We know, for instance, that over at the Bioware writing desks they spend their lunch hours and break times playing 40k. In just the same way, we know from Metal Gear Solid that Hideo Kojima spends his spare time surfing the history section on wikipedia, reading conspiracy theories and watching ecchi anime.

I just wish he'd decide which one he wants to do.

He'll try to tie his game to real world events. mentioning things like the Sandinistas and Iran-Contra, and then will make his main villain a guy like this:

And then, before you can get your head around what kind of monumentally idiotic person would come up with something like that, suddenly you start hearing a long monologue about a teenaged girl being molested by a female doctor:

The tone in the average Metal Gear game bounces back and forth from gritty historical realism to loony GI Joe bad dudes to ecchi bullshit so quickly that I genuinely think that Kojima does not know how to differentiate between these three things. To him, those are the three things he thinks are COOL and so obviously he'd put them all into his personal wankfest game. The fact that they don't mesh well at all doesn't even occur to this guy because he lives in an impenetrable bubble forged by his own slavishly devoted fandom.


Ich. Fuck you Hideo Kojima.

2) Kojima is not original.

There are a bunch of tapes you have in your inventory at the start of the game that let you hear about a character called Paz. The above mentioned lesbian molestation is from said tapes. In a subsequent tape, you are treated to a description of what happened to Paz when she caught a cold.

First a dude tries to take his pants off in front of her for some reason and she hits him with a pillow. Then the lesbian lady comes in saying:

And she throws her Kleenix box at her. Then the rest of the cast comes in and there are similar WACKY HIJINKS, until at last Snake himself arrives and she gets all blushy and serious...

This scene is in every harem anime ever made. "Dumb love interests try dumb things in wacky montage, snubs all around, then the real deal happens and mushy music plays." Kojima uses this tripe without a moment's regret.

The basic template for Paz, the tsundere, is employed in similar fashion. In this artless and blunt way, with no drop of humanity or soul in there. Kojima's just saying "I'll do this thing I saw in that anime I watched last night that I liked."

Ugh. And yet this man is lauded as an artist! Fuck you Hideo Kojima.

3) This thing is collapsing under its own weight.

For obvious reasons, this is the first Hideo Kojima game I've played since MGS3. In spite of all the summary pages that the game provides trying to bring me up to speed on a guy called Zero and an organization called Cipher, it still is a huge mess of conspiracies and counterconspiracies, with the KGB and CIA involved in some convoluted plan to do something or other for reasons that are quite obscure to me and that doubtlessly would be obscure to all but the most devoted follower of Kojima.

But Kojima isn't willing to let one thread of it go. It's all shovelled out there and you'll hear these melodramatic dialogues with a guy demanding to know "WHERE IS ZERO?" when you're still trying to remember who the fuck Zero is supposed to be.

This is ultimately why Metal Gear Revengeance (the best entry in this dreadful series, which not by coincidence is also the entry Kojima had almost nothing to do with) succeeds where Kojima's work fails. MGR just said 'yeah whatever' to the history of Metal Gear and focused on telling a story. There was no attempt to weave these crippled details together that you'd have to go back to the old 2D Metal Gears to fully understand.

But Kojima, with his charmed life, cannot understand that and simply assumes that his readers will follow along with him. In the world he lives in, which is so completely insulated from legitimate criticism, such thoughts would obviously be forbidden.

And that is why I'll say it again: Fuck you Hideo Kojima.

I think I'll conclude the matter there, as that's about all one can really say about a criminally short two hour hackjob.

Maybe we'll talk about this again when Phantom Pain comes out, assuming someone gets it for me.