After I played MGSV first time, I was stunned by it's graphics. Everything is so perfect: materials, lighting, camera movement, character animation.
Looking forward for next Kojima's game - Death Stranding.
Looking forward for next Kojima's game - Death Stranding.
I mean, on closer inspection sure you can tell its not video, but at an initial glance it wasn't immediately obvious to me. The Ground Zeros trailers were great but everything had a 'gloss' to it, MGSV tuned that up and the results truly were exceptional to me.
I don't watch or play many games, but so far MGSV is the only game that has done that to me and the results in the trailer matched the final product which is a feat of its own.
Just look at this rendition of Mads Mikkelsen: https://youtu.be/H2Hy96sOnq8?t=200
Because one person makes a game... sorry it's my pet peeve, a game is made by a team not a single name.
Props to the graphics team that worked on this game.
This guy surely runs circles around us...
It took me until 3 to actually think Kojima was decent at storytelling, and then 4 got me onboard the "Kojima is a genius" train. Metal Gear's backdrop is a fever dream about the military industrial complex, but the storytelling is always much more focused on exploring themes and ideals than it is dedication to realism.
FWIW, there has been a significant increase in the quality of his work. Solid 1 was kind of puerile and hamfisted in its approach to its themes, in a kind of "terrible shounen anime" kind of way. Solid 2 was a really amazing prediction of the way surveillance works in a modern society, but was needlessly obtuse. Solid 3 was way easier to digest, and Solid 4 was sublime. But neither really work in isolation from the first two, and slogging through them definitely takes a lot of patience, so I see where you're coming from.
I guess the way I'd summarize is: a lot of people talk about abandoning setting details for other motives (e.g. there are monsters in the witcher, so why can't there be a sizeable black population), but Kojima is one of the few I'd trust to actually pull it off - I just need it to not be ~1999 Kojima.
sub:
Paths of Glory : Kubrick
Seven Samurai : Kurosawa
Stalker : Tarkovsky
The first level is most definitely a MGS game. Unique voice acting, level design, action, gameplay mechanics. The works.
Then you finish that intro and it's a complete 180 - now it's open world, no more voice acting, no more cutscenes, no more story. Just open world diarrhea with assets they most likely finished and could use in the game.
It's as if the studio finished the first level, Konami pulled the plug and cut funding, they told Kojima wrap up with what you have and we ended up with this totally shallow game.
I felt like the game was a bait n switch. How far off base am I?
It's not that unthinkable that Kojima's grand ambitions ran into budget constraints and they had to cut down the story content. I can easily imagine dozens of more hours of voiced and animated cutscenes polishing out the content that's already in there, but voicing and animation are expensive.
What remains is imho still quite good and entertaining, I really enjoyed the open world parts, the base management, hunting for new soldiers or grooming favorites.
The multiplayer part made it all a bit grindy, without some story fluff in-between, but I think it was a smart game mechanic to add to a sneaking game where you have the option for non-lethal take-downs/straight up bypassing of enemies, especially in the context of the "lore".
But having at least some of these tapes as actual cutscenes would probably have changed a lot about the game feeling "unfinished". A lot of important main story beats are revealed through those tapes, of which there are so many that going through them feels like a chore at times. That's probably why so many people consider the game so light on story: Those tapes are easily skipped by players so they can progress further through the game, but barely anybody would skip a full blown cutscene with said tapes content.
But on the other hand I got the impression that the game was definitely not finished plot wise and even stylistically, at least not to the point that Kojima and his core team had originally envisioned. It felt like we got 90%, but that last 10% was the bit that was supposed to fill in the gaps in the plot and leave the player feeling satisfied. Compared to e.g. the ending of MGS4 (which is my favorite in the series), the latter third of MGSV was just so... unfulfilling.
I suspect friction over Kojima's vision versus Konami wanting to get the game to market was why they parted ways, even though Konami was very clearly killing the golden goose.
Hospital mission is not even longest one, nor most detailed.
It does definitely go overboard though, with the missions that are there being repeated and many of them not being that memorable. There are also plot threads that are clearly just dropped (e.g. major character disappearing with an important item that is only addressed in an unfinished state on a bonus disc/cutscenes that seemingly have no way to be unlocked in-game),and given how Konami just dropped Kojima Productions it's a reasonable assumption that it wrapped early (though whether that is due to Konami plugging the plug early or because it overran budget/time estimates is less clear).
[0] http://ameblo.jp/kp-blogcast/entry-10466416389.html#main