Hideo Kojima’s Video-Game Worlds

There are a couple ways I believe. You can do the time trick and there's at least one point where you can snipe him early. I think you can end the game early by killing the boss in the first level by pulling the trigger during a cutscene where you're looking through a sniper scope.

>I'm firmly in the camp of people who get bored by the punishingly long cutscenes in his games but I also can't deny that gameplay-wise they are some of the most fun, fresh, and unexpected titles out there. My mind was blown the first time I found out about the way you can cheese The End fight.

I can totally understand when people say this about the long cutscenes. However, that's partially why I love his Metal Gear games. They're like playing one "movie" (or a series) and it enhances the player feeling. I always felt like I was living through a (rather long) interactive movie. It was glorious. A little long-winded at times but otherwise entertaining.

It's a great juxtaposition with other games that have great storytelling and gameplay but sometimes feel more disconnected and "on rails." If that makes sense.

The End fight totally blew my mind. In my opinion, MGS 3 is one of the best games ever made. The attention to detail is amazing.

My mind has been blown to smithereens by literally playing his games during the course of my life - playing MGS trilogy annually is kind of a Christmas tradition for me. It is simply my favorite videogame trilogy of all time.

The first time I fought against Psycho Mantis, I simply marveled the genius behind the fight. MGS2 was way ahead of the curve in almost of all of the aspects - smart texturing work, AI squad tactics, pinpoint pointer shooting accuracy, the still amazing weather effects, cue to the future of information warfare and fake news, VR missions, realtime cutscenes which I can't believe were possible on PS2 during its early stages, the score by Tappy/Harry Gregson Williams/ Hibino, superb VR missions, crisply written dialog and narrative - I still discover something new during my annual playthrough. MGS3 broke grounds by pushing PS2 to its limits, details such as the way the bullets rustle leaves during enemy skirmishes, realtime cutscenes that still hold very well today, probably the best boss fights in the series, great story, score, tight controls and that Hideo Kojima touch. I still remember the fight with The Sorrow, I had no idea on what to do and then I realized - these are characters that I have killed over the course of the game.

Kojima, is an auteur and a master of his craft.

Bonus edit: I recently discovered by accident (epsxe mis-configuration) that MGS1 detects if the player has a monoaural TV set during the fight with Hind D. Video here (not uploaded by me) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzG8Sty9veI

Yeah, there is a certain cinematic je ne sais quoi about his flourish. I feel like it's a window to a very prosperous fountain of creativity and all I have to say is that I'm very proud of the people who got to put those designs and systems in place.

One aspect of Death Stranding I'm still fascinated by is its punishment of fast travel. It's like the antithesis of any other modern open world game (like Ghost Recon Wildlands, Far Cry 5, Horizon Zero Dawn...) where traversing the open world is largely negated by the ability to simply warp to the objective area. In Death Stranding, however, I'm forced to give up all of my inventory to fast travel; the game is centered around the travel itself. I've never experienced a similar game, where I'm plotting a course and deciding how many ladders and ropes I might need, and how heavy of a load I can safely bring with me. Absolutely fascinating, I still haven't finished the game because I'm obsessed with the side objectives and feeling like I'm helping other players by constructing roads.

Kojima always adds some political plot on his games. MGS2 was basically a prediction of the era of fake news and private military. The fact that in Death Stranding your job is to "reconnect America" is probably no accident, knowing Kojima, it's probably some kind of critique on the polarised political climate as of late.

He allures to it in the article but DS might be first in a genre of similarly immersive experiences. I’m hoping other games are made that deliver such a rich experience but with better storyline perhaps.

The fallout between Kojima & Konami is definitely an interesting story.

In the end, it would have been in Konami's best interest to retain him and let him do what he wanted, rather than pump him for more money via MGS. The man gets eyeballs (and dollars) on whatever he makes, you think Konami would recognize that.

Kojima has publicly said he was done or wanted to be done making Metal Gear games after... pretty much every Metal Gear game since Metal Gear Solid.

Though he did seem to get more enthusiastic about Peace Walker and V, two games that share a lot of things.

I’ve always that MGS V is a stellar action game but a disappointing entry in the Metal Gear franchise, particularly if you’re into that particular Kojima brand of weird.

It was just so barren in terms of narrative, and what was there was forgettable and ultimately unimportant to the overall story. I wonder what could have been if the second half of the game was what it was originally intended to be, instead of just repeating some earlier missions on a harder difficulty. Ground Zeroes really set things up for the full game to be something amazing, but it didn’t pay off.

That, and I think it was a very low blow to not ask David Hayter back. Given how few lines Kiefer Sutherland has in the whole game I guess his rates were a little higher.

If Kojima was not interested in MGS games anymore he would be an amazing liar. I saw him about every year talking about each new episode or spin off and he never looked like he was even a little bored with it.

No way man. He makes great games but he adds a lot of cinematics with cringey dialogue and an overt the top story to all of his games.

The man isn't perfect. I feel a game like red dead redemption 2 is more closer to that perfect game we're looking for. It hits all the the marks in terms of story and systems based gameplay.

Death stranding is interesting and worth the play nonetheless. I think it's a memorable experience. Are you going to jump for joy? No. But it's not a forgettable game or experience.

Death Stranding is definitely a lot more divisive. I personally enjoyed the snot out of it, but understand why others didn't. It's definitely a quality is in the hands of the beholder sort of thing though.

I don't think he's an exceptional writer. He is very imaginative and has vision, but his writing has a ton of ass-pulls, general WTF, and weirdness for the sake of being weird. Some of it can be cool/entertaining, much of it just seems kind of dumb.

The story was really the worst part of Death Stranding for me even though the gameplay is what gets noticed as bad.

Unlike the MGS games, the story has so many opportunities to take a nuanced stance on issues of the internet (aghem, Chiral Net), data collection and the obvious metaphor of Amazon.com. It wastes every opportunity to tell a story about how the internet is inherently good even if it's controlled by Bridges. The game is spent building bridges without any question of whether those bridges actually make us more connected or more distant.

Furthermore, the "extinction event" i.e. the death stranding is presented as something which is inevitable to all species rather than something which is explicitly caused by and solved by humans.

It's just really strange seeing all this low hanging fruit go to waste. There are plenty of other problems such as character names and plotlines being overly literal. The exposition dumps are way too much, even compared to MGS which is famous for them.

Overall though it just comes down to the game having an utterly bizarre viewpoint on the world's problems. I had thought that to overarching theme of "rebuilding America by connecting everyone again" would at least touch on the current state of US politics where people are more divided than ever. Unfortunately, the game chalks that problem up to an inevitable event of nature rather than something humans could actually prevent.

Going into the game as a huge Kojima fanboy I basically gave the story way too many chances to redeem itself and it just gets worse.

So bad, unfortunately, that I'm forced to reassess his other games. Surely they have their faults which "come with the territory" of crazy anime style plotlines. But are the good parts even attributable to Kojima? Did somebody special from his Konami team not make it over to Kojima Productions?

Anyway, having said all that, the gameplay was pretty cool, the world itself was beautiful and I do suggest you at least check it out if it goes on sale or something. Meanwhile I'll be waiting for Kojima to hopefully tell better stories in the horror genre as he's suggested he may do.

> I love MGS, but apparently death stranding doesn't seem to be as good as people say it is.

The script was horrible despite the cast of talented actors.

I'm not talking about the plot itself but the delivery, the exposition dumps, the stupid dialogues, it's a catastrophe, even by videogame standards, which makes me ask myself whether Kojima was always like that but he had other people keeping him in check or something…

And unfortunately the gameplay couldn't redeem anything, the gameplay was tedious and unfun. MGS is fun, you infiltrate places by various means, you have a lot of cool gadgets, there is tension. The story was silly but it had memorable characters.

in DS, everything sucks except the concept, the idea, the concept is interesting, the execution is bad.

Yes, Kojima tried to be innovative, but it just doesn't work because it fails at the most basic things regarding gameplay and story telling.

The game is beautiful though.

> He is indeed an exceptional writer.

He is an "idea guy". Like George Lucas and many many other. He needs somebody else to makes sense of his ideas.

Death Stranding was my game of the year last year, I played it without knowing anything going in and had a great time. I've seen a bunch of people say they were turned off by the reviews and then ended up loving it when they finally tried it themselves.

It breaks a lot of convention, and it's weird, so it's going to have a lot of people who love or hate it. It's a very well made game (aside from the classic, impenetrable Japanese-style menus), he seems to have fully implemented his vision for what he wanted it to be. Whether you like it or not is more down to whether it clicks with you. Since the experience is hard to describe, the only way to find out is to play it. But if you find that you don't like it, I'd suggest that you at least get a couple of hours into chapter 3 before you give up, because that's where the game starts to get into its' swing. The other thing I'd mention is that people seem to think Kojima takes himself more seriously than he actually does, and I've seen people complaining about things that'd I'd enjoyed and attributed to Kojima humor.

Also, it basically has a feature length ending, with cutscenes interspersed with repetitive gameplay where you just have to trigger more cutscenes. If you want to complete the ending in one sitting, make sure you have a couple of hours.

Edit: One thing I remembered that frustrated me about it. The game is essentially a stealth-action, and it gives you a lot of freedom to choose how you approach the problems it gives you. But it doesn't always reward your choices the way you would expect. Did you choose to clear out an entire area of baddies so that you could freely loot it? Well in some specific cases, they'll respawn before you're done.

Death stranding is the only game I ever preordered, anything made by Kojima got a free pass from me - until then.

After a couple of hours it becomes really clear that Kojima spent ALL of his time on the plot and directing the cutscenes, and it's almost like the actual gameplay was left to be done by a pack of interns who weren't even given guidance.

The terrain physics are awful. The combat is extremely repetitive and not at all engaging. Almost every mission is 'go from point A to point B'. The plot (or rather the series of cutscenes that convey the plot) have absolutely nothing to do with the gameplay. They might as well have the player do rounds of tetris between cutscenes and the overall experience would remain largely unchanged.

When you get roughly through 3/4 of the game, you hit the level that's shown in the early trailers. That level is great fun. And despite being late into the game, it starts showing you tutorial tips and coaching you on mechanics you already know. You realize that this was meant to be the opening level of the game. They clearly intended to create a much better game but at some stage said fuck it, we'll make a bland open world exploration sandbox and throw in some cutscenes.

It's sad. I would have happily waited another few years to get a full game that plays and feels like what was in the trailer level. No more preorders even for Kojima.

> He is indeed an exceptional writer.

I almost choked on that one. He is exceptional good at coming up with ideas but writing wise he is absolutely terrible and gets worse over time. Way too verbose where it does not have to be.

Several of the Metal Gear titles are on PC and XBox. Death Stranding will be released for PC this summer.

The first MGS was re-released on the Gamecube (as "Twin Snakes"). So you could play that with a Gamecube or Wii.

The first Metal Gear is available in English on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Not sure about the MSX2 version. It's also included in the Gamecube release of MGS.

No official English release for Metal Gear 2 on the MSX2. Fan translations available.

Many of the Metal Gear Solid games have had re-releases on the Xbox 360, and Windows ports in some cases.

Snatcher is on the Sega CD and Sega Saturn.

Policenauts, Saturn and 3DO.

He's had less-involved roles in a lot of games on other platforms, like the Gameboy Advance (e.g. Boktai, for which he served in producer and designer roles)

MGS1,MGS2 and MGS5 are on PC. You can emulate MGS3,MGS peace walker, MGS portable OPS, Snatcher and co by various means.