kojimaās whole thing is that heās a willfully indulgent overthinker; if the title is clumsy itās because heās actually trying too hard to say something clever and falling all over himself in that pursuit (also, you know, not being a native english speaker), not that he picked words out of a hat. you can apply this to everything he does.
i donāt know what getting people heās excited to work with in the game has to do with its coherency
heās been trying and threatening to make anything other than metal gear for as long as heās been making metal gear and itās way off the mark to figure that heās suddenly lost without it and just cobbling shit together in haste. haste reflected in, uh, barely talking about or showing anything in the two+ years since he left to work on this.
re: the playable bit in the trailer: i think we can just take from this that mgs5ās prologue chapter was him trying to figure out where he wants to go with cutscene direction, doesnāt necessarily tell us anything about how it will fundamentally work As A Game
Iām not trying to dampen anyoneās excitement at all. However, letās not forget that this is the man that was gushing about how great Dan Brown books were with Tim. There is no high-level concept here, Kojimaās is simply a glorified nerd with a short attention span.
it was a joke. iām absolutely sure kojima loves dan brownās movies regardless, though. how couldnāt he.
anyway you seem to be operating from the idea that kojimaās trademark is being lolrandom rather than the opposite problem being that he overextends himself. working backwards to explain why you donāt like or get what youāve seen so far, the assumption must be that none of it was ācarefully plannedā because obviously if it was then it would be Good, as if that necessarily follows. what a weird argument to unpack
One of my major problems with Metal Gear Solid 5 was that the characters are barely coherent as āpeopleā so much as walking theme dispensers. The themes may well be ideas grabbed out of a hat at random, but the game did not treat them disposably or whimsically; it took those themes and hammered on them over and over to the point that none of the characters felt like people so much as monologue delivery devices. This is what Iām afraid of seeing happen in this game.
my hot take on MGSV (and to some extent also MGS4) is that a lot of it was Kojima trying to say āPlease stop liking this so I can do something elseā
Didnāt work though, I liked them both. Although Mt. Snakemore was just kinda āI canāt even pretend this isnāt stupidā
Youāre assuming quite a bit there. First off, it was not a joke. Iāve heard Tim recall the story several times without his brand of knowing irony.
I only bring it back up to highlight the fact that Hideo Kojima is an idiot. Thatās not to say he doesnāt make interesting games but he is not operating on some higher plane of existence. His games have āconcernsā and he certainly has his fetishes but they donāt signify anything other than than tired āauteuristā tropes that have filtered down from the movies he likes. Does anyone else read his column on Glixel?
I was reading some interview with Kojima the other day about Death Stranding which explained the rain in the trailer is called Timefall, and itās something special that makes you age faster like what happened to the guy in the trailer. The interviewer posited to Kojima the connection between the Timefall and the tears we saw streaming down Reedusās face but Kojima explained āno, he was crying because he was sad.ā
If it were always easy to delineate Real Tim from Fake Tim I donāt think we wouldāve ever had these interpretive conflicts, and yet they happened/happen all the time. I like Tim but Iām not going to implicitly trust the accuracy of his Dev Lore especially when it was often deployed simply for narrative effect in his older articles
tbh after reading over your posts Iām not sure what your argument is here except that you think Kojima is a dumbo which okay, youāre entitled to think that, but are you trying to draw some absolute line between the quality of a personās character or persona and their work, because if so you have a whole masterās thesis to write
