I've never played any other Kojima game than 'Death Stranding.' I felt it essential to learn more about Metal Gear Solid and Kojima's dialogue in the original Japanese (and I am very grateful to Sam Byford in Tokyo for his help here) to understand why the script in DS is SO bad—and yes, you're right that it is really bad; so bad it often verges on becoming a pastiche of itself.
But despite the bad dialogue, the rest of Death Stranding is so good, which is why the turgid cutscenes didn't bother me as much the more I progressed and came to enjoy other aspects of the game, some of which are truly astonishing.
For further context, I find the writing bad in most video games tbh. Cutscenes aren't my thing. As a result, I tend to avoid narrative-driven games in general. I quickly gave up on 'Horizon Forbidden West' and 'Assassins Creed Valhalla,' not just because of the interminable cut scenes and garbage dialogue, but because I also found the gameplay a chore. The same was true of 'Star Wars Outlaws.'
That is why I love FromSoftware games so much; the story and dialogue are there simply to propel the game forward. I couldn't tell you what Elden Ring is about—I haven't a clue. But that hasn't stopped me from playing well over 300 hours of the game and DLC, and I consider it one of the greatest games ever made.
FromSoft seems to treat storytelling as simply a necessary part of making a great game, but one that should never get in the way of the gameplay itself. I certainly think Kojima would benefit from heeding that lesson a little.
> For further context, I find the writing bad in most video games tbh.
Yeah. I know there are lots of complicated reasons for this. But I don't think it's going to get better until we collectively admit how terrible it is. The standard attempted solution to this problem seems to be more writing, which only makes the problem much, much, much worse. Many AAA games now put writer-types in charge of the whole game, and that is definitely not working. We know this problem CAN be solved, because we have games like Portal and Disco Elysium as existence proofs.
Agreed. I think the problem is that too many games fall into the trap of trying to be like a great movie instead of a great game with a good story. One studio that seems to have found a good balance between original storytelling and gameplay is Remedy. I loved Control; so atmospheric and creative, and I have heard that Alan Wake 2 is fantastic (I'm not into the whole horror thing, so I haven't played it myself)
Control, imo, has a different, related problem, which is repetitive, boring, generic, shooting-based combat. That game is so visually beautiful, so atmospheric and thematically rich, the fact that they couldn't think of anything other than bog-standard, off-the-shelf shooting to anchor the gameplay feels like a catastrophic lack of imagination and courage.
You are spot on about both Death Stranding and Control. I enjoy both for what they are, but both feel like their ambition in some respects lead to pulling their creative punches in other respects, which sours the overall package for me. While I do like the occasional "Sony prestige cinematic over the shoulder shimmy through tight crevice" type of game, you are so right about the danger of that being the future of the artform. This is the first writing I've seen from you but I'm gonna go buy your book and sign up for your newsletter, I think!
I have played so few shooter games I will defer to you here, but I thought the gameplay mechanics of Control were superb, especially the levitation and kinetic "force" ability to grab objects and throw them at enemies. I loved it
This is a great piece that better articulates some thoughts I've been having.
Death Stranding was my first Kojima game, and I tried to like it, hearing how his convoluted dialogue was part of his intentional *style*.
I kept on trying to appreciate it, but it just didn't feel like the kind of intentionally surreal dialogue I was expecting. For example, David Lynch's films have strange and dreamlike dialogue that are very effective and feel intentional. Kojima's dialogue just felt flat and unmemorable to me. I can't remember a word anyone said in the opening hours of endless dialogue.
This piece made me think a bit more and decide that Death Stranding, indeed, simply has bad dialogue that is not trying to be bad. Death Stranding garnered some criticism for its gameplay, but this is the first I've seen of a focused critique of the dialogue, and I have to agree. The gameplay worked for me, but I stopped playing because I wasn't looking forward to seeing what happened next in the story. I didn't care about anyone. BB was probably my favorite character, and could be due to the lack of dialogue! BB conveyed more personality through little tiny body motions than the other characters did in hours of time.
And I agree that we are beyond the point where games need to be defended as an art form, and we should be having more conversations about what games *can* be, versus defending them as if we're still in the 1990s and politicians like Joseph Liebermen is wagging his finger at games for daring to include explicit violence or target older audiences. We made it. Last of Us was adapted into an HBO show.
I'm much more excited about what's possible than what exists currently in the industry. But we'll never get there if we, as a collective audience, reward and extoll the virtues of more of the same.
I was thinking about Deadly Premonition the whole time while reading this, where everything but the cutscenes is complete garbage, but it's fun anyway in a bizarre way. I say videogames are bad constantly. I think I am addicted to dreaming of possibility and there's so much goddamn potential in what a video game could be (anything) that even the saddest skeleton of a game can be the implicit shadow of something incredible. But they're bad. Except Tetris.
I love the reams of obtuse dialogue Kojima characters spill out. His jargon is so confidently logorrheic that it almost becomes a kind of cubism, asserting his voice through the collaborative process of development. No matter how sophisticated the graphics are, his characters are still composited avatars for his pen and paper musings. Compared to the flattened tenor of contemporary Triple A titles, I can appreciate his complete commitment to his schtick.
Interesting. But I don't know if I agree. Death Stranding was the first Kojima game I played. In fact, it's the only Kojima game I have played. Two hours in, my judgment was that this guy is a genius. The visual ideas. Incredible. Then the story starts to unfold, and things get weird. And interesting. I did not know this, but I certainly found out that Kojima's writing is very allegorical. That is his style. Now, growing up as a Tolkien fan, I don't usually like allegory. I like authenticity and realism. But Kojima is allegorical in everything: in the dialogues, in the characters, in their archetypical names, and "functions" within the narrative. It's quite fascinating.
As I played Death Stranding, I thought there is no way any of this is every going to make sense. And maybe that is okay.
The greatest surprise, for me, is that despite all the weirdness that Kojima envisioned, by the end, everything makes sense within its own world structure. And I realized the guy truly is a genius.
I finished Death Stranding, on a saturday, well past midnight, lights turned off, and there I was, sitting in the dark, watching the credits roll, tears down my face. I'm glad I was alone. But it was one of the most moving experiences I ever had as a gamer.
So, as I wait for the sequel, all I can say is that Death Stranding was the first and only Kojima game I have played, but it certainly won't be the last.
I enjoyed reading this. I don’t play games but I really enjoy games criticism. that said, I wonder if Sword and #Sworcery counts toward this discussion? I did play that, and often jump back in for a replay. I felt the narrative and storytelling tone of it was brilliantly balanced and the ending was genuinely surprising and moving. I get that it was an indie game and more able to conform to a single artistic vision, but it that maybe an answer to this problem? Or when you are talking about games are you only concerned with mass market releases for major platforms?
Couldn't agree more. I get so frustrated with the way game critics forgive egregious storytelling and writing when the gameplay is decent, then turn around and forgive hideous gameplay when the storytelling is decent. Sorry, but greatness in this medium requires both things to be solid. It's not enough to just do one.
I'd be interested in hearing your opinion about Alan Wake 2, which I thought was an egregious failure on both counts. The dialogue is Kojima level pretentious dreck, the plot doesn't make a lick of sense, and the gameplay is a combination of clunky third-person action and a laughably interaction-free approximation of "detective work." Yet it topped almost every best of the year list. I find it funny how much credit both Remedy, Kojima, and Yoko Taro get simply for being meta. Referencing the fact that I'm playing a video game doesn't make it smart...
This description of Kojima's oeuvre is, to the letter, how I would describe "Megalopolis" - which I loved and saw three times in the theater! Personally, a lot of the things people saw as "bad" aspects of the film were things that made the film... probably less good, but also more human.
I think a lot of the things we view as ripe for parody about 20th century video games (bad voice acting by random people in the developer's workspace, for instance) are reminders that they were made by teams of at most a dozen people working in a medium that could not possibly express the fullness of their visions. Which makes a lot of games look or sound shitty, but also makes them... kind of miraculous, in a way that "better" contemporary video games aren't.
An annoyance I have with game criticism today is that most critics assume there's just certain things about a particular game or genre which are bad, but must be accepted without question. The fans back this up by reacting to anything outside of the status-quo take on said bad thing with outrage.
Or, on the flip side, certain things are uniformly regarded as not part of a game or genre for *reasons* and any argument in favor of them is immediately viewed as an out-of-touch opinion from a casual.
Absolutely love Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 (although separate from Kojima, I’m praying the remaster/remake is going to be good), but I must say that death stranding seemed like the result of letting him go fully off-leash, and the results seemed as crazy as expected.
I agree with you, the stupid dialog and storylines definitely ruin the Kojima games. I have been saying for a while that Last Of Us is the best game of the last ~15 years, because both the cutscenes and gameplay are great on their own, *and* they also complement each other.
Neither agreeing or disagreeing with your opinion on Kojima's games (I personally haven't played them to form an opinion), but I do agree with your point about gaming culture "accepting" parts of games that are only really there because we let them be. I think a lot about those youtube videos where it's people acting out a common part of a game or whatever and sort of making fun of it, acknowledging the accepted ways of doing things in games are often silly or just bad, yet unable to envision games as anything else, simply just accepting that "it's just how games are".
(A lot of the below is responding more to a general vibe I get from arguments like this than anything you're actually specifically saying. I more or less agree with the post)
In these conversations I tend to agree with the gestalt idea and that art can't be reduced to its good and bad parts, but that's more a point I'd make in defense of an individual game. In terms of your general ideas about how this affects the medium and games culture, I do largely agree. That said, I do generally tend to find this perspective coincides with a degree of artistic insecurity and seeking the validation and legitimacy that older mediums get.
I feel like this perspective often leads to trying to ape film and TV very directly. So you end up with Kojima cutscenes and Naughty Dog cutscenes (and super on-rails gameplay). Some of these are "bad" and some of these are "good". But this form of story telling feels very at odds with games themselves. The solve for poor writing becomes for games to literally have less game and more non-game in them.
I'm not some purist who thinks cutscenes are an inherent cheat. They have their place. But looking at a bunch of cutscenes and saying that they're mostly stupid and bad feels like it's missing the forest for the trees. The goal should be to figure out how to tell a good story via a game, not find the best way to pretend games are movies. There are great games that tell a good story through play. There are great games that don't bother with any kind of conventional narrative at all. And yeah, there are games with a bunch of cutscenes. Pursue every option. Make it all good. I guess just don't think we should be doing it from a place of embarassment and insecurity, because that feels like it'll really scare people into coloring inside the lines.
Totally agree. It's a subtle point, but part of what's driving the bad parts of Kojima games is precisely this desperate attempt to be a "masterpiece" in the style of film and other linear media, which is, arguably, at odds with the "natural grain" of games as experiences and as culture.
Having said that, even so, we know it's possible to make games in this mode that do work. Shadow of the Colossus is deeply cinematic in its inspiration and strongly narrative/thematic in its structure, and I would consider it a flawless masterpiece. Portal is another example. Disco Elysium has tons of and tons of dialogue and is absolutely brilliant. Games like these are existence proofs that what Kojima is trying to do isn't impossible.
> I guess just don't think we should be doing it from a place of embarassment and insecurity...
Yes. In particular we should stop anxiously and jealously chasing the status, prestige, and glamour of other pop cultural forms - that's not the way forward.
Re - "Having said that, even so, we know it's possible to make games in this mode that do work."
Yes, I think this is what can get missed. Ninja Gaiden 1 for the NES was the first game in this format I played growing up, and I think the cinematics greatly enhanced the game, especially at a time when the NES couldn't convey the nuance of facial expressions yet. It gave stakes and motivation to the gameplay segments.
Hideo Kojima suffers from what I like to call "George Lucas Syndrome," and to elevate this new term further Rocco Botte of Mega64 once said about Kojima's story telling, despite having immense respect for Kojima's craft, "Metal Gear Solid is ten pounds of plot in a five pound bag." You might already understand from the term and quote alone, but to elaborate: it means he needs fewer yes-men and more people willing to challenge him, particularly in terms of storytelling. He needs collaborators who excel at crafting narratives working alongside him not gravelling at his feet. George Lucas thrived because he worked with a team and wasn’t in sole control—until you know when. (That said, I still love the prequels despite many of the dissections, like RLM’s critiques, because there's some originality and unique ideas among an ocean of fish poop)
But that’s just it. Kojima is a brilliant ideas man, just like George Lucas. They both excel at generating groundbreaking concepts and visionary worlds. However, to create a true magnum opus, they need to collaborate with others who can refine and elevate their ideas into a cohesive, compelling narrative. Otherwise, they risk creating another B-movie-tier story carried by gameplay on a Goliath scale.
Collaboration often turns good ideas into great works, and without it, even the most brilliant visionaries can miss their full potential. But as George Lucas has pointed out about the film industry (and the same applies to video games), it's a high-stakes arena where massive risks are taken, often gambling with millions of dollars from investors who expect a return on their investment.
Death Stranding is a perfect example of how precarious this process can be. The game almost never happened. Kojima was fortunate to be gifted the Decima Engine from Guerrilla Games, the studio behind Horizon Zero Dawn. Yet even with this generosity, his new team initially struggled to believe in his ambitious vision. Kojima very well could have crashed and burned, but his success speaks to the balance of risk, collaboration, and trust required to bring unique ideas to life in such a competitive industry.
I know this doesn’t need to be said, but I love when the Giant Bomb crew reiterates, after a heavy sigh, "Games are hard. Games are hard to make." No game is perfect—and that’s where we come in, to dissect them. When I love something, I don’t want to settle for it as-is or let its flaws slide. I want to engage with it critically but without cynicism, striving to appreciate its ambitions while seeking its best version. To me, that means being more like Noah Caldwell-Gervais—the best video game essayist of our time—by embracing a fundamentally anti-cynical approach to the medium.
Games aren’t bad in and of themselves, as you asked in the title of your beautiful writing, but to paraphrase Dunkey, it’s just that 90% of them are bad. The 4PlayerPodcast crew might double down on this sentiment, adding, “…The market is so oversaturated with games that you’ll never play them all.”
But that’s the thing—games aren’t inherently bad. They’re just incredibly hard to make. The co-creator of Fallout 1 and 2 argues not over criticising games, that the ones you do not enjoy are not for you but may be for others to enjoy; to each their own so to speak. Every game, even the flawed ones, represents countless hours of effort, risk, and creativity. And while not every game reaches greatness, that’s what makes the exceptional ones worth dissecting, celebrating, and striving to understand.
I've never played any other Kojima game than 'Death Stranding.' I felt it essential to learn more about Metal Gear Solid and Kojima's dialogue in the original Japanese (and I am very grateful to Sam Byford in Tokyo for his help here) to understand why the script in DS is SO bad—and yes, you're right that it is really bad; so bad it often verges on becoming a pastiche of itself.
But despite the bad dialogue, the rest of Death Stranding is so good, which is why the turgid cutscenes didn't bother me as much the more I progressed and came to enjoy other aspects of the game, some of which are truly astonishing.
For further context, I find the writing bad in most video games tbh. Cutscenes aren't my thing. As a result, I tend to avoid narrative-driven games in general. I quickly gave up on 'Horizon Forbidden West' and 'Assassins Creed Valhalla,' not just because of the interminable cut scenes and garbage dialogue, but because I also found the gameplay a chore. The same was true of 'Star Wars Outlaws.'
That is why I love FromSoftware games so much; the story and dialogue are there simply to propel the game forward. I couldn't tell you what Elden Ring is about—I haven't a clue. But that hasn't stopped me from playing well over 300 hours of the game and DLC, and I consider it one of the greatest games ever made.
FromSoft seems to treat storytelling as simply a necessary part of making a great game, but one that should never get in the way of the gameplay itself. I certainly think Kojima would benefit from heeding that lesson a little.
> For further context, I find the writing bad in most video games tbh.
Yeah. I know there are lots of complicated reasons for this. But I don't think it's going to get better until we collectively admit how terrible it is. The standard attempted solution to this problem seems to be more writing, which only makes the problem much, much, much worse. Many AAA games now put writer-types in charge of the whole game, and that is definitely not working. We know this problem CAN be solved, because we have games like Portal and Disco Elysium as existence proofs.
Agreed. I think the problem is that too many games fall into the trap of trying to be like a great movie instead of a great game with a good story. One studio that seems to have found a good balance between original storytelling and gameplay is Remedy. I loved Control; so atmospheric and creative, and I have heard that Alan Wake 2 is fantastic (I'm not into the whole horror thing, so I haven't played it myself)
Control, imo, has a different, related problem, which is repetitive, boring, generic, shooting-based combat. That game is so visually beautiful, so atmospheric and thematically rich, the fact that they couldn't think of anything other than bog-standard, off-the-shelf shooting to anchor the gameplay feels like a catastrophic lack of imagination and courage.
You are spot on about both Death Stranding and Control. I enjoy both for what they are, but both feel like their ambition in some respects lead to pulling their creative punches in other respects, which sours the overall package for me. While I do like the occasional "Sony prestige cinematic over the shoulder shimmy through tight crevice" type of game, you are so right about the danger of that being the future of the artform. This is the first writing I've seen from you but I'm gonna go buy your book and sign up for your newsletter, I think!
I have played so few shooter games I will defer to you here, but I thought the gameplay mechanics of Control were superb, especially the levitation and kinetic "force" ability to grab objects and throw them at enemies. I loved it
This is a great piece that better articulates some thoughts I've been having.
Death Stranding was my first Kojima game, and I tried to like it, hearing how his convoluted dialogue was part of his intentional *style*.
I kept on trying to appreciate it, but it just didn't feel like the kind of intentionally surreal dialogue I was expecting. For example, David Lynch's films have strange and dreamlike dialogue that are very effective and feel intentional. Kojima's dialogue just felt flat and unmemorable to me. I can't remember a word anyone said in the opening hours of endless dialogue.
This piece made me think a bit more and decide that Death Stranding, indeed, simply has bad dialogue that is not trying to be bad. Death Stranding garnered some criticism for its gameplay, but this is the first I've seen of a focused critique of the dialogue, and I have to agree. The gameplay worked for me, but I stopped playing because I wasn't looking forward to seeing what happened next in the story. I didn't care about anyone. BB was probably my favorite character, and could be due to the lack of dialogue! BB conveyed more personality through little tiny body motions than the other characters did in hours of time.
And I agree that we are beyond the point where games need to be defended as an art form, and we should be having more conversations about what games *can* be, versus defending them as if we're still in the 1990s and politicians like Joseph Liebermen is wagging his finger at games for daring to include explicit violence or target older audiences. We made it. Last of Us was adapted into an HBO show.
I'm much more excited about what's possible than what exists currently in the industry. But we'll never get there if we, as a collective audience, reward and extoll the virtues of more of the same.
I was thinking about Deadly Premonition the whole time while reading this, where everything but the cutscenes is complete garbage, but it's fun anyway in a bizarre way. I say videogames are bad constantly. I think I am addicted to dreaming of possibility and there's so much goddamn potential in what a video game could be (anything) that even the saddest skeleton of a game can be the implicit shadow of something incredible. But they're bad. Except Tetris.
Yes.
I love the reams of obtuse dialogue Kojima characters spill out. His jargon is so confidently logorrheic that it almost becomes a kind of cubism, asserting his voice through the collaborative process of development. No matter how sophisticated the graphics are, his characters are still composited avatars for his pen and paper musings. Compared to the flattened tenor of contemporary Triple A titles, I can appreciate his complete commitment to his schtick.
Interesting. But I don't know if I agree. Death Stranding was the first Kojima game I played. In fact, it's the only Kojima game I have played. Two hours in, my judgment was that this guy is a genius. The visual ideas. Incredible. Then the story starts to unfold, and things get weird. And interesting. I did not know this, but I certainly found out that Kojima's writing is very allegorical. That is his style. Now, growing up as a Tolkien fan, I don't usually like allegory. I like authenticity and realism. But Kojima is allegorical in everything: in the dialogues, in the characters, in their archetypical names, and "functions" within the narrative. It's quite fascinating.
As I played Death Stranding, I thought there is no way any of this is every going to make sense. And maybe that is okay.
The greatest surprise, for me, is that despite all the weirdness that Kojima envisioned, by the end, everything makes sense within its own world structure. And I realized the guy truly is a genius.
I finished Death Stranding, on a saturday, well past midnight, lights turned off, and there I was, sitting in the dark, watching the credits roll, tears down my face. I'm glad I was alone. But it was one of the most moving experiences I ever had as a gamer.
So, as I wait for the sequel, all I can say is that Death Stranding was the first and only Kojima game I have played, but it certainly won't be the last.
Thanks for an interesting and provocative read.
That's beautiful man. I'm glad you had that experience. That is games, right there, that's how they do it, warts and all.
I enjoyed reading this. I don’t play games but I really enjoy games criticism. that said, I wonder if Sword and #Sworcery counts toward this discussion? I did play that, and often jump back in for a replay. I felt the narrative and storytelling tone of it was brilliantly balanced and the ending was genuinely surprising and moving. I get that it was an indie game and more able to conform to a single artistic vision, but it that maybe an answer to this problem? Or when you are talking about games are you only concerned with mass market releases for major platforms?
Couldn't agree more. I get so frustrated with the way game critics forgive egregious storytelling and writing when the gameplay is decent, then turn around and forgive hideous gameplay when the storytelling is decent. Sorry, but greatness in this medium requires both things to be solid. It's not enough to just do one.
I'd be interested in hearing your opinion about Alan Wake 2, which I thought was an egregious failure on both counts. The dialogue is Kojima level pretentious dreck, the plot doesn't make a lick of sense, and the gameplay is a combination of clunky third-person action and a laughably interaction-free approximation of "detective work." Yet it topped almost every best of the year list. I find it funny how much credit both Remedy, Kojima, and Yoko Taro get simply for being meta. Referencing the fact that I'm playing a video game doesn't make it smart...
Well put.
This description of Kojima's oeuvre is, to the letter, how I would describe "Megalopolis" - which I loved and saw three times in the theater! Personally, a lot of the things people saw as "bad" aspects of the film were things that made the film... probably less good, but also more human.
I think a lot of the things we view as ripe for parody about 20th century video games (bad voice acting by random people in the developer's workspace, for instance) are reminders that they were made by teams of at most a dozen people working in a medium that could not possibly express the fullness of their visions. Which makes a lot of games look or sound shitty, but also makes them... kind of miraculous, in a way that "better" contemporary video games aren't.
I appreciate this.
An annoyance I have with game criticism today is that most critics assume there's just certain things about a particular game or genre which are bad, but must be accepted without question. The fans back this up by reacting to anything outside of the status-quo take on said bad thing with outrage.
Or, on the flip side, certain things are uniformly regarded as not part of a game or genre for *reasons* and any argument in favor of them is immediately viewed as an out-of-touch opinion from a casual.
Absolutely love Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 (although separate from Kojima, I’m praying the remaster/remake is going to be good), but I must say that death stranding seemed like the result of letting him go fully off-leash, and the results seemed as crazy as expected.
I agree with you, the stupid dialog and storylines definitely ruin the Kojima games. I have been saying for a while that Last Of Us is the best game of the last ~15 years, because both the cutscenes and gameplay are great on their own, *and* they also complement each other.
Neither agreeing or disagreeing with your opinion on Kojima's games (I personally haven't played them to form an opinion), but I do agree with your point about gaming culture "accepting" parts of games that are only really there because we let them be. I think a lot about those youtube videos where it's people acting out a common part of a game or whatever and sort of making fun of it, acknowledging the accepted ways of doing things in games are often silly or just bad, yet unable to envision games as anything else, simply just accepting that "it's just how games are".
(A lot of the below is responding more to a general vibe I get from arguments like this than anything you're actually specifically saying. I more or less agree with the post)
In these conversations I tend to agree with the gestalt idea and that art can't be reduced to its good and bad parts, but that's more a point I'd make in defense of an individual game. In terms of your general ideas about how this affects the medium and games culture, I do largely agree. That said, I do generally tend to find this perspective coincides with a degree of artistic insecurity and seeking the validation and legitimacy that older mediums get.
I feel like this perspective often leads to trying to ape film and TV very directly. So you end up with Kojima cutscenes and Naughty Dog cutscenes (and super on-rails gameplay). Some of these are "bad" and some of these are "good". But this form of story telling feels very at odds with games themselves. The solve for poor writing becomes for games to literally have less game and more non-game in them.
I'm not some purist who thinks cutscenes are an inherent cheat. They have their place. But looking at a bunch of cutscenes and saying that they're mostly stupid and bad feels like it's missing the forest for the trees. The goal should be to figure out how to tell a good story via a game, not find the best way to pretend games are movies. There are great games that tell a good story through play. There are great games that don't bother with any kind of conventional narrative at all. And yeah, there are games with a bunch of cutscenes. Pursue every option. Make it all good. I guess just don't think we should be doing it from a place of embarassment and insecurity, because that feels like it'll really scare people into coloring inside the lines.
Totally agree. It's a subtle point, but part of what's driving the bad parts of Kojima games is precisely this desperate attempt to be a "masterpiece" in the style of film and other linear media, which is, arguably, at odds with the "natural grain" of games as experiences and as culture.
Having said that, even so, we know it's possible to make games in this mode that do work. Shadow of the Colossus is deeply cinematic in its inspiration and strongly narrative/thematic in its structure, and I would consider it a flawless masterpiece. Portal is another example. Disco Elysium has tons of and tons of dialogue and is absolutely brilliant. Games like these are existence proofs that what Kojima is trying to do isn't impossible.
> I guess just don't think we should be doing it from a place of embarassment and insecurity...
Yes. In particular we should stop anxiously and jealously chasing the status, prestige, and glamour of other pop cultural forms - that's not the way forward.
Re - "Having said that, even so, we know it's possible to make games in this mode that do work."
Yes, I think this is what can get missed. Ninja Gaiden 1 for the NES was the first game in this format I played growing up, and I think the cinematics greatly enhanced the game, especially at a time when the NES couldn't convey the nuance of facial expressions yet. It gave stakes and motivation to the gameplay segments.
Hideo Kojima suffers from what I like to call "George Lucas Syndrome," and to elevate this new term further Rocco Botte of Mega64 once said about Kojima's story telling, despite having immense respect for Kojima's craft, "Metal Gear Solid is ten pounds of plot in a five pound bag." You might already understand from the term and quote alone, but to elaborate: it means he needs fewer yes-men and more people willing to challenge him, particularly in terms of storytelling. He needs collaborators who excel at crafting narratives working alongside him not gravelling at his feet. George Lucas thrived because he worked with a team and wasn’t in sole control—until you know when. (That said, I still love the prequels despite many of the dissections, like RLM’s critiques, because there's some originality and unique ideas among an ocean of fish poop)
But that’s just it. Kojima is a brilliant ideas man, just like George Lucas. They both excel at generating groundbreaking concepts and visionary worlds. However, to create a true magnum opus, they need to collaborate with others who can refine and elevate their ideas into a cohesive, compelling narrative. Otherwise, they risk creating another B-movie-tier story carried by gameplay on a Goliath scale.
Collaboration often turns good ideas into great works, and without it, even the most brilliant visionaries can miss their full potential. But as George Lucas has pointed out about the film industry (and the same applies to video games), it's a high-stakes arena where massive risks are taken, often gambling with millions of dollars from investors who expect a return on their investment.
Death Stranding is a perfect example of how precarious this process can be. The game almost never happened. Kojima was fortunate to be gifted the Decima Engine from Guerrilla Games, the studio behind Horizon Zero Dawn. Yet even with this generosity, his new team initially struggled to believe in his ambitious vision. Kojima very well could have crashed and burned, but his success speaks to the balance of risk, collaboration, and trust required to bring unique ideas to life in such a competitive industry.
I know this doesn’t need to be said, but I love when the Giant Bomb crew reiterates, after a heavy sigh, "Games are hard. Games are hard to make." No game is perfect—and that’s where we come in, to dissect them. When I love something, I don’t want to settle for it as-is or let its flaws slide. I want to engage with it critically but without cynicism, striving to appreciate its ambitions while seeking its best version. To me, that means being more like Noah Caldwell-Gervais—the best video game essayist of our time—by embracing a fundamentally anti-cynical approach to the medium.
Games aren’t bad in and of themselves, as you asked in the title of your beautiful writing, but to paraphrase Dunkey, it’s just that 90% of them are bad. The 4PlayerPodcast crew might double down on this sentiment, adding, “…The market is so oversaturated with games that you’ll never play them all.”
But that’s the thing—games aren’t inherently bad. They’re just incredibly hard to make. The co-creator of Fallout 1 and 2 argues not over criticising games, that the ones you do not enjoy are not for you but may be for others to enjoy; to each their own so to speak. Every game, even the flawed ones, represents countless hours of effort, risk, and creativity. And while not every game reaches greatness, that’s what makes the exceptional ones worth dissecting, celebrating, and striving to understand.
Nice piece! imo Kojima is a unique artistic voice in gaming, and its the variety of voices that makes gaming so good.