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.
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 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 this article and it prompted me into writing one of my own, which I’d love to have your thoughts on. Could I just post a link over here? Fantastic piece. Thanks Frank.
What is storytelling, anyway? What is writing? What are the referents by which quality is judged? Videogames are not cinematic, they're just easily mistaken for cinema because they may contain moving images. Is Thomas Pynchon good writing? Is Agatha Christie? Is New X-Men? Is Grey's Anatomy? Is good writing determined by its formal characteristics, by its conformity (or lack thereof) to some manner of deontology? Is good writing that which moves us? Which makes us think? Which changes our minds?
Writing is the programming of the soul. Reading is the closest you will ever get to inhabiting another person's mind. It is the best compromise we have between information density and legibility. Nearly all other art can be directed or described by writing, although art gallery curators continuously do their worst to disprove this notion. Fortunately Michel Houellebecq is pulling on the other side of that rope.
Videogames are obviously not about writing, even though some of the very earliest inchoate expressions of the form consist purely of text. This is a category error, fortunately redressed by the otherwise culturally irrelevant field of interactive fiction. Videogames are about systems of rules that form a magic circle, facilitating play. Oh, but what is play? I'll answer that after you tell me what is good writing.
Writing in games are best understood as part of their interface metaphors. Writing provides scaffolding that saves the game designer from having to define all his terms. It is framing fiction that provides an entry point to the simulation and allows the player to cobble together an understanding of their role in the simulation, its goals and the ways in which you achieve them. The meaning of the simulation is the experience of engaging with it. Writing can form part of that meaning, by providing a mind to read that contextualizes the activity.
My favorite example of how to write a videogame is Nier: Automata. It does all the Japanese things: Big robots named after European philosophers, BDSM cyborgs with frilly panties, shameless intermixing of pathos and bathos. It has about 15 hours of content, which it attempts to stretch out to over 60 hours of play. It's heavy on the tropes, and starts out establishing the hoary premise that there are sentient robots. The player is embodied by sentient robots, the enemies are sentient robots, the story is all about sentient robots. The sentient robot characters controlled by the player make fun of the idea that robots can be sentient. Little robots insist that they are sentient, acting out little tableaus of empathy, love, loss; the full gamut of emotion that we can all grudgingly agree makes us human.
The game wallows in tropes. There are typical videogame villages inhabited by robots, reminding you that they were always inhabited by robots, just dressed up as people. Shallow automatons delivering the same lines over and over again, asking you to do chores for them wrapped up in manipulative language trying to fast-track you to emotional involvement, foisting you urgently along while they stand still in their designated places because giving them agency would be both technically impractical and experientially pointless. The game, after all, is about you and not them.
Over time, you simply accept all of this. It becomes a videogame. There are robot avatars, robot enemies, robot bosses, robot quest dispensers, robot cosmetic NPCs. You go alright, this is a game where robots are just like people. You get used to the idea that robots are sentient, because what does it matter, this is a mid-budget Japanese spectacle brawler with a light but novel progression system and what appears to be lofty ambitions. It's trying to do a lot with a little, and the story and themes are a neat conceit justifying reusing the same half-dozen robot designs and models for nearly all the characters and enemies. It's tidy, every now and then there's a big showpiece that makes you go "ah, this is where they spent the cash".
If you are patient enough to put up with this for however long it takes the game to lull you into its fiction, for it to become habitual, utterly grokked, it finally pulls its trick. For me, this happened around the 40 hour mark. The hoary premise that there are sentient robots has been fully internalized, and then Yoko Taro starts pulling on that thread. Slowly he unfurls your notion of sentience. All the little robots that you have gotten used to imbuing with personality, emotions and intent are revealed to be automatons acting out scripts, mimicking sentience, their apparent souls merely metaphors once intended to provide a familiar and comfortable interface for a humanity long extinct, now a vestigial reflection waiting for a narcissist to come along and fall in love with it.
We all know that there is no way to ascertain sentience, apart from tolerating reasonable doubt. You are sentient, after all, aren't you? Why not accord the same privilege to those around you that appear to be sentient? Like pornography, you know sentience when you see it. It's hardly a novel notion to acknowledge, put plainly it borders on the banal. But the unfolding of exactly this flavor of the realization, the way in which your mind is read by the distant author whose mind you are supposed to be reading, the sense of your habituated thinking being a convenient fiction, the existential dread slowly easing its fangs into your neck; a trick pulled off in a fashion only a videogame with its unreasonable expectation of time investment, its tropes, its technical constraints, its decades of conventions layered like geological strata, could.
Videogames ask you to adopt a new literacy. This is hard, it may even be impossible for generations habituated to cinematic and literary modes. It's a frontier that only a few geniuses, most of them unrecognized as such, have even the faintest sense of how to navigate, let alone master. Some day in the future, the idea of measuring the writing of a videogame against other forms of writing will make no sense. Then we won't need to talk about whether or not videogames have good writing any longer.
Maybe I need to go back and finish Nier: Automata. I didn't like the big empty levels and tedious combat, but now I feel like maybe I missed something.
Hey did you ever release Myriad? I just watched a youtube video of it and I'd love to try it out.
According to Jeremy Blaustein, writer of the English localization of MGS1, Kojima became frustrated when he learned that the English version of the game deviated from an exact translation of his original script. As a result, he made sure that future localizations would follow his work to a tee. This is why MGS1 contains more American-style action movie cliches (“you don’t know how good a cigarette tastes in the morning”, "that takes care of the cremation!", etc) while MGS2-5 and Death Stranding have a more literal, awkward-sounding English translation (Otacon broodingly identifying himself as a "Science-aholic", the infamous Princess Beach line). I'm a huge fan, but he's not beating the egomaniac allegations.
That being said, it's not just the localization. Kojima's games are ham-fisted and campy in both form and content. I believe that this is deliberate, but not ironic. Rather, it contains a formal necessity. It is a tribulation the player must pass through in order to achieve the desired consciousness. One might not understand or super enjoy the constant monologuing and dozen plot twists in MGS2, but I don't think one can deny that the experience bonds the player closer to that of Raiden, who is equally confused and traumatized by information overload. Kojima does things in a weird way, but it always serves his thesis.
The other day I was discussing No More Heroes with a friend. To this day I genuinely have no idea whether Suda51's obnoxious world of pointless violence and moronic repartee was intended as a satire of American pop culture or a genuine attempt to approximate it. It's bad, but is it bad on purpose? Is it bad because it has to be? I do not know, but the mystery itself constitutes my interest in the game.
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...
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.
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.
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 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 this article and it prompted me into writing one of my own, which I’d love to have your thoughts on. Could I just post a link over here? Fantastic piece. Thanks Frank.
Yes, please share a link to your piece, thanks!
https://medium.com/@odinperez98/games-are-good-ce7bf2d54e6d
Thanks for such short notice Frank, I’m honored. Let me know what’d ya think ;)
What is storytelling, anyway? What is writing? What are the referents by which quality is judged? Videogames are not cinematic, they're just easily mistaken for cinema because they may contain moving images. Is Thomas Pynchon good writing? Is Agatha Christie? Is New X-Men? Is Grey's Anatomy? Is good writing determined by its formal characteristics, by its conformity (or lack thereof) to some manner of deontology? Is good writing that which moves us? Which makes us think? Which changes our minds?
Writing is the programming of the soul. Reading is the closest you will ever get to inhabiting another person's mind. It is the best compromise we have between information density and legibility. Nearly all other art can be directed or described by writing, although art gallery curators continuously do their worst to disprove this notion. Fortunately Michel Houellebecq is pulling on the other side of that rope.
Videogames are obviously not about writing, even though some of the very earliest inchoate expressions of the form consist purely of text. This is a category error, fortunately redressed by the otherwise culturally irrelevant field of interactive fiction. Videogames are about systems of rules that form a magic circle, facilitating play. Oh, but what is play? I'll answer that after you tell me what is good writing.
Writing in games are best understood as part of their interface metaphors. Writing provides scaffolding that saves the game designer from having to define all his terms. It is framing fiction that provides an entry point to the simulation and allows the player to cobble together an understanding of their role in the simulation, its goals and the ways in which you achieve them. The meaning of the simulation is the experience of engaging with it. Writing can form part of that meaning, by providing a mind to read that contextualizes the activity.
My favorite example of how to write a videogame is Nier: Automata. It does all the Japanese things: Big robots named after European philosophers, BDSM cyborgs with frilly panties, shameless intermixing of pathos and bathos. It has about 15 hours of content, which it attempts to stretch out to over 60 hours of play. It's heavy on the tropes, and starts out establishing the hoary premise that there are sentient robots. The player is embodied by sentient robots, the enemies are sentient robots, the story is all about sentient robots. The sentient robot characters controlled by the player make fun of the idea that robots can be sentient. Little robots insist that they are sentient, acting out little tableaus of empathy, love, loss; the full gamut of emotion that we can all grudgingly agree makes us human.
The game wallows in tropes. There are typical videogame villages inhabited by robots, reminding you that they were always inhabited by robots, just dressed up as people. Shallow automatons delivering the same lines over and over again, asking you to do chores for them wrapped up in manipulative language trying to fast-track you to emotional involvement, foisting you urgently along while they stand still in their designated places because giving them agency would be both technically impractical and experientially pointless. The game, after all, is about you and not them.
Over time, you simply accept all of this. It becomes a videogame. There are robot avatars, robot enemies, robot bosses, robot quest dispensers, robot cosmetic NPCs. You go alright, this is a game where robots are just like people. You get used to the idea that robots are sentient, because what does it matter, this is a mid-budget Japanese spectacle brawler with a light but novel progression system and what appears to be lofty ambitions. It's trying to do a lot with a little, and the story and themes are a neat conceit justifying reusing the same half-dozen robot designs and models for nearly all the characters and enemies. It's tidy, every now and then there's a big showpiece that makes you go "ah, this is where they spent the cash".
If you are patient enough to put up with this for however long it takes the game to lull you into its fiction, for it to become habitual, utterly grokked, it finally pulls its trick. For me, this happened around the 40 hour mark. The hoary premise that there are sentient robots has been fully internalized, and then Yoko Taro starts pulling on that thread. Slowly he unfurls your notion of sentience. All the little robots that you have gotten used to imbuing with personality, emotions and intent are revealed to be automatons acting out scripts, mimicking sentience, their apparent souls merely metaphors once intended to provide a familiar and comfortable interface for a humanity long extinct, now a vestigial reflection waiting for a narcissist to come along and fall in love with it.
We all know that there is no way to ascertain sentience, apart from tolerating reasonable doubt. You are sentient, after all, aren't you? Why not accord the same privilege to those around you that appear to be sentient? Like pornography, you know sentience when you see it. It's hardly a novel notion to acknowledge, put plainly it borders on the banal. But the unfolding of exactly this flavor of the realization, the way in which your mind is read by the distant author whose mind you are supposed to be reading, the sense of your habituated thinking being a convenient fiction, the existential dread slowly easing its fangs into your neck; a trick pulled off in a fashion only a videogame with its unreasonable expectation of time investment, its tropes, its technical constraints, its decades of conventions layered like geological strata, could.
Videogames ask you to adopt a new literacy. This is hard, it may even be impossible for generations habituated to cinematic and literary modes. It's a frontier that only a few geniuses, most of them unrecognized as such, have even the faintest sense of how to navigate, let alone master. Some day in the future, the idea of measuring the writing of a videogame against other forms of writing will make no sense. Then we won't need to talk about whether or not videogames have good writing any longer.
Maybe I need to go back and finish Nier: Automata. I didn't like the big empty levels and tedious combat, but now I feel like maybe I missed something.
Hey did you ever release Myriad? I just watched a youtube video of it and I'd love to try it out.
According to Jeremy Blaustein, writer of the English localization of MGS1, Kojima became frustrated when he learned that the English version of the game deviated from an exact translation of his original script. As a result, he made sure that future localizations would follow his work to a tee. This is why MGS1 contains more American-style action movie cliches (“you don’t know how good a cigarette tastes in the morning”, "that takes care of the cremation!", etc) while MGS2-5 and Death Stranding have a more literal, awkward-sounding English translation (Otacon broodingly identifying himself as a "Science-aholic", the infamous Princess Beach line). I'm a huge fan, but he's not beating the egomaniac allegations.
That being said, it's not just the localization. Kojima's games are ham-fisted and campy in both form and content. I believe that this is deliberate, but not ironic. Rather, it contains a formal necessity. It is a tribulation the player must pass through in order to achieve the desired consciousness. One might not understand or super enjoy the constant monologuing and dozen plot twists in MGS2, but I don't think one can deny that the experience bonds the player closer to that of Raiden, who is equally confused and traumatized by information overload. Kojima does things in a weird way, but it always serves his thesis.
The other day I was discussing No More Heroes with a friend. To this day I genuinely have no idea whether Suda51's obnoxious world of pointless violence and moronic repartee was intended as a satire of American pop culture or a genuine attempt to approximate it. It's bad, but is it bad on purpose? Is it bad because it has to be? I do not know, but the mystery itself constitutes my interest in the game.
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.
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.