Next: actually fuckin’ Snatcher! I love Snatcher. Here we have, right off the bat: are you fucking with us? Did you do this on purpose? And no matter how you pose the question, all you get is a wry smile, and maybe a wink if you’re lucky. I don’t know if Kojima has expounded on this stuff – but regardless of whatever he’s said since, it remains an article of faith. It is for sure an article of faith whether you see this as post-facto rationalization for Wacky Game Design Bloopers or as clear, intentional subversion of not only established gameplay norms but of the player’s trust, of the basically unchallenged notion of the Reliable Narrator in Videogames.
#METAL GEAR SOLID V THE PHANTOM PAIN CASSETTE TAPES FULL#
Still: questions, which may in fact be plot holes, existed that wouldn’t be answered for another 27 years, and scenes such as the infamous Gas Warning bit, where Big Boss helpfully chimes in to let you know a room is full of poison gas that you should wear a gas mask for only once you’ve reached the other side of the room, sure seem to fulfill notions of diegetic meaning within the game’s script. Or maybe it’s not deliberate, and we’re reading too much into it.
The text is not especially dense, or complex, but there’s enough of it, and it is, emphatically, used in a very deliberate and meaningful way.
Again, I can only judge from the English version, but it’s already interesting. Real quick, let’s run down the relevant – and very nearly complete – work history of Kojima.įirst: Metal Gear releases in 1987. In other words: verbosity was becoming someone’s stock-in-trade, deliberately or not. Oh, and also, about 50 years earlier, the West dropped two massively destructive future weapons on two of their major population centers, and the consensus remained “they had it comin’”, which hoo boy do I not have time to discuss.) We had no idea that Kojima was coming to this work reasonably fresh off of writing two visual novels and directing them both, along with at least one dating sim. (This was about as much context as we had, in 1998. Agness Kaku had some choice words on the topic re: MGS2 in an interview which has since been taken down at her request I believe her, though.) If it gets a little long-toothed on some conversations, well – American-Brand Peaceful Hippyism was pretty widely known to be a Thing in Japan, and it was only fair to expect it from Kojima. But it’s pretty good! I genuinely believe that the localization process for each future game was probably damaged by requiring the translators to translate literally, and not localize. (Important Note: I can only judge the English translation. Metal Gear Solid at no point begs the player to consider the context of its creator’s oeuvre and to study his method, though, which, if I can be frank and kinda basic, is how, in an ideal magical christmas vacuum, all art should work. Something about the anti-nuke, Can U Do Love On A Battlefield, war-is-wrong-but-also-its-details-are-fascinating text manages to successfully mesh with the framework of the very special strongest soldier clone boy beating up his brother and his dad’s lover and their weird friends to get back his dad’s bones ( SPOILER ALERT: uhhh David I have some bad news for you about those bones).
Its diatribing, despite CLEARLY being diatribacious in a way that must be deliberate, somehow manages to feel only a hair’s-width out of place. It is wrong to say that Metal Gear Solid isn’t up-to-snuff on its genre reading, let alone its -savvy, but it’s also completely fair to surmise that the goal was a widely-appealing military action-stealth-thriller. What I am saying: there is a huge, fundamental, canyon-sized difference in the Approach-To-Art that Metal Gear Solid has and the Approach-To-Art that Metal Gear Solid 2 has. (maybe.) I think the problem is that Hideo Kojima, nursed on his own work in a medium that developed in cultural isolation (the Visual Novel, heavy emphasis on the Visual aspect his text-based works always had more of an adventure game shine to them than the VN genre has come to embrace (not to paint the whole thing with one brush.)), got so good at masturbating that he could whip it out in front of you in broad daylight and, when he was done, you’d applaud. It was, though one hates to admit it happened this late, probably the genesis of postmodern videogame analysis the moment when we (should have) realized, hey, wait: sometimes a huge masturbatory disappointment is just a huge masturbatory disappointment, but sometimes, if it winks enough and leaves just enough leeway to believe that it’s in on the joke, that huge masturbatory disappointment can actually be a statement about the impossibility of creating art under capitalism. It’s been sixteen years since Tim Rogers’s “dreaming in an empty room / (a defense of Metal Gear Solid 2)” and I don’t want to paraphrase an article that’s better than mine, so if you haven’t recently, go read it (again).
0 kommentar(er)
