My Life As A Gamer: Kojima Is Fine. The Cult Of Kojima Is Not.

Razorfist has words about Hideo Kojima and Death Stranding.

In terms of his talk regarding media bullshitting their way around covering up contra-Narrative developments, he's accurate. They can, and do, employ all sorts of word-magic to baffle with bullshit those they're told to protect. They are doing this with Death Stranding. Reception, in the U.S., is not what some would like to see. That's all factual.

But I think he's jumped the gun. The game's not been out a week yet and only now are the serious players, those who blitzed it, finishing up full and complete playthroughs on anything harder than Babby's First Bideogame. As such, some of the criticisms are not warranted. Summarizing it as The Postman by way of Metal Gear does toss out some important details, naming that what you're set out to do isn't what's going on, and all the weirdness isn't the allegory he's after. The connections talked about are cast in interpersonal terms, but what's going on the larger cosmic connections and the rightful order they bring; when that's disrupted, the system falls apart and a hard reset is ordered. That's what the game is about.

Oliver Campbell said it best in a recent livestream. Kojima is like George Lucas; he's a fantastic producer, a great idea man. Get him quality talent to execute those ideas, and exercise restraint over him, and you get some S-tier results. Let him run things, and you get something narratively dense with pacing problems but otherwise is a fine example of the form; most of Kojima's career since Metal Gear Solid has been the latter, which is why he gets knocked around like he does.

In short, the man needs an editor who knows how to say "No" to him and get him to write cleaner and leaner narratives with better pacing. His current famous associates are none of this, which is not surprising when looking at who is in this game and how they are used. His past associates were no such help either. This is a consistent pattern; the games he puts out are not nearly as difficult to comprehend as they're made out to be. They're just densely packed and poorly paced.

From what I watched, this game is worth playing, but not at $60. Wait for a price drop, buy used--should be a copy available soon--or get a good discount.

What does get me is that Kojima is both worshipped and shat upon in manners one might say were fannish in nature. He does have a tendency to be needlessly obfuscatory about his work, both in talking about it and in the playing of it. He is fixated upon Cold War era fears of annihilation and control by shadowy elites with manipulative practices, a thing that Death Stranding didn't change. That doesn't change that he consistently creates gameplay experiences that do approach the High Art ambitions he aspires to, and we still talk a lot more about the Metal Gear games than their competitors; he ain't Kurosawa, but denying that he's not a legit heavy weight in world culture, and has the output to back that claim up, especially as shit he talked about over a decade ago comes to pass here and now and the last proper game had a thread about language control thought straight out of 1984 with "parasites" as allegory for "cultish paradigm control".

In ludological terms, there's nothing unusual. Non-lethal play is given early and always an option, especially given the consequences for sloppy lethal violence here; damage done to the landscape is permanent regardless of when in the game it occurs, so it persists into the open world post-game state. The Asynchronus online play succeeds in creating the sense of others being present while you--in active play--are alone and have to handle things on your own; you can see others contributing to the infrastructure enabling play on the map, but you still have to do the hoofing it to link up regions to the network and bring them online- doing so phases you into the shared world state therein. You also have to do certain unlocks before you can make and use certain things, like ziplines (and you do want those; gets you around massive regions like mountains fast and easy).

While the narrative has the aforementioned issues, the gameplay is solid and truly What You See Is What You Get. The mechanics of things is explained in a far cleaner manner than the narrative itself, and by the time certain items are obtained or temporarily disabled you should have learned enough about other mechanics (e.g. enemy tells) to make the most of the gameplay changes. Sure, you can't Fulton an entire base of Russians and their gear back to Mother Base, but being able to 3d print a highway so you can speed across a plain is just as fantastic. The game is fine. The hype's the problem.

So lay off the hate, and the worship. He's just a man, flawed like all of us, but still a bright and observant man who's trying to use what he has to say what he's got.

He just needs a manager to rein in his excesses. If he can do that, count on the next game being a awe-inspiring masterpiece, and not a scuffed one like this game is.