games

i love the other games but I think MGSV and Peace Walker are the only two that have a well-formed political outlook. The other games are more personal, or more about scifi themes like abuse of technology, or how disinformation spreads. Peace Walker and V hit different and are very concerned with themes like racism and imperialism. Maybe by that point Kojima had a more well-baked ideological basis to work with, but who knows.

V is unfinished though. A third of the game just doesn't exist and it's why you spend the last section of the game replaying earlier missions and the story doesn't go anywhere. I've always like how clear it is that you're part of the bad guys in V. Only a few of the missions involve anything heroic, most of them have you involving yourself in both sides of a conflict while also fighting the shadowy illuminati guys. I usually have more interesting thoughts about this game but I'm tired from work and my brain is fried. Phantom Pain is still one of the most interesting games ever made to me though. It's so silly and exaggerated and yet it's got a really compelling breakdown of what revenge entails, how conflict starts and how groups form to secure resources. It's neat. Kojima is neat.

imo Kojima was hitting his stride when he had a co-writer like on MGS 1-3, left to his own devices his stuff is kind of a mess. Do agree it's a neat idea though.

The "goes over the head" meme with the person looking at MGSV saying "linguistic imperialism bad" and the phrase "English is inherently evil and must be destroyed" going over his head.

Honestly really wish Kojima had read Lenin in high school or something. Across the series, MGS so consistently almost hits the mark but just doesn't quite get there. You get these flashes but it's too often mired down by an underdeveloped understanding of politics

I think the not-quite-canon Portable Ops did the idea of "words that kill" much better with Gene.

I was really expecting with the whole theme there would be more disinformation, propaganda, narrative control, persuasion techniques type stuff - "words that kill" being the words that turn men into soldiers and killers or cause people to turn on each other in civil war (yes, it's not a materialist understanding of how that works IRL but still). Skullface would be like Gene, a master of controlling words to control the world - if it then turned out his goal was to wipe out the English language: fantastic, that's Metal Gear baby. But instead, the "words that kill" are just the sounds that activate a particular strain of vocal cord parasite to cause a lethal infection. And the same parasites explain all the crazy supernatural powers of the Cobras that didn't need explaining. Combined with all the other unfinished storylines and missing content, it really left me feeling...

Bonus: Gene's speech in Japanese, as voiced by the inimitable Norio Wakamoto

My takeaway from mgsv was being gay for Kaz and Ocelot. I didn't pay attention to anything else.

Yeah, I enjoyed that concept a lot.

My problem with it is that it (and like other things, like the prime directive from star trek and ect.) just kinda reads like someone just found out that white people did a lot of evil. I'm at work atm, so I don't have time to go into it with details right now.