Author’s Note: The very concept of an ‘auteur’ is one that’s been challenged in video games. Unlike films, TV shows and comics, the nature of modern big budget video-game development is one where a single person can’t have the same kind of influence as those mediums. It’s not an intention of this article to downplay the amount of work done by other people in the games mentioned, but Hideo Kojima’s strong presence on a game’s development has been well documented in the past, and his quirks and desires come through strongly in any work he’s directly involved in. A game like Death Stranding, for instance, probably would never exist without a Hideo Kojima. Therefore, while it’s not meant to disrespect anyone else, I do think it’s fair to discuss Kojima as a single entity, artist or brand.
Despite it being obviously incomplete, Metal Gear Solid 5’s story may be my favorite one of the entire franchise. It is, in many ways, the accumulation of the themes the series had from the beginning. It’s the story of Big Boss, a man who became a legend that’s bigger than life, but was really a mediocre solider whose accomplishments only came because he was helped time and time again by others, usually from the shadows. His true ability, it turned out, was to understand how he could use this legend to his advantage. He strips another man of his name, his memory and his very life to take his place and do the true work while the real Big Boss stayed deep in the shadows, his legend growing without him lifting a finger.
Hideo Kojima is probably the only real superstar game developer there’s ever been. There was a brief time in the early 2000s when games media tried to make gaming ‘rock stars’ a thing with the likes of Cliffy B., Tomonobu Itagaki, and Shinji Mikami becoming the faces of the game industry. While some of them are still around and deserve respect for their accomplishments, only Kojima still has that name and image that is, itself, as big as any game he’s done. He not only recreated a genre, he helped recreate video gaming itself with the Metal Gear Solid series that injected mainstream games with a cinematic, movie style that still is ingrained in the biggest blockbuster titles today. His mixture of serious real-world themes, absurdist humor and self-awareness is something no other game has managed to capture.
He’s also overseen some of the worst dreck you’ll ever have to play through.
For years, Kojima was heralded as a genius. His Metal Gear Solid series always had its pulse on some of the most modern dreads of society: nuclear proliferation, technology gone awry, the continued fracturing of society making spread of misinformation easier, the overwhelming presence of the American war industry and unseen manipulation by governments.
For as many years, his work has also been filled with poor and misogynist portrayals of women. The Beauty and the Beast unit in Metal Gear Solid 4 was a group of psychologically abused women who would strike sexy poses for you in skintight clothing. Quiet is a woman who could literally not wear a full set of clothes because she’s half plant or something. Going all the way back to the adventure game Snatcher, there’s many uncomfortable scenes involving women that involve breast fondling, panty sniffing and a creepy sequence with an underaged girl.
Because of things like that, the legend of Kojima has been something more and more people have started to question as time goes on. The reception to his latest game, Death Stranding, reflects that. While the reviews are by no means terrible, it’s by far his least favorably reviewed title in many years. The discourse around it has been even more polarizing.
Death Stranding is, in many ways, Kojima and all of his flaws magnified. His stories love to repeat themselves. While the Metal Gear franchise is a little more subtle, Death Stranding regurgitates its story and themes so much you’ll wonder if Kojima forgot the story he was writing at various points in the game. While the women aren’t as needlessly sexualized as the other examples, they are regulated almost exclusively to maternal roles. One of the few key female characters is literally called Mama.
Paradoxically, it’s also a game that shows one of his best strengths as a storyteller.
Most writers have a constant theme they revisit. But one thing that separates a good writer from a great one is that they can not just revisit a theme, but build upon it and evolve with more complex versions with each work. While Kojima has explored a lot of themes in his work, one has run through it all: that the heroes and legends we love aren’t really that great.
Solid Snake, the main protagonist of most of the Metal Gear Solid games, tends to play the straight man in the bizarre plots. In one line that maybe encompasses this theme is when Snake, in disguise and talking about his own legend to someone else, says, “There’s not a lot of difference between heroes and madmen.” Through the course of the Metal Gear Solid series, we find out that Big Boss, whose DNA is coveted for his feats as a solider, wasn’t that great a solider. Solid Snake’s legendary Shadow Moses mission was one that could easily be replicated under the right circumstances with any competently trained individual and him being the legendary son of Big Boss had no bearing on anything. These idolized people aren’t all that special when it’s all said and done.
I would argue that the way he’s evolved this theme of false ideas of heroes and legends is genius. It began with simple musings about how our heroes aren’t who we think they are, but eventually finds itself to how people use these bogus legends to build things, from armies to legacies to societies. In Death Stranding, we see something of the ultimate accumulation of this when the main character’s mission is misrepresented to inspire an entire nation in a broken and dying America.
It’s reminiscent of another science fiction writer I tend to liken Kojima to: Philip K. Dick.
Dick’s early work uses a basic theme of reality not being what it seems, something pretty tired and true. But as he progressed, that theme became more complex with works like The Man in the High Castle and A Scanner Darkly where the ‘fake’ and ‘real’ constantly dance with one another, and the very concept of what reality even is begins to take center stage. Dick’s writing was hit or miss (some of that early stuff can be rough to go back to), but the way his ideas became bigger and bigger on a natural level is one of the reasons his legend as a sci-fi writer is still remembered today. Interestingly, his work also now gets criticism for his treatment of women.
The legend of Hideo Kojima helped create the studio he now heads. Kojima has recounted the story of how, after leaving longtime employer Konami, he struggled to find funding until a higher-up at one bank knew him and his work. I can honestly say I don’t think any other creator in video games could get the kind of budget, marketing and time to make something like Death Stranding. That freedom, ironically, has lead to a revaluation of who he is as a storyteller. Is the legend of Hideo Kojima like the legends in his works: not that great and bolstered by a combination of who he was working with as well as the time period it took place in? It’s hard to deny that there is some truly terrible, near amateurish levels of writing in a lot of his recent games. Yet, there is something about how he can build a world, a story, an idea, that is unlike anyone else that will probably ever be.
Is Kojima a genius or a hack who has managed to use his brand in a way no else could? Or maybe he’s somewhere in that between of artists who have brilliant ideas but execution is anything but brilliant. Kojima’s works are often defined by that in-between with moments you can’t tell as serious or silly, always dancing somewhere in the middle. Maybe that’s all part of the genius, in the end, just another part of the legend.
Image credit: Georges Seguin (Okki)
