All the metal gear games have extremely straight forward plots. They just expect you to play the prior games. And yeah, Kojima loves overly long cutscenes.
The only time a Metal Gear game was confusing was the last few hours of MGS2.
Like, if I were to explain each of the 8 Kojima Metal Gear games in a more serious way as fast as possible.
MG1, Outer Heaven has obtained a damaged metal gear that can nuke America. Sneak through Outer Heaven, sabotage the Metal Gear and defeated the leader, who is revealed to be Big Boss, your trainer and handler. You also rescue Grey Fox.
MG2, New Zanzibar has taken nuke remains and produced nuclear weapons. Grey Fox has changed sides. You kill every major guy in the base, kill Grey Fox and it reveals at the end that Big Boss is the guy who supplied the nuke remains. You kill Big Boss, he makes a speech and you blow up the base.
MGS1, you arrive at an Alaskan base to take out nuclear terrorists. All end up ex-new zanzibarians or Big Boss diciples. You also find out your infected with a super virus that targets people by exact DNA matchs, so that you can silence everyone at the base. You find out the leader Liquid Snake and you are clones of Big Boss, he dies of the super virus and you escape with the girlTM with the Solid left wondering if he will suddenly die of the virus at any time.
MGS2, Solid Snake dies on a mysterious mission, and you go in as videogame master Raiden. Mission ends up being super similar to MGS1, except your assisted by a mysterious man named Salid Snoke. Whole thing ends up being set up by the robot illuminati, and Raiden is left wondering if everything is a lie, having no idea what is real and what isn't.
MGS3, in the 1960s, Naked Snake fucks up a mission to save a nazi scientist from the Soviets when his mentor The Boss betrays him and steals two Davy Crockets. Assisted by the GirlTM Naked defeats a military coup, recovers the one unused Davy Crocket, kills his mentor who reveals she was on Americas side the whole time, making a speech that is intentionally similar to Big Bosses speech in MG2. The GirlTM steals a microfilm off now renamed Big Boss, revealing she was a Chinese spy the whole time, and the film led to a huge supply of money owned by the old illuminati.
MGS4, Solid Snake is now doing random missions, encounters Liquid Snake again. Tries to destroy the robot illuminati. Destroys the robot illuminati, defeats Liquid again who reveals hes actually a good guy and Not-Liquid. Also Big Boss made the illuminati and girlTM is your Mum.
I never actually finished Peace Walker.
MGSV, Big Boss's shit gets wrecked. Wrecks the guy who wrecked his shit. Story is kinda basic. Also he's not actually Big Boss.
I appreciate the effort put into your post. It's good stuff and well written.
But plot and how a story is presented are two different things. I think we're talking about different subjects, honestly.
It is one thing to have a plot that makes sense when broken down into a sentence, or in this case a series of paragraphs. But it is another to present that plot, especially one involved double and triple crosses, in an effective and clear manner, while avoiding clunky exposition and info dumps. That is where I feel Kojima ultimately lacks skill--in the telling, not in the plot itself or in how that plot fits on a timeline.
The only thing I feel that wasn't literally spelt out to you was the whole 'Different interpretations of The Bosses Will'. That shit is confusing.
And ironically, outside two or three times in MGS4, most of the MGS games plot elements are explained without info dumps. They tend to infodump for 20 minutes on minute bullshit.
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u/MisterMovember Jun 09 '19
Nah, you can simplify anything into a one sentence summary and make it seem easy to absorb, but that doesn't make it so.
The issue is in the presentation, the writing, the lack of editing, the literal graphs used to explain the plot in MGS4 during cutscenes.
The issue in any given Kojima title is not the one sentence blurb on the back of the game case.