I disagree. His involvement might be what is needed for Konami. Regardless of how anyone feels about Kojima, the reality is Metal Gear Solid is the house that Kojima built and that very much is going to have people not open to buying a new MGS if they feel he is not involved in some way. I'd NEVER go as far as to say he was done with this series "four games ago". "started to really show towards the end." based on what? We don't even know how many of those changes to the series were even his doing completely, as Konami still owns the IP. That would be like saying the failure of Survive is his doing too.
He made it into a Battle Royal Zombie game?
A change so fucking drastic like that tells , me many of those changes with MGSV might be from Konami.
"I would take a Rising 2 though" I mean sure, but we are talking about how to save Konami in general, they can get Platinum to do Rising 2 and still have their own team do MGS6 as those are 2 completely different teams and not either ors.
So I think the overall community wants to see Kojima and Murata pen a story that Konami doesn't keep trying to fuck up for sales. I have a hard time believing Kojima and Murata didn't want to kill off Solid Snake at the end of MGS4, that sounds like they wrote it that way, showed a trailer very much foreshadowing Solid Snake killing himself for the greater good and Konami wasn't having it and saw $$$ and forced them to re-write it. Big Boss is clearly a bad guy in Metal Gear 1, but....Konami not wanting to make some bad guy the main character, suddenly its time to fuck up MGSV story. All of this is to keep the main character alive, good, the hero etc. It tells me maybe Konami is doing this to move units and Kojima and Murata have story ideas to move the series forward, not force it to only be about 1 or 2 damn people.
look at Rising, don't you think its weird they even needed to go so far as to fucking make a side game JUST to have Raiden as the main character? So you could have Solid Snake off himself in MGS4, Raiden grief stricken goes on a killing rampage in Snakes honor mirroring Naked Snake/The Joy relationship, Rising 1 could be Metal Gear Solid 6 as it does take place after 4 and you could have a start to a new chapter to the series.
So if they want to, they can make Rising 2, simply Metal Gear Solid 6, kill off Snake or even just have him an old person helping Raiden like Otacon helped him. Lots of room exist for the series to just move on with someone else to show progression.
I mean, Kojima himself has said "This is the last one I'm directing" for every MGS game since Sons of Liberty, hahah. Admittedly though, a lot of it is just my personal reading into the way the series progressed.
I talk a lot of shit about Kojima here (I'm trying to dial back my shitposting lately I promise), but if the dude is anything at all he's creative. MGS was an unprecedented experience at the time of its release, a huge success for both Konami and Sony. People ate that shit up, myself included. A sequel was inevitable, and MGS2 was again a huge success. Then with MGS3, he got the chance to tell Big Boss's story, which was apparently something he really felt strongly about, and that game was fucking amazing and one of my top 5 GOATs.
At this point he became a bit more vocal about wanting to turn the franchise over to other people within Konami. A creative guy like Kojima would no doubt want to move on to other projects and not be tied to one franchise forever; Zone of the Enders was pretty successful and new entries in that franchise were rumored for a while too, and then there was Boktai which I never played but heard good things about.
But for whatever reason, MGS kept ending up back on his plate. Maybe he wasn't happy with what the younger crew was cranking out or maybe Konami bigwigs weren't happy with what the younger crew was cranking out, I'm not sure. Someone wasn't happy and Kojima kept ending up back at the helm.
So then there's MGS4, which set out to answer every question Kojima never meant to have answers and tie up every dangling thread left by the first three games. A daunting task, and one that people might argue was too much even for Kojima to handle. But it got done and the franchise got a proper ending.
Then he had to do Peace Walker, which was both a fairly big gameplay departure from the other games and a wholly unnecessary story in the MGS timeline. MGS4's writing was certainly beyond goofy, but Peace Walker somehow went even farther. An AI Boss, Pacifica Ocean, fucking Hot Coldman lol...cracks are starting to show here.
Then I think almost immediately after that, he begins work on "Project Ogre" aka MGSV. This ends up being an even bigger gameplay departure from the rest of the series, and again a wholly unnecessary midquel elbowing its way into the middle of the series timeline, changing the context of events both before and after it.
People had fun with it, sure, but in my mind Phantom Pain has very little of what made the earlier MGS games great. Even Ocelot, probably the greatest frenemy in all of games and the highlight of any scene he shows up in, is a shell of his former self here.
I dunno. It felt like it could've (or should've) been something other than a Metal Gear game, like a new franchise.
While he's doing all this, he gets a bit of involvement with the Castlevania franchise and starts working in some capacity on a new Silent Hill game. So he tries to branch out as much as he can, but keeps getting shunted back to Metal Gear (whether by Konami bigwigs or his own inability to let it go).
So based on the way the games really started changing (starting with 4 making it a point to answer every question there was left about the series and with the original idea for the ending being Snake and Otacon's execution, and ending with V's wholly different approach to gameplay and sparse, esoteric narrative) and Kojima's attitude after forming his own studio, I really get the feeling that he was just a creative dude that got tired of being Metal Gear Guy.
Maybe I'm being harsh. Maybe MGS6, or an MGS reboot or whatever, could benefit from a bit of story input from Kojima. I just get the feeling that he wouldn't be interested in returning to that world, and if he's doing something he doesn't
really want to do then it'll suffer. Just look at how quickly he got Death Stranding out the door vs. how long it took to get MGSV, essentially half a game, released.
I have no basis for any of this though, hahah.
www.pushsquare.com
