DTG said:
Peoples idea of a complex video game story told well seem to be the Half Life series and Bioshock. I'm sorry, but those games were not complex by any stretch of the immagination. Deus Ex is another popular example, and while telling a great narrative, it was nowhere near as fleshed out in either creating it's universe, characters and storyarch nor in exploring it's themes it clearly tried to pursue as was MGS2. Of course not every game should be like MGS2, but my point is that Kojima's ambitions simply cannot be presented through gameplay alone. They need hefty scenes of dialogue and lengthy exposition to translate in their complete form to the player that is willing to listen. It's an aquired taste. |
My barometer is Planescape: Torment, which has a superior and deeper story than the entire MGS series. What I was saying is Kojima can't make a great videogame story without resorting to cutscenes only. It's fine if it's a game where the story is not the main concern, but when it's a story-centric game, using only cutscenes to tell the story is fatal.
Not only that, but the stories in MGS are convoluted, and then everything must be explained in the dialogues in order to be understood. Kojima simply is not able to story tell in the gameplay (interactively). That is common in most japanese developers.
As for Deus Ex, it does approach alot of subjects, and as deeply as any MGS game. The difference between Deus Ex and an MGS is that Deus has a far superior writing, presentation and interactivity; so it doesn't need to explain things as if it was a documentary or an interview.
