Dante9 said:
I don't get the hate that Cage gets. I have enjoyed his games very much, I think he's a good storyteller with a talent for creating atmosphere. Very movie-like, which I love in my games. I guess the haters are those who don't want games to resemble movies? |
That is interesting. I mean Detroit and Heavy Rain sold well enough. I bought them myself. But I would not say they were good games by modern standards.
And "modern standards", or standards that keep on getting higher might be a bigger problem here. Havy Rain might be good for a game that is almost 13 years old. But things have changed. It was only three years after Heavy Rain that The Last of Us released. Both story heavy games that want to explore some deep sh*t about the human condition. Both were considered daring and heavy hitting when they came out. But looking back now, Heavy Rain seems like a joke in comparison to TLoU - a game that has gotten enough praise, but perhaps not for how realistic its characters were portraied. Joel and Ellie spoke like real humans. It was a quantum leap. Ethan (the Heavy Rain guy) was like a robot in comparison. Performance was fine, but the material, the dialogue and the directing was god awfull. So overly sentimental. So much: ahhh, look at how we can capture real emotions now! It was a saw movie with the sentimentality (and plot holes) of a soap opera.
Video games evolved and David Cage got stuck in the past. And perhaps so did Kojima as well. MGS4 I thought was really good. For a 2008 game. But it took itself very seriously. It's tone was (generaly) heavy and the drama thick. Perhaps Kojima can even be regarded as trailblazer for emotional storytelling. I can't think of many who did it better at the time. It was something rarely tried perhaps. But the things said in mgs4 and DS (and how they are saying them) could not be picked up by any serious movie studio today.
It is obviously a good thing that our standards rose. And perhaps taking that into account, I was too critical of Kojima in my OP. But the point I think still stands: some of his concepts and ideas (mgs2 for example) feel as new and important as ever. But his style of storytelling, his writing (that I am familiar with) and even directing (cry some more, we need thicker drama) did not endure the test of time in this very fast evolving medium.
