I've played MGS 1-5, thought 1 was really cool, hated the others. I find him grossly overrated. His games are just so boring.

This may be a hot take, but the ending to MGS4 was unfortunately very cringe to me.

MGS4 Ending movie inside the spoiler tags:

I skimmed through it again just now to try to count how many times one person falls over in the scene, and I believe it comes out to 8 times.
I understand once or twice for dramatic effect, but he falls 8 times...

It was full of ham fisted dialogue. Simple concepts are said in ways to make them sound more profound and poetic, just for the sake of it.

"Once the source of evil returns to zero..."
*camera shows Major Zero*

Then cut to more moments of that character falling over.

There's a language barrier between Jp and En to consider. I can tell a few sentences are very Japanese, but it doesn't explain away how the dialogue is written.

There were moments like that in the earlier games, but I generally liked the dialogue in MGS 1 and 3. And to a lesser extent in 2.
But starting with 4, most of it falling flat was a consistant problem.

There are few things in MGS5's storytelling that I don't dislike. Even down to picking a hollywood voice actor for Snake.
And I did not feel ashamed for questioning Quiet's outfit after I learned her story.

There were strange, uncomfortable concepts in the early games. But once he started focusing on them more and more with the later ones, it gave the whole game a really bad aftertaste for me.

I think the Yakuza series has managed to mix very silly and serious tones together really well. So there's not neccesarily an inherant problem with that.

You mentioned that it is a common problem with japanese writers to come up with convoluted stories. There must be some truth to this at least in video games. I tend to enjoy stories from japan way less. Does not mean that there are no japanese games with good stories. But there are hardly any with good and simple stories. Everything is always a bit of a mess. I wonder it this has something to do with translation, or with some cultural difference in perception and taste. (Again, not saying that is the case with literaly every japanese game. The storys of ICO and Shadow of the Colossus are just great. But they are also not the rule in how japanese games even tell stories.)

Good example to me aswell - Felt for a long time now that the ending of mgs4 (among many other scenes throughout the game) were cringy.

And I actually totaly agree with you that you can balance silly and serious tones in one product. Avatar TLA also comes to mind. So even though it is not generally a problem, it very much is a problem for me in MGS. I just don't think it fits well together how they have done it.

 Indeed. Cage is a total fucking jack fraud.All his games are trash but I cringed and laughed so hard at Become Human. So much of it didn't make sense but the worst thing about it is the game boils down to this. What if black people but robots. Most tone deaf take on the civil rights movement. Dues Ex Human Revolution did it so much better and Nier Automata which also had themes is one of the best stories in a game to me.

The best part about Detroit is this clip.

I’m pretty sure the guy is in love with it’s own name. The first time I’ve noticed it was while playing MGS4 where Hideo appeared at every occasions.
At the time, I thought those were nice puns like “no place to hideo” on the cardboard boxes. I don’t remember if it was already there in previous game or not.
Than, when MGS5 was released, I made a bet with an employee about how many time is name will appear in the game. Just counting the main missions, I counted more than 125 times.
I’m still not decided if he was was just stroking his own ego or if the episodic nature of the missions with end credits were just a way to get back at Konami for removing its name from the cover ?

MGS4 is, according to my experience, by far his worst game story-wise. At the time, he was trying to get away from the series, and I think it really shows in the game. It gets better after that, but it definitely seems like he's been seeking himself and trying new things since then. Personally I think he can do some great stuff, even with stories, but he's somewhat inconsistent. For example, MGSV was, for the most part, a fairly coherent game, but then there's things like Quiet that don't really fit in even once you learn the story. I mean she makes sense (kind of), but it still doesn't fit in.

Death Stranding feels a bit convoluted at times, but as far as I'm concerned, not enough to be a real problem. Sure, the writing could be better, but it doesn't really hurt the game that much, I don't think. I can see the gameplay being more divisive though, but I definitely liked the story in the game (despite some of its issues in writing).

No, Kojima is overrated, but the most overrated is David Cage

Looking back on MGS4 and even 5, yeah, both of them had pretty cringe moments and dialogue.

5 especially more so because of the whole Skull face sitting in the hummer scene, or the "such a lust for revenge...WHOOOO" (which got me laughing more than thinking it serious), or any scenes with quiet in them (especially Kojima's cringe explanation for how she can breath).

To elaborate a bit on this, for example in MGS3 there was a character sexually abusing/assaulting other characters.
But those events were implied. And it still gets across the message that war is horrible well enough.

But then in MGSV there's a straight up r@pe tape (audio). And then when they're done they shove a bomb up her vagina.

I don't know if Kojima think that's edgy, but I didn't need to hear/see all that.
I much prefer how he did it in MGS 3 where he has a character say "go wait for me in my room", etc.