I’ve been looking forward to Death Stranding. I even got the collector’s edition for the baby-lamp. And I played a good amount of it over the weekend. I haven’t gotten very far, but already I can recognize that this is the result of a unique artistic vision. And, after both playing some Death Stranding and playing through Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, I realize just how much I appreciate games made by an auteur whose unique approach to the medium can only be described as genius.
The problem is, that genius is Yoko Taro.
Don’t get me wrong, I respect Hideo Kojima’s work, I recognize how brilliant and unique he is, and there’s no question about how much work he puts into his games. But wow, when it comes to developers who want to embrace video games as an art form and push the medium to tell a story that resonates with fundamental concepts of humanity, Yoko Taro eats his lunch with a moon-faced smile.
Art can come in many different forms and cover many different concepts, but I believe video games are at their best when they explore humanity. The ideas of what it’s like to be human, how we can have so many perspectives, how we can feel suffering and joy and connection with each other, and how we can find purpose in our existence, those are what interactive media can really excel at past non-interactive media like films.
I appreciate weird for weird’s sake, and both Kojima and Taro have that in spades. The problem is that Kojima’s storytelling has almost always been a vacuously high-minded prodding at broad concepts, while Taro really digs into what it is to be a person in a world. To explain how Kojima is Goofus to Taro’s Gallant in artistic expression, I’m going to have to spoil the Metal Gear, Drakengard, and Nier series a bit, so heads up.
Obligatory spoiler warning line for Metal Gear, Drakengard, Nier, and Nier: Automata.
The Metal Gear Solid series ostensibly explores the nature of being a soldier, and how humans interact through war. The entire series is about misguided hero-worship of idealistic, imperfect, and ultimately socially stranded figures. The Boss, Big Boss, Venom Snake, and Solid Snake are all legends after or during their time, and they all find themselves betrayed and cast out by the people they believed in. And, especially for the first three, they ultimately end up betraying the people who believe in them in some way, their very legacies end up betraying their ideals. The entire series is about soldiers getting chewed up and spat out by the systems they serve, and that’s a brilliant concept to explore.
The problem is how Kojima ultimately muddles that exploration into an overbuilt, convoluted mess that rings hollow past its broad premise. He repeats himself structurally, but he doesn’t pull that repetition together thematically.
Quiet Vs. Kaine
Look at Quiet in The Phantom Pain. She’s a heavily sexualized sniper who Kojima warned would make us feel ashamed of our words and deeds once we found out the reason she dresses the way she does. And that reason is that she was given a mutant plant treatment that makes her breathe through her skin. That’s… that’s great, but it doesn’t really make her sexualization any more contextualized in the narrative or tie in with the themes of the game.
Compare that to Yoko Taro with the first Nier, where you are joined by Kaine, an aggressive woman who’s tainted by the Shades that are threatening the world. She dresses extremely suggestively, in what amounts to a tiny nightie with bandages all over her left side. Kaine is one of the best characters in Nier, and possibly in the entire seventh generation of video games.
Kaine is not conventionally female. She was born with hermaphrodism, which led to her being outcast by her village and raised by her foul-mouthed, grandmother, who treated her as the woman she presented herself as, and she adopted her mannerisms from her. When her grandmother was killed by a shade, she accepted being partly taken over by another shade who promised to help her get revenge, which left her right arm and leg covered in the black scrawl that indicates infection. So she wears sexy lingerie while covering up half of her body. Her character is defined by levels of duality, in hiding any male aspect and expressing solely as female, and in hiding any demonic aspect and expressing solely as human. And Nier, like Kaine’s grandmother, accepts her for who she is. And that’s how you get a sexy-looking character with layers of significance in her appearance.
B&B Unit Vs. YoRHa
Now look at the Beauty and the Beast Unit in MGS4. More sexualized women who are cybernetically enhanced monsters, whose very names call back to the bosses of MGS and MGS3. “Crying Wolf” as a combination of The Sorrow and Sniper Wolf is a brilliant name, but besides the amalgamation happening they don’t actually contribute much to the game. Which is a huge shame, because they easily could have with a few narrative tweaks.
The B&B Unit consists of women who went through the horrors of war. They’re heavily traumatized and then turned into cybernetic supersoldiers. When you beat them, you’re told some of their background, of the very horrors they went through. The problem is, none of that comes through in their presentation or how you fight them. They’re just lore dumps after the fact that lack any emotional or contextual resonance beyond, “War is bad.”
In both of these cases, Kojima claims some high-mindedness that simply doesn’t come through in the work. He wanted Quiet to be sexy, so he made some excuse for it. He took the idea of hot robot women for bosses, then built trauma around their backstories as an afterthought. Whatever thematic payoff could have been had from these characters is lost in the disingenuity.
Contrast that with the female androids of YoRHa in Nier: Automata. They appear to be attractive anime women dressed in gothic lolita fashions with absurd high heels. You can even blow 2B’s clothes off with a self-destruct move and leave her in a thong-backed leotard. And why are they like that?
Because Yoko Taro likes girls. It might not have any thematic significance to the game’s questions about what humanity actually means and how one can contribute with or without a purpose, but at least it’s honest. And with the sexiness out of the way, the rest of the game can keep rolling on with much more directly connected theming, like contrasting the sexy anime girls (who are built like Barbie dolls with the same anatomical accuracy) against alien-built robots trying to emulate humanity and failing repeatedly.The prurience is acknowledged and moved on from, instead of building a falsely deep backstory to justify things without making them tie in with the narrative or theming.
Something About Soldiers Vs. Everything About Humanity
The MGS series is, as I said, ostensibly about soldiers and purpose and betrayal. The problem is the games become so self-referential and curve inward on themselves until they become ridiculous knots that don’t seem to actually say anything for all the talking they contain.
Can anyone tell me what the message of a given MGS game is, or the message of the whole series? What does it say about soldiers? What does it ask about soldiers? Trust? Patriotism? For everything that’s spoken and explored in these games, does it reach any depth?
Nier: Automata, meanwhile, does so much more thematically with so much less. Once you get past the Platinum combat and the sexy robot women, you face an unrelentingly horrific image of inevitability in the face of purpose, tempered with hope for humanity in what we do for each other. And this is all thousands of years after humanity is completely dead.
YoRHa was created to fight alien robots in the name of humans on the moon. The problem is, humans died out long before that because of the events of Nier. Instead, a race of androids struggling to find purpose created that very purpose in the face of an alien robot invasion, and then maintained that purpose through self-sabotage and secrecy. Give your people a reason to live by having them fight for people they don’t know are dead, all because they don’t consider themselves to be people to begin with. Just automation feeding into itself. And on the other side, among those alien robots whose masters are also long dead, are constant failed attempts at emulating humanity.
Everyone’s purpose is supposedly to fight each other, but that isn’t their reason for existing, and that becomes clear as soon as you meet Pascal. He’s a robot who leads a village of pacifists, and who trades with android settlements. He’s the first indication that preconceptions aren’t entirely correct, but the dynamic isn’t as simple as the incongruity hints. All through this, 2B and 9S (the player characters) question their preconceptions while still robotically following orders, growing closer even as their programming ultimately dooms them to be apart, killed by the system that exists to keep their race going.
When the truth is revealed to 9S, he accepts it. But when 2B dies, even with his knowledge that 2B would inevitably have to kill him, 9S goes into a rage and tries to destroy the entire system. His inhumanity was shattered by his burgeoning humanity, but it still ultimately broke him as a person. Meanwhile, A2, an older YoRHa model on a crusade to simply kill robots, tries to follow another path of peace thanks to Pascal, whose own traumatic fate is left up to the player. Finally, in the end, the player must choose whether or not to destroy the entire system and let the android race, like the human race before it, simply die out.
Then, after you explore those choices, the drone pods who have been at 2B and 9S’ side the entire game and facing their own subtle awakening of consciousness, directly offer the player another, more personal option. With the system still in place, do you recover and restore 2B and 9S, knowing that they may be fated to die again in the same horrible way, simply because there’s a glimmer of hope that, because of the unpredictability of consciousness and realizing one’s humanity, it might not happen?
There’s a reason I tear up whenever I hear “Weight of the World,” the end credits theme of Nier: Automata.
No, the game doesn’t answer many questions about what it is to be human. But it asks better questions and explores them in far more poignant ways than the Metal Gear Solid series ever did about what it is to be a soldier.
Oh, and the first Nier has similar brilliance in the game’s revelation of Replicants and Gestalts, and the second playthrough where you can hear and understand the very shades you slaughtered through the first playthrough. But that’s its own essay.
I like Hideo Kojima’s games. I recognize that he has an artistic vision. But he just isn’t nearly as good at actually exploring themes and bringing together concepts in a coherent (while still very strange) narrative as Yoko Taro.
Maybe Death Stranding will surprise me, but a few hours in and it feels like Kojima is exploring the ideas of human connection and isolation with the same disconnected, aimless, wildly expensive frippery as he did militarization in The Phantom Pain.
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