Does Metal Gear Solid need a new Kojima? Konami has 'a lot of people' in mind but it's 'difficult'

Nearly a decade after his acrimonious departure from Konami, Hideo Kojima’s shadow still looms over Metal Gear Solid. He stands, barely camouflaged, in the thickets of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater — a remake of the fifth MGS game, originally released in 2004, that tells the story of a lone U.S. special operator hunting down superweapons and former mentors in the jungles of the southern Soviet Union.

I say “remake,” but this feels more like a rerelease in spirit. True, it now runs in Unreal Engine, with the option of manual, third-person, and cover-shooter controls in addition to the old top-down perspectives. Yes, it introduces new improvements, like wounds now scarring and clothes picking up stray leaves. Yes, there's a new interface with floating in-world menus that make switching between layers a little less awkward. It's the product of a lot of work, with development split between Konami and external support partner Virtuos. But while Konami's other major restoration project, Bloober's Silent Hill 2 remake, was a creative dialogue with the original game, Delta feels consumed with fidelity to Kojima's original design.

I replayed the first hour of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater more than any other game, trying to pull off the perfect escape from the stupid camouflage system that let you instantly change clothes and face paint while lying in front of enemies. An hour of Delta felt like another chance at the reward: rescuing my bag from a tree branch, navigating a swamp with crocodiles, hiding from guards inside a hollow log, hurrying to the factory across an open rope bridge with a Soviet rocket scientist. Konami could call this familiarity an achievement, but MGS3 had been re-released twice before—as an expanded Subsistence edition in 2005, and as an HD update that’s still available in 2011. So far, I don’t feel like I need another spin on Naked Snake’s boots, but I guess I can’t fault Konami for paying attention to Delta’s design. Kojima’s first attempt at a zombie game since Metal Gear Solid , 2018’s Metal Gear Survive, was a bit of a dud.

Snake walking along a tree branch in Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater

A radio codec chatting snake in Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater

Snake hiding behind a wall and looking at the camouflage menu in Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater

A player points a gun at soldiers in first person in Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater

Image credit: Konami

To steal one of Graham’s ideas from last week when discussing the game, the biggest ‘update’ to Delta is the realisation that Hideo Kojima is no longer working on the game. This changes my perception of Snake Eater’s quirks and foibles. They’re no longer the work of an adventurous and unfeeling creator-tyrant, but a committee reimagining of that personal vision with some “modern” bits carefully added on top. The obvious rebuttal there is that the extent of Kojima’s control and oversight has always been a bit misleading, because even at the time of Snake Eater’s creation, the Metal Gear Solid games were major productions. There’s some truth to the idea that the obsessive Kojima has his fingerprints on everything, but it’s also a carefully crafted aspect of Kojima’s brand. The reason MGS enthusiasts play MGS is because of the impression of being close to the master in every detail.

Could this closeness leave the “creator” behind, or has Kojima (prepare for a deep cut) become something like the Colonel Campbell who oversaw Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2? And if that's the case, who could finally oust the Kojima figure and lead Konami into creating brand new, original Metal Gear Solid games? I asked producer Noriaki Okamura about that at the Delta hands-on event. The answer: no one right now, but we have a few on our radar.

“So in terms of someone taking over the creative director role, there's not really one person taking over,” Okamura told me through a translator. “Instead, we've created this new Metal Gear Solid team – we've got a great team full of young, new creative minds, we've got a very talented team working together on this game right now.

“And there are a lot of people on that team that we think could definitely be those types of people in the future, that could create those new ideas, that could have those creative visions, and that's definitely a team that we would want to develop and elevate into those types of roles. But there's not necessarily one specific person taking over, it's more of a team effort.”

Okamura himself seems to have the know-how to cover this, having worked with Kojima on a bunch of Metal Gear Solid games and Zone Of The Enders, but as he later explained, it's hard to emulate the particular blend of designer craft and salesmanship that Kojima embodies. “He's very particular about game design, about the very detailed aspects of what he creates. He's also very good at just creating a product and selling that product and knowing how to pitch that product from start to finish. And it's hard to find someone who's good at all of those things in the same capacity. So we can't just go and find someone else who can do the same things, and I don't think that's something I could do on my own.

“Obviously we have a lot of respect for his creative vision,” Okamura added. “And for our new team, we want to create these games in our own style, with our own talented team, with our own creative ideas for the current generation of fans and the next generation of fans.”

Okamura's answer also answered my follow-up question: did Delta's creators consider taking more liberties with the foundations of MGS3, perhaps meddling in the story? I bring this up partly in light of the relatively modest success Square Enix has had with their Final Fantasy 7 remakes, which are effectively brand new works that respond semi-antagonistically to the originals, with vastly different combat, writing, and framing. But I also ask because the Metal Gear Solid games in particular seem to enjoy making fun of their predecessors, and the techno-thriller psycho-drama of Metal Gear as a whole.

The original version of Snake Eater opens with a joke aimed at people who hated Raiden in MGS2, for example. Snake takes off his oxygen mask and there it looks like there's a new Raiden underneath, but then it's Moreover a mask. That playfulness is long gone in Delta—I can’t remember if it was removed in this or a previous Snake Eater rerelease—which makes sense considering we’re talking about a 20-year-old fan debate. But then again, that’s the kind of meta humor and clever trolling I look for in Metal Gear Solid. So far, Delta seems intent on playing its own “remake” status head-on.

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Of course, Okamura doesn't see things that way. MGS3 is his “personal favorite” of the series, and he wants “both old fans and new fans to experience the excitement and thrill that he felt when he first played Metal Gear Solid 3.” Okamura said of Konami, “Delta is Metal Gear Solid 3, it's not something new, it's not a completely new title. It's the game that works for us.

“Obviously this is a 20-year-old game now, so the graphics needed to be updated and the controls needed to be updated, for example, to adapt to the current-gen consoles, the current-gen gamers,” he said. “We want them to be able to experience it the way it was before, but without thinking, 'I don't know how to use these controls, I don't understand what this is.' We want them to be able to experience the game without any difficulty.”

Again, this caveat is added after Survive. But still – speaking as an outsider who is completely out of touch with practicalities, I would have liked Konami to reposition Kojima as Metal Gear Solid’s unspoken spiritual nemesis, a forbidding legacy kept alive by Kojima’s later projects. That would be a reasonable extension of the reportedly tumultuous circumstances of Kojima’s exit, which led to him being disqualified by Konami’s lawyers from receiving an award for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. But you still have to find the right people – or invent them. Turning Kojima into some kind of nebulous arch-villain would require the construction and elevation of a new hero, a new Boss or a Patriots-style visionary inner council, with enough ego and charisma to impose a story on a series that lives in Kojima’s shadow.

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