Nearly a decade after his acrimonious departure from Konami, Hideo Kojima's shadow still looms over Metal Gear Solid. It's there, barely camouflaged, among the undergrowth of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater – a remake of the fifth Metal Gear game, originally released in 2004, that tells the story of a lone American special operator searching for superweapons and old mentors in the jungles of the southern Soviet Union.
I say “remake,” but this feels more like a re-release, in spirit. True, it now runs on Unreal Engine, with the option for a manual third-person perspective and cover-based shooting controls in addition to the old top-down viewpoints. Yes, it features new details, such as wounds that now leave scars and clothing that collects loose leaves. Yes, there’s a new interface with floating menus in the world, making moving between layers a little less awkward. It’s the product of a lot of work, with development split between Konami and third-party support partner Virtuos. But where Konami’s other big restoration project, Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 Remakeis A creative dialogue with the original game.Delta seems consumed by faithfulness to Kojima's original design.
I’ve replayed the first hour of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater more than any other game, and I’ve had to work hard to get the most out of its ridiculous camouflage systems, which let you change clothes and face paint on the fly while lying right under an enemy’s nose. Playing an hour of Delta felt like going for the prize: rescuing my bag from a tree branch, navigating that swampy area with the crocodiles, hiding from guards in a hollow log, running across an exposed rope bridge to the factory with the Soviet rocket scientist. Konami might say that familiarity was a success, but MGS3 has been re-released twice before: there was the expanded Subsistence version in 2005 and the HD update in 2011, which is still available. So far, I don’t feel the need to step back into Naked Snake’s shoes, though I suppose I can’t blame Konami for being careful with Delta’s design. His first attempt at a post-Kojima Metal Gear Solid, the 2018 zombie interlude Metal Gear surviveswas A little smelly.
To paraphrase one of Graham’s thoughts when we discussed the game last week, the biggest “update” in Delta is simply the awareness that Hideo Kojima is no longer working on the game. It alters my perception of Snake Eater’s quirks and foibles. They are no longer the tactics of an adventurous, obtuse creative tyrant, but a design-by-committee recreation of that personal vision, with a few “modern” details delicately grafted on. The obvious rebuttal is that the scope of Kojima’s control and oversight has always been a bit illusory, because even at the time of Snake Eater’s creation, the Metal Gear Solid games were big productions. There is some truth to the idea that Kojima the obsessive has his fingerprints on everything, but this is also a carefully cultivated aspect of the Kojima brand. It’s what MGS fans play MGS for, that impression of closeness to the master in every detail.
Can that intimacy outlive the “creator,” or has Kojima become (brace yourselves for a pretty deep cut) something like the Colonel Campbell who oversees Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2? And if that’s the case, who might ultimately unseat the Kojima figure and lead Konami through the creation of entirely new, original Metal Gear Solid games? I asked producer Noriaki Okamura about this at Delta’s hands-on event. The answer: there isn’t anyone currently, but we do have a few people on our radar.
“As for the person who can replace the creative director, there's no one who has taken over,” Okamura told me through a translator. “Rather, we've created this new Metal Gear Solid team. We have a great team full of young creative minds, a very talented team that's currently working on this game.”
“And within this team there are a lot of people who we think in the future could also be people like that, who could create new ideas, have creative visions, and this is definitely a team that we would like to develop and grow in roles like that. But there's no specific person who's taken over, necessarily, it's much more of a team effort.”
Okamura himself seems to have the know-how to cover it, having worked with Kojima on a number of Metal Gear Solid games and Zone Of The Enders, but as he explained, the particular blend of design flair and business savvy that Kojima embodies is hard to replicate. “In his game design, he’s very particular about the very detailed aspects of what he creates. He’s also very good at creating a product, selling that product, and knowing how to promote it from start to finish. And to find someone like that, who’s good at all of those things in the same capacity, is pretty difficult. So it’s not like we could go and find someone else who can do all of the same things, and it’s not something I think I could do myself.”
“Obviously, we have a lot of respect for their creative vision,” Okamura added. “And as for our new team, we'd like to create these games in our own way with our talented team, with our own creative ideas for the current generation of fans and also for the next generation.”
Okamura’s answer also gave me the answer to my next question: did the creators of Delta consider taking more liberties with the fundamentals of MGS3, perhaps meddling with the story? I mentioned this partly in light of Square Enix’s limited success with the Final Fantasy 7 remakes, which are effectively entirely new works with drastically different combat, writing, and frameworks that respond somewhat antagonistically to the original. But I also asked because the Metal Gear Solid games in particular love to poke fun at their predecessors and the techno-thriller psychodrama that is Metal Gear as a whole.
The original version of Snake Eater starts off with a joke aimed at people who hated Raiden in MGS2, for example. Snake takes off his oxygen mask and lo and behold, it looks like there's a new Raiden underneath, but then it turns out that this is… also a mask. This touch of humor has long since disappeared in Delta (I can't remember if it was removed by this or an earlier Snake Eater re-release), which makes sense, given that we're talking about a 20-year-old fan controversy. Still, that's the kind of meta humor and cool jokes I look for in a Metal Gear Solid. So far, Delta seems intent on playing up its own “remake” status.
Okamura doesn't see things that way, of course. MGS3 is his “personal favorite” of the series, and he wants “both old and new fans to experience the same excitement and enthusiasm that he experienced when he first played Metal Gear Solid 3.” As for Konami, Okamura continued: “Delta is Metal Gear Solid 3 – it's not something new, it's not a completely new title. It's the game as it works for us.”
“Obviously, it's a game from 20 years ago, so the graphics, for example, needed to be updated, and the controls needed to be updated, to fit the current generation of consoles, the current generation of gamers,” he said. “We want them to be able to enjoy the experience in the same way as 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 kind of difficulty.”
This caveat comes in the wake of Survive. But still, speaking as an outsider untethered to practical matters, I'd love to see Konami half-jokingly reposition Kojima as Metal Gear Solid's unspoken spiritual nemesis, a menacing legacy kept alive by comparison to Kojima's post-Konami projects. It would certainly be a plausible extension of the supposedly heated circumstances of Kojima's exit, which saw Konami's lawyers bar him from collecting an award for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Either way, the right people need to be found to lead the series, or invented. Turning Kojima into some sort of nebulous arch-nemesis would require the construction and elevation of a new protagonist, a new inner council of prophetic oddballs a la Boss or Patriots, with enough egotism and charisma to impose a story on a series still living in Kojima's shadow.
