The Remake Problem

What follows will occasionally ride off the rails. It’s why I’ve started writing it about eight times over the last three years, and why I’ve not written it before now.

Anyone who has ready my blog or social media feeds knows that I speak out against remakes of video games. Movies too, but we’re going to stick to games here, because the problems I’m going to be talking about are unique to video games. This seems like the right time to tackle this subject, with the follow up to That Game I Didn’t Like coming out this month, and renewed begging from a certain corner of the Final Fantasy fandom asking for a remake of Final Fantasy VIII. Rather than blocking another dozen Twitter users for their opinions, it’s time to just…put it all on the page so I can point to this wall of text in the future so people can continue to ignore me.

But the fact remains that this is a sensitive topic to me for a number of reasons. I do see video games as an art form. I think that it’s an interesting medium for narrative, both in terms of literal storytelling and ludonarrative alike. This means that original texts are going to be far more compelling to me than a revised text. The meaning can get lost in constant translation – something that anyone who has played Working Designs release can attest to.

This isn’t to suggest that remakes are universally bad. Some remakes are genuinely inspired works, such as Resident Evil. The Gamecube reimagining of the original 1996 game has been ported to modern consoles continuously for a reason.

But what about the original?

Replacement and Erasure

Resident Evil released in the US in March of 1996 on the PlayStation and Sega Saturn. The original long box release is a gem amongst collectors for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being the ridiculous art work on the tall CD box. But as I learned from a fantastic video by Stop Skeletons From Fighting, there’s more to the original version of the game than the box, or even the original soundtrack.

In the process of localization, Capcom introduced numerous changes to the original release of Resident Evil, all of which made the game harder. This measure was taken to pull players away from renting the game and finishing it in a weekend, a fact that’s hilarious given the sheer volume of people who have finished the game only using the knife. Ink ribbons came in smaller allotments. Auto aim was removed. Following the jewel case printings of the original game, the game would go through its first modification in the form of Resident Evil: Director’s Cut. Most of the changes would be considered to be for the better, since the game now had multiple difficulty levels and aim assist. Unfortunately, it would not be the last time that the game would get modified. The Greatest Hits release of Resident Evil: Director’s Cut would see the original score abandoned and replaced with one that is…let’s be charitable and call it experimental.

By 1998, there were three versions of Resident Evil. Sure, this is somewhat typical of Capcom given how their fighting games get numerous revisions. I would argue that this is different though. For one, I can play pretty much any version of Street Fighter II on my Switch right now using one of two different cartridges. I can not do the same with Resident Evil.

The 2002 remake only compounds this problem. A further revision on the Nintendo DS is yet another wrench in the works.

If you can hear terrible MIDI trumpets right now, I am sorry.

In 2024, you have two legal options to play Resident Evil on modern hardware. You can play a remastered version of the 2002 remake, or you can play Resident Evil: Director’s Cut Dual Shock Version through a PlayStation Plus subscription. There is no legal avenue to play with the original soundtrack, or to tackle the unique difficulty of the original release. Admittedly, this isn’t a worst case situation. But it does reflect how a remake or revision can push an original version out of the view of players.

Far worse is Silent Hill 2.

The original Silent Hill 2 was released on the PlayStation 2 in 2001, less than a year after the console launched. As recently discussed on this blog, it remains a revered classic. Months later, an expanded version would release on the original Xbox, akin to the Substance version of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. These versions eventually made their way back to the PlayStation 2. A poorly developed remaster of Silent Hill 2 released on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2012. There are also PC ports of the original, but…

There are no legal avenues to place the original version of Silent Hill 2 on modern hardware. Instead a remake is in the works from Bloober Team. If you’ll allow me to editorialize a bit: it looks completely terrible.

With the release of the remake, newcomers to the series will only have the newest version of the game to take into account. This is the case for games like Resident Evil 2, any number of classic Final Fantasy games, and dozens upon dozens of others. The only avenue to play original texts is often emulation or the purchase of expensive original pressings.

Preservation in a Time of Erasure

According to the Video Game History Foundation, 87% of video games are no longer available. I’d have to do a bit more digging to find out, but I do wonder if examples such as the ones I’ve listed above are included in this.

As more and more games are delisted from digital platforms, and the concept of ownership is further and further pushed into the trash, access to legacy titles is slipping through our fingers. Certainly, if you have the money, you could indulge in the hobby of retro game collecting, but that bubble never seems to burst. This leaves piracy, but not everyone is comfortable with the concept, or wants to learn the ropes associated with emulators and such. But this isn’t a problem for a number of younger players, who were raised on live service attractions first and foremost. That’s the market of the future, and the one that major publishers want to attract.

I’ve acquired so many sets like this on Switch for a reason…

The death of preservation, the erasure of classic games, is nothing but good for those who hold the money at the top of the industry. An industry that generated 347 billion dollars in 2023 has little interest in the past – it isn’t worth as much money as a digital t-shirt in Fortnite. It is a net negative for the potential of video games as an artform, however, to attribute success of the medium to the amount of money it has generated in revenue when most of that money comes from predatory microtransactions, not to mention the quality of life for the people who created everything that generated that money.

The art isn’t making the money.

Art, however, is a continuum, ever moving, ever evolving. Access to the history of the medium can drive and influence new works. Knowing what worked and what didn’t can teach a lot more than a class on how to generate the most income with an indie game.

The ongoing push for remakes from an incredibly vocal public suggests that while the interest in classic games is there, there isn’t enough interest in playing the original texts. Certainly, you could go play Final Fantasy VIII Remastered on any modern platform, but this hasn’t stopped a number of people from taking to social media to demand a remake in the vein of Final Fantasy VII Remake.

Remakes Are Ultimately Uninteresting

For the sake of consistency, I will reuse one of my previous examples.

I know what Silent Hill 2 was about. I know what happened, I know how it played, I know what I saw and experienced. I know what the Red Pyramid Thing is and what it represents. Silent Hill 2, as a text, is a brilliant work of art that utilizes the medium beautifully.

This game is going to be bad!

The remake can not repeat the successes of the original text by the simple merit of the original text already existing. I have played the original, and there are no surprises to be had from playing a remake. The changes depicted in the existing trailers point to a game that seems to be alien to the experience I had while having no ideas of its own. The promise of a Red Pyramid Thing origin story isn’t appealing. As Patton Oswalt so perfectly put it, I don’t give a shit where the stuff I love comes from.

I’ve been following video games for 24 years at this point, and have played hundreds of titles. This includes a number of remakes, revisions, etc. It’s almost impossible to avoid, largely due to the way that video games were developed and ported and released over the first twenty years after the NES revived the industry. Good remakes, such as Ys Memories of Celceta, only cause me to have interest in the original texts. This entry in the Ys series is not a remake, but the canonical telling of Ys IV, as the original games Dawn of Ys and Mask of the Sun were outsourced to HudsonSoft and Tonkin House respectively rather than developed in house by Falcom. Celceta references both of these games. And, given that I quite liked Memories of Celta, I want to know more. I want to play these games.

Also, that 90’s anime box art. Yes.

Which means that I have to play original versions, emulated, patched for translation. And…I will. I have a Polymega now. I will be buying these games off of eBay and playing them using fan translations to experience the original texts.

But that’s not ideal at all. It’s not something that everyone will do, not something that many will be willing to do. It’s the kind of thing that obsessive enthusiasts and historians do, and I’m definitely of the former category. While I’m okay that Falcom has created their canonized Ys IV, I lament the fact that the originals are doomed to obscurity, much like the okay-at-best Ys III: Wanderers From Ys.

To press it further, I feel like there isn’t enough consideration for the practical costs of a full remake of an a idea. The cost of video game development is extraordinary at this point, and games like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth aren’t cheap to produce or promote. Asking for more of those means that the money goes to remakes, not new ideas. I may have thought that Final Fantasy XVI was mediocre, but I’ll gladly accept that over the ongoing rehash of VII. The original text should be maintained and rereleased on modern platforms, but I don’t expect a studio to pour tens of millions of dollars into “updating” a game when that original game is perfectly fine as it is. Even bad games deserve to be maintained in such a way. We have plenty that we can learn from bad games.

Revisionist History

Before I wrap this up, I want to address one of the common talking points I see in online discourse regarding remakes. This is the idea that a remake allows a game to “live up to the original vision” or something along those lines.

It’s still an incredibly captivating experience because the writing is superb.

I could spin an entire thread about how this ultimately gets us things like the Star Wars Special Edition trilogy, but I’ll keep this simple: A finished text needs to stand up to scrutiny. I’ll gladly point players to Xenogears as an example of one of the most fascinating JRPGs, an ambitious and incredible game that still isn’t celebrated as much as it should be because of a flawed second half. And as much as I’d like to step into the parallel universe where Xenogears was finished to its original spec, I can’t. I have to play the version we have. Thankfully, it’s very good, and worthy of study and dissection. See the incredible video from KBash that released in 2023 for one such discussion.

It may be true that Kazushige Nojima wanted Final Fantasy VII to be an endless battle between Sephiroth and Cloud in the original game, but that isn’t what the original text boils down to. The original text is about spirituality, grief, environmentalism. It isn’t about Sephiroth. If it was, in fact, about the spiky haired amnesiac fighting the silver haired guy with the long sword, there would have been more of that in the game. Instead, Sephiroth is just a villain to frame the adventure around, a means to bring the player to each beat in the story. He doesn’t do much of anything in the original game because it would interfere with the themes being explored through each character’s story. This idea that the original text would have been better with 80% more Sephiroth is grotesque to me.

I can’t imagine that Stephen King imagined the final chapters of The Dark Tower unfolding as they did before his traumatic accident in 1999. The accident informs the work, changed the way he envisioned it. Whether or not you think the final books in King’s epic are good are beside the point because they are what the author wrote, and it is there for us to experience as it is.

Final Fantasy VII Remake spoiler ahead.

This is a bit unfair. I really just think Zack is an awful, boring character.

Zack Fair walking through a portal at the end of Final Fantasy VII Remake was a Greedo Shot First moment for me. It completely undermines the meaning of the original text and reveals the remake to be exactly what it is: fan service, or even more accurately, fan fiction. You might like fan fiction, may enjoy writing it, but you have to admit that, on some level, you don’t get fan fiction without the original text existing.

That anyone thinks that Nojima meant for Zack Fair to be alive in the original game is appalling to me. It’s revisionist history. It’s deeply boring and cynical. It’s exploitative. It appeals to fans and no one else.

The Golden Age of Remasters

As I write this, Limited Run Games has collected remasters of Rocket Knight Adventures and Felix the Cat on sale, marking the first time these games have been legally available since their original releases. Similarly, the boutique publisher and developer has sold a remastered rerelease of the obscene and awful Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties, which launches digitally in March 2024. Konami has released numerous collections of classic games, Atari and Digital Eclipse released a monstrous documentary-esque collection with Atari 50. For all of the doom and gloom about the 87% of lost games, there is an effort being made in some corners of the industry to preserve and revive games that were left in the past. It isn’t difficult to play a game as bland and lifeless as Cybermorph or as challenging as Gimmick in 2024. The work is being done to keep these games alive.

Don’t skip this game! It’s great!

When the topic of games being remade comes up online, I immediately say “remaster or port only” I do not want a reimagining. I do not want remakes. I do not need games to have up to date graphics and retooled gameplay. Turn based games do not need to be made into action games. Action games, likewise, don’t need to be turn based. The original games were the way they were for a reason, top to bottom, and should retain those decisions as they are rereleased for modern players. I will give a pass to things like save states and rewind features. They are staples of emulation platforms, and can ultimately be ignored.

If you’ve reached the end of this piece, thank you for reading. Please understand that I’m not out to take the fun away from you, nor am I suggesting that the old video games are somehow better than new ones. They are different. The past isn’t wholly good or bad for any medium. But video games, like any art form, have a rich enough history that there will always be lessons waiting for the next generation to tap into. When we demand a remake, we are, in some form, asking to erase the original texts. To make them hard to access. The remake will be on new code, more likely to be retained and reused to sell the game again in the future. A remaster, port, or emulated rerelease may have problems, but they will give a player a far more interesting look into a work than a remake ever can. Because the art is in the original text. The remake is just tracing the outlines.

A Short Message About Silent Hill

Konami has revived the venerated Silent Hill franchise. What remains of the beloved series resembles a reanimated corpse. 

Following the launch of the bizarre Silent Hill: Ascension, I’d wondered if some of the other projects that Konami announced as part of the series revival would go through retooling or even be outright cancelled as a result of the backlash. Based on the recent free release The Short Message, I do not think this is the case. Perhaps its because of the cost of producing a web series, a free release short video game, upcoming additional games from various studios that the train can’t slow down. One product will promote the next and so on simply by keeping the name in the public conscious. A decisively bad choose-your-own-adventure web series can be replaced by a free game that has all of the tact of a sack of hammers. That will ultimately be replaced by the anticipated remake of Silent Hill 2 by Bloober Team. Given the history of the series, one wonders if they will surface.

Putting aside my ongoing apathy for remakes – not to mention my complete lack of confidence in the Silent Hill 2 remake based on the trailers and reputation of the studio producing it – I find myself wondering if Silent Hill, as a series, should have just stayed dormant.

Part of what follows is a review of the free title, Silent Hill: The Short Message. Part of it is an assessment of what seems to be haunting Silent Hill as a concept. No, this will not be about the nebulous existence of Team Silent. Yes, the games I would claim as the “good” Silent Hill games comprise the first four titles, attributed to Team Silent in myth. However, PT is also a great Silent Hill. Yes, we will be talking about PT.

The Short Message

Silent Hill is a series known for many things. What comes to my mind, first and foremost, is surrealism. There’s something off about the world that the player explores. It bears the resemblance of an average small city, resembling any middle American vacation spot. It could even be the city where I live, whose downtown sits on the waterfront, and spells out a history of bloodshed and horror. This, of course, isn’t a rule. Silent Hill 4: The Room is tangentially connected to the city of it’s namesake. It is no less a Silent Hill experience.

Second, of course, is subtlety. The characters in Silent Hill games aren’t pouring out a novel’s worth of text. There are beautifully directed cutscenes, of course, but the dialogue isn’t natural. It’s the dialogue of a David Lynch character. It’s easy to trace a line from these games to a number of films – Jacob’s Ladder would be the one I always point to. The distorted Americana is all Twin Peaks, a series that inspired a lot of famous video games.

However, I’m sure that anyone reading this is aware of the lineage and aesthetic components of a Silent Hill. There’s something of a shorthand in place with the series at this point, one where it can be pointed to when any new horror game aims to copy it’s specific blend of uncanny storytelling and hellish environs. It is the thing that the weaker entries in the series can most easily copy, leaving us with games like Silent Hill: Homecoming, Origins, or the painfully awful Book of Memories.

Silent Hill: The Short Message starts here, with the aesthetics of a distorted reality. The protagonist, Anita, is dumped into the ruin of an apartment building, striking the bells of cliche by suddenly waking up and having to go and find a missing friend. The corridors of the old building are full of doors that do not open, trash, graffiti, and touches that foreshadow what will come in the last twenty minutes or so of the game. So far, so Silent Hill 2.

The problem is that Anita never stops talking.

Her constant speech breaks any connection that I, as the player, have with the narrative and experience. There is never a moment where I can put myself into what is happening in this dilapidated apartment complex because there isn’t enough space for me in this. It’s entirely Anita’s experience, through and through, and I am just there to watch it unfold. All subtlety is lost because there is no need to look into the visual storytelling – Anita will explain everything for you.

There is a certain amount of conversation that could be had about the script that I’m not entirely comfortable discussing. For one, I’ve seen the depictions of teenagers cited as realistic, accurate. I’ve seen defenses for the message of the game in regards to online bullying and abuse. I have also seen that this called trauma tourism, a comment that is itself damming (I could not find an original tweet referencing this, so I am linking to the recent Jimquisition on the subject.) I am going to limit my commentary to the issues I’ve had with the game.

The splicing of live action scenes into the story to break up gameplay was an okay touch. Honestly, the writing for Maya is far more interesting than Anita because she bears all of odd touches that make for a Silent Hill character. She’s a bit pretentious, which means I liked her more than anyone in the entire series, and there is a degree of unease that surrounds what she says despite how lively her paintings are.

See, I can say nice things too…but they aren’t about the gameplay. And the gameplay is really what kills this for me.

The Short Message seems to want to fill the space left by PT, itself a free game made in the leadup to a larger project. The player explores linear corridors and does a few light puzzles to proceed to the next story beat, and there is a loop to the experience where the story splits into three chapters. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a tedious romp. The building doesn’t change from loop to loop, just the access to a couple of new places, including a vibrantly lit high school hall. This is the place where the first of two puzzles is introduced, a tedious number search that feels completely out of place.

Between the slow crawls through repetitive corridors are sequences where Anita is chased down by a monster. Passing through a door marks a delineation between the exploration portion of the game and the Scary Monster Time portion. These parts are, mostly, incredibly easy. I didn’t see the monster at all until the second to last chase, and even then, it’s easy to avoid it.

This also describes any number of indie horror games that spawned out of the success of PT and ultimate cancellation of Silent Hills. The chase sequences also remind me of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.

Except this isn’t scary.

Part of this is on me, of course. I saw the cherry blossom monster the first time and thought it looked like the cornflake homunculus from the Jimquisition, and that immediately killed any terror it might have inflicted.

But more than that, separating the monster chase hallways from the rest of the setting means that there is no reason to feel tense at any other stage of the game. It’s just a place where cutscenes happen and a character constantly talks and texts people. There is no isolation, there are no threats. The game does not engage with the player beyond sticking the movie in their face.

So, it’s not a good game. That’s okay. We haven’t had a good Silent Hill game in a long time, and this didn’t change that. Why would this keep the series on my mind for days after?

The Looming Spectre of P.T.

PS4 consoles containing PT still sell for hundreds of dollars. Efforts remain ongoing to keep the promise of a brilliant Silent Hill in the form of this experimental demo alive years after it was taken off of the PS4 online store. There’s a reason for this – it’s genuinely an incredible little game, and thanks to a single publisher’s poor thinking, one that will be impossible to play someday. Hardware fails us all, eventually.

Lamentations continue for the death of Hideo Kojima’s Silent Hills, a game that promised to bring back the unease and terror of the legendary series, snuffed out in the night by Konami much like their relationship with the esteemed creator at the helm of the experience. PT remains a point of discussion when talking about video game preservation, and there have been numerous efforts by fans to recreate the game for PC. The shadow of this little game loom large over the series, as it truly was a promising glimpse of what Kojima Productions could have done with Silent Hill.

Comparisons of The Short Message to PT are not an accident. It is no doubt an effort to fill some of the space where the conversation of PT took place. But it lacks everything that made PT worth discussing. It’s far to easy and straightforward. There wasn’t a concerted effort by players to figure out how to finish this game because it folded over within 90-120 minutes of effort. What’s more, The Short Message lacks any meaningful interactivity as the player proceeds through its environment. The only inputs required by the player are for movement and opening doors. PT didn’t ask much of the player beyond a few light puzzles, but even some moments required the use of a the zoom button, which pushed the tension up for some quick jump scares.

Cheap? Sure. But usually effective because of how it uses interactivity to drive the experience.

Part of what makes PT special is that it exists as an allusion to Silent Hill while bearing few of its hallmarks. There is no thick cloud of fog on a lakeside town. There are no unusual side characters. There is only one monster, and doesn’t have a simple symbolism attached to it akin to any number of post-Room Silent Hill entities. It is raw and it is itself. It can bear the name of Silent Hill without directly making visual references.

And it didn’t even need a Pyramid Head stand-in.

The Legacy of Silent Hill 2

Silent Hill 2 is often considered the best horror game ever. It is frequently cited as one of the best video game narratives. It certainly deserves those accolades. I would call it my favorite in the series as well. However, do not take this as a sign of my bias against other entries in the series. That isn’t the point of this section, nor is it to continue gushing about one of the most over-analyzed and celebrated video games.

Silent Hill can not get out of the shadow of Silent Hill 2.

The upcoming remake is cashing in on the iconic Red Pyramid Thing just as games like Silent Hill Homecoming before it. Like the 2006 film Silent Hill before it, which was a soft adaptation of the first game in the series, not Silent Hill 2. Even when the towering monster rapist (look, that’s just what I see in the first scene with Pyramid Head, you can have your interpretation if you want) isn’t in a new Silent Hill, the very basic idea is there. There is a symbolic monster that wants to kill the protagonist. Anita has a flower covered Pyramid Head in The Short Message. Why was it in the movie? Homecoming? Because it was expected by a certain group of people who didn’t buy the other games in the series, I guess. Sales of SH3 and The Room certainly didn’t size up to Silent Hill 2. So what’s a business to do to make money other than copy the successful thing that they did twenty years ago?

I’m rambling. I am. It’s 1AM. So let me put it this way:

Silent Hill 2 is great for all of the ways that it differentiates itself from the other three games that surround it. This can be said for the other three games as well. Art means creating and saying new things with the craft, with the medium being used. Later Silent Hill games were the kinds of products that Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty railed against.

Still, the series grinds ever onward, dragging its legacy out to be redressed for another age. Silent Hill is now about playing the hits and hoping the old fans still show up to the concert.

So much of what made the series special seems locked in the past. The production cycle of modern video games is almost completely alien to the processes of the PS1 and PS2 eras. Even the explosive reaction to PT is nearly impossible to recreate in today’s social media landscape, which has evolved away from that of even a decade ago. The technical limitations of the PS1 created so many of the hallmarks of the Silent Hill series, and developers are still mired in those ideas over twenty-five years later, unable to meaningfully iterate on the mere idea of what Silent Hill can be.

For now, it will just be a character and how they are haunted by symbols of trauma.

Sleep Deprived Thoughts on MGS2

NOTE: Forgive me readers, I just wanted to write this before all of it left my brain. There will be wild leaps across subjects. Also, there will be spoilers for a twenty-two year old game.

I rolled credits on a replay of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty last night. It has been around fifteen years since the last time I played it through to the end.

What a beautiful mess of a game.

There are valid criticisms that can be laid against MGS2. It’s overwritten. There is a lot of needless backtracking that is misunderstood as an aspect of the metanarrative. The marketing cycle misled players into believing that they would get another adventure where they get to play the grizzled mullet man they remembered from the first Metal Gear Solid. Much of this is by design, of course, something that wasn’t picked up on when the game initially released in 2001.

I could think of other games that would benefit from a massive interactive documentary.

I can imagine that MGS2 in 2023 benefits from context provided by twenty years worth of think pieces on the series, the rise of the video essay, and even the creation of The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2, released by Konami for the PS2 in 2002. Certainly, I didn’t take in every aspect of the inner workings of the narrative when I played the game in late 2008. I took the experience at face value, thriving on the density of Hideo Kojima’s world building and the bleakness of the final hours of the game.

The idea of the game being overwritten hadn’t occurred to me yet. That was pointed out to me by critics of Kojima’s writing and storytelling. They aren’t wrong, of course. Video games being an interactive narrative implies that the game itself should be telling more of the story than the interruptions the game is inundated with. It was a part of the experience that I accepted, though it remained on my mind during my replay of the game over the last couple of weeks (I took a long break before the bomb diffusion section).

While I feel that the metatext of MGS2 has been dissected, I don’t think that enough has been said in defense of the writing. Again, yes, there is definitely too much writing in the game, too much dialogue, too many codec conversations, too many cut scenes. What I have spent much of the last two nights thinking about is how this story could have done what it did with less.

So that I don’t prattle on too long, I will focus this on a topic that I seem to recall annoying people back in the gaming press in 2001: the codec chatter between Colonel Campbell, Raiden, and Rose.

I Need Scissors. 61!

From the first time that Raiden meets Lieutenant JG Plisken some twenty or so minutes into the Shell chapter of Metal Gear Solid 2, Campbell will recount the following to Raiden any time the resurrected Solid Snake is brought up: he was not part of the simulation. This is a break in Campbell’s script, foreshadowing that something is innately wrong with how he communicates with Raiden during the first two acts of the game. Everything else he says is an echo of the events that transpired at Shadow Moses in MGS, a revelation that isn’t clarified to the player until the third act.

Admittedly, this is easier to read into the game on a second play through. The very nature of sequels, something that Kojima was critiquing with this game, cites that a sequel should refine on is predecessor while playing into what fans of the original enjoyed about the first. So much of what Campbell says and does, how Paul Eiding performs the lines, is reflective of the original game, and feels natural to the player. But the foreshadowing is still there, and in the middle of the second act, it becomes a provocation.

As Raiden becomes increasingly suspicious of Campbell and Rose, Campbell reiterates on his comments about the simulation, sparking an outburst from Raiden that see Rose urging him to calm down. The trust between Raiden and his commanding officer has been broken, and isn’t resolved. The fractures in Raiden’s person are growing deeper as the second act pushes on, carrying him into the Sniper Wolf Redux where he defends Emma Emmerich from drone gunfire, snipers, and soldiers alike. What isn’t clear is that Campbell isn’t the only person provoking Raiden, pushing him further and further to the breaking point.

Rose

Rose is difficult for some players to accept. On the surface level, many of her conversations with Raiden do not match the tone of the game. They seem wildly out of place for what is ostensibly a military operation. Campbell never intervenes in these conversations, a fact that I’m only just now thinking of as I write this.

Rose wants her boyfriend to talk about their relationship at a time when he is focuses on his mission. He doesn’t want to dwell on the time they spent watching Godzilla movies, or what April 30th means to their relationship. For Raiden, those topics can wait.

And as the player, it can be easy to align with his point of view. In a game that is already pulling control away from the player for cut scenes and codec conversations at a rate that exceeds even the first game’s verbose jargon-laden chats with Naomi, Campbell, and Mei Ling, having to talk about the shaky relationship that Raiden has with his partner doesn’t seem relevant. Much like Campbell’s comments about the simulation, however, Rose is pressing Raiden.

This is the only screencap I stole from the net.

The third act of Metal Gear Solid 2 does not work nearly as well unless Rose establishes the narrative of her relationship with Raiden along the way. What we should take away from every one of those scenes are an assessment of Raiden as a person divorced from the gameplay. The opening of the Shell chapter and the first half of the following events see him striving to live up to his VR experiences. It’s Rose that pressures the human part of Raiden, to emerge from the cocoon built up by the nebulous Patriots and Solidus.

The downside of all of this is that the ultimate reveals about Raiden’s history are muddied while the reality depicted up to the third act breaks down into the finale. Finding out that Raiden was a child soldier is a contradiction from the opening hours that depict him as a soldier trained by video games rather than experience. It’s a dark twist in the narrative that ties him directly to the villain, and it does prove entertaining as a beat in the story. However, so much is happening by this point, it can be easy for details to get lost in the noise, especially if you’re dining on this particular brand of crazy in the middle of a night where you’re short on sleep. This is also why this little blog post about a video game I like is going to get messier here. I need to go to sleep.

Last Bit About MGS2

But I want to close with a response to a criticism I often see thrown around.

Occasionally, I will see someone defend the Kingdom Hearts series with some variation on the line “it’s just as confusing/convoluted as Metal Gear Solid, but no one complains about that.” First, the statement is just factually incorrect. People have complained about the writing in Metal Gear games for over two decades. But that’s not what I’m interested in responding to.

I think that there is a distinct difference in the complications that are present in each of these series. Kingdom Hearts was launched as a mostly kid-friendly action RPG where you team up with Disney characters to save other Disney characters. As a series, it started clean and neat, only to be disserved by an encyclopedia of terms and half-baked world building that doesn’t come up during 90% of the gameplay. Tetsuya Nomura, as I’ve said in the past, makes fun games, but he’s a poor storyteller, unable to handle the medium he’s working in well enough to layer the story he clearly wants to tell into the series he is famous for – one where he has to also give the cliff’s notes version of a stack of Disney films at the same time.

It is not an easy prospect to handle those disparate ideas, and I do not envy anyone who has to do it. But it is a problem with the way that Nomura decided to evolve the series, and it does make the series difficult to approach, impossible to discuss with a fervent crowd of fans, and frustrating for reasons that aren’t relevant to this conversation.

Hideo Kojima doesn’t have these problems in his games. They are indeed overwritten, explaining a suite of ideas and elaborating on the military shorthand and technojargon as to not leave players out of any the obsessions that Kojima brought to the table. Kojima is an avid reader, a devourer of cinema and music. Reading his book The Creative Gene is an illustration of this love of art, as well as an assessment of where some of his ideas were born.

As a game designer, he designs the game, and as a storyteller, he tells stories. The gameplay reflects the stories he wants to tell, even if the writing could be pared down. There may frequently be a wall between narrative and gameplay, but the information is presented cleanly. Cinematics illustrate the action movie set pieces that have always inspired the series. Lengthy codec conversations delve into the backstories of the characters, grow the intrigue about the unveiling mysteries, and as listed above, always drive the plot forward. For the first three entries in the Metal Gear Solid series, there aren’t any wasted moments.

The answer is actually extremely disappointing.

I can’t say the same of Kingdom Hearts, a series which has its protagonist gawk at an iconic scene from Frozen for five minutes straight for no other reason than the game has to tell the Disney stories. 0

The criticism that MGS and Kingdom Hearts have similar amounts of baggage is a misunderstanding of MGS as a series. Hideo Kojima did not want players to endlessly obsess about things like the identity of the Patriots after Metal Gear Solid 2. He wanted players to leave that game thinking about the passage of information down through generations, not what was coming up in Metal Gear Solid 3.

And yet, we know that he did not get his wish. People and publisher alike pushed Kojima back into the director’s chair, over and over, demanding that Metal Gear continue for as long as it could be profitable.

I’m going to sleep now…

ADDITIONAL TASTY THINGS

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Creative-Gene/Hideo-Kojima/9781974725915

Nintendo Direct – Sept 2023

I took a bit of a break during my editing this morning to watch the latest Nintendo Direct. It was good! Great at times! Nintendo is about to make a lot of money.

But, from a promotional angle, Nintendo is definitely preparing for new hardware next year.

The winter lineup for 2023 going into 2024 is a set of safe bets from Nintendo. There’s a lot of Mario coming our way in the form of remakes/remasters of Mario RPG and The Thousand Year Door alike. Two new platformers in the series are on the way. WarioWare, Luigi’s Mansion…it’s a bit much, really. But the diversity in gameplay styles means that there’s something for everyone if you like Mario games, and that’s great for Nintendo. I…will not be buying some of them. I have my eyes on the RPGs (obvously) as well as both Mario Wonder and the newly unveiled Princess Peach Showtime. However, none of this captured my attention as some of the other news.

First up, Horizon Chase 2 is an absolute must-have for me. I spent dozens of hours on the first Horizon Chase Turbo, reveling in the stylish visual, tight controls, and massive series of races. A sequel is a safe bet in my book, especially since even the DLC for the first game was stellar. If you’ve not played the first, squeeze it in before the sequel drops. It’s a great throwback to 90s arcade racers.

SaGa: Emerald Beyond is a title I’ve been waiting for more information on. A brand new SaGa game is somewhat unbelievable for those of us who watched the series get snuffed out by Square-Enix in the PS2 era, and since I’ve actually played some of the games now? Absolutely. Give me all of your weird, Square-Enix. I much prefer it to your fan-bait loaded Final Fantasy VII rehashes! The trailer looks nice, but the combat UI is absurdly overwrought. I hope that gets tweaked before release. Or that it earns its keep. Whichever. I’m still in no matter what. The series is great. And weird. And hard!

And while I talk about enjoying difficult games, a trailer for a set of remastered Tomb Raider games was announced, coming from Aspyr. I’m pretty happy about this one: you can switch their ugly updated visuals back to PS1 level, and Aspyr is, in my experience, the kind of studio that hashes these ports out as quickly as possible. What does this mean?

It means that they didn’t actually change the game and it’s going to be just as jank as the originals! And that’s fantastic!

Video game history and preservation is important to me, and remaking everything to “bring it up to a modern standard” usually means that the edges and quirks that make the classics interesting get sanded away to be easier for modern players. And…accesibility is fine, but those games should still be accessible in the original format. And Aspyr will do that. Even if it means the game is kinda awkward in adaptation like their Jedi Knight remasters on the Switch. Those are direct PC ports. There is a software registration button. I have no idea how they got that through quality control!

I am using an irresponsible amount of exclamation marks tonight…chalk it up to me trying to hammer this out before bed.

The biggest surprise for me out of the entire show was the announcement of a new title from VanillaWare. If you aren’t familiar with VanillaWare, you have some amazing catching up to do. The developers of some of my favorite 2D games ever are currently working on a strategy RPG called Unicorn Overlord, a game lush with beautiful visuals. And…yeah, I’m the same person who likes to wax about how graphics don’t make a game great, but VanillaWare creates the most beautiful 2D games out there. And they’re damn fun to boot. This is a day one pick up for me. If you want to know why, go play Odin Sphere or 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim.

Beyond this…well, there’s a pair of League of Legends spinoffs that I snoozed through, a new Contra that I’m hesitant to get excited about, a lot of games that slipped off of my brain as soon as the trailer was over and I’m not going to recount despite their presence in my notes, and even some things that I need to go read up on, like Another Code!

This has been a sloppy recount of the entire event. But that’s fine. It’s late. I’m tired. I spent hours editing a story today and then even more time trying to do house related stuff while spending time with my daughter. It was a fine day, and a fine Direct. I just haven’t got any sense left.

I do want to close on a bit about F-Zero 99. First off, I haven’t played it yet, though I intend to. My comments aren’t going to be about the quality of the game that is currently out, but more so the conversation that I knew would surround the game as soon as the trailer shifted from the SNES footage to the new game. F-Zero fans have waited literal decades for a new game from Nintendo, and this definitely isn’t what any of them had in mind. I’ve seen some genuinely nasty comments about it online, including several comments comparing it to the dreadful Metroid Prime: Federation Force for 3DS. While I think that such comments are beyond extreme, I can understand being disappointed.

But, the reality is pretty simple F-Zero isn’t a known money maker for Nintendo. Neither is StarFox. Both series have been surviving on scraps for decades, and Nintendo doesn’t seem to know what to do with either of them to draw an audience that isn’t people in their thirties who enjoyed the N64 or GameCube releases. However, remakes and rehashes aren’t going to draw that audience, nor are games with experimental controls like Star Fox Zero had.

We’ve been pretty fortunate during the Switch’s lifespan to see what many people refer to as The Switch Effect – games with historically weak sales having record sales on the Switch. This is partially due to the massive install base for the Switch, as well as the fantastic games that have come out on the console, like Metroid Dread. The time for such a game is drawing to an end, as Nintendo starts their transition to new hardware over the next eighteen months (this is likely a stretch). I think that Nintendo is being careful, and testing the waters with F-Zero 99. I think that, with enough interest, the next Nintendo console will feature a new F-Zero.

But everyone needs to relax with the rage. Have a little bit of common sense.

…

What the hell am I talking about? The internet doesn’t know what common sense is.

Anyway. It was a fine Direct, and I am going to drown in Switch cartridges by the time this console is finally discontinued. Thanks for reading.