What a load of garbage. And yeah, I know I'm talking about a "game design legend," but the actual design of the Metal Gear games... isn't very good.

The controls have historically been crap. Yeah, MGS can be forgiven for that, but by the time you get to MGS2, they've been totally left in the dust. That's not a "Western technology" issue, that's a game design issue. Yes, there's technology involved, just as there's technology involved in every aspect of game creation.

What western developers have done well is shed the traditions that bound Japanese developers, and embraced a better understanding of the nonlinearity and interactivity that makes games *games*. It's why you rarely have a Western developer who makes two hour long cutscenes in games, because from a *design* perspective, most Western studios have realized that a two hour long cutscene is a movie, not a videogame.

MGS was a spectacular game. MGS2 was a narrative disaster wrapped up in a competent videogame. MGS3 took the same idiotic nonsense narrative and then broke all the game mechanics. I haven't even played MGS4 because I never bothered to finish MGS3. Seriously, MGS3 had some of the most fundamentally broken game mechanics I've ever seen.

I understand why Kojima is held in high esteem. His games are full of charming and weird details, and the narrative he tells has a lot of style, even if I think he should have someone who follows him around and slaps him every time his stories veer off into stupidity. (yeah, that guy would have a full-time job.)

But he's totally, totally wrong if he thinks the solution is Western technology. It's the fundamental difference in design philosophy that's made the biggest difference.

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