Hideo Kojima isn’t normally one to practise what he preaches. The Metal Gear saga warns against puppet masters who would govern our lives from the shadows, but does so in adventures traditionally trussed up by directorial intent and a rigid script. Kojima’s self-contradictory nature is perfectly captured in The Phantom Pain when series mainstay Revolver Ocelot berates new recruits for “fighting as Hollywood taught them” only to spend a few seconds swivelling a six-shooter on his finger in slow motion. This is the same man who, two hours earlier, helped us unload a shotgun into a flaming unicorn. The series has made knowing nods to the conflict between authorial vision and agency in the past – think of Raiden at the end of MGS2 – but until The Phantom Pain (and its playable prologue, Ground Zeroes), it had not sought to remedy it.
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