Nearly a decade after his acrimonious departure from Konami, Hideo Kojima's shadow still looms over Metal Gear Solid. It's there, barely camouflaged, in 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 agent searching for superweapons and old mentors in the jungles of the southern Soviet Union.
I say “remake,” but it feels more like a re-release, in spirit. True, it now runs on Unreal Engine, with the option of a manual third-person perspective and cover-shooting controls in addition to the old top-down viewpoints. Yes, it features new details, like wounds that now leave scars and clothes that pick up stray leaves. Yes, there’s a new interface with floating menus in the world, which makes switching between layers a little less awkward. It’s the product of a considerable amount of work, with development split between Konami and external support partner Virtuos. But where Konami’s other major restoration project, Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 remake, is a creative dialogue with the original game, Delta seems consumed by 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 make the most of its cheesy camouflage systems, which let you change clothes and makeup instantly while standing right under an enemy's nose. Playing an hour of Delta felt like I was taking another chance: rescuing my bag from a tree branch, navigating that swampy area with the crocodiles, hiding from guards in a hollow log, scrambling across an exposed rope bridge to the factory with the Soviet rocket scientist. Konami might call this familiarity a success, but MGS3 has already been re-released twice—there was the expanded Subsistence in 2005, and the HD update in 2011, which is still available. I don't feel the need to take another ride in Naked Snake's boots so far, though I suppose I can't blame Konami for being cautious with Delta's design. Their first attempt at a post-Kojima Metal Gear Solid, 2018's zombie interlude Metal Gear Survive, was a bit of a dud.
To borrow one of Graham's ideas from when we discussed the game last week, Delta's biggest “update” is simply the realization that Hideo Kojima is no longer working on the game. It changes my perception of Snake Eater's quirks and foibles. They are no longer the gambits of an obtuse, adventurous creator-tyrant, but a recreation of that personal vision, designed by committee, with a few “modern” elements delicately grafted in. The obvious rebuttal is that the extent of Kojima's control and oversight has always been a bit illusory, because even at the time Snake Eater was created, the Metal Gear Solid games were vast productions. There is some truth to the idea that the obsessive Kojima leaves his fingerprints on everything, but it is also a carefully cultivated aspect of the Kojima brand. It is why MGS fans play MGS, that sense of proximity to the master in every detail.
Can this intimacy outlive “its” creator, or has Kojima become (prepare for a pretty deep cut) some sort of Colonel Campbell overseeing Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2? And if so, who might ultimately replace Kojima and guide Konami in creating new, original Metal Gear Solid games? I posed the question to producer Noriaki Okamura at the Delta demo event. The answer: There’s no one right now, but we have a few people on our radar.
“As for the question of who would replace this creative director, there’s not really anyone who’s taken over,” Okamura told me through a translator. “Instead, 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 working together on this game right now.”
“And within that team, there are a lot of people that we think could definitely become people like that in the future, who could create these new ideas, have these creative visions, and it’s certainly a team that we would like to grow and evolve into roles like that. But there’s not necessarily one specific person that’s taken over, it’s much more of a team effort.”
Okamura himself seems to have the know-how to pull this off, having worked with Kojima on several Metal Gear Solid and Zone Of The Enders games, but as he explained, Kojima's particular blend of design talent and business acumen is hard to replicate. “With his game design, he's very meticulous about very detailed aspects of what he's creating. He's also very good at creating a product, selling it, and knowing how to promote it from start to finish. And finding someone like that, who's good at all of those things with the same ability, is pretty hard. So it's not like we can just go and find someone else who can do all of the same things, and it's not something I think I can do on my own.”
“We obviously have a lot of respect for his creative vision,” Okamura added. “And as for our new team, we would like to create these games in our own way, with our own talented team, with our own creative ideas for the current generation of fans, and also for the next generation of fans.”
Okamura's response also gave me the answer to my next question: have Delta's creators considered taking more liberties with the fundamentals of MGS3, perhaps by meddling with the story? I raised this question partly in light of Square Enix's mixed success with the Final Fantasy 7 remakes, which are essentially entirely new works with radically different combat, writing, and framing that are semi-antagonistic responses to the original. But I also asked this question because the Metal Gear Solid games in particular like to poke fun at their predecessors and the techno-thriller psychodrama that is Metal Gear as a whole.
The original Snake Eater for example opens with a gag aimed at people who hated Raiden in MGS2. Snake takes off his oxygen mask and lo and behold, there appears to be a new Raiden underneath, but it turns out to be Also a mask. That wacky edge is long gone in Delta—I can't remember if it was removed by this re-release or an earlier Snake Eater release—which makes sense, given that we're talking about a 20-year-old fan controversy. Still, it's the kind of meta humor and brilliant trolling I look for in a Metal Gear Solid. So far, Delta seems determined to play fair with its own “remake” status.
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Okamura doesn't see it that way, of course. MGS3 is his “personal favorite” of the series, and he wants “old fans and new fans alike to feel the same excitement and thrill that he felt when he first experienced Metal Gear Solid 3.” 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 the game is already 20 years old, so we had to update the graphics, the controls, to adapt to the current generation of consoles, to the current generation of players,” he said. “We want them to be able to enjoy the experience in the same way as before, but without saying to themselves: ‘I don’t know how to use these controls, I don’t understand what this is.’ We want them to be able to discover the game without any difficulty.”
This caution adds up to Survive’s sequel. But still, as an outsider who doesn’t care about practicalities, I’d like Konami to half-jokingly reposition Kojima as Metal Gear Solid’s unspoken spiritual enemy, a forbidding legacy kept alive by comparison to Kojima’s post-Konami projects. It would certainly be a plausible extension of the seemingly fractious circumstances of Kojima’s departure, which saw him blocked by Konami’s lawyers from receiving an award for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Again, though, the right people to lead the series need to be found, or invented. Turning Kojima into some kind of nebulous arch-villain would require the construction and elevation of a new protagonist, a new Boss or Patriots-style inner council of visionary oddballs, with enough ego and charisma to impose a story on a series that still lives in Kojima’s shadow.