The actual execution was a mess, but Skullface’s inspiration for his parasite weapon being the experience of linguistic imperialism as a child was a really novel premise. The idea that he would get his revenge by creating a weapon that killed anyone who spoke English is some cool super-villain shit I don’t think I’ve ever encountered before. “Race-selective” weapons, genetic-targetting weapons, religious indoctrination viruses, I’ve seen all those, but I think MGSV is the only time I’ve encountered a weapon that targets a language community.
Honestly really wish Kojima had read Lenin in high school or something. Across the series, MGS so consistently almost hits the mark but just doesn’t quite get there. You get these flashes but it’s too often mired down by an underdeveloped understanding of politics
how do you know he didn’t but he’s constrained by the capital requirements necessary to finance his games into always toning things down into wacky lib shit
could a person so consistently nearly hit the mark if they didn’t really know what they were aiming for??
Kojima consistently hits near the mark but is given way more credit than due. He has a few cool concepts and accidently came up with post modernism a second time but he’s fucking stupid as hell in most ways. Pretty sure if he’d read Lennin he’d have a less cartoonist view of the cold war than he exemplified. A brief look at mgs3, peace walker and 5 shows he had a massively lib brained view of the world and complete and utter historical illiteracy. He is I Am 14 And This Is Deep embodied.
he has an obsessive personality if you believe the stuff he says about staring at a pic of mads mikkelsen for hours
I’d argue Kojima leans Anarchist, I felt like the games made a lot more sense approached through that lens
Kojima has definitely read Lenin. He lionises Che Guevara and there’s absolutely no way he hasn’t looked into Che’s influences. He also regularly recommends incredibly obscure Mao-era movies to people on twitter that I literally can not find anywhere, they are probably so rare that only an obsessive film person like him can possibly collect them.
The issue with Kojima is that he’s such a movie fan that he’s a fan of hollywood and what it produces. This love of hollywood aesthetic and style influences and americanises all of his work.