MGS4 out soon, too much story?

That's Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of The Patriots. Not too long now before you can pick yours up from retailers. This is one of the two biggest releases for the PS3 to possibly ever come out. The other being GTAIV obviously. And by big I mean lots of people are waiting for it, they're hyping it to hell and a shitload of money was spent developing it.

Anyway, MGS1 was great. I bought it and really enjoyed the espionage action in it even though I'm not really the biggest fan of these sneak games. The only problem was that it had way too many and too long cut-scenes with just a radio showing 2 people's faces talking about boring stuff. I'm a big fan of storytelling but it went a bit too far.

Then came MGS2 which I played through and in the end was left mouth open. Not because it was the greatest game I ever played but because I couldn't understand what the fuck had just happened. It had way too long cut-scenes (you CANNOT start a game out with a huge long cut-scene, you have to give the player some game time because that's what they're there for, GTAIV has just enough intro to get you in the mood without pissing you off) and too much talking resulting in a plot that made absolutely no sense at first. So I sold the game to a friend of mine and decided to forget all about it. It wasn't bad, it just had a lot of great gameplay ruined by dumb design decisions regarding storytelling.

MGS3 I picked up a lot later because MGS2 killed the interest in the series for me. I've only played the first jungle areas in MGS3 because the PS3 I've been playing it on has the european software emulation of PS2 games and it crashes every now and then. I can't be bothered to plug in the PS2 for it. Maybe I'll play it one day. But what really got to me again were the dumb parts in the beginning that made absolutely no sense. Having done military leadership training here I know that the things this "super soldier" does would be TOTALLY out of the question in an infiltration situation like the one portrayed in the beginning of Snake Eater. I have a few quotes below from 2 people on the QT3 forums that I found extremely satisfying to read because to me it feels like they couldn't have hit the nail on the head any better.

So, here are 2 quotes about the MGS series. I find them brilliant and I couldn't agree more because I've been thinking the EXACT same things for so many years and always thought nobody agreed with me and everyone was a Kojima fanboy.

Jason Cross writes:

They're technically brilliant, full of amazing character art and animation and in-engine cutscenes and stuff. But Kojima obviously wants to make movies, because he takes a lot of badass fights and stuff - stuff that by all rights you should be playing though - and turns them into cutscenes so he can get fancy camerawork and lots of bullshit dialogue in there. And while they're all very impressive technically, they're horribly dumb.

MattKeil writes:

I think the true breaking point for me was the beginning of MGS3, in which it was made abundantly clear that they'd completely given up trying to make the "OMG KEWL BADASS" actions of the characters in the cutscenes match the actual dialogue in the game. Snake does a HALO jump into the jungle, releases his parachute. This is just after he's been told the mission is an ultra-secret black op and he can't even leave bullet casings behind. The parachute floats away into the jungle. Then he dramatically removes his helmet, re-enacting the iconic "Snake reveals himself" title sequence that has been in all MGS games. He tosses it away, despite the fact that it reads U.S. Air Force on the damn thing. Then he gets on the damn phone and whines at The Boss for nearly 10 minutes, despite being told earlier that if he's not at the extraction point in 2 hours, they're leaving him there and he can walk home.

You can't have everyone spouting dramatic Tom Clancy military shit and then have them act like petulant teenagers in an anime harem comedy. I played the demo at TGS 2007, which had great gameplay, an amazing battlefield environment, and some really cool moments, only to be rewarded with a cutscene that featured a Power Rangers sight gag and no less than three diarrhea jokes. I can only speculate what a 90 minute MGS4 cutscene will offer up.

With all the talk of long cut-scenes in MGS4, I'm getting second thoughts on whether to buy the game or not. Having seen all the trailers about the game I think I'll still give it a shot for the simple entertainment value but I'll be more prepared this time. A quick change of words through a static boring radio system is all I'll be up for, if it seems to drag out I'll just skip it (actually, I don't think Kojima-san will allow you to skip story elements). Story is great but games are still games.

The dialogue always seemed dumb at points and completely inappropriate for the situation. But then again that's what Japanese developers do a lot, you get Phoenix Wright talking during court like a 15 year old and even the judge is a complete moron, that's just how it is. The MGS series has always had some very nice design ideas that make the player go "wow cool!" and weird scenarios that make you go "wow what the hell?". Boss fights in MGS1 and MGS3 come to mind.

I'm sure MGS4 will sell like hot cakes all over the world because it's cool to own and try it out if only for the visuals, but I honestly feel like this series is taking the story element overboard even though I love a good story in games. At least reviewers aren't repeating the pathetic 100/100 rampage of reviews as they did for GTAIV. MGS4 still seems to be doing pretty damn well according to metacritic. It's probably a good game though, albeit covered with a bit too much pointless yapping.

Note: Why does Blogspot adjust line spacing after using the block quote tag? The later paragraphs have every line closer to each other than the first paragraphs.