There’s no doubting Hideo Kojima’s devotion to the artwork of video video games. But one query that has adopted the Metal Gear grasp round for a lot of his profession is “Why doesn’t he just make a movie?”. This sentiment no doubt stems from the notion that his work at each Konami and Kojima Productions has been cutscene-heavy, opting to inform tales by means of often-thrillingly orchestrated cinematics quite than natural gameplay design. But is that this perceived notion a actuality? And, more importantly, does it even matter?
Well, I’ve carried out some quantity crunching and labored out what portion of every of the mainline Metal Gear Solid video games, plus the duo of Death Strandings, is cutscenes. In some circumstances, it’s what you’d count on. In others, not a lot…
How a lot of every Kojima game is cutscenes?
To work out simply how a lot of every game is cutscene, I’ve used the average time to finish a essential story playthrough, sourced from How Long to Beat’s information. I’ve then taken the whole runtime of every game’s cutscenes and used it to evaluate what proportion that runtime is of the average playthrough. The outcomes are:
- Metal Gear Solid: 20.29% (11hr, 30m average playthrough, 2hr 20m of cutscenes)
- Metal Gear Solid 2: 23.21% (13hr average playthrough, 3hr 1m of cutscenes)
- Metal Gear Solid 3: 26.35% (16hr average playthrough, 4hr 13m of cutscenes)
- Metal Gear Solid 4: 40.63% (18hr 30m average playthrough, 7hr 31m of cutscenes)
- Metal Gear Solid 5: 8.13% (45hr 30m average playthrough, 3hr 42m of cutscenes)
- Death Stranding: 15.75% (40hr 30m average playthrough, 6hr 22m of cutscenes)
- Death Stranding 2: 15.97% (37hr 40m average playthrough*, 6hr 1m of cutscenes)
It is important to notice that this proportion pertains to cinematic cutscenes solely. Codec calls or different such in-game conversations usually are not included, as they require some participant interactivity to progress.
*average playthrough primarily based on information from multiple IGN editors.
What do these percentages reveal about Kojima’s profession?
It seems that the unique three Metal Gear Solid video games comply with a comparable trend – cutscenes make up round 20-ish % of the total playtime, with every subsequent entry step by step contributing to a very slight upward trajectory. It’s with Metal Gear Solid 4 that issues actually shift. With 40% of it being cinematics, it’s not too removed from the reality to say Guns of the Patriots is half cutscenes. Understandably, the game has grow to be the poster baby for Kojima’s cinematic indulgence, one thing solely emphasised by size – the story famously crescendoes in a 71 minute-long last cinematic. That’s simply 10 minutes shorter than the 1995 animated movie Toy Story.
The similar can’t be stated for Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, nevertheless. A game with a troubled growth path to say the least, it suffers from the precise reverse difficulty as MGS 4: a paper-thin story. With just below 4 hours of cutscenes in 45 hours of gameplay, it’s a starkly low ratio by comparability to its predecessors. MGS 5 is undoubtedly one of the biggest stealth video games ever constituted of a mechanical perspective, however its lack of narrative throughline (and, to be trustworthy, ending) prevents it from feeling like a full Kojima bundle.
And then now we have the Death Stranding video games, which function runtimes akin to The Phantom Pain, however a cutscene proportion nearer to that of the first Metal Gear Solid. The result’s a duology of video games that really feel more narratively full than MGS 5, however not as trapped by cinematic ambition as Kojima’s more indulgent initiatives.
Are there too many cutscenes in Kojima’s video games?
With all that information crunching out the method, let’s handle the actual query: is Kojima too reliant on cutscenes? I feel the reply lies in every particular person venture, or at the very least every period of his profession.
Across the unique Metal Gear Solid trilogy, between a fifth and a quarter of every game is cinematics. Is being passive for that length a downside? I’m not so sure. In the PS1 and PS2 period, telling advanced tales was tougher to do in player-controlled situations, and in order that’s the place cinematics, codec calls, or prolonged dialogue sequences got here into play. The first three Metal Gear Solid video games have been lauded during their time, and are nonetheless revered, for his or her cinematic strategy to presentation, and people early journeys by means of Shadow Moses, Big Shell, and Soviet forests flowed superbly. They informed their tales by means of a wholesome quantity of cutscenes, yes, however by no means at the value of gameplay, which ushered in never-before-seen approaches to stealth-action and lots of experimental fourth-wall-breaking surprises. They have been cutscene-heavy, however by no means at the expense of the game itself.
That unquestionably adjustments with Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. 7 hours and 31 minutes of it’s spent idly watching cinematics that play out on both aspect of its linear stealth corridors and boss battles. Kojima had a grand story he needed to inform, with a number of threads that needed tying up from throughout the trilogy that preceded it, however this arguably got here at the value of the game itself. The story isn’t essentially a unhealthy one, it simply all-too-frequently interrupts the stealth-action all of us need from one of Snake’s adventures. And typically they are often excessively prolonged – I’ve already talked about the longer-than-a-movie finale, however the cutscenes that bridge one act to a different typically function TV show-like runtimes.
Things go in the full wrong way with Metal Gear Solid 5, and whereas some of that may be blamed on its fraught growth cycle, a lot of its lowered cutscene proportion is down to the swap from linear to open world design. This expanded imaginative and prescient aligned with “modern” game growth traits in 2015, as huge maps full of alternative have been all the rage in a post-Skyrim world. Crucially, although, the open worlds developed round that time by studios like Bethesda, CD Projekt Red, and even Ubisoft have been full of narrative components, each at small and huge scale, made up of a mixture of environmental storytelling, companion conversations, and cutscenes. Kojima didn’t subscribe to this formulation, although, maybe by means of a cussed adherence to his conventional strategies of sectioning off gameplay from story. But that large open world meant that more time was spent in energetic gameplay situations, and few particular person missions in The Phantom Pain really progress the plot as you play by means of them. The essential story is informed largely through cutscenes delivered as half of your journeys back to Mother Base, and your time there may be a lot more restricted than your time in the discipline. This strategy is concurrently very Kojima, however oddly faraway from the storytelling complexities we’d come to count on in 2015. It’s a improbable game, however much less so when considered purely by means of a narrative lens, and the noticeably low quantity of cutscenes displays this.
Heading into 2019’s Death Stranding, it might not have been a shock to see Kojima head back to his roots in the case of story building. Sam Porter Bridges' story is informed predominantly by means of cutscenes, and infrequently during any of the many, many deliveries he’s requested to do. There’s the odd exception – Higgs planting a bomb in his cargo that he has to shortly dispose of, for instance – however for the most half, story is reserved for hologram chatter (Death Stranding’s reply to codec calls) and superbly rendered cinematics.
Both Death Stranding video games are of a comparable size to The Phantom Pain however, crucially, they don’t really feel wherever close to as narratively sparse. The core gameplay, during which you join varied cities round a continent through delivering objects and lengthening the internet-like “Chiral Network,” could not act as a direct automobile for the story, however your mission targets by no means really feel totally divorced from the themes of human contact in a digital age. And so whereas the majority of the plot is subsequently nonetheless informed through cutscenes, as was the case method back in 1998 for Kojima on the unique Metal Gear Solid, every part in between nonetheless feels narratively richer than it does in Metal Gear Solid 5.
Kojima’s impact on single-player tales
We’ve seen that the ratio of cutscenes can fluctuate considerably throughout Kojima’s library, however how does his work examine to different studios working in comparable areas? Metal Gear Solid did, afterall, virtually form what modern-day PlayStation would grow to be. We can see the affect of its legacy in lots of single-player, story-focused video games – a latest prime instance can be The Last of Us Part 2. 15.55% of its average playtime consists of non-interactive cinematic cutscenes, a proportion extremely close to each Death Stranding video games. Similarly, Grand Theft Auto 5, one other open-world game with cinematic aspirations, is 12.5% cutscene on an average playthrough.
In each The Last of Us Part 2 and GTA 5, there feels like there’s a lot more story occurring between cutscenes in comparison with Kojima’s video games. Characters are consistently conversing to build out one another's backstories, and radios chatter away to color photos of their worlds. But this fixed noise could be overwhelming, and admittedly, wouldn’t swimsuit the worlds of Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding in any respect. Both are constructed round protagonists that work in isolation – deep behind enemy strains, or trekking on a lonesome supply path. This solitude, which allows stretches of reflection and contemplation, are what make these worlds – notably that of Death Stranding – so singular to wander. The thought of story being injected merely to hurry up the circulate of its supply feels counterintuitive. You don’t embody Sam Porter Bridges anticipating an audiobook. Instead you get one thing of a therapeutic white noise machine that plays in between new chapter milestones.
So, ought to Kojima “just make a movie”? No. He’s created some of the most partaking worlds and distinctive mechanical gameplay experiences, each of which have helped form the complete medium. We’d all be a lot poorer with out his contributions. Should he be much less reliant on cinematic cutscenes, or incorporate story into his missions? Perhaps. But his strategy has labored nicely enough for me thus far, and I don’t assume a couple of blips 10-15 years in the past ought to change my perspective on that. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach manages to inform a extremely partaking story in solely the method Kojima is aware of how, and I wouldn’t need him following a trend at the risk of receiving something much less attention-grabbing.
Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can primarily be discovered skulking round open world video games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.