Hideo Kojima and crew’s Three Decades with Playstation reviewed and ranked

A screen shot of Physint announcement trailer shown in the “ancient” time of early 2024. This barrier-transcendent between media forms is a very bad idea, Mr. K. Hasn’t your new partner told you about Quantum Break? Oh, wait, that game taught you that you can be up to more bullshit bankrolled by Xbox, huh?

Kojima Productions moved their digital sock puppet shop to Microsoft. Until Xbox needs to cut cost further that is. Whether that new spy game comes to being or not still depends on OD. If the horror game made it to the finish line by 2028, it would mark the first time “A Hideo Kojima Game” not coming out on a Playstation platform at launch in three decades. So, it’s high time to look back on Kojima and crew’s 30 years with Sony.

 I am among the “happy few” who played from Polienauts to Death Stranding with a couple missed in between. The 3 post-MGS4 Big Boss games are omitted on this list. Peace Walker just isn’t my speed while I have not touched MGSV “duology” in the roaring twenties of ours. The six listed here are 50/50 in terms of thumb down and thumb up. Now allow me to take it from the top, or the bottom depends on where you stand.

Part One an end for me

6 Death Stranding

Yours truly is among the millions whose action led to Sony Interactive Entertainment pulling fund on Physint. Said action being played 2019’s Death Stranding, then loathed it enough to not bother with the sequel. I for one find Death Stranding 2 On the Beach being greenlit in the first place more baffled than SIE backing off from Physint. “Fooled me once” and all that. The first DS had speedrun the entirety of Metal Gear franchise already, continuation to that would be more pointless than the circle MGS went through.

Metal Gear series is set in a fantasy land of military science fiction (Nothing in our ever shifting reality points to cyborg ninja being the next paradigm shift in infantry kit after all. So, it’s still fantasy.). Many mistook it for a grounded high-tech thriller due to the amount of real-world jargons in them. Death Stranding switching to mostly made-up things is turning its back on Kojima’s audience in that sense.

It took me 31 hours to see end credits roll on DS and its padded-out home stretch did not leave a good after taste. To say that it’s mechanically similar to 2015’s Phantom Pain would not be accurate. Them Diamond Dog mercs move through any terrain smoothly in PP. Close-quarter combat in that game can mostly be boiled down to “pull the right trigger to win”. While in DS, walking is the first mechanic to learn within its first say, 5 hours and fist fights take way too much effort to be fun.

Is Death Stranding different from other games as expensive to make? Yes, but that does not make the game any more special for me. If Kojima’s response to “needed more interaction” is a padded-out and shitty endgame plus whatever fantasy that penultimate interactive credits sequence fulfills, then I guess we all need to reconsider the whole concept of “A Hideo Kojima Game”.

 Sony had made some bad investments in recent years, like that eye-watering price tag on Bungie. But stop funding Kojima Production’s is certainly not among those. For one, Mr. K is more interested in making digital “sock puppets” out of celebrities than making video games. For another, he certainly got his own cargo cult thinking.

Part Two the beginning for part of a brand

5 Policenauts

1994’s Policenauts marked Hideo Kojima’s first attempt to make a video game seem cinematic. Part of such attempt dates it: after New Game is selected, a female voice over public announcement system says “Now, our feature presentation: Policenauts”, something Japanese cinemas did once upon a time. Then the opening credits that followed wouldn’t make it feel any more modern. I for one struggle to recall a movie released in 2026 with opening credits. Finally, there is a false claim of authorship.

The first of opening credits are 8 kanjis pronounced “Ko Jima Hide O Kan Doku Saku Hin” meaning “A Hideo Kojima Game”, like “Kuro Sawa Akira Kan Doku Saku Hin” meaning “An Akira Kurosawa Film”. It’s utter bullshit, legally speaking. No copyrights law on this planet grants a human authorship over expansive-to-make computer software requiring loads of developers such as AAA games. The equally corporate film industry at least has wiggle room for individual authors but no such luck with video games.

Policenauts was first made for the non-Windows computer NEC PC-98, which is why the text adventure’s tit-touching can’t be blamed on Kojima. He was just appealing to that platform’s main “gooner” audience. Though why didn’t he make the player character as sexy ladies straight out of some Masamune Shirow manga did show his own preference. I mean Stellar Blade had proved that the male gamers do not mind having a playable dress-up doll in their game, yet Hideo Kojima would not be caught dead making one.

Policenauts’ console ports were more on par with 2025’s Metal Gear Solid Delta Snake Eater: all-new graphic, minor mechanic twitch and kept vocal performances. Time gaps are different of course. The text adventure came to the original Playstation and SEGA Saturn only 2 years after PC-98, while MGS3 became Unreal Engine Five slop more than 2 decades after its PS2 debut. One has to wonder: with Policenauts’s animated console ports being outsourcing job, could it still be called “A Hideo Kojima Game”?

The PS1 port was abridged, but I honestly could not tell with the game’s second half being just info dumps. Policenauts can be considered as Kojima’s “third feature” after Metal Gear 1 and 2, so I guess the man was pretty full of himself making it. He read some encyclopedia and want some pages sliced into this game with no regard to the economy of storytelling. Mystery novelists usually padded their novels with red herrings. Yet Mr. Kojima could not even cook up compelling enough misdirection that worth a damn.

Guess the space age here is still better than MGS’ world dominated by military-industrial complex by comparison. Bad guys in Policenauts are just homicidal organ harvesters. MGS’s weaponized weirdness, on the other hands, took much more than that. Anything branded “A Hideo Kojima Game” is simpler than it appears, they just have the reputation of complexity with long info dump and convoluted telling. It all started with Policenauts.

Part Three the long middle for many and the whole bloody thing for even more

If the whole brand recognition of Hideo Kojima is to be spelled out, it would say “A Hideo Kojima Game, Tactical Espionage Action, Metal Gear Solid”. Take any one of those three out, there would be no selling point. The English-speaking fandom of Kojima is just this narrow since, oh let’s say, MGS4 put up a chorological and thematic end. I mean the spin-off only started to dry up after that, with the only exception being 2013’s MGR. Anyway here is how another stranger on the internet thinks about MGS 1 to 4.

4 Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty

2001‘s MGS2 is undoubtedly the most ambitious installment of the series, and I do not mean it as a compliment. On top of cringe-worthy romantic subplot, the game has dual antagonists to match its seemingly dual protagonists. The problem this led to is that player getting more long-ass villain monologues. Yeah, yeah, it’s about the digital society we all live in now. But before we homo sapiens entered said digital society, the whole thing is just dull science fiction in desperate need of editing.

And I think the story told here is showing what a one-trick pony Kojima is on the narrative front. After Solid Snake found a life he can call his own, Kojima’s narrative team did not explore farther into that. Instead, they created another poor sod code named Raiden to be the forced agent of establishment like Snake has been since 1987’s Metal Gear. Every bloody non-player character is preachy towards the new guy Jack in this fucking game as well.

It’s not that Kojima and crew did not consider the narrative pacing of this one. It’s just that the solution they came up with is pretty unhinged. Instead of piled the double villain monologue before the final boss fight, they decided to save a piece to slide into the mid-point of said boss fight. MGS4 is long and preachy as they get, but at very least, no one calls old Snake during the heat of battle.

And on the “Kojima invented nothing!” front, how Solid Snake is framed by Ocelot was lifted wholesale out of Ghost in the Shell, Masamune Shirow’s graphic novel that is. Motoko Kusanaki leaving Section 9 is due to being caught on camera shooting someone on a boat. The unit is seen as a police death squad so she faked her own death and legged it. The 1995 flick changed it because it’s very anticlimactic while the 2026 series just adapted it faithfully. Guess Kojima and crew considered it as a fitting intermission.

Intermission Thumb up as package down

Excuse the dick joke. This is a series famous for starring Mr. Constant Hard-on after all. Anyway, the threshold here is between thing I like and those I loathe. What I feel more positively about were when Kojima crew cleaned up at least some of their acts, while the 3 above were definitely Kojima unleashed. I do mean it in the ejection sense given how similarly messy the end result is. So I do prefer when he kept it in his pants.

3 Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater

Star Wars Machete Order takes the trilogy released between 1977 and 1983 as its main body. But before the finale there is a sharp turn into the prequels showing the final boss as a brat in his 20s. While their reasoning is “We do not like Phantom Menace around here”, the viewing order is suspiciously like MGS 1 to 4. By “the final boss as a brat in his 20s” for MGS series, I of course do mean Ocelot. Big Boss has not appeared as an enemy in any of the series’ polygonal installment.

But Lucas and Kojima reached their respective result from opposite directions. Georgey boy was planning a series far longer than a trilogy, but found out that expensive films were also hard to make. So, he concluded most plot lines in the 1983 flick, forced to combine several characters. Kojima and crew loved to walk away with questions they didn’t want to answer, so even a prequel was expansion for them with “There were actually 2” being their party line.

Having 2 global cabals is a smart way to weasel out of the corner MGS2’s ending got into. Then there is the “Liquid Snake is full of shit” school of retroactive continuity. Not yet Big Boss is a young forced agent of establishment, the usual type for this series’ player character, and his target in this game is the mentor he gave a shit about. So, I guess the whole spy commandos were more valued during the Colid War Liquid said turns out false.

Reconsidering the ranking all I had went through MGS 1 to 4 in 2020s, Snake Eater had fallen down a bit. The first save file clocked around 30 minutes without skipping cut scenes being part of the reason. Bad tutorial compared to the next 2 games being another. I mean the only bit of interaction before first save being tree climbing is just bullshit. One is supposed to keep a low file playing tactical espionage action, what is that one good for? What is the whole survival suite good for?

2 Metal Gear Solid 4 Guns of Patriots

As the saying goes: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. MGS series fooled me once on the long cut scene front, shame on it and the video game media singing its praises. Persona series and its yoke fooled me a second time on the too long non-interactive bit in video games front, shame on me for going blind again. Part of my own shame would be going back to MGS4 after Persona and Persona-likes, those infamously long cut scenes in the 2008 game just flew by, 71 minutes finale included.

It’s not to say that I love every second of it. The Beauty & Beast Corp is still a sauceless lot, and I can do without the Roman Pantomime before they are put down or away. That whole whatever the fuck triangle among Campell, Rose and Raiden is cringe worthy. It would have been better if Meryl was the only one pissed by it, while Raiden acknowledged the existence of some arrangement and Snake trusted Campell not to make some malice advancement on a young lady like Rose. “Nanomachines, son!” never bothered me too much though.

MGS4’s multi-platform release came shortly after Kyoto Xanadu, a Persona-like. KX has a similar five acts structure yet it’s about 3 times as long as MGS4. The Falcom game is also episodic to a fault with each act ends with long and crazy backstory about party members, player character and antagonists. Guns of Patriots goes by fast in comparison, Even Drebin’s unbelievable battlefield horror stories about BB Corp members take mere minutes while play character’s batshit origin story spread across hours in KX.

Part of MGS4’s speed comes from how much more visually interesting those cut scenes are. It seemed like Kojima and crew threw out the good old tool of montage after this game in pursuit of pointless one-shots. Facial expressions are still convincing after almost 2 decades. Nanomi Hunter’s tragedy is expressed more through the expressions on her face than the voice-over provided by Jennifer Hale or that Japanese lady. Or maybe I am just happier not glued in front of a PS3…

1 Metal Gear Solid

And finally, the one started it all for the English speakers or any non-Japanese speaker. Kojima was merely a narrative lead on Snatcher and I doubt a Senor del Toro had picked up Policenauts. I ran out of good things to say about it so why not try this more obvious product of its time out and decide for yourself.