Say what you will about the man and his work, but pretty much every time Hideo Kojima drops a new trailer – or, if you’re Geoff Keighley, so much as inhales – it’s an event. This week was no different, with Death Stranding 2’s nine-minute-long State of Play trailer turning heads both in the traditional sense and in that way dogs do when they’re confused. A conversation about Kojima on this week’s episode of our weekly podcast, Aftermath Hours, was basically unavoidable.
Elsewhere in the episode, we talk about Suicide Squad, a game that’s had people going full knives-out psycho mode for years even though it’s turned out to be just fine. Then we mourn the loss of a new Deus Ex game that only became public knowledge after Embracer killed it. We also talk about funerals. Cheery subject matter all around!
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that our fledgling podcast can grow up to be big and strong.
Here’s an excerpt from this week’s largely civil Kojima debate-scussion:
Nathan: Say what you will about Hideo Kojima, but this game is very Hideo Kojima.
Chris: Yeah, shit's goofy. It's the sequel to a goofy game. I had trouble wording this online and then people got mad at me.
Riley: People online? Mad???
Chris: Because we had this long conversation about how you, Riley, bristle at Kojima in this way where it's like, "This is weird or annoying" or something like that. In particular, the part where I think we ended up agreeing is that people kind of throw themselves at Kojima in a way that's sort of embarrassing. And I agree as somebody who really likes Hideo Kojima's work: I think it gets annoying sometimes. I think it fundamentally becomes irritating the degree to which people who should be professionals about this talk about this stuff. I say this as somebody who's regularly like, "Oh yeah, that fucking rules." And I like big parts of that trailer. Little puppet guy? Sure. Taking off your mask and it's a Joker face? Sure, fine.
Nathan: Guitar as a weapon? Hell yeah.
Chris: And we all agree Troy Baker is great. But the issue to me is that I think [Kojima would] have less of a cult of personality if more people got to do this shit – if they got a big game and were able to make a little glove that lights your cigarette for you. I think that shit's cool, I think more people should be given carte blanche to do it, and the response from – I'm going to say it – cult-like devotees to Kojima uncritically was, "Well, he gets to do that." It was just a meritocratic response. And I'm like, you're missing the fucking point. Yes, he has a long history of earned goodwill, but it's also an engineered thing. It's this thing we've all agreed on: the person of Kojima versus the people who develop his games.
It's kind of annoying sometimes. It makes you uncritical. It makes you less able to engage with the work in a meaningful way and to engage with the person in a meaningful way. If some shit ever came out about Kojima that was bad, I think a lot of people would have difficulty reconciling it with their idea of who Kojima is. I'm not saying that's necessarily the case, but this is one of the many pitfalls you come into when you deify a person like that, and it's a shame that he's in the catbird seat to make new images – to make weird shit. That's the part that bums me out. Give other people a shot.
Nathan: I think also to your point about the lack of criticality around him, you also end up in this place where – and our former Kotaku colleague Harper was tweeting about this – because everyone considers Kojima to be the weird shit guy, they look at his stuff and say, "Oh, it's so weird and wacky" without engaging with the substance of what he's trying to say. Which in a lot of cases is not actually that hard to read. It's pretty legible. He's straightforward in the points he's trying to make and his broader politics, even if he does it in ways that are sometimes weird or wacky.
Chris: Yeah, there are times where he becomes obtuse. There are times where he's using magical realism and metaphor and shit like that, but it's one of those things I come back to again and again and again: The floor is so low for so much of gaming that we fully bought into auteur theory. You can say a lot of things about Remedy, Miyazaki, but I think there's a whole category of auteur that's sort of just [Kojima]. I think he's part of an older class of guy you don't see anymore, like fucking Peter Molyneux or the creator of Heavy Rain. These guys who were the everything guys because everybody had sort of loaded auteur theory onto that shit.
And again, that's not to take anything away from him, because he's a singular fucking guy. He does singular work in certain ways. But he's also part of a team. What makes his games is not just him. It's the people who work there. I have complicated feelings about him, and you should, because that's how you should engage with people's art you like.
Riley: We were saying this yesterday as I subjected myself to the entire Death Stranding 2 trailer, getting angrier and angrier until I think Luke was like, "Why are you watching this? You’re not running a press conference. You don't have to watch this." And I've never played a Kojima game. I didn't play Death Stranding. That's why I can't get myself all riled up: I know I don't understand it. I did try to play Metal Gear Solid 5, and I didn't get far. I like stealth games! But for some reason in the way of a stealth game was all this tedious junk. We were talking about this yesterday – Nathan and I clash over this a lot – I'm sort of anti-maximalism and anti-nonsense.
Nathan: And I'm pro-maximalism and pro-nonsense. I want to reveal to everybody here: I've watched that entire Death Stranding 2 trailer twice. I watched it again last night. Just for fun!
Riley: I thought Harper's points were good, because I just watched it grow increasingly weirder like, "What about that? What about this? I want to put this in here. Here's that!" And I'm just like, for Christ's sake, man. And again, I was watching it. I could have just closed it. It's my fault.
But I think to what you said before, Chris, because the bar is so low in games -- and we could argue about what that means and whether or not it's true -- I feel like I get sort of inordinately mad when I see things I don't understand be held up as "This is our genius!" I feel the same way about Neil Druckmann, where it's like, "This is our smart adult man."
(Podcast production by Multitude.)
