What's your take on it? If it's about cutscene amount, Snake was never the one who did much of the talking.
I don't care if Snake does much of the talking in cutscenes. Make the game you want to make, I suppose.
There's multiple problems I see with this statement, though. Anyone with deductive reasoning can tell you
why this happened - Kojima is blinded by starfucking and will do whatever it takes, absolutely whatever it takes, to keep him on board without spending a game's budget on the cost. And that's fairly reasonable, movies often have to rejigger themselves to pay for cast changes, it makes sense it can happen in video games, too.
But then it becomes less about making the game you want to make and more about making the game you can afford. Which always happens, but is rarely so blatantly obvious and almost never for a change most of the audience dislikes.
I
hated the way Kiefer Sutherland played the character in Ground Zeroes and it shook me more than most changes to games shake me. I loved MGS3. I own *counts* six copies of MGS3 as different versions. Playing through that game in one night was the defining experience of the series for me and I've played through it over and over and over since.
I was disappointed in Portable Ops but thought, this is just a spin-off game, next time, they'll do Big Boss justice like MGS3 did.
I was disappointed in Peace Walker but thought, this is just a handheld not-quite mainline game, next time, they'll do Big Boss justice like MGS3 did.
I was disappointed in Ground Zeroes but thought, this is just an extended demo before the main game and they didn't want to pay a ton of money just for the demo, next time, they'll do Big Boss justice like MGS3 did.
So when I see "No, this time YOU ARE SNAKE" and it's clear
exactly why they're doing this, I just sink into my chair. I don't want to be Snake. At no point in playing the series have I ever thought that being an audience surrogate would be beneficial to my enjoyment of the series. I want to sit and enjoy conversations about a box from otherwise serious characters. I want pages of dumb codec calls, of Snake reacting to allies in trouble, of looking confusedly over prototype Metal Gear documents that a drunken russian bureaucrat handed him and dismissively saying it doesn't matter.
I didn't get these in Ground Zeroes. I doubt I will get these things in The Phantom Pain. But who knows, maybe I'm wrong. I'd prefer to be. This statement fills me with dread on its own, combined with some degree of reasoning and my experience disliking Ground Zeroes, it basically strips away a lot of my confidence.
So my take is that I don't know and I want to be excited for this.
