Making no distinction between high brow and low brow culture is one of the hallmarks of post-modernist fiction, which is definitely what most of Kojima's work can be considered. Take one of my favourite novels, for example. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It's a book about how the progress of technology and the increasing power of global industry inevitably not only lead to the industrialized genocide that was the Holocaust, but also the constant fear of total annihilation that came with the Cold War. It's also a book in which people have a pie fight between hot air balloons, a man dresses as a pig, and a paranormal government agencies chases a man around Europe because they believe his erections predict the impact of missiles. Actually, I'm pretty sure that novel was a pretty big influence on the Metal Gear series and its distinctive brand of what I've seen described as "Military Surrealism". I think the tonal dissonance in Kojima's games, between pertinent social commentary, in depth elaboration on various political and philosophical topics, witty meta commentary on video games, but also over the top action, storytelling that that one would expect from superhero comicbooks and what can sometimes be very juvenile comic relief is surely jarring, but it is also most definitely intentional and most definitely a defining part of his style as a director.
A friend of mine recently joked that Death Stranding "Feels like it's directed by Michael Bay, when it doesn't feel like it's directed by Stanley Kubrick." and I couldn't exactly disagree with him. It does. I just don't think it's a bad thing. It's a style of writing that's only really possible in video games. No movie studio would provide adequate funding for a movie with a story like that of Death Stranding. Because it's weird, tonally bipolar and yes, sometimes awkward. But we should consider ourselves lucky something like it exists. Late in the game you get to a bossfight that involves two immortal postmen having a fistfight over the continued survival of mankind on a metaphysical beach that connects life and afterlife with fighting game health bars hovering above them. And frankly, this is the kind of shit that I play video games for. Interestingly enough, Last of Us 2 has a final bossfight that plays out in a somewhat similar way. You have a beach, you have two characters who are kinda foils to each other and you have a fist fight, even though for vastly different reasons. Both of these scenes invoke the visual language of low brow 80s - 90s action movies. The kind Schwarzenegger and Stallone or, if it's one of the better ones, Willis might have starred in. The difference is, where Druckmann pays homage to movies like that in a very straightforward way, Kojima elevates their iconography through larger than life scales and cheeky postmodernist flourishes like the aforementioned fighting game health bars or the fact that, in an earlier phase of the fight, you can literally beat your opponent with suitcases constaining Playstation 4 consoles. I enjoyed recent games like Last of Us 2, Ghost of Tsushima or Red Dead Redemption a lot for what they are. But they are all built, almost entirely, from the tropes, if not to say clichés of their respective genres. Death Stranding isn't just another Post Apocalyptic Survivors Tale and the Metal Gear games aren't just random Spy Thrillers. They all expand upon these genres in ways that make them not only more compelling as stories, games, and in the end, works of audiovisual media
No, I disagree. I think it terms of gameplay, MGS2 is an improvement on MGS1 in almost every way. It's not a bad game, neither intentionally or unintentionally.
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