I received an email recently from a reader who wasn’t impressed with my review. He said that it felt like a kneejerk reaction against the game, without all of the nuance and insight that I usually give. This was my reply to him, which may interest some of you:
My review was written as a judgment, not an analysis. Most of my articles do not review MGS games, they study them, as you said. For a review, however, the purpose is to decide what I personally like or dislike, and to criticize the product as a product. MGSV is a product that costs money, and which either meets or fails to meet expectations of consumers who paid to experience it. I am one of those consumers. I’m not a disciple of Kojima.
If you read my actual review of MGS2, which follows at the end of my “Complete Breakdown” analysis, you’ll see that I also give it criticism in ways that I never did elsewhere. Perhaps it’s rare, but I can simultaneously understand the deep intentions of Kojima and step back and judge his output from a more unbiased point of view.
With that said, my review is positive. Perhaps you interpreted it as negative because you expected an analysis instead of a review. My analysis will be in my book, and its too early for me to even get into that side of things at this point. Once we know about what the hell happened during production with Konami and him I’ll feel more comfortable doing a meta analysis, but honestly, everyone else is pretty much on the same level as me until we hear more.
I appreciate the email and I knew that it would come off that way. I also felt bad giving a judgment on it as a product, because my role has been an analyst for years, but that’s not nearly all I have to say about the game. I hope you’ll look forward to a deeper analysis without judgment down the road, because I am too.
Like I said, though, I genuinely give it a positive review and don’t hate it. Trust me that I can see the attempts at meta things better than anyone else out there, trying to be smart about the artistic intentions and the twist. I have some important things to say about the meta aspect that I haven’t shared yet. But i just wanted to get my EVALUATION of the PRODUCT out of the way while it was fresh, and I felt that I may as well articulate what people were experiencing.
I did pretty much insult the way it tried to be clever, but there is a sick habit going around the gaming community as a whole where people defend games based on everything except enjoyment and user experience. We’re all experts now, familiar with behind-the-scenes production struggles, sympathizing with various creators, or even just what they represent. “This game isn’t fun but it represents the indie scene and anti-corporate practices so I’m going to defend it!”. But what about the experience itself? Is it impossible to separate our view of a product from the production itself?
My REVIEW is about that 16 year old who picks up the game without knowing anything about Konami politics, but played some of the old games and wants to experience something worth their money. My analysis will be about Kojima and the meaning of it all.