Konami

Two and a half years ago, at a gaming industry conference in San Francisco, the mercurial Japanese developer Hideo Kojima took the stage for a keynote presentation with his entire face wrapped in white bandages. To particularly devoted fans of Kojima's Metal Gear series, this made sense. The bandages were a reference to Joakim Mogren, a fictional Dutch game developer at the center of an elaborate ruse Kojima had concocted to sow confusion about the newest installment in the series. (Joakim Mogren is an anagram for Hideo Kojima.) Shortly after the presentation began, Kojima removed the bandages and introduced Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. To many in the crowd, it was a bizarre move. This wasn't E3, an annual gaming hypefest targeted at consumers. It was the relatively staid, often technical Game Developers Conference. Metal Gear is a legendary title in gaming, but Kojima had invited an odd crowd to its debut: grown-ups in the games business, people with jobs, people who could hardly be expected to know or care about Joakim Mogren or any of the strange feints of a man who can come across as a kook. The reaction in the room was one of tolerant amusement, like you might extend to an eccentric uncle at a wedding. I hadn't paid attention to Kojima's bafflingly complex games — or his hijinks — since I was a teenager, and I remember sitting there thinking, What the hell is the deal with the bandages?

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Earlier this month, I sat down to play The Phantom Pain based on the good word of mouth the game was getting. It had me laughing almost immediately. The opening scene of the game takes place in a hospital, where players are immediately confronted with not one, but two characters whose faces are totally covered in white bandages. It was the punch line to a two-and-a-half-year-long joke that no one outside of Konami had even realized was happening. "So this was his plan all along," I whispered aloud, to no one. It was the perfect introduction to Metal Gear Solid V, which is the most surprising and delightful video game I have played in years, and a complete vindication of one of gaming's most notorious eccentrics. Eccentric! Metal Gear Solid V is a game in which you attach high-powered balloons to your unconscious enemies in order to whisk them back to your secret base in the Seychelles. It's a game in which you can ship yourself around that secret base in a cardboard box to save time. It's a game that revolves around an anticolonial plot to eradicate the English language. It's a game set in a 1984 in which you get perfect internet service in the wadis of Afghanistan. It's also a game with a special button combination to make your horse poop.

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In other words, this game is not Modern Warfare — safe, focus-tested, and massaged within an inch of its life. Though MGSV bears a passing resemblance to the military shooters that corporate behemoths like Activision and Electronic Arts churn out, its spirit is impish and possibly radical. Like all the games in the series since 1998's Metal Gear Solid, The Phantom Pain requires players to sneak into military bases to grab something secret or kill someone bad. Most games with guns are generic power fantasies. Metal Gear games often feel more like prank simulators. Players are encouraged to play tricks on enemies, to fool them with decoys, to be clever. Violence, when it happens, feels not gratuitous but witty. When you play MGSV, you are more Anansi than Arnold. There are other so-called "stealth" games — Metal Gear Solid basically created the genre — but none with MGSV's absurd streak, with its Inspector Gadget–like complement of zany spy tools, with its wild open world. The game is a joy. It is what I thought video games would be like in the future when I was 13, in 1998. The most depressing paradox in game development is that companies with the most powerful technology are often the most risk-averse. That means the games that have the most impressive graphical fidelity and production values can be, strangely, the least interesting. To play a big-budget game in 2015 that so clearly expresses an individual sensibility feels like a gift.

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