At this point in history, no author is more divisive than Jonathan Franzen. Even people who like his books have to admit that they’re kind of terrible. In Grantland, Brian Phillips wrote: “Probably no one alive is a better novelist than Jonathan Franzen, and this is frustrating because his novels are awful, excellent but awful, books you read quickly and remember ponderously, books of exhaustive craft and yet a weird, spiraling cluelessness about the data they exhaustively collate.” Which is to say that Franzen writes great books entirely in spite of himself.

If video games have an equivalent, it is Hideo Kojima, the brilliant and exhausting Japanese game designer who makes some of the most interesting big budget action games. His work subverts the genre in ways that are both intelligent and maddening: Kojima's most famous series, Metal Gear, has been satisfying, sprawling, and convoluted since it began in 1987. Nearly 30 years later, the (supposedly) final installment, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, is Kojima’s crowning achievement. Released in early September, the game cost over $80 million to produce and sold 3 million copies within the first five days. I have played dozens of hours of it since launch day. And I can say that for all of its genius, The Phantom Pain is so excellent and so awful.

The Metal Gear games take place in an alternate timeline where the world is governed by technology and paramilitary warfare. All of its characters are tragic figures shellshocked from the unending horrors of battle; as a title, The Phantom Pain refers to the sensation of pain in a lost limb. The game takes place in the ’80s, where the player assumes the role of Punished “Venom” Snake, the vengeful leader of a private army that houses itself on a bright orange platform in the middle of the ocean. You take on a series of contract missions—rescues, assassinations, espionage—across beautiful open-world renderings of Afghanistan’s deserts and the jungles of the Angola-Zaire border in pursuit of a mysterious villain named Skull Face, later connected to a global conspiracy that links the story of The Phantom Pain to other Metal Gear games.

Franzen writes great books entirely in spite of himself.

On the surface, The Phantom Pain plays like any other popular militaristic shooter. Triple-A titles, particularly American-made ones, position themselves as broadly as possible, rife with blandly uncomplicated scenarios where the player fights some vague threat. None of the Metal Gear games do this. If nothing else, Hideo Kojima is interested in making games that are unabashedly weird and oddly specific.

For an example, look no further than The Phantom Pain: The game is bizarrely nostalgic. Snake carries a Walkman at all times; cassette tapes with staple ’80s songs like Hall and Oates's "Maneater" or A-ha's "Take On Me" can be collected throughout the game, and you can listen to them if you’d like. Snake's army is dubbed the Diamond Dogs; neither their obsession with diamonds nor the throwaway reference to the David Bowie album are ever explained. As the title suggests, The Phantom Pain continues the Kojima's strange fascination with bodily dismemberment. That's not to say any of this makes The Phantom Pain better. But it certainly makes it memorable.