Hideo Kojima Wanted Metal Gear Solid V’s Character to Be “More Erotic” to Encourage Cosplay and Figurine Sales

Giuseppe Nelva September 4, 2013 3:23 AM EST

Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima is well known for not having any qualms in showcasing quite a lot of skin when designing some of his characters, both male and female. Today he made a quite surprising statement about one of the members of the cast of the upcoming Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

I’ve been ordering to Yoji to make the character more erotic, and he did it well. Recently I’ve been making characters this way. (link) I create the setting thoroughly, how he/she spent early life, name, style, favorite phrase, fashion, action to stand the character out. (link) The initial target is to make u want to do cosplay or its figurine to sell well. (link) The character I asked Yoji to make it more erotic, this one may not be cosplayable. (link)

Apparently Kojima-san is talking about a character that hasn’t been revealed yet, as hinted at by the last tweet of the string (I apologize for the manual linking, but Twitter seems to have disabled embedding). None of the characters revealed so far are so erotically charged that they would be inappropriate for public cosplay. “Yoji” most probably refers to the game’s Lead Artist Yoji Shinkawa.

It’s worth mentioning that Kojima-san seems to be still very interested in creating deep and multifaceted characters, as expressed in the third tweet of the sequence, and not just in making them “erotic”.

One thing is for sure, this statement will probably get an army of pundits on the warpath, especially given the current climate between some of the most controversy-driven areas of the gaming press.

If we weren’t talking about Hideo Kojima, I would have immediately thought about a jest or an attempt to troll said jumpy press, and in the end it might very well be just that, but we’re indeed talking about Kojima-san, so nothing is impossible.