Of course, my comments are just my opinion and the analysis is simply my interpretation of the game based on points of opinion. It’s totally subjective, as you say. Biased? Well yes, that’s the nature of opinion.

Perhaps it’s cultural, I’m not sure. From my experience in China, the Chinese prefer narratives which can be followed and do make logical sense, MGS4 does not. (It might be a Japanese thing?) Leading up to the release of MGS4, I spent many, many hours scouring for clues, re-watching key cut scenes and reviewing the entire series chronology and still MGS4 was completely unclear at times. I even missed one of the plot twists entirely, thank god for Wikipedia.

Defenders of the Matrix trilogy make the same accusations, chalking up the negative reaction of Reloaded and Revolutions as too layered, too rich for thick-headed westerners, I also disagree here. I actively seek out rich, layered narratives which challenge myself as a reader. However, as with the later Matrix movies, Metal Gear Solid 4 glosses over crucial parts of the story line and spends literally hours waffling on about nanomachines etc. I love the MGS series, but I’m not going to be in denial over MGS4; there’s a difference between deep and needlessly complicated.

Plus, a lot of westerners didn’t understand the complicatedness and the style of long winded narrative of this game, so their common reaction is to criticize it. It’s just something cultural; in east asia, those long winded stories and complex, complicated, even not understandable stories and tails are part of the history since milleniums, so for the youngsters who have been brought up with such cultures, MGS’s complicatedness is just something beautiful. I consider it as something beautiful, and the more complicated it is, the more it makes me want to spend hours and days thinking about its meaning. It’s just something cultural. So no one can criticize it.

It’s just about culture and taste differentiations. It’s not about the game’s flaws.

The earlier MGS games felt more cohesive story-wise despite having a lot of codec dialogue. I never did feel impatient because the twists were keeping me on my toes.

Interestingly, I felt that the last one (MGS4) droned on and on. There were many instances when the explanations spoke of redundant things which I believe ought to have been cut from the final product.

And here was Kojima complaining that the Blu-Ray disk wasn’t big enough.