Phantom pain silent sniper rifle series#

There is no objective correlative in Kojima’s games, no grand romantic union of circumstances, language, and action into iconic moments that can't be imagined in any other form. He makes games in which the needs of corporate management become ironically inseparable from the needs of fans-both of whom want one more entry, one more conspiratorial rearrangement of the familiar, returning ambiguity to plot twists and character turns that seemed to lack the dramatic pathos of American narrative art. The few times when concrete answers are unavoidable, Kojima ducks thematic consistency and retreats to genre clichés like nanomachines, hypnosis, or anthropomorphic AIs. Each sequel adds only complication never clarification. There is no canon in Metal Gear, only a structure that sought to justify the series’ ceaselessness after the fact.

Phantom pain silent sniper rifle series#

In that spirit, Kojima’s final entry in a series he never wanted to be more than one game has thoroughly reversed itself, heroizing the original’s villain alongside the title's playfully semiotic shift from Arabic numerals to Roman numerals. Kojima’s work is sometimes loosely glossed as postmodern, but it’s closer to the spirit of modernism with its symbolic excesses and exuberant self-awareness of the artificiality of forms. Throughout the Metal Gear series, Kojima has been driven to invent storylines that invalidate symbolic thinking by overwhelming them with clichés. Kojima argued that the negational response to Quiet “is exactly what ‘MGSV’ itself is.” Quiet seems to have been designed to both provoke and deny negational criticism, leaving Kojima in a paradoxical position of essentially agreeing with his critics even as he defies them, reproducing the anatomical clichés of female sexuality not as a vehicle for male desire but as one for male shame. At the same time, negation requires struggle to avoid becoming imprisoned by its proscriptive visions. “Negation is the mind’s first freedom,” Emil Cioran wrote, the Romanian philosopher who served as Kojima’s muse for The Phantom Pain, and from whom the game’s epigraph comes. All as a way of showing how superficial people’s response’s to hollow signifiers can be, jumping at the sight of potentially offensive material and using it as a sawhorse for negating both the work and the person who made it. In 2013, Hideo Kojima said he designed Quiet “as an antithesis to the women characters appeared in the past fighting game who are excessively exposed.” He argued Quiet fits into the game’s larger theme about “misunderstanding, prejudice, hatred, conflict caused by the difference of language, race, custom, culture, and preference.” In the best light, Kojima has consciously chosen to make Quiet a symbol of sexuality, even as she doesn’t seem to have any of her own.

When you approach one from behind and put him in a chokehold for interrogation, he might thank you and ask to be choked harder. The closest thing to erotics come in the small gestures of homoerotic kink that appear between Big Boss and his conscripts. She has no expressed libido, nor do any of the game’s bumblingly inelegant men. As often happens with jarringly anatomical women in videogames, Quiet’s sexualization doesn’t seem to be acknowledged by anyone in the game world.