Said circle was probably not born as such, as the then-young game designer could have not possibly predicted how his experimental game would evolve in a multi-million dollar franchise (Makuch, 2014). The last chapter directed and supervised by Kojima is the closure of a circle that had begun almost 30 years before, with the release of the first Metal Gear game (Konami, 1987), in which a rookie Solid Snake infiltrates the fortress of Outer Heaven to dismantle a terrorist threat, only to find out that the terrorist leader is none other than his commander in chief, the legendary soldier known as Big Boss. This event marked the end of the Metal Gear saga intended as “A Hideo Kojima Game”, the tagline typically attached to the titles directed by him, although Konami holds the intellectual property and the series continued without its original author. In October 2015, Hideo Kojima and Konami severed an employment relationship that dated back to 1986 (Sarkar, 2015). Keywords: metal gear, avatar, identity, agency, meta-narrative This paper aims to examine how, through the narrative and the gameplay of the final chapter of the canonical Metal Gear series, Hideo Kojima delivers his closing statement on the saga by elevating the empirical player as its ultimate protagonist, while at the same time reaffirming his role as demiurge toying around with the concepts of agency, identity and self.
Luca Papale (Independent Researcher), Russelline François (Independent Researcher)ĭownload the pdf A screenshot from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Kojima Productions, 2015).įrom its very first entry, the Metal Gear video game series has shown a knack for breaking the fourth wall, sometimes with the intent to shock and surprise the player with gimmicks, at other times to create plot twists aimed to challenge the players’ role in the unfolding of the story.
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