Final Impressions: The Art Of Patience For Art And Creations

On November 13, 2001 Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty released. It was Hideo Kojima’s most ambitious project in his career to that point. A remarkable achievement of art and philosophy, Kojima and the team at Kojima Productions dared to tell a mind-bending, experimental story that challenged everything we knew to be true. The internal struggle between political liberties and freedom of thought, the dangers of the information age becoming a nihilistic hellscape where nothing matters, the powerful exerting more control over the range of acceptable ideas, and postmodernism becoming a truly real threat. The team put it all on the table.

The reviews were in. Divisive and polarizing? You bet it was.

How the narrative played itself out was a point of contention, some thought it to be incoherent and rambling madness, others were upset that the series beloved protagonist Solid Snake had been replaced with Raiden. Drastically different in personality and appearance, Snake being relegated to support character for much of the game. Possibly not an unexpected reaction for a video game in 2001 being so intellectually complex and bold, but probably more sour and antagonistic than anticipated.

As the years passed and we headed into the far flung future of the 2010s, something happened. Actually many things happened: echo chambers, post-truth politics, social engineering…wait a minute, that Kojima bloke was actually right?! Maybe overly simplistic to say he was “right” but he wasn’t wrong. 

My guess is that by the middle of the decade people were starting to play Metal Gear Solid 2 again. Seeing its fictional warnings play out before their eyes. Fresh perspective, emotional measurement, and time had done it a world of good. All seems kind of silly now.

The Mass Effect trilogy was coming to a close, the anticipation had built to a fever pitch, the characters everyone had grown to know, the story threads that were unresolved, and satisfaction would reverberate throughout the player base upon it’s conclusion.

Not quite.

Promises were broken, dialogue choices were scaled back, combat was changed, endings were basic. This wasn’t the RPG people were familiar with or expecting. It was a third person shooter with RPG elements.

These criticisms are valid, we all have different standards when it comes to art, there’s not one universal standard. Humans aren’t monolithic after all. You’re well within your rights to think this game is absolute garbage. But I will defend this game until I am no longer alive, if I could defend it in death I’d probably do that too. The game is still good, in spite of the development decisions aimed towards a broad appeal. If it’s not a good RPG then it’s a damn good third person shooter in my eyes. I can only hope the upcoming re-release will to the 3rd entry some favors that I believe it is due. There’s a difference between taste and opinion after all.

Expectation is such an understated piece of the critical analysis pie. If you feel let down by something you were emotionally invested in in the immediate aftermath, it’s fresh, it’s going to factor into how you score it. We can’t be rational when we’re emotional, we confuse disappointment with bad, when we do that is it possible to see something the way it deserves to be seen and experienced?

This is not exclusive to the video games industry. Fall Out Boy’s 2008 album Folie A Deux was ironically considered “too different” from other Fall Out Boy releases, probably by the same people who lap up American Beauty/American Psycho and Mania. BTS’ Love Yourself album series was considered too much of a deviation from their regular tone and sound. Korea now considers them cultural icons after many domestic Kpop fans largely ignored them before their international stardom. Barry Lyndon was considered Stanley Kubrick’s worst film, overly long and boring, it is now considered by a fair few to be the best of his illustrious career. And this is just a few in a large list.

And now it is Cyberpunk 2077’s turn. With more against it than any of the previously mentioned works. It is unfinished, released a year before it was realistically ready to be released, packed full of glitches, poor performance across the board, CD Projekt Red are being slaughtered in the press, by consumers, and probably by the development team as well. All of this criticism is warranted on a commercial level and to some degree and artistic one as well. 

But I believe that when the dust has settled, beneath all of the broken elements of this game on a technical level that there is something worth experiencing beneath its buggy surface.

Popular sentiment can often influence us to believe that something is, even if it is not. In our modern age where life moves faster than we can comprehend, maybe we can at least allow our creations to be given the time and patience that we won’t give ourselves or each other. It might be a personal diamond in the public rough.