I never found myself liking any of the MGS games. Two of my friends played all of them extensively, and whenever they'd show me a cutscene (many times) or I'd just watch them play, I found myself unimpressed. This dejection is compounded by the wide acclaim that MGS games have gotten, and even more by MGS4's reported strong points being gameplay and storyline, which in my opinion are the main problems with the whole series.
The story is convoluted to the point of irrelevance. It seems that every plotline has a twist for the sake of having a twist. The beauty is that throughout the story, while I start yawning at everything that happens and revel in the utter boredom it presents, the characters never change their outlook on things. Snake always plays the aloof, experienced anti-hero and will always oppose Liquid Snake and Ocelot, no matter how many times major facts he thought were true were proven not to be true. That is called lack of adaptation, and is not good writing. Kojima himself has publicly stated that he made the story up as he went, and sometimes for reasons not at all concerned with the storyline. For example, he had Snake be an older man in MGS4 in order to see how the PS3 renders an old face. He's basically consciously feeding the public his own shit, knowing that they eat it up. The tragedy is that they do eat it up.
The dialogue is the cheesiest, most annoying thing about every cutscene. I swear that I heard 'I'm no hero' from Snake around seven times in MGS4 and I don't even own the game. It's all one large B-movie experience that is ultimately lost on me. It tries to be cool and classy but I read it like a book written for a high school English project. It's, for lack of a better word, garbage.
The gameplay, while technically sound, is ruined by moronic interactions with enemies that come straight out of the original Doom. Let me describe to you one fight that sticks in my mind. My friend hid behind a corner, and had enemies chase him. They all turned the corner, and the game popped out that trademark "!" along with its complementary sound _every time_. My friend then proceeded to shoot them off one by one as they stood there, pointing him, out, each doing exactly what the guy in front of him was, which was stand, look at Snake, and get shot. They did this while in single-file formation, feeding the player piecemeal kills. That is bullshit. There's no excuse to have no real AI when a game like Half-Life brought squad tactics against players back in 1999. It doesn't help that the enemies emit the same reaction and sound every time they get wounded, making them seem arcadish and sloppy, which takes away from the only good thing about MGS4: presentation.
What it lacked in everything, MGS4 had in abundance in presentation. It looked great, and the action sequences were fantastic. The seamless transition between cutscene and gameplay was sublime and that's basically the list of what's good about MGS4.
I'm sorry, but it never really did anything. Hideo Kojima passes as a cinematographer, not a writer, not a director, and definitely not an editor. Hey, at least he's still better than Michael Bay.
