Saturday I put in a few solid (pun!) hours into Metal Gear Solid 4. I finished Act I, took out Laughing Octopus and had good fun skipping around merrily stealth-killing various mercenary henchmen. It's been great. Really great. So why do you get the feeling I'm about to pull a Debbie Downer? The cut-scenes. Those damn cut-scenes.
There is probably a school of thought that I shouldn't even mention the cut-scenes, that the cut-scenes are as much a part of this game series as Solid Snake. They are probably right. However, let me narrow the focus of my ire. It isn't so much their existence as the preponderance of ponderous dialog that leads to bloated, overlong cut-scenes.
Every cut-scene follows a basic formula: an NPC will mention a concept to Snake. Snake then repeats the concept back to the NPC in the form of a question. The NPC, to answer the question, embarks on a five, ten, fifteen minute exposition on the concept. Rinse and repeat, and repeat, and repeat. Sometimes more than once within the same cut-scene.
The dialog, within this exposition, could easily be pared, trimmed, and cut to be lean and mean and, importantly, short. Unfortunately it's not. I do not need arms-dealer Drebin to spend fifteen minutes explaining to me what a war economy is. I get it. I can figure it out. Even if I couldn't, a couple of words would do. But what can be done with a couple of words, MGS4 accomplishes with thousands.
The game is enough fun that I want to get back to the action. I want to keep my flow. I want to get back to my murderous ways. If I could be sure, absolutely sure, that a given cut-scene wouldn't contain some vital tidbit I'd need down the line I would skip them without a second thought. But I can't. How can I know what tiny nugget of gold is buried in the avalanche of verbal dross? I can't. So I sit. And I wait. And wait. And wait.
Me: You guys have a war economy when what you needed was a word economy.
Snake: Word economy?
Me: Oh shut up.
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