Yeah, I’ve seen a few people wondering why the visuals were a bit dull and wondering if was the remains of The Escapist finishing them up to push them out and being lazy about it.
But it does by all accounts look like this was edited before the implosion, as they had literally zero employees left of the video team, including everyone who did video editing. The videos were all finished and uploaded to YouTube, just awaiting someone click the “publish” button.
If you want a fun LP of Phantasmagoria 2, the lead actors of Phantasmagoria 1 and 2 got together recently to play it on stream. www.youtube.com/live/hw5iLuVC0w4
Kojima, the driving force of Metal Gear is gone. What is left is a corporate committee who through focus testing and guesswork try to keep the franchise on the road roughly in the same direction it has been going and avoid crashing into stuff.
They will make any new version look and feel as much as possible as the previous games, only deviating for committee-approved reasons of monetization, trend chasing, or marketing appeal.
What they will not and can not do is to strap a rocket to the roof of Metal Gear Solid, take a hard right and drive the car off the road and into the hills and launch it over Mount Everest. They don’t have the will, the auteur ability, or the trust of the fanbase.
Kojima could do that, which is what made the franchise what it is today.
MGS is dead, but Konami owns the pelt. What comes out next is just taxidermy with animatronics.
The same board of directors who put him there are in charge. The same corporate culture that let him push these decisions is still in place. The same critical mass of people in leadership who would care enough to block such crap still don’t work there.