The unbearable weight of Metal Gear Solid 4's cutscenes

I posted this weekend about how cutscene heavy Metal Gear Solid 4 is, and a few people went, "yup, that's Kojima for you!" But I want to stress how insane this game is, even as a seasoned Kojima stan who has played pretty much all of his games several times (a few of them 5-10 times).

Here's how long the cutscenes are in all 5 mainline Metal Gear Solid games, as well as both Death Strandings:

Metal Gear Solid 4 has effectively 2-3x more time spent in cutscenes than any other game in the MGS series, and 60-90 minutes more than in Death Stranding. On it's face, this hopefully illustrates that this isn't just another Kojima game, but let's go further and compare how much of the game time is spent sitting through cutscenes:

Yeah, you spend close to half your time with this game watching it. That's a pretty serious leap from any of his other games, and I think that's what really makes it feel so suffocating to me. Both Death Stranding games technically have quite a bit of cutscene time as well, but those are much longer games where I routinely spent hours at a time just playing the game. Meanwhile, there are moments where you watch a little 3 minute scene in MGS4, you take control, you walk 10 steps, and another 3 minute scene plays.

Oh, and did you know that MGS4 holds the Guinness World Record for the longest cutscene in video game history at 71 minutes?

Now don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be a Kojima fan if I didn't enjoy this stuff, but replaying MGS4 again after so long has reminded me that (a) this game crosses into new territory that I found became too much and (b) this is the game where Kojima was the most self-indulgent he's ever been. I still plan on finishing this game because it's still pretty fun, but it's easily my least favorite of all of Kojima's games I've ever played.