Is Metal Gear Badly Written?

I'm just dipping my toes in the water with this post. I've been mulling it in my head for a few days, and this is a little venting of the valves! We'll see what comes of it.

Is Metal Gear badly written? Honestly, I can't answer with a simple 'yes' or 'no'. Can a narrative as a whole be serviceable though it be marbled through with cringe-worthy dialogue, like gristle and veins of fat in a decent cut of meat? Can the strength of characterizations carry the day when the chronology has been tweaked and retconned so many times that Hideo Kojima himself has admitted he doesn't know exactly what all went on? Can the hint of irreverent absurdity excuse a lot of the issues people have with the game, though that may be a disservice to those who want to treat it as Serious Business?

TV Tropes calls the dialogue, at least, "weirdly stylized" and that is about as neutrally as I've ever heard it described. The narrative's chronology suffers from constant reshuffling, overwriting, and retconning. The characters in the games can be ludicrously over-the-top in speech, action, and design, but more often than not they come across as completely and
believably human characters. The set pieces are epic while simultaneously being epically ridiculous.

The foremost target for complaint is the repetitive nature of the dialogue. I think there's two dimensions to this issue. One, the micro dimension, wherein characters will repeat phrases after one another with little variation, or a single character will muse repetitively. I believe this comes down not so much to Kojima's writing, but the localization.

An example, you say?! Sure! There's a reason L says 'dramatically' to Light: "I would like to tell you that I am L." Many English-speaking fans giggled at this moment, which is so dramatic
in Japanese, because of L's needless wordcruft. There's a translation issue at play here, though, that has nothing to do with L or the author. "Watashi wa L ('ellu') des" contains a lot more
phonemes than the English phrase "I'm L." His lips were still flapping, he couldn't just say "I'm L." and leave it at that. He'd look like a badly out-of-sync ventriloquist doll. A certain amount
of the awkwardness of the scripts - which are not written in English - can probably be attributed to these oddities that invariably sneak into dubbing.

Now I have to start to reach, not being a Japanese speaker. Forgive the foray into baseless speculation. I take this next line of thought from my own experiences translating between Old
English and modern English.

Some of the clumsiness may also be the result of trying to translate not just the discrete units of phonemes called words, but the constellations of connotations that words entail. When
there's no ready list of precise and appropriate synonyms, it's easy to fall victim to repetition. As well, even fluent bilinguals may have some blindness or clumsiness when it comes to transposing a linguistic symbol or spectrum of connotation from one language into another, like a square peg and a round hole. Maybe that's just crap. Who knows?

Time to go buy some scholarly books about bilingualism, language theory, and translation convention!

Next time - characters who are in on the joke. Stay tuned, or something.