The stats
There's something to be said for a single auteur project, a film, a book, or a videogame, that allows us a look into the author's mind. Even in the PlayStation days though, a single developer was no longer the case and teams are always involved. Adventure games especially ask us to think like the developer, to see the world they see it, and to do what they would do in a given situation.
While unrelated froma pure canon perspective, Policenauts it the sequel to Snatcher. Both games started on Japanese exclusive computers like the PC-88 before coming over to consoles like the MegaCD, Saturn and PlayStation many years later. In this case many, many years later, as I played the excellent translated version which was only completed in 20xx.
What Kojima does with the Snatcher template with a more powerful platform is more of everything - more cutscenes, more clicking, more interaction. Whether more is better is something we'll discuss here, as the method of progression seems to be to click everything in every scene over and over again in some cases. Thankfully there are still some optional interactions even in there, as the interface has many, many options to look at lots of objects in the environment, but especially women.
Women is the key point here because unfortunately Kojima (or his team) let their freak flag fly here. There's so much potential for depth here with all the optional conversations - the amount of stuff you can click on is impressive - but the ratio of world-building to perviness is way too far. You can touch legs, you can bounce boobs, thankfully no female characters ever have their back to you because I'm sure you would be able to smack their arses if that happened. Much like Gillian, Jonathan is an unrelenting horndog. Now, the female characters for the most part admonish you for taking such options but the fact that "bounce the boobs of a woman you're interrogating as a police officer/PI" is an option in this game is not acceptable.
The world-building that you do get for diving into these optional conversations is impressive though, and in true Kojima style calls back to previous games, and in future some of the world-building established here will be called back to in games like Metal Gear Solid (Otacon loves Policenauts apparently) and Metal Gear Solid 4 (Raiden is a Frozener essentially in his cyborg body). There's been clear thought put into how humanity in space would work, and while my high school physics knowledge is getting pretty dusty up there, it's good to see references to how purely inhospitable space is to us folks. Having a black market in organ trading because living in space just fucks up our bodies is an amazing touch.
For the game itself though, all this clicking and world-building does make it more of a visual novel than anything else. If you split the game into Disc 1 and Disc 2, Disc 1 is a lot of clicking and