r/todayilearned • u/Guitar-String • 2h ago
TIL Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008) holds the world record for the longest cutscene in any video game, with a single continuous cutscene of 71 minutes and a total of over 8 hours of cutscenes
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/86547-longest-cutscene-in-a-videogame223
u/Aolian_Am 1h ago
Kingdom Hearts 3 cheats the system by throwing a single hallway in between 40 minute long cutscens
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u/RockSauron 1h ago
There was a boss right after the hallway too, if memory serves (and I’m thinking of the same moment as you lol)
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u/Aolian_Am 1h ago
I think the 2nd cinematic was the Donald Duck Zeta Flare moment, but i honestly barely remember the game. I just remember there being a stupid amount of watch cutscene, fight, watch cutscene, run down hallway, watch cutscene, fight, watch cutscene etc. moments.
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u/Collection_Vivid 1h ago
Naruto storm 4 has mini fights between what is basically a 2 hour cutscene
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u/schmitzel88 1h ago
FFX did this too, they had unskippable cutscenes broken up by segments where you were trapped in a room with everyone and had to talk to each of them (which each triggered a small cutscene) before the main cutscene would resume.
Loved the game as a kid, but as an adult who knows how the story goes already, it is just unbearable.
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u/OneRandomVictory 1h ago
While true, there's far more actual gameplay in KH3 than MGS4.
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u/Cowgirl_Taint 1h ago
And I spent that entire cutscene having to go take a leak because I didn't know if trying to pause it would skip it or not.
MGS4 and the Extended Edition of Return of the King caused permanent damage to my bladder...
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u/TemporaryImaginary 1h ago
Kojima gave me a UTI, and I want my money now!
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u/chyld989 1h ago
And that's the reason that I always try to pause the first cutscene in a game now, or at least see if opening the Xbox Guide pauses it. I'd rather know up front vs somewhere down the road where I try to pause and end up skipping it and then having no idea what I'm doing in the game.
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u/Cowgirl_Taint 1h ago edited 1h ago
Yeah. MGS4 is the game that taught me that in the first 30 seconds of a game? Move all the analog sticks to see if a prompt comes up to let you know what pauses it. Then actually start hitting buttons. If it skip? Delete the save and restart.
That said? It might have been a Nier where I leaned my head out of the bathroom to keep watching the screen and went back in with a paper towel to clean up the dribble after the fact.
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u/BlatantConservative 58m ago
Yeah 2B had that effect on a lot of us. And like you couldn't just jack off in front of the TV.
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u/Every-Candidate-6158 1h ago
Yeah, one thing I really liked about that (7th?) gen of ganing consoles, was the ability of pausing using the home button.
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u/chyld989 1h ago
There are still a handful of games that it doesn't work with, but it's fairly standard at this point to allow pausing cutscenes and I'm so happy.
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u/Fackos 1h ago
I played this game with a buddy back in the day. That cut scene started, we ordered food, smoked a joint, food arrived, we ate said food and some how it was still fucking going.
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u/Martin_Aurelius 1h ago
Is the the one where they say "la li lu le lo" over and over again?
I'd just scored some of the best weed I ever had in my life when that game came out, and that scene had me convinced I'd broken my brain.
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u/ChanceVance 1h ago
I played it for the first time recently. You'd finish a mission. 20 minute cutscene, 20 minute mission briefing, 10 minute introduction, 2 minutes of gameplay and another cutscene.
Nothing about it's reputation had been exaggerated.
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u/David_Summerset 1h ago
I was playing it today. There’s a part where after a cutscene you walk about 5 feet, fall down an elevator shaft, and immediately enter another cutscene when you walk out of the shaft.
Still, for MGS fans it’s brilliant
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u/OkayyBeta 24m ago
For MGS4 fans it's brilliant. I loved 1, 2 and 3 and think this is fucking stupid.
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u/crawlswithgusto 1h ago
When it came out on ps3 it was such a wild experience, having only played the PSP version of metal gear. I am still nostalgic for those cutscenes
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u/ManoSilence 1h ago
And. It. Is. Worth. Every. Second.
I am Raiden. The Rain transformed
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u/DayOneDLC2 1h ago
It was my first Metal Gear game, and fortunately my last Metal Gear movie.
I still remember how my dad literally checked out 4 hours into the game, maybe 30 minutes into actual gameplay.
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u/zomgieee 1h ago
Kind of reminds me of Final Fantasy XIV. Nowhere near 71 minutes though, and the game would actually warn you/ check you were ready to sit back and watch a long cutscene, very handy.
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u/Thesmokingcode 1h ago
Isn't it still 45 minutes if you skip the text and read nothing?
XIV is crazy theres something like 150 hours of cutscenes.
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u/deathm00n 1h ago
But then they started using that for basically everything, so it would warn you that a long cutscene was about to play ans then it is like 5 minutes
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u/isoterica 1h ago
My first play through back then was 16 hours. I looked up on YouTube an edit of all the cutscenes and it was 8 hours long. 8 hours of gameplay. 8 hours of cutscenes.
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u/Joxsund 1h ago
I played it on release and my play time was about 19 hours. I immediately played again while skipping every cutscene and finished in just over 9 hours.
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u/three-sense 1h ago
I did this but with MGS2. It was 12+ hours, and when I skipped everything it was 2h40m. Holy moly
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u/Silverjackal_ 1h ago
I played resident evil 4 after this game. I died so many times to the qte stuff because I was so conditioned to put my controller down from this game anytime a cutscene started.
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u/Fritzkreig 2h ago
Not sure if I want a movie in my game, is the cutscene good at least?
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u/Jumboliva 1h ago
Kojima has a wonderful sense of the entertaining and maybe literally zero sense of relative levels of importance. Everything that happens is at 100 the whole time, and 80% of it is people asking for or delivering clarity on what a proper noun means
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u/the-cartmaniac 1h ago
Snake “What is the Philosophers Legacy, anyway?”
Volgin proceeds to give an undergrad-level lecture for twenty minutes.
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u/robotsock 1h ago
A Hind D?
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u/TurnipFire 1h ago
Who are the Patriots?
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u/Midgetcookies 1h ago
Nano-machines?
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u/herrcollin 1h ago edited 1h ago
My favorite is the cutscene within a cutscene moments. Snake and Otacon, or whoever, will just be chatterboxing in an already extended cutscene and then someone will be like ".. But then the Bicentennial Philososaurs got involved..."
Snake: Bicentennials?
And then it cuts to a new cutscene within this cutscene where the character monologues over images of blueprints or smt and explains who they are (kinda, it's usually only half the story with the other half to be revealed later and all of it maybe possibly retconned/someone else all along anyway)
And you better pay the fuck attention
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u/velders01 1h ago edited 1h ago
I still forget what the la li lu le lo are... and how the hell am I remembering this 20 yrs + later? I was a teenager when I played MGS2, I'm over 40 now.
Edit: Ok, I googled this thinking there must be some deep reasoning behind why the Patriots are called the "la li lu le lo" and fuck'n Kojima said it's because there is no "L" sound in Japanese, so to Japanese, it would sound mysterious... wtf ROFL, that's it?
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u/herrcollin 1h ago
The reasoning for the la li lu le lo and their being no "L's" was if someone (with nanomachines, basically everyone) tried to say "The Patriots" it would get automatically retranslated to LaLiLuLeLo and they'd simply sound like a fuggin crazy person. Especially in Japanese. It was to protect the Patriots.
It makes sense if you don't think about it at all
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u/velders01 1h ago
As someone who's played most Kojima games... this makes sense to me.... mystery = good, got it.
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u/LangyMD 1h ago
Weren't they a group of AIs that took down or became the Illuminati or something?
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u/velders01 1h ago
I feel like every other group in the MGS verse is a secret society of global elites, but holy shit, you're right, the memories of 20+ years ago are coming back. The Patriots (la li lu le lo) were originally composed of humans but eventually got replaced by AI... or something.
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u/Akamiso29 53m ago
Well, the Japanese syllabary starts off with five vowels:
あ “ah”
い “ee”
う “ooh”
え “eh”
お “oh”And they repeat these vowel patterns with each consonant in Japanese. As such, Japanese does not really have standalone consonant sounds other than their “n” sound ん.
So you learn the Japanese syllabary by repeating this pattern: a, i, u, e, o is then followed by ka, ki, ku, ke, ko and then sa, shi, su, se, so, etc.
The closest sound to L/R in Japanese is made by saying an L but keeping your tongue further back, touching the bridge of your upper jaw. This is usually written as ra, ri, ru, re, ro (らりるれろ) as the sound definitely sounds more like an R to western ears. However, it is a flexible sound and will sound more like an “l” while, say, singing or when making certain phonological transitions during a sentence.
You can see how the nonsensical phrase translates to Japanese instantly. For the Japanese version, I think the patriots were called the 愛国者達 (aikokushatachi), which was just censored by らりるれろ whenever someone tried to speak of them.
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u/shanem222 1h ago
In hindsight, while I thought this game was epic back in 2008, because most games of the same era didn’t and couldn’t afford to indulge cutscenes like this: it has aged pretty poorly, and I say this as a Kojima fan. As an example, look at the conclusion of Act 2 of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which is ~30 minutes of cutscenes, but portrays a complete narrative shift through acting, music, and cinematography that Metal Gear Solid never came close to matching.
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u/Jumboliva 1h ago
Listening to Kojima’s podcast convinced me that his interest in the world is as undiscriminating as his games sometimes felt. Like, he loves when a movie or a book or a song does something Big, but he does not seem to have any overriding concerns or wounds to work through. So it’s hard now for me to read his games as getting at something rich or complicated; the easier interpretation is that they always involve a million complications because he sees quality as a quantitative thing.
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u/Cowgirl_Taint 1h ago
If you have been playing the MGS (or even Metal Gear) series since MGS1 (or MG1)? It is massively cathartic. There is some very blatant filler that you actively don't care about, but by and large it is constant plotline resolutions and lore drops.
Whether that counts as "good" is a debate.
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u/Kyajin 1h ago
Cathartic is a great word for it. For whatever faults MGS4 has, everything in the graveyard was absolute peak imo.
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u/Hardmode-Activated 1h ago
If I'm not mistaken it's to tie up the last 3 games of bullshit and give a lot of characters closure
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u/Fritzkreig 1h ago
I can dig that!
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u/saanity 1h ago
Except it's all tell not show. The Lalilulelo being ai counterparts of dead people who we never meet seems like it could be cool but it's just told in a long conversation. The action cutscenes were great, the talking ones, not so much.
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u/TheGreatDave666 1h ago
What? You wanna go up against the deep state AI overlords or do you wanna fight their machinations? This is a political stealth action game series, not Asura's Wrath.
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u/sinsculpt 1h ago
Sons of Liberty was God tier, many of those cutscenes were iconic.
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u/SirNortonOfNoFux 1h ago
Tell em. No lies detected
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u/sinsculpt 1h ago
Seriously, a few years back in my early 30s I just watched a YouTube video of all the cinematics and it basically told the entire story.
It made for some incredible storytelling and shockingly relevant nostalgia, as I was hangin' out with my Newborn.
Who I named Lalilulelo, by the way. /S
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u/mostly_lurking 1h ago
Especially if its a movie you can't pause or resume later. At 71 minutes I would even you should be able to rewind.
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u/coolcatt9998 1h ago
You can pause the cutscenes in MGS4. That cutscene is also "just" the entirety of the final part of the game.
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u/1990sTimAllen 1h ago
Yes, it's the finale of the game and the conclusion of Solid Snake and company's entire story arc covering numerous games. It's epic, emotional, grandiose, and incredibly confusing. You wouldn't be playing MGS4 otherwise if you didn't want to know how the story ends.
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u/ToranjaNuclear 1h ago
Well, Kojima's cutscenes are very cinematic. Guy aspired to be a movie director after all.
Whether it is good or not depends on how invested you are in the story and the inherent goofiness of the franchise.
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u/lionheart4life 1h ago
Yes, for the most part amazing. It pretty much tied up the entire series. I don't think I'd watch the entire thing again, but for the 1st time though and after playing the rest of the series it was great.
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u/brakenbonez 1h ago
Weirdly enough one of my favorite games did sort of have movie-type tie ins mid game but they were more like episodes. It's called Quantum Break. It had a linear story with a few choices and there were 30 minute live action episodes between chapters. I think it was like 5 episodes total but they changed based on certain choices you made in the game. Definitely a unique concept but unfortunately it didn't go over to well with players so it just has a cult following. So sadly it never got a sequel despite the ending perfectly setting one up.
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u/LostRonin 1h ago
Basically, the first time you're playing the game you're more cautious and the cutscenes seem spread out.
If you're legit good at the game though you will quickly realize you're being mostly funneled down tight corridors and small spaces. You can skip the cutscenes and beat the game in about 2 or 3 hours.
MGS4 is an amazing conclusion to an amazing story. The controls and gameplay loop are nearly perfect. It plays even better than MGS5 imo. Its just a really short game with really long cutscenes.
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u/b_lett 37m ago edited 3m ago
Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Chapter 5-6 transition, is about 2 hours long, and the game has about 19 hours worth of cutscenes. There is an interactive boss fight sequence about an hour into the cutscene that likely disqualifies it.
I remember hitting this point in XBC3 late night and thinking I am almost at a stopping point and I was up until about 2AM. No regrets.
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u/Euphemisticles 35m ago edited 22m ago
How well paced are the cutscenes? And do they do that annoying pause after each person talks before the next person starts talking?
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u/nemofbaby2014 1h ago
Which one was 71 minutes?
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u/RusskayaRuletka 1h ago
Last cut scene in the game, It's a combination of effectively the epilogue for all the characters.
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u/DarkGunslinger 32m ago
I started that cutscene at 2:30 in the morning. Didn't know what I was getting into. I was exhausted but engrossed by it.
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u/brandont04 1h ago
MGS cutscenes are skipable. The OG opening scene of Okami, 25 min, was unskipable.
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u/DolphinFraud 1h ago
Sure, but why are you playing MGS if you’re skipping the cutscenes? The cutscenes are like the whole point of the games.
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u/IndecisiveMate 1h ago
71 minute cutscene?
That's a fucking movie. Surely by the 20 minute mark, people would start wondering why they haven't been playing for a good bit.
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u/The_Joker_116 1h ago
Last time I did 2 playthroughs back to back, I skipped all the cutscenes on my second playthrough. I cut like 8-10 hours on my playtime, it was insane.
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u/Thejustinset 1h ago
Some of you aren’t ready for a five minute ladder climb
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u/SumDudeThatExists 1h ago
I remember occasionally stopping by to watch my dad play this game growing up and was always confused as to why he was always watching a cutscene.
I remember sitting and waiting forever wondering why there was no gameplay. It was probably this specific cutscene.
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u/nether_region 1h ago
IIRC you can control the cutscene camera a bit in that game. So...there's that.
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u/Chikitiki90 1h ago
I got to this cutscene on a Sunday underway in the navy. People kept coming back for their turn to play and I was like, “sorry man, it’s still fucking going!”
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u/CommissionCharming35 1h ago
It does not hold that record anymore. Death Stranding beat it in 2019 and Death Stranding 2 set it again last year. All three games were made by Hideo Kojima.
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u/ConnorOfAstora 19m ago
It's at the very end too, you beat the final boss and you're rewarded with a cutscene that's 3 minutes longer than Lilo and Stitch 2
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u/enigma94RS 14m ago
I once spent the whole night playing that game for like 14 hours straight and the game litterally told me to take a break
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u/be4u4get 1h ago
Story time: I don’t remember the year, but it was way back when metal gear solid 4 came out. I love the game and was near the ending and it was like 1 o’clock in the morning. I was exhausted but I was like I gotta finish it. So I finish it and there’s this cut scene that just never ends and I was so tired, but I didn’t wanna miss anything so I had to stay up till like two in the morning. Good times.
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u/MrdnBrd19 1h ago
This was the first game I played after I started smoking weed again as an adult. So utterly confusing.
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u/BubbleWild 33m ago
Semi-related: Mighty No. 9's credits sequence is 3 hours and 48 minutes long. Only game I can think of where the credits are longer than the game itself.
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u/jrdnmdhl 1h ago
Hideo Kojima's entire game direction style in the later parts of the MGS series can be described by a single hand gesture.
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u/MarcusDA 30m ago
What about Quantum Break? Didn’t they have like legit tv shows in between?
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u/ohcrapitspanic 1h ago
When I was about it finish this game, I had work the next day, but I thought I night as well just get through it before bed. Slept about an hour less than I had planned to.
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u/GarrusBueller 46m ago
Oh I know. After the second curcsene, I chose to drink a beer every damn time. Sit back and enjoy the ride, I wasn't going to let not playing the game stop from enjoying playing the game.
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u/FellowDeviant 21m ago
I never thought twice about cutscene length back then but I did remember Snake taking 20 minute long smoke breaks in between chapters as the game was deleting and installing new assets.
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u/Cnote0717 1h ago
My only question for someone who has yet to play this game: do you have to keep your controller active during these cutscenes to prevent the screen from dimming?
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u/SuperBackup9000 1h ago
If you want 100% completion as far as trophy/achievements go, you’ll have to be ready and waiting for quick time events (they don’t impact anything, just do quick flashes of memories), but aside from that, no. At least the PS3 version didn’t, and I can’t imagine the new version would go out of their way to have that.
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u/RotInPissKobe 1h ago
There are moments where you can press a button to see the perspective from someone else in the scene or to see hidden details
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u/AaronBasedGodgers 1h ago
Hideo Kojima is a film maker who settled on being a video game director. And before you say I'm being negative much of his twitter feed is about movies (and Usada Pekora of Hololive).
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u/untraiined 13m ago
its the epilogue and its a wrap up of an entire 20 year franchise, something with insane amount of heart and soul. if youre a fan its awesome. if youre someone that just wants to compelte games and move on without finding any joy or love of the art then you can press the skip cutscene button and look it up later. But how many times are you going to do that in your life before you realize some things are not worth just fast forwarding, you only get so many awesome experiences
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u/zuckuss00 1h ago
I just finished this game for the first time last week. It was so damn confusing even as a MGS fan. Kojima just assumes we understand what JD is same with GW. They explain maybe once what they are and the rest of the time they reference them like we have a full gasp of the batshit crazy narrative he has going on.
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u/ChanceVance 1h ago
Also has this insane info dump that every one of these events traces back to your mission commander that liked 007 from Snake Eater.
Then V reveals it was actually Skull Face that took Zero out of action a long time ago so it's actually his fault too.
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u/Palp18 1h ago
I started Death Stranding (same game director, Hideo Kojima) a few days ago. Of the 2 hours or so that I played, maybe 20 minutes of it was gameplay. The rest is cutscense of a stunning landscape of a very alien earth, complex characters, even more complex world building, and such bizarre gameplay, that I'm not exploring it any further.
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u/Venom_Snake_KSA 1h ago
Without spoiling things out, MGS4 is the last game in timeline of events, 71 minutes cutscene even though it is long, for someone who played and understood the story since 1999, was great way to wrap things up. First time going through it, I didn’t feel the time going by.
Finally you can pause the cutscene.
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u/Toomanynightshifts 17m ago
Unpopular opinion, but I fucking loved these.
People don't like the idea of long cutscenes these days, but that cutscene in question was absolute fire.
It's also a monster effort by a dev at the time.
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u/JuicyJakeJuicySteak 1h ago
Someone really needs to let Kojima direct an actual movie
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u/VIP_KILLA 1h ago
When this game came out it was the era of my brother and I having to split play time, and a limited amount per day. We both loved the game but taking hour long turns was quite difficult when sometimes your whole turn was a cutscene.
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u/TurnaboutAdam 1h ago
It finally got re-released. Not my favourite MGS, but certainly an enigma of a game
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u/sephkane 39m ago
I recently finished this one and Death Stranding, and I thought the latter's ending felt longer.
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u/opeth10657 34m ago
The three Xenosaga games have something like a combined 23 hours of cutscenes over three games.
Most of them aren't real long though, and it's a jrpg so its basically like a game mixed with an anime.
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u/spaceraingame 1h ago edited 1h ago
Oh don’t remind me. I watched every damn cutscene in that game and didn’t skip a single one. The fucking POST CREDITS scene was like 40 minutes long. It felt like torture in a way.
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u/midwestbeaner 1h ago
Don't let fanboys and haters lie to you. MGS4 is the greatest train wreck ever. Go play it!!!!
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u/asianwaste 54m ago
Yea. This gave the series a bit of notoriety and some of fans dropped in the series right there. I think they returned to the right balance with Peace Walker but the damage was already done.
In my opinion Metal Gear Rising suffered a bit too but ironically it was memes that gave it a second life (nano machines, son and rules of nature).
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u/whiskyfuktober 51m ago
I think this was the one that did me in. I remember watching a long-ass cutscene, then I resumed gameplay and literally moved Snake from one side of a room to the other, and I launched into another long-ass cutscene. I’ve only played racing games since.
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u/BaconConnoisseur 1h ago
I remember one that was about 30 minutes long and it wasn’t even at the end. It’s been about 15 years since I’ve played it.
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u/ShakyIncision 54m ago
How long is the FF14 cutscene at the end of A Realm Reborn? It's 30 mins to an hour, right?
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u/Vast_Low_9949 14m ago
While MGS is notorious for long cutscenes, “Ending scene” would make more sense than “cutscene” because this happens at the end, not in-between gameplay.
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u/Strtftr 14m ago
I remember when the simpsons movie was being made they cut so much content they had to contact the film academy lawyers to ask what the minimum length for a full feature film is and the answer was 72 minutes.b
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u/CivilizedPsycho 1h ago
I will die on this hill: For all of its other issues, MGS4 has the one of the most, if not the most satisfying final chapters of any game I've ever played.
Starting with the microwave hallway where you see all of your allies in their final stands while Snake crawls through his final bits of life, and then the CQC fight through the generations of Ocelot
SO DAMN GOOD
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u/DEFINITELY_NOT_PETE 1h ago
Man I had to get ready for a gig the day I beat this and was like ok I’ll hop in the shower after this cut scene and this mf would not end lol
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u/Dickbob 2h ago
I remember thinking I could go to bed as soon as I watch this one little cutscene and then two hours later I was exhausted and way past my bedtime.