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Japanese game design has always been fairly mystifying for Western audiences, employing aesthetics and logic that seem to have been engineered in some sci-fi terra incognita. When simple, Japanese games have a psychedelic elegance, like the snowballing glee of Katamari Damacy’s giant rolling spheres or the bounce-go feel of a Mario game. But as the complexity builds, Japanese games enter a space of unchecked extravagance, asking you to master an orgy of opaque systems while force-feeding you operas-worth of cutscenes.

As a rule, this end of the spectrum I tend to avoid. Once processing power moved past 16-bits, the philosophical chasm between this baroque Japanese approach and Western gameplay - restrained and emphasizing the player’s agency - widened as the technological ceiling lifted. With a new spatial dimension to work with in game, a new design space had to be charted, and with it came new excesses.

Few games are more emblematic of this hardcore Japanese style than Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid, a series that is both revered and renowned for its unbridled stylization. And it’s a series I come to fresh, unspoiled, and unsure.

The fourth game in the series - Guns of the Patriots - arrives this month, and everyone is frothing at the mouth for it to drop. The marketing, to an outsider, is impenetrable. I know there is something here people are getting excited about, but watching the previews, it’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly, since we’re seeing almost nothing but cutscenes.

So it’s back to 1998 and the original Metal Gear Solid I go to figure out what it’s all about. I’ll be playing through all four games back-to-back, not including the two NES games, under the title Metal Gear, that preceded them. On the NES, Metal Gear had a very 80s Schwarzenegger action-movie feel and it becomes apparent that the series’ attitude has changed a bit on the way to the Playstation, much more Tom Clancy by way of Ridley Scott.

I’m at first surprised at exactly how arcade-like the gameplay is despite this heavy handed tone. The hero is one Solid Snake, a stoic superspy sent to infiltrate an Alaskan military base that has been taken over by terrorist group FOXHOUND, formerly an anti-terrorist group of which Snake was a member (a twist that occurred in an earlier game). You take control from a top-down view, ducking and sneaking, picking up ammunition and equipment that’s floating and rotating a foot off of the ground.

In this sense the gameplay doesn’t seem to have evolved much past its NES roots. The central conceit of the series from the beginning has always been stealth - that is, your only chance of survival is sneaking around unseen rather than the usual brute-force approach. It’s both exciting and rewarding, albeit rife with frustration. I find myself enjoying it.

Very quickly, a strange sense of humor and self-deprecation starts to emerge. The villains in the game could’ve been lifted from G.I. Joe, and your superspy gadgets have a certain Looney Tunes quality to them. All of it is presented with an oddly convincing straight-face: the hard-boiled Solid Snake exists in a shadowy world where war never ends, painted in cold blues and blacks, that operates on Tom & Jerry logic. Soon enough, I stop thinking twice about whether or not hiding under a box and scooting along the floor is a realistic method of evasion.

It’s a strange mix of over-the-top elements that so far seem to work, but I’ve a long ways to go. In Metal Gear Solid 4, Snake is an old man, another Jon McClane or Indiana Jones drawn out in the open for a final adventure. To put things in perspective, I haven’t even run from the boulder.