As it turns out, I'm something of a minority. A real minority. See, I watched the Metal Gear Survive trailer from Gamescom, and I didn't immediately want to walk into the Konami offices and commit a few atrocities to all the potted plants, just for a start. Based on the reactions I've seen so far, that puts me in an exclusive class of people best defined as "almost nobody." Thus when I caught a newsy bit out at IGN wondering how Metal Gear Survive could actually win anyone over, I was intrigued, and got to wondering: can this game actually survive?

Given that the IGN video in question referred to Metal Gear Survive as "a raging dumpster fire", it's safe to say there's a lot of ill will going into this. In fact, even without the trailer, we all pretty much knew that Konami was going to face spectacular gamer backlash for any game it ever attempted to put out ever again. In perpetuity. Throughout the universe.

Metal Gear Survive could come to every gamer's door wrapped in $100 bills and carried by half a dozen attractive young women with low standards and most gamers would probably still turn it away at the door. Why? Because of the unmitigated disaster that was the Hideo Kojima affair. Basically, Konami kept this guy--the creative mastermind behind the Metal Gear Solid series--a near-prisoner for several months, publicly humiliated him by not letting him accept an award for his own game at the Video Game Awards event, and then finally let him go, whereupon they kept the rights to the game. Konami then canceled a game that many were looking forward to, devoted a lot of its efforts to gambling devices, and then, apparently, decided to come back.

Leaving aside the massive quantity of hate that this company has stacked against it, I'm personally intrigued by this. The thought of Metal Gear making the jump to some kind of State of Decay style affair with a massive studio behind it could be exciting. I'm ambivalent about the concept of stealth, and it looks like, for once, this game will actually allow some more stand-up fights to take place. But I know full well that Metal Gear has long been a reward for the stealthy, so that should certainly be an option.

The big problem here, of course, is indeed that big block of hate. Some will never touch a Konami game again after the frantic flipping of the bird that Konami was firing at gamers for the better part of 2015. Speaking here from a mysticism viewpoint, Konami has so much bad karma built up it should be literally bursting into flames to come back as a chihuahua with mange and a tapeworm.

While we don't have much to go on so far, I'm fairly eager to at least give this a rental. If Metal Gear Survive can build on what it's done so far, and if it can overcome the gigantic hate-on staring it down, then it might be able to pull off a success. Honestly, there's a lot against this little piece from the start, and it may never be game enough to fight against the backlash.