Hideo Kojima explains that there's a reason behind Metal Gear protagonist Solid Snake's cool, strong, and silent personality in the first game, but it was actually because of technical limitations rather than a creative decision.
As translated by Automaton, Metal Gear director Kojima recently wrote an essay for the An An magazine website to discuss voices and voice acting in games, in which he notes that when he entered the games industry in 1986, "games still couldn't speak. Characters did not have voices." Not only this, but Japanese "kanji fonts weren't supported," with katakana characters used instead.
There are three main writing systems in Japan – kanji, hiragana, and katakana – which are all used interchangeably for different purposes. Kanji is often used to write words like nouns and parts of verbs, while hiragana and katakana are phonetic symbols that represent syllables. Generally speaking, hiragana is commonly used for grammatical reasons, while katakana is used to spell out foreign loan words, amongst other things. Needless to say, you wouldn't normally see a whole script written solely in katakana, but this was the way things had to be.
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