the solid snake surrogate is cucking sam.
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cliff was the solid snake surrogate last time right? and then old mate either wanted to do it again or wanted to say something different i guess? maybe neither here nor there but sam represents connection and strand-type gaming by contrast right and kojima’s exploring the relationship between these two phases of his life or whatever. i’m certain you’re across all this already i’m just typing
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When you have to go back to The Motherhood and Dollman says “Finish up stuff” he means it because after that you are in The End Game. There’s quite a lot of game after that but you lose options you had before that make “just fucking around” much harder.
And if you think “making a really long delivery would be fun” well they’ll make you do about 7 before the game is over.
I’m at The End and will almost certainly see credits tonight. It is certainly Death Stranding Two. I said it in another thread but unless something changes calling this Hideo Kojima’s Mega Man 4.
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You can’t choose the other options.
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The Ending is about 2.5 hours long.
I’ll sleep on it.
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Full Game thoughts with minimal spoilers but I’ll be safe:
I think this is the first time Kojima/KojiPro didn’t have the juice. The back quarter of the game where they up the BT/Mechs and remove fast travel is probably what Kojima said about making the game less fun. The mountain this time is just annoying and not this imposing challenge.
The story is about three or four points on “I want these things to happen” and working backwards from there. The story is pretty short! All told. They did kind of spoil everything but the bushfire scene in the previous trailers. The bushfire is really good and I’d have loved some submissions of more bush fire. Hell a 4 hour video of the bushfire stuff would be incredible.
The new characters are underused and the old characters are sort of slammed there. Nothing is as weird or unknown. They needed to make a sequel and did and I certainly played it.
I did not expect how much Alan Wake 2 was in this game. Right down to multiple musical numbers.
Not enough Australians in Australia. Also giving Australia a giant snow mountains was bad. I suspect at some point in development the game was set in Japan and they changed their mind. There are a lot of Asians.
We should have gotten more stuff about how Australia handled The Death Stranding not “well same thing as last time.”
Where I complain more directly about two plot points Giant Spoilers
Lou being Sam’s sperm child sucks. That they have to confirm “Nah dude she’s totally yours” sucks. And they get out of Sam having to raise a child in the Death Stranding by time bullshit. You rescue Lou but now she’s an adult and the star of Death Stranding 3 Eurasia Me Crazy.
But there was that beautiful theme of him taking this bond to this “replacement” child to the one he lost years before and trying his best to raise her. Surprise turns out it was destiny or something because it was YOUR KID and not just your kid but your JIZZ. Neil didn’t knock up your wife when she cheated on you bro.
Being a parent is showing up every day. Especially a single parent. A parent, a family member to a child is a daily decision. DS2 got it both ways in that “you were always the father (in jizz)” and “woof you didn’t have to raise her that’s good. Now She’s an adult and can go on her own adventures.” Like we don’t even get a quiet moment of Sam and Lou at the end. Just them on the bridge of the DHV Magellan. Maybe I need to play the post game to get Father Daughter time. They should build a relationship!
You really felt like KojiPro heard every complaint I and others made about how he wrote women and he REALLY TRIED to write women this time.
They let Diehardman be a little fat and that ruled.
Now I gotta track down the remaining preppers. And every lost package to the VTuber I spitefully shoot to destruction. Emu justice.
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The package I lost to Mr Impossible was on a cliffside between him and the Lone Commander. I have not gotten it to respawn.
It is a nice jacket and for that price it should be.
The game is not about nothing, but the way in which it is about anything is frequently frustrating.
I need to make a summary post of thoughts soon.
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my summary of thoughts so far is
man, i wish videogames were still good. this game reminds me of when i used to enjoy videogames in an almost religious way. i would commune with the game and have experiences and treasure them long after the game was over. i find most games just don’t have the juice for this for me anymore. too much bullshit that breaks your trust in the developer, at which point you become very skeptical of every design decision
this game is good enough that i am able to entirely break this cycle and simply trust the game. i can say that about essentially no other contemporary game - maybe tears of the kingdom. that’s it.
it’s so rare that i feel this kind of “faith”, but i simply can’t argue with how i feel. the game makes me feel so confident that it is going to involve me having a good time and thinking about interesting things that i’ve stopped worrying about it. when i play, it’s 100% enjoyment and 0% worry.
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ok some more (specific) things
- when i play ds2, sometimes i don’t even really “play” it at all. probably 5 or more times now, i’ve gone out to sit on the couch, put the game on, and proceeded to chill out by the TV and let sam sleep or turn on the music player and sit under a timefall shelter in the rain. i think this game has the most affecting weather of any videogame (Tears of the Kingdom and its excellent weather comes to mind again, but this game is operating on another level i think). rain has a huge (positive) effect on me irl, and this game is the closest i’ve felt to actually being in a storm, digitally. i remember liking the rain a lot in ground zeroes, too - kojima seems get his people to put out more affecting weather implementations than most
- the dialogue in this game has an almost ASMR-like effect on me sometimes? idk, something about the little chimes and the vocal timbres and delivery… there’s something soothing about the game most of the time
- i feel real feelings for my bridge links?? sometimes i get a connection where someone clearly mashed the touchpad 200 times in a few seconds and i’m like. damn. for me?
part of me really doesn’t want it to end, so i was happy when i saw there are fucking 400 standard orders to s-rank in this game. i’mma do every last one and i’ll probably enjoy it as much as the 200 hours i spent doing them all in DS1 - 200 hours of which i regret none! somehow…
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big agree on the weather. it’s easily the most beautiful game world i’ve ever gone around in, in a way that is quite moving. for me it’s the darkness: VERY few games (except for like, explicitly horror games but even then) genuinely let darkness be dark.
This was one of my favorite things about FF15 back in the day–the game really tried to emphasize that its heroes had a life rhythm (adventure in the day, go back to camp at night), and part of that was the whole “ohh stronger enemies come out at night!” thing. Many games do this, but FF15 succeeded because of how hard it committed. The enemies are REALLY strong, so strong that you genuinely should not be fighting them, and it’s REALLY REALLY DARK at night, so it’s easier to get lost or stumble into a scary enemy, etc. It worked! Instead of ignoring the game’s implied system like I would do with a worse game, I did in fact retire and enjoy letting Prompto cook everyone a stat boost meal for the next day; without this rhythm the game probably wouldn’t be very good at all, much less excellent.
DS2 doesn’t have the same rhythm at all–while there are suggestions that Sam should go to sleep, take a shower, etcetera, and while maybe the game SHOULD have gone harder on that (I’ve always found it disappointing that in this and DS1 you can fill up your piss meter but never HAVE to piss regularly), I also think it’s kind of the opposite. Sam is a workaholic, this is what he lives for and it’s ostensibly healing him, so of course he would do deliveries at night or in the rain or a sandstorm. There are so MANY nighttimes in the game. There’s clear gorgeous nights, auto-driving down the Great Trans-Australian Highway beneath bright stars and moon. There’s cozy cloudy nights, trodding along in pleasing solitude. And then there’s rainy foggy nights, where you can’t see shit and it’s really scary, but exciting. Nights where you feel you’re in another world, a world Regular People don’t ever have the opportunity or misfortune of seeing.
Hell of a game. My forward progress is forever stymied by my irrepressible urge to make the greatest zip-line network of all time, i’m at like 60 hours in chapter 8.
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damn, now i have to go back and finish ff15 and continue playing ff7 remake and rebirth (when i’m done with ds2 anyway). poster’s delight
due to my idling so often even though i got the game on preorder so was playing it on the 24th last month, i’m at like ~50 hours and only still in chapter 4 lol
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I’m blasting through Death Stranding 1 right now… If I go straight from that to the sequel is it gonna be Too Much Cake, or is the sequel different enough that it’ll be OK?
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Too much cake imo, best to have some different courses in between
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Far far too much cake. I replayed DS1 last year and still feels too close.
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yeah gotta agree, it’s going to be way too much cake i think
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Finished it two days ago and still unwrapping my feelings about it.
On one hand, it’s the first AAA game I felt compelled to finish since forever which says something about the level of craft on display. It is a real attempt at offering the player with a new idiosyncratic way of looking at the world (I think it’s the only recent blockbuster attempt at communicating something important to the creator?), the graphic and mechanical design are nothing but pure joy, the traversal displays incredible attention to weight and sensation (the use of Dual Sense is stellar), actors like Seydoux and Reedus are amazing at selling unsellable material, the progression and evolving mission structure leave no room for staleness and boredom.
On the other hand, that pressure to deliver constant novelty kind of makes it feel less special than the first game. DS1 was the best in the learning phase when every order felt like a real trek into the unknown, a longer excuse to be alone with your thoughts, experiment with the tools that make your life easier. Ultimately, when you understand the design, it’s a trivial game, but one that’s engrossing to understand. I feel like my ideal DS sequel would either go SMB2 route with finetuning difficulty of what’s already there or obscure the design again, giving you a completely new environment or a system to master. DS2 does neither. Even on Brutal, the game is trivial to S-rank all the way through (except for maybe three boss fights), and it relies on the familiar gameplay loop, tightened to ensure constant dopamine dripfeed, more bite-sized, less filling in a long run. It only dares to occasionally bare its fangs in the third act, but by then you should have hundreds of consumables and unlockable tools and Strand structures (God, these are absolutely everywhere, even before the upgrades) that ensure you’ll succeed no matter what. That one interview that revealed Kojima was frustrated with the game having too high internal reviews makes perfect sense. The part that implies he did something about it doesn’t.
Same with the interview where Kojima claimed Dollman will be a very popular companion. God, I hate Dollman. I hate the director he’s based on and I hate the voice actor he got. I hate his local libertarian politician look. I hate his insistence to overexplain every little thing on the screen in a nerdy “actually…” voice. I hate how he refuses to let me feel alone. I hate the stupid backstory he gets, mercifully pushed into the postgame, but mindblowingly stupid. So throughout the game, you get these hints that he’s super into j-pop, Daichi Miura in particular. Eventually, he reveals that he took his 8 yo daughter into a BT zone to look for his BT wife, played a Daichi Miura song to her, and she got so pissed off she killed the child and turned him into a doll somehow. Why wouldn’t you want to chuck him into the nearest river after hearing this?
The treatment of women in the cast is almost as annoying. Fragile is as much of a failure masquerading as a girlboss as she ever was, she’d be unbearable if anyone but Seydoux played her. Kutsuna’s backstory is embarrassing, an incomprehensible jumble of western sci-fi and Japanese folklore stuff focused on cheap sentimentality, plus Kojima’s weirdness about pregnancies rears its head again and continues in the Debra Wilson subplot. Elle Fanning is actually tolerable in comparison, I don’t care about the “barefoot is legal” stuff everyone uses as an excuse to reheat their stale Tarantino jokes, at least she’s mostly doing stuff and not relying on Reedus in these cool action scenes with Yuji Shimomura/U’den choreography, but yeah, she’s just your typical battle bishoujo in the end. All of them are obviously written by an aging Japanese director who wants you to know he thinks women are beautiful but still sort of alien, it often results in these bizarre scenes where stars of the Cannes red carpet are told to showcase Generic Anime Girl Friendship Rituals. I don’t know, I thought I’ve learned to accept this is what Kojima is in this regard, but I feel this needed more bonding rituals between shirtless men with big asses to compensate.
Picking Woodkid as a main composer next to Forsell also feels like a mistake to me. Most of his music feels like it aims to be included in the same playlists as Hans Zimmer - Time, it’s like he never assumes he might be too pushy with his sentimentality, all the children choirs and the weepy lyrics set to marching drums and the soaring Epicness results in something unauthentic and corny. I guess I accept his VR Themes with their bombastic 00s hip hop beat sound and the shameless AMV epic violins in the Tomorrow theme, it feels like a wink-nudge convention, but in general, man, even his Bryce Dessner produced song managed to annoy me. On the other hand, Caroline Polachek’s song is incredible, if there’s a next game, she should probably just replace the guy. Or maybe they should just license more classic Silent Poets tracks. The use of Low Roar generally got to me as well, considering the themes of the game and the fate of the band.
Of course, I had a ton of fun. The Phantom Pain/Peace Walker progression structure is one of my favorite progression models, the gamefeel is immaculate, the tools varied, the attention to detail unparalleled. But I kinda hope this was Kojima’s way to get the failures (perceived and otherwise) of MGSV and DS1 out of his head, deliver something that feels complete and move on to something new. It’s interesting to see all the talk about grief and being separated with one’s baby intersecting with all the references to Metal Gear, even the release date kinda feels like something picked to spite the MGS Delta team. Marinelli’s subplot as an Italian Zombie Solid Snake constantly forced to do a job against his will and choosing to smuggle what’s good out of an abusive corporation is too chaotic to intepret definitively, but the emotions feel quite clear. And hell, I get it, I’d probably still be mad too.
Ultimately, what’s most resonant about the game is this odd portrait of the world where life and death no longer mean what they used to, something that functions mostly as an allegory or an the artist’s personal cosmology, even though the script is hellbent on weighing it all down with too much useless literal exposition. The people around Sam make it extremely unclear whether they’re alive or dead and to what degree, those long gone still control your next steps, their presence is still palpably felt, Ryan Karazija’s voice keeps resounding throughout your travels, the works of long-dead writers shape the creative vision, AI keeps trying to reconstruct the souls and thoughts of the departed, and so on, and so on. It comes across like a valiant struggle to redefine what it means to persist in the 21st century, the information era, when our mindset is still stuck in the 20th century in many ways. The story culminates in a resurrection in an unexpected form, it’s contrived and stupid but also like a sincere declaration of believing Love will prevail, that death is not the end, a lot of old man’s sentiments expressed directly and shamelessly.
…and mixed with a lot of typical Hideo Kojima nonsense, of course. I kinda expect more of him as an artist, I didn’t know an epilogue with so many End of Evangelion and Drakengard vibes could leave me so cold, and the social media stuff with all of Kojima’s Best Friends puts me in the “we shouldn’t have connected” mood which I don’t assume was the intention. But I don’t know, whenever I got pissed (which happened quite a few times), it usually led to me remembering no other big game of this generation tried to have a dialogue about the most important things.
That terrible documentary about Kojima, Connecting Worlds, has only one line that stayed with me, from Grimes of all people. She mostly offers a lot of pointless comments, but she does say the key appeal of Kojima’s work for her is that it occupies “this uncanny valley between, like, comedy and, like, extreme earnestness, and it’s, like, profoundly funny, but also, like, deeply sad [and you never know if the guy is for real right now]”. DS2 is Kojima unfiltered, a man who’s 50% keen artistic perspective and 50% dogwater taste, 50% wistful old man trying to share his experience before it’s too late and 50% immature otaku nonsense, unpacking which is which has never been so hard and so crucial to processing his work. And it’s not always rewarding, but compared to the upcoming slate of blockbuster auteur production (Ken Levine’s Rick and Morty, Goichi Suda’s Rick and Morty, Neil Druckmann’s Rick and Morty), sure, I’ll take it.
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This is 100% how I felt (though I ultimately come down a lot more negative on the game, I do cherish that brief window of playing the game where I didn’t know enough to trivialize the experience)
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Also, a friend noted how all the blabbering about Ha and Ka made him think about the song that opens the sixth season of The Sopranos, William S. Burroughs talking about how Egyptians discerned between seven types of death, which fits perfectly into the themes of the game in a way that’s uncharacteristically understated for Kojima (unless I missed some Corpus definition or something similar):
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