DEATH STRANDER With a 2 in it 🐋 🐙 🦘

[wourme]

I’ve been spending a decent amount of time in this game but my progress is slow. Half the time I basically treat it as easy-mode SnowRunner, just making standard deliveries and repairing roads and using the truck almost exclusively.

Often I forget about making progress in the story at all until I take a break from whatever I’ve been focused on to finally sleep in the ship like it’s been telling me to and suddenly get confronted with a boss or something.

Still looking out for traces of other SB players. I’ve found four so far but things aren’t always easy to see even if you know what to look for.

[SUPERSONNICK]

checked on my NAS and lo and behold, there it is

- YouTube

[scross]

I’ve read that Maddy Myers piece about gender essentialism in DS2 and while it’s worthwhile to try and label all the ways Kojima’s othering women, idk, it feels weird to me when someone implying that the guy thinks all men should just be men and he’s not creative at all when it comes to gender roles. He gave the archetypical 21st century TV show macho a defective artificial womb and made a bunch of bald women led by a gynaecologist symbolically accept him as their own as he’s mourning, I think it’s fair to assume there’s something offbeat going on there given that, nevermind all the homoeroticism in his work. IMO Kojima’s just a kind of person who could only arrive at some profound expression of a truth about womanhood by accident while writing a weird dude, and never while writing a woman. (Still amuses me a lot whenever I remember that The Boss was written so unusually for him because he stole her from a children’s book with a female cat mentor).

[iguferon]

My biggest problem was the part half heartedly talking about how kojima is basically applying christian allegory to Sam and Amelie when like all the ancient egyptian shit is right there and they talk about it in the fuckin game

[wourme]

It took a while, but the game has started doing what I’d hoped for from the start.

There was an order that required crossing some snowy mountains. Without thinking about it too much, I fabricated a coffin board and was off. Since I don’t use that mode of transportation much, I forgot that it doesn’t work off-network. So I ended up dragging it most of the way as it deteriorated, while scaling difficult rocks. When I finally reached my destination, I couldn’t connect it to the network but was immediately sent back out even further into the blizzard on another quest, a rescue. So I slept on the front porch by the terminal because my stamina was at zero, left my almost destroyed board behind, and set off on foot again.

I’d like an entire game of just this sort of thing.

[eska]

i’m not reading your spoiler but i hope those were THE Snowy Mountains, somewhere in the southeast

[parker]

I thought the same thing at the same place, I wish there was a whole game of that and/or some european extreme difficulty mode where you really had to manage your water and body temperature and whatnot

[dedede69]

played through this over the last two weeks…

it really won me over. around 10 hours in i turned down the online stuff to the middle setting (online features, but no structures) and i really think this is essential. i don’t remember it being a problem in the first game, but maybe starting this 2 weeks later and not release day made a difference? maybe the balance is just worse for it here.

i wasn’t sure why they would make another one of these games, and i don’t think that’s ever really answered, but the pacing really feels like a step up to me. the narrative is non existent for most of the game, but that’s great for the writing, reminds me of the second half of mgsv, this sort of ambient open world storytelling where it can just set up ideas and then let them float around in your head for the next 40hrs. kojima’s supernatural gimmick women work a lot better when they have the space to hang around the ship and aren’t just the next step in the script, and laying out your big neo-colonialist infrastructure plan in very direct terms before just letting you go and uncritically do it lands better for me than something that would try and say something more coherent about those ideas.

the last couple hours don’t really hit for me (or interest me all that much), but its such a small part of the game i dont mind them having their fun with it.

still not sure why this was made, and i think theres somethng between the two games that would be the best version of this, but i land on preferring this to the first game quite a bit in the end.

[dedede69]

also, glad i started skipping trailers for this after the first one. im not really spoiler averse, but its wild how much is in those.

[aggie]

I am right at the end of this fucker. 80 hours in, like, a week? About 10 hours a day, in any case. Looking forward to Standard Deliveries and building infrastructure.

I gotta say Higgs is the corniest, least threatening villain I have ever experienced. Youre supposed to love to hate him, but I just hate him and find him annoying/pitiful. Definitely a low point in the game, haha. When he shows up on the Bridge (before appearing in the Giant Red Ninja form Deadman used and I still dont understand) and takes Fragile hostage only to… Get rid of his leverage to square up with Tomorrow (also kind of a weak character, I just dont think she’s nearly as cool as Kojima thinks but thats ok, I forgive her) she just kicks his ass completely. All he does is lose.

On the other hand, When Charlie/Die-Hardman shows up and dances for the Ghost Singularity President, that was awesome. That was so awesome. Tommie Earl Jenkins looks really cool in that outfit he wears as well. And it was cool when the President was like “Youve been controlled by me all along” and Die-Hardman is like “Yo I have actually been controlling shit dont worry everyone” but then it gets immediately less cool when Higgs appears (this time as the Big Red Ninja) and says “I have actually been controlling everything” and doesnt offer an explanation as to how.

I wish I could have replayed DS fully and got really into the codices because I feel like I only understand the broad strokes and emotional beats. There’s so much jargon and twists and shit I just let it wash over me.

This game is actually kinda slight in some respects story-wise. Like, really, only a few major things happen, the rest is just endless complications. The tar currents are unstable! Guess I’ll walk.

Lucy is a comically inept therapist. I think its supposed to be like this irony thing with her job and we’re supposed to feel for her, but it is implied she just fucked Sam til he got over his fear of touch, and I understand she has this weird emotional history with Neil from when she saved him and he abandoned her and its got her fucked up, like, so she’s too close to the subject to remain objective, but I couldnt help but feel bad for Neil and Sam on her account. She kinda screwed them both over by, well, screwing them both. It’s just weird because her incompetency makes her almost villainous because its so inappropriate.

Ultimately, the game’s not about any of that. It’s about Pizza Karate.

Highlight of my playthru was probably taking out the giant octopus mech with only my Mazer pistol left.

[Rudie]

When I saw Rainy I kept thinking “she’s doing the thing from Deadpool” and today find out She Is Yukiko From Deadpool.

[aggie]

Posting from phone. I’ll just spoiler the whole thing. Watched the credits today.

When I last posted I felt somewhat soured and befuddled by On the Beach. Overall positive but somewhat underwhelmed. This completely turned around by the end.

It felt like every thing I didnt understand I could sorta implicitly and emotional understand by the end. They pretty much tell you repeatedly what youll see in the final scene of Neil Vana (awesome name) the whole time, but they prolong the experience so that you only truly get it at the last moment. They do that with a lot, obfuscating just enough, revealing the truth little by little until you see the whole picture with some emotional irony or sentiment or whatever.

What I thought was interesting, and maybe Im kooky crazy banana pants, but I feel like this game is the chiral double of Death Stranding, in some way.

I wanna capture all the BTs!

Death Stranding 3 Business as Usual

This game is and its predecessor are, essentially mythic. I could see it presented as, like, engravings on a wall. There’s meaning and symbolic weight charged in all the objects. Sam is basically a hero, he travels to the underworld, receives visions etc. He’s like Hercules combined with Moses or something, IDK !! But its very powerful. And he has other characters who are, like, gods around him. Like Bridget/Amelie. Deadman achieves godlike power and has a mythic kind of origin, being a man who was made artificially and believed he had no Ka only to have one of the strongest Kas around, capable of forming a bridge between the Magellan and the giant BT. You could do a d’Aulaires for DS is what Im saying.

What was up with Margaret Qualley’s role in this game?

[wourme]

My progress is still slow despite playing for several hours each time I play. Hard to resist those standard deliveries, I guess. The game almost feels like a second job, but not in a bad way. They’ve just created a great sandbox that it’s nice to spend time in.

The scenery gets much more impressive than this but I don’t want to spoil too much.

[wourme]

I just hit the end credits. The ending sequence and the actual ending went places. I don’t know about all that emphasis on guitars but overall I liked how things resolved and tied up the events of both games.

I was left with one question, though:

Whose sign is this?

[Rudie]

Shout outs to the youtuber trying to make 20 videos of content out of the 1200 dollar jacket.

[Brooks]

honestly the photoshoot kojima did for ssense was kind of fun
remarkable trousers

[eska]

i mean that might be enough to claim it on tax!

[wourme]

I wish that instead of 400 standard deliveries there were more things like that Mr. Impossible suborder. That one took me a while in part because I forgot it wasn’t a standard order and I was very careful not to damage the packages at all.

Two things I figured out later than I should have:

• You should always claim all chiral crystals from every stop. If you need to fabricate something that uses them it’s just one more button press to automatically add them back as part of the process.
• The climbing gloves let you grab crystals on the ground while driving a truck. I guess I didn’t read the description at first and only used the combat gloves for a long time until for some reason I happened to have the other ones equipped and noticed the prompt. (Equipment spoiler I guess but a helpful one.)

[cask]

@captainlove

I am just coming away grumpy and annoyed from each session. The game really wants me to engage with everything equally but for me its appeal is so uneven.

FWIW your posts reflect my feelings on the game pretty much exactly. It’s a game that is deeply affected by whatever mood I’m in when I sit down to play, and seems totally unable to positively affect my emotional state:

Early morning, well rested, puttering around doing deliveries and building roads before starting the day- hey this feels great
Before bed, tired, trying to grind out story missions, mashing x to skip the delivery dialogue and repetitive delivery cutscenes - wtf I hate this

Also this is probably the first Kojima game since Dreaming in an Empty Room a million years ago that I am just completely 100% out on the tone and story (I’m in Chapter 6). I’m finding it impossible to engage with in any way, and except for Norman Reedus who looks like a clay golem in both the game and also real life I’m having deeply negative uncanny valley reactions to the way all of the characters look.

[OneSecondBefore]

I’m pretty early on (just fought the red octo-mech boss fight), but I’m enjoying it a lot so far. As a sequel, it’s reminding me a lot of We Love Katamari, but less jaundiced and reluctant. Like that game, it’s taking a very elegantly designed and paced predecessor and blowing it up into a big wild playground party.

The first game was so careful about the way it distributed your gadgets, making you slog through a tough delivery before you received the device that would have trivialized it, so you could better appreciate its utility. Meanwhile this game is dropping toys left and right, giving you everything you need before you ever need them.

You get a music player you can build playlists in, and the songs you get can be pretty silly. I have a Goofing Around playlist that goes from “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” (a perfect needle drop for this game) right into this overblown self-serious orchestral instrumental that sounds like it’s from an old samurai movie or something. Kojima’s music taste is kind of dismal IMO but so far I’ve only heard one Low Roar song in this game, so it’s a huge improvement over the first game… And as I’m collecting songs there are a decent number I’m enjoying. Plus the Caroline Polachek theme rules.

I’m glad they put the tranquilizer pistol from MGSV in this, hell yeah.