I'm currently 20 hours and 4 "episodes" deep into Death Stranding 2 on PC and I don't have the patience to wait til the Monday megathread rolls around again to voice my thoughts. This isn't my first time playing a Kojima game; I've got over 100 hours in the first Death Stranding and I've also finished multiple entries in the Metal Gear series, I've even played Boktai 2 on the GBA (though I didn't know that was a Kojima game til much later). I enjoy the vision, wackiness, flexibility in gameplay, and emphasis on little details that are fairly characteristic of a Kojima game, and those things are definitely very present in this one as well. That said though, there is one thing that only becomes more and more clear as I progress:

Hideo Kojima is terrible at writing dialogue. By that, I don't mean characters fail to express themselves or convey ideas well through a lack of words; rather, they're entirely too reliant on words. In an era of cinema that loves "show, don't tell", Kojima leans more towards "tell, tell, tell some more, and then maybe have a bit more tell as a treat". Any character with a backstory that Kojima wants you to know about will spend a good 10 minutes unloading their life story almost as soon as they meet the main character. Any time there's a new piece of information being revealed, someone will explain it to you in textbook-level depth. I'm not sure if Kojima thinks that it's ok to have so many incredibly long exposition-dumping cutscenes in his game because the ratio of cutscene to game is still fairly low but all I can say is these cutscenes and talking sequences are not good cinema. I don't care which movie star is getting a cameo when the script itself is this absurdly poor, my immersion is shattered and watching has now become a chore.

That said though, it's not like the game is devoid of cinematic moments, they just happen to be entirely outside of the cutscenes themselves. By far the most memorable and impactful moments in this game and the original are those times of solitude during a delivery where you're just quietly traversing through a zone, luggage in tow, and a Low Roar track starts playing. It's during these moments of calm, of pure show and no tell at all, where the player gets truly immersed in the role of the main character and has time to contemplate their journey while taking in the beauty of the nature around them. These aren't accidental or purely player-driven moments, those songs are set to play at a particular place during certain missions and knowing Kojima, he definitely had a major role in directing these as well. So it's not like he doesn't know how to create absolute cinema, but at the same time it's limited purely to gameplay moments where you're not forced to listen to someone deliver a 10 minute monologue in a way that no actual human being talks.

So yeah, thanks for not becoming a movie director, Kojima. Your script writing's terrible but your gameplay ideas are great. I'd suggest you hire an editorial team but you probably already have and ignore them.

So the Mrs. and I are planning on a trip to Japan for June of this year. I received a tip to take a look at the deals found on said travel agency and I was impressed. I made a cursory research on the legitimacy of the service and found that it does deliver. I took the dive and got myself booked--with an additional fee to cancel and have my deposit fully refunded. Since then I've been looking more and more into their services and find that way too many reviews are overwhelmingly negative. The corresponding Reddit board screams "don't do it!" (though most of the posts there are a bit dated, admittedly)
And now that I'm finally a member of this fine community at Tildes, I figured that I'd ask you kind people for your feedback and discussion. What do you all say? Is there any consensus on any particular travel agency? Or is it best that I engage in the grunt work to book all the hotels ahead of time? We're looking to hit Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto at the very least. My total cost so far is less than $5000 for 9 days, FYI. And travelling from USA, if that makes any difference.
This is my first post on Tildes prompting discussion, btw. Glad to be here! 🤞

Here's a a double feature about game console history: two YouTube videos that were released in the past few days. While the videos are unconnected, both are great quality little documentaries and I think when watched together offer an interesting contrast between the two worlds that existed at the time.

The Untold History of the Nintendo Entertainment System (45 min) by The Video Game History Foundation documents how the NES was launched in the US 40 years ago. While I was familiar with the main story, many of the details were totally new to me, including the prototypes and the initial ideas of what the NES might have been, and could well have been had the market and initial test audiences reacted differently.

The Hunt for the Lost Communist Console (18 min) by fern looks at the BSS-01, a video game console manufactured in East Germany in 1979. It was the only game console released in the country and I think somewhat similar to the Soviet console Turnir, as both used the same AY-3-8500 chipset imported from the West and offered a collection of Pong clones.