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.