I'm glad Hideo Kojima went into games instead of directing movies
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.
It's the problem most commercially successful auteurs have, regardless of medium - No one wants to be the one to tell them "no". As long as the money's coming in...
Wow, this is quite surprising! My understanding up to now was that Death Stranding was a complete swing and a miss of a game, I'd be interested to hear about what you like about the game and why it's worth playing (at least enough to get you to play the sequel). Also, is it still engaging/worthwhile if you zone out during the cutscenes (or skip them if they're skippable)?
I've enjoyed the Metal Gear I've played, but I've not played much and I don't think I've played another Kojima game
Nah it never was. It’s just not a mass appeal game like MGS and trying to do something different. It’s NOT for everyone and it’s not made to be, kojima nonsense aside, but there’s still an interesting game in there.
Part of the other issue is that being a new game on a new engine it’s also got spots that aren’t fleshed out right. Kojima games are always overly ambitious gameplay wise and have a shoot for the stars hit the moon approach, and stranding suffered more than most there, but it’s still quite interesting even if not my thing
It's definitely a niche title and the core gameplay loop of just delivering packages from point A to B definitely turns away most people right off the bat, but it's very much about the journey and not the destination. Sometimes it'll be an uneventful trip where you just take a quick drive to a nearby shelter, other times you'll be carefully traversing through hostile territory trying to damage your cargo as little as possible, or navigating through rough terrain for the first time and trying to figure out a route with the tools you have on hand. In other games this kind of activity would be a boring chore but here it's a puzzle that has occasional moments of zen.
One of the most memorable moments I've had in DS2 so far was during an optional job to neutralize a bandit camp and retrieve their stolen goods. I had an engagement which started stealthy and finished as a shootout with some brawling (the melee combat's surprisingly dynamic). As I was gathering up the cargo after the fight, the rain intensified and the water level of the nearby river rose, so I had to make a makeshift bridge with some ladders I picked up in the camp to cross back over. I exhausted my stamina halfway on the return trip, so I sat down on a forest path to rest and restore it a bit. The game gave me options to massage my shoulders and stretch my legs and I don't know if they actually helped but it felt like they did. Some somber music began to play while I was resting too, and I've only heard it play when I rest. I thought it was interesting, how the game has this emphasis on moments where you slow down or relax where most games are about hyping up big moments with lots of action.
The actual most unique feature of the Death Stranding games though is how they're single player games with seamless multiplayer interaction. While you'll never actually see another player, you can still help each other out by contributing to or building useful structures that are shared across multiple players' games, or donating supplies, or leaving deliveries at intermediate locations for other players to complete. They're total strangers you'll never meet or talk to, and you may not get anything for helping them aside from some digital thumbs up, but there's something really wholesome about being able to help each other even from a distance.
I'd second the social strand feature is very important to the game's experience.
In DS1 there's delivery to the wind farm early on in the game. The forest in front of the wind farm is infested with BTs and you'll need to sneak around. Once you connected the wind farm to the chiral network now you'll see people putting 👻 signs around BT dense area making the return trip easier to plot around.
Then there's a quest that asks you to go over the mountain to deliver to the next city. The mountain is also BT infested so you can't really use a vehicle. Once you're there I think the next quest would be a chilling one, instead it just throws you into a boss fight with no warning. I'm not equipped for a boss fight but you'll have ghosts of other players throwing gears at you (if you're offline they just unnamed ghosts) after that fight I went back to the boss area and throw down two loads of gear just for the next poor soul even though it looked like I'm just litterring the ground
That's really cool! I had no idea that's what a "strand type" game meant!
Awesome, thanks for sharing! Sounds like I might enjoy it quite a bit! Did you have any thoughts to share on the importance of the cutscenes and story to the enjoyment of the game? I'm not one for sitting patiently through long, uninteresting ramblings, unfortunately
In terms of understanding what's going on the cutscenes are pretty vital, I'm pretty sure Kojima is self-aware on how unintuitive or nonsensical many of his ideas and plot points are so he just chooses to have people explain it to the main character rather than leave it to the player to figure it out. Not all cutscenes are just boring exposition dumps, sometimes there are just very cool visuals going on with little explanation, and I'm still only in the first third of the game so maybe it gets better once the main character's finally up to speed on who's who and what's what.
It would honestly be hilarious to try and sit Hideo Kojima down and tryto get him to explain the entirety of the MGS lore.
I personally love MGS 2 and 3, but I can admit that I barely know what is supposed to be happening for most of the time.