VideoGame Norman Reedus and the Amazing Fetus
Death Stranding is a game about traversal and logistics, You aim to deliver a box from A to B in good time and shape, and your reward is the fabled S-Rank. The main quest is a pretty easy 70 missions, while the side-content is the pretty time-consuming act of achieving max-rank with 30 odd settlements.
HIGHS
- It's a long game that never makes killing worth-while. You'll hog-tie the odd postman or sever a ghost's umbilical cord but there's no call for bloodshed. You're not a soldier, you're the best damn Fed Ex courier who ever lived.
- It's a unique game about the very act of traversal. You have to consider your carry-weight, your chosen route, the terrain's surface, terrain-height, enemy-occupied zones, etc. This is not a Ubisoft checklist, this is a chunk of America you have to learn like the back of your prematurely-aged hand.
- It is highly cathartic later-on to S-Rank multiple deliveries at once later in the game. Being able to learn not just the landscape, but every little mechanic, is more rewarding than any XP or rare loot.
MIXED
- It's not worth doing any side-content until you unlock the zip-lines and vehicles. Progressing the main-quest enables a drip-feed of upgrades that makes your day easier. Trying to deviate from the main-path before then would be like Mario trying to rescue Princess Beach without once pressing the jump-button.
- The boss fights are pretty bland. Every once in a while a giant health-bar pops up that you must dispatch by tossing a bottle of piss at it. A particularly jarring moment halfway through is when Mads Mikkelson challenges you to a gunfight, when there had been no gunplay until now.
LOWS
- Kojima needs a collaborator or an editor. So much exposition is repeated ad nauseam and so many metaphors are bluntly hammered down. Supporting characters blend together because their main purpose is to spout exposition instead of providing character or flavour. The bulk of the story happens at the very beginning and the very end of the game, leading to a slow first-impression and a sluggish last-act. Horizon Zero Dawn far exceeds this game in terms of story-telling. It was better-paced and more economical with its cutscenes. I thought the use of real-life actors was distracting as the material given to them did little to make their characters interesting, unlike Lance Reddick's Sylens in Horizon.
- There are a ton of menus, menu-cutscenes, and hold X to continue prompts. I know this title is complex but I feel there should have been more options to shortcut past the mechanical formalities.
- I called it a day and put the game down for the good after seeing the true ending. I really do not want to go back to that snowy mountain zone. It's telling that in a messed-up world of psycho-postmen, acid-rain, and oil-slick ghosts it's the prospect of a White Christmas that makes me groan.
CONCLUSION
Death Stranding is Kojima unfiltered and unrestrained. The gameplay is genius for making a fun loop out of such a mundane activity, but the plot suffers for being non-existent in the middle 80% of the game and most of the cast are ciphers instead of interesting characters. For his next game Kojima could stand to move out his comfort zone using such familar tropes as the gruff loner, the nerdy CO team, and the fecked-up supporting female cast.
Death Stranding is a game I recommend you play from beginning to end, and then move on with your life. 8/10
VideoGame A Unique, Incredible Game That I'm Never Playing Again
I just finished Death Stranding by getting the platinum trophy in the post-game. That was a one-of-a-kind experience about isolation, connections, and survival that I don't think will ever be replicated or fade from my memory...and at 130+ hours (for my run), it's something I'm never playing again.
Death Stranding is my first Kojima game, so I wasn't ready for his particular brand of weirdness and obsession with details/references. The character names, the soundtrack choices, the imagery and cinematography, Sam's understated characterization and relationship with his BB, Mads Mikkelsen; all these things blend together to create a whole new type of narrative, one where the night-irreversibly fucked-up apocalyptic world around you balances surprisingly evenly with the quirky and bizarre people inhabiting it, who are presented as naturally as someone casually reading a newspaper on a park bench. Just about every actor works wonders with their character, major or minor - only a couple got on my nerves throughout the entire game, and the rest were all memorable in their own way, each with a certain obsession or characteristic that their entire personality revolved around yet never left them feeling one-note (Cliff is a standout example of this, and the role that made me truly appreciate The Mikkelsen). Per the overarching story, I'm really glad I went into this only having seen the first gameplay trailer because I really did not see most of the plot twists coming, especially in the last 5 hours of the game, and enjoyed them all the more for it. Having recently gone through an extended period of isolation from my loved ones due to two mind-numbing jobs with terrible working hours, the narrative's themes of debilitating isolation, the importance of connecting with others even if you're not necessarily on the same page as them, and Sam himself slowly but surely growing a bit more open to others over time really hit me hard. It was a learning experience, in many aspects.
I also wasn't expecting a completely new gameplay system in the form of the cargo delivery and balance systems, but after a couple hours I got the feel for it and really started having fun. It takes a bit for the vehicles and guns to be made available, but once they are your options really open up for completing deliveries, though I won't deny that there were still a few points of frustration (one that made me quit for a solid 3 weeks to do other stuff, another that had me switch over to Firewatch and beat it in an afternoon just to feel a sense of progression). What few boss fights there are feel pretty damn hype because of how dialed-back most of the game, and the combat by extension, normally is.
That being said, as much as I appreciate this game and as much enjoyment as I got out of playing it, I am never, ever starting a new game. I've gotten all the trophies (which is thankfully quite possible to due in a single playthrough, since you can change your difficulty at will and nothing is missable) and, having read all the emails and interviews, feel quite confident that I've experienced the entire game...so I'm not gonna dedicate another several dozen hours to trekking through it all over again, unlike other long games I've played through multiple times like Kingdom Hearts II, Darksiders 2, and Fallout 3. It was a very fulfilling journey and one I don't regret embarking on, don't get me wrong - but I can only justify sparing 3 months for such a game once. But I do recommend it to anyone interested in a new experience.
VideoGame This Game changed my opinion of Kojima.
Before I played Death Stranding, I had an impression that Kojima was the George Lucas of Videogames: A person with amazing ideas, but that needed a lot of people to help him get his vision into fruition by saying 'no', directing in his stead, and keeping him in check.
But now that I finished this game, this changed.
Now I am certain that he is the George Lucas of Videogames.
The story itself is actually fine, for the first time since Metal Gear Solid 1 there was a plot that could be followed, and some twists that were actually set up instead of the wild insane ride that was MG 4 (I still have a trauma of that game), you are Sam Bridges, you deliver packages to convince people to gather up America again. The gameplay is actually pretty nice, delivering packages through the country, using many tools at your disposal to traverse territory giving you the satisfaction of a job well done, and when you finish your Zipline network backed by a whole set of roads, there is that delicious shiver of satisfaction that few games nowadays deliver. Combat is simple and straightforward, with an actual reason to not kill everyone you see in your path, with pros and cons of going rambo.
The problem is the directing itself and the minutiae of each one of these points that don't mesh well when joined, making the game feel like a puzzle of nice pieces that don't fit. I played the Director's edition using a controller, and the game prioritized grabbing empty boxes near Sam instead of drawing a gun, because the 'grab the package' 'hold yourself to not fall' and the 'draw weapon' were the one and the same button, resulting in a fistful of lead up Sam's face. There are tons of smaller mechanics that don't add anything, and turn up to be a pain, such as constantly having to brace yourself, even if you are already inside the building you're supposed to reach (or in the middle of a firefight, with a light load AND exoskeleton). Driving a vehicle outside a road is bad? Ok, I agree, except the handling isn't bad, its atrocious, with the trucks having no traction whatsoever, sliding rocky hills as if their tires were made of glass and snow, and the bike literally bumping onto nothing because of a slight uneven ground leveling being interpreted as a rock.
And the directing of the story is nothing short of amateurish. Kojima doesn't know the basics such as pacing, or climax, usage of symbolism or bonding. Characters waste time repeating over and over and over the same thing (I loathed Die-Hardman by the end of the game, calling him 'Die-parrotman'), with dialogue that brushes George Lucas level "I'm your princess beach!" and interactions are mostly exposition, or worse, e-mail. In a game about being in constant movement, you check how characters are doing through reading e-mail. Chapters will be focused solely on a single character and most, if not all meaningful interaction will be done there, and then its over, instead of gradually talking to them, knowing them, and influencing them. The worse thing about this is that Kojima had the perfect mold for this kind of story development: Metal Gear Solid, where you have a team of experts that slowly open up to the main character as things develop. Why couldn't the same be done here!? Instead of having to stop to talk to the codec, why not listen to them, and interact with them, as you are climbing a hill through a call? After all isn't the theme of the game is 'being connected'? Have questions about the BB? Call deadman instead of reading a report. Problems with your equipment? Call Mama. Instead, the game thinks it knows when to call you, insisting over and over about things you already know and wasting your time with redundancies, like the same screen no matter how many times you recycle things or a whole status screen about a single lost delivery you found right outside and decided to return it.
Speaking of which, Kojima behaves like a newbie chef that discovered the mighty power of Garlic. He will put tons of it in everything, even in ice cream, especially ice cream. Symbolism loses any and all nuance, being exposed and repeated on your face over and over. Did you know that Sam will be the BRIDGE to UNITE AMERICA? Because his name is BRIDGES, and his chosen surname is PORTER, PORTER BRIDGES, GET IT? And what infuriates me is that Kojima has the tools he needs to make a great story, brushing with greatness but being caught up in self-servicing vices and ruined. I realized the whole deal about heartman in the first five seconds of his interaction with Sam from all the clues gathered, but Kojima assumed that I was a moron, because he proceeded to explain everything in half hour of dialogue that could be just three lines. Norman Reedus feels wasted here, relegated only to grunt and be awkward, while Mads Mikkelsen absolutely steals the show whenever he shows up with simple, methodical and superb acting.
In the end, I think that this game's biggest 'sin' is Kojima himself, if he went the honest path and revealed from the getgo that this game was about deliveries and relationships in a post-apocalyptic world instead of making people wild with cryptic videos, the hype backlash would have been minimal. And if he actually had found a good director, this game would have been great. In the end, I enjoyed it, but the repetition and bloated story made me not want to repeat the ordeal.