Idle Thoughts

Come for the Kojima antics, stay for the delivery sim (★★★★☆)

Death Stranding 2 is one big expansion pack to Death Stranding 1. That’s the gist of it. It adds some tweaks, which honestly are pretty hard to notice if you’re not very familiar with the original. Other than that, you get the same challenges, presented in the same order, and unlock the same tools. Even the story follows exactly the same arc, which is almost an achievement. So you get more of the same: a unique open-world game centered on traversal, cargo management as well as light infrastructure building and where combat is secondary.

I suppose there’s nothing wrong about an unambitious sequel. Call of Duty is basically the same game year after year. Even Dark Souls got formulaic biannual sequels.

But it’s Kojima we’re talking about here. The big ambitious visionary! Every single one of his main Metal Gear Solid games pushed the envelope in some way. It’s been five years since the original Death Stranding too, more time than between MGS1 and MGS2 if Wikipedia is to be believed.

So yeah, Death Stranding 2 is as good as the original, but adds very little, which is a disappointment in and of itself.

THE END

Let’s be real, you want to hear about crazy Kojima stuff, right? Of course you do!

The story is, obviously, completely insane and completely heartfelt at the same time. Imagine various characters having to explain these plot points to Norman Reedus’ character:

– Hi, we have a job for you that requires touring all of Mexico. I know you’re the only support of your 11-month-old baby, but that’s okay, you can leave her with me, a half-stranger. I’m sure it’ll be fine…

– You know how I got your kid killed during that last job? Bummer, I know. How about you work through that grief by doing a new job for me? Meet the crew, everyone got their kids killed in one way or another. It’ll be great! We even got you a new therapist, a ventriloquist dummy. He’s literally going to be attached to you at all times.

– We have finally opened the magical barrier south of Mexico. We can now cross over to Australia.

– Your former therapist, who was also your wife, got pregnant from one of her patients; we’re just not sure which one, ’cause she had an affair with two of you.

– You know how your kid died in act I? Actually, you were in denial the whole time, because your child is actually dead (that’s not a typo, I can’t even wrap my head around this plot “twist”).

It’s a good thing Norman Reedus keeps a deadpan expression throughout the entire game. What can you reply to any of this? Besides, what the fuck is that sudden obsession with dead kids?

As I said, the sequel hits the same story beats in the same order, which is odd. The original Death Stranding had you slowly reconnect all of the United States from east coast to west coast. It made some kind of inherent sense as a sci-fi pastiche of Manifest Destiny. You reconnected the world by going around on foot delivering stuff to people and fixing their Wi-Fi expanding the Chiral network.

There is no inherent sense in reconnecting Mexico and Australia, not that I know much about either country’s national identity. I suppose that’s why Kojima came up with the dead kid angle: to free up the main character for the sequel and to find a new angle to the story.

Now I can see a powerful narrative about working through grief by putting one foot in front of the other, literally and figuratively, again and again and again. In a sense, there is no other way through grief. And yet, if someone is going to adroitly pull off a story like this, it sure as shit isn’t Kojima and not in a game with therapist puppets, karate-wielding pizza chefs and gunfights with giant crabs.

The first few cutscenes bombard you with all the gobbledygook inherited from the first game and a little signal pops up every time a new term comes up, just in case you want to interrupt an exposition-heavy custcene by reading a dry encyclopedia entry. It should be a drinking game. Every time the link to the glossary pops up, take a shot: “DOOMs sufferers have their Beaches affected by the BTs because the BBs were made by Bridges before the Stranding in the Chiral network caused by the repatriate voidout.” Cheers!

The other notable thing about the story and characters is that everyone is basically a cameo or a guest appearance of some kind. I suppose the whole point of becoming a director is to give jobs to your friends and people you like, to cast women you think are hot and to feature music you listen to. You’re just not supposed to be so obvious about it. The only character I like in all of this is Troy Baker’s Higgs, the returning villain. He’s been hired to chew the scenery and by God does he give it all he’s got.

Oh and you have a ship now, piloted by none other than George Miller. It’s a teleporting ship powered by the Tar, Death Stranding’s magic substance that basically does anything the plot requires. On the one hand, it’s nice to have a mobile base of operations from a gameplay perspective: it’s a convenient way to move all your stuff that even includes a garage. On the other hand, it turns the game into a cheap Star Trek knockoff: every few minutes, you are called to the bridge for a plot explanation, often a contrived reason why your super advanced technology just isn’t working. Sorry, the Tar isn’t feeling it today; you have to trek back to the other side of the continent and return with a new battery.

Even when the ship is working, you’re not supposed to actually deliver cargo by using it. You get a heavy penalty if you do so, which makes sense since it completely negates the whole point of the game. Still, the game doesn’t really explain why there’s a penalty. Besides, what’s the point of making your hero a lonesome wanderer if he has a fully crewed giant spaceship at his disposal? Did they not think about this?

As many critics point out, it’s impossible to really get mad at Kojima or his stories. After all, he is often delightfully crazypants and moreover, he is a member of a dying breed. How many genuine video game “directors” are left? The kind with brand name recognition and the power to impose their sensibilities on the final product, no matter how weird or fickle? Well, I’m using the word “sensibilities”, perhaps it’s not the right term to describe someone whose entire influences are action flicks from the 80s and anime. But you get what I mean.

If we want to start psychologising, you could say that casting a bunch of trendy movie directors into your game is a way to make yourself a great movie director by association. Heck, if you’re the one casting them, maybe that makes you even better! A director of directors! Alpha director!

Death Stranding 2 also features faux 8-bit music and characters clearly inspired by the original Metal Gear on NES/MSX2. You could see this as a way to recreate an 8-bit past Death Stranding never had, the kind of history that the Metal Gear series had and that Kojima lost when leaving Konami.

When playing Death Stranding 2, it’s hard not to get the feeling that Kojima created an innovative new world and gameplay proposition, but that part of him would just like to make another Metal Gear Solid game. One minute you’re trying to deliver a case of underpants to East Knot City, the next you’re in a war zone against a bullet-spongy, overly dramatic paramilitary unit with barely a shred of context.

In fact, I think these are the two things in Kojima’s sense of self that directly hamper Death Stranding 2: the delusion that he’s a great movie director and his unwillingness to let go of Metal Gear. Those are probably the points that actually sell the game, but they don’t make the game good, do they?

As I alluded to before in my entry about Metal Gear Survive, Kojima’s insane storylines have always been the most visible part of his work, but his true genius is in innovative gameplay. He came up with a lot of cool systems: non-lethal combat, camouflage, CQC, “capture anyone and steal anything base building”, etc.

So yes, enough about Kojima’s weird stories. I think I’ve earned the right now to geek out about the nitty-gritty of the mechanics of Death Stranding.

The original Death Stranding was visionary but flawed in many ways. It’s the kind of dad game I could get behind. Eurogamer called it: “grandiose and goofy, liberating and frustrating, thrilling and audaciously dull”.

You just get stuff delivered. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it gets to its destination. Your own equipment is also highly breakable so use it, chuck it, give it to other players. Don’t worry about it. The stuff must flow. “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” will stop you from getting stuff delivered. Oh, there are also heavily armored bandits and invisible ghosts that make you explode in a gigantic crater. You know, the usual workplace hazards, but the emphasis is still on delivery.

There’s even a touch of the sublime in the banal in the act of delivering. You lay down your burden in the middle of nowhere to look at the stars. As you crest over a hill, your destination comes into view and soulful music starts playing. Norman Reedus grumbles and reprimands himself when you take a tumble. As the rain clears, a rainbow forms overhead.

In a way, it took Kojima to realize that open worlds involve a lot of going from A to B, so why not make that the core of the game? Elevation matters, the amount of stuff you need to carry on a trip matters. Do you need to cross a river? Is the mission timed?

The more you deliver, the more new toys you unlock: from a humble ladder and a climbing rope, all the way to exoskeletons, placeable bridges, sticky guns to reach faraway packages and floating platforms you can tie to your waist. Sadly, a lot of your tools are weapons, but the overall selection is still staggering. You also eventually restore roads and drive around in your truck. It’s just feeding resources to build a predetermined segment of road, but it still feels like crafting roads in a more significant way than, well, Roadcraft. The gist of the progression is that you start as a lowly pedestrian and then roads and vehicles massively increase your efficiency. The final act is delivering in the mountains, so you’re suddenly back to being a pedestrian, except with high-tech ziplines and exoskeletons for support.

If only Death Stranding 2 had spent more time focusing on the delivering, we’d have a much more solid game, IMO.

The combat is still subpar, and there’s more of it this time around. Shooting around a corner never feels good. For a stealth shooter, this is inexcusable. There’s too many bullet-sponge bosses and they’re all tedious. Most of them you literally fight with both feet planted in tar. They’ve even expanded the melee combat, which remains awful.

The passive multiplayer system still doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be. Basically, you see signs from other players, Dark Souls style, but also their constructions, dropped items, etc. You can deliver stuff for other players and benefit from their structures. It’s a brilliant idea, but the balance is completely out of whack. Once you connect an area to the network, it goes from pristine wilderness to massive heap of player-created garbage. You tend to get the most convenient player-created facilities, which is obviously useful, but completely undercuts your role as urban planner. There’s even an upgrade that makes you automatically (and constantly) beg other players for random shit you don’t need. Auto-spam mode. What the hell? Get that thing patched out ASAP. There are some options regarding multiplayer, but none of them feel good since the skill tree is dependent on getting likes from other players and you don’t get any extra leeway if you decide to do everything yourself. Once again, there is a mismatch here. Am I a lonely, unassuming everyday hero or a likes-maximizing savior vying for attention over all the other saviors? Am I L’homme qui plantait des arbres or Mr. Beast?

Death Stranding 2 even adds new flaws that screw up “high-level” play, if you can call it that.

First of all, your delivery rating is immensely increased by getting into fights, even if it’s not at all part of the mission. Obviously, this incentive totally transforms the “optimal” way to play the game from careful to reckless. BTW, how the heck does that make sense? Do you like your Purolator guy more if he gets into a random bar brawl before delivering your order? Just give me my air fryer and don’t look for trouble on the way, please…

Secondly, the game introduces off-road tires that almost let you drive at a 90-degree angle on any terrain. As I alluded to earlier, this completely negates the third act of the game, where vehicles are stripped of their advantages and your role as a porter comes back front and center. In the original, building your own zipline network through the mountains was your final exam in infrastructure building. No more roads, no more hand-holding: it was up to you to plan your structures according to distances and ferry materials to make your route a reality. It’s a rare open-world game that would actually let you plan out your own infrastructure network to “cheese” missions. It did make most missions easy as pie, but it’s not really cheating either. It’s more like front-loading the work.

Finally, they’ve removed an element from Death Stranding’s Director’s Cut that I thought was genius: leaderboards. Now, I think leaderboards are usually a waste of time. What made it interesting in Death Stranding is that it involved speedrunning a specific delivery weekly, i.e a 1-5-minute block of the game. The route and the means are up to you. Do you just try to improve your execution or is there a much better route you haven’t thought of? In other words, all the interesting parts of speedrunning, without dedicating ten years of your life to glitching out Super Mario Bros. Micro-speedrunning. Speedrunning for the masses.

The ending of Death Stranding 2 obviously sets up another sequel, maybe even a whole series of games. My wish is that Death Stranding 3 finally commits to being a delivering game instead of hiding its core mechanic behind a pseudo-stealth-action game and expensive cutscenes. That would be a bold step. I’m not saying to remove the combat and supernatural elements completely, oh no, they’re certainly part of the fun. If anything, the supernatural would be even more interesting as unexplained occurrences and not something that the characters pontificate about ad nauseam. Heck, even David Lynch took a break from being weird to make something like The Straight Story and it is considered one of his better movies. For Kojima, making a “boring” game would truly be original.