Finished the game over a week ago, but wanted to give some time to percolate on it before going in on it.
With MGSV, I was beginning to get bad feels about Kojima as a writer, and with Death Stranding I think he's done and needs to step back and collaborate. Death Stranding feels like a fever dream he had one night, committed to a note book, and just assumed his genius would be able to wrangle into a full videogame narrative as they developed it. Instead it is a convoluted mess that doesn't even execute on its few themes well, dragged up almost entirely by Mads and Tommie Earl's performances. Reedus was alright, but forced into a Snake mold he never fit. Now the real picking:
- The Chiral Network, supposedly needing the bandwidth of time-travel through the Beach, never amounts to more than a slightly beefed up present day fiber broadband. It never justifies its existence, the Q-pid system is never actually explained beyond a macguffin you have to replace, and the entire premise of them "not setting it up properly" the first time through is thinly veiled nonsense needed for videogame activities. Worse still is when its revealed a BB is the node required to build it, a sacrifice. After Sam is revealed to be a BB himself, and he frees Lou as a BB, I guess that plot point is just neatly forgotten and no need to worry about that other BB we plugged in to Edge Knot City. American citizens need to 3D print their sex dolls at 100mbps after all.
- Much of the games names for things felt like first draft markers to be replaced with actual names later. DOOMS is never actually explained as an acronym anywhere, other than some characters just having a case of sad dreams and weird phobias. Sam Porter Bridges, his name changing to suit what company he was working for, pointed to a sort of medieval societal system of naming people after their trade. Except many other characters don't follow this naming convention, nor is it ever established as a part of the world. Then of course later on its revealed Lisa's surname was Bridges anyway, so its all some Kojima shit metaphor that is about as deep as the distance from his eyes to his own nose. Die Hardman's real name being John McLane actually made me suspend my PS4 for 30 minutes while I waited for my eyeballs to roll back the right way round from out of their sockets. Bridget Strand/Samantha America Strand being the name of the entity thats about to bring about The Last STRANDing? It rhymes. Like poetry. Imagine working at KojiPro and knowing this is absolute dogshit writing, but just having to shrug to camera.
- Higg's terrorist group is never incorporated into gameplay. They've completely disappeared by the end of the game, unless you want to count one of the MULE camps with guns as a group of his. Its probably just as well because DS felt like a huge leap backwards from MGS4 when KojiPro had western employees help with making great third person shooter controls all the way through to MGSV. DS when it gets to the shooting elements feels like a PS2 game in strange ways.
- Bosses were just a mess. The initial squid boss and maybe The Big Man boss we're fairly competent, but a far cry from the incredible boss experiences KojiPro used to be renowned for. A squid, a lion, a big man, and a whale. Failing to execute on the 5 Extinctions theme by making them all reflect a past extinction feels particularly insane, considering we could have had a dinosaur battle in the Decima engine, imagine that eh. Higgs and Sam getting fighter health bars was a bad recycle of MGS4's, and just ended up feeling like Kojima is tapped out. No YOU'RE damaged goods!!
- Character arcs that went nowhere is the name of the game. Let's not even touch upon Sam's dead wife remaining a smudge the entire game. I think Fragile is about the only one to get a full arc. The pacing of the introduction of the rest of the cast of Sam's Best Buddies Ever is so poorly implemented, I thought I'd missed Heartman's somehow as I was two thirds through the game and yet to see his house. His own subplot of searching for his family has no resolution beyond an e-mail that he's hooked up with a woman with Spade as a surname. Why not go the whole hog Kojima and have them get a dog named Ace, and plan on calling their first child Club? Too afraid? COWARDICE. Deadman as a character never resonated with me because he was aggressively telling you to shitcan the BB for the first third of the game, and then sort of casually explained he was a test tube baby and that he made himself a frankenstein from other corpses and also that he doesn't have a soul so no fun Beach times for him. It is okay though because there is a funny shower scene where Sam bonds with the monster. Also Deadman spoiled Mama 'dying' as when I turned in a memory chip, he said it would have been something Mama would have appreciated. GEE THANKS DEL TORO. Die Hardman's emotional breakdown sequence being great aside, I don't even know if he knew Sam was Mad's BB? If he didn't, that requires him to have Plot Amnesia. Mads is the real core of the games narrative, but its never revealed why he gets to be a conventional angry ghost and not a BT, while everyone else is relegated to floating melty things. Ssh, do not think, only feelings now.
-Amelie deserves her own section, because she's by far the worst part of the entire game. For The Big Ol' Twisty, everyone involved has to have Plot Amnesia and Plot Stupidity for it to even vaguely work. Sam's relationship with his mother is bizarrely angry, offset by his weird romantic relationship with his step-sister who he was never seen in real life ever. No cutscenes ever really sell Amelie of having a split personality capable of also working with Higgs to bring about the Last Stranding in the most despicable way possible either. I couldn't personally ever reconcile the games hard sci fi basis with the lazy explanation of there still being a magic based God system, and that Amelie was just randomly an Extinction Entity. The games end is just some weird delay on humanity's extinction with her just waiting a bit longer because thats the nice thing to do? It goes back to my assumption this games plot was just a fever dream. Dreams typically don't have conclusions, and thats why it felt impossible for Death Stranding's plot to conclude. BT's seemed to flip flop from being ghosts of dead people to anti matter projections of ourselves from another dimension. If we stopped the Stranding supposedly, why were we taking to Lou to the incinerator, because presumably we'd stopped all this necro business for a bit? If not, Sams right, everythings still mega shit, whats the point.
-WE NEVER WENT TO THE FUCKING MOON. No, seeing the Earth in the background of Amelie's beach doesn't count. You don't keep setting up the Moon as a location with Mads bedtime story, the concept of Ludens astronauts, and so on, and then not contrive your already nonsense plot to send us to the moon somehow. That could have been Higgs master plot, to trick you into entering a 3d printed rocket, shooting you to the moon, and then have fun repatriating in space, fucko! Maybe Mads could have taken us to the moon after Vietnam. Just something. It didn't help that pre-release, I had just assumed we were going to the Moon and Mars already with some of the environments shown. Interplanetary internet is something that would have at least vaguely explained the need for the Chiral network. Just say Sam doesn't breathe like other DOOMS, and thats why they get to be porters. Oh well eh.
-Gameplay systems and stuff that felt either tacked on or barely finished. The Oxygen Mask being used for precisely one little area at the end of the mountain and nothing else. Great design chops. The truck wanting to go sideways at the slightest hint of an incline. There being a way to color scheme your private room, but only if you build and fully upgrade your own safe house (no small feat) somewhere on the map (cant remember if its only for post-game too), making it effectively pointless. The BB nightmares amounting to exactly 2, which replay over and over again. No real need to use the Shower grenades as you get Hermetics so quickly afterwards anyway. Needing to get caught and dragged by a BT to cross the Tar Belt was the games only one "oh, actually clever!" moment for me, considering all other combat encounters were just padded and bad. The penultimate boss being a whale that did nothing is still just bizarre, and symptomatic of Kojima being obsessed with whales and Moby Dick due to the whole Konami imposion.
Whew. The core gameplay loop of package delivery was fun, as was building roads and ziplines, but everything narrative dragged the entire experience down in to shit town. I hated Low Roar by the end of the game, so if that was the mission statement of overdoing that 20 times, consider it accomplished.
HOW AMERICAN.