First of all, I wasn't really a big kojima gal? I had played the first and a bit of the fifth MGS until earlier this year, where i finally finished MGS V
i realized it is an extremely precient and political game, and I think i like kojima's brand of crazy.
So then I read about death stranding. I saw the promo footage years ago, and it followed that cutscene where Deadman finds himself on that combat beach, and I assumed it was more action heavy bs that I was growing out of (hormones change your tastes what can i say), so i completely ignored it until i grabbed it on a whim recently
and anyway, WOW! so I fucking love this game. Everything is so weird. Astrology and esoterica are canon, everything is a fucking insane metaphor for something else, the world has been utterly bent the fuck over by cataclysm, and you're just a dude out there with your artificial womb, making deliveries and linking up the remnants of humanity.
I love the vibe of these little communities and holdout preppers coming together, sharing what they have to move forward into a post-cataclysmic future. I love all the stupid shit with Lockne & Malingen, I love the bridge babies, i love that one of the most potent weapons in the game is made by running around until you're so tired you piss blood, and that bloody piss gets turned into a grenade. I love having weaponized body fluids. This shit owns.
I'm not even sure death stranding 2 can live up to this.
also the multiplayer features can be a bit much (I have it set up to log in offline and to not automatically share structures because people will just spam structures in the most annoying fucking places, but they're also awesome.
I love how much cooperation and community effort is the front and foremost thing, to the point it's literally one of the stats the game tracks.
Sorry, I needed to gush about how rad this game is, years after its heyday
edit: Also if anybody is currently playing and wants to form strand contracts, i'm on the Steam PC version. I'd rather see like, specific people's stuff in my game world than like, random people's.
Right now i use strand contracts with inactive friends to sort of make it less likely i get six bridges in a forest when i go online, but i'd actually enjoy building the world map out with some people. Not gonna put my steam id out in public though, pm me for all that
Get the speed skeleton and stabilizer. The stabilizer sounds boring but is actually a fucking jetpack. You can then launch yourself across the map like you're on the moon, it's amazing.
Edit: here's a video (spoilers for some late game gear) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQDIzfmgmgg
Edit 2: this can only reach its full potential in the director's cut btw
I'm sorry but i will die before i sacrifice my grenade pockets
i wanna try it though, maybe later
i bit the bullet and tried this, and the resultant discovery that BB is a badass and that hyper jumps are amazing has sold me completely. I also got the upgraded stabilizer, so grenade pockets are back on the menu
I'm going to have to wait. It will presumably be PS5-only on release, and the come out on PC with the $60 price tag, so it will be like 4 years until it's at a reasonable price on PC.
Hol' up
Why am I just now learning Kojima was involved in this game?
Welp...
I guess I know what I'm playing after I get done screaming inappropriately loud after I get bullshitted for the 10th time in a row in Elden Ring DLC.
"Why is it always weak foe?"
Kojima was more than just involved; it might be the most Kojimary Kojima game ever made.
He's like the frontman for the whole thing, how do you miss that lol. It's from his own game studio. He did marketing interviews and everything. It says his name like every time you finish part of the game or something too I think.
It's slightly less in-your-face than MGSV, where every single mission started with "CREATED BY: HIDEO KOJIMA, DIRECTED BY: HIDEO KOJIMA, WRITTEN BY: HIDEO KOJIMA"
I think the only game I've played for more than an hour in the last 3 years is Elden ring
Oh yeah, God of War as well
Kinda been out of the game scene for much longer. I always loved the first 3 MGS games though. I played IV but don't remember much of it and V came along and I couldn't get into it (might revisit that)
I feel like I have to emphasize that while this game is awesome, i feel like any given screenshot and even certain sequences in the game will misrepresent just exactly what kind of game this is.
It's a logistics game with an action coat of paint and some cosmic horror themes. It is not an action game strictly speaking. There is a lot of walking around, picking up resources, building stuff, delivering stuff, and there is only some amount of shooting things and being a punchman gunboi
The traversing the terrain stuff can feel somewhat actiony, at least before you get the final upgrades. And the story has lots of "scripted" action sections with the BTs. But I agree. But even the guns and action stuff is so well done.
Something people don't bring up enough about the game is just how amazing the controls and animations and sound effects are. Everything just feels so perfect. There are so many games that mess up basic keyboard controls (although the director's cut doesn't let you bind vehicle controls to arrow keys 🤬). It's one of those games that's just nice to play because you don't have to constantly fight the controls or wait for tons of stupid animations to play (although there is some of that).
I was playing Elden Ring recently and both the keyboard and gamepad controls suck. Simultaneously overcomplicated and too simplistic. I don't know how you can mess up game controls so badly and still get so much praise for the end result. The game has two different overcomplicated "shortcut" systems for using secondary items and they both suck and are difficult to use. I feel like I spend half my time just fighting the controls. In Death Stranding, not only is the equipment system decent (ok it actually could be a lot better still, pretty clunky), but it also has some animations and nice sound effects and animated UI elements.
In DS they knew you would be spending a lot of time in menus and so they made an unparalleled menu system that is easy and efficient to navigate. Kojima always makes sure things like that are just right in his games.
I have to agree with some caveats. I wish screens pertaining to performance eval and stuff were a bit denser, and I feel like i really would've liked some interface options for manually managing cargo that wasn't just "drop and pick up in the order I want, auto-sort, or fuck myself"
Watching my partner play through this in the early days of the first Covid lockdown here was a fucking surreal but kind of hauntingly perfect experience. Kojima is basically this era's Nostradamus.
I am a big fan of the post Konami Kojimbo, death stranding was interesting to me even before release and when I finished it for the first time I felt the sense of emptiness that it was filling. Incredible atmosphere and world not similar to anything. Characters that all have their own puny motivation, and the scene of
Tap for spoiler
Sam punching the shit out of Higgs while venting his frustrations was incredible.
I am awaiting for DS2.
The game came out when I was really into low roar and the vibes hit perfectly at the time. Game made me feel really emotional and i don't know why.
I've been looking for a reason to start up the directors cut version on a new save, sharing structures sounds like fun although I'll be all the way back at the beginning.
If you like this give mgs and zone of the enders a go. Death stranding actually helped me appreciate Kojima more in his other games.
Picked it up free on epic last year I think, but sadly the game kept crashing for me after finishing what I think was the tutorials (around 4-5 hours?) so I couldn't experience it.
