Really wanted to like this game, I thoroughly enjoyed the first death stranding game. We started playing this game immediately after playing God of War Ragnarok, which was very well written, with very believable characters and very little suspension of disbelief. Unfortunately, death stranding 2 hit us with quite a few story writing decisions early on that just rubbed us the wrong way and took away a lot of fun from the story.
Being parents of young kids ourselves, having your first ever babysitter berate you with a smug face that her app had solutions for all problems, and then within a couple of hours get your 10 month old kid killed that you have just spent 9 months caring for on your own would destroy you world. That would take a lot longer than 1 month of drinking beers to get over. Continuing immediately with the plan to extend the network to australia without any word about what happened to lou just feels wrong in every way. And for the love of god: please stop shaking babies to “soothe” them.
The game took quite a while to get started. Somehow the story doesn’t really take off in the first 12 hours up until all characters are introduced. 19 hours in, it’s clear that the game is more of the same from the first game, very similar structure and little deviation from the things you have already witnessed before. The story feels almost paused during the midsection of the game, resorting to encounters with random higgs and his random mech army without real motivation other than ego driven revenge on sam and fragile that feels irrelevant to the storyline.
We also have to talk about the reduced difficulty of this game. There are some points where the game is able to force you into BT territory to achieve an objective, but more often than not it is possible to just completely circumvent any encounters by just walking around the perimeter and entering the area from the other side. Being able to just revive mid boss fight without consequences and continue chipping away the life bar also feels like a bit of a cheat.
For me, having the Magellan ship following you around after each delivery takes away from the feeling of loneliness and hardship of the porter fantasy. I still vividly remember well the sense of accomplishment after the beautiful long treks on foot in the first death stranding, and walking away toward the next phase without any others near you. I understand the game needs to be accessible to a wide audience but if I remember correctly, the feeling of loneliness was one of the important design tropes that Kojima held in high regard during development.
I have to give credits for the visuals, the game looks great. The draw distance is insane and the details in waterfalls in the distance is unlike anything ive ever seen in a game. The intro sequence made you guess in a couple of frames if you were looking at a real video.
I finished the game in about 39 hours. I was relieved that in the final hours the game finally manage to achieve a little story progression and character development, arching back to sam’s loss(es). Still, it felt like some of this story contents could have been told much earlier and could especially development of the side characters could have been a lot more interesting. What was up with dollman? How did tomorrow turn into a half-bt? What was up with Tarman and his son? What was higgs trying to get at? The story leans heavily on the japanese strangeness which I can handle since that was what I liked about the Metal Gear series, but here I’m afraid we’ll have to wait for answers in the next installment of the franchise.
TABLE file.cday as Created
where contains(file.outlinks, [[]])
SORT file.cday DESC