You need to play MGS 5. the story is incomplete. like literally last 1/3rd of the game is not there. but the Gameplay... you have so much freedom, so many mechanics to use... its just crazy. Death stranding has borning gameplay. good story. imo. but MGS 5 still got the best gameplay in 2020.
I can just imagine Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet walking through a portal with Whitelight's logo on his face being like, "The hardest choices require the strongest wills, allow me to demonstrate who's stronger." 😂😂😂
i bought a p4 just play this game. I've been playing everyday since its release, i really love this game. i love slow burn movies, tv and games. i also love really grindy games, ambiguous story, and world. this game is a accumulation of everything i love. its in my top5 games i ever played.
Quite the interesting choice of games not that I disagree, for me I love games that give me a humongous challenge dark souls bloodborne sekiro etc I really like the feeling of beating a boss that not many people can say they beat
When you tell your friends you're gonna watch a movie but in reality you are getting cozy to watch a 2 hour long critique on a game you have no intention of playing. Hell... they wouldn't understand
HAHA I told my friends the same thing!! I had no patience to try and explain why I was blowing them off to watch a 2 hour game critique Again.... they wouldn't understand
From what I understand, Amelie repatriated Lou as she once did Sam. She sent Lou back with her quipu, which is what she's holding all of a sudden. And I *think* that sending back the quipu - Amelie's final connection to the world - cut off her beach from the world, which was the source of the death stranding and the timefall, which is why the color blue is back in the end and the timefall is once again just rain. I think.
I don’t get how a lot of people didn’t get this. It was so obvious... maybe I was just sooo into the game that it was made clear when Lou came back with Amelie’s quipo. And also the beauty of the full circle between Sam’s repatriation and Lou’s. Beautiful story.
I thought this too, but Deadman said she cut her beach off while they were still searching for Sam. But Amelie did say that her and Sam would always be connected, so maybe she still had access to him somehow.
I actually spent a lot of time designing zipline networks and found that the bandwith limitation made it more interesting since you had to think about efficient placing and strategic upgrades, as well as incorporating online ziplines into your network.
100% this! Although God damn some of the zipline placement I saw from my strand players was so shockingly bad I cancelled my strand contracts with them 🤣🤣🤣
1:08:00 I’m pretty confident that the beach “purgatory” sequence is meant to make players experience the extreme loneliness and isolation that Amelie has had to live through for most of her life being trapped on the beach. That kind of living hell makes it understandable why she wanted to bring about the last stranding and end her own tortured existence. And it also makes her decision to cut herself off more powerful since she’s dooming herself to that kind of existence for basically eternity. It’s also implied in dialogue that due to time being perceived differently on the beach that Sam himself was trapped for what felt like years (that’s why he resorted to attempting suicide). I think Deadman says something along the lines of “I don’t even want to imagine how long you felt like you were trapped”. So forcing players to sit though half an hour of slow credits may be a way to emulate that feeling as well.
ezzahhh come on, he explained it very well and you wanna be ‘clever’.... there were definitely good critiques but this wasn’t one. Sometimes there are explanations for story lines.
I just got this game yesterday and my only regret is not getting it sooner. Everyone who I heard talking about this game said if you don’t think you’ll like it, you probably won’t, so I waited 5 years to play it. If you have any doubts about it but aren’t 100% turned off just get it.
@@fariyanahmed6592 this is not an argument though. To label every defense of the game as this only serves as a way to put down ppl who like the game and their relationship with it wich for you to do is incredibly entitled and selfish imo.
I‘d agree. The small steps towards Sam being inspired by NPC‘s opening up and coming out of their hiding hole would have never worked if it was a thing from the first delivery. The game is fundamentally about a isolated man learning to connect with others and to open up after shutting himself out after trauma. It wouldn‘t have worked if it followed the status quo. To do that wiuld ruin the game‘s message i think.
I tried snowboarding down it--while my sister was watching--and Sam fell and tumbled repeatedly for a whole minute until he crashed at the bottom. It was hilarious!
I've tried, I failed, miserably. Instead I got mad and created a huge zipline network that takes up most of my bandwidth all over the mountains that extends from mountain knot to both the mountain distro center and south knot distro center, goes to every shelter along the mountains including the secret prepper near the spiritualist, the other secret prepper near the photographer, and also gets to the elder as well too. All uninterrupted ziplining. I can get from the evo devo biologist to the mountaineer in less than 5 minutes. I was actually lucky enough to get a player made zipline at the mountaineer so that timed section lasted 30 seconds. I feel like I skipped one of the hardest deliveries because some rando made a zipline in the perfect spot. Edit: turns out he talks about that exact delivery!
I think the chiral bandwidth was actually a very smart idea from Kojima. Instead of building my own zipline network I had to integrate my ziplines with the ziplines of others, which makes for a far more challenging and rewarding puzzle. The best part was the return trip at the end. I had spent so much time and care planning my integrated network that I was able to cross the entire mountain range on ziplines, and at the end of my zipline network was my highway. If only Deadman stopped interrupting me every 30 seconds on the way back East...
It's funny how my bike would dead stop for Deadman expositions. Like damn Sam just experienced 20 Gs of force so you can run your fucking mouth thanks bud.
That's what makes the connection functionality so amazing You're on your own, walking through a barren wasteland, knowing that when you make that next delivery, the world will be populated with other people's stuff They all spent time building something, either for themselves or because they knew it would make it easier for others Hell, I finished the road from lake knot to mountain knot in my game because I wanted to see what it looked like When I finished, within 3 days I could see that tens of thousands of people also got to see what it looked like. It was an amazing feeling
The Zipline argument really blows my mind. I've heard this so much, but I think it's crazy. No one get mad at Minecraft because an XP farm "negates" the XP system. It's the work that goes into it that makes it worth it. On a Zipline you have to scout good locations, plan it, get it there, and build it. My two cents.
building your zipline network require a lot of work, bogth to be sure that it work, but also to use existing infrastructure. i think doing that was one if not my favourite part of the game, when i could do the whole endgame zone without ever walking a meter
Yeah but that leads to lower creativity at higher levels. If there were other methods as efficient as ziplines (which there is one other, bike+extreme ramps, although bts are an issue in this method). Ultimately my counter argument is that it lowers end-game creativity when it comes to delivering packages.
Regarding the randomness of the landscape, I’m going to defend it. What you haven’t addressed is the effect that people have when traveling. The more people that choose to take a particular path, the more that path clears itself of obstacles over time, making subsequent travel easier through repetition. Eventually the cleared, easier path is even drawn as a visible trail that you can follow, instead of footprints that can only be seen when you scan the area to see where you and other people have passed. The players actually *define* the routes that are available in any play-though, a collaborative effort that makes everyone’s lives better as long as they choose to follow in each other’s footsteps. It’s like the emergent paths that show up on the grass of college quads or the gaps in parking lot greenery that you’d otherwise have to walk around if you followed the architect’s aesthetic intent. An uncoordinated mass of people all contribute to defining optimized shortcuts that everyone can use, revealing them through repetition. This speaks directly to two major themes of the game: indirect collaboration, and connecting remote areas to make travel easier. You’re rebuilding a chiral network AND a physical network, to make everyone’s lives better. The upsetting and friction-heavy randomness of the landscape is something you can actively improve upon, giving you a sense of accomplishment. You’re fixing an annoyance, the difficulty of travel itself. I haven’t seen anyone discuss these changes in the landscape due to people crossing it, so perhaps it’s subtle, but the “blaze a trail” quote points it out directly. It’s a major focus of the narrative, and one of my favorite mechanics.
Weird... I was talking to my Uber driver the other night about the same general idea, but about the snow where I live. With cars and, on a more personal level (like the game): walking humans. A shin-deep stretch of snow on the sidewalk becomes peppered with one path of boot-shaped holes... Then someone comes by 10 minutes later, subconsciously thankful for a rough trail, while also acknowledging they can kick through those walls of snow between boot prints, carving an easier path for the next person, and so on and so on, until hundreds of "co-workers" have paved the same trail while (often) never seeing each other, "in the act" anyway. Just a cool concept I was surprised to see here, thanks for commenting!
@Peter Kenner - I had just gotten done writing the exact same point that you made (though yours was more eloquent than mine). I’m glad to see that other people noticed the erosion and how it contributes to the “Strand type game” philosophy of the shared actions of people that you will never see or meet making your life easier through collaboration. Where you couldn’t get your brand new bike through to Lake Knot City on your first attempt (not without a lot of difficulty anyhow), it will eventually be eroded to the point where you can squeeze vehicles through. I also loved that the contributions from others towards the highway, the bridges they built, the TimeFall Shelter and Battery Chargers erected for their use as well as others, the post boxes before dangerous areas, the ropes and ladders to assist you on hills and cliffs, the vehicles and weapons left behind that always seem to show up when you need them most, and even people delivering your lost packages for you (as well as connecting their zip line hubs to yours for a shared network in which you might only have one segment in someone else’s roller coaster park, but for that brief moment and location, you and another player have chosen to build upon the plan already set forth. There’s just so much that’s interesting about this and I think it flies under the radar for the vast majority of people who find it a “boring walking sim”, which is crazy (due to the variety of vehicles and weapons, the roller coaster park of ZipLines I built through the mountains and then out to every possible location, the fun of hover boarding down a mountain, etc.). I find this game to be very zen-like and after my first playthrough, I would still return to 5 star deliveries while listening to a CD/Spotify or podcast or stand-up comedy special on Netflix or whatever. I’m not the type of person that would sit down to listen to a podcast outside of traveling already (like in a commute to work or a trip), but this game lends itself perfectly to giving you something interactive to do while making it easy to pay attention to another form of media simultaneously. I’d love to see a sequel, whether it has anything to do with Sam’s story, or perhaps we could see what it looked like if Kojima decided to have someone else work on reconnecting the Bridge Network in Europe or Japan or wherever, or perhaps a prequel that shows us the early days when they didn’t yet understand BT’s and the Beach, and how it went from such a populated world to one man single handedly reconnecting the means of communication across an entire country. Such an underrated game.
@@nanoplasm this is why I hate “oh this is just lazy game design” arguments. As if they have any fucking clue. Maybe the reviewer is the lazy one, too lazy to grasp what is put right in front of him. It’s a little infuriating. I love this aspect of the game and actively partake in it to try and cut shorter more ideal paths. For someone to chalk it up to laziness because they literally are too stupid to understand such a simple concept is obnoxious
I guess being the kind of guy who goes everywhere on foot and horseback in Skyrim, navigating by the signs. This is my kind of game. Though I may try to shoot her at the end too. That said I have Red Dead 2 to play first. Very thorough. Glad you made it.
Yeah like Dutch having a plan. No for real, be careful man. Someone spoiled a big story driven moment for me. Especially after waiting eight years for Rdr2. And the first game ending got spoiled for me as well. Right before I got there myself. Someone told me, just like that. Didn't even had a chance to stop him.
@@Frank-kq4te games like red dead 2, skyrim and witcher3 are filled with intresting to find and encounter. death stranding is empty so theres no point in taking.
@@John-996 The problem is not that in my opinion, the problem is that the game doesn't want you to take things slowly, it always pressures you not to take things slowly, with timing score, mules that tracks you, you are not entitled to enjoy the landscape because is filled with shit other players builds. So it is a game that is about "slow walking" and still everything the game does is giving you elements and mechanics to prevent you to have "slow walks".
I'm not a Kojima fan, I honestly have a lot of mixed feelings about Death Stranding but I actually liked Bridget's death scene. Not loved but liked. I liked the symbolism between her and the BT's how they leave handprints. And the wires that look like the umbilical cords to the beach.
Yes, it's shot like she's a monster, and knowing that the main character has a major phobia of being touched adds to that characterization in that scene. It's quite deliberate. But we must have Kojima Syndrome I suppose...
Oh really?....all this time I thought Death Stranding was made on the Fox Engine 🤔....But yes, it is indeed a well optimized engine to run well even on less powerful hardware. I had a GTX 970, and the game ran so smoothly and beautifully without any stutters or hick ups, and looked so crunchy with punchy colors, as if it was running on HDR!...It just looks stunning and next gen! On a side note; maybe DS isn't so high on the fun factor, but I really appreciate what Kojima was trying to do with it. He wanted to tell a mature and emotionally desolate story, with all of its intricate details. From the weight of the cargo on your back to his feeling of exhaustion, down to every drop of rain and every step you make on the smallest rock....you feel it all. Heck, I felt so physically drained just playing it for a couple hours. It's a heavy game!...Kojima's views on games as a medium is maturing, and it shows!
You're actually so right, especially on the why should you save America. Honestly i kept hoping I'd bump into a community at one point in some bunker or they'd have this whole underground city waiting for us to finish connecting the network. But with the exception of curiosity and wanting to see what happens, most of the time you don't get any impulse to keep going. There's rarely an incentive to continue, especially in the first half making trips on the same areas, bumping into hidden walls and limits.
Florin I think what was intended was for you not to want to help America for America’s sake, but for Amelie’s. Sam even says this outright many times throughout the game. It just so happened that they failed to make you want to save America for Amelie’s sake
I kept waiting for that too. Especially at lake knot I saw some trucks way back at the wall into the city and looked forward to being able to go in there and not just the distro
Michael Williams No? Florin said that he agreed with Stephens that he felt no incentive to help America for America’s sake. I said that i dont think they ever intended for you to feel an incentive to help America for America’s sake, but instead for Amelie’s sake and that they also failed to do that. How are you getting that me and Florin are saying the same things that warrants a “he literally just said that” response?
I want to preface this by saying that I generally like and I agree with your critiques on other games. Saying that every design choice you disagree with is "Kojima Syndrome" is lazy and moronic. It's fine to express that you don't like how something was put together is fine. But implying that people only like it because of Kojima's brilliance is missing the entire point. I've never played a Kojima game before and I can say that the emptiness and randomness of the world combined with the music and the narrative made the world feel natural. Even if you don't find it enjoyable, it achieves something that is DIFFERENT. Not everyone likes that, but saying that I only enjoy it because I suffer from "Kojima Syndrome" is an idiotic critique. From my perspective, if the environments had a clear way of navigating them, the game would not be enjoyable. The gameplay is planning a trip, fabricating the proper equipment, and dealing with challenges along the way. It doesn't have to be like other open world games to be good. I love the Witcher but this is not the same type of game, nor should it be. Having an unpredictable and difficult world was the goal of the game. If you don't like it that's fine. I also completely disagree about the opening of the game. For me, the mystery of the world hooked me. Of course you can simply pick apart every detail and make fun of things for not making sense, but the story effectively ties together those moments and discovering the answers to those questions is what drives the player to complete more deliveries. Obviously there are parts of the story that could be done better. I completely agree with some of your critiques about the way certain sequences were handled like the weird end credits scene. TLDR: Calling everything you dislike or don't appreciate "Kojima Syndrome" is stupid. People appreciate games for different reasons.
I would also point out that one in four people dropping the game in the first few hours is normal if it were higher say two in four, then that would be telling.
Liking a game that makes you walk slowly and balance your self using l2 and r2 for hours for nothing interesting is stupid. There’s not some grand deeper meaning it just completely sucks
Enjoy wholeheartedly with your comment. The thing I love about Death Stranding is that with most game you are mindlessly holding down a toggle to get to the next mission or point of interest, whereas death stranding the navigation IS the most interesting part of the process. The journey is the challenge, arriving at your destination is more of a break where you can finally take a breath. It completely flips the formula around compared to most games. It really is more about the journey than the destination and I love that.
Very thought-out critique and a good one, too. Although I felt that you used your term 'Kojima syndrome' for many things, which - when it comes to interpreting the game - could also just be made in favor of the game without being overly attached to a positive view of the game and its creator. That part I kinda found a bit too easy and reliant on the same type of argumentation, because it feels like categorically devaluing any kind of interpretation that is not negative. Anyway, good video :)
@@Threesixtyci You're not wrong lol this vid was kinda rough even though some valid points were made. As another poster said: "Kojia Syndrome isn't really a thing".
The world was built to make you feel isolated and alone therefore hammering home the point of needing to build connections. In my opinion it was conscious design choice and not laziness. This game was made to be vastly different than other triple a titles
Agreed. Wether things would have been different without limitations, this was the entire symbolic identify of the game. It’s not supposed to feel alive.
The hug at the end is important because Sam has that weird phobia about touch. He doesn’t like others to touch him all game long. He is retracted from everyone. At the end he connects in the real way by human touch.
I looked at it another way: People are evil in their nature and it is actually hilarious that the first thing we ALL want to do is shoot. You think it is intended for you to hug her? Why then give the choice? Shoot, death, or hug, CONNECTION. I mean it literally teaches you to be “human”. So it was intended for you to shoot, so that the game can show you, that it is not the only way to deal with your problems, by just asserting to the violence.
@@lolkek6807 totally agree with that. Because the end game felt so combat focused (with all the BT, Cliff and Higgs fights, I was in this fight-or-flight approach to everything that was “alive”, so when it gets to that moment with Amelie, I first tried shooting all my bullets in the air to see what happens. Because this didn’t work, I resorted to shooting, and failed twice. By the forth attempt, I holsted my gun and ran to punch her 😂 but then I saw the hug command and I was like “damn, and here I am trying to kill her. Sorry, world”
1:15:00 I think it’s implied that Amelie revived Lou, much like she revived Sam. You can see Lou holding Amelie’s quipu when she comes back to life. (A lot of people think that Lou grabbed the quipu pin that bridges staff started wearing, but Sam doesn’t wear one and the one Lou holds is clearly a necklace, not a pin.) Right afterwards the Death Stranding is shown to have ended, so Amelie reviving Lou and sending back her quipu was her parting gift for Sam before she cut herself off from the world and ended the Deaths Stranding.
At the end of playing this game I was very much done with it; it took too long, got boring and tedious. However, when I think back on it, it is like I think back on a vacation: at the end of the vacation you desperately want to go home, but thinking back on it, you start to appreciate the time you had. These thoughts and feelings come up when I play the song Give Up by Low Roar, which starts to play in the game after you've just walked for 30/40 minutes through the snow to deliver a package. It was a very beautiful moment. I rarely had a game give me such a feeling.
Exactly my feeling lol, i would still choose the boredom of death stranding over the zone control open world games exploring nowadays, after 1 year i still think of death stranding even though at moments i was bored
I don't get why he had to "get back to that later" in the first place. He only explains maybe half of his "later's" and even then, it's just 1-3 sentences which would've fit in just as well when he originally covered the topic in question.
@@BlackThanator it annoyed me a lot that for the first 40 minutes he would start sentences about some shit only to say "but we'll get to that later" why the fuck would you when you can just ennunciate your full argument later instead of just scattering it around?
@@Yin7094 Lol kind of ironic seeing that the narrative of the game is like this. “Here’s some bizarre thing that won’t be fully explained until much later”
I absolutely loved this game. I was completely and fully immersed, and it's still one of the few games I platinumed in. It took a while to get into it, but once I did - game over, man, game over!
Will it actually let you do that? I have to admit I tried to piss on an unconscious MULE but it wouldn’t let me. So I gave up and threw pee and poo grenades on him lol... I know, I need help
@@trontastic9327 The whole twist/spoiler doesn't really matter when Sam's concern for his 'sister' was in fact, the whole point of the MC's motivation.
@@trontastic9327 even so, it was love that made him cross the United States. And that's the whole theme of the game! His love for his sister was redirected for his mother. He transformed from a cold, unloving character into a loving one.
Unfortunately it’s not really conveyed to the audience through the performance very well at all. One thing I’ve found in the game so far is that most of the celebrities in the game are not well cast. Norman Redus is not a guy you lean on performance wise to carry an isolating experience. He needs people to bounce off of and the person playing Amelie and Del Toro’s deadman aren’t it.
24:10 - honestly i agree with everything here but... this: I actually think the point of holograms is to show how boring life is without actual connections. I also think it serves (albeit maybe unintentionally) to contrast with the reason Sam believes Amelie is real and the people he actually meets. I think this is reinforced by the few times the people from the hologram actually meet u in their bunker, which is meant to feel special. While the birds and other examples require some weird 4D chess logic, this is pretty simple and fits perfectly with the main theme.
Honestly, I don’t mind the advertising and strangeness in the game. I understand that some people don’t like Kojima’s “style” which I don’t believe is actually his style. I find it humorous and something to break the extremely serious tone of most of the game. I have no problem if you don’t like it, that’s your opinion. I, as my own opinion, like it for some reason. Maybe I’m just screwed in the head, but I do like it.
When Lou died, she went to amelie's beach and she revived her just like she did with Sam when he was a BB. That's why lou is holding her necklace when she starts crying.. And DS is finally over because Amelie decided to end it the same moment she revived Lou
I love Kojima’s stuff. And I defend his wackadoo shit with “it’s just his style” but I really loathe his pacing. It’s his weakness, not his style. There are great painters who have weak perspective. Great basketball players who can’t shoot free throws. Great cooks who can’t bake. Kojima is great at making games, mechanics, and conceptual, unique weirdness, but he can’t pace a script to save his life.
Honestly, just kinked out 12 hours of this game in 2 days and I love the pacing. The game does not throw stuff at you like a lot of other adventure games, you get used to each peice of gear and understand it well before you get anything new. story pacing seems to be on the slower side but I don't really care. its a laid back relaxing game.
Indeed, he's an atrocious writer. Great with concepts but hos best work was always achieved with people who were able to refine the concepts and write an interesting story. When Kojima takes over that role it's a mess, he cant really even do basic stuff like beginning middle end. There's no shame in it nobody is a genius at everything I just wish he'd play to his strengths, then find and work with people who compliment his inability to write a story. Which is essentially what he did at konami up until MGS3 iirc.
I haven’t played a Kojima game since MGS2. I think at 19 years old when that game came out, I was too young to sit through the exhaustive exposition at the end, and/or care about any of it. I picked this game up on a whim, and kinda low key loved it. Yes, the entire mountain section should have been way shorter. Way too many goddamn preppers there. I fully anticipated the end of the game being hours of cutscenes so was mentally prepared, and I have to say, it worked for me. While I think it could have been just as impactful if cut in half, it was still effective. I think Kojima is brilliant, but even sone of the most brilliant creators, need a good editor, a good script writer, and at times better localization so the English translations don’t sound so stiff. I agree with Luke that the acting and dialogue of most preppers was bad. However all of the main character stuff was great. He’s attempting to criticize why things make sense or are based in reality, in a game that makes itself very clear from the beginning that this is a FICTIONAL world full of METAPHYSICAL craziness. The entire thing is a metaphor, on top of a metaphor, on top of a metaphor. Unlike other games, which are profoundly grounded in reality, where characters are human and say human things, suspension of disbelief in this world is a given. If you don’t buy it, then fine. I have a friend who play almost exclusively online battle royal. I always encourage him to play more single player stuff, but he never makes it past 3 hours in most games I lend him. HE, is actually the one who turned me onto Death Stranding. He liked the old Metal Gear games so he gave this a chance and he liked it, A LOT. I was shocked, that my friend and I could actually discuss a game for once. I also feel like while Luke keeps criticizing Kojima for being lazy, he takes the same liberties by continually falling back on his self-made phrase “Kojima Syndrome”. There are a lot of flaws in this game, but certain parts are absolutely brilliant. Whether the brilliance outshines the bad will vary based on the player. I played TLOU2 on launch day, and it couldn’t end fast enough. It was literally painful. The longest 25 hour game in history. I fired up Death Stranding after, hoping for a more positive uplifting experience, and if the goal was to get an emotional response from the player when you realize that Cliff was Sam’s father, and BB/Louise was saved.....mission accomplished, because I was a crying mess. Death Stranding didn’t win GOTY, and I don’t think that it deserved to. However, with another year of development, some streamlining of the script, having more revealed in long cutscenes throughout instead of all at the end, and tightening up a bit of the slower middle parts of the game.....it could easily have won.
@@Deeplycloseted435 u might have a point there,I think if Kojima wasn't stupid enough to inform people what kind of game this was and didn't create such vague trailers in the first place, people would have different expectations.Why the hell did Kojima say this game would be revolutionary when he can't do writing and pacing right! If he fixed the atrocitious 50 hour pacing into a 25 hour one without hours of cutscenes at a time it would be atleast palatable for people. Kojima would never be accepted as a film maker if he can't do such basic things right. I doubt he can make a somewhat decent game by himself.
You may call it Kojima syndrome but I have some thoughts on the whole "how to make the start of the game not boring" 33:35 Allowing players to fight BTs from the get go would only kill any tension towards BTs encounters in the early chapters... 34:20 "It should be enough"... That's the mindset which explains why every AAA game starts with an explosive polished opener to then crawl back into bland, boring mediocrity... And now, occidental players act like cranky kids if they can't blow up something in the first 20 minutes. I know we live in a world where attention span gets shorter every year but come on... 35:03 Kojima has shown through the years that if he wants to, he can hook up the player through flashy/interesting gameplay early on (just look at MGS). Seems to me he wanted to start the game with Sam as helpless as possible to establish the danger of his task Edit: 59:50 25% of people not finishing an open world is far from a failure, just look at the trophies on Ps4 for any open world and look at the % of players who finished the story... You'll have 70 to 80% in the best cases 1:00:00 Well, I applied your theory of the first hour needing to hook a viewer / player and since right now 90% of what I heard could be summed up to "I don't like it and if you disagree ... Kojima syndrome", I'll stop watching and leave a dislike... Sorry not sorry.
i agree with this comment. this review is the most cynical take on death stranding i've seen yet and doesn't actually try to explain anything in the game. we don't have to excuse flaws of the game like the poor ass combat with mules and sucky vehicles mechanics, but we should keep in mind that kojima makes games like he makes movies. in movies, no choice is made without a reason, everything is made in the favor of storytelling and rythm of your movie. so i don't think kojima thought about making things easier while making repetitive quests where you have to walk the whole way back. i think it's tedious, hard and annoying, but i also think that it was 100% kojima's choice and that those segments actually served the way you would experience the story, cause if it was any other way, those long cinematics would have far less impact on you. they're better and more enjoyable because of all that you went through.
Out of your 4 points of criticism, only one consists of proper argumentation and critical thought. (the first one). In your second point, you simply attack Luke's statement (that one hour of gameplay should be enough to convince a player that the game is fun to play) which he admits is simply his personal preference, which means you attack him for his completely subjective OPINION, calling him a cranky western kid with short attention span!!! (which is ughhh how to put it... irrational at least?). Your third point is also irrational. Luke is trying to prove that Kojima fails to captivate the player audience (is that the correct term?) in this particular game. This is not a critique of Kojima, or the MGS series, this is a critique of Death Stranding. Therefore, replying with "Kojima has accomplished captivating/flashy intros in previous games" is not a valid response to Luke's criticism to this specific game. To sum it up, in your comment you attack Luke for having a personal opinion and you attempt to justify potential flaws of the game by using Kojima's previous succesful games as an example - in short you seem to validate Luke's 'theory' of "Kojima Syndrome" whilst trying to accuse him for it. Well done.
I thought the same thing about the trophies. Then I dug in a little bit and found the Lou chapter has considerably less earn rate than other open world games like Horizon Zero Dawn, Far Cry New Dawn, Far Cry 5 Far Cry 4, Days Gone and the like. Of course those games have been out longer than Death Stranding so time will tell.
It's a truly bizarre, incomprehensible choice. Kojima did something similar with MGS3- condensing diverse landscapes/environments/wildlife in order to create a sense of diversity and depth in what was an otherwise relatively compressed world map, owing to the limits of the PS2/disc space. Never the less, he always seemed to be willing and passionate about using realistic settings where appropriate (NY in MGS2, Alaska in MGS1, the frankly picture perfect desolation of Afghanistan in MGS5)- not using the actual sprawling and beautiful landscape of the US for.. ya know, the US.. is.. incomprehensible
The only point I strongly disagree with is your criticism of the open world design. It's pointless to compare it with The Witcher's or RDR2's world, because in those games the geography serves a different purpose. Here the terrain itself is the main challenge and not "merely" a tissue to connect various points of interest where the actual challenge happens (while providing a nice visual backdrop). I did not expect nor want to have an interesting encounter every 30 seconds. The barrenness and organic randomness of the world adds a lot to the game's apocalyptic atmosphere. This is not a magical kingdom full of wonders to explore. Here in this fundamentally hostile environment the goal is to get from A to B as fast and safe as possible. I am no Kojima fanboy at all, but this type of world design in THIS type of game works for me better, even if it is the result of "laziness" rather than deliberate decisions (although I really doubt that). I also loved how dynamic the world is: when you build roads and create a large network of zip-lines every remote are becomes just a few minutes away. In short, it's not fair to judge this one by the same metrics as a Witcher game, because despite also having an open world, it is a completely different genre.
1:00:24 I read an article recently that these numbers are quite common for almost any videogam. Many Players just play a few hours, most of them never finish a game, as can also be seen on the percentage of achievements.
Exactly. EA/Bioware recently posted info about Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which a lot of people bought after playing the originals. A huge percentage of people never finish. Same as when Mass Effect 3 first was released and you could view the statistics. Most people don't finish games.
I recently finished this game and absolutely loved the 3rd act (aside from the Amelie/Credits section)...my two biggest critiques that hold it back from being amazing like you said Luke are the pacing (instead of 2 hours of cutscenes with a lot of rehashing) and the double exposition (someone at a terminal would tell you something and then immediately on the codex either that same person or someone else would tell you the SAME EXACT THING)....overall though, I loved it.
My first too. I’m not too far in yet but I’m hooked. I actually liked the first few hours of game. It’s been a while since I got this excited to play a game
@@HasBeensNAddicts yeah havent played it but im really skeptical of these arguments. This guy seems to rely quite a bit on his whole "Kojima effect" argument. It almost feels like he feels the need to critique the game just because its a kojima game.
I'm almost half way through the video and had to pause it and write this comment. Why? "Kojima Syndrome"..... So first of all: "Stockholm Syndrom" is not unspecifically "having good feelings for someone you're supposed to have bad feelings for" it is an emerging form of a paradoxical trust in a situation when somenone blackmails you. Lets not overstretch the meaning of this term. Secondly: You want to criticizes people for making themselves immune to criticism and are willing to defend "everything" Kojima did. But when you throw in "Kojima Syndrom!" the whole time you make yourself immune to different perspectives on the game. So are you not also doing what you criticize here? When you claim: *objectively* this was a bad design choice, you're proven wrong once a couple of people see it another way, right? So you have to discredit them as "fanboys". But maybe there are legitimate perspectives on some of those elements? Maybe the standard to which you hold the game to (aka: public opinion) is debatable? Maybe the game does what it should: making people think (or should it just entertain? We should talk about this!). And sometimes people overthink and read something into it. Fine. But thats not fanboy-ism but the tendency to see meaning where there is none (-> the show "Lost"). But this should not be discussed as fanboyism (ad hominem attack) but as an invalid interpretation. Thirdly: Should be buy into this self-marketing of Kojima? Wouldn't it be more radical to just ignore the fact that this game was made by Kojima? You always use sentences like "Kojima choose to do this and this". Maybe that's not the best way to "read" a game. Instead of talking about "intentio auctoris" - the intentions of the writer - (which are purely speculative) one could talk only about the game itself and what effect it had or what kind of meaning it implied. You don't need to dissect the brain or the psyche of a writer. In hermeneutics, the academic discipline of understanding something (like a work of art) it is the consensus that you should not primarilly focus on the author. The extreme position would be even the so called Death of the Author, where the author is ignored once a peace of art has been released. (Seriously: UA-cam with its pretetions of authenticity and its obsession with personality would need a bit of this "Death of the Author" thing). So basically: by mentioning Kojima the whole time you buy into Kojimas logic and make the game about himself. Maybe the most clever way of dealing with it would be to ask: is Kojima maybe (see the opening scores where the name Kojima is mentioned a ridiculous amount of times ) an implicit (and purely fictional) character in the game itself?
Since Hideo Kojima himself is the oil monster living in every one of Sams private rooms, an undead hallucination that tries to pull sam into ...the oil, to me kinda makes me think that Hideo Kojima sees himself as some sort of Apocalyptic God creature, running the show. I mean, allegorically i think it might be a thing with him.
Loved your critique Luke, I felt very much the same way about the entire experience. I played through the whole game but somehow felt very empty after all of it, I just kept playing hoping there was something more to it. You raised some excellent points I couldn't agree more with your analysis.
I just became a patron! I remember a few years back I watched your Outlast 2 review and really enjoyed your style. I liked it and moved on, but recently you popped up again and I have been going through your back catalogue. Love your content and you have a new loyal listener. Much love from Australia!
Like or hate Death Stranding, you can't really deny Hideo Kojima makes creative games like no other, the way his mind works is truly fascinating and unique...
I will agree with that creative as hell. But the game is trash. Why make something where you the only mofo knows what's going on. Hell he don't even know what's going on
I picked this up for free, actually. Off the Epic Store. I quite enjoyed it. I understand and sympathize with the criticisms towards it. But I never found it "boring". You don't always need to have combat sequences or whatnot. I found something almost entrancing by the slow trudge in the beginning of the game.
Bandwidth, my zipline network connects to every single spot, you need to 5 star each person. There are 3-4 locations that aren’t story related you’ll find if you explore, like the novelist’s son, the first porter, the musician.
@@dreamedweaver7676 the game has a couple of secret spots. I know about the Hori gate on a small mountain near the Timefall farm and there's ofc the hot water wells, which most are easy to find. But you still have to do a little exploring. Regardless, exploration is mandatory since you need to know the lay of the land to find the most efficient travel routes, especially to elude timefall rain, and setting up proficient ziplines. The map alone isn't enough.
85h hours played. I loved the game, far from perfect and many small things annoyed me, but in the end i was pulled in and captivated by the world and story. 8.5/10
I just couldn’t get into it. This game was the worse ps4 game sales in the history of Sony exclusives. Didn’t even sell half a million copies. Numbers don’t lie it sucked.
hanselthecaretaker About the 30 second rule and randomization, they probably didn’t think a game about delivering packages over various types of terrain would necessitate the exponentially greater effort involved in hand crafting a world. As it is, Kojima went from square one (no company, no engine, no dev team) to the end product in under four years, whereas it often takes longer for many well established, hugely staffed studios to put out far more derivative work than this in terms of gameplay systems, story, themes, etc. Having said that, the world itself in MGSV doesn’t really adhere to the 30 second rule either. There it’s more about giving the player gameplay tools to create their own fun in pre-established maps, with a handful of collectibles.
I really enjoyed Death Stranding and even can argue some of the points you made. I can't really have Kojima Syndrome when I've never played any of his other games (heard of Metal Gear but thought it was a COD type game), not even PT, or even knew who he was before seeing one of the last trailers for this game. I know you said you liked the game, but Kojima Syndrome isn't a thing. Sure there are fanboys, but that's with anything.
Respectfully; you have no valid basis to say kojima syndrome isn't a thing. Youre like a person without diabetes saying diabetes isn't real because it doesn't affect you. Anybody whose delved through kojimas past stories feels kojima syndrome when they play this game. Kojima is like Stanley Kubrick his fingerprints are recognizably distinct and present in all of his works. If you've only ever played policenauts from the early 90s; you can come to this game and see kojima in it clearly. Now that you've played this game you can see it too in his other works and some of it youll like but you might roll your eyes once or twice at other shit.
Your complaint at 1:40:00 about batteries is silly. I mean yeah batteries could last longer, but this was totally on you. The game tells you that driving through water drains batteries faster and you chose to drive through multiple streams on a level 1 truck. You clearly made no effort to build roads there which would completely negate the fact that batteries exist. And my personal favorite part of this: You had a PCC. You could have gotten out before the stream and built a generator. This game can be punishing if you're not prepared, but you ignored gameplay mechanics and suffered for it and complained it was the games fault.
Just one time I wanted to actually experience these "knot cities". I get that Kojima only spent 3 years on DS, but it would have added so much to be able to descend into at least a single city to see what life is like. The holograms come off as extremely lazy and off-putting to me. I've played budget games like Vampyr with more lively NPCs. Also I heard rumours that Kojima is super into that Japanese girl, and made this scene partly as a fanfiction for himself. It doesn't help that she is showed playing with children's toys. Man that entire segment is creepy and hilariously dumb.
@Ryno Ebert That's great, I'm sure Kojima put all of his passion into that sequence and it's awesome that you enjoyed it. I wanted to like it as well, but it was too rushed and poorly acted for me to develop any care for the characters. And I thought the artist was his adopted daughter on account of her playing with toys to lullaby tunes. So yeah, didn't really work for me. As for the holograms, I do understand their reasoning and I'm not saying every person should be a full fledged character. But it would have added tremendously to have a few more people physically present, and maybe access to even just one neighbourhood in a knot city. It could give a better insight into the loneliness and apathy felt down there beyond just words and emails.
I wanted A city too. Kojima already spoke saying he’ll make A sequel if people want it. Hopefully, we address the company and the cities! I knows it’s an apocalyptic world, but surely after the connections throughout America it can be A real possibility to be in cities and have A live community.
After finally finishing it I could finally complete this video and I gotta say I do agree and disagree. I mean especially the bare bones environment issue does resonate with me but also I feel like it‘s the case because maybe the players are supposed to be the focus aka player structures. I mean the game itself is all about connecting. And it does connect you genuinely and restricts it so it won‘t be abused by trolls or something. And I do love the fame for this. It makes every structure so much more worth it cause you know someone will also appreciate it. Also about the story, I feel like it‘s about Sam learning to let others in and the lore kind of serves as a metaphor at least for me. I mean Sam was traumatized as a child by being ripped from his father and abused imo by a lonely adoptive mother and the story does show us Sam‘s memories in the „woumb“ wich i see as a reference to what Mama said before her death. Wich reminds him of his trauma with his father and how this loving protectir was ripped away. And I feel like the BT‘s are a metaphor for Sam being scared of any connection and so BT‘s become a nightmarish way of connection Sam wants to avoid actively to avoid pain. And slowly the game transforms from a isolation world where people never open up too much and don‘t even show themselves, to ppl starting to opening up to Sam and coming out of their bunkers mirroring sam by also leading by example. This begins with the artist imo and was very satisfying to me. Then this stuff becomes more and more prominent and sam is trying to open up a bit more. This ofc then esxalates to the finale where Sam has gone from a scared isolated man to someone with a big friend group trying to do what he sees as right for not only himself but everyone else as well. And his final teat is the BB death one. Fragile at first is disappointed Sam has regressed back to the old sam so we aren‘t sure if he‘ll actually Burn BB. But the final part is Sam saving BB aka setting the child free of isolation and it‘s barrier and allowing it to be alive. Truely alive. And so this is how all the BT stuff stops. It represents, at least for me, Sam finally overcoming his fear of true human connection by deciding to keep and protect Lue instead of killing her. And this may not make much sense literally, but do stories have to be literal? Or can they be metaphorical as well withour being labeled imperfect for it? I feel like this is what Kojima means about Americans not understanding art and yes i do also frown at the sponsor bs that is inexcusable imo. But in general I would agree with Kojima here and I‘m not even a hardcore stan of his. In fact this is my first Kojima game and I still LOVE it. To me the game means something because it‘s unique, relaxing, deep, abstract and fun! And I do value it a lot for that. More so than any shooter I played. Not even Bioshock gripped me this much cause I do personally prefer idyllic game worlds cause my pain condition makes grungy horror/ugly worlds in games emotionally painful to play through. So I do love Death stranding also for not being horror esque 24/07. I mean generally I just see the game as a experience that symbolizes Sam‘s journey to open up and to start to live and do so out of his own will. And the ending does exactly that so satisfyingly. Sam has gone from ding with he‘s told by others with no emotions or care for others to a loving father who choses to go against the government to save his loved one and give her a life. He stopps the BT‘s because connection to him has become a positive. And with freeing BB like I said, he‘s freed himself. He made a choice to connect without someone telling him to. He made it as an active choice, and so he‘s finally freed himself. And I just find this absolutely beautiful. Especially cause I can relate so much to Sam. I too struggle with trusting others and connection and I also do fall into the traps of isolation so I do feel connected to sam in that way. But that‘s enough rambling. Still love the video though.
You keep talking about how other game worlds feel more "alive" .... you do realise the world is supposed to feel empty and dead as hardly anyone can see the threat so they hide in bunkers and the world has reclaimed everything, the world itself is your biggest enemy... and it still manages to be very beautiful. The overall experience of this game was refreshing to me and the only issues are most people have a comfort zone that is too narrow to opnmindedly experience things. My only complaint is that it can be easy once you get the hang of it and properly customize your backpack... but all games are that way so ita not a big deal to me
Every other point made in this video can either be summed up as "I am seemingly entirely ignorant as to why this is designed this way, therefore it is lazy, boring and bad" or "I am going to bring up a statistic now, watch as I jump to a conclusion based on said statistic, that confirms my bias without considering any other angles".
1:17:30 The pro-choice movement would love this guy lol Also the truck stopping the river was 100% your fault for boosting the whole way, your get like 2x-3x further without boosting the whole way, part of the game loop is the preparation for your journey and you should have brought a PCC with you or built a generator grid infrastructure. Building up your world is the most satisfying part of the game in my opinion so making the range infinite would defeat the purpose Another thing, if your transporting a human you can take a bath with them in the hot spring, I was carrying mama and she was pretty much dead at like 10% HP but after we took a bath she went to 100% HP
When you say that you don't really feel a connection to the America that you are supposed to be rebuilding, I think that is the point. Amelie and Die Hardman's America ends in basically extinction and everything is surface level hence the holograms. The couple you help get back together literally break up later even though it was supposed to be emotional. But what you end up realizing is that the real America is the friends you make along the way. The connections that you form with deadman, mama, heartman, fragile and lou are the real thing that you want to save and the end is basically made so that you can realize that. It's basically a critique of the shallow relationships that we form over social media.
3:10 I feel this way about every game, ESPECIALLY ones that I enjoyed. If we lose our ability to be objective and constructively critical, then we're sending a message to developers/studio heads/publishers that any shortcomings either don't exist, or are not worth seriously analyzing and addressing. That means any issues most likely won't get addressed in the next title.
I haven't played Death Stranding, but I love seeing videos about it. I do like your content, and even if I don't agree with some of your reasonings, I don't close myself to hear any sort of critique about the things that I do enjoy, because one way or another, they bring some insight about stuff that I didn't pay attention to, and of course, people should learn to hear about different opinions instead of just listening to what they want to hear. The only thing that I can add for future videos, Kojima related or not, is to avoid the constant "syndrome" or "I already see people in the comment section saying this and that", because that might make you look like some kind of pretentious person, while also trying to imply that other's "don't get" what you are trying to say; because of course, it can work both ways.
Personally, I found the first few hours to be my favourite part of the game. After that point the story seemed non-existent and when it eventually showed up it didn't interest me. In retrospect, apart from the opening hours, I found the rest of the game fairly forgettable. I found the scene where they are in the back of the truck and the first reveal of the giant BT and the void-out to be the most tense cut-scene in the game (and my favourite), I got Blade Runner vibes somehow. After the first boss and once it got to Chapter 3 (I think) it all kinda blends together for me aside from a few cool scenes like travelling across the sea/lake/whatever by being spotted by the BTs to get all the buildings to appear etc. The game itself I found really relaxing and fun but as more layers got added I just became more bored and I enjoyed it most at its simplest. Really didn't care for the massive boss fights either. Essentially just massive damage sponges and seemed kind of pointless. I really enjoyed the soundtrack as well, especially when it swelled up at the right moments while traversing over the land. The social elements were convenient sometimes as well but I never really liked the implementation of these asymmetric elements, they just cluttered up the environment and ruined it for me. I just liked seeing the unadulterated landscapes as I slowly worked my way through it.
i loved this critique! u said so many of the points that i was thinking of while playing the game. this is one of ur best videos in my opinion. keep up the great work.
As someone who never played a single Hideo Kojima game before Death Stranding and loved the game from the start I feel like this guy talks too much about how people are held captive by Kojima.
Your reliance on “Kojima Syndrome” dilutes your entire argument - PS, I have no interest in any of Kojima’s work, haven’t played a single one and don’t care to try any of them. I like watching your videos because I like to hear your thought process regarding the IPs, not because I have played the game or care for them (I enjoy this because I’m a Product Designer, so it’s useful). Around the 1:35:00 mark you are speaking about “moments of interest” and the average duration between them etc. I’ve seen your other videos with this kind of analysis (like RDR2 and Witcher 3). But in this instance you found the randomness quite shocking, even appalling. “How could they be so lazy?”. See I think the main issue is that you have anchored all your points around one assumption: that there is a “best” most “optimal” kind of goal for a video game - this being that it should maintain someone’s engagement, and reach a minimal level of excitement. Lets momentary replace your assumption with another one, lets say - A piece of WORK should be rated by how well it achieves its original vision. Now, when rating the randomness of the landscape, perhaps Kojima’s vision was to create the most lifelike landscape to scale in a virtual game. To be honest, from what I have heard and seen, it seems that is actually their goal. From my distant point of view, to me, it seems that Kojima’s goal was to create something that was outside the bounds of typical gaming, to try and merge it closer with abstract art or an interactive movie. If we take this assumption, the “true to life” random landscape makes more sense, the placement of random ads makes more sense, the use of all the A list actors makes more sense, and the (terribly written) long monologues makes more sense. TLDR: I like your work, I don’t care for any of this guy’s games, and I feel that your entire argument has a flaw, and that it is based around the assumption that the best way to rate a game is by how entertaining it is. It is VERY possible that Kojima’s goal was NOT to do this. Based on how much hype is around him, my hunch is that he wanted to try and “mature” the concept of what a video game could be. (Not saying he did reach this goal however).
Dude, usually i like your videos but this one was straight up hand waving and telling anyone who disagrees with you is a fanboy. Some people can like a certain mechanic without it being "Kojima Syndrome". If at any point in making an argument you have to stoop to insults to dismiss your oposition, your arguement was weak from the start. It seems like because you had fault with something, the whole game is at fault and not yourself. Your math doesnt really amount to anything either and seems extremely flawed and down right biased in certain instances. Small sample sizes isnt enough to prove your point
I played the whole game and somehow found myself delivering other people's cargo for hours. Point being this game makes you feel better knowing you and others online are helping one another
I started playing it solo, and it really kind of fucking sucks. I don't have PSN, so when I got to central there's no help from others for anything, so the highway I have to build entirely by myself. And that's a shitload of resources.
@@symbolicjohnson7 Really? Because on the exact same console I can't use any of the online features in DS, but when my buddy signed into his account with PS+, there they were.
@@JZStudiosonline Weird. Shouldn't be the case. Death Stranding online component is free. Try to check and adjust your game settings, maybe it's set to offline.
i played through death stranding, having actually NOT been intrigued by it and it convinced me otherwise. as i started playing, at first i was still skeptical and then something happened around the 10 hour mark. when i saw my first highway, i was floored. the game felt truly remarkable and the way that it actually immersed you in the desolate world by starting off in a grinding slog of a way actually ended up really working for me. the major flaws for me were the meandering plot and the beach at the end. it is not the type of game that usually satisfies me and yet i thought despite its flaws it was great and i competed it, and i rarely complete games
Regarding Map-Size. That's unfortunately a design-flaw of all open world Games, where you can always travel huge distances, even climatical zones within minutes, even Horizon, Witcher 3 (Games I love) are guilty of this ....So I don't blame Death Stranding too much here. But a better approach to this would be to have connected "Hub" Mini-OpenWorlds like Metro Exodus does, where you can imagine the distance between them thus creating a much larger world in the end than an single openworld can deliver. I don't know why more Game Developers don't chose this approach. Maybe "OpenWorld" was just a hyped buzzword for sales.
Ending Spoilers When faced with the decision to either allow the final extinction to occur or to cut off Amelie and delay it, I lowered the gun and went out to the water to join her in an attempt to choose the apocalypse instead of shooting/attacking her in some way which I figured would cut her off and halt the final stranding. I was left pretty surprised and disappointed to learn that doing the exact thing she told you would trigger the apocalypse-- joining her and waiting-- results in her changing her mind and delaying the inevitable. It actually took me until the point when your friends rescue you from the beach to fully realize that that's actually what happened bc up until then I had seen the earth burning in the background and had spent a while seemingly dead and alone with her on the beach. I didn't like most of the few characters and most of the other survivors are irritating or kind of assholes so I figured get it over with. Great breakdown as usual
The reason Kojima is so beloved by his fans is the MGS series. Arguably some of the best games of all time. I don’t agree with everything he does, but his body of work certainly deserves respect.
You nailed it on kojima needing oversight , I’m a old school fan and I’m his biggest critic , I love all his games but , for many years I got sick of his shit , doing what he wants , I was so upset with him that I gave up on him , but I seen that maybe he was older and wiser and still decided to play his work , but I agree with so much of what you said , he completely needs oversight , or he will just do what he wants , it’s been proven over the years that he does !
I really do agree with you that first impression of this game is very important, my fist exposure to this game’s game play is people showing off infrastructures they built in game, instead of the fist two hour of the actual game play. This difference means that I know there is more game play beyond the rather boring first region, and gave me initiatives to keep on playing. This was then rewarded when I started help building highways in game, then the positive feedback loop kicks in and I’m completely sucked into the game.
Outstanding video, Luke! You earned another Patron :) While I agreed with your critique, I'd like to offer my humble perspective on the world design: The random terrain and lack of pre-built roads encourage players to make their own paths and become invested in the world. I believe the gameplay feature of a dirt path appearing on the ground as you use the same route to be evidence of this. I personally fell in love with trailblazing as I "5-starred" the different preppers, because I made every choice how to get to them, regardless of if it was a meta option like a zipline to the front door or a complex bike trail through the woods. Years of staring at mini-maps and fast travel have made me complacent and this showed me how much fun using navigation equipment and planning trails can be :)
- I agree with your notion that 1 hour should be enough to determine a game - but i am also a father.. and i cant keep up with new game releases... so if the first hour sucks i may drop the game. That being said.. i loved death stranding. - It is funny - i did not mind the dialog between the Japanese woman and the scrapper. But then.. i am not a native English speaker, so I dont hear my language being butchered. - on the note of exploring: I some times went out and tried to find alternate paths that would be more safe.. does that count as exploring? - Also i played offline because i didnt want the other gamers to ruin the route planning which was what i found the most enjoyable :) - I found the fist fight with Higgs pretty hilarious. So i liked it... But i may have Kojima syndrome - The cut scene filled ending i actually enjoyed.. The Cliff Hunger reveal to be the father struck me real hard.. but i am also a father and could easily identify with him in that regard. - I agree with you... i did not find it intuitive to hug her... which is also a downer.. but i narratively i did like the ending - I do not agree that Kojima does not touch upon the implications of the BBs being treated as things - all of Cliff Hungers flashbacks is discussing this.. and he dies for his son - and i guess technically becomes a being of vengeance roaming the beaches for his son. Sam is also working against BB being seen as a thing, but cant do it too openly as i recall it.. if you get emotions for your BB they will be taken away from you? - I actually didnt find the world "random" the way you did... i put "random" in quotation marks as i do agree it could look Procedural Generation - but i did not mind that there were not a clear designed path. It was actually one of the most enjoyable things about the game to me.. that there were multiple paths, and some times a longer route would actually be the quicker because you would have an easier traversal and avoid obstacles as mules and BTs - I liked the limitations on the chiral network (and i even played offline) - again it forced me to plan with my resources. - Question: Why did you drive into the stream with so little battery left, and didn't park the truck on ground and build a power generator or walked to the nearest hub and got a new vehicle? - Question: did you never meet the roaming porters that offers to trade items? - I agree that the zip lines are way too powerful... i avoided to use them simply because they ruined my fun. Now a few things that i would have loved to be different were that the BTs and Mules were roaming too - IMO its way to easy when you have a marking to show were to expect mules, and once you've gone through an area once you know were the BTs are and can avoid them. Only when i was going back again after linking Edge Knot City - there were BTs places that had not been populated before. It put me back on the edge... I feel the game would have been a lot more interesting if Time Fall always had its risk of BT's - also the fact that you could just clear out a BT infested area and the Time Fall would stop there also bummed me out at bit. Second thing i didn't like is that you get one of the most, if not the most effective means to fight BTs as your first real weapon. The blood grenades are way too powerful a weapon to be given in the beginning if you ask me. I have not completed the movie - thanks for the critique
I love this channel so much, I just binge everything all day, every day. You've reignited my love for gaming and made it stronger in the process. Thank you
Hmm, the whole Kojima Syndrome at least for the first few examples of it forget one thing: context. It's explained why their aren't as many animals swarming the place due to timefall with the same applying to humans not going out of their way to meet Sam. HOWEVER, from a gameplay and time saving perspective, yes, it's most definitely lazy game design. Not all statements are black and white, they can be grey.
For me... somebody on the spectrum... and with ADHD... the game is incredibly difficult for me to focus on, but gods is beautiful, so thank you for making this so I could better understand on what to do in this game.
This is a good thorough review. :-) But sometimes I feel too much of the negative interpretations are just subjective bias on the part of the reviewer. Still a fun watch - thanks for making it! ;)
(Warning: Long text following - I love detailed and elaborate analyses, which is probably what brought me here). I just recently played Death Stranding for the first time, mostly blind, didn't play any other Kojima game before - so I'm pretty sure I am safe from "Kojima syndrome" (in fact, I wish he wasn't such a public figure, because I think him being one often gets in the way of discussing the game itself, which is well worth a discussion). I watched your entire video after finishing a 300+ hour completionist walkthrough of the game. While I agree with many of your points, I also think you're missing some important aspects. Not sure if you're still interested after 3 years, but I'll point them out just in case. :) I agree with your general assessment of the story in many ways - while I really liked the imagination, surrealism, and general weirdness and originality of the setting, as well as the rich lore delivered via the in-game "interview" texts, I also disliked many elements like the constant fourth-wall-breaking, the unimaginative naming of people and places, the lack of good voice direction in many dialogs, the pacing issues, and so on. However, all that did not affect my general appreciation of the game much, and the reason is this: Death Stranding is a triple-A game that unabashedly embraces many ideas that would never make it into a designed-by-committee triple-A title. It is, in its structure and design, an indie title that was produced with a triple-A budget - a game that's mainly based upon one man's vision and imagination (as indie games often are), but with production values that let it reach beyond the audience that indie games are often confined to. Its relation to other triple-A titles is similar to the relation of a decently well-crafted independent movie to Hollywood blockbusters. Personally, I'm often finding designed-by-committee games predictable and boring. They are often okay to play, but they rarely take me to the breathtaking journeys, astonishing new insights, and inspirational ideas that I hope for when I start engaging with a game. I feel that many triple-A titles don't even try to provide such experiences - they can't, they have to play it safe and target a least-common-denominator audience that's large enough to recoup the massive development costs and yield enough profit to satisfy the investors. Death Stranding is a title with triple-A production values that at least _tries_ to provide a unique new experience. Does it always succeed? Certainly not, because some of its parts are objectively terrible (like the performance of the voice actress for the Junk Dealer's wife), and other parts will always stick out like sore thumbs for large parts of the audience (like the constant fourth-wall-breaking). But that's always the risk when you give a very imaginative person with (apparently) poor creative self-control free reign over the complete design of a game. Some parts will be amazing, and some parts will be terrible. Personally, while I certainly acknowledge the game's flaws, I'm more than happy about the unique and original experience that the well-working parts of the game and its story provided. And I wish more triple-A games were willing to take that risk. One point where I find myself mostly disagreeing with you, is your criticism of the world design. I actually _agree_ with you that it feels fairly random - but that's exactly what I wanted, and I'll explain why. Nowadays, many triple-A titles with open worlds follow a very obvious design recipe. They separate their world in a couple regions, and then they e.g. determine that every region has to have one hub city, 3 smaller settlements, 2 dungeons, and 2 jumping puzzles. This design process then creates a very predictable world where, when I enter a new region, I already know what to expect. In Death Stranding, I did not know what to expect, because the world design felt much more random and organic. While the world in Death Stranding is indeed mostly dead and has a lot of repetition in it, it clearly wasn't designed in adherence to pattern such as I explained above. And I like that a lot, I found that quite immersive in fact. And while I agree that the games world design is pretty lackluster in some regard, I still cherish it - simply because it provides an experience that runs counter to the obvious design patterns of many other games that I find disappointing. I don't actually care if this was a "conscious design decision" or a "lazy world-building approach" - I don't think we'll ever know for sure anyway. But whatever process shaped the world of Death Stranding, I appreciate the outcome. I also disagree with you about the zip lines in particular. Yes, they make travel very easy and repetitive. But they also felt very rewarding to me because I planned and created them. The map is full of dangerous areas, and creating zip lines is a solution to this problem that gives full freedom to the player, who can (contrary to roads) decide freely where to build them. Building an efficient zip-line network that lets you succeed with all timed deliveries on "very hard" difficulty (where you only have a few minutes for each), while staying within your chiral bandwidth limit, is a fairly complex puzzle that I enjoyed to tackle and solve. So while they indeed made travel repetitive while doing the last few dozen missions to satisfy my completionist streak, that ease of travel was something that I worked for, that I created and optimized for many hours. Hence, the fact that my zip-line network succeeded in the tasks it was built for felt hugely rewarding. I think the main difference between us is that you, in many ways, were apparently still looking for a traditional type of game - which is fine, there's value in designing games in ways that have proven to work well with most of the audience. But that's why the parts of Death Stranding that don't work so well, really stick out to you. Whereas I was more looking for a game that breaks the mold that the current producers of triple-A games confine themselves to - and as such, the bad or questionable parts of the game's design don't affect me much. An artist willing to tread rarely used paths (or carving new ones) is bound to make more mistakes than others who play it safe and stick to the main roads. That doesn't mean that I deny the existence of the bad parts or try to find ways to reinterpret them as brilliant design decisions, but it means that it's fairly easy for me to not dwell on them and focus on the good things instead. In any case, thanks for spending the time to do such a detailed analysis on a single game. Hugely appreciated - very few people analyse games to the extend and depth that I want. I think I'll have to give this channel a closer look. :)
Great video, really enjoyed it. I am still in the early stages of the games but like it despite some of its unusual quirks. Have to agree that the back tracking can be a bit dull at times.
I think the ads for AMC and Monster drinks were done for funding - removed in update patches now it's got it's PS5/60fps upgrade. As an indie studio, he probably needed initial funding - so while the writing is his style - the ads I can see why they were there and then moved. Not defending it - just looking at the logic of why it was there and now it has been removed. I don't see this as Kojima Syndrome.
The Kojima Syndrome argument was overstated and straw mannish. There is certainly a huge, vocal population of Kojima fanboys out there, people who take MGS "lore" seriously and post misspelled hagiographies on Reddit; but this argument reads as if their mindset is responsible for literally every instance in which DS is defended on grounds that a critic misses the point or mistakes personal distaste for objective issues. The thing is, this was THE defining dynamic in the majority of negativity this game received. The archetypal negative DS review came from someone who felt entitled-by-default to a game that catered to their tastes, refused to engage with the game on its terms, and pinned their bad experience on objective flaws that really don't exist. If the critiques had been valid points about the writing, the fiddly management systems, the patronizing and intrusive tutorial chatter etc there wouldn't have been such controversy. "You just didn't get it" is a deeply suspect argument for good reasons, but it's undeniable that this DOES in fact happen, and it happened at a massive scale with DS. Kojima was kinda right - a large population of monkey brain fast-twitch Western gamers, who need overt action fed to them on tight schedule, lacked the patience and imagination to engage with the intended experience.
The fact that I actually got through that entire review surprises me still. Somehow he made it interesting enough for me to actually watch, not just listen, to most of it.
llirik I felt like there was a fine structure to his commentary. Touching on gameplay when to event. Narrative through out. And design and world when appropriate. But yeah it’s a commentary so it goes at the general structure of the story. It’s not great out of order like this critique can be.
I don’t necessarily think that it’s Kojima syndrome to say someone who is already dying and on life support would have a logical chance of dying after falling out of their hospital bed and ripping out the life support machines in the process. Especially if she has some kind of blood thinning medication in her system even a small fall like that could cause a lot of internal bleeding/damage. Don’t get me wrong I thought it was pretty sudden as well but that’s how I passed it off in my head in my first play through. Never played any other kojima games before either so don’t think I could be considered a fan boy.
I went into the game only watching half of the trailer, and not knowing who Kojima was. I loved it and plan on replaying, one of the best made games i've seen. Only two complaints would be how absurdly easy the game is (played on hard offline) and the character Fragile.
Great video. One reason I watched this was because David Brin, a US SF writer has got it into his head that Kojima has plagiarized his book "The Postman". He was even talking on his blog about getting lawyers involved! This sort of long form review explaining the story of Death Stranding is perfect to reassure myself Brin is talking out of his arse.
1:23:23 Vehicles in the mountains are awesome. I used the truck and trike for the majority of my time traversing the mountains. There were only a couple places that were too steep to use them, but otherwise they helped me traverse routes that avoided a bunch of BTs, and really sped things up. Also, at 1:39:44 when you're showing the range of a truck, could be wrong, but it appears that you're using it in boosted mode (based on the color around the battery icon). Driving in boosted mode drains the batteries incredibly fast. I've taken a fully charged truck across the mountain range with no issue, so if you just drive in normal mode, they work fine.
I never thought about using vehicles in the snowy mountains until i realised that there's no stamina issues, and the trucks roof is even more so the reason to use them
I was so hyped for this game and while I still love it (mostly the brave, bold choices Kojima and Co. made), I was quickly let down and realized that for some reason, I figured this had a GTA or MGSV-level budget when it's obvious not even a third of that.
Atleast he didn’t keep us waiting to long. He could’ve made his own engine, but he said it would’ve taken 4 or 5 years just to do so and he could’ve easily made an action game, but he wanted to offer or society something slow paced that involved A helping help rather than “using the stick” like 90 percent of gaming today.
Janis Daugavietis you are correct except for the Kojima being kicked out of Kojima thing lol it was Konami, but yes, true, he lost all of his stuff so just the same I presume.
My experience can best be summarised as: MGSV: Gameplay > Story Death Stranding: Story > Gameplay I love both games. And when I say "story", I include ludo-narrative assonance/dissonance. I believe Death Stranding's mechanics strongly relate to matching our motivations to those of Sam. This doesn't make a game for everyone, and I don't think you have to be "smart enough" to enjoy it, or that people who do enjoy it are fanboys. I can describe it best as, for me, Kojima delivered the product I was hoping for.
I almost uninstalled it in the first couple of hours as it was painfully slow with so little gameplay. But I'm a cross country runner, and the game creates the same thoughts and feelings when you're running cross country and you're seeing distant landmarks to aim for. The story and characters weren't a hit for me but I would get DS2 if it ever gets made
As is true with everything in the game. I think it's either you like delivering, or like he said he didn't. If you don't then all the rest will seem boring. Since it's all based around it.
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You need to play MGS 5. the story is incomplete. like literally last 1/3rd of the game is not there. but the Gameplay... you have so much freedom, so many mechanics to use... its just crazy. Death stranding has borning gameplay. good story. imo. but MGS 5 still got the best gameplay in 2020.
Luke Stephens will you ever be going back to uploading on sound cloud ? Spotify? The podcast format is dope as many of us just like to listen
And dude you cannot cherry pick the comments you want to show in order to prove your point. Show both good and bad comments. You have much to learn
@@krombopulost4699 what? Mgs5 is not 2020
@@FinneousPJ1 in 2020 we don't have any game with that much player freedom
Whitelight has entered the room
And this one isn’t 7 hours
He wasted my whole day lol
I can just imagine Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet walking through a portal with Whitelight's logo on his face being like, "The hardest choices require the strongest wills, allow me to demonstrate who's stronger." 😂😂😂
@retroFIX Gaming I like them both equally. They are both expert critics
I watched Witelights critique 3 times already😅
i bought a p4 just play this game. I've been playing everyday since its release, i really love this game. i love slow burn movies, tv and games. i also love really grindy games, ambiguous story, and world. this game is a accumulation of everything i love. its in my top5 games i ever played.
Nice
Man I know I don’t know you at all, but seeing you gush unabashedly about what you love and enjoy, has just made my day.
Thank you.
Wholesome comment section
Quite the interesting choice of games not that I disagree, for me I love games that give me a humongous challenge dark souls bloodborne sekiro etc I really like the feeling of beating a boss that not many people can say they beat
You, sir, are kind of a masochist. But you know your way so...
"Tomorrow is in your hands"
When you tell your friends you're gonna watch a movie but in reality you are getting cozy to watch a 2 hour long critique on a game you have no intention of playing.
Hell... they wouldn't understand
HAHA I told my friends the same thing!! I had no patience to try and explain why I was blowing them off to watch a 2 hour game critique
Again.... they wouldn't understand
Does he talk about how the Bridges buildings look like whales?
Well you missed out on not playing cause its great
@@originalcontent8809 lol....
@@stefans.1496 go away no one asked you to say anything
From what I understand, Amelie repatriated Lou as she once did Sam. She sent Lou back with her quipu, which is what she's holding all of a sudden. And I *think* that sending back the quipu - Amelie's final connection to the world - cut off her beach from the world, which was the source of the death stranding and the timefall, which is why the color blue is back in the end and the timefall is once again just rain. I think.
It's a really cool ending
Excellent insight, I would have never connected the dots!
that idea sounds really similar to whitelights commentary on death stranding
I don’t get how a lot of people didn’t get this. It was so obvious... maybe I was just sooo into the game that it was made clear when Lou came back with Amelie’s quipo. And also the beauty of the full circle between Sam’s repatriation and Lou’s. Beautiful story.
I thought this too, but Deadman said she cut her beach off while they were still searching for Sam. But Amelie did say that her and Sam would always be connected, so maybe she still had access to him somehow.
I actually spent a lot of time designing zipline networks and found that the bandwith limitation made it more interesting since you had to think about efficient placing and strategic upgrades, as well as incorporating online ziplines into your network.
I did the same thing, it's sort of a minigame in and of itself.
100% this! Although God damn some of the zipline placement I saw from my strand players was so shockingly bad I cancelled my strand contracts with them 🤣🤣🤣
Totally agreed. I felt the map was carefully crafted so that you need to upgrade most ziplines to level 3 in order to build a fully useful network.
@@1989ry05uke level 3 doesn't add to distance afaik, it only increases durability.
@@viktordoe1636 Was it level 2? I last played a couple of months ago so I don't remember
1:08:00 I’m pretty confident that the beach “purgatory” sequence is meant to make players experience the extreme loneliness and isolation that Amelie has had to live through for most of her life being trapped on the beach. That kind of living hell makes it understandable why she wanted to bring about the last stranding and end her own tortured existence. And it also makes her decision to cut herself off more powerful since she’s dooming herself to that kind of existence for basically eternity.
It’s also implied in dialogue that due to time being perceived differently on the beach that Sam himself was trapped for what felt like years (that’s why he resorted to attempting suicide). I think Deadman says something along the lines of “I don’t even want to imagine how long you felt like you were trapped”. So forcing players to sit though half an hour of slow credits may be a way to emulate that feeling as well.
Aka "Kojima Syndrome"
ezzahhh come on, he explained it very well and you wanna be ‘clever’.... there were definitely good critiques but this wasn’t one. Sometimes there are explanations for story lines.
"You're pretty good."
Nice metaphysical take on it but
It was still dragging as all hell, give me a skip button why don't ya
Deadman even tells him after the president sequence that they were looking for him for a month i think. So you might be right about the passed time.
I just got this game yesterday and my only regret is not getting it sooner. Everyone who I heard talking about this game said if you don’t think you’ll like it, you probably won’t, so I waited 5 years to play it. If you have any doubts about it but aren’t 100% turned off just get it.
I got it two months ago and i loved every second. I cant wait for the sequel and i couldn't finish this video 😂
Most of your criticisms are fair but I would totally argue that the holographic NPCs are central to the thematic elements of solitude and connectivity
Kojima syndrome
We should have had more interaction with other porters, security, guards, those bridges troops... support staff... etc
@@fariyanahmed6592 this is not an argument though. To label every defense of the game as this only serves as a way to put down ppl who like the game and their relationship with it wich for you to do is incredibly entitled and selfish imo.
I‘d agree. The small steps towards Sam being inspired by NPC‘s opening up and coming out of their hiding hole would have never worked if it was a thing from the first delivery. The game is fundamentally about a isolated man learning to connect with others and to open up after shutting himself out after trauma. It wouldn‘t have worked if it followed the status quo. To do that wiuld ruin the game‘s message i think.
@@takke9830 kojima syndrome
In the mountain sections, you can also use a floating carrier to glide down in a very fast way. Like a snowboard.
I tried snowboarding down it--while my sister was watching--and Sam fell and tumbled repeatedly for a whole minute until he crashed at the bottom. It was hilarious!
Reminds me of desert sledding in MGSV lol
I've tried, I failed, miserably. Instead I got mad and created a huge zipline network that takes up most of my bandwidth all over the mountains that extends from mountain knot to both the mountain distro center and south knot distro center, goes to every shelter along the mountains including the secret prepper near the spiritualist, the other secret prepper near the photographer, and also gets to the elder as well too. All uninterrupted ziplining. I can get from the evo devo biologist to the mountaineer in less than 5 minutes. I was actually lucky enough to get a player made zipline at the mountaineer so that timed section lasted 30 seconds. I feel like I skipped one of the hardest deliveries because some rando made a zipline in the perfect spot. Edit: turns out he talks about that exact delivery!
@@BlackPantherFTW goooo zip line !!!! 😉👍
you mean hoverboard :')
I think the chiral bandwidth was actually a very smart idea from Kojima. Instead of building my own zipline network I had to integrate my ziplines with the ziplines of others, which makes for a far more challenging and rewarding puzzle. The best part was the return trip at the end. I had spent so much time and care planning my integrated network that I was able to cross the entire mountain range on ziplines, and at the end of my zipline network was my highway. If only Deadman stopped interrupting me every 30 seconds on the way back East...
It's funny how my bike would dead stop for Deadman expositions. Like damn Sam just experienced 20 Gs of force so you can run your fucking mouth thanks bud.
That's what makes the connection functionality so amazing
You're on your own, walking through a barren wasteland, knowing that when you make that next delivery, the world will be populated with other people's stuff
They all spent time building something, either for themselves or because they knew it would make it easier for others
Hell, I finished the road from lake knot to mountain knot in my game because I wanted to see what it looked like
When I finished, within 3 days I could see that tens of thousands of people also got to see what it looked like. It was an amazing feeling
I raged so hard in the East section though. I understand why they did that, but man my network would have made the return trip a breeze.
The Zipline argument really blows my mind. I've heard this so much, but I think it's crazy. No one get mad at Minecraft because an XP farm "negates" the XP system. It's the work that goes into it that makes it worth it. On a Zipline you have to scout good locations, plan it, get it there, and build it. My two cents.
Exactly
You are supposed to find the best route, you have to work for making your trips easier
building your zipline network require a lot of work, bogth to be sure that it work, but also to use existing infrastructure. i think doing that was one if not my favourite part of the game, when i could do the whole endgame zone without ever walking a meter
100
Yeah but that leads to lower creativity at higher levels. If there were other methods as efficient as ziplines (which there is one other, bike+extreme ramps, although bts are an issue in this method). Ultimately my counter argument is that it lowers end-game creativity when it comes to delivering packages.
Regarding the randomness of the landscape, I’m going to defend it. What you haven’t addressed is the effect that people have when traveling. The more people that choose to take a particular path, the more that path clears itself of obstacles over time, making subsequent travel easier through repetition. Eventually the cleared, easier path is even drawn as a visible trail that you can follow, instead of footprints that can only be seen when you scan the area to see where you and other people have passed. The players actually *define* the routes that are available in any play-though, a collaborative effort that makes everyone’s lives better as long as they choose to follow in each other’s footsteps.
It’s like the emergent paths that show up on the grass of college quads or the gaps in parking lot greenery that you’d otherwise have to walk around if you followed the architect’s aesthetic intent. An uncoordinated mass of people all contribute to defining optimized shortcuts that everyone can use, revealing them through repetition. This speaks directly to two major themes of the game: indirect collaboration, and connecting remote areas to make travel easier. You’re rebuilding a chiral network AND a physical network, to make everyone’s lives better. The upsetting and friction-heavy randomness of the landscape is something you can actively improve upon, giving you a sense of accomplishment. You’re fixing an annoyance, the difficulty of travel itself.
I haven’t seen anyone discuss these changes in the landscape due to people crossing it, so perhaps it’s subtle, but the “blaze a trail” quote points it out directly. It’s a major focus of the narrative, and one of my favorite mechanics.
UA-cam young defiant death stranding
Weird...
I was talking to my Uber driver the other night about the same general idea, but about the snow where I live. With cars and, on a more personal level (like the game): walking humans. A shin-deep stretch of snow on the sidewalk becomes peppered with one path of boot-shaped holes... Then someone comes by 10 minutes later, subconsciously thankful for a rough trail, while also acknowledging they can kick through those walls of snow between boot prints, carving an easier path for the next person, and so on and so on, until hundreds of "co-workers" have paved the same trail while (often) never seeing each other, "in the act" anyway.
Just a cool concept I was surprised to see here, thanks for commenting!
@Peter Kenner - I had just gotten done writing the exact same point that you made (though yours was more eloquent than mine). I’m glad to see that other people noticed the erosion and how it contributes to the “Strand type game” philosophy of the shared actions of people that you will never see or meet making your life easier through collaboration. Where you couldn’t get your brand new bike through to Lake Knot City on your first attempt (not without a lot of difficulty anyhow), it will eventually be eroded to the point where you can squeeze vehicles through.
I also loved that the contributions from others towards the highway, the bridges they built, the TimeFall Shelter and Battery Chargers erected for their use as well as others, the post boxes before dangerous areas, the ropes and ladders to assist you on hills and cliffs, the vehicles and weapons left behind that always seem to show up when you need them most, and even people delivering your lost packages for you (as well as connecting their zip line hubs to yours for a shared network in which you might only have one segment in someone else’s roller coaster park, but for that brief moment and location, you and another player have chosen to build upon the plan already set forth.
There’s just so much that’s interesting about this and I think it flies under the radar for the vast majority of people who find it a “boring walking sim”, which is crazy (due to the variety of vehicles and weapons, the roller coaster park of ZipLines I built through the mountains and then out to every possible location, the fun of hover boarding down a mountain, etc.). I find this game to be very zen-like and after my first playthrough, I would still return to 5 star deliveries while listening to a CD/Spotify or podcast or stand-up comedy special on Netflix or whatever. I’m not the type of person that would sit down to listen to a podcast outside of traveling already (like in a commute to work or a trip), but this game lends itself perfectly to giving you something interactive to do while making it easy to pay attention to another form of media simultaneously.
I’d love to see a sequel, whether it has anything to do with Sam’s story, or perhaps we could see what it looked like if Kojima decided to have someone else work on reconnecting the Bridge Network in Europe or Japan or wherever, or perhaps a prequel that shows us the early days when they didn’t yet understand BT’s and the Beach, and how it went from such a populated world to one man single handedly reconnecting the means of communication across an entire country. Such an underrated game.
The video creator mistook one of the best features of the game as designer laziness, at 90 minutes into the video. SMH. Deduction 5000 likes.
@@nanoplasm this is why I hate “oh this is just lazy game design” arguments. As if they have any fucking clue. Maybe the reviewer is the lazy one, too lazy to grasp what is put right in front of him. It’s a little infuriating. I love this aspect of the game and actively partake in it to try and cut shorter more ideal paths. For someone to chalk it up to laziness because they literally are too stupid to understand such a simple concept is obnoxious
I guess being the kind of guy who goes everywhere on foot and horseback in Skyrim, navigating by the signs. This is my kind of game. Though I may try to shoot her at the end too. That said I have Red Dead 2 to play first. Very thorough. Glad you made it.
You should enjoy Rdr2. Just try to avoid spoilers.
Yeah like Dutch having a plan. No for real, be careful man. Someone spoiled a big story driven moment for me. Especially after waiting eight years for Rdr2. And the first game ending got spoiled for me as well. Right before I got there myself. Someone told me, just like that. Didn't even had a chance to stop him.
I'm exactly like you in terms of enjoying walks and taking things slow in games and let me tell you, ds is not the kind of game you think.
@@Frank-kq4te games like red dead 2, skyrim and witcher3 are filled with intresting to find and encounter. death stranding is empty so theres no point in taking.
@@John-996 The problem is not that in my opinion, the problem is that the game doesn't want you to take things slowly, it always pressures you not to take things slowly, with timing score, mules that tracks you, you are not entitled to enjoy the landscape because is filled with shit other players builds. So it is a game that is about "slow walking" and still everything the game does is giving you elements and mechanics to prevent you to have "slow walks".
The BB-Clifford ending cutscene is fucking amazing
I'm not a Kojima fan, I honestly have a lot of mixed feelings about Death Stranding but I actually liked Bridget's death scene. Not loved but liked. I liked the symbolism between her and the BT's how they leave handprints. And the wires that look like the umbilical cords to the beach.
Yes, it's shot like she's a monster, and knowing that the main character has a major phobia of being touched adds to that characterization in that scene. It's quite deliberate.
But we must have Kojima Syndrome I suppose...
Between Death Stranding and Horizon Zero Dawn this is one kick-ass game engine, beautiful & stable - I hope many more devs use it!
Oh really?....all this time I thought Death Stranding was made on the Fox Engine 🤔....But yes, it is indeed a well optimized engine to run well even on less powerful hardware. I had a GTX 970, and the game ran so smoothly and beautifully without any stutters or hick ups, and looked so crunchy with punchy colors, as if it was running on HDR!...It just looks stunning and next gen!
On a side note; maybe DS isn't so high on the fun factor, but I really appreciate what Kojima was trying to do with it. He wanted to tell a mature and emotionally desolate story, with all of its intricate details. From the weight of the cargo on your back to his feeling of exhaustion, down to every drop of rain and every step you make on the smallest rock....you feel it all. Heck, I felt so physically drained just playing it for a couple hours. It's a heavy game!...Kojima's views on games as a medium is maturing, and it shows!
You're actually so right, especially on the why should you save America. Honestly i kept hoping I'd bump into a community at one point in some bunker or they'd have this whole underground city waiting for us to finish connecting the network. But with the exception of curiosity and wanting to see what happens, most of the time you don't get any impulse to keep going. There's rarely an incentive to continue, especially in the first half making trips on the same areas, bumping into hidden walls and limits.
Florin
I think what was intended was for you not to want to help America for America’s sake, but for Amelie’s. Sam even says this outright many times throughout the game. It just so happened that they failed to make you want to save America for Amelie’s sake
@@chocolatemilk679 he literally just said that
I kept waiting for that too. Especially at lake knot I saw some trucks way back at the wall into the city and looked forward to being able to go in there and not just the distro
Michael Williams
No? Florin said that he agreed with Stephens that he felt no incentive to help America for America’s sake. I said that i dont think they ever intended for you to feel an incentive to help America for America’s sake, but instead for Amelie’s sake and that they also failed to do that.
How are you getting that me and Florin are saying the same things that warrants a “he literally just said that” response?
@@chocolatemilk679 because Luke Stephens was saying that the game doesn't make you want to save the world for the people either.
I want to preface this by saying that I generally like and I agree with your critiques on other games.
Saying that every design choice you disagree with is "Kojima Syndrome" is lazy and moronic. It's fine to express that you don't like how something was put together is fine. But implying that people only like it because of Kojima's brilliance is missing the entire point. I've never played a Kojima game before and I can say that the emptiness and randomness of the world combined with the music and the narrative made the world feel natural. Even if you don't find it enjoyable, it achieves something that is DIFFERENT. Not everyone likes that, but saying that I only enjoy it because I suffer from "Kojima Syndrome" is an idiotic critique.
From my perspective, if the environments had a clear way of navigating them, the game would not be enjoyable. The gameplay is planning a trip, fabricating the proper equipment, and dealing with challenges along the way. It doesn't have to be like other open world games to be good. I love the Witcher but this is not the same type of game, nor should it be. Having an unpredictable and difficult world was the goal of the game. If you don't like it that's fine.
I also completely disagree about the opening of the game. For me, the mystery of the world hooked me. Of course you can simply pick apart every detail and make fun of things for not making sense, but the story effectively ties together those moments and discovering the answers to those questions is what drives the player to complete more deliveries. Obviously there are parts of the story that could be done better. I completely agree with some of your critiques about the way certain sequences were handled like the weird end credits scene.
TLDR: Calling everything you dislike or don't appreciate "Kojima Syndrome" is stupid. People appreciate games for different reasons.
I would also point out that one in four people dropping the game in the first few hours is normal if it were higher say two in four, then that would be telling.
kojima syndrome:
Liking a game that makes you walk slowly and balance your self using l2 and r2 for hours for nothing interesting is stupid. There’s not some grand deeper meaning it just completely sucks
@@420pbomb Why are people like you so convinced that you have the right to determine objectivity based on your own preferences?
Enjoy wholeheartedly with your comment. The thing I love about Death Stranding is that with most game you are mindlessly holding down a toggle to get to the next mission or point of interest, whereas death stranding the navigation IS the most interesting part of the process. The journey is the challenge, arriving at your destination is more of a break where you can finally take a breath. It completely flips the formula around compared to most games. It really is more about the journey than the destination and I love that.
Very thought-out critique and a good one, too. Although I felt that you used your term 'Kojima syndrome' for many things, which - when it comes to interpreting the game - could also just be made in favor of the game without being overly attached to a positive view of the game and its creator. That part I kinda found a bit too easy and reliant on the same type of argumentation, because it feels like categorically devaluing any kind of interpretation that is not negative. Anyway, good video :)
Personally, all I hear is waaaa.... waaaa.... waaaa
@@Threesixtyci
You're not wrong lol this vid was kinda rough even though some valid points were made. As another poster said: "Kojia Syndrome isn't really a thing".
@@heavyrain5949 I think it is for some things, but not even close to how much he’s brought this up
The world was built to make you feel isolated and alone therefore hammering home the point of needing to build connections. In my opinion it was conscious design choice and not laziness. This game was made to be vastly different than other triple a titles
Agreed. Wether things would have been different without limitations, this was the entire symbolic identify of the game. It’s not supposed to feel alive.
Damn seeing all that cargo float away in the river really upset my heart. I felt Luke’s pain so transcendently.
The hug at the end is important because Sam has that weird phobia about touch. He doesn’t like others to touch him all game long. He is retracted from everyone. At the end he connects in the real way by human touch.
I looked at it another way:
People are evil in their nature and it is actually hilarious that the first thing we ALL want to do is shoot. You think it is intended for you to hug her? Why then give the choice? Shoot, death, or hug, CONNECTION. I mean it literally teaches you to be “human”. So it was intended for you to shoot, so that the game can show you, that it is not the only way to deal with your problems, by just asserting to the violence.
@@lolkek6807 totally agree with that. Because the end game felt so combat focused (with all the BT, Cliff and Higgs fights, I was in this fight-or-flight approach to everything that was “alive”, so when it gets to that moment with Amelie, I first tried shooting all my bullets in the air to see what happens. Because this didn’t work, I resorted to shooting, and failed twice. By the forth attempt, I holsted my gun and ran to punch her 😂 but then I saw the hug command and I was like “damn, and here I am trying to kill her. Sorry, world”
1:15:00 I think it’s implied that Amelie revived Lou, much like she revived Sam. You can see Lou holding Amelie’s quipu when she comes back to life. (A lot of people think that Lou grabbed the quipu pin that bridges staff started wearing, but Sam doesn’t wear one and the one Lou holds is clearly a necklace, not a pin.) Right afterwards the Death Stranding is shown to have ended, so Amelie reviving Lou and sending back her quipu was her parting gift for Sam before she cut herself off from the world and ended the Deaths Stranding.
Take a shot every time he says Kojima Syndrome
My liver has left my body for greener pastures, thank you kind youtuber..
writ large
Take a shot every time he says we will get to that later
I did it. I’m drunk.
Tyler Neal rip in peperonni
At the end of playing this game I was very much done with it; it took too long, got boring and tedious. However, when I think back on it, it is like I think back on a vacation: at the end of the vacation you desperately want to go home, but thinking back on it, you start to appreciate the time you had.
These thoughts and feelings come up when I play the song Give Up by Low Roar, which starts to play in the game after you've just walked for 30/40 minutes through the snow to deliver a package. It was a very beautiful moment.
I rarely had a game give me such a feeling.
Exactly my feeling lol, i would still choose the boredom of death stranding over the zone control open world games exploring nowadays, after 1 year i still think of death stranding even though at moments i was bored
This is just two hours of Kojima syndrome and we'll get to that later.
I don't get why he had to "get back to that later" in the first place.
He only explains maybe half of his "later's" and even then, it's just 1-3 sentences which would've fit in just as well when he originally covered the topic in question.
@@BlackThanator it annoyed me a lot that for the first 40 minutes he would start sentences about some shit only to say "but we'll get to that later" why the fuck would you when you can just ennunciate your full argument later instead of just scattering it around?
He does get back it later
I'm a fan of Luke and most of his takes but yeah, that line comes up in literally every critique he does. He does a lot to pad runtime in these.
@@Yin7094 Lol kind of ironic seeing that the narrative of the game is like this. “Here’s some bizarre thing that won’t be fully explained until much later”
What makes death stranding travel so awesome? 2 words: exoskeleton ,doublejump
yeah!
Hiking and double floaters with power Skelton’s and cool red glasses
Sweet..addicted to jumping in this game
Zipline
I didn’t even know you could double jump until the last area on the beach!
I absolutely loved this game. I was completely and fully immersed, and it's still one of the few games I platinumed in. It took a while to get into it, but once I did - game over, man, game over!
best part of DS is trying to pee while carrying Mama on your back lmao
Will it actually let you do that? I have to admit I tried to piss on an unconscious MULE but it wouldn’t let me. So I gave up and threw pee and poo grenades on him lol... I know, I need help
Genocide is fun oh good, that’s a relief.
😳
Good people around here
I tried and no the game wont let you
"even though they don't care about each other"
Um, no!! Sam literally undertakes the plot ONLY because of his concern for her!
"Her" isnt real
@@trontastic9327 The whole twist/spoiler doesn't really matter when Sam's concern for his 'sister' was in fact, the whole point of the MC's motivation.
@@trontastic9327 even so, it was love that made him cross the United States. And that's the whole theme of the game! His love for his sister was redirected for his mother. He transformed from a cold, unloving character into a loving one.
Unfortunately it’s not really conveyed to the audience through the performance very well at all. One thing I’ve found in the game so far is that most of the celebrities in the game are not well cast. Norman Redus is not a guy you lean on performance wise to carry an isolating experience. He needs people to bounce off of and the person playing Amelie and Del Toro’s deadman aren’t it.
@@thelinedrive Norman is super boring
24:10 - honestly i agree with everything here but... this: I actually think the point of holograms is to show how boring life is without actual connections. I also think it serves (albeit maybe unintentionally) to contrast with the reason Sam believes Amelie is real and the people he actually meets. I think this is reinforced by the few times the people from the hologram actually meet u in their bunker, which is meant to feel special. While the birds and other examples require some weird 4D chess logic, this is pretty simple and fits perfectly with the main theme.
Honestly, I don’t mind the advertising and strangeness in the game. I understand that some people don’t like Kojima’s “style” which I don’t believe is actually his style. I find it humorous and something to break the extremely serious tone of most of the game.
I have no problem if you don’t like it, that’s your opinion. I, as my own opinion, like it for some reason.
Maybe I’m just screwed in the head, but I do like it.
When Lou died, she went to amelie's beach and she revived her just like she did with Sam when he was a BB. That's why lou is holding her necklace when she starts crying.. And DS is finally over because Amelie decided to end it the same moment she revived Lou
I love Kojima’s stuff. And I defend his wackadoo shit with “it’s just his style” but I really loathe his pacing. It’s his weakness, not his style.
There are great painters who have weak perspective. Great basketball players who can’t shoot free throws. Great cooks who can’t bake. Kojima is great at making games, mechanics, and conceptual, unique weirdness, but he can’t pace a script to save his life.
Nailed it👍🏾👍🏾
Honestly, just kinked out 12 hours of this game in 2 days and I love the pacing. The game does not throw stuff at you like a lot of other adventure games, you get used to each peice of gear and understand it well before you get anything new. story pacing seems to be on the slower side but I don't really care. its a laid back relaxing game.
Indeed, he's an atrocious writer. Great with concepts but hos best work was always achieved with people who were able to refine the concepts and write an interesting story. When Kojima takes over that role it's a mess, he cant really even do basic stuff like beginning middle end. There's no shame in it nobody is a genius at everything I just wish he'd play to his strengths, then find and work with people who compliment his inability to write a story. Which is essentially what he did at konami up until MGS3 iirc.
I haven’t played a Kojima game since MGS2. I think at 19 years old when that game came out, I was too young to sit through the exhaustive exposition at the end, and/or care about any of it.
I picked this game up on a whim, and kinda low key loved it. Yes, the entire mountain section should have been way shorter. Way too many goddamn preppers there. I fully anticipated the end of the game being hours of cutscenes so was mentally prepared, and I have to say, it worked for me. While I think it could have been just as impactful if cut in half, it was still effective.
I think Kojima is brilliant, but even sone of the most brilliant creators, need a good editor, a good script writer, and at times better localization so the English translations don’t sound so stiff. I agree with Luke that the acting and dialogue of most preppers was bad. However all of the main character stuff was great. He’s attempting to criticize why things make sense or are based in reality, in a game that makes itself very clear from the beginning that this is a FICTIONAL world full of METAPHYSICAL craziness. The entire thing is a metaphor, on top of a metaphor, on top of a metaphor. Unlike other games, which are profoundly grounded in reality, where characters are human and say human things, suspension of disbelief in this world is a given. If you don’t buy it, then fine. I have a friend who play almost exclusively online battle royal. I always encourage him to play more single player stuff, but he never makes it past 3 hours in most games I lend him. HE, is actually the one who turned me onto Death Stranding. He liked the old Metal Gear games so he gave this a chance and he liked it, A LOT. I was shocked, that my friend and I could actually discuss a game for once.
I also feel like while Luke keeps criticizing Kojima for being lazy, he takes the same liberties by continually falling back on his self-made phrase “Kojima Syndrome”. There are a lot of flaws in this game, but certain parts are absolutely brilliant. Whether the brilliance outshines the bad will vary based on the player.
I played TLOU2 on launch day, and it couldn’t end fast enough. It was literally painful. The longest 25 hour game in history. I fired up Death Stranding after, hoping for a more positive uplifting experience, and if the goal was to get an emotional response from the player when you realize that Cliff was Sam’s father, and BB/Louise was saved.....mission accomplished, because I was a crying mess.
Death Stranding didn’t win GOTY, and I don’t think that it deserved to. However, with another year of development, some streamlining of the script, having more revealed in long cutscenes throughout instead of all at the end, and tightening up a bit of the slower middle parts of the game.....it could easily have won.
@@Deeplycloseted435 u might have a point there,I think if Kojima wasn't stupid enough to inform people what kind of game this was and didn't create such vague trailers in the first place, people would have different expectations.Why the hell did Kojima say this game would be revolutionary when he can't do writing and pacing right!
If he fixed the atrocitious 50 hour pacing into a 25 hour one without hours of cutscenes at a time it would be atleast palatable for people.
Kojima would never be accepted as a film maker if he can't do such basic things right.
I doubt he can make a somewhat decent game by himself.
You may call it Kojima syndrome but I have some thoughts on the whole "how to make the start of the game not boring"
33:35 Allowing players to fight BTs from the get go would only kill any tension towards BTs encounters in the early chapters...
34:20 "It should be enough"... That's the mindset which explains why every AAA game starts with an explosive polished opener to then crawl back into bland, boring mediocrity... And now, occidental players act like cranky kids if they can't blow up something in the first 20 minutes. I know we live in a world where attention span gets shorter every year but come on...
35:03 Kojima has shown through the years that if he wants to, he can hook up the player through flashy/interesting gameplay early on (just look at MGS). Seems to me he wanted to start the game with Sam as helpless as possible to establish the danger of his task
Edit:
59:50 25% of people not finishing an open world is far from a failure, just look at the trophies on Ps4 for any open world and look at the % of players who finished the story... You'll have 70 to 80% in the best cases
1:00:00 Well, I applied your theory of the first hour needing to hook a viewer / player and since right now 90% of what I heard could be summed up to "I don't like it and if you disagree ... Kojima syndrome", I'll stop watching and leave a dislike... Sorry not sorry.
i agree with this comment. this review is the most cynical take on death stranding i've seen yet and doesn't actually try to explain anything in the game. we don't have to excuse flaws of the game like the poor ass combat with mules and sucky vehicles mechanics, but we should keep in mind that kojima makes games like he makes movies. in movies, no choice is made without a reason, everything is made in the favor of storytelling and rythm of your movie. so i don't think kojima thought about making things easier while making repetitive quests where you have to walk the whole way back. i think it's tedious, hard and annoying, but i also think that it was 100% kojima's choice and that those segments actually served the way you would experience the story, cause if it was any other way, those long cinematics would have far less impact on you. they're better and more enjoyable because of all that you went through.
Kojima likes your comment boy
Out of your 4 points of criticism, only one consists of proper argumentation and critical thought. (the first one).
In your second point, you simply attack Luke's statement (that one hour of gameplay should be enough to convince a player that the game is fun to play) which he admits is simply his personal preference, which means you attack him for his completely subjective OPINION, calling him a cranky western kid with short attention span!!! (which is ughhh how to put it... irrational at least?).
Your third point is also irrational. Luke is trying to prove that Kojima fails to captivate the player audience (is that the correct term?) in this particular game. This is not a critique of Kojima, or the MGS series, this is a critique of Death Stranding. Therefore, replying with "Kojima has accomplished captivating/flashy intros in previous games" is not a valid response to Luke's criticism to this specific game.
To sum it up, in your comment you attack Luke for having a personal opinion and you attempt to justify potential flaws of the game by using Kojima's previous succesful games as an example - in short you seem to validate Luke's 'theory' of "Kojima Syndrome" whilst trying to accuse him for it. Well done.
I thought the same thing about the trophies. Then I dug in a little bit and found the Lou chapter has considerably less earn rate than other open world games like Horizon Zero Dawn, Far Cry New Dawn, Far Cry 5 Far Cry 4, Days Gone and the like.
Of course those games have been out longer than Death Stranding so time will tell.
Thank you so much for writing this! This is exactly the type of stuff I'm over here thinking but too lazy to type out. 👍🏽
"We want to make a game about traversing the United States. Where should we go to get some concept shots?"
"Iceland?"
"Brilliant!!!"
I thought it was odd as well.
It was still a beautiful journey all the same.
It makes me think about going hiking in Iceland.
It's a truly bizarre, incomprehensible choice. Kojima did something similar with MGS3- condensing diverse landscapes/environments/wildlife in order to create a sense of diversity and depth in what was an otherwise relatively compressed world map, owing to the limits of the PS2/disc space. Never the less, he always seemed to be willing and passionate about using realistic settings where appropriate (NY in MGS2, Alaska in MGS1, the frankly picture perfect desolation of Afghanistan in MGS5)- not using the actual sprawling and beautiful landscape of the US for.. ya know, the US.. is.. incomprehensible
Having a McDonald's every 2 blocks would be kinda epic
The only point I strongly disagree with is your criticism of the open world design. It's pointless to compare it with The Witcher's or RDR2's world, because in those games the geography serves a different purpose. Here the terrain itself is the main challenge and not "merely" a tissue to connect various points of interest where the actual challenge happens (while providing a nice visual backdrop). I did not expect nor want to have an interesting encounter every 30 seconds. The barrenness and organic randomness of the world adds a lot to the game's apocalyptic atmosphere. This is not a magical kingdom full of wonders to explore. Here in this fundamentally hostile environment the goal is to get from A to B as fast and safe as possible. I am no Kojima fanboy at all, but this type of world design in THIS type of game works for me better, even if it is the result of "laziness" rather than deliberate decisions (although I really doubt that). I also loved how dynamic the world is: when you build roads and create a large network of zip-lines every remote are becomes just a few minutes away.
In short, it's not fair to judge this one by the same metrics as a Witcher game, because despite also having an open world, it is a completely different genre.
1:00:24 I read an article recently that these numbers are quite common for almost any videogam. Many Players just play a few hours, most of them never finish a game, as can also be seen on the percentage of achievements.
Seems about right when you start looking at trophy completion for trophies that unlock through standard narrative gameplay.
Exactly. EA/Bioware recently posted info about Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which a lot of people bought after playing the originals. A huge percentage of people never finish. Same as when Mass Effect 3 first was released and you could view the statistics. Most people don't finish games.
These videos are why I'm a patron. Took me several days to finish this because of my busy schedule but it was worth it. Havent even played it lol
I recently finished this game and absolutely loved the 3rd act (aside from the Amelie/Credits section)...my two biggest critiques that hold it back from being amazing like you said Luke are the pacing (instead of 2 hours of cutscenes with a lot of rehashing) and the double exposition (someone at a terminal would tell you something and then immediately on the codex either that same person or someone else would tell you the SAME EXACT THING)....overall though, I loved it.
Reet - I really, really enjoyed this game... ~140h 😎 and this was a solid criticism 🙌🙌 I might be minority here but this was my first Kojima game 👾
Mine too. I loved it. I disagree with most of his arguments here
My first too. I’m not too far in yet but I’m hooked. I actually liked the first few hours of game. It’s been a while since I got this excited to play a game
@@HasBeensNAddicts yeah havent played it but im really skeptical of these arguments. This guy seems to rely quite a bit on his whole "Kojima effect" argument. It almost feels like he feels the need to critique the game just because its a kojima game.
@@TallCanDan02 it almost feels like he's on Kojima syndrome syndrome.
I'm almost half way through the video and had to pause it and write this comment. Why?
"Kojima Syndrome"..... So first of all: "Stockholm Syndrom" is not unspecifically "having good feelings for someone you're supposed to have bad feelings for" it is an emerging form of a paradoxical trust in a situation when somenone blackmails you. Lets not overstretch the meaning of this term.
Secondly: You want to criticizes people for making themselves immune to criticism and are willing to defend "everything" Kojima did. But when you throw in "Kojima Syndrom!" the whole time you make yourself immune to different perspectives on the game. So are you not also doing what you criticize here? When you claim: *objectively* this was a bad design choice, you're proven wrong once a couple of people see it another way, right? So you have to discredit them as "fanboys". But maybe there are legitimate perspectives on some of those elements? Maybe the standard to which you hold the game to (aka: public opinion) is debatable? Maybe the game does what it should: making people think (or should it just entertain? We should talk about this!). And sometimes people overthink and read something into it. Fine. But thats not fanboy-ism but the tendency to see meaning where there is none (-> the show "Lost"). But this should not be discussed as fanboyism (ad hominem attack) but as an invalid interpretation.
Thirdly: Should be buy into this self-marketing of Kojima? Wouldn't it be more radical to just ignore the fact that this game was made by Kojima? You always use sentences like "Kojima choose to do this and this". Maybe that's not the best way to "read" a game. Instead of talking about "intentio auctoris" - the intentions of the writer - (which are purely speculative) one could talk only about the game itself and what effect it had or what kind of meaning it implied. You don't need to dissect the brain or the psyche of a writer. In hermeneutics, the academic discipline of understanding something (like a work of art) it is the consensus that you should not primarilly focus on the author. The extreme position would be even the so called Death of the Author, where the author is ignored once a peace of art has been released. (Seriously: UA-cam with its pretetions of authenticity and its obsession with personality would need a bit of this "Death of the Author" thing). So basically: by mentioning Kojima the whole time you buy into Kojimas logic and make the game about himself. Maybe the most clever way of dealing with it would be to ask: is Kojima maybe (see the opening scores where the name Kojima is mentioned a ridiculous amount of times ) an implicit (and purely fictional) character in the game itself?
wig
Thanks
That’s a very good point.
Since Hideo Kojima himself is the oil monster living in every one of Sams private rooms, an undead hallucination that tries to pull sam into ...the oil, to me kinda makes me think that Hideo Kojima sees himself as some sort of Apocalyptic God creature, running the show. I mean, allegorically i think it might be a thing with him.
This vid came out at the perfect time I have a super long car ride looks like I know what to listen to
Loved your critique Luke, I felt very much the same way about the entire experience. I played through the whole game but somehow felt very empty after all of it, I just kept playing hoping there was something more to it. You raised some excellent points I couldn't agree more with your analysis.
I just became a patron! I remember a few years back I watched your Outlast 2 review and really enjoyed your style. I liked it and moved on, but recently you popped up again and I have been going through your back catalogue. Love your content and you have a new loyal listener. Much love from Australia!
Like or hate Death Stranding, you can't really deny Hideo Kojima makes creative games like no other, the way his mind works is truly fascinating and unique...
I will agree with that creative as hell. But the game is trash. Why make something where you the only mofo knows what's going on. Hell he don't even know what's going on
How is making a walker simulator "creative"?
@@JerkandDork creative story to go with it. But the game is a bore. Period. It's trash to me
Man this game is connecting people as hell, connecting people to discuss positive or negative aspects of the game
I picked this up for free, actually. Off the Epic Store.
I quite enjoyed it. I understand and sympathize with the criticisms towards it. But I never found it "boring". You don't always need to have combat sequences or whatnot. I found something almost entrancing by the slow trudge in the beginning of the game.
Bandwidth, my zipline network connects to every single spot, you need to 5 star each person. There are 3-4 locations that aren’t story related you’ll find if you explore, like the novelist’s son, the first porter, the musician.
Veteran porter is another hidden knot, I think. Found him on my own before getting any orders. And the Collector, which gives you backpack cover
Yeah, which means exploration is rewarded. He claims it isn’t.
@@dreamedweaver7676 the game has a couple of secret spots. I know about the Hori gate on a small mountain near the Timefall farm and there's ofc the hot water wells, which most are easy to find. But you still have to do a little exploring.
Regardless, exploration is mandatory since you need to know the lay of the land to find the most efficient travel routes, especially to elude timefall rain, and setting up proficient ziplines. The map alone isn't enough.
That Jeff Keighley edit was the best thing I’ve ever seen.
85h hours played. I loved the game, far from perfect and many small things annoyed me, but in the end i was pulled in and captivated by the world and story. 8.5/10
Exactly the same for me. Episode 6 was the only time i hated the game but otherwise i enjoyed it especially in the last act
I just couldn’t get into it. This game was the worse ps4 game sales in the history of Sony exclusives. Didn’t even sell half a million copies. Numbers don’t lie it sucked.
@@The_Primary_Axiom Cant argue with the numbers, still, I stand by my "review" xD
hanselthecaretaker
About the 30 second rule and randomization, they probably didn’t think a game about delivering packages over various types of terrain would necessitate the exponentially greater effort involved in hand crafting a world. As it is, Kojima went from square one (no company, no engine, no dev team) to the end product in under four years, whereas it often takes longer for many well established, hugely staffed studios to put out far more derivative work than this in terms of gameplay systems, story, themes, etc.
Having said that, the world itself in MGSV doesn’t really adhere to the 30 second rule either. There it’s more about giving the player gameplay tools to create their own fun in pre-established maps, with a handful of collectibles.
I really enjoyed Death Stranding and even can argue some of the points you made. I can't really have Kojima Syndrome when I've never played any of his other games (heard of Metal Gear but thought it was a COD type game), not even PT, or even knew who he was before seeing one of the last trailers for this game. I know you said you liked the game, but Kojima Syndrome isn't a thing. Sure there are fanboys, but that's with anything.
Respectfully; you have no valid basis to say kojima syndrome isn't a thing. Youre like a person without diabetes saying diabetes isn't real because it doesn't affect you. Anybody whose delved through kojimas past stories feels kojima syndrome when they play this game. Kojima is like Stanley Kubrick his fingerprints are recognizably distinct and present in all of his works. If you've only ever played policenauts from the early 90s; you can come to this game and see kojima in it clearly.
Now that you've played this game you can see it too in his other works and some of it youll like but you might roll your eyes once or twice at other shit.
@@JozefLucifugeKorzeniowski To me it's been his gameplay. The story was so so.
Your complaint at 1:40:00 about batteries is silly. I mean yeah batteries could last longer, but this was totally on you.
The game tells you that driving through water drains batteries faster and you chose to drive through multiple streams on a level 1 truck.
You clearly made no effort to build roads there which would completely negate the fact that batteries exist.
And my personal favorite part of this:
You had a PCC. You could have gotten out before the stream and built a generator.
This game can be punishing if you're not prepared, but you ignored gameplay mechanics and suffered for it and complained it was the games fault.
Just one time I wanted to actually experience these "knot cities". I get that Kojima only spent 3 years on DS, but it would have added so much to be able to descend into at least a single city to see what life is like. The holograms come off as extremely lazy and off-putting to me. I've played budget games like Vampyr with more lively NPCs.
Also I heard rumours that Kojima is super into that Japanese girl, and made this scene partly as a fanfiction for himself. It doesn't help that she is showed playing with children's toys. Man that entire segment is creepy and hilariously dumb.
@Ryno Ebert That's great, I'm sure Kojima put all of his passion into that sequence and it's awesome that you enjoyed it. I wanted to like it as well, but it was too rushed and poorly acted for me to develop any care for the characters. And I thought the artist was his adopted daughter on account of her playing with toys to lullaby tunes. So yeah, didn't really work for me.
As for the holograms, I do understand their reasoning and I'm not saying every person should be a full fledged character. But it would have added tremendously to have a few more people physically present, and maybe access to even just one neighbourhood in a knot city. It could give a better insight into the loneliness and apathy felt down there beyond just words and emails.
@@Loffeleif My brain short-circuited when I heard "marry me". I thought she was his daughter.
I wanted A city too. Kojima already spoke saying he’ll make A sequel if people want it. Hopefully, we address the company and the cities! I knows it’s an apocalyptic world, but surely after the connections throughout America it can be A real possibility to be in cities and have A live community.
Yeah he was super into her, she is apparently an instagram model that he was chasing online lol
one thing i wanted to see besides the Knot cities was something like a fallout vault or some underground apartment complex
After finally finishing it I could finally complete this video and I gotta say I do agree and disagree. I mean especially the bare bones environment issue does resonate with me but also I feel like it‘s the case because maybe the players are supposed to be the focus aka player structures. I mean the game itself is all about connecting. And it does connect you genuinely and restricts it so it won‘t be abused by trolls or something. And I do love the fame for this. It makes every structure so much more worth it cause you know someone will also appreciate it. Also about the story, I feel like it‘s about Sam learning to let others in and the lore kind of serves as a metaphor at least for me. I mean Sam was traumatized as a child by being ripped from his father and abused imo by a lonely adoptive mother and the story does show us Sam‘s memories in the „woumb“ wich i see as a reference to what Mama said before her death. Wich reminds him of his trauma with his father and how this loving protectir was ripped away. And I feel like the BT‘s are a metaphor for Sam being scared of any connection and so BT‘s become a nightmarish way of connection Sam wants to avoid actively to avoid pain. And slowly the game transforms from a isolation world where people never open up too much and don‘t even show themselves, to ppl starting to opening up to Sam and coming out of their bunkers mirroring sam by also leading by example. This begins with the artist imo and was very satisfying to me. Then this stuff becomes more and more prominent and sam is trying to open up a bit more. This ofc then esxalates to the finale where Sam has gone from a scared isolated man to someone with a big friend group trying to do what he sees as right for not only himself but everyone else as well. And his final teat is the BB death one. Fragile at first is disappointed Sam has regressed back to the old sam so we aren‘t sure if he‘ll actually Burn BB. But the final part is Sam saving BB aka setting the child free of isolation and it‘s barrier and allowing it to be alive. Truely alive. And so this is how all the BT stuff stops. It represents, at least for me, Sam finally overcoming his fear of true human connection by deciding to keep and protect Lue instead of killing her. And this may not make much sense literally, but do stories have to be literal? Or can they be metaphorical as well withour being labeled imperfect for it? I feel like this is what Kojima means about Americans not understanding art and yes i do also frown at the sponsor bs that is inexcusable imo. But in general I would agree with Kojima here and I‘m not even a hardcore stan of his. In fact this is my first Kojima game and I still LOVE it. To me the game means something because it‘s unique, relaxing, deep, abstract and fun! And I do value it a lot for that. More so than any shooter I played. Not even Bioshock gripped me this much cause I do personally prefer idyllic game worlds cause my pain condition makes grungy horror/ugly worlds in games emotionally painful to play through. So I do love Death stranding also for not being horror esque 24/07.
I mean generally I just see the game as a experience that symbolizes Sam‘s journey to open up and to start to live and do so out of his own will. And the ending does exactly that so satisfyingly. Sam has gone from ding with he‘s told by others with no emotions or care for others to a loving father who choses to go against the government to save his loved one and give her a life. He stopps the BT‘s because connection to him has become a positive. And with freeing BB like I said, he‘s freed himself. He made a choice to connect without someone telling him to. He made it as an active choice, and so he‘s finally freed himself. And I just find this absolutely beautiful. Especially cause I can relate so much to Sam. I too struggle with trusting others and connection and I also do fall into the traps of isolation so I do feel connected to sam in that way. But that‘s enough rambling. Still love the video though.
You keep talking about how other game worlds feel more "alive" .... you do realise the world is supposed to feel empty and dead as hardly anyone can see the threat so they hide in bunkers and the world has reclaimed everything, the world itself is your biggest enemy... and it still manages to be very beautiful. The overall experience of this game was refreshing to me and the only issues are most people have a comfort zone that is too narrow to opnmindedly experience things. My only complaint is that it can be easy once you get the hang of it and properly customize your backpack... but all games are that way so ita not a big deal to me
Every other point made in this video can either be summed up as "I am seemingly entirely ignorant as to why this is designed this way, therefore it is lazy, boring and bad" or "I am going to bring up a statistic now, watch as I jump to a conclusion based on said statistic, that confirms my bias without considering any other angles".
Bridgette resurrected lou at the end. That is why lou is holding the gold necklace when she comes back.
1:17:30 The pro-choice movement would love this guy lol
Also the truck stopping the river was 100% your fault for boosting the whole way, your get like 2x-3x further without boosting the whole way, part of the game loop is the preparation for your journey and you should have brought a PCC with you or built a generator grid infrastructure. Building up your world is the most satisfying part of the game in my opinion so making the range infinite would defeat the purpose
Another thing, if your transporting a human you can take a bath with them in the hot spring, I was carrying mama and she was pretty much dead at like 10% HP but after we took a bath she went to 100% HP
But boosting the truck the entire time is the only way you are faster than walking, even on roads. Just another unpolished/unbalanced design choice...
@@smort123that’s the point😂 if u wanna fly around without any risks or consequences play a superman game or spiderman
When you say that you don't really feel a connection to the America that you are supposed to be rebuilding, I think that is the point. Amelie and Die Hardman's America ends in basically extinction and everything is surface level hence the holograms. The couple you help get back together literally break up later even though it was supposed to be emotional. But what you end up realizing is that the real America is the friends you make along the way. The connections that you form with deadman, mama, heartman, fragile and lou are the real thing that you want to save and the end is basically made so that you can realize that. It's basically a critique of the shallow relationships that we form over social media.
fell asleep watching youtube and ended up waking up as this started. and now i'm finishing this before i even got my coffee. thank you for this luke
3:10 I feel this way about every game, ESPECIALLY ones that I enjoyed. If we lose our ability to be objective and constructively critical, then we're sending a message to developers/studio heads/publishers that any shortcomings either don't exist, or are not worth seriously analyzing and addressing. That means any issues most likely won't get addressed in the next title.
I haven't played Death Stranding, but I love seeing videos about it. I do like your content, and even if I don't agree with some of your reasonings, I don't close myself to hear any sort of critique about the things that I do enjoy, because one way or another, they bring some insight about stuff that I didn't pay attention to, and of course, people should learn to hear about different opinions instead of just listening to what they want to hear. The only thing that I can add for future videos, Kojima related or not, is to avoid the constant "syndrome" or "I already see people in the comment section saying this and that", because that might make you look like some kind of pretentious person, while also trying to imply that other's "don't get" what you are trying to say; because of course, it can work both ways.
Personally, I found the first few hours to be my favourite part of the game. After that point the story seemed non-existent and when it eventually showed up it didn't interest me.
In retrospect, apart from the opening hours, I found the rest of the game fairly forgettable. I found the scene where they are in the back of the truck and the first reveal of the giant BT and the void-out to be the most tense cut-scene in the game (and my favourite), I got Blade Runner vibes somehow.
After the first boss and once it got to Chapter 3 (I think) it all kinda blends together for me aside from a few cool scenes like travelling across the sea/lake/whatever by being spotted by the BTs to get all the buildings to appear etc.
The game itself I found really relaxing and fun but as more layers got added I just became more bored and I enjoyed it most at its simplest. Really didn't care for the massive boss fights either. Essentially just massive damage sponges and seemed kind of pointless.
I really enjoyed the soundtrack as well, especially when it swelled up at the right moments while traversing over the land.
The social elements were convenient sometimes as well but I never really liked the implementation of these asymmetric elements, they just cluttered up the environment and ruined it for me. I just liked seeing the unadulterated landscapes as I slowly worked my way through it.
Rossy1415
Imo, the soundtrack and atmosphere were the best parts of this game. The combat was a bit too easy
I played off line and just ran away from boss fights.
@@Fabi_87 I certainly ran away from every boss when it was an option, so virtually every boss of course.
I appreciate your honesty, thank you.
i loved this critique! u said so many of the points that i was thinking of while playing the game. this is one of ur best videos in my opinion. keep up the great work.
As someone who never played a single Hideo Kojima game before Death Stranding and loved the game from the start I feel like this guy talks too much about how people are held captive by Kojima.
Your reliance on “Kojima Syndrome” dilutes your entire argument - PS, I have no interest in any of Kojima’s work, haven’t played a single one and don’t care to try any of them. I like watching your videos because I like to hear your thought process regarding the IPs, not because I have played the game or care for them (I enjoy this because I’m a Product Designer, so it’s useful).
Around the 1:35:00 mark you are speaking about “moments of interest” and the average duration between them etc. I’ve seen your other videos with this kind of analysis (like RDR2 and Witcher 3). But in this instance you found the randomness quite shocking, even appalling. “How could they be so lazy?”. See I think the main issue is that you have anchored all your points around one assumption: that there is a “best” most “optimal” kind of goal for a video game - this being that it should maintain someone’s engagement, and reach a minimal level of excitement.
Lets momentary replace your assumption with another one, lets say - A piece of WORK should be rated by how well it achieves its original vision.
Now, when rating the randomness of the landscape, perhaps Kojima’s vision was to create the most lifelike landscape to scale in a virtual game. To be honest, from what I have heard and seen, it seems that is actually their goal.
From my distant point of view, to me, it seems that Kojima’s goal was to create something that was outside the bounds of typical gaming, to try and merge it closer with abstract art or an interactive movie. If we take this assumption, the “true to life” random landscape makes more sense, the placement of random ads makes more sense, the use of all the A list actors makes more sense, and the (terribly written) long monologues makes more sense.
TLDR: I like your work, I don’t care for any of this guy’s games, and I feel that your entire argument has a flaw, and that it is based around the assumption that the best way to rate a game is by how entertaining it is. It is VERY possible that Kojima’s goal was NOT to do this. Based on how much hype is around him, my hunch is that he wanted to try and “mature” the concept of what a video game could be. (Not saying he did reach this goal however).
Dude, usually i like your videos but this one was straight up hand waving and telling anyone who disagrees with you is a fanboy. Some people can like a certain mechanic without it being "Kojima Syndrome". If at any point in making an argument you have to stoop to insults to dismiss your oposition, your arguement was weak from the start. It seems like because you had fault with something, the whole game is at fault and not yourself. Your math doesnt really amount to anything either and seems extremely flawed and down right biased in certain instances. Small sample sizes isnt enough to prove your point
ty
This reviewer is projecting, hes even more pretentious than he says kojima is
Totally agree with you 💯
I love how you pretty much everything he predicted you would. According to your logic if he did not like the game as much as you did it is his fault.
templar684 vice versa.
I played the whole game and somehow found myself delivering other people's cargo for hours. Point being this game makes you feel better knowing you and others online are helping one another
I started playing it solo, and it really kind of fucking sucks. I don't have PSN, so when I got to central there's no help from others for anything, so the highway I have to build entirely by myself. And that's a shitload of resources.
@@JZStudiosonline DS online mode doesn't require PSN.
Somehow it's rewarding.
Also people leave a shitload of materials in shared lockers.
@@symbolicjohnson7 Really? Because on the exact same console I can't use any of the online features in DS, but when my buddy signed into his account with PS+, there they were.
@@JZStudiosonline Weird. Shouldn't be the case.
Death Stranding online component is free.
Try to check and adjust your game settings, maybe it's set to offline.
i played through death stranding, having actually NOT been intrigued by it and it convinced me otherwise. as i started playing, at first i was still skeptical and then something happened around the 10 hour mark. when i saw my first highway, i was floored. the game felt truly remarkable and the way that it actually immersed you in the desolate world by starting off in a grinding slog of a way actually ended up really working for me. the major flaws for me were the meandering plot and the beach at the end. it is not the type of game that usually satisfies me and yet i thought despite its flaws it was great and i competed it, and i rarely complete games
Regarding Map-Size. That's unfortunately a design-flaw of all open world Games, where you can always travel huge distances, even climatical zones within minutes, even Horizon, Witcher 3 (Games I love) are guilty of this ....So I don't blame Death Stranding too much here.
But a better approach to this would be to have connected "Hub" Mini-OpenWorlds like Metro Exodus does, where you can imagine the distance between them thus creating a much larger world in the end than an single openworld can deliver. I don't know why more Game Developers don't chose this approach. Maybe "OpenWorld" was just a hyped buzzword for sales.
Nice work Luke, great critique and got me intrigued to actually try it out.
Ending Spoilers
When faced with the decision to either allow the final extinction to occur or to cut off Amelie and delay it, I lowered the gun and went out to the water to join her in an attempt to choose the apocalypse instead of shooting/attacking her in some way which I figured would cut her off and halt the final stranding. I was left pretty surprised and disappointed to learn that doing the exact thing she told you would trigger the apocalypse-- joining her and waiting-- results in her changing her mind and delaying the inevitable. It actually took me until the point when your friends rescue you from the beach to fully realize that that's actually what happened bc up until then I had seen the earth burning in the background and had spent a while seemingly dead and alone with her on the beach. I didn't like most of the few characters and most of the other survivors are irritating or kind of assholes so I figured get it over with. Great breakdown as usual
It's insane how quickly relevent this game has become with people not allowed to touch, hold hands and delivery persons delivering food and supplies
Not really
But keep stretching
Kojima caused Crab-17 confirmed
More irrelevant now. No one even cares about this game anymore. COVID ruined everything.
The reason Kojima is so beloved by his fans is the MGS series. Arguably some of the best games of all time. I don’t agree with everything he does, but his body of work certainly deserves respect.
You nailed it on kojima needing oversight , I’m a old school fan and I’m his biggest critic , I love all his games but , for many years I got sick of his shit , doing what he wants , I was so upset with him that I gave up on him , but I seen that maybe he was older and wiser and still decided to play his work , but I agree with so much of what you said , he completely needs oversight , or he will just do what he wants , it’s been proven over the years that he does !
I really do agree with you that first impression of this game is very important, my fist exposure to this game’s game play is people showing off infrastructures they built in game, instead of the fist two hour of the actual game play. This difference means that I know there is more game play beyond the rather boring first region, and gave me initiatives to keep on playing. This was then rewarded when I started help building highways in game, then the positive feedback loop kicks in and I’m completely sucked into the game.
Outstanding video, Luke! You earned another Patron :)
While I agreed with your critique, I'd like to offer my humble perspective on the world design:
The random terrain and lack of pre-built roads encourage players to make their own paths and become invested in the world. I believe the gameplay feature of a dirt path appearing on the ground as you use the same route to be evidence of this. I personally fell in love with trailblazing as I "5-starred" the different preppers, because I made every choice how to get to them, regardless of if it was a meta option like a zipline to the front door or a complex bike trail through the woods. Years of staring at mini-maps and fast travel have made me complacent and this showed me how much fun using navigation equipment and planning trails can be :)
- I agree with your notion that 1 hour should be enough to determine a game - but i am also a father.. and i cant keep up with new game releases... so if the first hour sucks i may drop the game. That being said.. i loved death stranding.
- It is funny - i did not mind the dialog between the Japanese woman and the scrapper. But then.. i am not a native English speaker, so I dont hear my language being butchered.
- on the note of exploring: I some times went out and tried to find alternate paths that would be more safe.. does that count as exploring? - Also i played offline because i didnt want the other gamers to ruin the route planning which was what i found the most enjoyable :)
- I found the fist fight with Higgs pretty hilarious. So i liked it... But i may have Kojima syndrome
- The cut scene filled ending i actually enjoyed.. The Cliff Hunger reveal to be the father struck me real hard.. but i am also a father and could easily identify with him in that regard.
- I agree with you... i did not find it intuitive to hug her... which is also a downer.. but i narratively i did like the ending
- I do not agree that Kojima does not touch upon the implications of the BBs being treated as things - all of Cliff Hungers flashbacks is discussing this.. and he dies for his son - and i guess technically becomes a being of vengeance roaming the beaches for his son. Sam is also working against BB being seen as a thing, but cant do it too openly as i recall it.. if you get emotions for your BB they will be taken away from you?
- I actually didnt find the world "random" the way you did... i put "random" in quotation marks as i do agree it could look Procedural Generation - but i did not mind that there were not a clear designed path. It was actually one of the most enjoyable things about the game to me.. that there were multiple paths, and some times a longer route would actually be the quicker because you would have an easier traversal and avoid obstacles as mules and BTs
- I liked the limitations on the chiral network (and i even played offline) - again it forced me to plan with my resources.
- Question: Why did you drive into the stream with so little battery left, and didn't park the truck on ground and build a power generator or walked to the nearest hub and got a new vehicle?
- Question: did you never meet the roaming porters that offers to trade items?
- I agree that the zip lines are way too powerful... i avoided to use them simply because they ruined my fun.
Now a few things that i would have loved to be different were that the BTs and Mules were roaming too - IMO its way to easy when you have a marking to show were to expect mules, and once you've gone through an area once you know were the BTs are and can avoid them. Only when i was going back again after linking Edge Knot City - there were BTs places that had not been populated before. It put me back on the edge... I feel the game would have been a lot more interesting if Time Fall always had its risk of BT's - also the fact that you could just clear out a BT infested area and the Time Fall would stop there also bummed me out at bit.
Second thing i didn't like is that you get one of the most, if not the most effective means to fight BTs as your first real weapon. The blood grenades are way too powerful a weapon to be given in the beginning if you ask me.
I have not completed the movie - thanks for the critique
Yo I wish that the entire game had that pulled back camera that you get at the beginning and the end.
Couldn't agree more!
I love this channel so much, I just binge everything all day, every day. You've reignited my love for gaming and made it stronger in the process. Thank you
Hmm, the whole Kojima Syndrome at least for the first few examples of it forget one thing: context. It's explained why their aren't as many animals swarming the place due to timefall with the same applying to humans not going out of their way to meet Sam. HOWEVER, from a gameplay and time saving perspective, yes, it's most definitely lazy game design. Not all statements are black and white, they can be grey.
For me... somebody on the spectrum... and with ADHD... the game is incredibly difficult for me to focus on, but gods is beautiful, so thank you for making this so I could better understand on what to do in this game.
This is a good thorough review. :-) But sometimes I feel too much of the negative interpretations are just subjective bias on the part of the reviewer. Still a fun watch - thanks for making it! ;)
Totally agree. I think the game is amazing
(Warning: Long text following - I love detailed and elaborate analyses, which is probably what brought me here). I just recently played Death Stranding for the first time, mostly blind, didn't play any other Kojima game before - so I'm pretty sure I am safe from "Kojima syndrome" (in fact, I wish he wasn't such a public figure, because I think him being one often gets in the way of discussing the game itself, which is well worth a discussion). I watched your entire video after finishing a 300+ hour completionist walkthrough of the game. While I agree with many of your points, I also think you're missing some important aspects. Not sure if you're still interested after 3 years, but I'll point them out just in case. :)
I agree with your general assessment of the story in many ways - while I really liked the imagination, surrealism, and general weirdness and originality of the setting, as well as the rich lore delivered via the in-game "interview" texts, I also disliked many elements like the constant fourth-wall-breaking, the unimaginative naming of people and places, the lack of good voice direction in many dialogs, the pacing issues, and so on. However, all that did not affect my general appreciation of the game much, and the reason is this: Death Stranding is a triple-A game that unabashedly embraces many ideas that would never make it into a designed-by-committee triple-A title. It is, in its structure and design, an indie title that was produced with a triple-A budget - a game that's mainly based upon one man's vision and imagination (as indie games often are), but with production values that let it reach beyond the audience that indie games are often confined to. Its relation to other triple-A titles is similar to the relation of a decently well-crafted independent movie to Hollywood blockbusters.
Personally, I'm often finding designed-by-committee games predictable and boring. They are often okay to play, but they rarely take me to the breathtaking journeys, astonishing new insights, and inspirational ideas that I hope for when I start engaging with a game. I feel that many triple-A titles don't even try to provide such experiences - they can't, they have to play it safe and target a least-common-denominator audience that's large enough to recoup the massive development costs and yield enough profit to satisfy the investors. Death Stranding is a title with triple-A production values that at least _tries_ to provide a unique new experience. Does it always succeed? Certainly not, because some of its parts are objectively terrible (like the performance of the voice actress for the Junk Dealer's wife), and other parts will always stick out like sore thumbs for large parts of the audience (like the constant fourth-wall-breaking). But that's always the risk when you give a very imaginative person with (apparently) poor creative self-control free reign over the complete design of a game. Some parts will be amazing, and some parts will be terrible. Personally, while I certainly acknowledge the game's flaws, I'm more than happy about the unique and original experience that the well-working parts of the game and its story provided. And I wish more triple-A games were willing to take that risk.
One point where I find myself mostly disagreeing with you, is your criticism of the world design. I actually _agree_ with you that it feels fairly random - but that's exactly what I wanted, and I'll explain why. Nowadays, many triple-A titles with open worlds follow a very obvious design recipe. They separate their world in a couple regions, and then they e.g. determine that every region has to have one hub city, 3 smaller settlements, 2 dungeons, and 2 jumping puzzles. This design process then creates a very predictable world where, when I enter a new region, I already know what to expect. In Death Stranding, I did not know what to expect, because the world design felt much more random and organic. While the world in Death Stranding is indeed mostly dead and has a lot of repetition in it, it clearly wasn't designed in adherence to pattern such as I explained above. And I like that a lot, I found that quite immersive in fact. And while I agree that the games world design is pretty lackluster in some regard, I still cherish it - simply because it provides an experience that runs counter to the obvious design patterns of many other games that I find disappointing. I don't actually care if this was a "conscious design decision" or a "lazy world-building approach" - I don't think we'll ever know for sure anyway. But whatever process shaped the world of Death Stranding, I appreciate the outcome.
I also disagree with you about the zip lines in particular. Yes, they make travel very easy and repetitive. But they also felt very rewarding to me because I planned and created them. The map is full of dangerous areas, and creating zip lines is a solution to this problem that gives full freedom to the player, who can (contrary to roads) decide freely where to build them. Building an efficient zip-line network that lets you succeed with all timed deliveries on "very hard" difficulty (where you only have a few minutes for each), while staying within your chiral bandwidth limit, is a fairly complex puzzle that I enjoyed to tackle and solve. So while they indeed made travel repetitive while doing the last few dozen missions to satisfy my completionist streak, that ease of travel was something that I worked for, that I created and optimized for many hours. Hence, the fact that my zip-line network succeeded in the tasks it was built for felt hugely rewarding.
I think the main difference between us is that you, in many ways, were apparently still looking for a traditional type of game - which is fine, there's value in designing games in ways that have proven to work well with most of the audience. But that's why the parts of Death Stranding that don't work so well, really stick out to you. Whereas I was more looking for a game that breaks the mold that the current producers of triple-A games confine themselves to - and as such, the bad or questionable parts of the game's design don't affect me much. An artist willing to tread rarely used paths (or carving new ones) is bound to make more mistakes than others who play it safe and stick to the main roads. That doesn't mean that I deny the existence of the bad parts or try to find ways to reinterpret them as brilliant design decisions, but it means that it's fairly easy for me to not dwell on them and focus on the good things instead.
In any case, thanks for spending the time to do such a detailed analysis on a single game. Hugely appreciated - very few people analyse games to the extend and depth that I want. I think I'll have to give this channel a closer look. :)
I enjoyed his analysis as well as your take. 👍
Great video, really enjoyed it. I am still in the early stages of the games but like it despite some of its unusual quirks. Have to agree that the back tracking can be a bit dull at times.
I think the ads for AMC and Monster drinks were done for funding - removed in update patches now it's got it's PS5/60fps upgrade. As an indie studio, he probably needed initial funding - so while the writing is his style - the ads I can see why they were there and then moved. Not defending it - just looking at the logic of why it was there and now it has been removed. I don't see this as Kojima Syndrome.
The Kojima Syndrome argument was overstated and straw mannish. There is certainly a huge, vocal population of Kojima fanboys out there, people who take MGS "lore" seriously and post misspelled hagiographies on Reddit; but this argument reads as if their mindset is responsible for literally every instance in which DS is defended on grounds that a critic misses the point or mistakes personal distaste for objective issues. The thing is, this was THE defining dynamic in the majority of negativity this game received. The archetypal negative DS review came from someone who felt entitled-by-default to a game that catered to their tastes, refused to engage with the game on its terms, and pinned their bad experience on objective flaws that really don't exist. If the critiques had been valid points about the writing, the fiddly management systems, the patronizing and intrusive tutorial chatter etc there wouldn't have been such controversy. "You just didn't get it" is a deeply suspect argument for good reasons, but it's undeniable that this DOES in fact happen, and it happened at a massive scale with DS. Kojima was kinda right - a large population of monkey brain fast-twitch Western gamers, who need overt action fed to them on tight schedule, lacked the patience and imagination to engage with the intended experience.
Not reading allat 🤣🤣
Well it’s only 5 hours shorter than Whitelight’s but I’ll give it a shot lol
I’m kidding. Great content man!
I could only make it through about an hour and a half of white lights.... I don’t like that format or just commentary without much structure.
llirik I put whitelight’s vid on fir background noise and a sleeping aid. I ate dinner while watching this review.
Zonyae Ambrose for me that’s futurama when I’m trying to fall asleep 😅
The fact that I actually got through that entire review surprises me still. Somehow he made it interesting enough for me to actually watch, not just listen, to most of it.
llirik I felt like there was a fine structure to his commentary. Touching on gameplay when to event. Narrative through out.
And design and world when appropriate.
But yeah it’s a commentary so it goes at the general structure of the story. It’s not great out of order like this critique can be.
I don’t necessarily think that it’s Kojima syndrome to say someone who is already dying and on life support would have a logical chance of dying after falling out of their hospital bed and ripping out the life support machines in the process. Especially if she has some kind of blood thinning medication in her system even a small fall like that could cause a lot of internal bleeding/damage. Don’t get me wrong I thought it was pretty sudden as well but that’s how I passed it off in my head in my first play through. Never played any other kojima games before either so don’t think I could be considered a fan boy.
That Amelie scene you're fiance hated, I actually edited that scene completely out of my miniseries. I agree that it was boring and or unnecessary.
My girlfriend literally had the same reaction as cleanprinces lol
I went into the game only watching half of the trailer, and not knowing who Kojima was. I loved it and plan on replaying, one of the best made games i've seen. Only two complaints would be how absurdly easy the game is (played on hard offline) and the character Fragile.
Honest criticism very nice. 😁
Great video.
One reason I watched this was because David Brin, a US SF writer has got it into his head that Kojima has plagiarized his book "The Postman". He was even talking on his blog about getting lawyers involved!
This sort of long form review explaining the story of Death Stranding is perfect to reassure myself Brin is talking out of his arse.
If anything it woukd be letter bee that got plagarised(its not)
1:23:23 Vehicles in the mountains are awesome. I used the truck and trike for the majority of my time traversing the mountains. There were only a couple places that were too steep to use them, but otherwise they helped me traverse routes that avoided a bunch of BTs, and really sped things up.
Also, at 1:39:44 when you're showing the range of a truck, could be wrong, but it appears that you're using it in boosted mode (based on the color around the battery icon). Driving in boosted mode drains the batteries incredibly fast. I've taken a fully charged truck across the mountain range with no issue, so if you just drive in normal mode, they work fine.
I never thought about using vehicles in the snowy mountains until i realised that there's no stamina issues, and the trucks roof is even more so the reason to use them
I was so hyped for this game and while I still love it (mostly the brave, bold choices Kojima and Co. made), I was quickly let down and realized that for some reason, I figured this had a GTA or MGSV-level budget when it's obvious not even a third of that.
Atleast he didn’t keep us waiting to long. He could’ve made his own engine, but he said it would’ve taken 4 or 5 years just to do so and he could’ve easily made an action game, but he wanted to offer or society something slow paced that involved A helping help rather than “using the stick” like 90 percent of gaming today.
Janis Daugavietis you are correct except for the Kojima being kicked out of Kojima thing lol it was Konami, but yes, true, he lost all of his stuff so just the same I presume.
My experience can best be summarised as:
MGSV: Gameplay > Story
Death Stranding: Story > Gameplay
I love both games. And when I say "story", I include ludo-narrative assonance/dissonance. I believe Death Stranding's mechanics strongly relate to matching our motivations to those of Sam.
This doesn't make a game for everyone, and I don't think you have to be "smart enough" to enjoy it, or that people who do enjoy it are fanboys. I can describe it best as, for me, Kojima delivered the product I was hoping for.
I almost uninstalled it in the first couple of hours as it was painfully slow with so little gameplay. But I'm a cross country runner, and the game creates the same thoughts and feelings when you're running cross country and you're seeing distant landmarks to aim for. The story and characters weren't a hit for me but I would get DS2 if it ever gets made
The zip lines... I had to keep leveling up the pepper relationships to get more bandwidth to finish my zipping grid. I enjoyed it.
As is true with everything in the game. I think it's either you like delivering, or like he said he didn't. If you don't then all the rest will seem boring. Since it's all based around it.