Death Stranding 2
Not many games make me want to write about them with long typed outbursts, which most people will never read. You could say that I write it for myself, and honestly, that is sometimes enough.
5 years ago, I wrote some words about the original game (https://medium.com/@skendel/death-stranding-a-love-letter-to-gaming-and-storytelling-71684c01464b), and after that many words on the screen, one could only hope that I wouldn’t have anything to say about the Death Stranding 2, but unluckily, I have something to type. This time I will be short. I have only three things to mention.
Radical improvement without reinvention
It would be nice if we all could sneak inside Kojima Productions headquarters and take a peek to see the initial meeting when they discussed the first plans for Death Stranding 2. But, I can imagine that this meeting went somewhat like this:
”Let’s repeat the game, and let’s do it as we initially wanted to do it if we had more money and trust in this crazy concept. Let’s fix and improve every possible thing that we can improve with the original”.
In some strange way, this is the least ambitious Hideo Kojima game. Every Metal Gear Solid was branded as stealth action espionage blended in a movie-like game, and each new game always truly re-invented the core concept. It always set the new bar from 1998 until the last game. And each time, we always had a truly new game to play. This time, it’s a different story. Let’s make it graphic:
MGS1 — revolution → MGS2 — revolution → MGS3 — revolution → MGS4 — revolution → MGS5 — revolution → DS — evolution → DS2
Get Siniša Kenđel’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Playing Death Stranding 2 — you are going to play the same game from 5 years ago. It’s just “better” in almost every possible way. Giant code refactor. And that is okay.
OK story and amazing storytelling
I love the story of the original, but it always seemed a bit lacking in the department of storytelling. It felt that there was a lot more story in the beginning, middle, and end of the game. But in-between parts felt empty. Death Stranding 2 is a much more cohesive journey. In my 130+ hours of playtime (and I’m continuing to play it), it never felt empty. It was a complete journey where side content felt somehow glued to the main story in a much better way.
But, the story itself — it’s OK. World of Death Stranding is expanded and recycled, but it doesn’t have the freshness that the original had. The MGS1 story was a storm that took over the end of the 90s in video gaming, and MGS2 was like a tornado at the beginning of the new century. If Death Stranding was a storm, the DS2 story is more like a heavy rain in that comparison.
It’s not bad in any way — in the end, it’s an amazing journey, with a lot of crazy surprises, but it doesn’t feel as big as the first game in terms of originality; rather, it tries to deliver the message in a much nicer way, and less focusing on the message itself.
Somehow, it is missing a strong arc in the story, something which puts more ??? on our heads and constantly makes us wonder ‘what’s next’. I was rarely truly invested in what my Drawbridges teammates and I were trying to do; I just enjoyed the ride with them in the hope that my (Sam’s) kid is ok in the end.
I hope that there is no Death Stranding 3
Death Stranding 1 is my favorite game of the last generation, and together with DS2 goes into the top 5 or 10 games of all time on my lists. But, not sure that I want to see the 3rd part.
To make the DS3 work, I don’t think that I can be just another improvement. It would need to bring something new to the table, and the story would have to be expanded. It’s perfectly fine not to do it. It’s perfectly fine to create something new, like the very Death Stranding was, and even what DS2 is today — it’s still the most original (new) game today. Nothing comes close to it. Like or not, there isn’t a game that even tries to do what Death Stranding is doing. It’s a genre for itself. And as Kojima is getting older, and even to quote the guy himself, he thinks that he has only a few games left in him, I would rather that he spends his time not re-inventing, but rather inventing (again) something incredible, as these 2 games were.
For my dear fellow porters: Keep on keeping on. 👍
