The point of a game is to be FUN, not just "interesting". Death Stranding (Spoilers)
TL;DR: I love all of the MGS games and especially the long-winded codec conversations and cut-scenes. But Death Stranding is the least fun I have ever had playing a game, and was full of cliche' plot-twists and boring character tropes. A better direction would have been to let us be Higgs and play as the Homo-Demons working to stop Sam Porter Bridges rebuilding a glorified internet.
Okay. I've had Death Stranding since it came out last fall. I've tried numerous times to get into it. I finally tried again about a month or 2 ago. I got past the first 5 hours, started encountering enemies, getting into the bulk of the game... And I just. Can't. So I went and read full spoilers, story synopsis, watched cutscenes...
After reading that Kojima suggested Americans in particular aren't clever enough to understand the game...
Listen guy, the point of making a videogame is first and foremost to make sure the player has FUN playing it. I'm a huge fan of the MGS series, and not just because they are FUN to play - I may be in the minority, but I also love the codec conversations and cut-scenes. I loved the cinematic style of all of them. I LOVED MGS4.
Where do I begin with Death Stranding? The first 2 hours - The beginning mission and cut scenes, great. The next 5-10 hours? Oh my god dude...
Yes.. It's a walking simulator. No getting around it. But the walking is a fucking chore. The controls are clunky, the environment is bland and uninteresting, and the delivery mechanics? The biggest complaint about Open World games is the constant fetch-quests and go to point A and then to point B structure... And that's not just what this game is, but it's also to point C and point D somewhere mixed in.
Then you get the trike, or motortrike or whatever... And I felt like I was playing Sled Storm on PS1, holy crap the controls were awful and it was as clunky as a vehicle control has ever been, you hit 1 little rock and come to an almost complete halt. You can JUMP with it - defying all physics in a game where the physics engine literally has you tripping all over rocks and falling due to carry weight and environmental gradient...
So I put it down and went to read the spoilers and story and watched some videos of the cut-scenes, etc.... And it's just an Oedipal mess. It's not clever, it's not even interesting. I saw a lot of it coming from an in-game mile away. First off, re-building America? Barf. Then saying Americans aren't bright enough to understand the story? What's so hard to understand? Your sister is a hologram, sketchy, and the bad guys have her but let her freely roam as a hologram... Sketchy. You are basically re-building the internet to get America Online v.20XX past 56kbps so everyone can watch old movies and read magazines.
Oh shit! The bad guys aren't really bad guys but they ARE! Your sister is your mother! And not your sister! You are the original BB all grown up! The BB flashbacks are YOUR memories of YOUR dad! And he's a dick! All of this was phoned in from the start, I'm so glad I didn't play-through this slog-fest just to be let down by this predictable mess... And then you run back across America after you run from coast to coast, only to have MGS4 style final boss fights and hug your sister.
I thought the world building was excellent, don't get me wrong. The soundtrack fit the game perfectly. I liked the timing of the songs after missions. The "Death Stranding" event is super cool - I like that the world of the dead and the living collided in a failed mass-extinction event. The concepts were very cool and interesting... DOOMs, BB's being a link between the world of the dead and living, the Beach... But boring gameplay, cliche' character development, predictable plot-twists and tropes watered down a really cool "proof-of-concept" that had a lot of potential. And the product placement was a travesty... All those Monster Energy Drink cans in my private room, FFS... Taking a shit and seeing Norman Reedus's motorcycle show on AMC advertised... Ugh.
This game was the opposite of Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. Whereas that game dropped you into a chimp simulator, it did a wonderful job letting you just be a chimp in a jungle and do chimp things - And while a lot of people didn't like that game, I had fun banging rocks together and swinging through trees. I loved the complete lack of a traditional narrative. You were completely free to roam the world and the controls were rewarding.
Death Stranding has too many menus, too many fetch quests, too many clunky controls and a terrible user-interface. You're a deliveryman who has a hard time delivering ANYTHING and apparently, every other deliveryman is competing for title of "worst courier" because they lose their shit all over the place and you can go pick it up... Or just ignore it. Even if you leave it all there to quite literally rot, everyone still blows their load over you being a legendary porter. God, even when I got my piss and shit grenades I wasn't excited to throw my excrement at sloppy ghosts... I had way more fun trying to sneak around them but those moments - as tense and interesting as they were - were too few and far in between and they were basically just interactive set-pieces. I get that there was a mass-extinction event... But the world is so empty and devoid of interesting places, I couldn't even enjoy the visual accomplishment this game is.
The game was too ambitious for it's own good, the "rah-rah America" shit was stupid - It wasn't ironic, it wasn't tongue-in-cheek, it's wasn't a critique of anything... I don't want to reunite the country, I want to see it burn... What really would have made this game interesting? Let me be the Higgs and play as the Homo-Demons, now THAT would have been a clever twist on videogame tropes and genres. Let us play the people trying to stop Sam Porter Bridges and prevent the UCA from re-forming. Fuck, have us fail in the end, I don't care, but THAT would have been a fun game.
What a complete waste of assets and potential.
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