We all know the Castlevania Netflix series is good, but it was all the more impactful to watch right after playing Death Stranding. I’ll preface this with the fact that, yes, they are paced wildly differently and are two completely different mediums, but that doesn’t excuse some of DS’s issues. Also, spoilers for both.
This is the difference between awkward and excellent writing. Kojima is so fucking obtuse in the way he conveys things and I almost never care about any of his characters, apart from the ones with cool outfits. I care about everyone in Castlevania despite their attire. I love the artist he chooses to be, and I love the Metal Gear series, but good god is DS unnecessarily bloated.
Castlevania is complex in its simplicity. Death Stranding is just complex, and boring, and a slog. Yes, a large part of the game is taking your time and soaking in the beautiful landscape, but when Die-Hardman has to remind me for the fifth time in three minutes that I’m carrying an antimatter bomb and it has to go [here], I kinda want to smack my head against a table. This is especially annoying when I can check that same info by simply opening my cufflink. No other game has held my hand so much... except when it conveniently doesn’t want to. I had to crawl through BT territory on my hands and knees for the first time recently because, of all the 800 poorly-organized tutorial messages in this game, a quarter of which are duplicates of each other, NONE of them say I need to unequip the oxygen mask before I can take a swig from my magic Monster Energy canteen.
When I said that Castlevania is complex in its simplicity, I mean that both settings are incredibly esoteric, yet the show manages to deliver the “It’s magic. I ain’t gotta explain shit.” message so much more fluidly than DS. The Forgemasters, the Infinite Corridor. There are maybe 25-30 minutes across all four seasons devoted to explaining these concepts and, by the end, we easily understand them as necromantic hell-creature blacksmithing and soul-controlled space-time travel respectively. DS’s explanations always amount to Chiralium this, Beach that, and nothing more. I’m a smart guy. Me know big word. But maybe, just maybe, there could be some helpful metaphors in there too? I still don’t know what causes DOOMs, nor what the acronym even stands for, but even more important than that are the characters.
For a game so character-centric, we really don’t spend enough time with the characters that are the most intriguing. Kojima is so good at writing interesting characters, I want the guy to just make movies already. I’d rather watch Sam DJ Heartman’s birthday party than pick five crates of fossilized whatever out of the poison gas pit two feet from the Paleontologist’s front door. Seriously, you’re giving me a WHOLE tutorial mission for the item that was already explained to me by the Paleontologist, Heartman, and Lockne?? Every time I start enjoying hanging out with a character, they either die, or a new chapter starts and I have to head off again. And don’t tell me Mama’s soul merged with Lockne’s. It’s not the same. There is a serious pacing issue here with, strangely, not enough lengthy cutscenes to balance out the hiking trips.
Even the coolest boss fight so far was a mess (I’m on chapter 9). There’s a way to do bosses well and they didn’t do it in DS. Too much health, too many phases. I don’t know how I would have beaten the giant BT if I wasn’t playing online with other players’ Reedus’ hawking extra RPGs at me. Higgs is great, but when he teleports every other step, at that point I’m just focusing on why he’s teleporting, and not what he’s saying. He also took just a few too many potted plants and PlayStations to the face for me to enjoy that part of the fight. Then they reused the “two tired old men punch each other until one falls over” fight from Metal Gear Solid 4 just for the sake of a reference in a fight that shouldn’t have been about perseverance. The ENTIRE game so far has been perseverance. The boss should have been a bottling up of all the emotion thrust upon the player thus far and then a quick, well-executed finishing blow. I honestly would’ve preferred a quick-time event, and I NEVER thought I’d say that.
All this may be the adrenaline of Castlevania speaking, but it’s sad, because I know what Kojima’s capable of, and DS ain’t it. I can say with finality that it was not a great game, even though I carried the same level of hype I got from the Apocolyptica reveal trailer with me up to this point.
It’s unique for sure. There’s nothing like it, they branded it that way, and they were right to do so, but there are underlying systems and a story that don’t quite fit. Right from the start, in DC, Norman Reedus literally says “Fuck America”, then proceeds to cross it to save his sister and when he finally gets to California and saves her, he says it again. I don’t want to play a game where the main character doesn’t want to play the game either.
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