Death Stranding 2: Much Better. Still Stupid.

6 years ago, shortly after Death Stranding released, I made a video mainly about how mystified I was by the critical reception of the game. The video argued that literally everything about the game was bad. The story, despite having excellent individual direction in its cutscenes, made no sense. It was ideologically and philosophically muddled and almost childlike in its stupidity. The gameplay was both totally at odds with what the story was trying to get across and also suffered from miserable balance. The game was so absurdly easy. It was impossible to feel anything playing it. People talked about all the difficult decisions you needed to make, but they were just 100% objectively wrong. The answer to every single mission was to load yourself down with ladders, climbing hooks, and carriers, and then just discard crap as you went along. The game actually required zero thought because there was no penalty to dropping stuff as you went. It was basically impossible to run out of resources and it was impossible to die. And if you did die, there were no consequences at all. The balance between combat, stealth, cutscene, and walking sim was way out of whack with something like 18 hours of cutscenes, 30 hours of walking, and like an hour of stealth and combat. The context for why you were doing anything was minimal, as the scores of dozens of meaningless side quests added nothing to the world, the story, or even to the cardboard cutout characters who populated the melodramatic soap opera that was posing as an interesting universe. When you actually looked at what that game was, you ended up with Fetchqu Quest, the game married to dozens of hours of beautifully directed but narratively empty cutscenes. The game was also just comically inhuman in its values. A world where nobody actually sees or touches anyone else for reasons. It made no sense. It was bad. Like impossibly bad. But it had pretty graphics and the name of the box was famous enough that things players would absolutely reject in other games were defended to the death in this one. 6 years later, Death Stranding 2 released and after many dozens of hours, I have finished it. In many ways, the sequel is a direct response to many of my criticisms of the first game. It is far more human in that other actually existent humans see and talk to one another in real life and not exclusively via hologram. The balance between walking sim, cutscene, and combat stealth is tremendously improved. The story is certainly better, but it still has huge ideological and philosophical incoherencies, and the side quests are much more entertaining narratively than the first game's neverending strings of pointless, contextless fetch quests. I still have many, many serious complaints. But unlike the first game, I can confidently say that Death Stranding 2 on the Beach is a very good game that you should probably buy. Balance and context go a long way. So today, let's look at the sequel to visionary genius filmmaker Houdi Kojima's Death Stranding and figure out why it is very flawed, but also much much better than the massive disaster that was the first game after the logo. Game play pacing is everything. One of the biggest issues with the first game was how relentlessly boring it was. Combat and stealth were almost never actually required. And when they were, the AI was perhaps the worst I have ever seen in a game. Stealth was pointless because enemies posed zero threat. And they weren't even fun to fight because they'd run directly at you one after another. I really quickly realized that you could shoot your gun in the air and then just kneel down and knock enemies out one after another with a bowl gun as they made a beline to you. They didn't flank. They didn't try and flush you out of cover. They didn't actually take cover themselves. It was really amazing when you consider that the enemies in the Metal Gear games are actually quite threatening. There's no getting around the fact that Death Stranding 2 is still way, way, way too easy on the normal difficulty. I didn't try the brutal one because I always play games on the setting the developers consider default the first time, but I regret it now. I believe I died once when I was surprised a boss could swallow me with an attack, but that's it. About halfway through, I read what the difficulty settings did, and while I liked the idea of Timefall being way more punishing, having less health, and ramping up enemy aggression, the idea of falling down more easily was a non-starter for me. What Death Stranding 2 desperately needs is a difficulty fine-tuning option like many other games have started doing now. I wanted the rain and degradation aspects to be much more intense. And I wanted enemies to actually have a chance of killing me, but the tradeoff of having to constantly mash the triggers to keep my balance and watching my character fall down is unacceptable to me. I just like truly despise that aspect of the game. Anyway, back to the combat. While enemies simply cannot kill you because you have a ton of health, they are at least now engaging to fight. Enemies take cover. They do actually flank you. They do force you out of cover. Now, again, the game's too easy, but it's no longer comically boring, which is a massive improvement. Stealth is also entertaining, but again, it's just too easy. There are two places in the whole game where setting off an alarm leads to reinforcements. I don't understand this. I enjoyed stealthing through whole areas because the game feels good to play, but there's no actual reason to do it. Again, you can simply walk into a camp and shoot somebody and then just fight because the AI is better. It's now more fun to do that, but the game refuses to punish you for playing stupidly. I just don't understand this. Middle Gear 5 was pretty brutal about enemy reinforcements. They would alert other camps and reinforcements would constantly spawn in until you destroyed a transmitter. Kojima already had a great system that heavily incentivized stealth. And Death Stranding 2 would have been massively improved by just putting a couple of transmitters in every camp that spawned reinforcements until they're disabled. When it comes to the BTS, the game's monsters, stealth again doesn't really matter. While it is very fun to stealth through areas, cutting the watcher's cords, the punishment for being seen is either having to run a short distance away and do a QTE or just letting yourself get caught and fighting a mini boss. Again, the game gives you a bunch of fun tools like a huge arsenal of weapons and even the ability to catch BTS like Pokemon and use them in combat. So, it's still fun to fight, but the stakes are really low because Sam is almost impossible to kill. Man, at the end of the day, combat and stealth are way improved because the AI is better, and especially because the game forces you into those situations far more often, but it still falls short on the default difficulty because of how insanely easy it is. If I could individually jack up combat difficulty, lower Sam's health, and make Timefall more punishing without having to increase the falling down QTE, the game would be probably perfect. But that's not the case. So, while the game is much more fun to play in combat, it still ultimately suffers from badly tuned difficulty. Where combat and stealth were probably like 10% or less of the first game, it's closer to 35 or 40% of the sequel, which is a dramatic improvement. But even the walking sim aspect of the gameplay is improved by subtle balancing and better context for its endless stream of fetch quests. Everyone derides fetch quests in games, but Death Stranding, which was quite literally an entire game of almost nothing but fetch quests, strangely escaped this critique. Death Stranding 2 is Fetch Quest the game too, but the increased combat really helps with the overpowering sense of boredom that was in the first game. There are other small tweaks to the fetch quest nature of the game that also go a long way to make it more interesting. First of all, you need to spend way less time dealing with a screaming baby. I've gotten three kids, and in all my years as a parent, at no point did I ever stop and think, man, having an infant scream in your face is so fun. Somebody should absolutely gify this. In the first game, Lou was constantly screaming. He screamed when you fell down. He screamed when you took damage. He screamed for like no reason at all half the time if you got colds. And every time that happens, you need to stop what you were doing and use your motion controls to rock him back to sleep. It is very possibly the worst thing that has ever been put into any kind of game in the history of the human race. Evolution has shaped the sound of a human baby to be the most annoying sound possible to a human adult. Now, in the sequel, Lou almost never flat out screams at you. He very rarely gets a little fussy, but he almost never goes full screaming mode, and he's much quicker to calm down, so that's a huge improvement. The game also features far less of the most annoying types of geography. There are still hills and rocks and rivers to deal with, but far less of the map is designed to purposely make you fall down. It's not until the very late game, and those areas are fairly short. It's a strange thing, but in the first game, walking around was much worse and annoyed me so much that I barely wanted to engage with the game. This time, the actual deliveries are less oppressive and ended up spending way more time building roads. By the end, I had built the vast majority of the entire road system out just because it was cool to do it. Not because it was a way to avoid the annoyance, but just because it felt good to actually have the whole continent connected. Most importantly, in the first game, the NPCs were all absurd stereotypes with absolutely zero character and nothing nothing at all interesting about them. They could have just used the same character model for all of them because there was nothing to distinguish one from the other aside from their name. This was one of my biggest complaints with the first game and it has been massively improved for the sequel. The characters you deliver for are more interesting. I honestly can't recall even one character I made a delivery for in the first game. The sequel has its share of pointless nobodies, but every area has at least one or two actually fun or interesting characters. I'm much more likely to do a fetch quest if I'm given context by a character I find interesting. The fisherman, the data scientist, the motherhood, the pizza chef, the sniper guy, and more were all interesting characters with backstories that made them closer to feeling like real people. The first game had a dark undercurrent that seemed to imply people are nothing but their job. It annoyed me that nobody had an actual name, that they were all just a job. The sequel still has everyone be nothing but a job, but at least they also have personalities and like tragic backstories that provides actual context to the fetch quest chains. All of these changes are seemingly small things. The balance between fetch quest and combat, the actual balance mechanic of walking around being more forgiving, giving the characters at least basic backstories to ground them in the world. None of those are huge mechanical or narrative changes, but they are the difference between a miserable slog and a game I gladly played for like 60 hours. Now, let's get to the story where I'm going to be way less positive because while that too is significantly better than the first game, it is still not very good. Story, an interesting world, and a coherent narrative are not the same thing. Okay, so here's the thing. Death Stranding 2 really isn't a sequel. It's basically a reboot. The fact is, the story of Death Stranding 2 is exactly the same as the story of Death Stranding 1. You have to connect a continent to the Chyro Network. Higs wants to kill you. There's an extinction entity. There's a mystery dude who you fight through the game only to realize at the end is actually a good guy after all. Almost all of the characters return in one form or another. It's basically what the first game should have been. The story is the same thing, but this time it's better executed, though it still has all the classic Kojima flaws. Let's look at the good and bad of the narrative. One thing to get out of the way is Death Stranding 2 is one of the best looking games ever, especially when it comes to motion capture and facial capture and character models. When you combine that with super highquality cinematography and direction, you get cutscenes that truly feel and look like a movie, which means the game story is always entertaining to watch. And the fourth wall breaking Kosimus games always do is as fun here as it always is. Once again, all the components to a really great story are present. mostly great acting from Hollywood celebrities, including George Miller of Mad Max fame this time. An absolutely tremendous score, as well as a bunch of outstanding music when you're doing deliveries. Truly cinematic quality direction, topshelf visual fidelity in and out of cutscenes. The world and setting is interesting and mysterious, and it is a major component of the story. All the pieces are there for a truly great story. But as is usually the case with a Kojima game, it is often bogged down by plot holes, ridiculous character motivations, soap opera style melodrama, and obviously predictable twists that leave you groaning. Plot, it's a lot. I understand why people enjoy the story in Kosma games. I really do. To start, Kojima was one of the earliest developers to use cinematic techniques in games. And early on, the story in middle games was much more pronounced than it was in almost any other games of the time. Games were a very young medium, and his style of movie like melodrama mixed with winking fourth wall breaking was totally fresh and unique. As the Metal Gear games moved on, the quality of the cutscene direction remained miles above what you see in most games. While movie style direction is now completely ordinary in games, movie quality cutscene directions remains very rare. And no matter what someone thinks of the story in most of Kojima's games, there's no debating that the cutscenes themselves are like cinematic quality. This is especially true in the Death Stranding games that feature a bunch of massively expensive name brand actors, top-notch scores and music, amazing art design, and artouse style visuals. But for at least the last three games, as his film making craft has improved, the quality of his stories has degraded. Phantom Pain had like 20 hours of cutscenes to barely tell a story that ultimately made very little sense and left a ton of plot points hanging from the series. The form of the cutscenes was fantastic and the content of the cutscenes was halfbaked. Death Stranding took the quality of the film making to an even higher level, making them some of the highest quality technical and visual film making in games. a quality really only rivaled by Naughty Dog games. But Naughty Dog marries that highquality film making to literary quality writing. While Death Stranding had hours and hours of cutscenes to tell a story that left a ton of questions unanswered and a bunch of other questions totally unasked. The plot was full of absurd coincidences and the characters were collections of quirky characteristics rather than real people behaving in a believable way. On the beach massively improves the gameplay through small balance tweaks and it improves the story a bit by making the side quest characters actually characters. But the main story of the game is equally bad to the first game. Let me explain why. On the beach is only able to cobble together two movies worth of cinematics because Kojima keeps crucial information from the player so we can have a twist at the end. Even worse, that twist is so painfully obvious that it's completely unbelievable. We're about to go into story spoilers here, so if you plan on playing the game, this is your chance to skip ahead. Move forward to here for the wrap-up. 3 2 1 Okay. On the Beach is best thought of as a reboot because the story is basically the exact same thing as the first game. The world is [ __ ] and Sam Porter has to carry boxes across a continent to bring people together without actually seeing most of them in person. He's opposed by Higs, again, voiced by Troy Baker, and he routinely has to fight a mystery man who is somehow connected to his BB unit. Oh, by the way, do you get the reference? Higs, like the Higs Bosan, the God particle. Does that reference mean anything at all? No, it's just cool. And that is going to be a pattern. In the first game, the mystery guy who attacked Sam with a team of skeleton soldiers was actually his dad, who was a soldier who somehow became aware of Lou and mistakenly thought it was his child. This was very convenient, but at least made some sense. This time, the soldier with a squad of skeletons isn't actually a soldier. He's a smuggler, which makes the whole squad of skeleton soldiers thing stupid. I have no idea why he has a squad of skeletons. This time he just does. Don't think about it. It's cool. I'm not going to go over the whole plot because it's 7 hours, but I am going to point out a few things make no sense when you make the mistake of stopping to think about them for a few minutes. Okay. Suddenly, and on the beach, multiple people are able to puppet their souls into other things. Dead Man can somehow puppet his soul into Heartman when he's dead. That's very stupid. You have a companion who for some reason has been able to put his soul into a doll. He is of course called doll man. This is very stupid. The rules no longer make sense in this world. Now there's seemingly magic. I start with this because it's important context for one of the five pointless twists this game pulls off. First off, after Sam abandons his infant's son with Fragile to go to Mexico, Higs attacks his house. Fragile is killed in this encounter. But you don't know this because it turns out that Fragile is the only person in the universe who is able to somehow keep her body alive by having her soul puppet into her own body from the other side. Okay. In general, philosophically, we have a word for someone whose soul resides within their body. We call that person alive. What the [ __ ] does even mean in this context? Fragile is dead and on her beach, but she is simultaneously splitting her consciousness. Is she in two places at once? Isn't puppeting your soul into your own body just actually called being alive? Fragile for quite literally no [ __ ] reason at all not only keeps the fact that she's actually dead and just puppeting her own for some reason not rotting corpse. She also allows Sam to believe that Lou, his infant daughter, is dead even though she is not. Why? No reason really. Just because twists are cool. I guess the game says that Fragile kept all this information from Sam so he could heal. But he heal from what? His daughter is not in fact dead. Instead, his daughter, all grown up, is actually on the ship. I want you to ask yourself what your reaction would be if your friend told you that your infant daughter was dead despite knowing full well she was not. I imagine I'd probably beat that person to within an inch of their life and never speak to them again. I'm pretty confident that like 99.9% of people would also have that reaction. Tomorrow is actually Lou all grown up. This is because time is different in the land of the dead. Why didn't Fragile tell this to Sam? No good reason is ever given. The actual reason is because Koshima is a great director and a terrible writer. What about the new soldier guy you fight a bunch of times in the game? Again, it's extremely absurd that the exact same thing happens again, isn't it? Of course it is. But don't worry about that. It looks cool. Well, it turns out that that guy is Neil Vana. It sounds like Nirvana. Get it? Is there any meaning at all behind this? Perhaps some deep connection to Buddhism. Is there a reason for his name to sound like Nirvana? None. Absolutely none. It just sounds cool. Well, it turns out that Neil Vana had the same therapist you had. You'll recall that Sam Porter was married to his therapist in the first game. I'm not sure how many of you I must explain this to, but marrying your patient is so titanically [ __ ] it's instant grounds to lose your license. It proves you are simply not trustworthy enough to be a therapist. This pissed me off in the first game, but I let it slide. [ __ ] happens. I guess, right? Well, it turns out that when your wife/ther therapist was a child, she happened to save Neil Vanna's life during the Death Stranding. A quarter century later, Neil Vanna is now a porter who works for the US government, smuggling pregnant women from Mexico so they can give birth to BBS. Quite the coincidence. This grates at his conscience, and he seeks therapy. And what do you know? The therapist he's assigned to is the very same little girl who saved his life all those years ago. That's another insane coincidence. Once the two realize this connection that they briefly knew each other as little children 25 years ago, they have an affair. If you're counting, that would now be the second totally inappropriate careerending affair that Lucy Strand has had with a patient. It's important to note, by the way, she is not presented as the irredeemable villain she actually is in this game. She's presented quite sympathetically when she is in fact a borderline monster. We're piling up ridiculous coincidences here, but we're coming around the bend, I promise. You might recall that Lucy Strand was pregnant when she died, but Sam was told the baby was not his. It turns out she told everyone it was Neil Vanna's baby. Why? Because Lou the BB was Sam's baby all along. And the evil government run by your mother, who you spend the whole first game helping, was going to steal Lou and kill him because it turns out the Chyro network is created by killing BB's. When Fragile was attacked by Higs, she teleported to the beach and gave Lou over to Neil Vanna. How did she know Neil Vanna? How did she know he even existed? Who knows? Doesn't matter. It's cool. Vanna agrees to take care of Lou in the land of the dead because he still loves his therapist/lover slash Sam's wife/s Sam's therapist. One would imagine that dead but not dead fragile would immediately tell Sam, "Hey, Lou is not dead. Actually, I gave him to this dead guy that neither of us know but who had an affair with your wife who was also his therapist." Crazy, right? Anyway, we should immediately go get her. But no, she doesn't do that. Instead, she lets Sam think Lou is dead so that he can focus on delivering pizzas in Australia. Why? Because the game needs a twist. That's why. And it's cool. Shut up. Eventually, you are teleported to the land of dead to fight Neil. Why is Neil attacking you while simultaneously protecting your daughter? There's literally no reason at all for this. None. I guess because it happened in the first game and skeletons with flaming heads are cool. Eventually, you kill Neil. I don't know how you kill a dead person and the game doesn't either. So, you're just not supposed to think about that. Then Neil tells you to take care of Lou. Okay, this is supposed to be touching. And if you look at people online, they apparently have a weakness for absurd melodrama loaded with plot holes, but I do not have that issue. This story is ridiculous. Nobody's motivations make sense. None of the characters act like real people would, and dead people aren't dead, so who gives a [ __ ] in the end? I'm not going to do this kind of breakdown for the whole thing, but understand that literally every single thing that happens can be critiqued like this. The villain of the game is a bunch of dead people who combined with servers in the afterlife after there was an explosion. Why are servers suddenly transported to the afterlife? Is the afterlife also for inanimate objects now? Is it just servers? What about an Apple Watch? Does that get to go to heaven, too? What about my microwave? If my house blows up and I'm brewing coffee, will I merge with my carriage machine? I wonder what crazy schemes to dominate the world we get up to. Die Hard Man. He knows everything that's happening and is stowed away on the ship, but he doesn't tell you what's going on. Dead Man can puppet heart man, but it's a secret for some reason. Literally, every single character and every single plot point is a plot hole. If you didn't realize this, I implore you to spend 15 minutes thinking about each character and asking yourself, "But why did they do that? Why is Dead Man keeping it a secret from Sam that he's in Heartman? Why?" You'll find the story is quite terribly written. Now, because the direction is great and Kojima basically writes small soap operas, you'll probably feel something, but only as long as you make sure not to think about anything. Like every Kosima game, the story is great right up to the second you attempt to think about it, and then it falls apart. Philosophy, it's [ __ ] man. It's [ __ ] One of my biggest issues with many of Kojima's games is the philosophy and politics of the narratives are absurdly childlike. Kojima seems to want to address current issues, but he's basically wrong about everything. The Metal Gear games were smack dab in the middle of the war on terror and there was an uptick in the amount of private military groups being used in American foreign policy. Then Eric Prince's Blackwater was involved in several controversial engagements including a famous massacre and the role of Blackwater became an important political issue in the West. Now there were and are legitimate social and political issues around using PMC's and their rules of engagement that deserved careful thoughtful debates. There was a raft of fiction and games around a future where corporations had their own private armies and became more powerful than the state. The actual interesting thing about PMC's is they're often used in wars that aren't popular enough to drive regular citizens to fight. Mercenaries weren't really needed in World War II because all of society was fully bought into the war. They were needed for the invasion of Iraq because while society was bought in enough to let it happen, they weren't even close to bought in enough to go fight. This has been the way war has worked for like thousands of years. Metal Gear seemed to imply that this was a tremendous fundamental change in the way wars were fought. This is false. Mercenary groups have been a part of the vast majority of wars in human history. The United States used mercenary groups throughout its early history, including massive use of privateeers in their revolution and the War of 1812. Kojima took an interesting political question, mix it with conspiracy theories and his disdain for the nation state, which he implies exists solely as an arm of corporations. Now, listen, I'm not saying these were bad stories. I'm saying they showed a fundamental childishness and refusal to see the world's actual complexity. We're a quarter century on and who' have thought the state is still larger than the companies and PMC's are still a tiny component of the great power militaries. Death Stranding 2 continues Kojima's childish political development. He seems to have completely lost belief in the state at all. In the first game, the entire message was muddled. The state was involved in a massive horrible conspiracy that destroyed the world. But the people who refused to become part of the new United States were doomers and preppers. The main villains of the game, this is true, were former mailmen who had gone literally crazy and had entirely lost their identity after losing their jobs to robots. Nobody who opposed Sam had a legitimate disagreement about politics. They were all just crazy people. On the beach takes this even further. The whole point of the game is the same bringing people together. But are you bringing people together? The vast majority of people you hook up to the network still don't even bother to be in your physical presence. They talk to you via hologram from presumably the other side of the door. the connection you're creating is basically a standin for hooking people up to the internet. I think that's beyond debate that the connections you're making in a game are in fact analogies for the internet. I mean, the game's XP is social media likes. The entire time in Australia, the game keeps talking about the massive increase in creativity that is unleashed by the interpersonal connections forged through the Chairo network. The network brings teamwork and togetherness. Social media brings the people of the world together in an unambiguously good way in the universe of Death Stranding. Now, I find it insane that one can live in the world we live in and have such faith in the universal benefits of the internet in general and social media in particular. The internet has not brought us together. It has torn us apart. People have become siloed in ever smaller micro communities. They're flooded with lies and propaganda. People put more faith in memes shared by some stranger than they do in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. The research they do is basically finding information that validates their pre-existing beliefs. The internet is a giant machine built to tell people that they are never wrong, that they are never responsible, and that it is always someone else's fault. Your drug addiction is caused by big pharma. Your economic situation is caused by the terrible elites. The failure of the government isn't caused by your terrible voting. It's caused by an invisible cabal. In Kojima's world, the government is bad and people can do it all themselves with the power of technology and social media likes. The current UCA doesn't actually even have voting. Instead, a corporation uses data to accurately decide what people want. This is like a classic insane idea of technoutopianism that we will eventually not need the state because technology will help us make the right choices and we can have a technoirect democracy without the need for messy arguments or frustrating representatives or voting or any of that stuff. I came across this the first time I built a road. This nicely sums up the strange techno libertarian optimism that Kojima seems to have now fallen for. I can't even begin to describe the sheer level of wrong that this is. People cannot and do not build roads. States build roads. No amount of cooperation with your fellow man can build a road. In fact, roads didn't even really exist until states arose. Rome built roads. And when Rome fell, the roads disappeared. In the US, you will find this starkly proven, man. If you live in unincorporated areas, you'll find that there really aren't paved roads, but gravel tracks. How could people cooperate to build a road system? If this was actually the state of things, roads would only exist for the wealthy, and everyone else would be using mud tracks. Who would help build a road unless it went directly past their home? Why would I go help build a road in a community I don't belong to? Without a state, roads would instantly become a resource that was dominated by whoever had more guns. Every road would be a toll road and 95% of Mississippi would be game trails. The game itself proves this wrong because I never built the few sections of road that I didn't need. I never wanted to go to the animal shelter. So, you know what? I didn't build those roads. I was like, I'm good. Why would I put my materials into that road I'm not going to use? That's what would happen in the real world. Want more proof that only powerful states build roads? If you go to this, you'll see that the most powerful states have roads and the weakest states do not. The Democratic Republic of Congo has 106 million people and is the 11th largest country in the world and has 95,000 m of roads. The UK has like a 30% smaller population, is 1/8 the size of the Congo, and has 250,000 miles of roads. The US has 4.1 million miles of roads. On the Beach is ideologically stupid. It's also philosophically and religiously stupid. As in the first game, I think it's important to point out that death is totally pointless in this universe. As I said after that game, I me plenty would vastly prefer to live in the apocalypse of Death Stranding than in our world because in the universe of the game, life after death is a known scientific fact. Not only is it a fact that you live on after death, apparently it's possible to inhabit your own body after you die and still hang out and go on adventures with your friends. Or you could like live in a doll. or you can freely communicate through technology with the living after you die. For a game nominally about dealing with this universe's shattering reality and never ask how much different the world would be if we were certain death doesn't matter. If you could actually communicate with the dead, who cares if your friend dies? Why would any of us fear death at all? Who cares if our child dies? If we know they live on after death and that there's probably a computer that can make us talk to them once in a while, wouldn't the Death Stranding have a massive religious component? Wouldn't people instantly be killing each other over their different religious interpretations of this event? And yet, nobody in either of the games seems to believe in a god. Seems a little weird that in an apocalypse where the dead now walk the earth, nobody ever mentions religion. There's so many things like this. A cool idea that's not at all explored. Every single interesting thing that is implied in a world where the afterlife is real and ghosts are all over the place is unressed. Like the first game, On the Beach left me annoyed and frustrated. It's even more beautiful looking and even stupider as a work of fiction. I don't think Kojima is actually smart enough to even write a coherent piece of fiction. He'd be way better off just doing the direction and cinematography, which he is amazing at, and letting an actual writer write the story. Wrapping up. Okay, I'm sure I'll get a bunch more hate in the comments for this one because Death Stranding 2 has gotten universal praise. And I think the game is pretty good. It looks great. It's loaded with a bunch of really cool tools and mechanics, and the game has a fun sense of humor lots of the time. It's a massive improvement on the first game, but it still has so many flaws that I can't believe people insist on calling this a masterpiece, man. It's definitely worth playing, but its story is so stupid. It's impossible to play it without getting annoyed. If I had to give it a number grade, it would be like a 7 and 1/2 out of 10. Now, that's way better than the 2 out of 10 I would have given the first game, but it falls far far short of the 10 out of 10 perfect game treatment that it's been getting. After playing it, I just found myself really wishing the story wasn't so muddled and ridiculous. I can't enjoy something if I'm constantly thinking about how dumb it is. For every awesome electric guitar boss fight or giant mech fight skybox, there's a pointless thing that makes no sense. Like a huge samurai who turns out to be dead man. Why is dead man a samurai? Why doesn't he tell you that he is the samurai until the end of the game? Good question. There's just so many pointless contrivances that it grates on me. And if you have issues with like ridiculous convenient plot twists or like pointless secrets that are kept just for the purpose of the story that would never happen in real life, you will have the same response, I'm sure. Also, again, it wastes your time so much, dude. You have to press skip four times every time you deliver something. You have to press skip every time you drink a soda. Every time you eat this thing to go shower and have your three drinks and your three food, you need to skip like 11 cutscenes, dude. Why? Why is it take me 12 skipped cut scenes to go from the surface down to have a shower and drink my stuff? Why? It's ridiculous. That's a waste of time. Over the course of a game, that adds up to like 20 minutes of skipped cut scenes. Dude, why is there a cut scene for putting the package inside of the delivery box? Why? That kind of [ __ ] still is all in Death Stranding. It purposely wastes your time, and I hate that. Either way, if you got the money, I do recommend you play it, but man, it's still really stupid in so many ways. All right, I'm going to do Destiny 2 next because the new expansion has things I need to talk about. All right, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.