A Story Analysis of Death Stranding

death stranding is an unforgettable experience because whether I like it or not I will not forget about this game anytime soon I say that because this game is odd yet remarkable it's odd and more severe and critical ways like its pacing and some elements about the story and gameplay but is also comically odd like the fact that Jeff Keeley and Conan O'Brien have Cameo appearances and the game does this completely straightfaced as if that's an entirely normal thing to see in a game but it's also remarkable in all of those same aspects as its gameplay and story are impressively thought provoking and unique and those comedic elements really make the game feel like a game something that's wackly filled with fourth wall breaks and strange NPC naming structures as usual the players to go through the story and discuss what's actually going on here and trust me there is a lot going on here in death stranding but will also be periodically taking breaks to discuss these story elements to see if they're well implemented so without further Ado let's get started I can't think of a better place to start when discussing the Oddity that is death stranding than first starting with its intro first impressions are important for a game I consider to be the first two hours because it's still within the standard refund period death stranding simultaneously has an amazing yet terrible first impression depending on what you're looking for story wise it shows incredible promise and provides an intriguing plot alongside a Mysterious World gameplay Wise It's like two missions the game starts with our protagonist Sam driving a motorcycle through some planes death stranding sometimes excels at giving out information in a very natural way right behind Sam is an upside down rainbow that is Then followed by a rainstorm but this rain is unique in that it ages anything it touches as it turns part of Sam's hair white and it kills the bird's implants surrounding him when he eventually gets to a cave to wait out the rain we notice something is following him along with there also being some random woman nearby from their reactions these creatures seem to be hostile to humans and they also seem to be attracted to sound which is why they're holding their breath and making very subtle movements we can also see that Sam is looking at the footprints while the girl named fragile is looking up this is because she can actually see the beings while Sam can only sense them these invisible creatures are called BTS or Beach things the reason these two can either sense or see them is that they have what's called Dooms Dooms for a lack of a better word on our magical abilities that do things depending on your level Sam has level 2 Dooms so he can only sense the BT's presence fragile has something higher than two since she can actually see them she's also able to teleport as we saw earlier while they talk we also see more of the time Falls effects as despite fragile having the face of someone in their mid to late 30s her hand is that of an older woman so adjusting timefall can have some drastic impermanent effects The Last Detail we learn is that both of them are Porters fragile works for her own business fragile Express and Sam is a freelancer this gives us a pretty good idea of the world of death straining and how different it is compared to our own and will continue this Theme by having Sam pair up with Igor he needs help to dispose of a corpse because simply burying them in the world is not an option once a body dies it enters a stage of necrosis if it reaches the final stages BTS start to go towards the body the smaller BTS then summon larger creatures these larger creatures have what's called antimatter in them and wants the antimatter of a BT connects with the matter of a human body it causes an explosion known as void out and just one of these can level an entire city so it's critical that we not only get the body out of the city as the resulting explosion would kill everyone but we also need to get to an incinerator so that the Flames can destroy the body preventing the BTS from being able to connect with it the last and final thing we see is a baby inside of a tank connected to Igor these are bridge babies and according to Igor they help him sends the BTS fragile doesn't need one since she can see them but Sam and Igor would need one since they can't Sam's able to sense when BTS are nearby so he could avoid them once he gets close but having the bridge baby would help as it uses the spinning device on his shoulder called an Audra deck to show the exact Direction it's in all this once again is fantastic and adds to the mystery of the world what are these BTS and what happened to the world to cause all this the game lays out the information about the world's current condition and also how Humanity has adapted to it allowing us to see the current state of the World At Large this all goes in the complete opposite direction though as while Sam and Igor drive to the incinerator Igor goes on a minute long spiel about the world of death straining before the events of the game it's Allure dump and while it's helpful to the player Sam should already know this he's been a delivery man for years and has been on his own for a while so he should be aware what the death stranding is and what is happening within the world Igor says that the death stranding caused the world to be the way that it is due to the world of the living and the dead mixing together he also says that because of the constant threat of timefall in the BTS people have been isolated and held up inside the cities or in their own homes outside the cities Sim being a delivery man whose sole job is to go from place to place to deliver packages should know this so Igor explaining this to him is pointless the game also does this later when people try to shake his hand Sam never shakes people's hands due to a condition called affenfosmphobia which is the fear of being touched he also seems to bruise easily when touched which is why he avoids it this is shown non-verbally multiple times but when someone tries to shake his hand later they go ah right aphen fossum phobia the fear of being touched I read it in your file I understand why the game would want to bring attention to this detail as not everyone has this kind of reaction to being touched but I think anyone playing could have sensed that Sam doesn't like it the game didn't need to bring attention to with their dialogue when the cutscene does a good enough job on its own overexplaining and repetitive dialogue is a constant disease that plagues this game and we'll see a lot more of it as we continue getting back on track though is the group makes it to the incinerator they run into some BTS causing the truck to flip the group was also too late as the body necrotized and was taken into the tar this causes BTS to appear and take the guy who is stuck under the truck Igor kills the man before he was taken away showing that death is a much better fate than what comes next we already know what that fate is though which are the void outs Sam's able to avoid the smaller BTS because of his blood for some reason but the same cannot be said for the others Igor ends up getting taken as well and resorts to stabbing himself repeatedly so as to not be taken alive before all this he gives Sam the bridge baby and tells him to get out of here Sam like anyone though is in awe of the giant beast in front of him which swallows Igor causing a void out Sam seems to be dead but then wakes up on a beach he cradles the baby before seeing a few ominous figures in the distance and a woman in red singing he then goes back to the real world before seeing the destruction and like I said one person can level an entire city so far it's been an incredible start and as his tradition with this game lots of questions not a lot of answers but we'll get to them in time the reason Sam is alive is that he's a repatriot basically he can come back to life after dying using something called the seam Sam then wakes up next to a man named dead man who has a job for him deliver morphine to the president of the United States as if that's not wild enough already we learn from another oddly named individual die Hardman that the president Bridget strand is Sam's mother Bridget wants to connect all the United States together she wants people to connect instead of remain isolated thanks to the death stranding she had her daughter ameligo across the country in order to do this but Amelie is trapped and needs Sam's help she wants him to do this because quote it'll make America whole again the last time I heard that phrase in alien race of necromancer try to wipe out Humanity but don't worry there are no markers or Brethren moons here regardless the president ends up dying and now has to be cremated or like before another void out will occur so we have to haul her corpse all the way to the incinerator once Sam does and disposes of the president he's also instructed to cremate the bridge baby or a BB for short as it's been put on order for decommission Sam refuses and ends up using it to escape the BTS and head back to the city this Mission then transitions us into episode 2 which is perfect as this was roughly the first two hours of the game as I said story wise we have a lot to work with we learn so much information about Sam and the world and all of it for the most part will showcased quite well we're also left with dozens of questions I'd hope the player in which forced them to play more if they want to find out the answers the visuals and cinematography were also just as great as the framing of certain scenes reinforces the emotions the scenes want to convey like how it positions the camera by Sam to show how large and ominous the BT really is the game is also slow in this way as dialogue and actions are spaced out allowing you to release sit with these moments and take them in such as the crater it wants you to feel the pain of this scene knowing that there used to be people who lived here that are now gone in a Flash it's incredible and hooked me from the very beginning the gameplay though leaves a lot to be desired out of the 120 Minutes that make up these two hours around 30 minutes of it is actual gameplay that is a fourth of the game so far all of the other 90 minutes are cutscenes and I truly mean that I've seen a growing rise in complaints over the years regarding Sony games as people describe them as movie games this game with games like The Last of Us Part 2 as well as God of War 2018 and Ragnarok but while I disagree when it comes to those games I can see the argument for it here death stranding will space out its cutscenes later and ironically enough actually flip it on its head later as there are times where you can go three hours without any cutscenes or some kind of story progression but as of right now there's not a whole lot of time for the player to really get a feel for the gameplay all we do is two missions carry the cargo to the city then carry the president to the incinerator it does teach you how to maneuver the landscape which is nice but it's not a whole lot these would be great as introductory missions and they are but as I said we're two hours into the game and a lot more Mission should have gone by this creates a problem those who want to skip the story so they can play the game are able to do more missions but at the cost of the story causing them to be even more confused and they likely already are but on the other hand playing the game at its current Pace means you miss out on a lot of the gameplay the main thing you'll be doing throughout the game to enjoy death stranding you really have to commit to the game for longer than you may think and while that was fine for me I can understand why others drop the game around this point from here though we enter episode 2 when our tasks were going all the way to the United States to a place called ajnot city as this support Amelie is being held captive along the way though we're tasked with looking at various cities and homes by plugging them into the chiral Network a sort of successor to the internet this is our current and Main objective of death stranding finish what Amelie and Bridget started by linking up the entire United States and then save Amelie when we make it West before we embark on that Journey though we have a quick history lesson as I think all of you would like some answers and as to what's going on and I thankfully have them the world of death straining was very much like our own until the BT was discovered by Humanity a doctor was performing a C-section on a woman because the mother was brain dead but they believed that they could still deliver the baby when he touched the umbilical cord he saw a BT floating above the mother but because it was a BT it caused the void out this was the first instance of this happening so far but because the cause of it was rather unusual people began testing and experimenting with ways to prevent it from happening again this is what led to the bridge babies after the original void out there were experiments going on in a secret facility in Manhattan this ended in the entire facility exploding thanks to another void out accident the current president at the time was also there at the facility so America was without a president for some time until Bridget strand became the next in line her first act as president was shutting down the experiments but eventually Bridget realized that the BBS had potential to uncover the secrets of the BTS so she reinstated the project but under the secretive eyes of bridges the BB program though was not well received by the general public seeing as it requires EXP experimentation on a fetus that comes from a still mother which is why she did it in secret under bridges the company she created the reason the BBS work the way that they do is that the womb of the mother facilitates a connection between the world of the living and the world of the Dead the world of the living is our world the one we walk and live on the world of the Dead is just another name for the afterlife and in between that is the beach a sort of limbo area that connects the two planes of existence to get there though people will need to travel through the seam which is what that watery place we find salmon whenever we die basically in order a person lives in the world of a living then dies but while the body is Left Behind the soul is then taken through the seam and onto the beach that person then walks into the water through the seam again and into the Afterlife we don't ever see past the beach so we have no idea what actually happens when someone crosses over but thanks to various experiments over the years we know a bit about the beach itself and how it functions the beach is a plane of existence but everyone has a different Beach so while you and I might be on the beach our specific Beach is different the beach is a manifestation of human entities Consciousness and perception of death as such everyone's Beach is different as we all think and perceive things differently it was hypothesized that animals may also have beaches but they don't necrotize like humans do so it's assumed that beaches are a human-only experience the beaches also contain various amounts of fish and whales because of the real world event called the cetacean stranding this is more commonly known as beaching but it's a weird phenomenon where whales dolphins and other sea life all wash up on the shore and are unable to swim back so they die in the land so just as the whales are unable to go back to the ocean anyone who arrives on the beach can't return to the land of the living to add to the references this concept of death is roughly based on the ancient Egyptian beliefs the Egyptians believed in Aha and akka the ha is the physical body while the KA is the soul the intended process would be for the body to die and decompose while the soul continues on into the Afterlife but that changed after the death stranding the death stranding is the name of the official event that killed the world it'll be explained throughout the game so I won't give too many details now but the result of what transpired was numerous void outs at the the same time hundreds of BTS came from the world of the Dead threw the beach and back to the living they then made contact with human bodies and then the void out started many hypothesized that the BTS do this because they're reaching out for a connection as evidenced by the tar bodies that touch you when you're captured but also the various handprints that are not only on Sam's body but in the crater when a void out happens on top of this timefall was also created shortly after this event thanks to a new substance called chirillium these gold hand-shaped crystals are called chirillium and its point of origin is the beach when kyrillium enters the atmosphere and interacts with regular clouds it causes the rain to become timefall like how certain chemicals can create acid rain not all the water is dangerous though as once it hits something it becomes regular water which is why lakes and waterfalls don't kill you furthermore Dooms are also created shortly after the death stranding which gives people unique abilities Sam uses it to sense BTS fragile can use it to teleport and some others can even do some wackier things the other ability that manifested from this event was repatriation which is when Sam is able to resurrect himself so instead of Sam going from the land of the living through the seam into the beach he uses the seam to go backwards and back to the land of the living again hopefully though this gives you a brief understanding of what we're working with here it's a lot of compelling lore which raises many questions Chief among them what caused the death stranding throughout the game will not only be learning about the present day plot but also a lot about the world's history along the way so we'll come back to this event periodically but like I said hopefully Now understand what's going on as we can now return to the present to refresh your memory we're tasks will go into specific buildings like distribution centers way stations and other people's homes and connecting them to the chiral Network this will connect everyone together preventing people from no longer being isolated and giving us the means to share information with each other through the beach due to time being stagnant on the beach thus making data transfer immediate connecting the final note in Edge not city will also bring us to where Amelie is located who according to her was kidnapped by a group of terrorists amelu led a group called Bridges one they were the first expedition team that would go from east to west and connect America the same thing we're doing now they made incredible progress but were stopped by a group of terrorists who took her captive they want the world to stay disconnected and also want the UCA or the United cities of America the new government to leave them alone and Amelie is their insurance to make sure their needs are met these terrorists are called homo demons or Mad Men in Latin which is a fitting name as they're not afraid to kill people in fact they've been known to intentionally kill people in order to trigger void outs the body that we had to take in the beginning is hypothesized to be the work of the homo demon seeing as one of them does show up right when the BTS arrive also I figured I should mention this Amelie is in the room with us but she's using a hologram the terrorists are cool with her doing this for a very specific reason that I'll mention later but I felt like I should mention that seeing as I just said she was captured but she's also in the room with that laid out though we can start our journey our first step is to oh sorry hold on a minute triple check your Loadout I take it anyway our first step is to [Music] yeah death stranding doesn't shut up sometimes this is that over explaining problem I talked about before Whenever there was something new the game always seems to stop and force the player to hear someone explain what the weapon or item does it also loves to stop you in the middle of an expedition just to make you listen to people and fully believe you are incompetent at times like when later when we link up a weather station this girl Mama comes by and says that we can now use our cufflinks to check for timefall and plan our route accordingly die hardwin then gets on the comms literally right after this to say the same exact thing I understand that the game is different and making sure players know what to do is important especially because it's not something they can intuitively know from playing other games like how to shoot in a first person shooter but the hand holding here is egregious at times furthermore the names we gotta talk about the names just about every character in this game is named using some kind of conjunction or reference Sam Porter Bridges is not only a porter but also works for Bridges die hard man is called that because when serving in the military he was able to survive against impossible odds because for him dying is hard man Bridget seems reasonable except her name is two words combined Bridge it like Bridging the world together she's also the creator of bridges Amelie is surprisingly safe from this until you realize her full name is Samantha America strand which is just insane not only is her daughter named after Amerigo Vespucci the man whose name was used to name the country America but it's also just the fact that the president's daughter's middle name is the same as the country she's the president of I guess you can't get more patriotic than that I suppose I would love to play a game with you if you've never played death straining before I want to see if you can guess why the characters of this game are named the way that they are before I reveal why let me know how you do that being said this isn't even the end of the absurdity as this also plagues the other lesser-known NPCs in the cities like Jake wind owner of the Wind Farm or Nick Easton leader of capital not city which is the easternmost City in the game all the cities have some kind of knot in their name as well out like edgenot portnot Capital knot and South not this is because as Amelie says we're creating a large rope from east to west that connects the country together but to do that we need to tie other ropes into knots and connect them together so the robe is longer this rope is the chiral Network and the knots are all the places we stop along the way to Edge not City it is genuinely absurd how much Kojima commits to this and honestly this didn't even bother me at first I wasn't even going to bring this up since I too struggle with naming characters if my d d Adventures are anything to look at but I've come to realize that Kojima just hates conventional names this is the same guy who in Metal Gear Solid has four different characters named snake and a guy named skullface whose face looks like a skull crazy I know when I read reviews about death stranding I heard a lot of people say that this is such a Kojima game I think I'm starting to get it now oddly enough this ends up working stupidly well as I was just able to remember one random NPC who only appears in one location because of his moronic name moving on though we have our first job which is delivering oxytocin to a group of workers this is a great Mission as if it's in line with the story making sure the main quest is important as a top priority for the story if the missions don't feel important then they just feel like side content and while death straining is hit or miss when it comes to this for now we're on the right track oxytocin is often called The Love drug as it's a hormone that manages certain key aspects of the reproductive system it's known to help with certain behaviors and interactions like sexual arousal trust and romantic attachment among many others in the world of death stranding people are isolated and can't go outside due to a fear of BTS and timefall so there's a lot more important things to worry about than getting it on as such the oxytocin we're delivering will help these individuals get back on their feet and hopefully not be as worried and scared as they were before as I said this is a great example of a mission that fits in line with the story now delivering a package may not seem like a main quest Mission as most other games usually have you fight dozens of people by now but that's because this is the main gameplay loop of death stranding out of all the things this game brings to the table the gameplay was met with the most criticism at the most basic level all you're doing is accepting an order and then taking that package to its intended location on the surface it seems shallow but there is a surprising amount of depth to the system there are various hazards to watch out for like water and terrain which can make traversal a hassle you also have to worry about the cargo and Equipment as Fallen could damage the goods you're carrying and timefall can destroy the quality of the container if you're not careful then you also have to consider your actual weight if there's too much weight or the cargo is stacked too high then you'll start to lean and have to shift your weight so that Sam doesn't trip over and fall if the game also gives the player the option to fly back against the hazards you can use ladders and anchors to ascend or descend a large structure use pccs which allow to create things like generators Bridges and safe houses and the Audra deck labels the ground with markers so you know where uneven terrain is it's surprisingly in-depth and provides a very fulfilling gameplay Loop that being said I can understand why people would dislike this system Kojima wanted to create a game about building connections and you can't do that by killing each other death stranding couldn't have been anything other than a delivery simulator as is how we first started as a world world and as a country the first form of long-distance communication was through letters using carrier pigeons over time this evolved into mailman which not only gave rise to more jobs but also allowed us to converse with people across the country despite being a United Nation the East and West sides of the country were largely separate from one another due to the long travel time even back then it was still long as you could write a letter to someone across the country and it would take months just for it to arrive America became connected through mailmen and delivery services so it's only natural that the America of death stranding is connected to those same exact means we're basically repeating the same steps as our ancestors and this is further reinforced later in the game when we start building highways the Lincoln Highway was the first transcontinental Highway that sent from New York to Los Angeles and we're doing the exact same thing with the chiral Network as we start here roughly where New York would be and then we're going to finish in Edge not City located in California that's more of a digital highway but there comes a point where we build actual highways which connect the entire central region together the thought of doing deliveries all day sounds incredibly boring which is what leads people to call this a walking Sim there is a strange amount of community in this game that can be hard to find anywhere else this is due to the game's genre which Kojima calls a strand type game basically whenever you play something in the game like a ladder anchor or even leave a bike or truck laying around there's a chance for it to show up in another person's game if that person likes the thing you place down then you receive a like for it the more likes it gets the more gets sent to other players worlds before it essentially becomes a permanent part of the world like this bridge that connects the land to this doctor's house someone placed this here and gained enough likes to where it's probably shown up in your game too the game also has various systems in place to basically have a continuous loop there are shared lockers at each station that allow people to take vehicles and equipment for themselves if they need it the players who put that equipment in there are doing it for a specific reason to allow others to use their gear that they don't need at the moment you can also pick up and deliver lost cargo sometimes another person's cargo is Left Behind and you can either bring it to its intended destination or put it in the lost cargo bin for another player to deliver it it's this constant feedback of altruism because we're all trying to help each other so in turn we both both get the help we need when we need it and then help others with their issues for example I had a few hermetic grenades after a BT encounter but it was too much cargo for me so I dropped off a few with the shared Locker I'm not sure if anyone actually used them but I can put it there knowing that there's a chance someone might need it everyone will likely start out the same way and that's using your own materials for their own projects but once that one person helps you at the perfect moment your mind starts to expand a bit more there were numerous times in a bridge ladder generator or zipline either saved my ass or cut off literal minutes of time from my route allowing me to skip some of the game's more hazardous sections I have never forgotten these moments and they made me not only consider my own route but others as well this can be incredibly easy to achieve since we're all playing the same game it's like when someone says hey man let me help you out I've been in this predicament before you helped that person out because you know the struggle of being in that situation this can be hard in the real world because we're all living different lives but in death stranding we're all doing the same thing we're all journeying to the same places and going through the same hazards so these places aren't just annoying to you but to everyone playing the game even if you didn't intend for the structure to benefit anyone but yourself everyone is still doing the same thing so someone is inevitably going to cross the same path as you in the central region later there's this incredibly annoying landscape filled with rocks and gaps which is why people place Bridges and ramps on them so that no one has to deal with how annoying these hazards are you have provided not only a convenience for yourself but a convenience for many others and the more people that use it the more likes you get likes are basically the XP of death stranding which I found to be rather important for the gameplay because they're kinda useless most games have a super epic reward at the end like a new gun or a unique armor set but death stranding just rewards likes these likes to increase some of your stats and your overall Porter grade but they aren't large increases the point of this is to not do it for the reward but for the benefit of others and making the reward pointless further reinforces this idea I don't have close to 50 000 likes from other players because helping them gets me a reward I have them because I wanted to help people and there's no Greater Joy in this game than logging on after not playing for a few hours and seeing your likes go up along with how many people you helped in the meantime it may made me want to help people more and just be a better and Kinder person it's the textbook definition of altruism helping others for the sake of it death straining is a lonely place and the game really drives this point home by only having you interact with Holograms 90 of the time but doing this makes those few times that you see a structure or sign outside in the world knowing somewhere out there in this Barren landscape there are other groups of players fighting the good fight alongside you all the better it's ironic how a game that is designed to make you feel alone also makes you feel connected to other players in a way I've never seen done before returning to the story for the next five hours and I do genuinely mean that we'll be doing deliveries and slowly building up our arsenal of weapons and equipment as I said death straining is a very slow game whereas other games get their tutorials out of the way within 20 or 30 minutes death Journey takes hours to do so which means that straining is going to be quite the long game and for the most part it is during this though we'll come into contact with two enemy factions the mules and the homo demons mules are other reporters who are so addicted to the delivery process that they steal other Porter's cargo before the death stranding occur the world was quite automated Delivery Systems are all handled by Ai and the belief was that doing this would revolutionize the system however this ended up having the opposite effect as people started Contracting cases of drone syndrome oxytocin and hormone imbalances convince people that humans needed to be a part of the process so they removed some of the machines to allow for more human interaction but this caused another issue as people saw themselves as Frontline workers they couldn't be replaced as Society couldn't function without them this then led to another disorder called delivery dependence syndrome this was further exacerbated after the death stranding as timefall shut down any chance for aircraft to be used so couriers were the only people that could get packages to other places whether they liked it or not so people took this Courier Obsession too far and were addicted to the thrill of delivering and the high that comes from getting likes personally I think that entire summary wasn't needed as the last line is all that's important these made-up syndromes are nice but I find them unnecessary because it's very clear this is kojima's thoughts on modern day social media and how people crave attention and likes getting likes in game makes you feel validated and appreciate the same way someone getting thousands of likes on a tweet will make that person feel validated and appreciated but all things must be done in moderation as over dependence on this can lead people to go too far walking through a sign or icon in the game gives the person a like so you'll often see people put these signs in places you have to cross like the hallway leading to Hartman's lab this allows these people to gain likes that are actually contributing to the World At Large even though the game is all about doing deliveries and getting likes players will always find a way to game the system but while doing this to death stranding is not a huge problem doing so in real life could have some drastic consequences some people will do anything for attention either because it gives people validation or it pays their bills literally just this week as of writing this script some YouTuber was shot while doing a prank video there's this consensus that you have to go bigger and better with every video and if it pays the bills or gets your attention who cares who gets hurt in the process now a tweet in a YouTube video are very different things but each can be damaging in their own way fake or stolen tweets are made all the time for attention and likes and the mules are representation of this idea they're so obsessed with their profession and how that they get from it that they'll attack people and take their cargo to play Devil's Advocate though they aren't really bad people at least when compared to the homo demons as they don't kill you they only knock you out because killing you would cause a void out and they can't exactly deliver packages in a world that doesn't exist this is in stark contrast to the homo demons who will kill you just to cause a void out we talked about them earlier but we're about to come face to face with one of their members Higgs Higgs isn't exactly a leader as the group has no leader but Higgs is the most well-respected member of the organization this is likely due to his current Powers as he has the highest level of Dooms in the game where Sam's Doom level is at level 2 Higgs has at least seven levels in it as he has the ability to control BTS as evidenced by him summoning one in front of us foreign [Music] so how about it aren't you getting tired of the grind isn't this what you've been waiting for this whole time a game over I find the placement of that last line rather funny as at the moment I was actually enjoying my time in the game but a few hours from now that grind was about to hit me like a truck before Higgs summons the giant squid he tells us that bridge strand is dead and that Amelie has taken her place furthermore Higgs calls Amelie an Extinction entity which is something we'll learn about later but its placement here is meant to show that Higgs somehow knows a lot more than we do especially since the news about Bridget is top secret higgs's name will also be the one you won't understand unless you're fluid in particle physics pigs is a reference to the Higgs boson which is often called the Higgs particle or God Particle the first thing that Higgs says after his name is the particle of God that permeates all existence which connects to the role of the Higgs boson in her Universe the Higgs boson is believed to be the particle that gives all other matter its mass without it things wouldn't have mass and the world would be dysfunctional or more likely not even exist to relate this back to Higgs he sees himself as a god a being who can control the world to his liking this ego of his is likely because of his Dooms as he's able to control BTS which is unheard of at this stage to make even more connections earlier we talked about ancient Egypt and their thoughts on death while Higgs is out of it has a golden black stripe on the cape which is similar to the color scheme of the Pharaoh statues who's really taking this God identity to the next level this squid though is a required interaction meaning we've come to our first boss fight and it is less than Stellar death stranding is not a great action game because it's not one to begin with still boss fights are almost a requirement in games like this as they ramp up the intensity and increase the stakes Higgs is the main antagonist it'd be weird to defeat him at the end of the game when all our interactions were just us talking like this fights need to occur in order to solidify their role as the protagonist and antagonist which just goes back to the root of the issue death straining isn't an action game most of the fight sees the player throwing grenades are shooting at it until its health is gone none of these fights ever really felt satisfying though it's either me doing a hitless run for the whole fight or I'm getting smacked around because Sam can aim straight due to the cargo shift in his weight while these are important to talk about as all the boss fights serve as narrative climaxes to cap off an area it's very clear that this is not a primary part of of the game in the same way that hacking mini games and RPGs are incredibly simplistic as do not take away from the real fun of the game so too is this boss fights make up a small amount of your overall play time and that's even including the couple times you might get caught and Trigger one on your own not just the story related ones the game even summons these white tar creatures that are supposed to be other players who will throw you weapons since nine times out of ten you're not gonna have enough equipment to fight them unless you know ahead of time that's why the optional ones you trigger lie to leave the area stopping the flight entirely and the required ones always have these little guys throwing blood bags and guns at you Kojima clearly doesn't want the player to struggle in these fights EDS is not a part of the game that they should be struggling with having trouble when planning your correct route is a part of the gameplay struggling to kill BTS Like It's Call of Duty isn't that's why I'm not going to give these too much [ __ ] as from a sheer visual perspective death straining succeeds in making these fights feel cinematic and bombastic the gameplay sadly doesn't carry to the finish line but it's clear they were put on the back burner since the traversal of the world was the most important part of the gameplay while the fight has been playing in the background you may have noticed a Red Cloud coming from the grenades and this goes back to the intro apparently since Sam is a repatriot his blood can be used to harm BTS it's also not just his blood but his other bodily fluids a showering and going to the bathroom rewards you with certain grenades from your own fluids which is as weird as it sounds these could be used to kill all the BTS we've met meaning these larger creatures and the smaller ones we find out in the world which adds another layer of depth to the gameplay by giving the player more ways to fight back against the hazards once the squid has been cooked it calcifies into this chirillium statue and then breaks apart spreading all the kyrillium into the atmosphere fragile then comes by and Sam and her talk about going to the central region to do that though they're going to need to travel via boat the central region is important to fragile as it's where fragile Express usually operates the business has been on a downward spiral as of late though due to some recent backlash unlike real life the backlash wasn't about some company running a scam or having some misconduct in the workplace but rather fragile Express killed an entire city by outlying themselves with the terrorists and delivering a nuke to the city's front door now it is learned later that fragile did not know there was a nuke in the case but everyone else outside of the company sees the express as terrorists so yeah it's kind of a big deal so much so that a lot of people don't want anything to do with fragile Express or the UCA for that matter which then becomes a problem for us every time we go to one of these weigh stations or houses we use the cupid to link them to the network but if the people refuse we can't do anything about it since we're trying to do things in a more civil way or we're just as bad as the terrorists there are quite a few Preppers located here in the central region that we'll need to convince that we can get the network link to their property which means we're going to need to run some deliveries for them just like before the missions need to line up with the story in order to make sense and so far they do these preppers are hesitant to put their trust in another company especially after what happened the last time they did so helping them out and showing that we mean well makes sense each of them has different feelings about fragile Express and the UCA the engineer is comfortable with joining up and doesn't take too much convincing due to the long-term isolation they've been in the other joins just as fast but doesn't want anything to do with the UCA since he believes connecting people together is what got the city nuke to Oblivion in the first place so he'd rather stay out of it and the Craftsman is against both and sees fragile as a terrorist doing his delivery Mission though does at least convince him to connect to the network since we retrieve one of his prized possessions from a BT invested Zone each one of them has a different opinion and differing levels of trust in fragile in her business which I liked but it just felt like busy work none of these missions actually addresses anything we never meet these individuals again unless you deliver lost cargo to them so they serve as extremely long roadblocks for the player to get over pretty much this entire episode is just busy work the only other things of note that we do is visit and activate a weather station and then deal with two other Preppers a junk dealer and a timefall farmer the timefall farmer is admittedly pretty cool as it's not something I'd considered a toe was brought to my attention since timefall ages anything it touches crops that usually take weeks or months to grow now take seconds it's a cool way of showing that in every negative situation is a positive outcome waiting to be discovered and how humanity is such an intelligent and impressive species that we always find ways around our problems even if it means using those problems to our advantage the other two though aren't as interesting if I'm being honest I still have no clue how to use the weather station remember when I talked about this game and how much it holds her hand what got to a point where I just turned off all the tips permanently sometimes a pop-up will appear on the bottom of your screen that has some kind of tip such as using cargo as a weapon or how you won't be able to sneak by murals if your cargo's too high these are are fine but they seem to appear all the time whenever the situation calls for it I just got so overwhelmed that I disabled them entirely which may have had the side effect of skipping the tutorial on how to use the weather station I don't even know you could do anything with it until I saw someone's playthrough where they were going through a menu I had no idea existed to be fair though it is also entirely possible that I just skipped through the tutorial myself because I wanted to get through the repetitive dialogue one of my biggest pet peeves in general is wasting time and death stranding loves to do this by repeating the same animations every single time every time you use the cupid to connect someone to the chiral Network the same scene plays again every time it just got to a point where I was skipping it each time it happened I've never pressed the skip button this much on a first playthrough in any game before and I've never disabled tips or tutorials either but death straining is really making me tread new ground here now this isn't really a critique of the game as it's definitely a skill issue on my part but there is definitely a discussion to be had as to not only how much time this game wastes of yours but also how viable the weather station really is if you could go the whole game without using it and come out with minimal issues as for the junk dealer he wants us to go get his girl who he thought was dead in the recent bombing but was recently informed that she survived despite what you may think that is not his daughter but actually his girlfriend who ends up proposing when they get together it's really sweet and is a perfect encapsulation of what death stranding is all about reuniting people together and sharing connections the two haven't seen each other in I believe years and it's nice to see them all happy again although I don't know what Kojima was planning to do with this as just like every single person you deliver for they email you about their life and throughout the game the couple gets into an argument cancels the marriage then gets back together again what's even more bizarre is that the girl literally leaves his house to go back to hers despite the walk being filled with BTS and timefall episode 3 is probably the longest and most drawn out part of the game and is also my least favorite by far remember how the first two hours had more cutscenes than gameplay well now we're going in the opposite direction there are 20 main missions in this episode which is basically the preview these two episodes combined and it's not until the final mission that things start to actually go somewhere this is around the time I started to clock out side missions are nice as they break up the pace of the main quest but sometimes you just want to place the story to see what happens the problem is that I'm doing both at the same time I have to blaze through these supposed main quest missions to get to the real meat of the story The pacing of this game is all over the place and episode 3 is at the Forefront of this problem to give you an idea of what I mean there are 70 main missions in death straining that are split across 13 episodes Mission 38 is at the end of episode 3 so just going based off the numbers we're halfway through the missions but barely a third of the way through the game how is that even possible 38 missions are split across the first three episodes with the other 32 being split across the next 10. that is a major imbalance as one minute it feels like you've made zero progress and then the next you're going through multiple episodes in just a couple hours it's just all over the place and I came for the life of me figure out why I was created this way thankfully episode 3 ends with a bang both figuratively and literally in some ways as it first starts with us going to South Mount City to deliver some Provisions before we head out though a Bridge's employee stops us and gives us another package that was supposed to be a part of the original order this is a lie as the game literally labels this as a small thermonuclear Weapon It's also the only Cargo in the game to my knowledge that has an owner history and we can see that Higgs is listed meaning Higgs is not going to Bridges to give us a nuke with the hope that he could pull a fast one on us like he did fragile it's a nice twist I just wish the game didn't immediately Give It Away by labeling the cargo we're carrying I do however like that we can ignore this and take it to South not and subsequently blow up the city the game instructs you to go to fragile before going to the city but doesn't tell you where she's located as die Hardman already told you a few minutes ago to be fair though there's only like two locations she could be on this map so it's not hard to find her the suit will then open up the package and discover that it's a nuke fragile then says that we have to take get to a tar pit near South not city as it should be able to prevent the explosion from expanding she's correct and after throwing it inside we prevent the nuke from fully exploding the reason she knows this is because this situation is all too familiar to her as right after we complete the mission we get a lengthy cutscene showing the moment that Higgs betrayed fragile fragile tells us earlier that Higgs used to work with her and that he wasn't always this way he used to be an honest Porter until something changed now he's a terrorist who's trying to blow up cities with nukes around this time fragile caught wind of a package and managed to take it before it was delivered but Higgs had planned for this Higgs then surrounds fragile strips or to her underwear makes it rain timefall and then gives her a choice her time or the peoples see fragile has the ability to teleport and she does this by using the beach the problem is that she can't take anything with her and at this point in the game you already know this as fragile allows you to teleport places which is The Game's way of canonizing fast travel when you do this though you have to leave all your cargo behind so fragile either has to leave the nuke and let it go off by teleporting and saving herself or getting rid of the nuke saving in the people but also has to run through timefall in order to do so she hops to take it herself which is how her skin became noticeably older compared to her face the only question I have regarding this scene is the timefall as the intro shows us that it can grow and kill things like birds and plants but fragile ran practically naked through timefall for at least a few minutes and hadn't even been 10 seconds yet and her skin was already noticeably withered so how was she not dead it's never explained but I can only assume that timefall doesn't kill but rather Aegis things as far as possible without causing death which is a weird loophole and doesn't make any sense to me but I think a more plausible outcome though is that fragile had ingested kryptobites these worm-like creatures are apparently not only very nourishing but can also Grant resistance to timefall assuming fragile's one-off saying a crypto by today keeps the time fall away is actually real and not just something she made up on the spot this would mean that she found some on the way there since she clearly doesn't have the room to carry any both explanations aren't as satisfying as I would have personally liked but the resulting feelings that fragile has because of this incident are something I did like after hearing the story Sam calls her a hero but she disagrees fragile actually regrets that choice she wishes that she just teleported and left even though it would have killed thousands fragile also doubles down on this mentality earlier as when we talked to her in our room she says how she doesn't care about the United States or Bridges she just wants to screw over Higgs which is why she joined us in the first place she's had an ulterior motive from the beginning she never planned on helping us with package delivery or any of that she just wanted us to get back at Higgs it's actually a refreshing take to have as this whole game has been about altruism and being good and here we have someone who would have easily let an entire city go to waste just so she didn't have to suffer the effects of timefall it's fantastic and is one of the main reasons I love fragile as a character after their talk fragile leaves Sam with one task defeat Higgs and take him alive as she wants to know why he betrayed her that's going to take some time though as Higgs is not going to be an easy person to catch so for now we'll just focus on the deliveries but just as I say that we're interrupted by a storm the group calls a supercell this isn't any ordinary storm as it drags Sam into it and once he wakes up he finds himself in the trenches of world war one here in this Dreamscape is a man labeled the combat veteran who's actually named Clifford Unger now anyone playing the game should recognize this individual as they've appeared in numerous flashbacks throughout the game so far each time Sam connects to BB a memory plays of cliff and a room doing various things from drinking to celebrating to talking dead man says that people with doom should not be using BBS as it's dangerous and can also create feedback loops using their memories fear and stress are Amplified and the memories start to bleed through from time to time dead man assumes these memories are BB's the thing is though is that we don't know what Cliff has to do with this I'll talk about the relationship between BB and Cliff later but there does seem to be a connection between the two as Cliff wants our BB which is why he hunts us the whole world war one era thing though we can definitely talk about beaches have the ability to change depending on the circumstances for example Mama a character will meet later has a beach that she and her twin sister share furthermore Hartman's Beach was shared by a few others because they all died at the same time in the same place these World War beaches are likely the same thing soldiers who all died in the same place at the same time and also Harbor the same thoughts of anger guilt and rage these feelings manifested their own Beach where the soldiers fight tirelessly Without End as for why Cliff is here well it's not a great explanation but Cliff is a soldier so it connects to his background given his age though he wouldn't have been old enough to serve in Afghanistan while also serving in World War one so I think it's more of a stylistic choice regardless this won't be the last time we see Cliff as there are three different battles we get thrown into at random Parts in the game the battles play out like a Call of Duty level which I'm totally fine with as the shooting isn't terrible in this game especially at close range but once we defeat Cliff we wake up on the floor near where we were taken however according to Mama we were only gone a few seconds so clearly time passes differently here mama is one of the few people we've talked to throughout the game and just so happens to be the next person we're tasked with meeting we need to meet with her instead of the other way around due to her child there wasn't anything too wild about this I figured yeah she's a mother and she's trying to work while also taking care of a kid so naturally she'd be Tethered to her lab I didn't think that she would literally be Tethered to her lab though since her baby is a BT Mama's life is a fascinating case to me as is filled with so many bizarre details that I couldn't help but listen to everything she said Mama is as you would expect a mother but her real name is malingan she's also a twin with the other one being named lochna oddly enough they were more than just twins as the two were literally conjoined together when born but thanks to a successful surgery they were able to move independent of one another but there were still two beings in one body and thus had one Soul meaning they share the same Beach as each other furthermore the two can feel how each other feels all the time it's commonly known that twins can sometimes feel how another is feeling even if they aren't in the same room well this seems to be the same for these two but possibly to an even higher degree as they use their Dooms to sense each other the two from birth were pretty much Geniuses and would end up also being the creators of the chiral Network Mama handled the hardware and lochna did the software despite how similar they were in both appearance and intellect though they always disagreed when it came to Children Mama never cared for children as she was always engulfed in her work but lokna always wanted kids the problem is that each sister got a different working reproductive organ mama was incapable of producing eggs and locked as uterus wasn't able to carry a child to term meaning the two could never have a child on their own this became problematic for lokna as she fell in love with an employee from Bridges and wanted to start a family together this was made all the the worst when the man had passed away in an accident which left Lochness suicidal thanks to her Dooms mama was able to sense this feeling in her and asked if she could carry her baby to term for her through some incredible Ingenuity by combining the man's sperm and locking his eggs and then having Mama be the surrogate they were able to have a kid they weren't out of the woods yet though and you can likely see where this is going as right when Mama was about to give birth an attack on the city occurred and mama was injured and trapped under the rubble she would end up trapped on here for a few days straight thankfully Aaron water were no concern though as water was dripping down from above the problem though is that she came to this hospital when she was ready to give birth so naturally time had passed and she gave birth here in the rubble but she gave birth to a baby who ended up being her link to the other side this BT is the only reason she's even alive to begin with earlier we saw some sort of ghostly figure reaching out for the baby this is assumed to be mama's soul her body is only alive due to this umbilical connection between her and her child as such severing it would kill her eventually she'd be rescued by Bridges but was only able to leave since the BT is bound to this place all the BTS in this game never move from where they're positioned they can creep toward you but it seems like there's only so far they can go that's why mama can't leave her child as she can't be too far from the hospital I can't imagine the amount of trauma that comes from having to spend the rest of your life during the place that almost killed you I mean the rubble is literally right behind her to cap off this horrific story she also severed her bomb with lockna likely due to the shame of not being able to birth her child properly I'm not entirely sure how that works given it uses Dooms but we do know that the feeling the two used to have where they were able to sense and communicate with each other no longer exists there's a real depressing irony in both sisters thoughts on children being twisted around as Mama became the mother despite not wanting kids it's a real heartbreaking story luckily we're gonna make things right although that will come later for now though mama wants us to take the cupid 2 Mountain not city where lochna is located since she and her co-created the device the reason we're doing this is because mama had a hunch that the cupid would eventually become faulty and she also thinks the super cell tornado that we got sucked into may have been created because the massive spikes in chirillion we've been generating due to connecting all these places to the chirillium network given what we're told at the end of the game I don't believe this is the case but rather just Mama's hypothesis this is a common theme amongst this game where we're given unreliable information from unreliable narrators it does make sense in the context of the story as there's so much about the world the characters don't know so they throw out random theories based off what they do know it just makes it harder for the player to piece things together regardless once we reach the city lochner says that she doesn't want any part of the UCA or the chiral Network for that matter so we're gonna need to do some convincing such as bringing her sister with us which means we'll have to walk all the way back to Mama's lab just to go back to where we are currently it's as tedious as it sounds but thankfully mama likes to talk during the trip so it's on a complete drag once we make it back to the lab though she has a new device for US Gold handcuffs that work as Cutters these should allow us to walk up to BTS and sever their umbilical cords giving us a way to take out the BTS through stealth and mama gives us us the opportunity to test them by having us cut hers over the months to years it's been since she's given birth she's realized that the baby likely wants to cross over and not be Tethered to the world like it is now but doing so would kill her and she didn't want to let lachna down as this was supposed to be her child but she realized that's not right so the plan is to cut her cord and then take her to see lochna this will eventually kill her but thankfully due to her already being dead she doesn't necrotize like the other bodies do so there's no need to incinerate her I really like the detail here of Sam asking Mama if she's alright with being zipped up since her being constricted like this is just like when she was trapped under the rubble just goes to show how much Sam cares about her well-being two bad Higgs is here to ruin the fun and summon a BT now I don't know what was wrong with the wires in my brain at this point but after hearing Mama tell me to run and then hearing Higgs say he was gonna tweak the rules a bit my first thought was not to run but rather take the thing head on with Mama on my back this not only killed me but also hurt Mama quite a bit thankfully she can join him in the hot springs and regain her health these are spread out throughout the map and regain some of Sam's Health and stamina while also giving you a chance to watch BB swim but it's also possible to have your human cargo join you which is a really cool detail some people might not know once we take Mama to the city locking on her get a few minutes to talk before Mama passes away Machina is disappointed in herself as she thought Mama cut off the connection to her intentionally said she could steal her baby when that obviously wasn't the case from Locker though we also learned that something was wrong within the code of the Cupid lachana assumes that someone tampered with it somehow and given that these two are the Geniuses that made it it's not hard to assume that Mama intentionally tampered with it so she had a reason to go see her sister again it might seem strange to do this instead of just you know going to see her but Mama couldn't leave without killing herself and the child so she would have needed someone to assist her anyway sometimes people are so wrapped up in a predicament or mentality that an outside force is the only way to get them to snap out of it and thanks to Sam the sisters were able to come together again in more ways than one actually as we see one of lochna's eyes changed to Blue the same color as Mama's meaning the sisters are back to their original form the one they had when they were born one mind one body can join forever Mama's story is an incredibly sweet tale and one of my favorites in the game it might seem rather pointless to solve this conundrum between these two sisters when we have a world to connect but just like with the earlier couple this is what death straining is all about connecting people together these missions are much different than the ones we did earlier because those characters are insignificant to the overall story and we aren't really connecting them to anyone except the network with mama she was able to see her own sister again and also come to terms of her condition as right before we cut her cord she says you have to break some ties to forge others it's sort of like saying when one door closes another opens sometimes ending things opens up the opportunity to start other things and Mama severing her connection with her baby gave her the chance to move on and reconnect with her sister again hauling a corpse from one side of the map to the other takes a lot of work out of you which is why Sam takes a rest in his private quarters until he realizes that BB's gone dead man took it because something's up BBS are only able to be in service for a short time due to their age BBS are still fetuses but after enough time they start to get older and become an actual living being this is a problem as the BBS are designed to be Bridges between the world of the dead and the living so them being actual children would mean they lose their ability to function as intended Sam and luckily the player are starting to get worried as they've likely grown attached to BB seeing as they're the sole reason they can cross the BT zones to begin with to save BB dead man needs to perform some surgery in order to realign it but that's going to take some time as will be without it for a while one very interesting detail that comes out during this scene though is that dead man says that doing the surgery might erase some of bibi's memories to which Sam responds wait so Lou's gonna forget about me up until this point Sam has never said the name Lou or even mentioned that he named the BB this is foreshadowing for later so keep that in mind still though we're gonna be without Lou for a while which sucks a lot this Trope is very common in games where players are forced to fight without inability or their entire inventory and it's the same here for death straining it just so happens to be one of the most important pieces in our Arsenal and you know the game is going to throw lots of BTS at you just to hammer home how vital Lou is to the team Dwight insult to injury the game also ramps up the difficulty by having you Trek through the mountains which are steep covered in snow and walking through a drains or stamina fast while I absolutely hated going through it at the time now that I finished the game I can say that I at least appreciate the spike in difficulty this area provided before we can head out though we joined dead men in the shower for some alone time it's not the alone time you're thinking of given Sam riddy struggles enough with just touching people but rather some actual alone time as the showers are the only places they can't be monitored and dead man has some information for us he repeats what we talked about a few minutes ago regarding Bridges and the secret BB experiments but he adds that Bridget wanted to also make the BB's not just BT detectors but also objects that connect to the chiral Network in an attempt to facilitate travel to the beach this never worked though and after some time the terrorists retrieve their own BBS which is why Higgs has one despite not being employed by Bridges seeing his dihardwin is the director of bridges he must have had some kind of involvement in this or at the very least knew what was going on but dead man has turned up nothing and that's what scares him he doesn't even know his real claim and has never seen his face before so he thinks he has something to hide this like a lot of info and death training is something that we'll be explained later towards the final hours of the game so we'll Circle back to this at the end getting back to the task at hand we're told by die Hardman to link up more Preppers in the area and we're also told that there's a giant tar belt surrounding ajinot City so getting through there is going to be a problem more importantly though more Preppers means more busy work and it's arguably worse here since all of them joined without any issue except the Mountaineer he wants us to travel to a doctor so we can get him a medical device for his wife this is all that's needed to link up the final prepper so I must ask if they left the UCA to live on their own why are they this adamant about going back die Hardman makes it seem like getting these people back on our side is going to be difficult admittedly it's rather merciful that it's not given how pointless these missions are but it doesn't make the game any less interesting talking to and linking up these people doesn't further the plot and it sucks to have to go from a stellar Quest like Mama's to more of this right after it's not that they needed to have a central part of the plot like our main cast for it to matter but the missions don't solve anything or answer questions the earlier Mission with the oxytocin was connected to the world of death straining given these Preppers their packages isn't in the grand scheme of things technically everything we do is furthering The Narrative as the chiral network is not only being shared to these individuals but their own works are being added to it too so everyone is benefiting from it still though it's not something we ever see nor is it something I feel is important even if the game says that it is where things start to get interesting though is when we get introduced to the photographer she claims that her father had a camera with some pictures on it that could prove vital to our investigations to the death stranding on the camera is images of a cave painting from the Neanderthals and one of the paintings is that of a dolphin Harman hypothesizes that because the cave this was from was nowhere near the coastline the Neanderthals didn't run into Dolphins but rather be teas and assuming that this is true this means that the death straining is not the first of its kind Hartman further states that the death straining may have also been the cause of the big five the big 5 are the five mass extinctions that have happened in our own world the one most commonly known is the dinosaurs who are wiped up by an asteroid Hartman has a theory that the death straining was the cause of these five mass extinctions I say Theory but he's correct just about everything that comes out of his mouth is correct which isn't out of character since he is a beach expert but still it's a bit strange how a lot of the mystery is solved almost immediately thanks to Hartman spelling it out for us thanks to his so-called theories always being facts it's very clear that Kojima is speaking to us through Hartman and it can be a bit bothersome at times this isn't even the only character he does this to as this Aaron Hill person emails you to talk about Mama's unique Audra deck and how it reminds him of a fallen angel like the one who followed Beelzebub down to Egypt and my first thought was who the hell are you and how did you get my email some of the characters in this game are either vessels for Kojima or become possessed by him for a short time and it's not hard to notice once you start looking after a few more deliveries dead man comes by and talks about Lou and says to meet at a specific location once we arrive though we're sucked into another supercell but this time from World War II I will say while Higgs is really good at making an entrance verbally Cliff is the same but for the exact opposite reason you just can't help but get hyped whenever he appears on screen even if his whole plan is to kill you and take Lou before we defeat Cliff though we need to find dead man and Luke who are inside one of the sewer systems this near-death experience allows dead man to open up to Sam giving us a chance to learn more about him he opens up maybe a bit too much though as not only does he Share info with us about himself but also about Sam's backstory which is not a pleasant one to say the least for dead man he is called that not because he's fascinated with the dead although that is part of it but rather he's an actual Frankenstein monster dead man was born via in vitro fertilization meaning he's a test tube baby except the sperm donors are unknown and the womb is artificial so by technicality he was never born in the traditional sense furthermore some of his organs didn't function as intended or were just simply missing so the doctors took them from other donors whereas I can personally say that my body is my own as I've never had a transplant of any kind the same cannot be said for dead man everything that's a part of him is not his own from his organs to even his own birth which is why his name is dead man as he was never truly alive to begin with as such given the nature of the beach he can't visit one as he doesn't have one having one means you have a soul that will pass on to the beach but dead man has no soul just a body a body that isn't even his to begin with due to being artificial dead man never had any parents and he also struggled to make friends that is until Sam came along as he's the only one to have built a connection with him which is why he was comfortable sharing that information but of course now that their friends it's only fair that the first thing dead man does is repeat all of Sam's history to us and make him relive one of the worst days of his life dead man looked into the archives and discovered why Sam named as Bibi Lou It Feels So unnatural to get this information this way it felt like it would have just been better for Sam to say it instead of dead man that being said though the info is quite important as it gives us a lot of context regarding Sam's departure from Bridges and his hatred for America Sam's birth is something we'll have to talk about later but I'll just say that Bridget is not his biological mother yet she still took care of him as if he was her own as Sam got older he started reappearing on the beach constantly and ended up manifesting those Doom abilities of his being a child he had no idea what was going on which is why Amelie would comfort him as much as possible while on the beach this is also around the time he contracted that athenophosm phobia so Bridget recommended he see a therapist to his name Lucy Lucy is a sort of atheist in the sense as she doesn't believe in the beach she knows that BT's Dooms and repatriots exist but the beach is something she sees as a collective delusion a way for Humanity to explain what these New Creations are strange that she draws the line there of all places but regardless she was tasked with helping Sam come to terms with his condition and possibly overcome it Lucy assumed that a lot of this stem from Amelie and she theorizes that if they distance themselves he might overcome this resistance to his physical touch Sam lashed out at her for this comment but instead of backing down she went further and told him that the beach was fictional and that his repatriation was just a way for him to explain his near-death experiences that he's had instead of getting angry though he remained quiet for the rest of the session as she feared that she may have pushed him too far well she did as the next time that they meet Sam seems determined to prove her wrong by committing suicide in her office to show that he can return from the beach this of course convinces her and is also what made Sam break down as he's always wanted to talk about this with someone who understand and accept him that isn't Bridget or Amelie and since Lucy was his therapist someone whose job is to listen to him he developed a connection with her they also ended up holding hands after he woke up and he never pulled away and they both realized that they share a connection with each other thanks to Lucy Sam was not only able to cure his affenfasm phobia but he was also able to start a family the couple was going to have a daughter who Sam named Luis or Lou for short but as she got closer to giving birth she kept experiencing the same nightmare of waking up on the beach Bridget seemed to have caught wind of this and was able to show her everything Lucy saw the beach the birth of Sam the death stranding and even more things we haven't talked about yet and it practically broke her her last note was addressed to Sam and it talks about her taking her own life as we know though suicide isn't that simple in death straining and due to no one finding her she caused the void out which took the entire city Sam had actually went to go see her at this time as he wasn't able to get a hold of her and he was caught in the blast once he revived he saw the destruction which broke him even more given the circumstances of the death being a suicide and the husband of the deceased being the only Survivor Blaine was put on Sam immediately and he was blamed for the cause of the Void out Bridges was under a lot of public pressure due to this incident which led to Sam resigning that's why he's a freelancer in the intro he left Bridges but continued to do his work under his own name and not Bridges honestly given what happened I can understand why Sam would hate the UCA and would want nothing to do with America at all but this is why Bibi is called Lou as she's named after his late daughter this is very clearly a deep and traumatizing moment for Sam which is why it's weird that dead man is so comfortable which is blurting on his business like that in any case it's nice to be able to get some information for once on Sam as it gives us a better understanding as to why he initially disliked the idea of reconnecting America shortly after this Hartman comes by and asks if Sam can bring Mama's corpse to his lab as her body doesn't necrotize so he wants to see why just like all the characters we've met so far Hartman is another peculiar and unusual case Harmon's unique Quirk is that he purposely goes into cardiac arrest only to be revived three minutes later a few years ago Hartman was going to the hospital for heart surgery his wife and daughter were going to pay him a visit but needed to stop home first on their way home though they were caught in two simultaneous void outs killing them both Hartman wasn't caught in the blast but the Shockwave knocked out the power while he was on life support Hartman along with all the other victims of the Void outs were then sent to the beach however the backup power kicked on and sent Hartman back to the land of the living just like how bridges use his still mothers to replicate the first sighting of the BTS Harmon replicated the day he died in order to go back to the beach and search for his family he believes that if the beaches are different then the afterlifes have a chance to be different as well and he wants to make sure he ends up in the afterlife with his family when he dies so he spends his days repeating this cycle 21 minutes with the living three minutes with the dead exploring the various beaches of the world and hopes that he finds their Beach he says he makes about 60 trips to the beach a day and is on cycle 218 549 meaning he's been doing this every day for almost 10 years it's actually affected him so much that the repeated shocks to his heart have permanently changed the shape of his heart to that of a drawn one hell even the void outs create the same heart shape I don't really get why it was necessary to add that Last Detail but the information is at least interesting however unlike Mama we aren't able to help Hartman Hartman has other plans for us and even if we wanted to help him this is his life now we aren't going to be able to convince him to change he has to do that himself Harmon during this conversation says it's my damned Hearts fault that we were torn apart but it's also the reason I'll see them again someday ironically it's Hartman's heart that's the problem he can't accept that he has to move on so he does this every day just to be proved wrong each time it's also very likely he'll never find their Beach given how many people exist the nature of the beaches are still very confusing like whether or not a beach still exists if that person passed on and whether or not people outside the U.S count as this game only focuses on the stage but doesn't mention if the broader world has been affected by this too but hypothetically if we were to assume on the low end that there's only one million beaches Hartman's still going to be doing that for at least another 30 years at most there is a less than one percent chance he actually finds them which not only shows how dedicated he is to achieving his goal but also how deluded his mind has become grief can be a hard thing to overcome and everyone Grieves in their own way but I hope we can all see how insane this is Hartman's heart is the reason he's alive but it's also the thing that's killing him I can understand where Hartman comes from as if this theory is true which is surprisingly the one theory he has that isn't a confirmed fact and Hartman and his family will be in separate afterlives then trying to prevent that is important as they would be separated for eternity otherwise but still there's too many variables and unknowns at play here that trying to find the answer would be a worthless Endeavor the world is cruel and bad things happen to good people and Hartman doesn't deserve what happened to him which is why it sucks that of all the people in this game he's the one we can't help however Hartman doesn't seem to mind he's been able to keep busy in between those 21 minute intervals as he's constantly working on Research into the beach since he could visit the beach more than any person he's become the lead researcher on the beaches so even if the beach he finds isn't his families his discoveries can still prove useful as such Hartman's instructions are to deliver some packages to a few other researchers it's once again more busy work but the difference here is that unlike our prior work these deliveries contribute to research regarding the beaches and the death stranding and completing these deliveries will give us more information about these topics it's just like the oxytocin delivery it's a set of quests that don't have a major focus on one character but do progress the narrative in a meaningful way before we go though Hartman finds a small vial in the bag we carried mama in which contains an umbilical cord that looks like a BT tether rather than an actual cord it doesn't have any information about it now but he might when we return one thing I will say is that I like how Hartman's condition was utilized during this cutscene his 21 minutes are about to be up when we talk to him so he has us weight in his room while he goes to the beach the game gives you enough things to look at but it can be a very boring three minutes plus you're right in the middle of a conversation and doing this shows the player how interactions with him can be people generally hate being interrupted and this is what interacting with Hartman is like as one minute he's awake and the next he's gone this also happens again later when Hartman collapses mid-conversation which prompts Sam to head out while he's asleep continuing on though the information we learned from the scientists is as follows there were apparently deposits of chirillium dating as far back as 65 million years ago meaning cairolium didn't just appear recently furthermore a species known as ammonite which is dated to be about 200 million years old had an umbilical cord attached to it mammals are the only species that have umbilical cords and we only use them for Reproductive reasons so the species having one is strange I know a lot of that information seems forced and out of nowhere but it does make sense in a weird way the chiral network not only allows people to share information with one another but it also uses the beach meaning we could use the beach to find data about our world that's been lost to time or the death stranding that's why building the chiral network is so critical as it provides us the means to overcome the death stranding by giving us all the information we had prior to its events once we return to Hartman he says he has a message for us from dead man he says that the umbilical cord we delivered was taken for Bridget's Strand and that it was outside her body rather than inside the cord like Mama's was filled with chirillion meaning Bridget had connection to the beach via the umbilical cord but why was it on the outside thanks to the info Hartman has a developing theory that the five mass extinctions occurred because of the death stranding and that were in the middle of the sixth one he further states that the death straining occurs because of a host called the extinction entity each entity from the previous five extinctions had an umbilical cord attached to the outside of their body despite the species not needing these chords for anything with that information laid out Harman thinks that Amelie could be the sixth Extinction entity once again I say Theory but he's correct Hartman is almost always right about everything now at the time this really is a theory and we'll have to wait to the end of the game to actually get the answer but upon replaying the game you'll notice how much of Hartman's supposed theories are really just facts it's nice to be able to get some concrete info in a game where the characters lie to you quite a bit but it does feel out of place sometimes Harmon goes from his talk about the extinction right into what he calls this Extinction entity Theory despite the fact that we've never heard this word before plus this isn't a theory it's just straight up Canon fact because all of this is real it's Kojima once again using Hartman to relay truth about the game to the player however I do have one genuine question about this theory of his Hartman states that the five extinctions all had an Extinction entity these would naturally be the ones leading the species so when the dinosaurs were reigning Supreme we can assume that the extinction entity was a dinosaur and that's where I'm lost I said earlier that animals can't enter the beach but Extinction entities require beaches in order to enact the death stranding but if all animals can't have beaches how does the extinction entity have a beach remember the beaches are a manifestation of Humanity's perception of death which means the beaches were created in Access there were higher level of thinking since we're sentient animals aren't sentient and thus don't think about the perception of death or any matter of high-level cognitive thought so since they can't how do they have beaches the game is practically contradicting itself here which is why I'm genuinely asking if I miss something as I have read no evidence that explains why my current theory is that this is either a mistake in the writing or that only the extinction entities have beaches the latter is a very loose Theory but it's my attempt to make sense of it all more important than that though is the information about Amelie it is indeed true that she is the extinction entity for the six death stranding so we should be careful around her and consider what she plans to do with her power with all that finished though we have one more thing left to do before reaching Edge not City figure out across the tar belt that surrounds the city this was admittedly a really cool puzzle as it didn't hold your hand unlike most of the game walking through the Tarbell kills you and you can drive or launch anything over it the only way to do it is to intentionally get captured by a BT once grabbed BTS will drag you to a more spacious location set the bigger BTS can spawn buildings in debris also spawn since the tar is raising the objects around it so by intentionally spawning a boss fight we now have a way to cross the tar belt parkouring across the buildings though is a bit of a pain but just in case you're like me and die the resulting void out will give you enough room to walk around the edge of the crater to Edge not City even though it took me a few minutes to solve I really enjoy the out of box thinking required to solve it Sam then sees Amelie near the coast before falling into the tar and waking up on the coast near Edge not City so far in this video the ratio of questions to answers has been about a thousand to one so it's time to flip that as the next few hours are all about answers after going through quite a few BTS we make it to Edge not city and have officially reconnected all of America to the Cardinal network but it's too early to celebrate as once the network is complete Higgs arrives to once again ruin the day Amelie says that since we've connected every knot together she can now link all the beaches to hers causing an Extinction far greater than anything that's came before it this isn't the sixth death stranding the one of the many links in the chain this would be the last stranding it would completely decimate the land killing all life and possibly the planet itself and as the extinction entity it's her job to bring about this destruction Higgs also adds that the reason we have Dooms and repatriation abilities is because of Amelie since she's the extinction entity she's the source of these powers what follows is a lengthy boss fight between Sam and one of the largest BTS in the game once it's defeated though the three reconvene again which leads to Higgs shooting Sam and taking only to the beach for what he calls the grand finale to get there though we're gonna need fragile who once again reminds Sam to uphold his part of the deal to feed Higgs but leave him alive fragile then plans to jump Sam into Amelie's Beach using his dream catcher and then using her bracelet to bring herself to Sam this necklace is given quite a bit of attention throughout the game along with this kipu that Sam made for Amelie it's learned that if you have a strong connection to someone then you can visit their Beach I don't know if there's a proper word for this but think of these objects as things that hold significance to these people which is why they can use it to find that person's beach now I want to clarify that the beaches still behaved normally so it's not like Sam can hold the dream catcher and then just magically appear on the beach he has to be taken there by someone who can like fragile but the Dreamcatcher can help him find the specific Beach easier as it's connected to Amelie this concept reappears shortly using a baby doll so keep this in mind but the plan ends up working and Sam makes it to the beach things look strange though is not only is Amelie confused as to why Sam is here but Higgs is Bowing in front of her despite the fact that he's supposed to be her captor before he's caught though he suspends her in a web of tar and tells Sam that his goal has been to keep the extinction entity safe according to Higgs Humanity has about a few thousand years before we all go extinct so why not cut to the Chase and go out with a bang Sam refuses to let that happen and Higgs won't let Sam win and so begins a good old-fashioned boss I'll just let Higgs say it in this place [ __ ] beach there's no repatriation here no one of us dies that's it he goes to the other side huh lucky loser just to put him into this rinse repeat oh [ __ ] once so no BTS no void out no [ __ ] just a good old-fashioned boss fight stick versus rule done versus strand one more inning before the end one last I think out of all the roles Troy Baker has ever done Higgs might be my favorite of them all while I liked his role as Joel In The Last of Us I've always found him to play a fantastic villain he is the actor who voiced Pagan Min after all Higgs is an incredible villain from his character designed to his charismatic fourth wall breaking he's one of those characters you just love to hate but keeping in line with the whole getting answers thing Higgs says that he's a repatriot we don't get to see him repatriating games so we can't tell if he's lying but it doesn't matter anyway as if one of them dies they can't go back repatriation allows someone's soul to go back to the land of the living however Sam and Higgs are past that plane of existence since they're on the beach and repatriation prevents you from going to the beach so Higgs is telling the truth here but this discovery brings up an interesting point we're so close to the end of the game and yet we don't really know a whole lot about Higgs well if you manage to do a specific side quest then you might know a bit more than you think early in the game we get a delivery order for pizza this is a part of the main quest section of orders yet feels like a side quest these are some of my favorite quests in all of video games as their side quests that are given main quest priority for some reason which means there's something going on here and sure enough there is the order is from a Peter Englert and just like with Higgs unless you have a degree in physics you likely won't catch the connection Peter Englert is a combination of two names Peter Higgs and Francis Englert who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the discovery of the Higgs mechanism if you've noticed the connection then you're catching on as Peter is actually Higgs which is not only hilarious as he's basically forcing Sam to travel across the country to deliver him pizza but it's also rather creepy as inside his house is various pictures of Sam at different points in the game Higgs has been stalking salmon by extension us throughout the game which is a very unsettling feeling on his desk though are some journal entries that are written by him for us to read but these are only a fraction of the total amount there are 28 different journal entries that are written by Higgs which give us an understanding of the world from his point of view the first nine entries are about higgs's early life as a porter surprisingly he used to do it for survival since he had a rough home life but over time he started to do it for the sake of it he was a real tried and true altruist and loved helping people fragile Express and ended up hearing about higgs's accomplishments and that he had Dooms so they recruited him to their outfit that's when he would meet fragile and the two worked as a team this also seems to be around the same time Higgs developed a hatred for Bridges one of the other side missions we can do is only available in the director's cut and it has to do with a woman named coffin coffin is fragile's Mother and just like her dad they were Porters who did deliveries for Bridges coffin would renounce her contract with them though once she discovered that the cargo she was carrying were BBS she then worked together with a ragtai group of Porters to bring down Bridges and among their ranks was Higgs now at the time Higgs was using his Peter persona but she cared deeply for him and sympathized with his tragic upbringing eventually though coffin would end up passing away as their final mission was to assault the facility we entered to complete the mission inside his various objects that are used by the stillmother's bridges has the facility was then overrun but Bridges managed to cover up their involvement by blowing up the facility and locking it away one by one the members would die with coffin being the last her final message was for Higgs and it was for him to continue her Legacy and not let the flame die out it's unclear if Higgs managed to find this message since the facility is locked from the inside but it seems to work anyway as the homo demons are likely his attempt at keeping that flame alive the timeline for Higgs is very confusing especially since the missions with coffin were added after the game's release but it seems like all of this happened before he met fragile assuming that's true Higgs would eventually meet fragile or coffin's daughter and the two would work as a team under fragile Express but as we know he would end up betraying her his betrayal was due to him meeting Amelie who would twist his world upside down he like Lucy was shown images of the beach and the death stranding and realized what's the point if the world is going to die why even bother trying that's why he joined up with Amelie to make the extinction happen the thing is though is that Amelie doesn't seem to want this to happen the last few entries of his journal are related to the present day events such as entry 17 that talks about salmon fragile arriving in Port not city which is when we had to fight that squid BT earlier but entry 18 says that Amelie seems to be rejecting her true nature and delaying the death stranding and this is indeed true Amelie is a bit of a complex case because she's both trying to and not trying to destroy the world she doesn't want to but the universe is forcing her as that's the role she was given at Birth her only purpose in life is to bring about the death stranding so refusing to do so would be going against her entire reason for existing circling back to the start of that entry though Higgs is trying to enact the last stranding as to him the world is doomed anyway so why not end it on our own terms there's a common saying you may have heard of and that's life has no meaning this is often used in nihilistic circles as a way to say that life has no meaning so what's the point anymore but this can also be twisted in a more positive meaning such as life has no meaning until you give it one since life has no meaning it's up to you to Define what that meaning is or in another way thanks to life having no predetermined meaning we're able to make our own Higgs and Sam are the two sides of this meaning one sees no point in continuing because of the odds while the other wants to keep going despite those odds this also connects to what Higgs says in the beginning of the fight regarding the stick vs rope and the gun vs strand the very first thing we see when starting the game is a quote about the stick in the rope and how these were the first two objects that man used the stick to keep things away and the Rope to bring them closer Higgs is the stick Sam is the Rope Higgs is pushing people away to make sure Amelie fulfills her purpose and Sam is bringing people together via the chiral Network that is what this fight is all about who will prevail the stick or the Rope the fight with Higgs requires us to use the cargo left on the beach as a weapon to distract him so we can get in closer this is also the moment that sparked that hole this game feels like a game comment I said in the intro as the final fight is a full-on street fighter style matchup fit with health bars light attacks and Dodges sadly there isn't any combos in the traditional sense you're really just playing footsies and fighting from neutral the whole time but it was fun and is the kind of absurdity you expect from games only video games are able to pull this off and not immediately provoke some side eye from the audience it's still incredibly out of place here in death stranding but that goes back to the hole that's just so Kojima comment death stranding is an incredibly serious game about a very serious topic but at its core it's still a game which is why there is references to grinding boss fights and game overs this does create a weird imbalance as you're supposed to take the game seriously but there's times in its contents are complete parody like the whole Metal Gear Solid game over screen in the background but I found that it was not only in good fun but it never took away from the overall message as right after this fight the game goes back to Serious mode and showcases another Core theme of the game once Higgs is defeated something happens he talks up a big game about how his bond between Amelie is made of stronger stuff before realizing his powers are gone his Dooms were never his to begin with they were always Amelie so he never had real power without her higgs's descent from altruistic Porter to egotistical terrorist is fascinating to see unfold as it connects to the idea of hiding behind a mask the game has placed a major importance on higgs's mask and not just visually but more symbolically masks are used quite a bit throughout the game mainly with die Hardman Higgs and Amelie for Higgs The Mask represents his ego with the mask he's Higgs The Fearsome terrorist without it he's Higgs the porter the mask is a representation of his ego thanks to him letting the powers he got go to his head we can even see this during the second part of the boss fight where he goes ugh I could beat you as if he's hyping himself up since he knows he's losing Higgs is nothing without these powers and he'd forgotten that along the way the mask is also ordained in this gold color so as to stand out amongst the others further reinforcing how far his ego has gone for Amelie it's a representation of her Extinction entity Persona every time we talk with her she isn't wearing it and these talks are about encouraging Sam to keep going once she wears the mask though she starts spouting out nonsense about the last stranding whereas a mask is used to hide the wearer's true appearance with Amelie it's the opposite but as I said it's complicated since she doesn't want to enact the last stranding but she also doesn't have a choice as for die Hardman well we'll get to him soon but it's clear that this mask of his is also hiding something Sam anomaly then talk for a bit and probably the worst line in the game is spoken amili tells Sam that she managed to visit him at one point during one of their many Talks meaning she was never captured and could have just left at any point she did this because Sam doesn't care about the UCA or America and thus wouldn't have gone on this journey if it didn't involve Amelie Sam then replies so what I'm Mario and you're a Princess Peach to which Amelie says I know I know but it worked out so let's run home together like Mario and Princess Beach I don't know if I should laugh at this line or be genuinely disappointed by it especially because the game fully commits to this bit by having the two run along the shore like it's the climax of romance novel it's the most out of place scene in the whole game but I think that's intentional this came right after the end of the final boss so my thinking is that Kojima put this here as a sort of subversion the last 20 minutes has this weird video game ending kind of feeling where we defeat the big bad or rescue the girl and go home that's why I found the health bars to not be too distracting as it fits what happens after you've grinded for hours and built up your arsenal of weapons and skills in order to defeat the big boss in an over-the-top boss fight the fight to end all fights the finale the climactic end to the game and then once you win you're rewarded with the girl you spend hours desperately trying to save and the two you walk off into the sunset like I said it's a very traditional video game style ending but death stranding is not a traditional game which is why the game is not done after this supposed ending I'd argue we're just getting started as right when they stop Amelie disappears and Bridget and Die Hard Men appear nearby die Hardman has a gun to bridge it and shoots her but the bullets go through her shortly after a cliff appears and die Hardman is shocked at seeing him Cliff then asks Bridget where Bibi is who then points to Sam Amelie reappears and pushes Sam off the cliff which somehow sends him back to the land of the living I'll get to that whole Fiasco later so for now let's just focus on the present Sam is back at the safe house that was located near the tar belt we crossed earlier dead man is also here via hologram and says that both him fragile Hartman and Mama are all here at the Capitol not City the problem is that fragile can't jump us to the city since she's already used her powers too many times we saw this much earlier when she started bleeding after teleporting too much but now she seems to be in a much worse state which means we have to go from here all the way back to the beginning of the game it's the longest and most dangerous Trek by far as the chiral density has increased so BTS have increased in number and simply entering a Zone will cause a boss fight to start once we reach the port we get the final fight with cliff and everything goes as expected except defeating him has a different ending instead of cliff and Sam fighting over Lou again he gives up he realizes that Bibi was in front of him all long dead man said that Sam and Lou's memories were mixing and what we were seeing were From bibi's perspective but this is false these are Sam's memories Sam is not only a former Bridge baby but also Cliff's son Sam doesn't understand it just yet but he will in time for now cliff and Sam hug as Father and Son something Cliff have been wanting to do this whole time it's such a captivating and a tear-jerking scene seeing these two actors act in such a believable way his father and son was incredible right after this Sam wakes up in another safe house and dead man plays in a recording of die Hardman who says that Bridget had invited him to her Beach which is how he got there earlier he knew it was a trap though which is why he made this recording and he states that when he became the director of bridges he used his access to look at some protected files in the company archives and within them he discovered that Bridget had during cancer in her 20s meaning she couldn't have had children yet somehow she gave birth to Amelie this is like one of those we've never seen Amalie and Bridget in the same room before so they must be the same person except this is actually real Amelie and Bridget are the same person Bridget is the body Amelie is the soul the heart and the car that's why Sam only met Amelie on the beach and why she could only ever be talked to Via hologram because she wasn't real to begin with this Extinction entity has two names Bridget and Amelie they are one in the same Bridget covered for her other half by saying that Amelie was her daughter and that she had a condition that made her not age Bridget was the body and thus the body Ages which is why she ages Amelie is the soul and souls don't age which is why she never aged the game also teases this during their princess beach scene as once Amelie appears again you'll notice that Bridget is no longer on the shore the same is when Bridget appears right when Amelie disappears this completely changes the story of death straining but we still have more to discuss the final leg of this journey has us fighting a giant BT whale the largest Boss by far in both sides and health Amelie is getting close to enacting the last stranding which is causing the world to go into chaos so it makes sense why the largest BT is still waiting for us I also like the detail of it being a whale of All Creatures too after it's defeated we visit fragile who's looking quite bad thankfully she musters up enough strength to send Sam to Amelie's beach before that happens though Sam says his speech to the group which talks about rebuilding what we lost and that even though death is inevitable we gotta keep going as long as we can so we can say we had a good run he also goes on to say that before he only cared about seeing the next sunrise but now that he's met them they helped them change his outlook on life Sam has shown genuine growth over the course of this game and has become less pessimistic about his life whereas Higgs went One Direction in regards to his character Arc Sam went the other he's gone from a lonely Porter to someone with friends friends who showed him the true beauty of life and how just building one connection with someone can change your life it's just overall such a great speech with an equally great message Sam will then appear on Amelie's Beach and hers is much different than any of the beaches we've ever gone to kind of wish the whole area wasn't covered in fog though because the Earth in the background is a real sight to behold if you screwed the photo mode settings salmon Amelie then meet and talk she presents Sam with two options and it now or continue on knowing that the struggle will be pointless she then hands Sam the gun and tells him to choose she also says that you should know what to do by now and if you've gotten this far then you should I feel like this message was directed at the player rather than Sam as death straining has told you since the beginning that death is not the answer no matter what which is why the correct answer is to put away the gun and embrace Amelie the last trending may happen tomorrow next week next year or next decade but that doesn't mean we stop like I said life has no meaning until you give it one just because the world is going to end doesn't mean we just drop what we're doing and accept it we should instead live our lives to the fullest knowing we had a good run hugging it out and preventing the last training temporarily is for the greater good but we are going to be hurting Amelie in the process she doesn't have a beach she is the beach as such she can't leave she'll be stuck here for however long it takes to enact the last stranding alone without anyone to speak to but she knows this is the right decision that if she has to suffer so that everyone can survive then she'll do it my favorite line of hers is at the end when she says that the extinction wasn't just an ending but an opportunity the death straining has connected the people of this world in ways that wouldn't have been possible without it they adapted in our attempt to overcome the very thing that is trying to destroy them by doing it together this is what death straining is all about human connection Embrace others rather than push them away become the rope and not the stick violence begets violence and killing Amelie would have solved nothing and letting her enact her own form of violence wouldn't have either which is why we have to stop this string of hatred and death once and for all and just accept each other regardless of who they are even if that being was born to kill the entire world Sam has a deep love for Amelie which makes this connection personal to him it's not just about saving the world but also letting someone he loves know that they aren't alone and that'll always be there for them even if they're stranded on the beach for the rest of time the problem is that doing this has now stranded Sam on his own Beach and he can't return after walking for what feels like an eternity Sam attempts to kill himself with a gun but it won't work Amelie doesn't want Sam to end it nor does she want him to feel lonely which is why she brought cliff and him together Amelie was the one who summoned cliff into the world the World War era Beach thing seems to be Cliff's own creation but him being present in the world was Amelie's doing she wanted Sam to know that he was never alone and that he needs to live and not throw away his life oddly enough attempting to kill himself was the key to saving it as Hartman was able to track its use to the beaches and find out where he was before he leaves though we see the same five entities we saw at the beginning of the game it's never explained what these individuals are but there are two theories they are either the five Extinction entities or the five friends Sam has made along the way fragile dead man Hartman die Hardman and Mama personally I think it's both just as a word's meaning may change over time so too has this in the beginning these entities represented death and were meant to be feared it wouldn't be wrong to assume that they were the extinction entities but now that Sam has made new friends and we the player have developed connections to these individuals the entities are now a representation of Sam's friendships each of these five people have built a bond with Sam and his actions have changed their lives for the better mama was able to move on and reconnect with her sister dead man found his first real friend Hartman didn't exactly move on but we do get an email after the game is over that says he has stopped his search for their beaches and his match someone new fragile has become a lot more friendly and like Sam has a more optimistic look towards the future earlier I said fragile had ulterior motives and it didn't mean for that to come off as villainous it's just that fragile never wanted to help with our main objective of finding Amelie the only reason she joined us is that it just so happens that our objectives are intertwined as finding Amelie also means defeating Higgs you can tell that fragile is happy to be of help to Sam whenever you use the Fast Travel mechanic you could see her smiling which just shows that she's happy to help we also learned after the game is over that fragile restarted the business she's back to doing what she wanted to do before Higgs ruined it I've said that fragile Express was her business but in reality it was her late father's idea the company was just named after her so getting rid of Higgs and reconnecting America gives her the chance to continue her father's Last Wish die Hardman is the only one I'm a bit unsure of but to be fair he has been a helping hand all game and reconnecting America was his goal so in a way we did help him with something but still each one of these five entities can be seen as the five friends we've grown to love over the course of the game as Sam approaches them dead man pulls him from the bottom through the seam and back into the land of the living time passes and we see die Hardman giving a speech to the us as the new president he and all our friends have the same kipu Sam made Amelie on their chest which represents their bond and connection not just to each other but to the whole United States everyone is in the room listening in Sam dead man Mama fragile even Hartman but he's in the middle of a beach trip everything has been answered except for one question what started the death stranding well the answer is Sam the final mission in the game is to take Lou to the incinerator as she's passed her expiration date but dead man says that Sam could take her out of the pot if he wants to but it could kill her in the process while at the incinerator we see the full scene of those memories of Cliff we've been seeing since the start of the game Cliff Unger was visiting his wife at the hospital when he was visited by die Hardman he quickly shuts off the cameras and tells Cliff to take Bibi and get out of here Die Hard Men knew of the BB experiments and didn't want his former commanding officer to have their son be used in BB Tech Cliff then shoots his wife as this would be the last time they would see each other and he doesn't want her to be a part of the experiments as well afterward he took Sam who is still in the BB pod and attempts to escape bucket shot in the process while he bleeds out he starts singing and talking to Sam before the guards break through the door die Hardman and Bridget are also here with the latter ordering the former to shoot him now that he's taken Bibi out of his pod here we can see the mask come into play again as Bridget is wearing a mask to mask her identity so no one can connect her to the experiments going on here die Hardman wears the mask because of what happens next as Bridget pulls the trigger for him killing cliff and Sam with the same bullet in order to cover up the story die Hardman would have to fake his own death and change his name whereas characters like Higgs is a mask to hide their other persona for Die Hard Men the mask was literal he needed to hide his face and name from everyone so that no one could find out what happened here while die Hardman is still getting over the death of his friend Bridget attempts to revive the baby to no avail and then gets sent to the beach next to Amelie who then revives it by sending it back through her Beast to the land of the living that's how Sam gained his doom and repatriate abilities but also how the death straining started as this opened the floodgates for all the BTS as they used Amelie's Beach to go to the land of the living to add to the Past references that's why the baby doll is so significant for Cliff and die Hardman the baby doll represents Sam because for Cliff that's his son and for die Hardman that's when he shot Sam as a baby that's why die Hardman was able to use the doll to travel to Amelie's Beach like how Sam uses his dream catcher to do the same and why these dolls are on Cliff during his introduction scenes Higgs also has the doll in his BB pod inside of an actual BB but I don't think there's a strong connection between them as the other two which now that I think about it actually makes sense as they're just working together and have no actual connection the doll was used in a more literal way to be a link to Amelie's Beach whereas the doll for characters like cliff and I Hardman had more meaning atop its intended use further reinforcing that what the two had was just superficial Higgs just protected her so that her purpose could be fully realized he never cared about her in the same way Sam cared for her the final flashback is a meeting between Bridget and die Hardman who decided to take Sam out of the Pod since he no longer serves his purpose as a BB this of course has a chance to kill him but as we know he survives and just like Sam Liu does the same and survives as well this then prompts Sam to remove his cufflinks and set off into the unknown world with his new daughter Lou even though Sam built these connections with these people he wants to leave them behind as he thinks this new America has no place for him seeing as there is a sequel coming I would love to see where this goes and why he decided to choose this but regardless this scene finally brings us to the end of death stranding for real this time to repeat what I said when I first did the credits wow death straining may be a jumbled mess of a story for 90 of its run time but it comes together at the end in a nicely wrapped package just about all the burning questions the player will have are answered and it makes for a rather cohesive Story the game is riddled with themes and messages all of which are important one I haven't even talked about yet as it was just shown towards the end and that's the pistol the same pistol that Bridget uses to shoot cliff and Sam is presumably the same when die Hardman uses to shoot Bridget and the same when Amelie gives to Sam when making his decision it's quite interesting how the gun that started the death stranding is also the one that ends it now we don't physically use the gun on Amelie of course but having the gun in her hand is a reminder that death is wrong in an industry where death and violence are commonplace where you can dismember your enemies in a million different ways Kojima wanted to make a game that's the opposite death straining was unlike anything I've ever played before and it's that key aspect of the game that's going to stay in my brain for the years to come a lot of games these days feel the same everything nowadays seems to be a bloated open world game filled with pointless filler to add run time it's just boring and while some may see death straining as a bad game I'd rather have a bad game than a boring one because at least I was conscious enough while playing to recognize what I disliked rather than just going through the motions like some kind of zombie death straining may not have been your cup of tea which is a completely valid opinion to have as the gameplay is not for everyone and the story can not only be difficult to to interpret but also inconsistent as it comes off as both intelligent and pretentious at the same time but we should at least recognize that in an industry that is flooded with similar gameplay Concepts and mechanics death straining was trying to be different it may not be your cup of tea but it sure as hell is mine it's a game with a very meta-like narrative that serves as a critique about our own world and how things like violence actually prevents peace rather than achieves it and how social media is a blessing and a curse the internet has made us more connected than ever but sometimes it feels like we're more disconnected than ever even if we ignore the out of game themes death stranding still has a wonderful story filled with likable characters in a great Central plot the pacing is off at times in the heavy Exposition can feel out of place but overall I was pleased at my experience I will admit though that this is not a game for everyone there's a reason why people say you either love it or hate it as this game is not the same stuff we've been subjected to so naturally it's going to displease those that hate it would really strike something in those that connect with it it's different and different doesn't always mean bad which is black command games reshape in the mold even if I wasn't a fan of the game personally and death straining is one of those games that reshaped the mold by creating a style of gameplay that's incredibly unique and a compelling narrative about human connection and how we should come together rather than isolate ourselves in an industry filled with sticks Kojima wanted to be the Rope thanks for watching if you enjoyed the video please be sure to leave a like And subscribe for more story analysis like this death straining was truly an experience and I'm excited to see what death straining 2 is about Sam seems to be much older fragile has smooth skin again Lou is also much older and Higgs seems to have taken over Amelie's body who for some reason is built like Ryden there's a lot that could happen with this game and I'll be here patiently waiting for its arrival as always thank you all for watching today and I hope you enjoyed like And subscribe if you're new and thinking to my returning viewers coming back to another video take care everyone goodbye

Channel: Gingy

Views: 1,125,307

Keywords: death stranding, death stranding story, death stranding ending, death stranding story explained, death stranding ending explained, death stranding gameplay, death stranding review, death stranding analysis, death stranding story analysis, death stranding story review, death stranding 2, death stranding explained, fragile, deadman, diehardman, higgs, death stranding higgs, gingy story, gingy review, death stranding retrospective

Id: FFtYXoOowKQ

Length: 97min 54sec (5874 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 18 2023