Death Stranding | The Ultimate Critique

I was very skeptical and even critical of death stranding going into it I bashed it for pretentious marketing intentionally vague explanations of gameplay and I heavily criticized Kojima himself for his seeming inability to concisely or even coherently define what death stranding was it seemed to be a game sold entirely on the name of its creator which is actually antithetical to Kojima's own beliefs or at least the beliefs that he described in 2014 with PT you see when he released the playable teaser onto the PlayStation Store as a free demo he intentionally hid his name his studio and his publishers branding from every piece of the demos promotional materials and according to him he did this so that players would be free of any presuppositions they may have going into a title knowing who created it in other words he wanted players to enjoy PT for what it was not for who it was created by however this is not so for death stranding death stranding was sold entirely on Kojima's name and the brilliance with which he crafts his games this is an important and remarkable shift in the pure sense of the word and it's one that cannot be overlooked this frankly changes the way that we all will look and play the game because Kojima himself is changing the way that he presents it to us now of course it goes without saying but when any individual is tied so inextricably to a game you have to look at it through that lens and so I decided to play death stranding as an impartial observer or even as a critic I am by no means a fanboy of Kojima and I have never actually played to completion any of his other games although I did play roughly five hours of Metal Gear Solid 5 in preparation for this video now if you followed this channel you'll know that I was not a fan of deaths training when I began in fact it took roughly eight hours for it to click and for me to begin enjoying it even in the I even made a video where I roasted the first two hours of the game much to the chagrin of the game's fans however after this 8 hour mark in other words once I got to the mid game I started looking forward to playing the game when I got back from classes and it actually became my relaxation outlet hiking and delivering packages was effectively stress relief simply put death stranding for me is a junk-food game it's easy to consume nearly impossible to fathom and it leaves you feeling as though you must consume more to gain any sustenance whatsoever even though there isn't actually much there now no game is perfect death stranding included and while introducing some interesting ideas to the industry it does have some serious flaws now I'm going to be very honest in this video I'm a fan of the game and I think most people who are critical of it have reasonable points but there are also things that deaths training does well and we'll discuss all of these things in this video but the point is if we're not honest about the game's shortcomings we can't help Kojima with whatever his next game is and if you've played deaths training for any length of time you should be aware of some of the plethora of issues and I just want to reiterate that while I am very conflicted on many of the design choices made here and I am going to spend most of this video explaining all of the problems with the game I really did enjoy my time with death stranding on the whole if I had to describe the game concisely I would say that it's a repetitive relaxing and uncomplicated game that is overly reliant on ambiguous storytelling and falls victim to some very bizarre directorial decisions at the hands of Hideo Kojima a man so closely tied to death straining that he and the game are inextricably tied mostly due to his own statements saying as much it's also probably important that I mentioned my qualifications for making this video I've put in well over a hundred hours into death stranding on two separate ps4 s a slim and a pro to get an idea of what this game can do technically something will touch on lightly later I read all of the emails completed all of the premium deliveries fought all of the BET's drove all of the vehicles talked to every celebrity shook all babies hunted down the memory chips five-star the locations explored the whole map and after all of that I can say confidently the death stranding is by far the most ironic game that I have ever played in my life you see the game was advertised as a new genre of game something that would focus on positivity and connecting people from all over the world but instead it's become one of the most divisive games of the last decade maybe of all time some will say that the world is empty boring and the gameplay is repetitive and the writing is terrible while others will say the deaths stranding is a triumph a game that try something new and succeeds a game focused on connections and fulfillment and the amazing thing is that everyone here is kind of right and I know that sounds like an oxymoron or completely nonsensical but I think I can actually defend that statement throughout the course of this video but this is my primary point the death stranding was advertised and held up as a game that would bring people together and I can't help but find it extremely ironic that it is done the exact opposite now as we move forward into the video I ask that you please hear me out on all the critiques I have for the game furthermore I'd also like for you to contribute all of your critiques and contributions down in the comments section below I will be reading through all of them now if you'd like my concise recommendation I'd say that you should only play death stranding if you have already been intrigued by it which if you are chances are you've already played it the unfortunate reality is that if you're skeptical of death stranding to any degree or if there are things that have repelled you thus far the game isn't going to convince you otherwise and the bizarre thing is that it seems as though this was a conscious design choice on the part of Kojima Productions that or it's just blatant stupidity something that we're gonna discuss in just a moment however if there is any chance that you're going to play this game you should do that first before watching don't worry this video will still be here once you're done also a couple of things that you should know I did conduct a massive survey with over 2400 respondents thank you by the way for all of you who contributed and I will be mentioning it throughout the video I have posted all of the data collected from this survey on my website Luke Stephens dotnet so that you can sift through and hold me accountable if you want to participate in the next survey for the next critique make sure to follow me on Instagram Twitter and discord so that you can be notified of when I publish it I also have a section in this video where I go over some descriptive analytics that I performed on data that I collected while playing this is dense and kind of complicated stuff I get that so rest assured that I'm going to try and make it as accessible as possible and lastly I want to thank all of these patrons for funding the creation of this video straight up it wouldn't have been made if these people didn't step up and contribute over on patreon thank you to all of you and a special vocal shout-out to Zachary Johnson Mike Holland Christopher Scott and Paige Richardson for their extreme generosity understand that this is a long video so I have timestamps below so you can jump around to chapters that you find most appealing and of course it should go without saying but this video is going to spoil pretty much everything so consider this your spoiler warning but with all of that said let's get into it [Music] the first impressions that a game gives the player are extremely important they're important for a variety of reasons but chief among them is that they serve to convince players who are skeptical of the game's quality that they should continue playing now normally for a $60 release if somebody has gone through the trouble of paying that amount of money for the game chances are they're already fairly confident that they're going to enjoy the game so what's the point of having an extremely polished first two hours or so if players are already forking over to cash well for one I would hope that the artists creating the game would want players to be intrigued by the title that they've put forward but furthermore deaths training is such a polarizing game and the gameplay was such a matter of debate before its release that many people watched streams and clips of the introductory hours of gameplay to decide whether or not they were going to try it this is pretty freakin gorgeous I mean for real look at this Norman Reedus the real-time rendering of pubes on a man's face has never looked so good and the unfortunate reality for Kojima Productions is that many people started playing the game and decided to quit within the first few hours this is a selection of responses from the survey I mentioned earlier of players who quit playing the game after starting it among the chief reasons why people stopped playing where that they said the first few hours were uninteresting slow boring confusing and even not as advertised now it's fair that every game is going to have some players who drop off after starting it that's completely unavoidable even for a masterpiece but the key takeaway is that going into the game the major contention on everybody's minds were whether or not this game was going to be uninteresting slow boring or confusing and the first few hours of the game certainly didn't help these preconceived notions but what specifically did Kojima do well he started the story in a very strategic way where Sam is just another porter performing normal deliveries like everybody else and it's implied that there's essentially an army of these types of Porter's that are delivering packages across the United States now I'll be honest I like this more than the alternative like in the old school god of war games like God of War three where you have all of the abilities up front and then they're ripped from you after you've tasted the forbidden fruit of what the player could look forward to having later in the game but it doesn't change the fact that this starts very slow in the opening cutscene Sam loses his bike and you're forced to transport cargo on foot for the first few hours furthermore it goes on for a while the first two hours really do feel like a trudge and I don't think that this is a controversial thing to say even if you are a fan of the game again I enjoyed my time with death stranding but this is simply a reality the first few hours the pacing is all over the place there also aren't very many interesting gameplay mechanics introduced here in fact the only missions that you're sent on are to deliver a small package of drugs to a dying president assist a corpse disposal crew you watch some cutscenes and then you are asked to incinerate the president's body after she's croaked and I don't really have an issue with these types of deliveries in fact I actually find them fairly relaxing and satisfying as I mentioned earlier but it does reaffirm the stereotype that death stranding is just a walking simulator especially because there's no real dynamic encounters there's no animals that you'll encounter in the world when you're going on these trips it's just you walking with some type of cargo strapped to your back trying to keep balance as you walk across a large open field scattered with rocks that are just there to make it slightly tedious for you to walk from point A to point B again not inherently bad it just reaffirms the preconceived notion that death stranding only has walking to offer in terms of gameplay even though as we'll find out later in the game there's much more to it now the baseline gameplay loop is made up of course of transporting cargo from one location to another or going to one location receiving cargo and returning it in other words a fetch quest now some people have heavily criticized the game for the core gameplay loop being made up of this very simple task which I actually disagree with any activity can be turned in a game given enough attention and time whether it's farming hunting or even talking all of these things can be turned into an experience that's worth playing furthermore death strandings gameplay system grows more complex over the course of the game they had guns grenade launchers monster boss fights that are dynamic bTW zones and even humanoid enemies known as mules that track your every movement and can hunt you down however you will need to get past around the 10 hour mark to see most of these things in full capacity and some of these things such as grenade launchers aren't even introduced until 25 to 30 hours in and this is one of the necessary frustrations with death stranding and it's a result of the studio that made it like many Japanese titles your time is required to buy into the world and the gameplay and I actually have a few examples Monster Hunter world for instance is a Japanese action RPG that I love to death and it requires a steep learning curve and a lot of effort on the player's part if you want to learn what all of the different components are that contribute to a fully mid maxed build I've put in roughly a hundred hours into monster hunter World and I'm still learning new things that the game has to offer or a look at persona 5s introductory section that can last by itself 15 to 22 hours depending on your play style and pace and yes that's considered the introduction the point is Japanese game development is different than westernized game development their games tend to have a lot of meat to them and they require a lot of time on the player's part in order to buy into and understand everything that there is to offer and this actually causes a lot of Western players to be turned off by these types of games like it or not Western gamers are very impatient and if a game is not grabbing a player within the first hour or even maybe two hours they're just gonna walk away and I don't think there's anything wrong with that it's just a feature of our culture I suppose but the point is Kojima even knew this which is why he roasted Americans for not having the quote-unquote artistic sensibilities on the level required to appreciate games such as death stranding to their list extent and here's confession time I live in the United States and Colorado I'm a Western gamer through and through and I am used to most of the coolest stuff in a game being front loaded to make sure that my attention is captured to show me what they have to offer look at Star Wars Jedi fallen order the first two hours are polished to high heaven and they are great or The Witcher 3 where the Griffon fight is front-loaded as with some butts which naturally sold me on it or Grand Theft Auto 5 where the robbery sequence is front loaded to show you what you can look forward to later in the game the point is a majority of triple-a Western titles specifically the ones that are critically acclaimed often feature front loaded gameplay sequences like it or not it's sort of a standard of Western titles at this point and the strange thing is that deaths training kind of meets this halfway what I mean is that the gameplay system is not very robust or extremely dense and complicated requiring hours upon hours of intensive research and studying to understand it rather it's pretty simple and just requires the player to mindlessly deliver packages from point A to point B what does require a huge amount of investment on the part of the player is the narrative for instance the best moment in this introductory section is the void out that we get to witness up-close it's bizarre and fantastic really there are a lot of interesting things here and we're gonna go over them in detail in just a few minutes now I don't know about you but when I saw this first I was concerned that they weren't actually going to have answers for most of the things that they were showing but they actually do and it looks like Kojima thought most of this through at least in as bizarre way as you would expect from Kojima you just have to wait roughly 38 hours to get those answers other problems also arise due to the fact that the game was developed narrative Lee and written in Japanese and then it was ported and get it over to English this is actually incredibly important to understand and I think it's a reason why a lot of the writing and deaths training has been panned this is a Japanese written story thus the dialogue is translated from the original writings of Kojima and his team into English for the actors and the can at times lead to some really strange and clunky phrasings but don't worry we'll get to this more later now you could argue that death stranding front-load some of its more flashy cinematic sequences and I think that that's fair to say especially with that void out sequence that we just looked at but in my opinion front-loading gameplay would have been a better idea due to gamers preconceived notions that the game is slow and has uninteresting gameplay I don't know that's just my opinion though let me know your thoughts below beyond this even with elaborate cutscenes shown off that are very flashy interesting and even visually intriguing shall we say these first two hours of death stranding are very bland and even downright confusing which i think is actually okay because it is a prologue after all and I think if a prologue wasn't at least somewhat confusing and intriguing it probably wouldn't be doing its job but from here the story progresses mostly through cutscenes featuring the main cast people like Sam fragile Amelie mama dead man die hard man Hartman Higgs cliff and some others some of these scenes are actually really well acted I mean there's a reason that Mads Mikkelsen won the game award for best performance but some other scenes are well not for instance leia pseudos scenes are universally awesome in spite of the writing not because of I think that's important to understand I'm fragile in fact her scenes are even up there with Mads Mikkelsen z-- which i think is high praise she has a very dry and yet emotional way of delivering her dialogue and while it does seem stilted at times I think that's mostly a result of the dialogue she's being fed there's no question that most of these actors are highly qualified to be in this piece whether you're looking at Mads Lea or Norman all of these guys are qualified and are very talented performers so perhaps I'm being unreasonable but to me it seems fair to blame most of the stilted lines and delivery on the direction and the writing as opposed to the performances however some of the performances that we see are downright bizarre and laughably bad in my opinion one of the worst performances we see in the game is that of Bridget / Amelie these scenes are bizarre they're staged strangely they're written in extremely verbose ways and they're presented in a manner that makes it seem like it should be very profound yet it appears to the viewer almost comedic in fact at the end of the game Amelie rambles for roughly 40 minutes slathering the player in unprompted exposition and when I was playing this for the first time I was actually in my bedroom and my fiancee Nikki was sitting on the bed watching me play and well this was her reaction to Amelie finally finishing one of her ten minute monologue diatribes and a lot of things actually follow this trend in death stranding inexplicably bad pacing dialogue and hilariously weird directorial choices now some people will say that this is just Kojima's style they say this to defend the game's more eccentric design choices and this is one of the weirder things to me people are defending something that doesn't hold any weight themselves what I mean is that of all of the things to conceive as weird design choices it would be something like a planted ad while a character in the game goes poop that seems like something we could all agree is a weird thing to include but the hardcore kojima fans will defend this as part of his style and if you don't like it you simply don't get it now I don't need to explain ad nauseam the fact that this is an appeal to Authority fallacy it's completely incomprehensible and in fact it's the height of stupidity chances are if you've made it this far into this video you're not the type of person that's going to be defending a choice like this with the defense that if you don't like it you just don't get it I can't reiterate this enough just because it's his style doesn't mean that something is good for instance I can have a style that's very unique like everything without cuts or having an extreme color grade placed on all of my footage this may be my style but that doesn't always mean that it's the best option in a given situation this is why most great directors have a style but they remain flexible either in the application of their style or in the content to which they apply their style what doesn't kill you make you stranger [Laughter] to mindlessly apply some sort of gimmick on everything that you do claiming that it's your style doesn't seem like an artistic expression to me it seems like a crutch but this is just one example of this sort of sycophantic fanboy ism that you see that surrounds kojima it's really bizarre and I don't know if it's just an army of accounts that Jeff Keely has created or if there are actual people out there that defend everything Kojima does as holy and infallible mister had a Okajima [Music] but regardless it is the height of irrationality even now I'm sure if you look in the comments section of this video you're going to see people defending things that Kojima did in this game and problems with death stranding saying that if you don't like it you just don't get it now if you don't know what Stockholm Syndrome is it's basically when somebody develops feelings of admiration or respect for someone with whom they should have negative feelings so I'm going to call what we're seeing with these sick of Fanta Kojima fans Kojima syndrome maybe somebody else has come up with a name for this that's more fitting but I'm calling it Kojima syndrome because it's like Stockholm Syndrome and I find it kind of funny let's try applying this to several examples there are little to no animals in the game even though we see a plethora of them in the introductory cutscene of the title is this a lazy short coming due to technical restraints or budgetary restrictions or is it a meta discussion of the emptiness of nature without conscious life and mankind's role within nature on a larger scale who can say Kojima syndrome or the fact that all of the boss fights are extremely clunky and don't actually put the player in much physical danger with the extremely generous reload system that they've put in place with the repatriation again is this just bad gameplay design a shortcoming of the development team or is it a statement on the helplessness of man in the face of death Kojima syndrome or lastly the fact that you mostly interact with humans through Holograms copy and pasted throughout the world whenever you deliver products back and forth is this simply lazy copy and pasted content to speed up development and get a game out quickly or is it a commentary on how reliant we are on technology that brings us all together again Kojima syndrome if you're not convinced of this that's fine just keep an open mind moving forward through the next few sections but I do have many more examples of when Kojima syndrome rears its ugly head but having said all of that I want you to know that I do have some fond feelings for death stranding I found my time relaxing even rejuvenating but there are objectively bad elements the death stranding has that deserve to be called out Kojima isn't immune to criticism just because Konami screwed him over and despite largely enjoying my time of the game I do have an obligation to call these things out and to critique the game fairly so while it may seem that I'm only criticizing the game remember that for one this is a critique and that's well kind of the point and two I enjoy deaths tranning writ large and I'll be elaborating more on those parts later overall the game is interesting and it lays out some original ideas but initial impressions don't do much to help it but I don't ever settle for the surface level and if you've watched this channel you'll be well aware of that so let's go through the whole game I know this may seem like overkill and excessively detailed but if any game ever deserved such a deep dive it would be this the most polarizing game of this generation so the game consists of 15 main story driven chapters each of which contain a plethora of orders that you need to complete they are as follows the prologue Porter and then episodes Bridget Amelie fragile which is by far the longest chapter in terms of content and orders to be completed hunger mama dead man Clifford Hartman Higgs die Hardman Clifford Unger bridges Sam strand Lew and the last chapter tomorrow is in your hands which is sort of a chapter but also not we'll talk about this more in a minute now most people including the official deaths training wiki moderators tend to separate all of these episodes into one of three acts Act one is the prologue through Episode four Act two is episodes 5 through 10 and act 3 is episodes 11 through 14 with episode 15 being the perpetual end games state of the game which again we're gonna address later now each act has its own focus Act one is focused on introducing the gameplay systems and the story and in my opinion this is the shortest and worst of all the three acts this is often what people are talking about when they say most players have to get over the hump act 2 is gameplay focused and it introduces a ton of new areas both visually and in terms of gameplay it features upgraded equipment and really lets the line out for the player this section is the most dynamic because the player can add in as many of these standard ordered quests as they want or they can engage with the dynamic quests which are centered around finding other players abandoned packages and delivering them to their original destinations these can be as numerous or as scarce as the player wants it's a nice way of reminding the player that there are other people that exist in the world even if you don't see them which is what we're going to talk about later but to be honest I really like this the idea that if I drop a package it's not a total loss and that somebody else may come along pick it up and deliver it for me they'll get likes out of it which is the social currency that features in death stranding and I will also get some likes because my package has been delivered it's the basic you scratch my back I'll scratch yours mechanic that you see in many many games but in this case it's used to make the player feel as though they're connected with players from around the world who they will never see speak to or interact with in any way other than these indirect interactions through signs pieces of equipment that you craft such as generators zip lines post boxes and the like and of course also these packages that you pick up dynamically throughout the world now in terms of specific placement of all of these things it seems pretty random and I actually did a lot of math to back this up which again we'll talk about later I know I'm saying that for everything but I promise we'll get to it act 3 is narrative Lea focused with lots of smaller sections pieced together as many varied chapters in all different locations that span from world war 1 to world war 2 to Vietnam all the way to a snowy mountain site these really are the narrative reward for the players who have made it this far this far being roughly 20 to 25 hours there are a ton of very long cutscenes that span anywhere from five minutes to fifteen to forty minutes long so make sure you've got your popcorn popped before you head into the last few chapters but I do want to say there are some fantastic performances as I said earlier I'm looking at you Mads now through all these chapters you're exploring the map death's training was of course made with the decima engine which is the same engine that was used for horizon zero dawn which itself featured a plethora of highly varied biomes and made the world feel as though it spanned a much larger area than it actually did and I might be picky but it seems as though this world really isn't as varied as it was initially made out to be even though it's meant to span effectively the entire United States it really doesn't feel extremely large in fact at the very end of the game one of your final assignments is to cross back over every square inch of the map that you've traveled to get back to the east coast on foot I like the meta implications of this assignment because it makes you go back and see how far you've come but when I was doing this I realized it only took me 20 to 30 minutes to travel all that way and again maybe I'm being picky but it seems as though for a map that's supposed to represent the entire United States it really isn't very big but I digress we'll discuss that more later in the gameplay section when we address the worlds layout and construction but for now let's discuss the opening of the game as I stated earlier the opening of death stranding isn't very effective but this does beg the question what would be effective now by effective I mean what do the opening hours have to achieve in order to convince players skeptical and not that it's actually worth playing past these opening hours now in my estimation it seems that for each game this is going to be different depending on the context what I mean is that the opening hours of Fallout 4 or cyberpunk 2077 are going to be different depending on how they were pitched the public's perception of the company that's publishing and creating the game and it can even be influenced by something as generic as the price tag for a $60 game for instance one would expect an extremely expansive polished experience whereas if coach were to only charge $40 for death stranding people would go into it with a lesser expectation this is why Naughty Dog when they released the Lost Legacy which was actually a standalone Uncharted game even though most people haven't heard of it they were able to get away with an experience that's only six hours long and is very very narrow compared to that of Uncharted for all because they only charged 40 dollars for the game out of the gate they set the expectation and then the game was able to live up to that expectation with death stranding there are a lot of preconceived notions that players have and had going into it to me it seems as though death stranding should have tried to convince a lot of skeptical people that the game isn't that which its critics claim it to be of course fans of Kojima's work were going to be interested regardless they were going to play it all the way through no matter what and this is reflected in the poll that I took of players of death stranding but new players have to be convinced of its Worth and I don't even think this is a controversial thing to say but I'm sure there will be some disagreeing in the comments but at least hear me out specifically what I mean is that death stranding has to prove that for one it has a rewarding and worthwhile gameplay loop and for two the narrative makes sense and has been thought through specifically number one because this was referred to as a walking simulator by many before launch which I actually disagree with but again I'll discuss that later I know I've said that a thousand times but I will the point is for new players coming in such as myself having had no major experience to Kojima other than with PT and smaller projects they are going to have this in mind from the very beginning they're going to be approaching death stranding with the preconceived idea that it is a walking simulator with gameplay that's unsatisfying and boring all Kojima would have to do is create the opening hours of death stranding in such a way that players would be convinced that there was more to this gameplay system than initially seemed present Kojima could have done this in a plethora of ways for one he could have started the game with him Beetee battle not just a cutscene of it but an actual gameplay system showing how you can fight these things as you do later on or he could have kept the large cutscene that shows off these be teased in the first couple of hours and just added some interactive parts to it QuickTime events in effect same thing that Naughty Dog does with all of their games again nobody was skeptical of the fact that kojima had a really beautiful and bizarre world to play with in death stranding what they doubted was the gameplay that backed that story up now some of you may think that all of these things shouldn't be very important but this is what is either going to hook players into a 50 hour playthrough or rappel players after a single hour of playing and before the pedantic comment comes along where somebody says that an hour isn't enough time to determine if the game is good or not I respectfully disagree it should be enough an hour is a long time after all though often the pacing of a game can be so awful that the first hour is terrible yet the later sections are great but I will admit that this is a personal preference some people are willing to grind through dozens upon dozens of hours of content before they get to the meat of the game while I personally think that that's unacceptable regardless this all should be easy enough to do right Kojima should be able to create an opening sequence that pulls people in he just would have had to show players some flashy gameplay and hook them with an intriguing narrative mechanism but no Kojima completely fails at this and I think I can convince you to do this I want to go through the opening sequence of the game and I'm actually going to keep these two things that bethe stranding has to prove up on screen that way as we go through this you can consistently ask yourself whether or not these checks are being met because like it or not this is the mental check that players are going to be applying as they go through the opening sequence consciously or not deaths training opens with what is presented as a profound quote from Coble eBay's poem I don't know if I'm pronouncing that name right I'm gonna be perfect Kobo Abe Kobo Abe I have no idea regardless it's not that relevant at the moment and even when it is explained and tied back into the narrative it fails to feel completely and truly profound specifically when Deadman quotes it at the very end of the game the President must have known all of this would happen ironic isn't it the gun that set this whole mess in motion ends up being that key to saving you Emily she said I had another purpose not a weapon but a lifeline a stick that became a rope I suppose that's one way of putting it after the excerpt is shown and plays off the credits rolling with a ton of beautiful landscape shots and I don't know about you but initially I thought these were all in engine or in-game screenshots or clips to show us the lands that we were going to be exploring as we went through the game and I got really excited however upon further investigation it actually turns out according to most people on the forums I've read through the consensus seems to be that these are actually the reference photos that kijima productions took when they did a company trip to Iceland to get reference photos for the landscapes within the game they put in some references to the later games such as the Karelian hands and things but there really isn't much here it's just photos of landscapes regardless it's pretty and it shows you what they were trying to mimic and the fact that it looks as though it could be an engine says everything it's really impressive that the engine is able to push things that could look this good even if in effect and in practice when you're playing through the game they don't hold up to this standard after these shots the game opens up with Sam Porter riding a motorcycle across a lush green rocky mountain side it's really pretty and it shows just what kind of cinematic experience you're in for it's raining and this rain you'll come to find out is known as time fall which makes everything it touches age at an extremely fast rate this has a ton of implications on game in addition to the story but again we'll get to that later as he's writing you see the time fall take effect on his hair the grass the plants and of course the animals that you see running across the mountainside even though you're not going to see hardly any of these things later on it's still really cool and it shows you just what this rain can do Sam speeds off and then all of a sudden yeah you seemingly run into her turns out she can teleport away to a beach which is this game world's effective purgatory basically when somebody dies they go to their own Beach and this is the intermediate place between this life and the afterlife some people in this world can actually interact freely with their beaches and use it to teleport around or to even at times come back from the dead which is what is referred to in the game as repatriates Sam being one of them which is how the game explains how you can die in game play and come back to life regardless the bike goes over the side of a cliff and is destroyed however if you know anything about video games you'll realize that you will eventually get access to one of these soon enough because why the hell not the developers spent all this time making the bike surely they would not just have done that for a cutscene realizing that you now have to travel on foot you collect the packages that fell off and you start walking you eventually stumble into a cave and you talk with fragile love it here it's explained that Sam cries whenever he's exposed to something called Karelian and fragile has the same allergic reaction we also see our first BT or beached thing yeah Kojima loves his abbreviations as you'll see now these don't make a lot of sense to new players held maybe they don't even make sense to late-game players but mostly they don't try to explain these things at all in the opening sections of the game they leave it all up to the imagination of the player and ask them just to take it on blind faith that this makes sense one would think that if a story features monsters who invisible and apparently have hands as feet and consents life-forces and pastime with their touch that they would have some sort of massive or mind-blowing explanation of how these things came into existence what they are their role in the world and how the people that inhabit the world interact with them no I'm not saying that Kojima Productions has to explain all of these things immediately in fact I think that would make a pretty terrible story if everything was exposed at all at once but it does make deaths training appear as though it is suffering from a severe case of lost itis namely that they were doing and establishing really weird things in the world just because it looked cool and was crazy and eye-catching this is actually something that the developers over at guerilla games the creators of horizon zero dawn hazard against vehemently in fact if you watch the documentary explaining how they created horizon zero dawn you'll hear them discuss what they call the rule of cool this is basically the idea that you should never put something in the game just because it's cool and this is also true of the story if you start falling victim and prey to the rule of cool all of a sudden the game is going to be nothing but dinosaurs that shoot lasers and have flamethrowers and everybody is half-naked it's gonna get out of hand really quickly furthermore you can get yourself into a lot of trouble trying to write your way out of this hole the TV show Lost ended up in this exact position when they had a lot of really cool crazy things they were showing off even though they had no idea how they were going to explain it later on now some people will just accept this writ large they'll accept that it makes sense within the world and they'll experience the game the way that the writer wants them to however the reality is that a lot of players are extremely skeptical of Kojima and his writing ability so love it or hate it this doesn't do much of anything to convince players who were skeptical of Kojima and the world that he's established here that he's actually thought everything through and that this makes sense and I suffered from this fear as well as I play through these opening hours the fear was real that they hadn't actually backed up any of this stuff I mean seriously how are they possibly going to explain a bunch of babies that are carried around in tanks on people's bellies or monsters that swim in tar that somehow disappears instantly after some arbitrary distance has been achieved but I'm happy to report thankfully Kojima did think all of this stuff through and he does have some answers as to why these things work the way they do even if they are vague and kind of insane however as to whether or not those answers are good is another question entirely and this is a slight tangent but we need to discuss this at some point so why not now with a world as strange as death strandings players rightly have a certain expectation namely that the world is thought-out and consistent no one cares if a world is unrealistic or crazy that's never held back sci-fi or fantasy stories before rather we just ask that the world live according to the rules that are supposed to govern it for instance if you were watching Star Wars and the evil Sith Lord is chilling out on a spaceship with a bunch of aliens while sensing other people's energy using a magical power called the force and traveling at Lightspeed through an imaginary galaxy you wouldn't care because the laws of the universe that that story takes place within allow that but if the Sith Lord all of a sudden was able to freeze time itself by beatboxing and rubbing his nipples you would immediately be turned off well maybe not in in that way but nevermind point is you have to be consistent I'm fine with death stranding having magical interdimensional whales rain that causes time to pass at crazy fast rates and even Norman Reedus but all I ask is that it's thought out and justified anyways moving on once you're done talking with fragile you grab up your stuff and deliver it to the city you walk through a beautiful Valley as music plays and you enter it this music is really peaceful the scenery is beautiful but again you're just walking with a package on your back does this achieve either of the two things outlined or I don't think so as you walk into the complex you realize that the compound is actually remarkably bland and it looks dead there's no one here in fact pretty much everyone we're going to be talking to in any of these places throughout the entire 50 hour campaign they're all gonna be Holograms we're not even going to meet them in person for reasons again Kojima syndrome you assisted body disposal crew and take a dead body out of the city to have it incinerated you don't know exactly what the big deal is but they seem to be taking it very very seriously so you play along there really isn't any player control here you at one point can control the camera while you're watching a cutscene play out I guess this was their way of avoiding a 40-minute cutscene again but it is still a cutscene so it doesn't really do it for me you drive out of the city and eventually your car is assaulted and crashes here along cutscene plays that introduces us to Higgs who's named after the Higgs boson a nerdy reference that I appreciated way too much and this cutscene raises a lot of questions but I think it achieved something very good at least for a video game it's intriguing who is this guy Higgs what is he doing why can he fly how is he summoning these monsters why does the rain make this guy turn old instantly why did the guy start stabbing himself trying to kill himself the second that he started getting lift in the air why is he being lifted in the air why is it that when bodies begin to decompose they start shaking violently what the hell is this all of these are fair questions and I think they motivate the player to want to play more to have these questions answered again the role of a prologue I think often is to pose a lot of these questions to the reader player or whoever is experiencing them I don't think they have to all be answered and I wouldn't even want them to all be answered in the opening sequence however with death strandings specific circumstance this doesn't do much to shake the preconceived notion again that this is all just crazy and done for the sake of being cool anyway a bunch of weird stuff happens this results in a massive crater and a handprint indentation in the land this is actually why everybody throughout the game freaks out whenever you actually kill someone with a lethal weapon again I know I've said this a thousand times but more on this later there's some cutscenes and exposition but essentially you meet some more characters such as dead man you get given drugs to deliver to the president because she's dying I guess and needs heroin and so you deliver them you're in the Oval Office but it's also a hospital at the same time you talk with the president who it said also raised you it's implied it's your mother but it's also left ambiguous enough that it could just be a woman who raised you but regardless you go through the sequence a cutscene plays out as she explains how you need to help them save the world by connecting things I guess while this has happened to the president ask that everybody leave the room so that it's just Sam and the Madam President and then she kind of freaks out she tackles him falling out of the bed in one of the clunkiest and worst blocked scenes I've ever seen in any entertainment medium like ever seriously even if you love death strandings story how can you defend this like it's it's so bad just watch this clip this is from my roasting video okay clearly she's dying but I swear to if she dies during this cutscene I'm gonna scream I hate coincidences like sweared mother right why is she hug the floor crowler oh my god she died oh I I gotta calm down I know but it's like so stupid I hate it when stories do this when they're like a character is dying go meet with them you meet with them and it just so happens during that like three-and-a-half minute time period where you went and said hello they died because it's convenient for the story like why isn't it that you leave say goodbye and then she has a heart attack and I just come on oh well then again Kojima syndrome check the comments I'm sure you'll see many people defending it so she dies and after this you learned that you need to take her body to the incinerator to avoid what happened in the earlier scene you load her up and you take her to the incinerators location it's actually a really peaceful sequence after you've strapped her up there's a little ribbon blowing in the breeze and you're walking across an expansive green pasture covered in rocks as a nice calming piece of music plays it's actually pretty relaxing but again does it do anything to shake the preconceived notion that this is a walking simulator no now while you're delivering the president's body to the incinerator you've also been asked to take a BB or a baby and a jar to this location to have it also decommissioned you're not told a whole lot except that this is malfunctioning and it's no longer in use however before Sam has a chance to do this beatty show up and you use this BB to escape the area again Kojima loves his acronyms and I actually really like this sequence this is the one moment where the player actually feels as though there's going to be more to the game than just a walking system however it's over before it even begins seriously I was able to get out of here within about thirty seconds in my humble opinion it seems as though Kojima Productions should have spent a lot more time showing off what the BT system could do and how the gameplay could be extremely varied but regardless I think this beatty sequence is really pretty I think it serves a purpose and I really like it so thumbs up you escape make it back and you learned that you need to quote unquote expand the chiral Network to fulfill Bridget's vision for America you're also introduced to Amelie which is a character that is painfully unlikable and has less charisma than a summer squash I know that this is probably more personal but I found her performance is all extremely stiff but again I don't know if this is just her fault for performing poorly or if this is a writing issue and came from the direction of Kojima again Kojima syndrome now a quick sidebar the characters are all asking Sam to cross the entire country an extremely dangerous post-apocalyptic country mind you and save it and while they're doing this they're all stiffer than me during Rocky Horror Picture Show what's pushing players at this point what's pushing Sam we've been told that we need to help connect America after a major event known as the death stranding okay we know that Amelie is Sam's sister even though they don't seem particularly infatuated or caring of each other but okay to me it seems as though the operative question is whether or not this world america in this case is worth saving where's the humanity that is worth saving and this is actually my biggest problem with death straining the game writ large it fails to give the player any clear evidence that the world is actually worth saving that all of this trouble is worth it now I get it there are not that many people now that the world has ended basically but still there are very few moments that attempt to humanize these delivery recipients I mean hell if you're gonna ask the player to go through the trouble of delivering packages mindlessly back and forth between locations it seems like you should at the very least try to emotionally motivate them to do so however all of your interactions with all of the people that you interact with these deliveries show up as Holograms you don't even get to see them in person but again was this a result of poor gain design lazy copy and pasted formatting of locations and interactions or is it a meta discussion on the hopelessness that people have and how empty the world is without connections again Kojima syndrome the clearest example of Kojima seemingly attempting to humanize this world and failing miserably is when you're delivering things to the scrapper you see he has a woman that he loves and that he thinks is dead you find out that she's alive but her performance has got to be the worst I've ever seen in a triple-a title I'm not joking I'm not trying to be funny I'm not trying to be mean this is just awful and I get it English is probably not her first language but this performance is one of if not the worst I have ever seen truly horrible nothing personal it's just that bad watch are you hurt thanks bridges I can't believe you're alive that's my life City I thought you were dead my mom told me you're getting close always but after the attack it stopped working I thought about fixing it getting the sand flowing again but it felt too much like moving on like forgetting you well now I can boss move on together you and me if you're ready of course damn I knew this hazard jump he fixed the things made him like new again picking up sub pieces in the makings are most of them that's what I do best - but this is one piece we don't need now this could have been a moment to prove to the player that they're still loving caring people in this world instead we're left thinking that maybe we should put these people out of their misery because clearly they're poisoned with arsenic now I know I'm being harsh but this happens repeatedly throughout the story where there's a chance for the small characters to prove that this world is worth saving but they universally fail again the question seems to me is the so writing issue on the part of Kojima is it his fault is it a directorial fault again landing on the shoulders of Kojima or is it just that their performances are that bad with this particular instance I think you could say the performance is just that bad but at the same time Hideo is the one that would presumably have cast this woman in this role so again the fault still lands on his shoulders point is I think that this is inexcusably bad and whether Kojima was happy with this performance and this narrative structuring in the way that you interact with these smaller characters the blame still lands on Kojima shoulders now thankfully the main cast is phenomenal and they try very hard to deal with the wordy and at times nonsensical that Hideo threw at them Sam cliff fragile mama dead man Hartman die Hartman Higgs they're all fantastic pretty much with the exception of Amelie / Bridget I think the main cast is pretty solid and it makes sense they're the main cast for a reason but when you're trying to motivate the player to save an entire country because they want to save the country you have to give the player some reason to love and to care about said country and its inhabitants and in my opinion I know that some will disagree deaths training fails miserably at humanizing the world that it's trying to convince you to save furthermore this world is so void of life it's kind of ridiculous we see wildlife in the opening sequence of the game as I mentioned earlier so we know that it exists in this world but we never experience it in the world like ever or at least I didn't you never see deer you never see a lot of birds flying through the sky you never interact with them in any way there are also very few original assets in death stranding a lot of things are repeated from the repeated bunkers to vehicles to landscapes to rock formations to mule camps everything is just copy and pasted around the map now we'll get into this in detail a lot more later don't worry I've done a lot of math surrounding the placement of these items and it's really telling but the point is it begs the question was this developed by a small team that simply didn't have the manpower to put more stuff into the game or was this a budgetary concern or was it some combination or was it part of Kojima's broader vision again Kojima syndrome regardless Sam agrees to help expand the chiral Network begrudge idli at least and the mid-game begins after a plethora of tutorial missions that introduce to you crafting inventory and loadout management course charting and much much more it's slow but it's probably necessary to be perfectly honest before releasing the players into the mid game and let me be clear there's nothing wrong with a long intro sure it can be frustrating especially during repeated playthroughs but it isn't inherently bad look at Assassin's Creed 3 the game bit has an inch that lasts roughly three hours before it even gives you control of a basic stripped-down assassin that it advertised pre-launch it's not inherently bad it's just inefficient the only reason efficiency is important is to convince the a fer mentions sceptical players to continue playing again look at those two goals I put on screen does a long dry intro achieve either of these probably not but I didn't want to just take all of this on assumption so in the survey that I conducted again all of the data is up on Luke Stephens net if you want to check it out yourself I asked players who hadn't finished the game at the time of polling and twenty eight and a half percent of them said that they either weren't going to continue playing or that they were unsure if they would that's over one in four players who didn't feel compelled to continue now no matter how you look at that no matter how you split it with a sample size of 2,400 people that is a straight-up failure of the game's pace and design I don't care if you're making a video game a song a movie or a book if somebody gets just a couple hours into it just dipping their toes into it and over 1 in 4 people are unsure or straight-up reject the idea of continuing you have failed furthermore the poll shows that over 36% of players who gave up on the game had put less than five hours in and roughly 66% had played less than 10 hours before stopping sure you can argue that this game simply wasn't meant for them or they were never going to enjoy it no matter how polished or how much they reworked the opening sequence but I think the fact that so many players dropped out in the first few hours of playing the game shows that something was wrong with the first few hours again these people are paying $60 presumably to play this game they put their money on the line which by itself lends these opinions credibility at least in my opinion but this brings us to the mid game were episodes 5 through 10 this really is deliveries galore you're slowly expanding the map exploring it deliver packages to your heart's content this is where the game shines this is where the gameplay reaches its highest potential you unlock all sorts of new tools vehicles and things that you can do crafting and much much more this was the act of the game that I found myself enjoying the most mostly because I was able to just look forward to making some deliveries and relaxing as I ran across the open countryside when I got back from a long day I racked my brain a lot as to why this was so relaxing to me and why I enjoyed it because on its face it really is pretty simplistic sure you might occasionally encounter some mules or BTS that require some stealth approaches to getting around them but writ large this is just a game about delivering packages from one location to the other it is extremely repetitive so why did I enjoy it it was a little baffling to me but after a lot of thought I think it's for the same reason that hiking is enjoyable because the game allows you to play it in just passive enough a state that you can let your mind wander you'll find yourself daydreaming about other things as you explore this vast expanse and it's relaxing plus it's no mystery that the world of death stranding is very beautiful especially in a lot of individualized places that are heavily trafficked other less trafficked areas show a significant lack of polish in terms of the graphic fidelity but we'll get to that later but here I'm actually gonna say something that makes me sound like a fanboy and that's that if you don't see the appeal of death strandings gameplay system I think you might need to try it now I'm not saying that you should go out and pay $60 for the game or 40 if it's on sale just to try this and that if you don't do that your opinion is invalid that's not what I'm saying what I am saying is that the relaxing nature of death strandings gameplay is something that you will only experience if you are the one doing it in the same way that watching somebody hike isn't satisfying in the same way that hiking itself is if you want to enjoy nature you have to be the one in it if you want to enjoy the world of death stranding you have to be the one exploring it this is why for a lot of people who say that they watched people played the game on Twitch and they don't understand the appeal of the gameplay system even though the streamer enjoyed it it doesn't make much sense to me because having played it it's pretty self-explanatory if you want to enjoy the world you have to be the one walking through it building things in it driving your motorcycle across it you have to do it but as to whether or not this is something that's going to appeal to everybody is a much larger and more difficult question to answer and it seems to me that this is something that just isn't going to appeal to everybody which is why I said at the beginning you should rely on your instincts if the game has repelled you or has been simply uninteresting to you it likely isn't going to change that opinion even after 10 hours anyway throughout the mid game you make a ton of deliveries you go from location to location unlocking new areas and meeting new people I'm hesitant to use the word exploring even though that's definitely the word that Kojima Productions wants you to use for one because in my mind exploring is something that you initiate yourself it's not something that you're pushed to do just because a quest can ask you to go from one location to a remote location to me that doesn't make you explore those locations that's just having you traverse to that location exploring to me seems like something that you're going to do for the sake of itself an example would be like in breadth of the wild when you find yourself just exploring the world going through it without any quests without anything specifically to do just exploring it for the sake of interacting with and exploring it it's adventure in its purest form death stranding really doesn't encourage you to do this ever there are very few secrets very few things that you can interact with and of course there are basically no NPCs or individuals that you can interact with within the world that make it worth exploring but again I know I've said this a billion times we're gonna talk about that more at length in just a few minutes but once we plow through all of that we get to the finale of the game or in other words act 3 the ding that never ends this is comprised of episodes 11 through 14 and it has big reveals such as Amelie and Bridget being the same person okay you find out that Alma Lee / Bridget are an extinction entity and that they can bring on the end of the world which again is okay and a lot of things are revealed in this sequence which to be honest I'm not entirely sure I could explain concisely even if I spent a week writing it out chances are if you made it this far into the video you probably already have a decent idea of what happens in these final hours so I won't bore you with explaining all of it over again the point is that Kojima actually explains a lot of the stuff that goes on during these sequences now don't get me wrong I think he could have done it in a tenth the time but I'll take what I can get there are a few things however I do want to touch on for instance the endless cutscenes at the very end of the game the last three or four hours of the game are almost exclusively cutscenes or sequences within which there is very little player control or interaction there's no big gameplay finale other than a large bTW fight I guess you could say qualifies as a boss fight there's also the sequence with Haig's fistfight with them which is clunkier than almost anything else in the game it's really terrible but I don't want to address all of that I want to talk about the purgatory cutscenes that Amelie presents to you as you run around the beach basically you're sent to your Beach with the help of fragile and everybody else and you're just sitting here and they play off some credits and it's very peaceful and it does feel like purgatory because as you run from one end of the beach to the other you will eventually just get spawned back further it's basically the story of Sisyphus and it's actually pretty cool I really liked this when I first came to this area however after the first 10 minutes or so it starts to get pretty horrible again is this just a poorly designed way of forcing the player to sit through all of the credits rolling incredibly slowly or is this some sort of meta discussion of the purgatory that we all experience when talking about post-credit scenes in games and move I don't know point is Kojima syndrome and every time you get transported back after a few minutes Amelie will show up and present a cut sequence where she offered some exposition again I'm glad that all of this is here and that it is expositor and there are reasons that all of this stuff in this world take place but I think it could have been done much more efficiently now after all of this happened to end up talking with Amelie at length and there is what vice referred to as the gameplay mechanic of the year Thank You Ryan on Twitter for sending me this I thought this was pretty funny basically Amelie describes that she's going to end the world and that you can stop her or you can not and let it happen of course most players are gonna try to stop her but I don't know let me know what you did below point is you have a gun and you can choose to shoot her or you can run after her and hug her which is what Vice referred to as the mechanic of the year now she gives a bunch of forewarning and she says that you should have known how this was going to play out and you know what to do because it's the entire point of your journey and looking back on it it makes sense she's saying that it's all about connecting people forgiving and embracing others so going up to her and hugging her seems like the natural choice however this didn't work for me at all pull the rope or cut the noose but whatever you do don't hesitate and I hesitated and I even tried to save because I decided immediately after she said I know what to do to shoot her six times and empty the gun in the back of her head which doesn't actually do anything at which point I ran up to her to try and punch her into submission to stop the world from ending but that also didn't work and instead I was prompted with a hug button at which point I pressed hug and I was made to feel as though I just made an incredible and generous decision when in reality it was kind of an accident now maybe I'm the weird one here but this made the ending sequence really awkward because it feels as though I kind of broke it it didn't expect me to shoot her in the back of the head empty my rounds and then go up to her trying to punch her only to find out my only option was to hug her it was completely unintentional that I saved the world which made this all very funny but after all of this you are saved and the world doesn't explode and everything's okay at which point you're eventually saved by all of the people that have helped you this far fragile dead men everybody and this is actually what those people off in the distance on the beach are we saw this in a trailer way back in the day a couple years ago and it seemed as though it was an explicable how they ever explained these people just floating over the ocean but they actually do explain it and it's kind of cool and after this Sam is saved you're brought back to the world of the living you go to a presidential inauguration for Die Hardman and you get some more exposition but eventually you find out after giving the president a pep talk that you need to take Bibi to the incinerator because it passed away or I guess in dead man's words it is no longer functioning and I'll be honest Kojima actually wrote this pretty well the player had built a relationship with Bibi having carried it with him for almost the entire game save for the sequence where it's removed from you and it's sad to be walking this deceased Bibi or dysfunctional Bibi however you want to phrase it off to an incinerator davit burn it's kind of a sorrowful event but I will be honest it's actually kind of cool to walk back through where you started for those of you not aware this is the exact same path that you walked with Brigid strand when she died to take her to the incinerator so effectively the last mission of the game is mirroring order three which is cool because that was basically the first order that you completed yourself there are no mules no BTS no threats you're just hiking along a large green mountainside and it's a nice way to finish but once you arrive at the incinerator a cutscene begins playing which you a new perspective on the smaller cutscenes that you've seen throughout the entire game every time you had a load screen coming out of a private room for instance now we get a new perspective and we see all of these sequences play out in order and it's actually pretty heartbreaking this is the place where Mads Mikkelsen actually earns his game Award for Best Performance he really nails it here it's beautiful it's sweet it's sad it's endearing it's everything it's incredibly emotional and I really enjoyed this but after all of this ends and you learned that the BBU was Sam and that Clifford was just trying to correct his mistakes from his past everything comes back into the world of the living and you realize that Lew has been taken out of the pod and is now cradled in Sam's hands he's frantically trying to revive her doing everything that he possibly can to wake her up however nothing seems to work and he eventually gives up cradles her as he begins to cry at this point after a brief beat you start to hear Lou crying she's back Sam is stunned and holds her in unparalleled jubilation as a bunch of BT's watched them from the background which is actually pretty cool because it seems as though this is what has broken the cycle of all of these B B's having their souls effectively destroyed in the incinerator holding Lu Sam walks out of the incinerator into the open air and it's actually raining although the time fall doesn't seem to be having any sort of effect it's just normal rain furthermore there is a full rainbow behind them which is extremely bright and also shows the color blue which is something that none of the other rainbows in the game show now what does all of this mean well it seems as though the death stranding has officially come to a close and B B's revitalization has effectively restored the stability of humanity or something however I will be honest this is so vague that there are probably a million different ways to interpret it and it's not particularly important because everyone will have their own interpretation which is kind of the point what I will say is that it's a very calming peaceful and emotional end even if I don't completely understand what's going on why was BB able to be restored even though necrotize ation was starting to set and B B was clearly dead what brought her back why does the time fall all of a sudden end at this point why is blue all of a sudden present in the rainbow just because a baby came back to life I'm not entirely sure but again that's probably not the point I would be interested however in hearing your theories as to what exactly happened when BB was saved here I'm sure some of you have thought this through and have a reasonable explanation I would love to hear it below and then the actual credits roll and after all of that happens we are greeted with episode 15 prompted up to us and a quick reading that shows two weeks before and this is what I meant earlier when I said that chapter 15 is basically indefinite it goes on forever even though it's just two weeks before the presidential inauguration this is effectively death strandings endgame state it goes on forever and it will allow the player to continue making deliveries five-star locations find and hunt down all of the memory chips and complete any other things that they might have left undone now overall the story while it is kind of bizarre and crazy it is thought through and it does have justifications and rules that govern it which is what I said at the beginning I was looking for however there are a couple of missed opportunities I can't help to wonder why Kojima didn't explore more they might have been that it just felt like it wasn't focused or it might have been something that never occurred to him I'm not entirely sure specifically something such as the discussion that has to do with BB's and slavery this is briefly touched on but it's not really elaborated upon specifically babies come from mothers who died while pregnant which is why those mothers are called still mothers there are also other times that this concept is applied within the world of death strandings such as with mama who we know was to give birth but was trapped in rubble after the death stranding which resulted in the baby becoming caught between the world of the living and the beach or the world of the dead this is of course why babies are able to detect BTS and can show them to the operator that has them strapped to their bellies now while Kojima does have a lot of writing in here that discusses the inherent value of human life even as a baby he never really touches on the idea that you are literally taking an independent human as prisoner and you're going to dispose of them once they're no longer useful as Deadman says it's a tool that's cuz we're partners partners Sam a B B's a tool not a human-being bridge yes baby no and they don't really explore this very much they do touch on the idea pretty aggressively that the BB is becoming sentient the 3b is becoming human and it's going to start growing like a regular human very soon this is of course why Deadman has to take the BB away from the player roughly halfway through the game in order to perform an operation to separate it from the humanity that's pulling it out of the world of the dead and closer to the world of the living and this is what partially makes me think that kojima had thought of this and simply decided to focus on the more pro-life discussion having to do with the bb's the idea that these infants still have value as human life even though they're just infants they're contained within a tank they don't have much of anything by way of autonomy but they still are valuable so it could be that Kojima just decided that the discussion on slavery would have been too much and wasn't worth pursuing or maybe he just didn't think to add it in I'm not entirely sure either way it could have been cool to see him explore the idea of bebés being enslaved to a more powerful master and not having any way of fighting it or claiming their own independence I'm not really sure let me know your thoughts below another thing that struck me is weird throughout the course of the story is the fact that they break the fourth wall all the time and I'm not entirely sure why now of course you could say that this is just Kojima style and that's what he likes to do so to judge it is simply unfair however as I discussed earlier the world that death straining is taking place within has to be consistent and it has to live by its own rules preferably at all times and for the most part it succeeds in this the game seems to want players to be immersed at all times with the realistic graphics and the traversal system being very realistic but at the same time Sam breaks the fourth wall constantly though in fairness it is mostly relegated to the private room it feels weird ride with Norman Reedus AMC as an ad on the bathroom while he poops it's really weird and out of place I'm not really sure why it's here plus if you leave the camera sitting on him too long he'll gesture at you and he'll stare at you make funny faces at you it's fun but it's weird if I were directing the game I would have cut all of this because in my opinion it's not worth the trouble it pulls the player out of the game and while you are in a private room when these things happen I don't think that that's an excuse though I will admit that this is probably a matter of personal preference some people will mind it such as myself others don't mind that at all and some I'm sure really enjoy it now of course these fourth wall breaks and these think outside the box mechanics are nothing new to Kojima as somebody sent me on Twitter Metal Gear Solid has a sequence like this when snake is fighting mantis you actually have to change the port that the controller is connected into in order to complete the game and continue on which is kind of funny imagine doing that today it's weird because Kojima talks about being an artistic purist and describes how he thinks Americans don't have artistic sensibilities but he's the one putting paid product placement in his games with the monster energy drinks and the AMC ads can you imagine what people would say if Todd Howard started putting Tesla ads and fallout or elder scrolls people would rightly lose their minds the only reason Kojima gets a break is again Kojima syndrome now don't get me wrong fourth wall breaks can be done well even in narrative focused games look at the lost legacy tower sequence for instance here there's a tower you can find and there's a very narrow route that you can climb up optionally and if you get to the top of it and you hang out there for an extended period of time Chloe will start to tease you and will actually break the fourth wall however things like the otter hat that you get from Conan O'Brien with in death stranding are somehow both weird and perfectly in place it's really bizarre but you can't help but feel as though Kojima didn't take all of this very seriously which I also to appreciate I mean their video games and all customization is like this from changing paints two glasses two otter hoods it's all fun and though it doesn't mean much in the story it's a welcome addition even if it doesn't make sense in terms of bridges having standardized uniforms that everybody is expected to wear but the point is while the fourth wall breaks may bug me I can understand why they might not bother other people I think it is a matter of personal preference it just bothers me though it might not bother you but with all of that let's discuss the gameplay and the systems that make death stranding work so obviously a lot of people have said that death strandings gameplay loop is quote-unquote boring to determine if this is true let's look at what your average mission is going to be comprised of let's start with story missions in this case we're going to look at a random order in the mid game now in this order we have 60 minutes to collect medical devices from one character in the mountainous area and then deliver them back to the area where we accepted the order in other words a fetch quest now this is actually one of the more elaborate order types that you can get because it involves multiple stops simpler orders just give you items with the destination so you accept the order and get told that you need to deliver the items quickly and furthermore that the items that you're picking up are classified as fragile which means that you can't drop the packages often you can't go in water etc basically you have to be extra careful you select your gear and load Sam up with any ladders pcc's climbing anchors extra boots or weapons that you may need then you set out and you begin hiking in this case I'm not going to use any vehicles because we're going through a mountainous area and they aren't particularly useful in this rocky snowy area this is what would usually be considered a more difficult mission specifically because it's in the snowy mountainous area not once in my over 100 hours with death stranding did I encounter a mission where I failed the time limit the only time I had any difficulty was when the items were fragile or when I was completing multiple orders all at once loading up with four or five orders at a given time and so the way that the game dynamically alters the difficulty is with the routes that they'll have you do this is why long routes tend to reward you with more likes and routes that go into the mountains also do the same now you can unlock certain items that makes traversal and mountain traversal easier for instance lots of ladders climbing anchors that you can level up power gloves the all-terrain exoskeleton and of course the zip lines which you can use to set up routes after you've initially explored them so with all this in mind I continued hiking eventually I reached a cliff top where I could have just dropped a ladder or a climbing anchor to descend and then cross by foot but I happen to know that this area is infested with BTS so I decided to build a zipline which allowed me to completely skip this area which effectively skips five to ten minutes of navigation don't worry we're gonna go into a lot of detail with these zip lines in just a bit I reach to the bottom and continue hiking eventually I pick up the items and then the entire process repeats as you're return now when you drop off the items you are graded on the condition that the packages are in this can be both the quality of the outside container in addition to the quality of the internal item which can experience damage if you aren't careful for instance if you fall off of a ladder you'll fall take damage and the packages will be worth less when they're eventually delivered there are however ways to deal with this for instance with the time fall shelters if you stay in them and especially once they're upgraded they'll actually repair your items as you stand underneath them there of course also the cargo repair sprays which you can carry on your back but this is basically it there isn't much more to the gameplay system other than this I know it may come as a surprise but death stranding is not a third-person shooter it's also not a monster fighting focused game which means that all of the combat encounters that you'll experience are pretty clunky and now I know about you but every time I went to one of these flashback sequences with cliff I was really excited because they're very visually impressive you get to travel back to World War one or World War two or Vietnam it's very interesting visually but once you actually engage with the gameplay you realize that it's just a shooting gallery and it's not a particularly difficult one even on the hardest possible difficulty it doesn't change much really as long as you're keeping cover and shooting the enemies when they appear which is all the time you're gonna be fine now as you would expect with the story the game heavily encourages you to make sure that you're never using actually lethal means of taking down opponents that you're only using non-lethal means for this reason they include non-lethal assault rifles which basically completely negates the difficulty that would have been put in place by having a non-lethal requirement basically these are still guns they just don't finish the opponent in a death state instead they're in an incapacitated state which allows you to just continue on your merry way I don't know why they did this because it seems to undermine their own pursuit of making sure that the player needs to take a step above everybody else the player needs to have non-lethal means of interacting with enemies such as the mules because they're better than the mules but instead you just use assault rifles that incapacitate them which completely eliminates any gameplay difficulty that would have been there as a result of taking a stealth approach or a peaceful approach but rest assured this idea of the game undoing itself is something we're going to talk about much more in just a moment but while discussing these deliveries it's also important to discuss the map design now in my mind this is probably the most important game design element that is here the mechanics of walking balancing and using vehicles can all be fantastically well-designed but if the world itself is not worthy of being explored nobody's gonna care now like I said before there are very few inherent reasons to explore the world of death stranding there are no major secrets no NPCs and only a very few select secret locations and items to find that make the player excited and wanting to explore more for instance in Red Dead Redemption 2 there are all sorts of dynamic encounters that you can either choose to interact with or not but the world is littered with them which means that every time you go out to explore the world you're going to find something new and interesting it's one of the reasons the world of Red Dead Redemption 2 feels so alive my favourite example in RDR too would of course be the incestuous siblings where I was just riding through the map and I encountered this brother and sister who were very close they try to kill you and a bunch of really funny and interesting stuff goes down I won't spoil it but I highly recommend hunting them down if you ever in that world or another example would be the puzzles and encampments that are hidden all over breath of the wild they make the world worth exploring for its own sake now there are things in deaths training to find I can already hear you saying it things such as the memory chips and the hot springs but I don't think these actually qualify and I'll explain why in just a moment the main thing to understand is that the world of death stranding isn't particularly well crafted at least in my opinion and I have a lot of math to back this up in fact it seems to me that this map was dynamically generated with very little input on the part of the development staff and they just went with it once they found a random arrangement that they liked once they had this they decided to scatter all of the flat areas with boulders and streams and I have to ask why seriously you will be hard-pressed to find any stretch of grass that's more than a hundred yards these rocks after all take a positive action to create somebody has to put them there so clearly there must be some reason as to why that individual was instructed to put them there and to me it seems pretty clear they're just there to break up the monotony and to make traversing a conscious activity and they also are there to make vehicles far more difficult to use this is because if vehicles become too useful the deliveries cease being an engaging experience where you're engaging with the world looking around and interacting with it and slowly begin to be a matter of tedium after all if all you need to do to make a delivery is hop in a car and drive from one location to the other why do you need to build and upgrade the roads why do you need to build zip lines there would be no reason to which is why you have to drop boulders on the ground to make cars and motorcycles just annoying enough to that it would be more useful to spend the time upgrading roads and zip lines now for those of you who followed this channel for a while or have seen to my older videos you will know that I do a series where I break down the density of a game world basically I will take a selection of gameplay that's two or three hours long and I will chart out how much time is in between moments of interest how I define moments of interest is something that changes my thought process so if I'm exploring the world and I see an animal run across the screen in Red Dead Redemption to something that catches my attention and changes my thought process that qualifies but some things such as just avoiding a tree while riding a horse wouldn't qualify because that's something I can do passively now granted this is an incredibly subjective way of measuring these types of things which is why it's something that I do myself I don't use data from other people or other people's gameplay this is only from me so it would seem in my estimation that that alone would serve as a fairly good control now all of this started back with The Witcher 3 the designer said that they were aiming for anywhere between 30 and 40 seconds between moments of interest if they hit that number then they would know that the world was dense enough to hold players attention while feeling expansive and in my testing The Witcher 3 does in fact adhere to that rule and I've tested a lot of games in this way zelda breath of the wild Skyrim Fallout New Vegas all of them I even calculated this for Red Dead Redemption 2 which had the longest time between moments of interaction but the quality of those interactions were much higher for this reason I decided to make these same calculations for death stranding because it seems to me that this world doesn't feel anywhere near as alive or interesting as the world of Red Dead Redemption to Zelda breath of the wild or even Fallout New Vegas so I broke the map into three broad areas where a lot of orders are going to be taking place snowy areas greenery laced late game areas and stream heavy areas where vehicles are usually going to be you but their batteries may drain quickly for these are used roughly two hours of gameplay footage timed out the moments in between moments of interest and then I paused the timer whenever I was interacting or dealing with something that engaged my interest so for instance if I encountered a mule that started attacking me I would pause the timer while I dealt with that threat and once I began exploring again with a clear mind I started the timer and this is the data I collected now do you notice anything it looks completely randomized there are a couple of exceptions here and there such as when I was navigating a very dense area and it required a lot more of my attention but broadly this is incredibly random in fact looking at the standard deviations and the kurtosis of the charts it seems to me it is randomized this is something I haven't seen in any of the after mentioned open-world games all of those had very intentionally placed items and dynamic interactions they were placed and designed in such a way that they would intrigue the player and they would be paced out in such a way that the player would always have something tickling their fancy however the world of death stranding is completely randomized everything here looks as though it was dynamically placed with almost no effort put on it from the developers there's no careful crafting of routes there's no trail building to give players a clear way of going there's nothing like that in this world it literally looks as though it was just randomly generated and left alone again I can't express how insane this is for a $60 title in 2019 in my opinion it's straight-up unacceptable now I can't help but also feel as though the world of death stranding is made in a much more realistic way in other words it is random it isn't carefully crafted by developers to enhance the experience of the player but the point is we're playing video games here this is in the real world and if you're going to try to improve the experience for the player you are going to need to enact some positive actions but even with this data staring them in the face I guarantee you there will be people who will defend this they will say that this more realistic way of designing the world was intentional and it's good because the world itself is more realistic and exploring it and navigating it is more realistic which is the point of death stranding blah Dee Bloo de blah blah again Kojima syndrome this is straight-up unacceptable in a triple a game in 2019 when this released it's not good this is laziness personified and frankly this explains why the world does feel so empty the design wasn't carefully crafted or arranged sure mules and BT zones are permanently placed and those don't change but rocks ledges routes and everything else in the world that you explore seems straight-up randomly placed I also did some further calculations on the placement of the items that you can find throughout the world such as other zip lines the players have crafted generators and the light and believe it or not these are also pretty much random there are a couple of constraints that seem to be put in place such as a limitation on how many of a single item can be in a given area so for instance you can only have one online generator within a certain radius of another generator but in general this is all randomly spawned in with the limitation of chiral volume and those distance limitations that I just mentioned this is laziness and I don't know how anybody could defend it again the question is is this just a team that was too small or was incapable technologically of dealing with this couldn't craft it more carefully or maybe they just decided it wasn't worth crafting it more carefully who can say whatever the excuse in practice the design of the world is random and it's lazy now speaking of chiral bandwidth I have to ask why why is this a thing chiral bandwidth is the system by which the game determines how many of a certain item or a collection of items you can craft want to build a zipline network that's massive and expansive and spans the whole map too bad because you have Kairo bandwidth to adhere to this is basically their version of a carry weight limit for items you need to craft even though there also is a physical carry weight limit but you get what I'm saying it's stupid it's just a way of controlling density and increasing tedium if you want to build a bunch of zip lines you have to go delete other zip lines in order to build new ones the question is whether this was a technical limitation something where they couldn't handle more of a certain item in the world or if it was a design choice again Kojima syndrome there were many times when I was building a massive zipline Network and I was limited because of this bandwidth now sure as you upgrade certain areas and new 5-star new locations you will increase the bandwidth that you're playing with but it's never unlimited and you never have the ability to build to your heart's content there is always this arbitrary limitation and it is very frustrating now it seems to me that this was probably put in place to make you reliant on other players in other words if you can't build an unlimited number of zip lines then you're going to have to rely on online generated zip lines as well and other things in the game do this as well they make you reliant on other players and their work examples being exoskeletons having batteries motorcycles and trucks all needing batteries as well in order to charge these up you need generators and dynamically in the world there are many online generators placed in highly trafficked areas this is something that makes you feel as though you need other people in order to continue exploring even though you could have just charged it up yourself with a generator you built it makes you feel as though you're all working together which is a cool mechanic to have and it does work in making you feel as though you're all working together but there is a side effect to this mechanism and that's specifically that these batteries just feel tedious especially when you consider how small the charge on these batteries actually are even in the long version of the vehicles building generators for these just feels like busywork it's not actually fun let me share with you the exact moment I was completely fed up with batteries and that system within this game I was driving this truck with a huge amount of cargo loaded in the back I dropped by one location I loaded it up fully charged it and then head out onto the plains and this is a futuristic truck with a fully charged battery but this thing has an operating distance that is so low it would make a first-generation Tesla blush seriously this is where I started and as I drive and drive and drive and drive not even going very far this is where the battery dies in the middle of the stream the car immediately starts freaking out it pushes me out and then instantly the car disappears and all of my cargo floats downstream and this was so much cargo I couldn't possibly load it up onto my back and it all drifted out into the water and was ruined this was well over a thousand likes instantly lost and several deliveries instantly failed due to a stupid mechanism just designed to make you engage in this tedious gameplay cycle of building generators to charge batteries to get to another generator to charge your battery so you can move on in no way is this realistic and that's the other question if this world is designed to be realistic and that's your excuse as to why the world design is so crappy then why are batteries and things like this so clearly gamified in order to make you engage in the gameplay system it's not consistent if you're going to make the gameplay systems realistic and lifelike do it don't do this half-assed thing otherwise it just ends up being frustrating and forcing the player to wonder whether or not you had any idea what you were doing now another feature of the world are the memory chips there are 56 of these and they're hidden in very random places with almost no visual cues now the first time you hear about these is when you receive an email in chapter three from a character named Nick Easton in it he describes a quote-unquote weird glowing thing that he wants you to find in capital not city's isolation ward and these emails are actually the only thing that pushed you towards finding these chips it's not really a concern in the main story now I ran around for hours and hours collecting these even the one in Higgs secret room that doesn't unlock until after fragile deals with him on the beach and the question is whether or not these are busy work just designed to pad out a platinum run or if these are placed in the world as a reason for you to explore it and to hike through trying to find every single one of them now to me it seems pretty clearly that it's the former not the latter and to prove this I'm going to show you some examples these are some of the more commonly collected ones so if you've yet to find all of them don't worry you can still hunt them down and have a good time for what it's worth when you go to the weather station there's one placed on a concrete ledge okay you run past this frequently enough I think I'm fine with this one this one however is along the red wall it's not an area you would ever be running by there's no reason for you to explore this area and even once you get there it hides very very well it's hidden in the truck bed of this area you have no reason to go to this one I'm les okay with and it doesn't seem as though it's hidden in a way that encourages you to explore the map it's hidden in a way that encourages this busywork type of gameplay this is another one that I'm actually okay with it's hidden in an underpass by Mama's base this is something that I did stumble on too while exploring I didn't have to read any email cueing me to this area so obviously I'm okay with this one this is one I'm not okay with it's on the hood of a semi Shore it's outside of an area you're going to be trafficking fairly frequently but you can't normally climb onto vehicles you have no reason to ever climb onto a vehicle so the only reason you would hop up on this is if you scanned it happen to spot it and jumped up to grab it there's no reason for the player to be looking up here or looking for memory chips in this area this is something that you would just stumble onto or would find if you were cued on to it there's this one in the back corner of the loading zone room it's just sitting on the floor now fair enough if you go back here you're going to spot it so it's fairly easy to find however the player has no reason to ever go back into one of these areas it's just placed here and you're expected to figure that out for reasons even though there's never anything else placed in these back corners in any of the other loading zones there's this one in the snow field just sitting on top of a collapsed pillar this is one that you would probably find during normal gameplay especially because this is a BT heavy area and this is zone where you're going to be crouching and stealth in your way through so I'm actually ok with this one this one makes sense this one's in a cave and this cave is actually marked with a ton of signs as a time fall shelter so it's also likely that you would probably encounter this one through regular gameplay even though I didn't but the one I like by far the most is the one hidden in hIG's his secret room this is in the top right corner of the central zone of the map it's basically Higgs is center of operations it's a really cool hidden area that I like a lot this is really cool that they included this here even if some of the quotes scribbled on the wall are kind of funny and weird I'll just say it again I really like this and I really wish there were more things like this hidden and scattered throughout the map if the map were littered with things such as this the player would have a reason and an excuse to explore for the sake of exploring without any deliveries strapped to their back just going through the world for the sake of interacting with it but alas as far as I'm aware this is the only thing like it in the game now it's pretty clear to me that these are supposed to be hunted down with emails that you receive in the game which is obviously true because many of these chips won't actually spawn until you've received a given email describing them so clearly they want you to be interacting with the emails and using the emails to find them for example the memory chip the walk doesn't actually unlock until you've leveled up the first prepper one of the most isolated individuals in the entire game and because you're supposed to rely on these emails I think it's fair to say that these are here to encourage you to read through the emails not here to encourage you to explore the world last thing that I can think of that would encourage you to explore the world for the sake of exploring it would be the hot springs these are something that are briefly mentioned and they're kind of cool basically there's six by my count in the middle zone alone and they allow you to hop in and there's regenerative qualities to them and though it is cute because you hop in and you chill with your bb I never really felt the need to use these or hunt them down intentionally when I encountered one I would hop in but that was really the only time I ever use them again I'm glad they're here but this is by no means a reason to explore the map it's just six things that sit on the map that are kind of fun when you find them but you'll forget about them within 50 feet the point of all of this is to say that the world design of death stranding is so incomprehensibly bad I don't really know how to explain it other than pure laziness hell my degree is in corporate finance I'm not a specialist in game design but all of this is pretty basic to me and the fact that Kojima Productions can't manage to follow any of the basic practices of triple-a open-world game development it's completely baffling to me if you have an explanation for it I would love to hear it down in the comment section below regardless one of the other common accusations that's levied against deaths training is the idea that the gameplay is purely repetitive and there's no reason to engage with it because of its repetitious nature and on the macro level I think that is fair enough which is why I ran through the basic outline of a quest earlier in this section however on the micro level is where I would slightly disagree because while you are going to be repeating the same basic macro process of delivering items from one location to the other you are going to be using a plethora of different tools in order to achieve this end whether you're walking using motorcycles or trucks ladders climbing anchors bridges or zip lines pretty much across the board you're going to be using a plethora of different tools all told it is repetitive in the purest sense of the word but what game isn't in Red Dead Redemption you're going to be engaging in gun firefights and riding your horse that's pretty much it in The Witcher 3 you're going to be talking with people and sword-fighting sure occasionally you're also going to be crafting things but that's also true of death stranding and even with Red Dead Redemption too every game has a set of gameplay mechanics that they're going to repeat rinse repeat rinse repeat over and over and over again after all it's kind of the definition of a video game to me the problem isn't with the fact that the gameplay system is repetitious the problem is that the orders while being repetitious require you to go over areas that you've traversed time and time and time again it ceases to be interesting after the first few times especially once you've built items that help you get over this such as ladders climbing anchors bridges or zip lines they completely negate the need to engage with the other elements of the gameplay loop and end up just turning this whole process into a tedious one instead of one of exploration and adventure this is especially an issue because you are encouraged to craft a ton of items and to load up way more than you likely need for a given mission I found myself many many times trying to use all of my ladders and climbing anchors that I brought with me just because I had crafted too many and I didn't want to have a back fully-loaded of things that I wasn't using so I would make sure that I would drop all the ladders all the climbing anchors and everything that I had carried to make sure that they were getting used if anything I ever built was interfering with the kairel density or was making it so that the Kairo bandwidth was overloaded I would just delete them and many times the game actually does this for you which is why the time fall is kind of a cool gameplay mechanic because it's a reason in game four items to deteriorate and get deleted effectively after a certain amount of time which forces you to go back over those areas rebuild the things that you had previously put there but I don't think time fall degrades these items fast enough for you to feel as though you need to constantly be up keeping on all of the things that you've put into the world furthermore I was almost never limited by resources when I was crafting these things after all resources tend to be stored in the locations at which you're crafting items so there's rarely ever a time where you find yourself short only when building Road and bridges did I notice a need for extra materials but after a few quick trips to a mule camp and back to the home base to extract materials all of this was fixed I experimented with some higher difficulty options to see if this would make item spawns or material spawns much lower to make this much more involved to make it so you couldn't craft for ladders to anchors to boots to gloves five guns and three vehicles all at the same time without ever feeling the impact of it and I'm sorry to report the difficulty really only affects the combat and the damage that you receive and deal out it doesn't actually change much of anything as far as I can tell in terms of item spawns or anything like that furthermore you can also repair items and packaging if a road is degrading or if a bridge is breaking down you can just repair it with some extra items though I will be honest I never felt the need to do this in all my time with the game because the crafting cost of a brand new one was so low but now we get to the point where deaths training starts to kind of undo itself and unravel and this is my biggest late-game problem with death stranding in addition to the poor world design and also the lack of any sort of emotional tied to the world you're trying to save you see the gameplay system is fairly sparse to begin with which isn't inherently bad after all anyone can boil anything down to its simplest parts you can say that disco Elysium is just a walking simulator or that Grand Theft Auto 5 is just a crime simulator in my eyes you can turn anything into a game as long as that thing is fun and fulfilling hell you can even make a farming game fun and relaxing so my problem isn't with simplistic gameplay systems it's with systems that undermine themselves on a fundamental level and I know that this is a big accusation to levy against death stranding and I don't make it lightly so allow me to argue my point the zipline and the leveling system you see the zipline in my opinion is far too useful it makes all other traversal techniques and mechanics completely obsolete you see once you set up a few zipline routes you have no need to ever craft ladders to ever craft climbing anchors all-terrain exoskeletons it's all useless because once you craft a couple of zip lines at the highest peak and build your network out from there you no longer have the need to interact with the lazily designed world all you do is dangle by your cuff link as you fly through the sky it bypasses all bt interactions all mule interactions effectively negating the entire gameplay system that they just set up and I think Kojima Productions was actually aware of this and became aware of it at least later in development which is why they added the chiral bandwidth system in in the first place because they realized if they allowed players to just build zip lines everywhere it would completely negate the need for crafting roads building ladders bridges everything now the obvious defense of these zip lines as they are is that they're going to force players to appreciate the work of other players that you're going to use online zip lines in addition to the zip lines your crafting paired with the chiral bandwidth system this makes sure that you're dependent on other people but I would argue that this isn't the case because roads which are introduced very early in the game require so many materials to construct they do this job zip lines are simply too cheap and easy to construct in order to make you feel truly dependent on other players in fact because the placement of these online zip lines seems so randomized as I discussed earlier I found myself deleting online zip lines multiple times because they were getting in the way of my own zip line network if Kojima really wanted zip lines to represent the ultimate cooperation between players they should have been far more expensive to build instead of just a level 2 PCC in my opinion the fix to this would be to make roads far more important in the late game and to have zip lines completely cut or made far more expensive on the same level of expense as roads these things are so cool fast and they bypass so much of the gameplay system just like the roads do that they shouldn't be so careless added this is coming from somebody who has a huge network of zip line set up in his safe file of the game I love the zip lines and I think they're far too useful now I don't know when they added zip lines to the game but it seems to me they were probably added later in development when they realized that the late-game map was going to be too vertical for roads this is likely one of the reasons why roads are discussed constantly in the first 10 to 15 hours of the game and then it seems like everybody forgets about them and they start talking about zip lines my guess is that this was because they realized roads and mountains don't mix very well whereas zip lines could be the ultimate fix all for navigating over mountaintops but to me this is no excuse all they had to do was make zip lines more expensive in terms of materials and to make it so perhaps they require three players chiral IDs or something to construct point is there are ways they could have done this to make sure that zip lines weren't too useful so that players would continue engaging with the core gameplay loop that they had spent 30 to 35 hours engaging with previous now I get it you're giving players more options more tools to use in order to engage with the game I get that but if players are given the chance to spam the gameplay loop they will for better and worse and in this case I think it's for worse and again it really seems that Kojima Productions were all aware of these systems becoming too useful they were scared that roads were too useful which is why they made them incredibly expensive to construct they were scared that vehicles were going to be too useful which is why they scattered almost every square inch of the map with rocks and boulders and rivers to make sure that they were just tedious enough to use that you wouldn't get reliant on them this is also why batteries are attached to every useful item in the game whether their speed exoskeletons power exoskeletons or the all-terrain ones all because they want you reliant on other players and to make sure that you aren't bypassing all of the other gameplay systems after all they could have made a truck or a snowmobile that made the mountain sections far easier but they didn't because those were supposed to be the difficult section which is why it's so strange to me that the zip lines completely negate all of the mountain sections and make them ridiculously easy now in addition to these zip lines the leveling system I think also undermines the gameplay progression though I will be honest in a much lesser degree you see every time you level up you can carry more you keep your balance better it increases your stamina your health everything this is pretty common but it often means that the Kame becomes easier to play the later you get into it this is actually one of the major criticisms I made of Assassin's Creed Odyssey that I made in my ultimate critique of that game which by the way is just under three hours if you're enjoying this video I recommend that you check that one out after this as well the point is that as the player becomes more powerful they become less reliant on the gear and the items that you have been given again undermining those very items now I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about the broader implication of death stranding as kojima described it he said the death stranding was going to become and was going to introduce a new type or genre of game in my opinion he didn't do this effectively the idea was that the world was going to be shared at least in terms of the items that players will put in the world to share now don't get me wrong the chiral network and shared items are cool but it doesn't actually feel like a revolution at least I think in the way that Kojima intended sure it's helpful to have a zip line already built in an area but the developers limited the number of items that can be placed in a particular zone so that it never feels particularly crowded and in concept this is pretty simple and straightforward it's a world that's shared but you can't actually see or find other players you only see traces of them which makes you dependent on them and the game actually tries to turn this into some sort of profound statement but I think it's just an attempt at explaining why other players are absent I don't know you let me know in the comments see the tracks you left behind they tell a story if you were spy on a mission you'd have failed but you're not so be proud of those tracks there's proof that you exist let people know you're out there give them the courage to come together again as you expand the network an angel fellow Americans you strengthen the bonds between us all and blazed the trail for them to follow and honestly having this in mind why not have other players visible and present you could give them other skins so that they don't look like Sam to avoid griefing and even have their movements recorded and then played back in your world at a later time to prevent griefing nauseam this would be similar to what racing games do when you race against your friends even when they're offline you just play against a ghost of theirs this could make it so as you explore the world you're actually seeing other Porter's delivering stuff and yeah sure now there are NPCs that you occasionally will see walking with weapons and things but these are non player controlled characters these are computer controlled they are not other players and while yes you can occasionally see a ghost of a player or signs that other players have left this is not anywhere near on the level of having truly interactable players at least in my opinion the point is they could have fully realized multiplayer systems in death stranding and it wouldn't have disrupted the story or the gameplay so why didn't they well it could have been technical it could have been monetarily determined it could have been that they didn't want to advertise it as an online game it could have been that they were avoiding the PlayStation Plus requirement for online play and that would have gone over the line or it could have been simply that Kojima wanted the world to be empty obviously he stripped it of other life like the birds and the deer that we see in the opening so maybe he meant all this to be empty and lifeless again Kojima syndrome I think could have really added to the game even just to have AI controlled NPCs wandering the wastes and delivering packages constantly you pass them on trails you can speak with them you can trade with them they might have a ladder and you have a climbing anchor you need the ladder more so you trade for it it could have made the world feel more alive again worth saving and this is my primary point of the section if this new genre of game is supposed to bring people together it's ironic that it's done the exact opposite but all of this thoroughly convinces me that this game was on a strict budget and even was rushed out the door allow me to argue my point to me it seems pretty clear animals were cut from the game they went through the trouble of modeling and animating them for the opening sequence they must have been in the game at some point and they were completely cut later in development when it became clear that they were going to be too tedious to place carefully in the world or perhaps they were making the world feel too alive and it didn't feel like an apocalypse either way it looks as though they were cut and PC interactions after orders are almost all holographic and look objectively terrible these are all copy and pasted with different skins effectively and new voice actors but they're all the same bridges and fragile housings buildings and environments are all copy and pasted across the entire game very few vehicles especially considering the variability of locations snowy areas rocky areas River covered areas they're all highly variable and the vehicles that are there to offer transportation across these are nowhere near as variable there are areas on the outskirts of the map in the central area which are all glitchy and frankly terrible it shows that they put a lot of effort in polishing the central areas in the heavily trafficked areas which is fair enough but it shows that there's a real lack of polish all over this game you just have to know where to look and all of this is too bad because it does really make you wonder what deaths training would have looked like if Kojima were given another year or so to work on it and a lot more money but that brings us to the question of Kojima's strengths and weaknesses which no doubt there are plenty I figured what better way to end this critique of deaths training than to discuss the man himself you see Kojima does whatever he wants whenever he wants to that's kind of the whole point of him leaving Konami is that now he is completely free however after playing through death stranding I can't help but feel as though he desperately needs a dramaturg or a co-director to keep him in check I feel as though through the course of this video I've outlined a lot of reasons why Kojima needs to be restrained and needs to have somebody to deal with him in a much more mature way because I honestly don't think he knows when to stop or when he's being ridiculous I could point to things such as the fourth wall breaks all of the product placement for AMC and monster energy drinks there's a lot of really bad plot twists and a lot of the writing in here is so wordy it's hard to even follow what Kojima is trying to communicate now I took a playwriting class a couple of years ago and it was really interesting but one of the things that the teacher said on the first day of class was that new writers tend to write a lot whereas experienced writers tend to write well and I couldn't help but feel as though Kojima is a new writer he seems to just throw all of the spaghetti at the wall just hoping something sticks so instead of writing a monologue that's three sentences long he'll write one that's 15 minutes long and hope that you get something more significant from that I think it shows a certain amount of insecurity in his writing that he feels as though he can't communicate in as short a time as a lot of other writers could such as Neil druckmann who wrote The Last of Us uncharted 4 and is currently writing and directing the Last of Us part two now listen I loved PT and that was all Kojima but it was a humble and confident Kojima it wasn't Kojima with something to prove having left to Konami and to be honest I like humble Kojima more than this new one now in that survey I mentioned at the top of this video where over 2400 of you responded I asked you guys what you thought of Hideo Kojima and many of you had some pretty varied opinions of him here's a selection of some of the ones I thought were interesting and funny he's an artistic genius who can't tell a coherent story I think he's innovative and incredibly talented but he fails to see criticism for what it is and his fans think he can do no wrong he needed others to rein in his vision to make it more appealing he knows exactly what he wants to make and he doesn't waver he's an innovator but not a hands-down genius he presents the most unique ideas for world building and characters despite falling on rather generic writing tropes he's an excellent designer with ideas he doesn't know how to clearly express the very definition of an auteur he's a great visionary and original storyteller but a weak writer and then 57 of you guys said he's kind of insane now all of this seems to coalesce into a consensus that he is a talented artist with a lot of really interesting original ideas but that he doesn't know when to stop and to delegate for instance he has an original story idea but he insists on writing out the macro and the micro story elements himself despite being objectively bad at writing dialogue and it's really too bad because if death straining were more lean it could have appealed to a lot more people and it could have made a much bigger splash so in closing death stranding is an enigma it's a game that I'm glad that I played the one that's plagued with issues through and through and while I'm glad that Kojima got to pursue his passion project I do hope that his next attempt is far more coherent more polished and much more fun but that's all from me thank you so much for watching if you've made it all the way to this point you are a scholar and the Saint special thank you again to the patrons that funded the production of this video again it would not have happened without the generosity of these individuals and a very special thank you to Zachary Johnson Mike Holland Christopher Scott and Paige Richardson for their generosity let me know all of your thoughts on death stranding below and if you'd like to vote on and help fund the next critique make sure you go and check out my patreon page in addition to getting all sorts of behind-the-scenes peeks at the development of these critiques helping pick the thumbnails and much much more you also get access to exclusive monthly q A's free merchandise early access to these critiques before anybody else and exclusive videos just for patrons but thank you all for watching I love you all more than you could possibly know and I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 207,054

Rating: 4.5496483 out of 5

Keywords: death stranding, critique, ultimate critique, luke stephens, analysis, kojima, stranding, commentary, death stranding review, norman reedus, inside gaming, death stranding is good, death stranding is bad, gaming news, death stranding critique, death stranding explained, death stranding walkthrough, death stranding discussion, joseph anderson, whitelight, death stranding gameplay, death stranding story, death stranding ending, death stranding analysis

Id: BqfCeH3nEz0

Length: 128min 55sec (7735 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 28 2020