i beat death stranding

I've beaten Death Stranding, my thoughts:

Gonna say straight up, the game is not worth playing through. Watch a youtube video or analysis or listen to people talk about it or whatever. The first 5 hours I've enjoyed somewhat, the hiking simulator was a nice change of pace from the usual open world fare and the game hits a unique stride where you're just hiking some mountains while music just plays. Hell, I sometimes get a kick out of off-road bike navigating through rough mountain terrain. But ultimately the game has just way too much filler content and NPC sob stories I don't care about even while doing the mandatory orders. The game is 30 hours long if you skip all the side quests, it should have been 10. Come to think of it, the story itself, the main reason I play most Kojima games is really lackluster this time around. There have been no characters I've really latched onto and everything is so underwhelming and poorly paced. None of the twists land and nothing really has any real significance. The beginning of the game and its expositions pretty much explain the themes and the point of everything, and all the ending really does deliver is some very minor revelations about stuff we already know.

There seems to be a trend lately with worshiping games despite their jankiness or the endurance they demand. Anyone who has played Pathologic, STALKER, Drakengard, and to some extent Last Guardian will understand what I'm talking about. There's a charm in how their bleak tone can make the bleak gameplay justified. Death Stranding can't really get away with that defence, it's an AAA game both in how its marketed and budgeted. Kojima has free reign to do whatever he wants so there's also no excuse in regards to how the game ended up. I legitimately think Kojima forgot how to make a good game, and he's officially in the phase where only die hard fans will cling to this game for whatever superficial reasons. I predict a youtube video 5 years from now that dissects all of the information packed into this game to proclaim the general populace "just didn't get it" Oh I get it, it's just not very good.

The James Bond action hero stuff at least grounded his earlier stories and the conventions helped alleviated some of the more broader messages Kojima wanted to impart. War is bad, nukes are bad, and maybe we ought to examine why we consume so much media about violence too. Death Stranding instead tries to tackle a lot of different things, everything to the Big Bang, society, dinosaurs, violence, government, and ropes. It's likely a reaction to how the internet has become this new form of discovery, instead of colonizing land we're now colonizing ideas and unifying based on beliefs. The ideas behind Trump getting elected and Brexit seemed to kind of bring about a turning point in the way the world is going. I think Kojima is trying to frame the worlds most cataclysmic events into some grand allegory to answer the question of what exactly we're living for. It's a bold direction go in and a lot of the game mechanics too play into that idea. I just... don't think playing this game is the best way to go about experiencing that. Whenever a twist or revelation happens it just falls flat, I even guessed some of the wilder reveals, only it's really not that significant at the end of the day.

Sure you could say that about the MGS series as a whole, that it's a huge mess that tries really hard to go after too many ideas. But at least there are good memories contained on their own from this. I don't think I'll remember much from Death Stranding, there was nothing that really resonated with me. You could argue that I'm just getting old, and that I'm probably disappointed about how actually similar DS is with MGS as a whole. That maybe me being desperate to beat the game just to be part of the discourse is my fault alone. That's probably true to some extent, I felt Nier Automata and Last Guardian were disappointing and maybe I'm just trying to chase the high I got from playing so many good PS2 games that surprised me in my youth. I tried to keep my expectations in check, watched as few trailers for Death Stranding, and ignored any opinions on it until I played it. Evidently I think video games can still make me feel and look forward to the next mind blowing story beat, it's just that I'll have to look elsewhere.