Dead Stranded: Life's a Beach
Disclaimer: Having issues with my disability benefits so my sub is up. Images will be added once I can again.
I’m not really “qualified” to write about Death Stranding. People much smarter than me have talked about it, failed to grasp some key intricacies... accused the director, Hideo Kojima, of failing to move away from action sequences due to being “too afraid” to have a quieter, more thoughtful experience...
As if they’ve never played another Hideo Kojima game.
A lot of the more in depth critique or summary leaves out most of the plot because they just kind of don’t seem to care that the game has one. Instead going on about the themes and the loneliness and the quiet of the game.
I’m not going to do either of those things. I’m going to talk about how Death Stranding is in conversation with Kojima’s older works. Because every single review or retrospective or critique of it I’ve seen examines it completely in a vacuum as if it’s Kojima’s first “Real” work.
That’s the thing that pisses me off. Acting like it’s not in conversation with the rest of his body of work, as if Snatcher, Policenauts, and Metal Gear were all just a prelude to “Real” art and then getting pissed off when he doesn’t “Leave government corruption and political thrillers behind” because that’s what it takes to be real art.
And don’t even get me started on those idiots who think that Metal Gear Sold Delta shouldn’t have “Gotten political! Oh no it’s political because SIGINT is BLACK and Paramedic is a WOMAN!” as if it’s not a remake of a PS2 game you absolute fucking clods. Your brain is smaller than mine. That’s impressive. That’s an impressively tiny brain. My brain is really small so yours must be exceptionally tiny and free of wrinkles to think the political thriller about a rocket scientist defecting from the soviet union isn’t political until there’s women and (by North American standards) ethnic minorities.
Anyway
Hideo Kojima is an anomaly of a writer-director. I don’t know how he does it but his work is written like an M Night Shamylan movie, with all the care that Yu Suzuki has for what kind of resolution the player would want out of such a story. But without the blinding lack of competence either one has has. His plot is generally long and winding with a payoff that lands even if it’s not a good ending. Definitively, Death Stranding fits in this camp.
It’s genuinely kind of hard to talk about Death Stranding because of the wonky criticism being laid out by people definitively smarter than me and more well equipped to handle its themes and story in academic terms than me. It’s like they looked slightly to the other side of what they were being handed and got angry it wasn’t what they wanted, instead of meeting it where it was. That irks me in a few ways, so... I’m going to lay down my actual problems with Death Stranding. There aren’t many!
In fact... they’re One. One major problem. The combat is unsatisfying. Even on high difficulties, enemies aren’t really a threat. Despite the narrative satisfaction of taking on Cliff Unger and his unit in The Battlefields or taking on a larger BT group to save a settlement or your cargo that might be a person... There’s not much gameplay satisfaction because they’re not all that much of a threat. Even on Very Hard.
Kojima’s extreme focus on narrative is a large part of his oeuvre in general, but the gameplay is usually just as satisfying. In Metal Gear Solid 2 you feel the satisfaction of suddenly having the mega-katana that Raiden would become known for a console generation later, and then taking down a string of Metal Gear Rays in a boss fight with a man portable missile launcher. In Metal Gear Solid 3 you engage in a tense sniper duel with a man so old he’s literally burning the hours he has left on the clock to buy a few glorious minutes to die in one last glorious battle with the protege of the woman he looks up to like a hero.
Death Stranding? I threw a few grenades filled with Norman Reedus- sorry, I mean Sam Porter Bridge’s poop at a giant cat made of ink and tentacles and it died. Or I shot a dude with rubber bullets until he passed out. Or I punched a MULE a few times. The one time I died in a game that has EXTENSIVE mechanics to enhance your gameplay experience locked behind death was when I wanted to see if repatriating from gameplay was like the cutscenes.
The story is incredible, and these moments are great in terms of catharsis or in some cases anticlimax in very narratively satisfying ways. The BTs becoming a surmountable challenge to be handled routinely is a part of the story, or at least the intention of the narrative is that humanity recovers to a point of being able to adapt to their presence in this new environment shaped by them. Incidental BT battles and running across terrorists or MULEs, though?
Intensely unsatisfying. They’re barely even speedbumps. Sometimes literally, because you have to run a human enemy over SEVERAL TIMES to actually kill them, which is a good thing because it’s easy to run over MULEs and Terorists if you’re trying to speed by them. I’ll definitely pass on the voidouts because I am a big brain boy with lots of gray matter that’s full of wrinkles that hold my massive intellect. That’s probably the entirety of my problems with Death Stranding summed up in a few nutshells, though. Unsatisfying combat. In a game based almost entirely around satisfying traversal mechanics as the only true challenge, it would have been a nice change of pace to have satisfying combat with the natural and supernatural.
Don’t get me wrong, the movement is absolutely stellar, the traversal and the deliveries are great, the main gameplay loop of trudging and driving through the lonely miles is incredible. The thing about Kojima as a director is that all of his games play well. Often incredible. And there’s a depth of story that isn’t there in other action games, sometimes to the detriment of the gameplay’s flow but never its quality. Metal Gear Solid 4 has cutscenes so long it asks if you want to save before them.
Kinda glad they reined that in for Metal Gear Solid 5 and then Death Stranding. Everyone else was until they were suddenly angry about it. Kojima has an unpleasable fanbase that grows with every entry into his franchises that people actually play.
Boktai: The Sun is In Your Hand and its solar sensor gimmick really did drive people up the wall. “I don’t play video games to GO OUITSIDE!”, the frustrated cry of the pasty gamer who loves Metal Gear and would play Kojima’s cool vampire games if he didn’t have to sit near a window to have sunlight hit the solar sensor on the game cartridge sticking out of his GBA.
Which is unfortunate, even if it is an actual flaw in the game’s physical design. Alongside the Overheat system keeping you from playing for extended periods.
Death Stranding is in conversation with this game, too, to be clear. Death Stranding is in conversation with Kojima’s entire body of work! His prior work doesn’t cease to matter just because he left Konami!
I guess my entire point is “Hey, if you’re going to critique something, at least be honest. If you think you’re being honest, examine the point you’re making and why. Dissect that point if you need to. Get to the core of it. It is that deep.”
If your problem is actually “Combat exists in Death Stranding”, perhaps ask yourself why instead of just flatly stating it like it’s self evident. Go into it. Show the class what you dug up. If you dig deeper and find out you have a different point buried underneath it? That’s some solid gold you found. It’s yours. Even if it’s a solid gold gem encrusted turd it’s still YOURS.
Don’t just parrot a popular opinion, or even an unpopular one if you share it. Do your own work. Form your own opinion. Even if you share someone else’s, how you got there has value all on its own.