Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

This is a Head Gum podcast.

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Sam, this is fragile.

The DHV Magellan is currently caught in the TAR currents, and we can't come to your location. You must go forward on your own, Sam.
Good luck. We are with you.

Sam, it's Dahlman. The DHV Magellan isn't working.
Maybe you've heard something about this. You could throw me up in the air and find a different location for us to have a conversation.

Sam, it's me, Chef Man.

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Sam, it's me.

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Unrelatedly. I'm sorry to tell you this.
Good luck, Sam.

Hey, Sam, this is Joel. I was wondering if you'd find any of these comic books that Ellie likes.
The ones I had got all gunked up on account of the tar. And you know what?

I'm just really glad there aren't any clickers around here because that would really cause a void out if you know what I mean. Anyway, goodbye.
I love you.

Sam, it's me, shit's penis man.

Shitting. And my face is a penis.
Ah!

I'm shitting in my face as a penis. Ah!

THV Magellan.

I'm stuck in a hallway. Why do I exist? Sam, come kill me on the ship.
Or take a nice photo of me on any of the floors.

We fight giant tar squids and wonder if we should have connected as we discuss Hideo Kojima's masterpiece, Death Stranding 2, this week on Get Played.

Welcome to Get Played, your one-stop show for good games, bad games, and every game in between. It's time to get played.
I'm your host, Heather Ann Campbell, along with my fellow host, Matt Apodaka.

Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the premiere video game podcast, where this week we are one crew member short because Nick,

Nick, Nick was voided out. Nick voided out.
His eyes crossed.

He got he sucked into like a pinpoint in front of us and then inverted. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Something we, you know, he's well documented, he's able to do.

Hey, no.

That was just for Nick. That was just for Nick.
That was just for Nick. Nick's not here, but

the reason we're

here. Yeah, the reason we're here.
The reason we're here. The reason we have a podcast is we're a podcast, but

we both finished Death Stranding 2. That's right.
We finished Death Stranding 2. And so this is going to be a spoiler-filled episode discussing Death Stranding 2.

I think we can talk about intro and early game stuff, but then we'll hit probably a pretty solid spoiler wall. We'll let you know when that's coming

as we enter into late game talk and I don't know, overall theory. Yeah, because like, here's the thing.
We got to spoil stuff. Yeah, we got to speak.
There's some really crazy stuff in it.

We got to talk about it.

I almost couldn't sleep last night when you texted that you had finished the game and that, because that sort of changed the trajectory of this episode because it was going to be something else.

And we didn't say what it was. Right.
We were, well, there was like the question was,

Am I going to be able to finish it in time for the podcast? And sure enough, I was able to

roll credits

and watch even the, there's like a little post-credit, just a tiny bit. Just a little something.
A little something, something.

And yeah, we'll talk all about it on today's episode of Get Played, the premiere Death Stranding podcast. That's true.
Yeah.

You know what?

As far as I'm concerned, one of the shows, one of the many shows that talks about Death Stranding. It is.
It is.

And we do it a lot. And, you know, know,

it's been some years.

It's been some years, but it's also like with the release of the second one, I've felt a bit of pressure as the podcast that talks about Death Stranding a lot to like really talk about Death Stranding 2.

But obviously, you know, everybody's got different commitments and things like that. So not everybody's able to dig in to Death Stranding 2 in a significant way.

I was surprised I finished it when I did. Yeah.
But we'll get to it, I'm sure. But like.

I was like, I was almost not in control of me finishing it, kind of.

And that's not to to say it was because it was just a long string of cutscenes because uh it was more that i was just like i was just so compelled to press on forward yes uh that i had to that i had to finish it yes i uh i totally understand uh and we'll talk about my end game experience when we get there right um but first

Normally, we aren't just playing one video game. We're playing a few different video games because we are video game players on this premiere video game podcast.
That's right.

And we always ask a question.

and that question is: what are you playing? What are you playing?

Hey, it's me to ruin the people.

And it,

oh, fuck, did I kill Nick? No, you didn't kill him. You didn't kill him.
He's just not here today. That's okay.

It's okay.

I know he's your favorite. It's okay.
Well, he's not my favorite. He's not your favorite.
Who's your favorite?

Ranch. Ranch? Well, yeah, that makes sense.
And honestly, two peas in a pot.

I'm terrified of ranch. Yeah.
But also. So is it like a keep your enemies, your friends close and your enemies closer type of thing? Yes.

I'm scared that if I say anybody else is my favorite, I'd wake up in a bag. Yeah, you'd be marked for death, certainly.
Yeah.

Bubsy was here last week. Bubsy? Yeah, but Bubsy said he didn't know you.

Who's Bubsy?

I was kind of surprised that you guys don't know each other from like the circuit. I was trying to make a friendship connection here.
Is Bubsy the bartender?

No.

No. You're thinking like bubbles? Like, like bubbles from, like, a drink? What? Or Sudsy?

I'm not confused about whether a drink is the bartender.

I know I'm all over the place, but that is not a confusing area for me. You're right.
I don't know what got into me. I don't know.
Bubsy, down at the joint.

Down at the joint. You walk in and you're like, hey, Bubsy.
Oh, maybe. Maybe a cold one.
Maybe, I mean, who knows what Bubsy got into after after

his, you know, his reign as a video game mascot. Of course, he has a new game coming out.

Let me describe Bubsy and you can tell me if it's the same guy. Okay, sure.
Yeah, Bubsy, that bartender, is really long.

He's got like a, he wears heavy glasses.

He's got like a, he's bald.

In the center. Okay.
And then he's got, he wears shorts exclusively. Yeah, okay, so I was letting you get to the, what I presume is the end of the description.

Nothing about your Bubsy matches up with the Bubsy human legs! No, definitely not Are you describing like Stone Cold Steve Austin? Yeah

Stone Cold Steve Austin and Bubsy are two different guys

I guess I just real quick if I could just if I could just ask you a question which is you know

What am I playing? No, not what are you playing

Because actors I know you're not an actor, you're a guy. Yeah, I'm a guy.

But like in my experience, I always hear about i feel like i hear about actors that that like started together like you hear about like andrew garfield charlie cox and a couple of other uh robert pattinson and a couple of other like english actors all living in the same flat together robert pattinson lived in a flat with other guys yeah do you think they were like oh no that one's the cute one I don't know.

I mean, hey, I don't think I named anybody to slouch at it

in any of this. They got together and they were like, should we cut him in his sleep? So he's got a shot.
Like, we're all nice looking, but he's too beautiful we gotta do something about it

beautiful man

i guess what i'm wondering is like do you know any other character are you pal pals with any other video game character oh so like are you asking if if uh

wreck-it ralph rules apply to me yeah i'm guessing if i'm asking if wreck-it ralph rules apply that it may i did not know anybody it may but it it may it could still happen they could still happen but as far as I know, I lived in a shack

near a castle.

Oh, so, but castle adjacent, that's not too bad. Yeah.

So you like, you don't know, you wouldn't purport to like know Leon Kennedy. You just sort of know of him.
I mean, I've met him a lot. Yeah, yeah.

Well, he's going to be paying you a visit quite often. That fucking guy, man,

no words. No.
He just, I'd ask him, what are you buying? Yeah. And he just fucking pointed shit.
Yeah, he's not really saying I'll have one of these. Yeah, he didn't look at me and be like that.

He's not getting

to your little

shit to me. Fuck that guy.
He's not getting to your open cloak and going, um, I'll have the uh

no, he's not doing any of that. He didn't do anything.
He just pointed at me like I'm an animal. Yeah, that's rude.
I'm sorry. What's rude? Yeah.
Horrible. Sorry about I'm sorry about that.

What was the question? If you just knew any other guys. Oh

I know.

Like, do you, I mean, Joel has been on here before.

Joel Miller, The Last of Us. Okay, so you don't know Joel.
You don't know Joel? You don't know Bubsy? You seem to know Ash Ketchum, I think. Oh, fuck.
Yeah, I don't like that guy.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ash Ketchum is tough.
He's terrifying. Yeah.

We did an episode together where I met him.

That's, yeah, I guess you did. I met him once.
You met once. And then I saw him in the hallway.
Yeah. You guys were doing

nemed, yeah, we're doing a neem

get a neemed

podcast, and he was in the waiting room. Yeah, he was getting ready to punch us.
Yeah, I don't like that little kid terrifying, yeah, quite rude.

He's like one of the, he's worse than one of the South Park kids.

Are those real?

Yeah, they're real, they're real, and they're quite rude, I think. Cartman, Kyle, Stan,

uh, Kenny, yeah, I didn't, I thought, I thought those were cartoons, They were real guys. Those are a real guy.
Well, I want to avoid Colorado. Yeah, you do.

I think it's for the best for all of us. Stay out of there.
You know what's nice about Nick not being here? What's that? You're not hustling me through.

I feel like that guy's always trying to get me to go. If you're accusing me of trying to pad the runtime, I'm not trying to accuse anything.

I just feel grateful because I feel like you're demonstrating friendship.

Well, I wouldn't go that far. I would say more that, like, Nick, when Nick's here, he has questions for you sometimes, and I'm sometimes I'm sitting back.

I don't feel like I get to interface with you as much. Nick is challenging.
Yeah, he's always trying to catch me on something.

Yeah, I'm just listening. Yeah, we're shooting this shit.
Yeah, well, your Coca-Cola has

a lady on it.

Yeah, this is a Coke Zero Star Wars collab. It's got Princess Leia

from Star Wars. Oh!

I like a Star Wars. That's pretty good.

Ranch!

Have you ever seen Star Wars?

I've seen episode four of Star Wars. So you've seen like the original one.
Yeah, you've seen one Star Wars. I've seen one Star Wars.
Was it... So when you saw the first, when you saw that one.

Which one is four? Four is a New Hope is the one where you meet Princess Leia for the first time, actually. Well, anytime you meet Princess Leia is the first time.
No.

No, because if you watch,

I mean,

if I watch Ridge of Skywalker,

that's the first time I've ever met Princess Leia. My knowledge of her is not new every time.

What? I'm not meeting her for the first time. They are typically.
New characters are always meeting her for the first time. But as a viewer,

it's all

I don't know I'm getting confused and scared I want to ask Rand something about yeah yeah Rance Rant Matt wants to ask you questions help um

so were you sort of like when you saw it were you like hey this is good I'll get to the other ones or were you sort of like I'm done with this I think

no I just haven't gotten to it I think I watched it in my eighth grade English class. Okay.
Wow. So you watched it over like three days?

Basically. And I really liked it.

I just, I think it just got to a point where there were so many that I was like this is a whole thing that I have to figure out how to deal with later yeah here's the thing there's a lot of them but there's a lot of great ones that one hey if you only saw one that's that's pretty good that's pretty good yeah I totally agree yeah that's a great one I've seen the okay

what I've seen one of them where he blows up a dead star

that could be like any number of them actually that happens quite a bit okay I saw one with a big furry guy. No, yeah, same, same.
That could be all.

It could be a lot of them, but not all of them. Okay.
I saw one

where a guy is like a robot.

Yeah. And he's got a bunch of lights.

Oh, that's actually specifically episode three? Yeah, I know. General Grievous? Yeah, I know Grievous.
You would. You guys have got a similar body.
I know that guy. Yeah.
Man, I like that guy.

I knew that they snapped when they made a robot that could cough.

Yay!

Why would you do that to a man's robot? Yeah, a robot with organic material and give him fucking asthma. Yeah.

That's the one I've seen. Now, so those are the ones I've seen.
Okay. Blows up the Dead Star, big furry guy.
Yeah. General Brevis.

He's kind of silly. And Heather, I wonder if you agree with me in this? What? What are we agreeing on? He's kind of cool, though.
He is kind of cool. He was a skinned Fortnite.
Oh, really?

That came out if you played through all the Star Wars stuff. And he's spindly.
So he's kind of hard to hit. Interesting.
Because he's skinny and weird.

Him,

Captain Phasma.

I think those two are characters that... And heck, maybe even Mace Windu, why not? Characters that I think didn't get their...
due diligence. Oh, okay.

I think that I could have seen a little bit more. Heck, I can use a little more Dooku.
I know there's a lot of Dooku in the Clone Wars series. Yeah, yeah.

But I like Dooku. The name, kind of funny.
I like Dooku. It's weird that Andor is one of my favorite Star Wars characters.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
No.

I think the first time

I laid eyes on Cassie and Andor, I was like, this is my number one guy. Just like a Mexican space pirate.
I was like, this guy fucking rules. I'll love him forever.

I don't care if whatever comes after this sucks.

He's my guy. I love him.
He's so fucking good. I love him.

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What are you playing, Heather? Well, okay. Thank you.
Thank you for it. That's not your job.
That's I want you.

Heather,

what are you playing? Thank you, Resident Evil Merchant. That's really nice.
You very rarely.

Let it go.

You rarely throw to me.

Well, of course, I've been playing Death Straining too. That's right.
But

I've also been playing the Nintendo 3DS. Why?

Heather, what's wrong with you? Why am I playing the Nintendo 3DS here in the year 2025? I'll tell you why.

As I've spoken about before, lightly on the podcast, there is an emulator for the Virtual Boy called Red Viper. Red Viper allows you to play Virtual Boy games as they were intended in 3D.

And I brought my 3DS here so that Matt could fool around with it

while I talked about my experience playing emulated 3D Virtual Boy games in red and black. Wow.

This was an exciting day because I get a text from Heather. Could you bring your 3DS charger? And let me tell you something.
I've never been more ready to bring something in my life.

That thing's bedside, the charger. Oh, really? Yeah.
Wow.

There's so many fucking hacks and homebrews on this. It takes forever for it to load up now.
Yeah. It takes like a full.
I've turned it on, and normally they just pop into life. Yeah.

But instead, it takes fucking forever. And my menu screen is like 150 games or some shit.
Yeah, mine's so many also, but yours is the

3DS. Mine is a 2DS Excel, and I'm looking at yours and I'm kind of like,

do I want that?

Well, I'll tell you why you want this.

It's because of the ability to play Red Viper. Yeah.

So I'm going to load up Virtual Boy Wario Land,

by far the standout game

for the

original 3DS.

Wow, I already forgot. I love looking at the 3D screen.
It's so good. It's really good.
And I'll tell you, I've been playing Virtual Boy Wario Land so much in the last week that my conclusion is

it is a good game. It's not just like

it's not just like a like, oh, a novelty to play it. Right.
I think what I've learned is

the Virtual Boy form factor was preventing me from truly enjoying Wario World or Wario Land, the game. Yeah.
Which is a full,

it's a Nintendo platformer that like

nobody has played because the Virtual Boy came and went in a span of eight months.

And then playing Virtual Boy, Wario Land on a flat screen removes the joy, the pleasure of all the 3D effects that they are fully throwing at you in order to demonstrate the 3D of the Virtual Boy.

Now,

kids at home, if you don't know what the Virtual Boy is, because I showed this to the writer's room and people were like, What are you fucking talking about?

Though we have done an episode of the Virtual Boy in the past, I'll tell you

after the Game Boy, before the Game Boy advanced, Nintendo released a tabletop 3D

video game system that you would mount on a tripod on your table and then peer into like a microscope and play three-dimensional games while

fully blocked off of light and

the surrounding world. Those games were only available in the colors red and black, which were also the decorative colors of the system.

And the truth is,

they fucking look great.

They're like not Game Boy Advanced level graphics, but better than Game Boy.

And I

really, really enjoy playing them on

the 3DS through the Red Viper emulator. I also played

Water World, which plays a lot better on

the 3DS. You can kind of understand what's happening, whereas when you play it

in the goggles themselves, you're confused what you're supposed to do.

I played some

tennis, some Mario Tennis. I played some

3D Tetris. awful game, really bad decision, but but uh futuristic uh leaning, like retro futuristic leaning game.
Um,

I don't know, man. I've been having a blast.
Uh, so I've been silently uh smiling and playing uh this Wario land game here. Um, and I'm honestly kind of blown away how good it looks on this screen.

It looks so nice and so like if this was the if if if this was the presentation of any of these games people would have been like they're on to something yeah like even if i mean i'm seeing it in red and black of course and like i know that there's like the mod for color or whatever yeah the red viper emulator allows you to change it so that they are like uh game boy color style graphics instead of just the red and black i i'm a purist yeah so i'm gonna play it in red and black but like it's just like It looks so good.

Even just a 3D effect, there was like a swinging ball coming toward the screen, and it looked how you would want it to look instead of shitty and bad. Yeah.
Yeah. No, it's, it's, it really, it,

it made me re-evaluate the Virtual Boy as like

it's, it takes up a place in my heart that is both like, you know, silly, nostalgic. I love a Nintendo hardware that fails.
That's interesting to me. Yeah.

But it makes me feel like if they'd managed to do a three-dimensional, like the 3DS, a three-dimensional Game Boy at the time, I think it would have sold crazy well. Oh, yeah.

Well, I'm also just like,

it's the the screen is just so nice. So like the pixel work is just like really well done and like they're like the sprite work.
It's just so like this is gorgeous. Yeah.

This is like this looks so crazy. You will not be able to get a good

look at it on the on the on the video. Right, because when you point a camera at the the 3D screen, it looks like nonsense.
I actually probably broke the camera.

Um, but like, there's this, like, and there's this animation of Wario jumping on these spring platforms and propelling him backward to another platform that's like in the foreground

and and then bringing him back to where like the play area is. And it's so cool.
Yeah. This is great, Heather.
Yeah, it's

it, it, it liberated. I I don't even want to talk about Death Stranding 2 anymore.
It liberated the Virtual Boy library and makes it really fun to play.

Um, so that's what I've been playing is fucking Virtual Boy games

on the 3DS

here in

here in the year 202025. Um

I'm happy for you. That's that's good stuff.
It is really fun.

3DS XL, nice in the hand, too. Yeah, yeah.
That's nice stuff. Yeah.
And this one,

it's a modded system. It has an IPS screen, so it's got richer blacks.
Oh, no wonder it looked so nice. Well, I mean, they all look

nice, but I was like, really like, this is nice. I was like, this one was like as nice as my phone.
Yeah, it looks, it looks really good.

All right. So I got to talk about a couple things real quick.
I'm going to briefly talk about

Metal Gear Solid Delta Snake Eater real quick. Sacrilegious on the Death Dragoning 2 episode, I got to say.
Ooh, spicy. Spicy.

I have been playing it, though, and I talked about it with Nick a little bit last week. Okay.

It's just the same shit. It's the same thing.
It's exactly the same game with updated

visuals and updated

and some updated gameplay. But they haven't changed.
Like, they made it so that, like,

I don't know how much of Metal Gear Solid V you've messed around with, but, like, he can aim on the ground and like sort of like roll around

and stuff like that and become prone. He can do do that in this one.
And

it's just,

I just love it. It's just like such a good,

it's just a good video game. And I am enjoying it.
And

I was, this is why I'm bringing it up for your sake, because I don't have that much more new to report. But I was trying

a

non-lethal run. Oh, wow.
I was attempting a non-lethal run and was getting

decently...

I wasn't handling it. I was doing well.

And then

I accidentally killed somebody.

And now I'm playing a murderous psychopath run

where the legend of naked snake big boss will be the day that he went

to fucking Groznygrad and killed every person in the area.

Which will then, of course, make

that one boss fight

super hard

or take forever because I'll be walking

a path of vengeance

where ghosts are trying to stop me at every turn. But I'm just really enjoying it, and the game is just like funny in the same way that it is.

But like, there's also like a splash screen at the beginning of the game. I didn't bring this up.
That's sort of like, hey, like

we remade this game exactly the way it was for 2003. There's some outdated shit shit in this,

which I think is cool that they

put that there.

But it's just like then funny to be like, oh, well, like, if you hadn't played it before, to be like, oh, I wonder what it is. Like, oh, there's this prompt on the screen for me to press R1.

I guess I better see. Oh, I'm just staring directly at Eva's chest.
Got it. Okay, okay, great.

So, like, I'm enjoying that.

It's great. I want to really mess around because I had never really

played the, I didn't mess too much around with snake

versus ape, the ape escape monkeys. And I, you know, I love, uh, I love those little monkeys.
So I'm going to try that out.

Hopefully, I'll beat it soon. I don't have like a big, well, that's not true.
I don't have like a triple-A experience going other than that right now. Because the main thing that I got going,

I just want to point, I just want to, I have to timestamp the episode. Conjunk.

It is,

by my account,

September 4th, 2025, the day that Silk Song, Hollow Knight Silk Song releases after many years of,

you know, after being released, or after being announced many years ago, and never coming out in like seven years, basically. Yes.

I've been talking about my Hollow Knight journey.

and playing through it and I took a pretty substantial break from it.

So I had to like relearn how to play the game. And I'm happy to report that as of last night,

like 11:40 p.m.,

I beat Hollow Knight. Now, it was the percentage

undesirable, perhaps, but I'm not going to do all that. I beat Hollow Knight, and look, the percentage, the game, it gives you a percentage at the end of the game when you're done.
2%.

I mean, I feel like the milk of finishers.

I feel like, honestly, it might as well be 2%. Oh, no.
It was like, I mean, it was low. It was 63.

It was high. It was high.
I did a lot of stuff, but like, there's like so much more. And then, like, so I'm playing the game.
I started it this year, right? Okay.

Seven years after it came out.

After all the DLC came out. Okay.
And I basically just like mainlined like the main.

story and there's like it's interesting because it's like not on like a dark souls or something where like all the lore is sort of like told in the background kind of and like in little texts and that and stuff that you can find.

So there's like

there's more to it than what I got

right, but I just I love the world of it so much and I just like I like being the little guy the little knight. Yeah.
And then wrapping up his little what my version of his story was

was a very fun experience, very challenging experience.

But I was just so excited and so pumped that I

got in there before the buzzer. Yeah.
Because like

people, I know it feels like stolen valor a little bit though, too, right? Because like people are so excited about, have been so excited about Silk Song.

People, a friend of mine played a demo of Silk Song in 2019 at E3. Wow.
Like, so like people, like... It's existed for a long time.
But something that we talked about, or I mentioned

last week, I think,

was there was an article that Jason Schreier wrote, and he interviewed Team Cherry, and he basically asked them like why it took so long to make the game, like to make Silk Song, and they were just like, We were just having a good time,

like they didn't have a deadline, they weren't online, like, they weren't really following like the discourse or what people were saying, or like

getting themselves concerned with like what people were thinking about. They were just like making sure it was good and then just like made it.
And

I'm I'm happy to say that I downloaded it this morning and

I will say not right at seven o'clock it was not on the eShop uh right away

it crashed uh every single uh digital storefront wow uh on Steam GOG uh PlayStation Xbox and uh

uh Nintendo Switch were all down wow uh which is which is really really crazy there was like 50 it sold 15 million the first one uh over the, you know, intervening years, which is, I feel like, quite a lot for a game of its size and scope.

So I'm hoping that

it would be so crazy if you were like such a fan of Hollow Knight that you bought it and finished it and you were like, I'm not going to get in there. I'm actually not interested in Silk Song.

I did start it up. I know Ranch started it up as well.
Ranch, the other Hollow Knight Sicko

in this room. What was your percentage when you finished game? Probably higher than mine, I would say.
97%

you got crazy with it. Yeah, I went deep.
Yeah, and then everything that whatever percentage I have left, I think it goes up to 112%.

Yeah, I just have tried, but I just am not good enough to go further. I like had, you know, I, and here's the thing, I could still go back, and there's a chance that I will someday.

Knowing that Silk Song was so close and that I was so close to being done, I had to just,

I just had to wrap it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I had to, I had to do it.

But

starting Silk Song, immediately I was like,

Death Stratting 2 might be in trouble.

This game is already so fucking good. It's so great.
What's your experience with it being like Sofar Ranch?

I was so happy to have more.

more areas to explore and more worlds.

I just like wanted so much more after I finished it. Yeah.
and now we have it, so it's a good feeling. It's really nuts because it was planned as DLC to the original game, which is crazy.
Really? Yes.

Yes,

and I think that's why it was playable at some point. Right.

And then they just took the time to like iterate and make it great. And it's like, there are already, of course, trolls on like Steam and stuff.

It's just a reskin of Hollow Knight. It's the same thing.

And it immediately plays so differently because you're playing as Hornet, who is a character that you meet in the first game and you have to fight several times

and has she's very fast and has a cool moveset and stuff and you don't have like access to like that stuff yet because then you know of course you start from zero of course uh every time in in in games like this except uh

Jedi Survivor. That was the only time where it was like, you basically have all your powers from the beginning and you get more.
Yeah.

Which is nuts. But so in this game,

you start as her and you play as her in this game. And it's already so different.
There's quests, there's dialogue between characters. There's,

whereas, like, in the first one, the knight that you play as doesn't speak, doesn't speak back, just kind of like listens.

Which I think there's like a good narrative reason for that he doesn't speak.

But in this one, Hornet's like, you know, her own lady. And so she's like going around just being like, where the fuck am I? What is this?

And it's really, really fun. The stuff that I've been enjoying so far, I already taken down

at least two bosses sort of like right away. It's like just ones that they sort of set you up to fight.
But you have this like diagonal.

In the first game, you can do what's called a needle jump, and that's like a downward attack. You jump up and then slash down with

your sword. In this one, you have that power, but it's diagonal.

Which, yeah, it's kind of interesting because you have to. It's like a Kuma drill kick.
You have to time it like very specifically if you're trying to do it.

If you're trying to hit somebody, they're not directly below you. You're not going to attack directly below.

You have to sort of like figure out when you're going to land that attack or use that attack

to traverse certain things that you can like jump on and stuff. You can also grab onto ledges when you jump, which is just a massive, massive upgrade.

But like you get like a double jump in the first game pretty late, I feel like. And then you can like sort of scale walls at a certain point, too.

But

early on, I'm just like already so satisfied and can't wait to get back in there. My time in the first one was like 40 hours, okay, which feels low, but I did so much and I died.

I wish they told me, I'm sure there's a stat

buried in there somewhere. I wonder how many times I died in the game because I'm going to guess it's

somewhere between

1,000 and 10,000. Oh my god.

Feels like so many. And it's like, but the game is so good, I was never mad at it.

There was, I was saying this to Rancher earlier, though, that like the Switch is so thin, and the Switch 2 is so thin that I was sort of worried that I was going to snap it in half.

I felt myself getting frustrated. But the game is so good that, like, it doesn't really let you do that because you're already just back in it as soon as you have to sometimes traverse

far back after you

die

to get back to where you were depending on like uh your last save similar to like elden ring or whatever like if you didn't check in at a site of grace or something right um

but it's just it's so great and i'm very excited about uh what's to come and like to just discover because that's what the great thing about the first one is it's all discovery and all like all of it's new but like all of this now nobody knows any of this shit it's new for everybody so it's like kind of cool that is cool like everybody that's playing it uh is like doesn't know any of it because they also didn't give it out to reviewers or anything like that

because they want they it was kick-started so they wanted to give it to the people that kick-started it first, which is fair. Yeah.

And I think that's just so cool. And I can't wait to see

can't wait to see more of it and be

blown away by the boss fights because the boss fights are I'm surprised you haven't really gotten in there because like the boss fights are so fucking good and so hard and like just punishing.

Hollow Knight just was outside of my radar. That's it.
It was, it's not that I haven't heard of it. It's just, it was one of those games where it's like, oh, yeah, Hollow Knight.

But I have such an enormous library of games that it wasn't like, like, anytime I think about like, what should I go back and play? I'm like, Persona,

Star Wars Outlaws. Like, I want to play Jedi Survivor.
I want to play, like, I have so many games from the last, like,

from the last two to three years, and then also from the last, like, 10 years. Yeah.
Yeah. And

it was just one of those ones that missed me. And I would imagine not a lot of those are like Metroidvanias.
Yeah. They're not really, that's not really your

zone. Yep.

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Shall we do the talk?

Let's have the talk. We're here to talk about Death Stranding 2 on the beach, developed by Kojima Productions and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Released on June 26, 2025 for the PlayStation 5 exclusively and featuring music by Woodkid and Ludwig Vorsal.

It was written by Hideo Kojima, Kenji Yano, Shuyo Murata, and Kota Watanabe,

directed, produced, designed by Hideo Kojima. It takes place 11 months after the first game, Death Stranding 1.

And you pick up the Death Stranding narrative on the run with Lou, the BB that you have rescued from the first game. Now, there's going to be a lot of words

in this episode. And if you haven't played Death Stranding, these words are going to be nonsense.
Yes.

A BB. Also, I'll venture to say, too, even if you have played the game,

some of it's going to be nonsense. We're going to get into that, Matt.
We're going to get into that.

A BB is

a bridge baby, a beach baby.

Not a bridge baby, beach baby,

who

is a premature baby born to a brain-dead or dead mother

who the future UCA, which is the sort of United Cities of America that take over once America has collapsed due to an event called the death stranding, wherein

the

other world that occurs to us all after death

has has breached into our own world and these

the other world unlike Valhalla, which is, you know, like a hall of violence or heaven, which is harps and angels, uh, in the world of Death Stranding, the other side is a beach, uh, and it is a beach in which time flows at a different rate.

Yeah.

Um, you are a male delivery man named Sam Porter Bridges, and these BBs, these babies, are uh removed from their still mothers, put into pods, and because they are half in between the worlds of life life and death, they can sense BTs, which are beached things, these ghostly apparitions of the dead that are now in the living's world's space.

When these beached things are nearby, they conjure timefall, which is a kind of rain that makes everything age very rapidly. And as Sam Porter bridges, you reconnect to the United States of America.

I can't believe I'm doing this. I was just about to say, Heather's not reading anything.
She's singing this on from her memory. It's very impressive.

As Sampora Bridges, you reconnect the United Cities of America via the chiral network,

a kind of internet that uses the rendering power of servers placed on the beach. Why would people do this? Well, because time moves differently on the other side, on the world beyond death,

it doesn't matter how long it takes a computer to process something. One of my favorite ideas from Death Stranding 1 is that we put servers

in heaven because it allowed us to do more computation.

Hooking up cities to this chiral network empowered by these servers on the beach,

you are able to 3D print, you're able to fabricate

designs and share information and connect the world.

Unfortunately,

due to a conspiracy and the villainous actions of Higgs, who is a guy who is obsessed with the idea that maybe

human beings should die in an extinction event,

you have to

fight Higgs,

convince your

Amelie. Is that the sister? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Convince your sister. She's an EE, an extinction entity.
She's an extinction entity. You have to convince your sister not to end the world.

She does so, and you return to the world of the living

with your BB, and then you have to flee the United Cities of America because BBs are supposed to be inventory. They're not supposed to be

things that you bond with.

And Sam takes his BB out of its pod and begins to raise it as a child, a child named Lou. And that's where the second game picks up.

You are on the run in Mexico, living in a shelter with your child, Lou.

Louise, a little girl.

I'm going to say, I'm going to level some complaints about Death Stranding 2 at the top. Whoa.

Playing Death Stranding 2 made me realize how much I love Death Stranding 1.

And the reason Death Stranding 2 doesn't

supersede that love

is because

a lot of Kojima's games, when he does a sequel, he doesn't just iterate on what's come before. He likes to fucking takes a left turn.
Yes.

And that's what I went into Death Stranding 2 expecting. I was expecting, if all of this shit that I learned in Death Stranding is the preamble,

what new crazy shit am I going to learn in Death Stranding 2? Like, if I have just, in that monologue that I just gave,

all of that was like playing a awesome science fiction novel. Yeah.
Like I was like, holy shit, this is stuff that I'm going to think about forever. It's like three-body problem.

It's like any, it's like anything, anything, right? Yeah. Any blade runner, like stuff that you like.

And so Death Straining 2 is not an expansion of ideas.

It is an expansion of mechanics and an expansion of story. Yes.
But it is very, very rarely an expansion on ideas. Yes.
And oftentimes repeats

beat for beat

a lot of the stuff that happens in Death Stranding 1. It is more well-paced.

But,

but yeah, I don't want to spoil anything yet, but

it's a little bit like

if I'm if in the first four minutes of Death Stranding 1, I'm introduced to BT's timefall, fragile,

and the idea that like porters are important, the first five minutes of Death Straining 2 is, I'm a dude with a daughter. Yeah.

And nothing new is happening. No, it's kind of...
Some of it is

Evangelion

and then rebirth.

Or rebuild. Yeah, rebuild.
Evangelion. Where it's like,

iterative.

It's almost like a facsimile of the first thing, but with some slightly new information or

a different angle

on the information as well. It's got tighter pacing.
It has,

you know, more. One of the things that you do in Death Stranding games is you build infrastructure and it has more options for infrastructure

available to you. You can build a monorail.

You can build new kinds of

equipment.

But

you can also build a lot of the same equipment. Yes.

And characters who are introducing this equipment to you in Death Stranding 2, and again, I'm saying all the negative stuff up top because I love the game. So I don't want to just.

And it's not even really negative. Yeah.
Characters will be like, hey, I invented a hat that does this. And Sam will be like, I already know about that hat.
And it's like, oh, well.

Yeah. That's really funny, though.
It is funny. It is funny.

But

it's a little like when somebody is telling you about a piece of equipment that they've invented, and really all they're doing is unlocking stuff that's available in the first game. Yeah.

And the player character has to say, I already know this.

It feels a little like a missed opportunity. Whereas there are elements like the fucking coffin board.

Yeah, which I discovered had a dual purpose after I had finished the game. And I don't think, I mean, it must have been said to me at some point, but it is, it is said to you.

I was shocked by what I learned. Well, it's like the coffin board is new.
Yes. And like, why not just fucking load up the game with weird shit like the coffin board?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I totally agree because like that's like the stuff that they do add that's like that is

like few and far between. There's not many, like, that many new things.
Yeah. But

it all just, I mean, obviously it all works for you. You like the game.

I love the game too. Loved it.

So I don't have as many complaints. I have like, I think, one very specific complaint.
I have one more complaint, but I'd like to hear yours unless you want to.

I mean, mine is mine's almost rude. Oh, okay.

Here's what I'll say. Okay.
You have people like Leah Sedou. Yep.
You have Troy Baker. Yep.

You have L Fanning. Yeah.

And

just a host

of

Tommy Earl Jenkins. Yep.
Norman Ritas.

Hang on a second. Oh.

You have all these just stellar performances in the game.

And sometimes with Sam, with Norman, you can't get more out of him than a...

I like that.

I kind of wish that, because

there's some scenes in the game later on,

early on too, where he really, really... I guess what I'm...

he really has to act yeah he has the opportunity to showcase some real emotional range yes and it's not for me it's not there yeah and i know that there is like this sort of uncanny valley thing too right where like he's like a he looks exactly like how he looks in real life but you obviously understand that it's a video game and like there's

i've seen the like bts uh footage of you know these actors wearing the suits and uh getting their face scanned and stuff and I know that like

you sort of have to almost really overact

with your face to like

make it be seen by computer to make it like you look at your face.

So maybe he's just like not doing it at that level.

But like there's like a, but he's still, I think he's great in the game, but like later on, there's like a, I mean, we'll get to it, but there's like a

There's just like a real close-up on Troy Baker's face when he's acting as Higgs later on that I was just like, this is better than anything he's done in any video game.

Troy Baker is by far the standout performance of Death Stranding 2. Yeah.

And he is among the greatest video game portrayals of all time. Oh, yeah.
In this game. Absolutely.
Without, with like a bullet. Like it's like,

it's going to be hard to...

He's the,

maybe not to blow too much smoke, but he's sort of like the Andy Circus of this medium. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Where you kind of like, oh yeah, you want to do, you want to do mocave?

You want to do Gollum stuff? You want to, you got to go to the big dog to like go to learn how to do it. Yeah.
Yeah.

Because he's great. He's, and he should,

he should do it in movies. He's really, yeah, he's very talented.
Why isn't he in movies? He's so talented. Yeah.

Yeah. I, so my other, my final complaint before we launch in all the stuff I love and you love.
Yeah.

Death Stranding 1 had weird information in the emails you got. It got, it had like,

like you'd get like a fucking email about motorcycles, and it was just like that, this motorcycle was a really popular motorcycle in the year 20, you know, 2019. Yeah.
And this is why it was popular.

Or like. Similar to Paramedic telling you about Godzilla King of the Monsters or

Radio. Yeah, it would be like there was weird stuff in Death Stranding 1 and it was, it felt like...

It felt like author flavor. It felt like, it felt like the author of this game being like,

also, I want to share stuff I love with you. Whereas Death Stranding 2 feels so much more focused and at the cost of people being like, oh man, you got to hear about

vinyl. Like, vinyl is like this medium that went out of fashion and then came back.
Yes. I missed that, that, that,

that color in it.

I think, I think he just like replaced it. Because like some of the um some of the corpus? Yeah, well some of the corpus entries like oh my yeah, the corpus is great.

That's like the act of time lore in this game where you can just go through a menu and just read everybody's story as it updates like while you're playing it. But

all like the shelters

where you then get to meet like the NPCs that you're making deliveries for and stuff. They all have like serve like certain flavor, right? Where like they like the artist

then uh populates her walls with art based on the things that you're uh and like that stuff's cool i think he just like maybe like that's not exactly it but like he just sort of like refocused like what the uh weird stuff was he's like oh like i like there's like the junji ito uh costume or whatever he's like junji ito also is just like real in this world like

sure

yeah

But yes, you do get a Junji Ito costume. George Miller is tar man and he's a different guy.
All these actors are different guys but

junji ito is real

i do i just miss somebody being like you haven't sam you haven't heard of the killer by john wu

like an excellent movie about uh the the power of a pure heart even in the worst and most villainous circumstances you'd be like okay great have you read necromancer

i i have to just tell you right now I love Dollman, and I have a group of guys that we all talk like Dollman to each other. Dollman is great.
He's so, so great.

I've been talking about his game a lot with some friends of mine that have a video game podcast. If I could just shout them out real quick,

they're over at Super NPC Radio, and they have a games club where they go through games like chapter by chapter. And so they asked me to sit in with them to talk Death Stranding too.

And I was like, absolutely. And so I've been having a nice time just like completing two chapters or whatever and being like, I can't wait to talk with my boy.

So if you want to hear hear that, you can go check them out. They're great lads, and we do all do the dollman voice together, and it's a lot, it's a lot of fun.

Sam,

I'm thinking of getting some dinner. Do you want a hot dog?

I like you turn off the game, and you come back like a couple days later, and immediately as you start it up, he's like, Sam, why don't you check out the corpus so that you can refresh yourself on what you've been doing?

I like that stuff. I don't like when he tells me something I already know.

Like that my

sniper rifle is really loud. I'm like, I know, bitch.
Or Sam,

that cargo is no good anymore.

Yeah, you, Sam, you fell off a cliff.

Sam, it appears this was the first time you used the anti-gravity upgrade on your truck and didn't understand how it worked.

And you tried to jump off of a mountain you've destroyed everything yeah yeah no it's like it lets you jump yeah

but it's not safe yeah

how many like because I felt like early on one of the new mechanics and we'll get we should talk about this in a discernible order but the with doll just while we're on doll man for a second you can throw him up in the air and like scope the area yeah

I felt like I did that two times. Zero times.
I did it like once when they told me to do it and then was like, okay, I'll do this again.

And then after I did it one time, I was like, I think I'm just going to go in. Yeah, yeah.
I don't, I don't need to know where everybody is. I also only built the lookout towers

enough times to be able to

get them to tell me to stop doing it.

Sam, you don't need to build lookout towers. I can throw it, just toss me in the air, Sam.

So the things I like.

The performance of Dollman 2 is fucking. I think I put him ahead over

Sam. Fucking Dollman is so good.

Hold on, though. I'm going to be a Sam defender for a moment.
Sure. Hey.

Mine's heavier. Mine's heavier.
Pekko.

That's this game's version of Snake doing the baked eyebrows. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny to be like, there's no weird stuff in this game. And I wore a rabbit hat all the way through endgame that every time Sam took like slow steps, he would go, Pekko.

You can also catch

BT's like Pokemon and use them. Yeah.
Yeah. There is weird shit.
There's new shit. The complaints are out of the way.
Yes. And I also, I'm going to defend Sam's, uh, Sam's mocap.
Sam,

when Sam gets a thing,

like when somebody, when you, like five-star

shelter. Yeah.

Um, and Sam sam gets a gift from them he picks it up and barely smiles and it's so good because it's like a guy embarrassed to like a thing that's that is good it is so good yeah he doesn't want to show that he's like feels nice that he got got a gift yeah also when he eats a cryptobite in his uh in his shelter and he kind of like looks at the camera just a little like you're being a little nasty yeah uh i liked making his face funny in photo mode.

I was doing more photo mode early on while like the environments were more novel to me, right? So like I would see something in like big moon. I'd see big moon.
Oh, big moon.

And which got me thinking about something that I texted you about yesterday that we'll talk about later. Okay, great.

But I would like every opportunity I had to like make him do. sticking tongue out face.
I'm like, I got to do that. That's like funny.

So maybe I was like, oh, his face is capable of so much more and he's not really doing it in the game, but because I'm making him be crazy in photo mode

well he's he's a stoic guy yeah yeah and he'll you know he he he had

uh in the first game he has a paranoia about touches like being touched at all that's true yeah and you know what i think if you're gonna cast somebody

perhaps based on simply that they look like a cool guy you can't do worse than the norman reeves i think he's one of the coolest looking guys he looks fucking awesome all the time

he's just like cool. He's a looking guy.
Yeah, he just like looks like a tough guy. Yeah.
Like a badass guy. Yeah.
He just looks like Daryl Dixon.

But,

okay,

again, I know there's weirdness. Yeah.
Like the first game had advertisements for his fucking TV show. I was lamenting that that was not present in it at all or any sort of significant

branding of any kind. Yeah, there's no branding in it.

There's no like, you know, like monster energy drink is in the first one, and there's no monster energy drinks there's it felt it felt a little there were points at which where i was like this feels like it is less

alive yeah to me um

i think it makes sense to not have that stuff though because they had to like patch it out anyway right like for like as like a

From like a licensing standpoint, it probably is like a pain in the ass to be like, why did we fucking put monster

energy drink in this to then just like patch it out or whatever? But like

uh, the stuff that's in there that is like songs, and then, like, or you know, I wish there were more books, actually, because they kind of made it seem like that the book thing was going to be more important than it ended up being.

Yeah, but it was just like it was just one book. Yeah, it's one, it's one, it's two books.
Yeah, it's two books.

I wish it, because I like, I don't know, that's when you can get then more like strange information, probably, right? Yeah. Um, but should we just like get into like

should we just get into well

how do we talk about the game without without talking spoilers? Because this game, the game is you deliver to shelters, you build up the chiral network in Mexico. Yes.

But I think there's a pretty major spoiler instantly in this game. And if you haven't played it, this is an emotional point that you may not want to cross.
So I think we enter into spoiler country

right now. I think, okay, fine.

Get your hats and

get your

hats that you get from the

Peko lady. Pekko.
Put that on and just Pekko.

And just say Pekko for the rest of the recording.

And Giddy up because we're in spoiler country. Yeah.

Because, yeah, basically, like, Sam's living like a nice, quiet life.

He's got Lou, you know.

Everything kind of sucks still. Like,

he's maybe feeling a little used from the last game, right? Like,

disillusioned, but he's still, he's out there making deliveries. He's like just delivering the mail, basically.

But then he gets contacted for just like one last job. Yeah.
Which is a good

start of any story, I think. Yeah.
Good shit. And if you choose not to take on that job,

the screen gets very, very small and fades into oblivion and then restarts you at the exact same decision. Because truly, the game only begins if you choose to take the last job.

Yes, which is very funny. There is like, that's weird.

Again, I think what we're, what I'm, I'm not saying there's not weird shit in it. Yeah, but there's not like anything we're...
Well, it's, it's like,

I just wanted, I wanted a little bit of the stuff that felt

anachronistic. That's what I wanted.
Yeah. There's tons of weirdness in the game.
And, but it, but, like, it's that thing that we've talked about in the past, though, too, where, like,

how weird is it really when, like, the reality of any video game is strained? Yeah. Right.
So, like, it's all weird within the context of Death Stranding, but maybe it's not

completely immersion-breaking. Yeah, I want dollmen to be like, Sam, you've never eaten at McDonald's.
Like, I want that shit. I love the fish delight.
That's what my favorite U.S.

president called it.

Also,

remember, like, in the emails

in the first game, there was also comment, like political commentary about like stuff that was happening in the US. Yeah.

And that's all gone. That stuff's gone, but like the stuff that I think remains is more like of a global interest, right? And it's like not as overt.
Sure. Where it's like

you could tell he cares very deeply about the climate crisis, for example. Like that's just like a big part of it.
And then, but like,

I mean, there's some also there's some, some, there's some other stuff in it too that I feel like maybe we shouldn't get into, but,

But like there's just like a there's just there's a lot in it. There's a lot in the text certainly, but Sam

goes on this one last gig goes on this one last gig

Holds the gun right at fragile

But then he just like he's off to it and he's basically there's this there's these

anomalies these like or this phenomenon they're called plate gates and

there's one that connects Mexico to Australia. Yeah.
And, well, first he has to get Mexico on the chiral network first. Yep.

And then from there, now that Mexico is online, they can then go through this plate gate. They can activate the plate gate.
Yeah, and then enter Australia. But

while he's doing this job, Fragile, who is staying with Lou at his shelter, is attacked

by a red

mechs, which we later learn are ghost mechs. Mechs powered by

energy of the beach. Yeah.

And they attack her and Lou,

and they shoot her as she is trying to transport Lou to safety, and they kill Lou. Yes.

And this is why you have to set a spoiler country right at the top because had I known this going in, I would have been bummed. Yeah, it's uh

it's shocking. It's yeah, it's it's really, really crazy.
I was about to say it's like another spoiler, and I won't do it

I just won't do it

Because that's not that's not fair. That's not how that works, but it is very sad.
It's a it's it's just like a very jarring. It's also like one of these things where you're like can they do that?

Like it's like that okay. Can you execute a baby in a video game? I guess you can.
I guess you can. Like and we've seen children die in like The Last of Us Part 1.
Yeah.

You know, you've seen kids die in a game before,

but never a baby, never a fucking toddler. Yeah, a toddler is never, yeah, shot in cold blood.
Yeah.

But it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, but it, it's really like the thing that then sets the story on fire. Like, it's like the reason that Sam has to continue, basically.

Sam, you uh, which then is brought up way later.

Sam, Sam's, uh, some time passes, and Sam is kind of a destitute, uh, grieving father of this, this, uh, bb that he adopted.

Um, and uh, Fragile shows up and is like, Hey, we think it might help you to go

do another delivery, like to just get out of the house, man, and do some more deliveries. We'd love you to come to Australia and link up the continent for like old time's sake.

And he meets a couple of uh of new people on um on the DHV Magellan, yes, uh, including uh tar man

um he also meets back up with dead man yeah uh who uh uh

gives him a little bit more backstory about like uh i forget exactly what it is that he hands him but he dies prior to

um

Lou dying. Oh, he dies.
Yeah. But Dead Man gives you like a thumb drive that lets you know a little bit about what went on with your

girlfriend who had died before before the events of Death Stranding 1. Yeah, Lucy.
Yeah, Lucy,

it turns out, was having an affair with a guy named Neil. Yes.
Neil, you meet in this second game, taking on the sort of

mantle of Clifford from the first game. You meet him in these sort of

sequences that are divorced from the main story, where you transport to another world and you fight Neil for reasons that aren't immediately clear to the player. right? Right, right.
And he

looks like Solid Snake for some reason. Well, I know why he looks like Solid Snake, and I want to talk to you about it.
Okay.

Do you want to just start talking about theory or you want to keep talking? I don't know.

I don't know. There's so many.

Can we do this for 10 hours?

There's a lot. I guess let's go through the story, though, right? All right.
So you go through the story real fast. I mean, a lot of crazy shit happened.

You fight Neil,

whose

name is Neil Vanna. Yeah, his name is Neil Vanna.
But

I will say, like,

to what you're saying, that, like, there's,

I feel like we can get through the story kind of quick because there's almost not that much of it. Yeah.
Um, so yeah, he meets, uh, we, we, we meet Neil, Neil Vanna.

There's a couple other new characters in this game. You have Rainy, who's part of your, your troop.

Rainy is, oh, go ahead. She's like Storm, where she can bring the rain.
She can bring the power of Time Fall Rain

on command, which has made her an outcast because she couldn't go anywhere without making it rain and here's the thing another stellar performance really really good fantastic performance then you meet um when you are fighting against neil vanna

i love the names i i wish this dude hadn't cornered the market on naming a character exactly what they are yeah because It would be so hype to have discovered that.

To just be like, like to be an author or a writer who just names your characters the thing. it is really a special touch, yeah, right.

And then, like, if somebody else did it, you'd kind of be like, That's Kojima's, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like if you, if you created an action movie and you name the main character tough to kill man,

like,

yeah, I like he does, he just basically has like male actor in a porno rules,

Johnny Hard.

And you're like, oh, cool. So, so, uh, when you're fighting against Neil Vana,

who appears to you in tar falls, which are

tar eruptions that come up out of the ground. The tar is sort of like a primordial fluid that is leaking from the beyond.

You rescue a girl

played by Al Fanning, who doesn't have a memory and doesn't have a capacity for speech.

She's real

infantilized female trope.

But

over the course of the next time,

whatever, weeks that this game takes place.

My Sam didn't really sleep, so it's kind of hard to know

when was what, you know?

Rainy

and Fragile, who is the sort of captain of the DHV Magellan, a ship that can go from location to location by surfing the tar currents underneath the mantle of the earth.

Yeah, when they do this, everybody look gray. Yeah, everybody looks gray.
I like that part.

They sort of restore function to tomorrow and teach her words. Yes.
And they also begin revealing her powers, which are sort of to make things age rapidly. Yes.

While you are sort of building up this cast of characters, Higgs, the enemy from the first game, shows up, reappears

in the second game, even though he was executed by Fragile in the first.

In the red

mech, yeah, ghost mech suit, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, by the way, I want to circle back real quick.
We did forget one major character, oh, yeah, Charlie.

Charlie, who is the uh, on board, uh, the DHV Magellan, um, and he is a mannequin with no arms or legs, but he's a robot.

And he, uh, you can select a voice for him, and three of the options are fake outs. And the only one that you actually can pick is Die Hardman's voice, and it's for a very good reason.

So

you're traversing the landscape of Australia with this crew in tow, connecting them to the chiral network as you begin to piece together Neil Vanna's story.

Neil Vanna was having an affair with your girlfriend, Lucy, and it turns out that he got her pregnant. And,

you know, Sam is like, well, fuck. You know, she fucking cheated on me anyway.
What difference does it fucking make? Yeah, yeah. It wasn't Mike's baby.

It's fine. I don't don't care.
It's like.

Oh, we also forgot that. Pekko.

Pekko. Pekko.
Pekko.

That he,

while he begins this journey, he is carrying his BB pod. Yes.
And in the BB pod appears a BT of Lou. Yes.

Like floating

in his BB pod. And so he still has this connection to

Lou

is still with him in this second game. But at a certain point,

it just looks like a baby again, right? Like, and that's like,

I mean,

we can just say it because we're in spoiler area. Sam is like having a really hard time with this mentally because no shit.
Like, it would be so crazy to go back to work after

your surrogate child has been murdered in front of your eyes. Yeah.

But so, like, all these characters are sort of like

helping keep this illusion that, like, Sam's fine, kind of, like, oh, like, yeah, like, and yeah, Sam's basically playing with like an empty basket, basically. Yeah.
Uh, and it's like, it's so sad.

It is, it is super sad, and they make it pretty clear to the player that there isn't anything in that pod. Yes, but the every time they

give you more information about it, they treat it like it's like a new piece of information. Yeah, uh, because it is for Sam, but it is not for you at all.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Everyone's a little bit like, well, how?

Can I see your pod, Sam? Yeah.

Oh, nice. Nice.
You meet a you meet a doctor whose ability to

she has like you know

supernatural beach connected hands yeah that she can reach in and out of wombs and can uh transplant babies to pods in order to examine them, which is fucking crazy. Yeah.

But I guess as the game goes on, what is revealed to you is that Neil Vanna

was not actually,

again, spoiler fucking country. Yeah.
Giddy yup, yeehaw. I'm Sam.
Pekko.

Neil Vanna,

who was having an affair with Lucy, your girlfriend, was not actually the father of the baby that she was carrying. It was indeed Sam.

But in order to protect that baby from the UCA, because Sam is a a repatriate, he has the ability to never die.

Neil was asked to pretend that it was his baby so that the UCA would be less interested in the baby.

The two plan to flee to Mexico in order to protect this baby from the clutches of the UCA and are both executed in the attempt.

That baby is then transferred to a BB pod and then transferred again to a different BB pod, BB00.

That BB then comes into

Sam's care. And it turns out that Lou, the baby he had been taking care of in the first game and was executed in the first few chapters of this one, was his actual daughter.
Yes.

Gasp.

And we should point out, too, that Neil and Lucy know each other from like they met long ago. Oh, yeah.

In like, what the original like incident yeah in the original stranding event yes uh when neil was a child yeah he was running through uh he's just an italian little boy he's

running through the streets fleeing the uh the effects of this sort of uh inter international incident the death stranding uh and he gets a um

a sort of metal uh

coin it's not a coin like a metal uh charm uh is so hot from uh from one of the explosions on one of these buildings that it singes into his skin and can't be pulled off right away.

And then he meets a little girl, and that little girl goes to grab his hand, and her hand is burnt from the burning metal piece that is still embedded in Neil's hand.

When they are adults and they reconnect, they realize that they'd met each other when they were children trying to flee this disaster.

So much of the story is revealed in the final like yes

Final 25% of the game, right?

Uh

I mean yeah, because a lot of it is like you're making deliveries that are crucial to just sort of move on to the next thing.

There's like a like one of my favorite missions in the game was the one or one of the my favorite sequences was when you have to sort of like log three different things on and you have support from the DHV Magellan and they can do like aerial blasts while you're sort of like handling stuff on the ground.

I thought that was like just like a great sequence. There's like some really great set pieces.

The stuff with Neil Vana is great because

you go into this, like, there's this

concept that is explored in this game

is Nirvana, right? And

they talk about it a little bit, and like, I just like did a little bit of reading on my own. So, like,

what's he getting at here? What are they trying to do? Because there was something about it was reminding me of something else.

And so I was looking into it, and then just like

the very basic idea of it is this, like, when you die,

your consciousness returning to a

collective consciousness rather than an individual soul or like identity or whatever. You sort of return to

like one

place and one thing.

And

because of that, and because of the beach and what the beach is, and what

Higgs wanted to do in the first game, and then what we learn is going to happen, or what he wants to happen in the second game.

It also was just really reminding me of Neon Genesis Evangelion, specifically the human instrumentality project. And I would not have known any of that had you not infected my brain

with that masterpiece.

But I was just like, really, like, gosh, like, what are they getting at with this? But

basically, they're like, he they want to get all of australia on the chiral network and you're doing this and you think there's well hold on two there's a president there's a president that's on board or not on board but like that talks with you quite a bit and is like hey like uh i think we have to like talk privately and stuff and then starts talking to you on a private channel which seemed Seemed wrong.

Seemed wrong immediately. It just seemed incorrect.
Especially because the way you see people on your

communicator thing is like they're like in a sort of blue sort of light type of thing. And then when you talk to their president by himself, it's like red and gray.
Yeah.

And I was like, I think he's bad.

Something about him seems bad to me. And he's talking to you and he's like, hey, like, I think that something's fucked up.
And I think that like

this,

you know, this new delivery system that's, or, you know, this new company that's like trying to

put Australia on the map or whatever might not be exactly what you think it is. And then we find out that that's true, but it's his fucking fault.
Yeah.

And so like, so it all kind of comes to a head in like chapter, gosh, like 13 or something. And I'm sure we're missing some

crucial detail, but like, I feel like a lot of stuff happens here forward. Yeah,

a lot of stuff sort of piles on at the end. Yeah.
What you learn is that

the president of Australia is actually sort of a manifestation of 4,000 souls that are

on the beach. There's no weird stuff in that.

Look, man.

This is a fucking robot guy with 4,000 souls.

He could look like any guy. That is a bad faith

reading of what I mean. I'm just joking.
I also have to circle back real quick.

There's a red samurai that you meet throughout the game that doesn't speak, but makes like the baby noises that Lou makes. And so for a lot of the game, I was like,

is Lou

as a baby? But then you find out at a certain point that it's Dead Man. Dead Man's corpse.
Dead Man's corpse. Because Dead Man, who had died early in the game,

he was able to put... his like ha in somebody else's car

in heart man's car or something and so like when heartman is on the beach, he's able to use his body because he's not using it.

Which is an interesting idea. It's an awesome idea.
Which is really, really, really gay. But then, yeah, the Samurai ends up being dead man, but then it's also then not dead man,

which is crazy. You so the president is like,

I'm actually going to make a perfect world for everybody where nobody has to leave their houses. Everybody can be in constant communication.
He's effectively pitching lockdown. Yes.

And given that Kojima rewrote part of this story when COVID happened, I wonder if that's the

part that he rewrites: is that the temptation is, what if we made a world where nobody had to go outside anymore?

And there is a tension between the desire to have things be tangible and real and the desire to be safe. And

this president of

4,000 Souls has decided to make everything safe for everybody

in exchange for your ability to be free.

And

Charlie. Kind of sounds like

what? Kind of sounds like real life. It does sound like real life.
Except we don't get safety and we just. Yeah, we don't get either thing.
Actually, this would be better.

You just get less free.

No safety in exchange.

Yeah.

Things are worse. Yeah.
That's how bad it is. I'm like, I'll take safety over no freedom, I guess.

So

it turns out that Charlie, who has been voiced by Die Hardman this whole time, actually is Die Hardman. And he has been

reverse hacking this, the president's chiral network in order to prevent the president from taking the actions that he wants to take and locking everybody into their houses.

And it seems like every, the day has been saved. There's not a big boss fight.
Even Higgs is like, we're not going to have a big boss fight, man. What's the fucking point? Yeah.

And you seem to be going forward with your life, but

Higgs shows up and kidnaps Tomorrow. Yeah.

And says, and says, actually, I'm going to take Tomorrow

to the other side because tomorrow

is Lou.

How does that work? Well, here's how it worked. When Fragile was shot, she teleported Lou and herself to the beach.
She took the bullet. Lou was protected and she left Lou on the other side.

And since time works in a different way on the beach, Lou grew up very fast

and became tomorrow. But still baby.
Yeah. And became Tomorrow.
Tomorrow then is exported from the beach. where she's been protected by Neil Vana this entire time.

Neil Vanna, who was protecting the son of Sam or the daughter of Sam. Yeah.
Yeah.

Protecting the daughter of Sam in a heroic martyrdom. Yes.

Despite Sam constantly trying to execute this dude, Neil is protecting, and you can see in his bag, you can see the glowing BB pod. You can see him actively protecting Sam's daughter.
Yeah.

Sam's daughter is tomorrow. Higgs knows it.
And if Sam's daughter is tomorrow, then she is also an extinction entity. He can use her to unlock the end of the world.

He brings her over to the side of the beach. There's a huge fucking fight where the DHV Magellan has to be grafted to a BT and punch people like he's Godzilla while you're running along the beach.

You fight the red samurai. Let me tell you something about the red samurai fight.
They did not program it well. Yeah, I didn't have a...

I didn't really have a hard time in the game at all. I played it on normal.
I played it on brutal. Yeah.
That thing is not programmed to

do any, like, it doesn't know what to do if you just run at it and hit it.

Like it will, I think it wants to have a shooting match. And that fight in particular, you only have a guitar that shoots.
Yeah.

That is a gun. No weird stuff.

I want to circle back to Die Hardman's reveal real quick though, because you basically learned that he was doing parasite in his own ship. Yes.

He's like in a fucking closet. Yeah, like everyone's like walking around.
He's just like, ooh.

And then you learn that the DHV Magellan stands for Die Hardman's Vessel.

And when he does his big reveal, he does so through the art of dance. He does,

I'll say,

a long dance. A long dance.
A long dance. It's not the only dance in the game either.

There's a great dance that is only triggered by a a certain event in the game if you play a song that Dollman knows and likes that then triggers a cutscene where a dollman dances.

You haven't seen this? Are we talking about the Hot Springs song? No.

No, I haven't seen this. I'll send you a link.
Okay.

It's one of these things where there's a lot of stuff in the game. that you could just like miss.
Yeah. That like.

Tar Man's Backstory. Tar Man's Backstory.
And like some of it is just like... it's not, none of it's buried in menus.
It's more just like somebody saying something that doesn't really sound

significant. Yeah.
But like if you kind of just like follow even the smallest thread, something like strange will happen. Yeah.

And so like this thing with Dollman, like you're in your room and you'll have heard the song

from point A to point B, like on the when you're traveling or whatever. And he'll be like, oh man, was that that song? Sam, Sam, was that that song? Man, I really like that song.

I'll tell you something about it if you want. And like, that's it.
And so then you, it's on you to then talk to him again. And then he'll tell you about why he likes the song.

And then you have to go to your music player

in the game to turn the song on. And then from there,

he then will do a dance. Like, and it's like,

it's unbelievable.

It's great. It's great.
Missed that.

But yeah, so then back to Higgs and what he's up to. Higgs has been,

it's interesting because

the president and APAS have been behind this this whole time. Yeah.
But then also Higgs has just, I guess, been, because they had sort of weaponized Higgs in this way.

They sort of knew that the only thing that was going to get Sam to do what they wanted to do was if Higgs killed Lou or somebody killed Lou.

If Higgs came back and was a threat,

then Sam would have no choice but to connect Australia

and then the president would be able to unveil his nefarious power. He makes a deal with the debt.
Like

fucking Higgs is dead. Yes.
He's dead, but he's inhabiting these robots as a ghost. Yes.

And the only place you can fight him is on the beach, which you do in the end of the game. Yes.

You charge up this beach, you beat the red samurai, and then you fight Higgs in a couple of different ways.

One is where he's teleporting in between servers.

One is where he is up on the shoulder of a giant BT.

And then finally, in a

basically one-for-one recreation of the first game's final fight, you get health bars on the top of the screen and you attack each other with guitars until you have beaten the shit out of one another while also once in a while jamming on those guitars.

It is very funny that they jam

because it's so funny in the first game that that's what the fight is and then you just have to think that Kojima was like, how do we like spice this up?

How do we like make this, how do we make this same point kind of that like, because I think the point that he's trying to make

maybe

is that like boss fights are kind of dumb. Like they're like they're kind of because like

It's not very exciting like some boss fights are like great depending on like the game or whatever like the game the bosses in like a souls game for or even hollow night for example are designed to be a certain length there's like attack patterns you got to follow and like stuff like that but sometimes they're just kind of like whatever like and i don't know if a game like this where the story is so dense and you need like and like i think the story is the game not the yeah uh yeah the fighting right and that's and that's i think

um

sort of hinted at by the fact that you can pretend you've won each boss.

Yeah, it's like you don't have to do it, actually. You can lose the fight, you can just pretend you won it with a button press.
You can also play a mode where you don't fight the bosses.

Like, he doesn't want you to suffer in order to see his story. Yes.

I was disappointed by the final boss fight. Were you? I mean, I was kind of like, it's this again.
Yeah. But because it was

the guitar stuff, I was like, this is good.

I was like, I was so bummed when it was the same. Because

when the first game

goes to 2D fighting and you get health bars,

I looked, I was like, this fucking game doesn't stop giving. It's everything

is so packed with ideas and fun and life. And so when it happens again, I was like, oh, we're literally doing the same fight again.
That bums me out.

I also understand Kojima Productions needs to make fucking money. Yes.
You know, like, and the more time you spend developing a game, like the, I don't know, the turnaround between the

initial planning stages of Death Stranding and the execution on Death Stranding, but it's only been five years to Death Stranding, too. Yeah, which is, I think, remarkably fast.
Yeah.

For a game in its size and scope. Right.

I guess like the end, like...

It is, I did think, oh, it's just this again, but like, I want I, there has to be some reason for it, right? like because

you think about if it was like a if it wasn't that and it was just like uh you're

fighting in the same way that you fight all the other characters that feels unrewarding in a way too right where if you're just like using the uh multi uh rocket launcher on higgs and like then it just

ends him and then there's a cut scene where you just like obviously blew him up but then he's gonna talk forever like you know like kind of it kind of to me is almost like an interactive cutscene because it's like, you're not going to, you're not going to lose that.

Right. And they're, and they're saying dialogue during the fight.
Yeah. You know, like, go fuck yourself.
Yeah. And I fucking hate you.
Yeah. Fuck you.
Yeah. Yeah.

After you beat Higgs, a giant baby version of Lou comes from a womb in reality

and

eats him. Yes.
And then you,

in a sort of phantom experience, you re-deliver Lou to your home shelter as you did in the beginning of the game,

only to reawaken on the DHV Magellan, where it is revealed that Fragile died protecting Lou,

that Lou never died and grew up to become tomorrow, and that Fragile died on the beach. And because time moves differently,

her body was still capable of living on until she was able to finish the mission with sam yes um you also before this you got a really lovely kissing scene with sam and fragile yeah where he's just kissing her corpse when you really sort of deconstruct what's happening yeah he's just like fucking sucking the face of a corpse here's here's what happened to me my wife comes home i'm playing this game We're in the end here.

Yep. It's basically all cutscenes from here on out.

I'm crying.

I'm sitting on the couch and I'm crying i cried and my wife is like are you okay and i was like yeah i just like i was like i can't explain any of this to you like i was like there's like i can't there's nowhere to begin i'm like i actually probably should just send her the episode honestly because like it is like so crazy to try to explain in that moment when i'm like like experiencing it uh and then we went out and then uh like i was still kind of like in like a bad mood not because i was like mad that the i didn't like the ending of the game or whatever but i was still so yeah like emotionally raw that i was like not ready to be outside uh and then everything was bothering me i i cried when you redo the opening oh yeah yeah and i then i paused the game and i turned to mary she was on the couch reading a book and she's like you okay and i'm like

you gotta you gotta bring the baby home

she's like what yeah because i'd also shown her like when uh die hardman is dancing i was like i think this might be the end of the game

And she's like, oh, let me watch. And we watched.
And then he started dancing. And she's like, what is happening? And I'm like, I don't know.
I actually don't think this is the end of the game.

This can't be it.

But it's, then it, it, it, it ends, and it's sort of like a, as happy of a resolution as it could be. Sam is reunited with Lou.
Who is tomorrow? Who's tomorrow? And she remembers the first game.

She's like, I remember our journey together. And then you see her years later and she has become a porter.
Do you think she remembered? Um,

do you think she remembered me falling down a mountain holding her?

Bro!

I was thinking about the stuff you have to think about when you're playing a game, like just like the cognitive dissonance you have to have, where you're sort of like, if I fell with a baby strapped to me down a mountain,

at least one of us would be dead.

Perhaps both. Baby's dead.
Yeah. I think that the game,

but I guess, gosh, we should really talk about what you think the game.

I mean, the central message of the game is just because you die, just because somebody has died or has passed on, doesn't mean that they're not still with you, which I think is a nice... Of course.

Is nice. That's a

nice message. I think the game is, and I might be reading into it too much.
Yeah. I think the game is about Kojima's relationship with Metal Gear.
Yeah.

One of the books that you read in the DHV Magellan is Moby Dick. And

Dolman

recaps it for you and it's like Captain Ahab had something taken from him. He had a phantom pain.

He had a phantom pain and he was never able to recoup that pain and he became obsessed with the thing that

took his limb.

And he created a ship

of like-minded sailors. And together they

formed

something that was going to head out into the ocean and slay the thing that that took Captain Ahab's lib.

And then Dolman just straight up says, it sounds like Kojima Productions, which is fucking great.

But I think

beyond what Kojima Productions represents as a ship trying to do battle with a whale that took Kojima's limb, you also have Neil Vana, who is

clearly, clearly a stand-in for Snake. Like he he looks like Snake.
He wears Snake's headband. And snake, you are trying, you're trying to execute snake as Sam.
You're trying to kill him off.

But what you don't realize is that snake, because snake exists, you are able to protect, like he is able to protect literal tomorrow. Yes.

And that it is misguided of Sam to try and attack the thing, to try and kill Snake. Yeah.
Because if it wasn't for Snake, the things you want want tomorrow wouldn't be possible, right?

And so it is very like it is a sort of like

a communion that they eventually come to, where Sam realizes, oh, if it wasn't for you, I wouldn't have this. Yeah.

And they kind of make peace with one another, even though he still has this bitterness because Snake cheated, like he was in love with somebody. Yeah.
And Snake cheats on

his lover.

It's like I was dating Lucy Lucy's Konami

I was just thinking this too. Yeah, we're like Lucy's Konami Sam is Kojima.

Yeah, and he thinks he got fucked over by Konami Yeah, but but Neil secretly was protecting his ability to keep moving forward.

Yeah, he's yeah Neil Neil Snake the reason that we even have Death Stranding is because of Snake in general. Yeah.
And so then that sort of then brings me to the concept of Nirvana. Right.
The

soul returning to a collective consciousness. Is that then,

do we think that's Kojima sort of reckoning that that

creation, that identity, that life that he gave to Snake and Metal Gear is no longer just his. It now belongs to everybody.

And I think that's gorgeous. I think that's so great.

Look, we might be reading into it. Yeah.
I doubt it because of because Dolman just says it's Kojima Kojima production. Yes, I

doubt it as well only because I've yet to see an ounce of subtlety in any of his video games.

But it is, it's interesting to think about because

it's so intentional. Yeah.
It's like because if it wasn't Snake, it wouldn't be Snake. You know what I mean? He just wouldn't make him look like...

Yeah. And also, it's just kind of crazy.
Coincidence that there's also a remake of one of his games out there now. Right.
And, you know, there's there's a lot to be said about that.

I know that there's a lot of people that were like, oh, Kojima's not involved. I'm not interested in it.
I'm not doing it.

I think I was reading something that was like two-thirds of the staff that worked on the game worked on the remake because they're all still at Konami.

Only like a third of the company left with Kojima.

And I'm like, that's... That's a pretty substantial amount of people

that then know there and that they are sort of thinking about it.

I certainly would never defend a company, but like,

I think it's like they were saying that they use that one because that one is like the most polished, to, they'd use that one to remake instead of doing one of the earlier ones so they could train a new generation of game designers on Metal Gear games, because like it's like the most Metal Gear.

Yeah. I'm like, that's, it's just interesting information is all.

As a game creator, there's an interesting dichotomy between how on the nose he is. Yeah.

Like how like directly he's saying things, and then also sort of the crypticness of what his feelings are about a thing, if that makes sense. Yeah.
Like,

we all have, you know, because we were all exposed to PT, because we were all exposed to Phantom Pain, and because we were all exposed to this very public and sudden breakup between

the company that had, you know, that had allowed him to make Metal Gear Sons of Liberty, like had said, okay, dude, if you want to do it, go for it. Yeah.

And then then suddenly being divorced from all of that IP that he had been so personally involved with,

you don't really know what happened. Yeah.
And you also don't really know,

like, does he, is he angry about it? I don't know. He hasn't spoken publicly about like being enraged.
Like, he hasn't given an interview where he's like,

there are a lot of, you know, like, I'll cite like the last Jedi when Mark Hamill was like, I don't think Luke would act like this.

You're like, oh, shit, you know,

you have a point of view and you've expressed it in such a raw way that it is affecting fandom. Yes.
Like, you have no idea what Kojima, like, he could be like, I don't give a shit about Snake.

It's like a video game. Yeah.
You know, like, he could, or he could be like, it felt like losing a child. And so that's why I made Death Stranding 2.

Yeah, but then I feel like I've read a lot of people too be like, he didn't even want to make a third one. Like, he didn't even want to make a third Metal Gear, which I'm sort of like,

it's murky, but I think the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. Yeah.

Like, uh, with, with something like that, but it's interesting that he's chewing on it in, like, I think in the most public way that he ever has. Like,

in the direct

sequel to a game that people,

I think, love and thought was great, but I feel like a lot of people write off as a

simply as a walking simulator, which I'm like, that to me is the greatest indication that you don't know what you're talking about and have not played the game actually.

I'll tell you what, I didn't do that much walking in this game. In this game, did you? No, no.
You walk a lot in the first one, but I wouldn't even call it a walking simulator.

I think it's just like, you wouldn't call God of War a walking simulator. You do a lot of walking in that game.
The Last of Us. Nope, walking.
Walking. Walking simulator.
You're doing other stuff.

You're doing other stuff in Death Stranding, too.

There's a point in Death Stranding, too, where, because I, you know,

I would log in and I'd I'd be like, I'll do a couple of deliveries and then I would end up just building roads because it's all I ever fucking did was build a fucking road.

It's all I, I was like, I have to finish these fucking highways. Yeah.

There's a late game mission where

Die Hardman's like, okay, this one's a pretty tough one. You got three options of which way to go.
You can go straight across the mountain. That's going to be a tough route.

You go this way or you can go that way.

And one of the ways he pointed to, he was like, you're going to have to go all the way around. And I was like, on my highway? Yeah.
Yeah. Okay.
Oh, no.

You want me to drive on my perfect road, you fucking idiot?

So I got on the road and I was just like driving the stuff. Yeah.

You do get attacked by motorcycles. You do.

But

it was funny to be like,

after that, it's just there's no more motorcycles. You're just like driving on the road.
Yeah. Yeah.

Like,

my road, I wasn't completely,

I wasn't a completionist with a lot of that stuff.

I didn't level two that road. No, stuff that I want to go do though, and like getting there.
But like, I had friends that were like,

they completed the monorail.

I did a lot of monorail. I did a lot of monorail too, but at a certain point, I was like, I'm just not in the mood for mining materials.
I'm just like, I'm good.

I think I'm, because also, the monorail takes too long. The monorail not that fast.
It's a slow rail. I'm already there by the time the monorail

decides to show up. I've already moved on to the next thing.
I've already driven to the top of the mountain and pressed jump with my anti-gravity truck

and heard Sam go, oh,

Packo. I'm wondering if there's, is there anything else that we feel like we want to get to? I feel like this won't be the only episode about this game we do.

But who knows? It might. It also could be.
It could be. I don't know if Nick, I don't know where Nick is in the game.
You have some feedback from our friends? I certainly have some of that.

I don't know if I have any other

thoughts. I think that the way the story comes together is really great.
I really love the characters. I love Dollman.
Dollman's an all-timer for me.

I think Neil is great.

And obviously, we've spent a little bit of time in what are you playing in weeks past, talking about some of the quality of life stuff that's changed and some of the

newer systems or the stuff that has been tweaked to be more functional and more

fun immediately. And that's the thing that I think that this game has over the first one is that, like, I think the first game is great, but this game is fun.
Yes, this game is more fun. Yes.

The fighting is

better.

You know, combats is clean and fun. Yeah.

I do think a lot about the interview that Kojima did or the presentation he did where he was like, you know, the game was playtesting so well that we had to go back and change it up a little because I was worried that we had made something mainstream.

And I

kind of agree. It is more mainstream than Death Stranding.
Man, I want to go back and play Stranding. Honestly, kind of me too.

Like, I'd be interested just to see, I would like some distance from both, I think,

and play them both back to back would be kind of fun because it is sort of it is it's almost Death Stranding 1.5 with like the with how it's uh with it's just more story I i also want to shout out the obvious uh emotional toll the death of the lead singer of low low roar took on yeah on kojima yeah um he talks about how the game wouldn't have the first game wouldn't have happened without low roar

and the way this game unlocks music is that like you the the the choice of music track that unlocks for you is does is designed for the greatest amount of vibes or emotional impact. Yeah.

And the last few tracks you hear are low roar tracks. And it was like, oh, yes.
Fuck, it hurt. And that's just one of the things, I mean, that's like the main thing he's talking about, though, too.

Like, I think, like, gosh, like, the game is obviously a lot about the pandemic. The first one wasn't because it came out right before it, right?

Which is crazy because it might as well have been about it. Yeah.
But this one, it was, it seems like it was just like a reaction to just like all the losses. Yeah, yeah.

And like

just that experience of just like losing people. There is really crazy.

Like, again, I know I leveled some criticism and it's not because I don't love, love, love, love these two games so fucking much. Yeah.
My office has Death Stranding windows on the wall. Yeah.

I've got a fucking BB on my shelf. Yeah.
You know, like,

I listen to the fucking soundtrack.

to and from work to and from work to and from work over and over again i love love this game and he has such a control of vibes yeah yeah like a there is no other gaming experience that i've had where all i'm doing is going from one place to another and i'm feeling something because of like where he times the music and the way the landscape is designed to be informed by that music.

It fucking rules. Yeah.
I honestly would like to see him like make a movie. Like I think it would be interesting.
Is he going to? Is he going to?

I think he's announced.

Oh, he has a partnership with like Paramount or

something.

And he's got representation at WME. That's right.
Yeah. And he is doing OD and he's doing Physant.
Yes. And then apparently is going to do a movie after those two.
Wow. Yeah.
And I know that.

Gosh, I wish I had the guy's name.

The director of Pig is supposedly doing the Death Stranding movie for A24.

And there's an anime coming of that.

But I'm just like, he has such a command on vibes and has like obviously befriended a lot of directors and like, I think, studies them and is just interested in them.

I think that he would do, it would serve him well to direct a movie, I think.

In the same way that like when we talked about Shin Godzilla last week on Get Animated, Hidi Akeano of

Evangelion directing a live-action Godzilla movie, I was like, oh, like you could tell that like, it's not, it's, it's not necessary, you wouldn't necessarily think of that as a transferable skill, kind of.

Like, I, like, it's, because

they're two very different things.

But then you see his movie and his vision, you're like, oh, yeah, no shit, he can make a fucking movie. Like, it's great.

Let's move on to the this next part, the Ryu crew.

Hello!

These are all from our Discord, discord.gg slash get played. Here we go.
This one's first one's from

the mountain that abides. Hello, the mountain.
I'm aware that there's a plot, and I I swear I'm invested in the plight of Sam and company.

But God help me, I'm addicted to building and upgrading roads.

That's the great thing about the game, and that's one of the things I think makes it so fun is that, well, it's also so funny because, like, some of the some of the stored reveals are legitimately like devastating at points.

Yeah. And then the idea, they just be like, I'm going to go build a road real quick.
Oh, that's something that I didn't talk about.

So there's a point where it's like, tomorrow's been captured. Yeah.
Yeah. And you got to go to fucking Mexico and you got to save her.
And I'm assuming this is where you're like, I can't turn back.

Yeah. I got to fucking go.
Unfortunately, the route I took, I passed by, I had the auto collection,

the auto collection thing on my, I had two, two shelters I had not unlocked and I couldn't figure out what I had missed. And I was like, God, I didn't feel like I rushed this fucking game.

And I'm driving across the mountain to get to Mexico and my auto, my auto grabber grabs a piece of lost cargo from one of these shelters that i haven't unlocked and i was like what the fuck it's like it was called like abap or something

or or something and i was like what the fuck is that and i like went to my cargo manager and i was like wait what is this yeah

and i stopped

going to save tomorrow and then just drove around on the mountain being like it must be in one of these two locations I haven't unlocked and then found the guy and he was weird and he's like, I'm not ready to go on the chiral network yet, but maybe if you do a couple of jobs.

And so I went to his orders and one of them was nearby and I was like, well, I got to see who this person is. So funny.
So I, so, like,

that's like getting in a car accident and then like seeing a friend you know and then being like the friend's like oh you want to like go do something real quick it's like yeah just like leaving your car there

also

also

like to the wilder had play like started playing it's like driving you towards mexico yeah and i when when I delivered to this guy, the song stops. Yeah.

Because the game is like, you're not going to be like, you're not going to fucking go save tomorrow. That's so funny.
So I got him on the chiral network and he starts unlocking all this cool shit.

And I was like, well, I want to see what else he can unlock before I go fight Higgs. You can almost buy it a little bit.
narratively that Higgs would wait though. Yeah.

Because he's like so dramatic that he's like, I want Sam to see this. So I'll just wait to do this without until he gets here because

I can't initiate the final stranding.

I still didn't unlock the final the final whoever the guy is yeah I had a couple of red spots on my map too and it was infuriating yeah but um luckily at the end of the game it's sort of like you can just kind of do whatever you want yeah but one I now at the end of the game I only have the one red spot okay because I stopped saving my daughter

this next one's from Delia N and they write The reveal that the mannequin being voiced by Die Hardman was really just Die Hardman the whole time is one of my favorite favorite twists of all time.

That's one of my favorite things about this game is that like twists are handled like twists, but they're not really. Yeah.

Because there's a point in the game too where like I can't remember if it's like fragile or rainy or something. They contact you on your

communicator thing and they're like, hey, like somebody logged into like the VR trainings as Charlie, but like Charlie doesn't have arms or legs. So like how could he have done that?

And like it's just like it makes you like Die Hardman.

And when i was when you do that i'm sort of like well he's just die hardman right like like you're always like a little bit ahead of the the reveals in it and i think that's i think that's a fun way to detwist yeah as non-information yeah uh this next one's from fake jsf i fake and they write it's crazy how they took one of the best games ever and made it way better dollman is the best shotgun passenger of all time agreed i love dollman fucking love dollman dollman's an all-timer for me This next one's from Captain Buzzerbeater.

What's up, Cap? The Magellan sound is forever etched into my conscious,

my consciousness. It's the first thing I hear when I wake up and the last thing I hear when I go to bed.
It is my cell phone ringtone. It is a good sound.

It wasn't jiving with me at first because I missed, because also I had changed my

ringtones from the first game immediately to the second game, and I wasn't used to them in the second game yet. So I was kind of like, I miss the old sounds a little bit.

But now that the, now that I know the true nature of the DHV Magellan, the sounds are bangers. The sound design across the board in the game is perfect.

Like every click is, is pleasurable, all of the like, there's like a CRT sound, like an on-television sound that happens when you're in the maps and the menus.

It's like a small buzz, and it feels so fucking warm and good. There's it's just it's great.
All the tone, the chimes, the tones, the voice of the Magellan, like it's great.

If he doesn't make any more games, he should just like help other games make the sounds good. Yeah, he should just have his fucking team like do design like he's Joni Ivey.
Yeah, yeah, totally.

And finally, from Norman Reedis, baby. Hey, Norman.
Thanks for listening. Yeah, thanks so much for listening.

I think you're a good actor.

I don't think he's a bad actor.

I just think that I was just craving a little bit more. Okay.
I would have got another take. You know, I would have just got, I was just, you know,

I think everybody did a great job.

You know, in the interviews he's done where he's like, yeah, you know, Hideo was telling me that, like, okay, now you're crying because there's tar coming up out of the ground.

And he's like, I don't know what any of this means. Yeah.
It's infuriating to me. Can you imagine being in a movie and saying something like that?

It's like, I don't know. It's like, to me, I'm sort of like, oh, it's still, it's an, I think it's a new medium for some actors, right? Some actors, right?

So like an actor who hasn't done that many of these, but has done two other ones

with him, you would think that you would sort of have a grasp on the style. But I would also, it wouldn't shock me if Sam, if, if, if, now, now we're getting into this is like mean territory.

It wouldn't shock me if Norman forgot he was in the first one.

He's the one that broke the news that the second one was heading. That's true, right? Yeah.

Norman Rita's baby writes: I wish more game directors inserted random shit into their games, like using electric guitars as energy guns or riding a coffin like the Silver Surfer just for the sole reason that it kicks ass.

That is sort of the driving force behind all of Kojima's ideas. It's like, is this cool? Does this look cool? And if the answer is yeah, he's like, good.
Is this awesome?

Yeah, it is awesome to surf on a coffin

and then put a corpse in it and dunk it into the earth.

Didn't even talk about my favorite moment in the entire game.

I have to get to this. There's a part on the ship where Die Hardman is basically like assembling the Avengers of everybody that's on the ship.

And sort of every character one by one has a moment and they give you a thumbs up.

And it's like nine thumbs up in a row and you feel like a million bucks. So you're like, these are my best friends on earth.
I love these guys. All of them.
Even Tarman's cat. Why not?

Who's maybe his son?

It's great. I love it.
It's an all-time experience to me. And

I can't wait to continue thinking about it. There is weird stuff.
It's like, you know what I mean. No, of course, I wasn't.
Hey, I wasn't saying nothing. I was just saying, I like the thumbs up.

I just, I love, I love all the fucking, I love the cat. I love the, you know, that Tarman is missing his hands and he uses it to feel around in the, I love all the fucking weird shit.
It is good.

I just miss missed the layer of, Sam, you haven't read Nintendo Power?

Sam, have you ever read this book, Kazen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

Right.

It's a contemplative read

and about a journey.

That's this week's Get Played. Our show is produced and engineered by Rochelle Chen Ranch.
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Oh, God, I'm so bad at fucking talking. This is ridiculous.
It's ridiculous. I should be dollman.
I should be Sam not saying anything in some of these cutscenes. Fucking ridiculous.

I think you're good at talking. Thanks so much.
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patreon.com slash get played for ad-free main feed episodes, our complete back catalog, and our exclusive show Get Animated, where we'll be talking about K-pop demon hunters. My little soda pop.

Join us over on our Discord. That was just for me.
That was for you. Join us on our Discord, discord.gg slash get played.
Enjoy the conversation, won't you?

And you know who got played this week?

Dollman. Dollman.
Dollman. I would do a playable character.

If there was like a

VMU. for the PlayStation 5 and there was a Dollman minigame.
Yeah. I'd platinum it.
Yeah, I want more Dollman.

I don't think, I hope we haven't seen the last of Dollman. Yeah, Dollman's great.
I love him. You know who got played actually? Higgs.
Yeah, fuck you, Higgs. Sorry, Higgs.
Mine's heavier.

That was a hit gun podcast.