Death Stranding 2 Adds Fun, Subtracts Frustration

So I want what so so when I want to get an honest answer from two separate people

I text them separately Yeah to see what they think on that perspective and this happened recently Yeah, I texted both Justin and Griffin separately talking about how I felt about Death Stranding 2, which is the game we're talking about today Apparently, they were sitting next to each other when they got the text.

It was absolutely insane.

Insane, my man. We were at Origins Game Convention.
Thanks to everybody who came out. Always love to see the hoops troops.
And

we both got the text independently, not in a group, but independently from Russ and both sent to me and Griffin.

Identical copy. Well, yeah, I just copied and pasted it.
You think I rewrote it? No, but like we realized it happened, felt like we were in a saw movie and decided to confront you.

And is that the verb? Yes, that's what I did. Confront you about your actions.
And would you like to the chance to explain them? Yeah, I mean, I said it at the top. I wanted a honest response

that wasn't tainted by the rest of the group. So even before we get into the fact that you played us against each other, like

a sociopath. Yeah.
I am disappointed in you for not being able to wait until after dinner to get your sweets desserts.

Reaching out to us to get our exclusive thoughts on the video game before

the listeners paid who has paid for it to hear these paying customers free one to get our insights for free i want a little sneaky peeky that's disappointing too my man we got it we have rules for a reason the rules are we don't talk to each other until we do the best right that's fair the question i guess the follow-up question i have is this yeah

how did you both find out that i texted you at the same time

We were sitting next to each other. But do you look at someone else's text?

No, I said to Griffin, Russ says that Death Stranding 2 is the best game, his

best game.

And I said he texted me the same thing. And then we looked at each other like, that can't be right.
And we started like, after you compare, we're like, Beverly, enhance. Enhance these texts, Beverly.

We think we have an impersonator. Absolutely wild.

My name is Justin McErhan. I know the best game of the week.
My name is Griffin Mackerel. I know the best game of the week.
My name is Christopher Thomas Blant, and I know the best game ever.

My name is Russ Fruschik. I know the best game of the week.
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This episode of the podcast is going to have the guts to ask a question that I didn't actually think we would be asking. And that question is,

what if Death Stranding 2 fucks?

Chris Plant, what does that mean? Speak on that. Well, Death Stranding is the sequel to a game where you walked around and delivered packages in the apocalypse.

But now it's back with a lot less story, a lot more delivering, and a hell of a lot more Metal Gear Solid. Did I mention it's made by the same person? I am now, Hideo Kajima.
More efforts.

What a wild. I would love to diagram that sentence.
Yep. I had a protractor, and we'll be right back after this.

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I had a moment where Rachel was out at a book club and I was like, all right, I'll have some time to dip into Death Stranding 2 on the beach.

And

I'm, I, I go.

Sorry, I was confused for a second. I thought you were playing it on the beach.

People should know that's the subtitle of I am heading to the beach this week, so I could ostensibly make that happen if I wanted to bring my 500-pound PlayStation 5 with me as I went.

I could probably, if I sat here for a couple hours, come up with a short list, but just like off the top of my head, I cannot think of a

more bonkers game for a loved one to walk in on you playing than having her walk in from her club where she just discussed literature with her with her friends and then come home to see me making Norman Ritas drink his own piss.

And then she's like, what's happening on the TV right now? And I'm like, well, this is a game where you make Norman Ritas drink his piss and eat his bugs.

And I don't see why that's weird. We both consumed art today and I'm going to discuss it later.

Yeah, I thought you were just going to talk about how weird it is when they come in and they're like, so what are you doing? And you're like, well, I'm

hand delivering this package. Like, how long have you been doing that for? And you're like, oh, 30 minutes.
And like, anything else happened?

No. Yeah, no, there's not a lot of stocks.
there's not a lot of random cross-sections of this game that you could place in front of a normal person

and have them not immediately go. So you just

run across the mountains and you drink piss, and you're Norman Ritas from Walking Dead? Yes.

It was truly the example of an elevator pitch only working because it started with Hideo Kojima made this game, and then everything else is like, okay, I guess we have to.

I would love to provide my perspective on Death Stranding 2 on the beach because I did not like Death Stranding 1.

It is a point of constant contention, I think, between the hosts of this video game podcast. I found it to be so laborious and anti-fun

that I was unable to suffer through, I was unable to eat my vegetables to get to the sweet dessert. And let me just say,

let me just say, I agree that the beginning of Death Stranding 1, the like first five to seven hours, is pretty fucking brutal. Like

I played 30, I probably played 30 hours of it and then I took a break and couldn't go back to it because I will say that I think it is

way too mechanically dense, period. So dense.

To me, that's unquestionably a failing of Death Stranding. Whatever else you want to say about it, it's just too complex for its own good.
Now, Death Stranding 2, more complex.

I feel like Death Stranding 2, I had a a tough time with at first. Death Stranding 2 presents itself very much as more of Death Stranding at the top of the game for the first

five, six hours of it. I wouldn't even say it's, I don't personally think it's that long.
There is a preface to the game. There is an act one to the game, after which point things really kick off.

And Act 1 took me about six or so hours.

What I would say about the two Act 1s, because the first game is,

I'm only making this point because I think there are a lot of people like you, Chris,

that get laid the first game and fucking bounced off hard, and I totally get that. The difference here with the beginning of both games is Dest Reading 1, shitload of cutscenes, shitload of setup.

Hideojima really wanted you to understand what every character was, why they were, what happened, blah, blah, blah, blah. This game...
More or less puts you in control almost immediately

and lets you start doing things almost immediately. You're getting vehicles almost immediately.
Compare that to like Death Training 1 for the first two hours, you're carrying the worst body ever.

It's like the body of your mom or and she's nine and a half feet tall and she weighs 600 pounds. Carrying bodies is the hardest thing to do in all of these games, including Death Training 2.

That is like, oh, you have to carry a body, fuck that. And they let you do it.
first thing.

So this game does learn that lesson where the things that you're doing first are much easier and more approachable. Yes.

The game makes a better first impression than Death Straining 1, without a doubt. Death Straining 1 makes a fucking bad first impression.

So I'm not sure that that bar is particularly impressive to clear. However,

after that first act,

shit goes absolutely bananas in a way that... makes me truly believe that Hideo Kojima is a madman at the height of his powers right now.
Truly, truly, truly. And not just outrageous in like,

I don't know, man, the kind of way you'd expect from the guy at this point. Like, absolutely off the wall, fucking over-the-top, even for him, level shit.
That

also kind of dovetails with the same point where, like, the game starts to get kind of fun to play. And that it really, really, really, really has clicked for me.

Share some of the stuff. I think it's fine to share.
I mean.

Okay, after act one, you meet a whole menagerie of characters all at once, all of whom are more deranged than the last.

I don't know how deep we want to go into it because I don't want to spoil anything because it truly is when the game starts to come alive and I would not like to steal that moment of satisfaction from you.

But like you get access to the little scooter really fast and then all of a sudden your opportunities for running is dramatically decreased, which is absolutely wonderful.

You can adjust

difficulty specifically like filtering out mechanics of the game that you just don't care for.

I don't like having to press L2 and R2 every every second and a half to adjust my weight onto my left and right foot because of the way that I put some box on my back.

You can pretty much just phase that out if you'd like to.

There's also a fucking ghost puppet. Like, there's a

ghost puppet. Yeah, I mean, I'm blending together.
There's, I'm saying there's a nice moment in this game. Everyone's trying to take some surprises.

I think it's worth pounding through

the first part of this game because I really do feel like it becomes something that I wanted it to be. Yeah.
And I have been enjoying it a lot more since then.

My broad take on it is, and I'm somebody who like, I did like the first one, but it took me a really long time to get into and it took me very little time to get out of because I just kind of dropped it.

This to me reminds me of Assassin's Creed 1 to Assassin's Creed 2.

It's the first game was, okay, we're going to try an entirely new thing. an entirely new sort of structure for doing video games.

And it's not going to be fun, but it is going to take us another iteration to figure out how to make it fun. It's going to work fundamentally, but it's not going to be pleasant.
And I feel like

what is so cool to me about Death Stranding 2 is

for, I have always thought of Hideo Kojima as somebody who is

self-indulgent. And I think that it's pretty easy to lay that at his feet a lot of the time.
What I will say is, Death Stranding 2 is not, to me, someone who is self-indulgent.

Death Stranding 2 is someone who took it on the chin a bit with Death Stranding 1 and said, okay, I actually am going to make this fun.

I'm actually going to double down on this and I'm going to make it work. I feel like he is somebody who is at the height right in this game of editing himself

to make it into a pleasant. This is somebody who I did not think had that in him.

I thought Death Stranding was something that is just going to continue down the road of like weirder and more self-indulgent.

This is weird and self-indulgent, but it is it is absolutely disciplined and like practiced in how it's deploying it. And also self-aware.

There's a great fucking beat where Sam is talking to Leah Sado's character, Fragile,

who has these two fake ghost hands that float on her neck that she can, that also sort of like controls and does little sort of mime combinations. Never discover.
But yeah.

Well, you can read the codec entry if you really want to fucking get into it.

But there's a moment where she sits down and her and Sam are are having this conversation and she stops and the dark light of the

tar world shines across her face as she just kind of stops talking for a good 20 seconds, pulls out a cigarette, lights the cigarette with the fake hands, takes a huge rip of that dart, puffs it out, and just kind of sits there looking contemplative in this super artsy black and white shot.

And then it hardcuts to Norman Reed as the Sami just goes, cool. So

like the game is fully, fully, like it says like, yeah, we, it feels like it fucking gets it, and it's kind of in on it, and that gives it license to do whatever the fuck it wants.

And I'm down to clown, absolutely.

My version of that, I agree. It feels like somebody there is editing him.

I don't get the sense that Kajim himself is,

you know, both the writer and editor here. It feels like somebody has been brought in that is editing both the gameplay and the story.

It feels like a producer, like, like bringing a producer in to work on the second album of like a garage band that like cleaned off the rough edges that's a really good yeah and i don't necessarily know that kojima has that in him like that's not his thing is like doing one one of the ways that they've changed this is fragile now that character who was in the first game who is played by aaliyessetto

she basically is narratively consuming all of the cutscenes on your behalf to the point where there you meet a new character and they the literally you'll like kind of peek in,

peek in, and Leah Saido will be like, Hey, um, it's a little crowded in here. Can you can you go back to your bed and maybe just go run some errands?

And like, I'll catch you up, I'll send you some text about what we learned. She is the she is the exposition eater because

has allowed her to consume it in your stead, and then she will, she will barf it into you in the point nuggets, little pellets.

I walked in on two characters singing um raindrops keep falling on my head together having this beautiful moment that's leading into a little bit of exposition and sam is sitting in the doorway not even part of it and at the very end it cuts to them realizing he's there and then he starts singing except for i had just run an errand and my character is covered in blood and excrement And he's like, okay, see you later.

And then it just disappears. And I was like, this perfectly captures the game, which is these these three women are having an entire adventure, and then I'm out here like fighting blood babies.

And every once in a while, you know, giving them some tools that they might need.

There's also, I have to shout out another. It's, I've yet to hit a cutscene that I felt like went too long.

When they do introduce all those characters, it's that one's a little bit lengthy, but there's a great bit where you go and you meet up with Guillermo del Toro,

Deadman. I think.
Yes. Yeah.
Okay.

And he's not Die Hardman. Not Die Hardman, Dead Man.
And he's giving you a lot of exposition. And right when you're like, fuck, man, I don't know, Guillermo del Toro, he's like, you know what?

I'm tired. Let's take a break.
And you're like, oh, okay, I guess we're taking a break in the middle of the cutscene. Then you go outside and do this huge fucking badass boss fight.

And then you come back in, and Guillermo del Toro is like, ooh, okay, let's

talk about that guy.

It really feels like someone was like, Kajima, you simply can't have this one cutscene of Guillermo del Toro explaining about gatequakes. You can't have that come on for five minutes.

I'm like, man, you got to throw in a big boss fight in there. And he's like, yeah, absolutely.
Let's do it.

Now, it's worth remembering, even for the like sickos of Death Stranding, the people that are obsessed with all of the fucking nitty-gritty details of the world, that's all still in there.

You get texts that give you that background plant mentioned. There's also a codex, which has like probably

an encyclopedia's worth of nonsense across every single like mechanical beat and world beat. So, if you want to know about anything in the world, that's all represented, very easy to search.
But it's

specifically, there's specifically a codex entry for Fragile's ghost hands, which is why I know what they are. I'm pretty sure, yeah, I do kind of want to find out what the fuck's going on.

It feels a little bit like the souls approach, which is like, if people want it, they can find it. You just have a little dig for it.

And for all the normies out there, fucking enjoy moving these packages around because it is pretty fucking fun. Can we talk about that? Sure.
Yes, please. Fun.
I don't know why.

So here's what's so interesting. Justin, you're still kind of early.
You're still in one of the earlier parts of the game. Yeah.

I'm surprised that you find it more dramatically more fun than previously because I think like you don't get a lot of the new wacky toys until it's not the new wacky toys.

I just feel like it's a lot of the they they from the very beginning are tell you here's how we would approach this

plot a route

you see the hazards on a map It is like gamifying walking.

It's adding that layer, right? Which I think really helps because it makes everything more concrete and it makes the idea of like packing for a route really make sense.

Like you know what you're going to need. I'm going to need a ladder when I get a line.
I'm going to need a ladder because I've got a place on here for a ladder.

I'm going to need some guns because I'm about to drive through these idiots. Like I'm, you know, you need a plan.

And honestly, if you're, if you deviate from that, you're choosing to, but it's your choice i mean you could execute on your plan and it'll go pretty much the way you know you think it's gonna go but then there's like you'll see some sort of cool thing you want to go look at some sort of treasure you want to go get and then you get into the to a bit of a pickle but it is uh the if you get into a i'll give you another one this real that's real good if you see a an encounter with enemies you can look at it with your binoculars you tag all your enemies that's nothing new but then you got a count at the top of the screen and then when you start eliminating enemies It starts decreasing it four out of six three out of six two out of six So you know exactly how many bad guys there are to eliminate in the encounter like just like those sort of quality of life things make what he is trying to do feel more like it removes more of the rough edges and just makes it into more Can I say my biggest quality of life upgrade?

You can see the fucking monsters now You can see the fucking monsters like Yeah, dog the monsters shouldn't be invisible.

You shouldn't be constantly pursued by invisible monsters while you're trying to go from point A to point B. It did make the monsters in the first game more scary, but also miserable to deal with.

They are still scary and still, frankly, my least favorite part of the getting around experience because I do not like being on my cool bike,

going on a

interstate, international road trip,

and then getting stopped abruptly because tar monsters fucking appear and try to slow me down.

But it's also like so early, by the way, where they're like, good news, Sam. We found some cool magic for bullets that makes them work on ghosts.
Yeah, right.

The other very nice quality of life feature that I think people sort of forget about the first game,

you can actually stealth into areas now. There was a convoluted way to do this where you have to like revert a scan.

But in the first game, every time you walked into enemy territory, the second you walked in there, a scan would ping you, know that you were carrying cargo, ping back, and all the enemies would run at you.

There was like, there were, again, ways to stealth it, but it was a pain in the ass. That's all gone.

You can now play in enemy encampments like you can in Metal Year Solid V or any other stealth game where you are sneaky and you hide in the high grass and you throw decoy grenades and you sneak up behind people and tie them up.

Like, that's all completely fun. And combat in the first game was basically an afterthought.
Like, it fucking sucks. Yeah.
So let's go down that route a bit because the first,

the first act or whatever is a shorter area in Mexico, similar to how the first game had an

open world you went to before the large open world.

The second area is Australia and all of Australia.

It felt to me like the first act in Mexico is kind of a speedrun of the first half of Death Stranding 1, which is the, you know, walking an action game.

I was surprised once you get to Australia, and it makes sense because the size of this game, it becomes a bit like Blaster Master and the NES.

And by that, I mean there is an on-foot game and there is a in-vehicle game. And vehicles were in the last game, but they were not nearly as predominant as they are.

I am almost always on my turbo trike. That shit.
Yeah, right.

Once you get a truck, like I feel like I go everywhere with the truck at this point because I'm always carrying materials to build these highways that you'll come across.

There's monorails in this game. And yeah, it's

basically the reason that you eventually have to get on foot is there's some train that forces you, but there's also a lot more Metal Gear Solid V in this game.

Like a lot, a lot more Metal Gear in this game than I've got. What do you mean?

Do you mean Metal Gear Solid V specifically or Metal Gear writ large? 5. I mean Metal Gear Solid V specifically, where it's the open world Metal Gear.
Hey, here's a big fort.

How are you going to go about solving this? Like with maybe around like the five or six hour mark, there is a mission.

And this is early in, I think, Australia, where you need to go into a base and bust, like hack their satellite or whatever, you know, some generic prompt.

And you can snipe them if you've unlocked that from like a distance, but the sniper rifle is extremely loud, so it attracts a ton of attention.

Something you have like a horde of people running at you. You can do the usual Metal Gear Solid sneak around where like people never even see you.

You can barrel a vehicle right through the thing and just kind of pray at the same time.

Non-lethal, I've non-lethally shredded some fucking games with an automobile. It has some like Spider-Man like logic where it's like, I mean, sure, I heard his neck break, but he's dead.

He's still alive. In the first game, there were a ton of weapons that were lethal weapons that basically were worthless.
Because the second you kill someone in the world of death stranding,

a BT shows up, a void out occurs, which is basically like a nuke going off in the middle of that area.

You know, it takes some time, but so it made lethal weapons basically worthless in a lot of ways. This game corrects that by giving you a ton of non-lethal options,

and most of them work on both BTs and people. Yep.
Helpful little icons too on each weapon that show, does it work on ghosts? Does it work on dudes? And

as you're doing missions for people, it's not just like, well, the bar is going up. You're also getting new gear every time you like rank up a relationship and things like that.

And all the new gear has a purpose for some sort of gameplay style, whether you're playing stealthy, whether you're playing like full-on assault,

all that stuff just makes the experience of getting around the world more fun and more.

This is where I think the big difference is and why this game has clicked so hard for me. This feels way more like an RPG.

I feel way more in control of my character and like what I'm able to do in the world. There's like a passive perk system that wasn't in the first game.

All of this stuff kind of combines to make me feel, again, the middle-year solid comparison.

I feel the same way about this that I did that game, which is you eventually get to a point where your snake is like very, or I guess big boss in that case, your big boss is very unique to anyone else's based on like what you're bringing along.

Were you afraid going to beat you up?

Russ, you're probably best equipped to talk about this because I think you're probably furthest.

I think the game is delightful

from a narrative perspective just because of like how much wild shit it keeps throwing at me.

There have been some moments of emotional resonance, I will say, and I don't want to sort of like get too deep into what that is, but also I have hit wide swaths of the story story where it kind of just feels like they're saying Kyrol over and over again.

And

maybe

the narrative is not quite as gripping.

I'm wondering your sort of take on like the narrative successes of this thing, barring the like obvious, like it's Hideo Kojima being a wild man, which we all love, but how is the writing sort of from a more traditional storytelling standpoint?

I think both this game and the first game are very, very simple stories, very straightforward that are obscured by chiral bridge connections across the void out, BT, death strength, et cetera, et cetera.

But at its core, the first game is really just like, hey, we're trying to bring America together by connecting people, and that'll make us all stronger in the long run.

And this game is very similar to that, but there's also an element of like fatherhood and the importance of family and things like that that is kind of layered on top.

That is really all you need to keep in mind. If you want to go down the freaky Kojima rabbit hole, you can, but most of that stuff is not in the cutscenes.

Like as you mentioned, the cutscenes are pretty short.

Half of them are like, we're just going to have Norman Ritas do some goofy ass shit.

I went into a hot spring at one point and he just starts like singing the song in Japanese and his like little like baby carrier thing starts like spinning around in the water like it's like a fantasy musical.

So like half of them are just jokes, and then the other half are like

you know, it'll be like evil, uh, bad guy shouting at you, but realistically, like, your goal is still the same. It's still you're trying to connect, in this case, Australia.

And there might be, as with the first game, I think the final act of that game narratively was like a total shit show mess.

I'm sure something similar will also happen here where it's a total shit show mess.

I don't care because I'm so compelled by both the goofy shit and also just like the minute-to-minute gameplay, like scratches exactly the right itch in my brain. Yeah.

Yeah, I will say I think there's a bit more there in the cutscenes as the person who loved the first game and, you know, sits through all the cutscenes here. I mean, I do.

I think that there's like a bit more about like the themes of this one are Kajima being still really upset about not making the rest of Metal Gear to like some pretty on-the-nose detours that the game takes.

It is his really peculiar obsession with kind of natalism and like what it means to have babies and who gets to have babies, which is bizarre.

And then there is a whole, whole lot about people need to log the fuck off the internet. Right.

And I think that's like,

again, like, Russ is right. You can understand the story, the plot, I guess, on you need to connect all these people together.
And is that good or bad? But he's still doing Kojima.

He's just doing it in three to four minute chunks instead of, I think of that Die. Was it

not Die Hardman, Heartman? Heartman. The Heartman.
Yeah, where like that was the iconic go-on forever cutscene of Death Stranding 1, where it truly went on for like 35, 40 minutes.

We don't have any of that so far.

We haven't really talked too much about the like other identifying characteristic of this franchise, which really has no parallel in other game franchises, which is the fact that people are contributing to your world based on what they build and vice versa.

When you build things, it can appear in other people's worlds. When I was playing this game over the course of the last week and a half or so, for most of that, the servers were off.

The servers were on at the very beginning when I first started playing. And then for most of it, the servers were off.
And then about three days ago, the servers turned back on again.

And holy shit, it is like so fascinating to play this game both offline and online. Yeah.

I can't imagine.

It's clearly balanced for online because there's a lot of like grindy resource management stuff that I was actually kind of getting a kick out of, but it just takes much longer to do anything.

But when the servers flipped online, it was going from like a backwater Wild West town to going in the middle of Las Vegas.

And suddenly there's fucking neon signs everywhere and jump packs and a giant fucking charger. You just like run into a charger.
Yeah.

I will say it is wild.

I, that, that mechanic works for me as often as it does not, but it does frequently deliver this moment. Do you mean works?

Sorry, just to clarify, do you mean works like actually technically works or works like you enjoy it? Oh, maybe a little column A, a little column B.

I was also wondering, I think Russ has cleared up to me why like I've had stretches of this game where I didn't see shit.

And it's possible that it was just like a a pre-release server outage situation. But the number of times where I've had the moment where like I would be in the shit

way far away from an outpost with a

sack full of garbage

and out of supplies. My shoes are all fucked up.
There's BTs crawling out of my ass.

And then I will just happen to come across like a shelter someone has built right where I need it, right where I would have built it if I'd had the supplies is a very, very very cool moment.

Because you think, like, oh, okay, someone, someone was thinking the same way that I was, except they actually bothered to bring a, you know, a PCC with them or whatever.

Or you'll like look around with a tough situation. You'll see a watchtower nearby.
And you're like, okay, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah.

You get it. You get it.
It is, it is cool. It is, it takes, there's a pretty steep learning curve to that stuff, I will say, because like

there is a learning the economy of this game takes a while. You have these resources that you need to make items and to build these big

structures, and that resource is not constant. It's like you stockpile some metals at this one outpost, and then when you go to the other outpost, it's not necessarily going to be there.

Because if it was, they wouldn't need porters. They could just fucking teleport everything that they need.

There is a helpful thing, and once you get to Australia, that kind of negates this, but like the stress I felt in the first game about, like, well, fuck, does it make sense to, do I have to keep my supplies with me every time I move to a new outpost?

I have to truck 200 kilograms of garbage from point A to point B?

I feel like they mitigate that quite a bit. Yeah, they definitely do.
I mean, this felt to me like Monster Hunter in some ways, because because of the DNA that I learned in the first game,

it was much easier for me to jump in and know that like, oh, chiral crystals actually have negative weight. So I should get as many as I can at any given time.

I don't think I ever absorbed that information from the first game.

And also, just like, oh, I should, you know, if I'm at a base and they have a bunch of materials, there's no reason not to take it out of that base as long as I can carry them.

So there's just like a lot of like DNA that I remember from that game that has helped me kind of get a little bit of a leg up.

But it feels like, I don't know, man, this feels like a good starting point for a lot of people because

you're not suffering through what is just a really steep learning curve of that first game.

Yeah, I frequently felt during the first one that Kojima was trying to teach me a direct visceral lesson about suffering. Like the suffering that I was experiencing.
I'm not even kidding.

No, at the beginning of the game, especially. Like the misery of the experience was part of the point.
And a little of that goes a long way for me. It's like, thank you.

I don't get that sense in this game.

Like it, it is about hardship in some ways, but it's not trying to as much give you the visceral experience of struggle that the first game i think was trying to like get across i do think i do think it is worth mentioning because we keep talking about this is a good starting point um the recap that is provided for the first death stranding game is a 17 slide info dump that you can shoot through in about 100 seconds.

It is

so tight. It's great.

It's tight.

It tells you literally, so far, I feel like I know everything I need to know, which is kind of damning, I think, of the story of Death Stranding 1, because that game takes longer than 100 seconds to show.

That's what I mean by simple. Like, it was a pretty simple plot.
I mean, if you're not looking at the themes, it's pretty straightforward.

But I did not play a ton of Death Stranding 1 because I didn't like it, and I do not feel at all lost here in Death Stranding 2. So

I agree that this is a good place to start. I do think if you really enjoy this,

and you want more after you play, you know, 200 hours of this game, the director's cut of Death Stranding 1 is still going to be enjoyable, I think, for that sort of person.

The Director's Cut has a lot more in common with this game than the original version of Death Stranding does. It's just infinitely more forgiving and has way more things to play with.

It has way more combat. It has a lot of the stuff that they ended up doing with this game.

I will say there is a certain sicko like myself who will miss some of the rough edges.

I don't miss having two-hour cutscenes interrupted, but to your point hoops of a little goes a long way, that's true, but I found in Death Stranding after like 40 or 50 hours and I had built,

you know, zip lines over a mountain, the feeling of success, of achievement, was one of my favorite things I have ever felt in a video game. And here you are

achievement comes like constantly. You are constantly being rewarded.

It really wants to make sure that even for like the smallest action you do, you're getting a treat out of it. I don't think that's bad.
I'm like, to be clear.

This is my, my, no, no, I, I, I mean, no, it's for filthy casuals. Just say it.
No, no, I, I, I like it. I just, I, I wish I could have like both at times.
I'll give you a concrete example.

of what you're talking about, Plant. And I think this is very fitting.
The zip lines in the first game. Zip lines could only go line of sight in the first game.

You could go straight in a straight beam line and that was the only way to do it. And when you line them up perfectly, like, oh shit, I can see the bars of the other zip line.

This feels really fucking good. I felt like I earned it here.
In this game, they let you bend the line a little bit so you can go like around a mountain or up and over something.

And it's just like that tiny little like, hey, this is a nice thing for you. That I was like, I kind of want to just ignore this because it feels a little unearned, this

helpful hand that they've given me, but that's a very sicko point. Oh, good.
Okay, yeah. Yeah, I acknowledge you.

The other thing I want to mention, Justin, you mentioned this earlier. I think if you quit this game for three days,

you're never coming back to it. And for the same exact notes that you gave previously.

This game is, even though it's more welcoming and even though they're giving you a lot more things, it is incredibly fucking dense to the point of like, I don't, like, I think this is like an all-or-nothing momentum thing that I don't know that I could keep bouncing back into.

Like, I'm going to put it in the back of the game. I've had to, by virtue of the fact that it's not on my, on my rogue ally, uh, I have taken quite, we've gone on tour

since we've had it. And I have streamed the game while I've been at home, which is fine.
It's just kind of annoying that it takes that extra, you know, minute or two to get it like streaming.

Um, and I usually play things in like pretty short little bursts. This would be kind of perfect for that.
Uh, I would be delighted if it was there. Um, so I would disagree with that.

I took I took a couple of breaks from this game and I did not necessarily struggle to get back. I think that there is some,

I think that I'm partially, this game is a lot more enjoyable for me because I played the first one and it is not having to do a whole lot of, it's not having to like restructure my entire brain as to like what kind of thing this is.

and i think that shorthand is really helpful it communicates it if you haven't played them before but one of the the last one but i think that like having that as a basis to to work from uh really really helps um also on the cutscenes i just want to say it i feel like

with the editing and the writing and it let being less self-indulgent to kojima i think having the random celebrity cameos feels a lot less i think exploitative or like, it is the word that I want to use here, but I think that that's right.

Like, it feels less like, here's someone I got in my game because I'm a fan of them. It feels like you get a little bit more of the actor's

personality and the person's like personality coming through that makes it feel like less creepy.

like fan service and more a little bit like it's a fun collaborative yeah kind of thing if that makes sense yeah like there one of the um people who was in Terrace House is in this game for people who remember that Netflix reality show.

Oh my god, yeah, she's the artist. Yes, and she's an artist now,

and she does like

real art. She does exhibits across the world.
And when you come across her, her character helps you, one, has the same name. Two, is an artist.

Three, gives you like color ways that you can use to change your stuff. But four, her actual art from the real world is hanging around her like little her bunker.

And same thing with like there's a musician that you come across and he shares his actual music and the real vinyl records are hanging on the wall.

It like really wants to introduce you to these people in the real world through the game rather than like you said, who's being like, oh, well, if you know, you know.

There's, I think it's like, okay, the George Miller thing. George Miller pops up.
It's a real fun character intro. It's 30 seconds long.
It's fun. You move on.
He pops up. He's like, what's up?

I'm George Miller. Here's what's weird about me.
Have fun. Have fun today.
And it's not in the first S training. I think it would have been like, I'm George Miller.

I'm going to talk to you for 20 minutes until you're so fucking sick of me that you delete Mad Max from your computer's hard drive. You know, like I, it feels a little bit more like.

respectful of the person like George Miller's kids and and maybe even George Miller himself because I think he plays video games aren't gonna play and be like God I'm really this is a really boring part I mean you you actually can access the 20-minute full backstory.

And the way they do it is they make it optional in your room. You'll be like looking through a book and you'll see a photo.
And it's like, ah, you should probably share this with George Miller.

But do you really want to? And you're like, oh, I know what that means. I know what you're saying.
Yeah. You're just saying, do I want that 20-minute cutscene?

And then you watch it on your own and you choose to. Turns out much more enjoyable.
There is a context-sensitive skip button in the game.

That is what maybe this game's greatest technological achievement.

If you hit circle during like any non-interactive scene, it'll drop out to this thing where it'll be like continue or skip or options or whatever. Or you can just hold X.

If you hold X, it takes like...

I think you can adjust the amount of time it takes for the skip. I highly recommend adjusting the time it takes.
You skip a lot of fucking cutscenes in this game. Because here's the thing.

No, there's different kinds of skips. For good cutscenes and bad ones.
That's it, right? So Norman Ritas goes and takes a piss for the hundredth time and eats a bug. I've seen that.

I can just hold X for a second and then zoom, we're literally instantly right past it. That's awesome.

But sometimes I'll go to the mirror because I need to shave his fucking gnarly face and I'll start to hold in the skip button and it'll take a little bit longer than it's supposed to.

I'll be like, oh shit, wait, like something cool is about to happen and something cool will happen. It tells you very discreetly, like, hey, you should, you should watch this next part.

It's pretty fucking amazing. It makes me feel all the more powerful when I do skip those scenes because I just want to get outside and haul smart boxes around.

It is

so many of

Hideoka Jima's worst instincts have been almost completely neutralized. I feel like, and it is all killer, no-filler for me so far.
By the way,

interesting. I just thought this was interesting.

I showed Sidney, I was very early and she happened to be in the room.

It was when you had a toddler on your chest at the very beginning of the game. You could take it out and soothe her.

And if she gets upset by your by your walking you need to take her out and soothe her or whatever and sydney was in i was like hey look at this and i showed her she actually thought was again and the way it's handling the game was actually pretty impressed that there was a mechanic that was attempted in the game that wasn't shooting or tying people up like and i felt like in the first game it it was it seemed a lot more awkward and a lot more weird and i feel like it feels more humane in this game and it feels less like a joke and a little bit more like a i don't know how to make this fun but it is part of the stuff that happens in the game is taking care of a baby.

Yeah. Yeah.
Um,

so this is my game of the year so far. Uh, I still haven't played Blueprints because we've talked about it, but uh, this is this is the best game that I've played this year by like a lot.

Like, wow, not even a question. Cool.
Uh, I'm a lot further than you guys are. Uh, it's only

flags in there. I love that part of your personality.
Did you use any guy?

Uh,

it's been great. Uh, so I hope hope people get to experience it.
I'm bummed that it's exclusive to PS5 because more people should play this, but I'm sure it will come to PC as the other version has.

And I think the other version even came to Xbox eventually. So

yay, good games. Love to see them.
Love it.

Love it. Let's take a break.
Then when we come back, we'll talk more Kojima.

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So I thought we'd just do a quick recap of like Kojima stuff coming because there's like basically two and a half Kojima games that are going to be coming pretty soon.

So just as a reminder, pretty soon. It's going to be five fucking years.
Anyway, the Metal Gear Solid 3 remake is coming out. He is not working on that.
He has no association with Konami.

He hates Konami. Konami hates him.
But there is a remake of the game that was probably one of his best titles ever released. That's coming out later this summer.
I think it's an August release.

So I'm very excited about that. There are two legit...
Kojima games coming. There's OD, which is a horror game that kind of looks like PT, I guess.
And then there's Fizint,

which I guess looks like Metal Gear Solid.

Okay. And both of these games basically feel like throwbacks to things he's worked on previously and people really liked.
But it kind of, it's exciting.

Fizzint has to be like a working title, right?

Fizzint?

Fizzent? Maybe.

Death Stranding sounds like a working title, and they went with that. It sounds like, hey, listen, check this joke out.
If it sounds like a working title, it Fizzent.

That's cool. Pretty good.

Pretty good.

I don't know. How are you guys feeling about? I mean, I'm very excited.

The names attached to OD are exciting to me. And then, but there would, it would be cool to see what it is and what it looks like and what it does,

what kind of game it is, and anything, anything at all about it. That would be so cool.
Stands for orange dick, just a heads up. Okay.

We know that. And now we're ready to move on, I guess.
We have some reader mail.

Okay,

first question. This one is from Matt.
As a veteran game journalist, so I guess journalists,

did you ever take a hard stance against the game that everyone loved at the time? And what game made you feel like you were on another planet than everyone else playing that game?

Fucking, it happened on this show, my friend. Go back and listen to our Starfield episode and then go back and read any review aside from maybe a small handful of reviews of Starfield.

I genuinely, genuinely is

the most

poignant example of this where I absolutely felt like I was being gaslit by the entire industry writ large. I still have no explanation for it.
I don't know anybody that likes that game.

I think it's crazy. But anyway, yes.
I mean, I think the overarching narrative is people have come around to our side on the matter.

But the game,

I don't know that the game has changed so fundamentally that it hasn't.

I think

it's just one of those cases where we were right and everyone else is wrong. And I don't know a nicer way of saying it than that.
You know what I mean?

Like we have been doing this a long time and we're probably smarter than a lot of other people doing it. Yeah.
It's always, it's genuinely quite scary to be the outlier. critic on a on a thing.

I say scary, like it's like some horrible, terrible thing is going to happen to you, but it is, it is, it is troubling when you, the reviews come out and you're like, oh, wow, I was a lot harder on this thing than everyone else.

Or I liked this thing much, much more than everyone else.

I will also say, for whatever it's worth, that if you are the solo game critic working somewhere and you don't talk to other people, and maybe it's probably a lot harder to trust that, like, your take on Starfield is accurate.

Like, maybe the problem is me because I think this sucks.

Oh, well, I better just sort of go with the flow because I don't want to be sticking my neck out because that is a really uncomfortable position to be in. Sure.

To be the dissenting.

I liked Nier a lot less than a lot of people, but that's it. The example that I thought of was that Saints Row reboot game that I actually kind of really liked.

Remember that game?

I had a lot of fun with that game, and everyone fucking hated it.

Part of that is like SJW, anti-woke, whatever, but also just like people hated it in general.

Mine is Last of Us 2, and I have felt vindicated by the reaction to the second season of the TV show. Yeah, it only took

eight years to get there.

There is an inverse side of this, too, where like I remember giving Skyward Sword a perfect glowing review.

I was absolutely gaga about that game, and it was, it received fairly middling reviews, I would say, uh, on average from, from a lot of other places.

And that is also sort of a very weird, kind of alienating feeling, but I can't think of too many examples. Do you regret it when that happened? Do I regret it?

No, I don't think so. You would stand by your language about Skyward Sword.

I mean, okay, knowing what

Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom would kind of become, like, obviously it doesn't hold a candle, but I do think there's a certain amount of walking so it could run that could happen.

So, no.

Last question. This one comes from Harry.
With the increasing rise of popularity of game-to-movie adaptations, what is the key to picking the right IP?

Is it a game with a well-written story like Last of Us? Fitting,

trying to get those iconic draft moments, or is it better to go the Sonic route where you pick a character we love with more freedom to do what you want to do with the story?

Yeah, I think it's about finding the right match of the tone and structure with the right game and the right people who actually enjoy the thing and know what's fun about it.

I think that like Sonic, the tone of Sonic is just exactly as reverent of Sonic as anyone feasibly should be. I think that's a big, a big big strength for Sonic.

Yeah,

I feel like folks get in trouble when they try to adapt the story of a

interactive branching narrative to a non-interactive, non-branching sort of

format. And so I do think, I think Sonic represents maybe the most successful video game to film adaptation like ever.

And they've done it three times. And that's just, that's really specific.
I saw an interview. Alex Garland is working on a Elden Ring movie.

And I saw an interview with him where he was, the interviewer was asking him

like he was going to trip him up.

What boss did he struggle with the most? And he said,

none of them, really. And I was like, oh, yeah, this guy does play Elden Ring.
And then he said, and then the host said, I struggle with Radon.

And then Alex Garland said, Radon is not hard. And then I was like, yeah, this guy gets it.
I don't know if he's going to make a good Elden Ring movie, but he certainly plays Elden Ring.

He's a legit Elden Ring. He definitely plays Elden Ring.
I bet you he beats Radon no summons. I bet you.
Oh, no, he explains no summons. No, he goes to summons.

He just explains you got to get the right summons, and then it's not hard. And it's like, yeah, that's accurate.

So I was. Elden Ring's a weird one, man.
I don't know how the fuck you adapt that. I genuinely don't.
It's not the story of the game of Elden Ring. That would be a bad story.

My wet man ran through the the bloodfields.

My dead wet dad eats shrimp to get strong and kill God.

I mean, the Malays

does a very good job because it's basically a comedy manga of the Elden Ring story, which works, but probably wouldn't work for an Alex Garland movie.

I think there's one narrative related to Castle Morn, where like the castle gets overrun by a bunch of monsters and like boots out the humans that were there because the monsters were like,

there's like, I think that's the only way to do it is you pick like one side story and around the edges of it you have like the world of elden ring but really you're just focused on the i think a story about radon

and and

uh

melany not melanya millennia

millennia and

millennium and the blight and like all that shit like ending with the festival like that would be pretty sick that would be pretty rad um but yeah i don't there's so much story there man i don't know what you get i would like for something that he couldn't resist you know yeah he he was like i'm gonna make a movie about men and they're like yeah he's like yeah and he's like i'm gonna make a movie about a civil war and they're like yeah go for it i'm gonna make a movie about warfare and then i'm gonna make a trilogy about 28 days later that's actually about coming to terms with death and they're like sure sure sure he's like and now i'm retired like that makes a lot of sense you've you've done a lot of work You know what?

I want to get one more. And they're like, oh, sure.
Like, is it women?

What do you got? And he's like,

so I just played Elden Ring.

I think that's going to end my career. I love it.
Go for it. You guys been playing anything else?

No.

Okay.

So much Death Stranding. A lot of Death Stranding.

I mean, people should go see 28 years later. That's my thing.
People should go see 28 years later because it's a miracle that movie got made and it is.

Not the movie that is being advertised really at all.

I didn't see 28 weeks later. Is that an issue? Actually, for the better, because they retcon it into oblivion within seconds.
Perfect. I love it.
I will say, if you are the sort of person who loves

just British comedy and history and the BBC, the movie is going to really click with you in a way that it won't with everybody else.

People, everybody, I think, will enjoy it, but it is a movie about British culture in the most blunt of in fucking wild of ways.

I want to, speaking of BBC comedy, I have been watching Taskmaster series 19, I think. It's the one with Jason Mantsukis on it.
Yeah. And it's fucking, it's a strong one.

I've fallen off that show just mostly because I was watching other stuff.

But I really was curious about how

his particular energy and brand of comedy would adapt to the Taskmaster format. And I have not been disappointed.
The whole cast is very strong.

It is, it is unhinged season, and Rachel and I have been really enjoying watching that at night. I also...
What were we just saying?

Apparently, he's the first American that's flown to the UK to do Taskmaster. Oh, that's interesting.
I guess. I mean, May Martin was living there.
But May Martin's Canadian, huh? Yeah, I guess. Yeah.

I've also been playing Pokemon TCG Pocket again, the trading card game, collectible trading card game. They added some stuff since launch, and one of those things was trading.

You can trade cards, but they've made it as obtuse and shitty as possible to keep people from getting the cards that they want without

buying into the Pokemon TCG pocket ecosystem. And someone has made a companion app called PokeTrade, where you can find people who have the cards that you want and set up the trades with them.

through a third-party platform.

And in using that, I have completed all but, I think, one of the sets that are available now. I just like collecting the cards.

i like opening the packs feels good man nice i would like to recommend lord of the rings the two towers on playstation 2.

i played a good deal of it while we were on tour and if you want to hit some of those scary ghosts with your sword and protect elijah wood it is a great time are there ghosts you can two towers photo and you can't be photo and you can be legolis and aragorn or gimli and not photo again just to be clear you could just be those three guys and there's the scary wraiths oh the ring wraiths sure i guess sure yeah sure that works i was thinking of the ghosts and the photo but it's uh there's also there's like clips from the movie so a lot of times you can't even tell if you're watching a movie or playing a game it's turned into seamless blend so yeah

you can fucking completely absolutely tell I can absolutely tell.

Justin showed me a picture of stretched out, stretched-ass Gimli. That looks so fucking profane.

There's no way I would confuse it. I got it.
I had it on with widescreen hacks. Looks great.
It made Gimli too wide, dude. He looked fucked up.
Didn't think it was possible.

All right, that's going to do it. What are we doing next week? A little game called

The Altars. Hey, all right.
Games make sense.

That sounds fun. I wanted to thank our patrons over at the besties, patreon.com slash the besties.
Thank you, everyone, for being patrons.

We have a new resties episode that's up. We have a new bracket episode.
It's going to be slightly delayed a couple days. I apologize.
We apologize.

Scheduling conflicts abound, but it's going to come out still that same week. So, keep an eye out for that in the first week of July.

And thank you all. We really, really appreciate you.
Be sure to join us again next time for the besties. Because, shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

Besties.