Excited about Death Stranding 2: On the Beach? So am I, and so I offer one piece of advice to you: don’t bother watching last night’s premiere event, which was held in LA’s Orpheum Theatre, hosted by Kojima’s best bud Geoff Keighley, and featured various Death Stranding 2 actors and creatives coming on-stage to talk about what a wonderful, magical creator Kojima is, and how special it is to be involved in such a production.
Maybe it’s the Brit in me, but pass the sick bag. I will go to bat for Hideo Kojima’s games, and I think he’s one of the greatest creators gaming has ever seen, but his embrace of the auteur trappings (and the willingness of others to play along) has really gotten old.
Last night’s event, which featured maybe 20 minutes of gameplay alongside an hour of talking heads praising DS2, told me almost nothing about the game’s big themes or ideas that wasn’t already known. And in labouring over cutscenes and lingering on Kojima’s demands for cast and crew, it actually made the game seem like a more straightforward and less exciting sequel than I’d expected.
We got to see the game’s opening mission, where Sam has to travel back to base with Lou (now a toddler), and Kojima made a big deal of the dynamic score: depending on how Sam’s traversing the (gorgeous) landscape, different instruments fade in and out of the music. We also got to see Sam soothing Lou, which works much as it did in Death Stranding, and generally this whole segment could’ve been in the first game.
“It’s a delivery game, I want to show the delivery process, but you might be bored,” said Kojima via a translator, “of course playing it is fun, watching is different… remember, this is a delivery game.” Keighley helpfully adds that “the deliveries are so beautiful, so incredible.”
Someone at Kojima Productions has spent an awful lot of time scanning [Elle Fanning’s] feet
We got to see a cutscene starring Elle Fanning’s character Tomorrow, which revealed that someone at Kojima Productions has spent an awful lot of time scanning the actor’s feet. The character’s powers involve her taking off her shoes then becoming some sort of tar sylph, who zooms around and dramatically boots a load of hapless soldiers as Sam looks on. All very nice but, honestly, Kojima’s wuxia-style cutscenes are not why I love his games.
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We then get one of the game’s early boss fights, which features the Solid Snake-y character Neil. This was a sequence with some incredible visual spectacle, with the battleground framed by fireworks and Neil warping around with his soldier buddies, but anyone who’s played the first game will find it all very reminiscent of the fights against Cliff.
That may well be an intentional echo in such an early fight, because Neil is clearly this game’s replacement for the role Cliff played in the original, but again the effect was to make this feel like a much more straight-up sequel than the earlier trailers suggested.
There were new aspects to the game shown. The Neil sequence begins with the use of a tar cannon, a heavy weapon that can be used both offensively and to put out fires in the environment. We also see Sam using a blood boomerang, a grenade pistol and smoke grenades. Oh, and you can now choose to wear caps backwards… which is nice?
I don’t think Kojima’s games need this kind of soft soap approach.
The panel consisted of Kojima, Keighley, Troy Baker (who plays Higgs), Shioli Kutsuna (Rainy), composer Woodkid, and Elle Fanning popped in with a brief video message. The event ended with basically a big actorly love-in, where the various participants were given one last chance to praise Kojima’s genius, and came out with lines like “Hideo really understands what we go through as actors.” He may well do, but I’m kinda sick of hearing it now, and I don’t think Kojima’s games need this kind of soft soap approach.
I know there’s something very “old man yells at cloud” about getting annoyed with an event intended to promote Kojima’s new game, which was just a load of people talking about how great the game is going to be and what a visionary Kojima is and what a privilege it is to work with him. But this kind of deification of creators doesn’t do much for me, and I somehow ended the stream less excited for Death Stranding 2 than when it began.
I’ll still play it, of course. But I’m left bewildered by how an event with the industry’s #1 hype man and one of my favourite creators somehow dampened my expectations, rather than raising them.
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