Death Stranding 2: Into the Known or Unknown
This coming April, I am giving a talk at the Popular Culture Association Annual Meeting on how video games tend to incorporate their own visions of Japanese pasts and futures. I've been focusing quite a bit on Japan in my talks at PCA; and so far that has amounted to Death Stranding getting plenty of coverage. Once, as a deliberate choice, part of a selection of games I wanted to cover - and then because I couldn't help it. Because my God, I really really like Death Stranding.
Some of it is for intensely personal reasons I might share some other time. But at least part of the appeal for me is that after years of dealing with people being really, really into Hideo Kojima he finally clicked for me. I like the Metal Gear Solid games; I just have trouble following some of the quirkier stuff. So when he decided to create a near-naked voluptuous antagonist for our friend Solid Snake (ok, Venom Snake) in Metal Gear Solid V, it was hard to take, honestly.
There are far less troubling aspects of Kojima's work that I understand help generate the fandom. The narrative/universe/setting/world of Metal Gear Solid is often quite grand, frequently nuts, and able to deliver political commentary in ways that a lot of games struggle to do. I've been talking to students about "War has changed" and the context of Kojima's upbringing in postwar and his adulthood in post-Cold War Japan for years. It just never really hooked me. I enjoyed Metal Gear Solid IV and Metal Gear Solid V because they were good games. Outside of some interesting thematic ideas, the plot tended to be a little distracting, if anything.
When Death Stranding first came out I did not pay much attention. It didn't seem for me. I ended up buying it and bounced off it quite quickly. Until a year or so later I decided to give it a try. And everything just clicked. So when Kojima released a ten minute (ten minute!!!) trailer for Death Stranding 2, I got excited.
I am not going to go through the whole trailer blow by blow or anything. Mostly I want to say - I think this is what I wanted from a Death Stranding sequel for the most part. I don't really need what looks like an uptick in Kojima-style action, but thematically and narratively I am all the way here for this. The first game crept on me and worked towards a crescendo that took a simple message and created something meaningful.
The trailer for the second game promises lots of mixing theme, form and gameplay. There also seems to be plenty of red meat for Kojima fans. It's hard to know right now how things will play out. It seems likely, to me, that Sam Porter-Bridges (Norman Reedus) will take up a lot of the player's time if not all of it. Everything we know so far about the second game points to a further deepening of his relationship with Fragile (Lea Seydoux), a plot point in the first game that gradually became central to what Kojima was trying to say thematically.
Listen, I'm not going to pretend that Death Stranding isn't weird, if not outright silly. Last week at work I decided to lay the entire plot of both The Last of Us games on a friend, and although that was more than she asked for, I felt relatively confident I wasn't going to lose her completely. I would not try that with Death Stranding. There's really only so many Die-Hard Mans and Heartmans one can take.
But having broken through the semiotic layer of self-consciousness and decency, Death Stranding 2 seems ready to let its freak flag fly. We are getting more samurai imagery, which is always fun. The trailer teases dire things, that might happen very early in the game, much later, or not at all. There will be walking.
Many theorize there will be less walking actually, which I must say makes me sad. Death Stranding spent a lot of time on traversing, and I came to love it. Few games have given me the sheer joy of discovery the way Death Stranding did. It also pushed the mechanics of the game on you so relentlessly that, if you stuck with it, gameplay met metaphor. I think Kojima has been working on this for a long time. I never thought he accomplished it with the Metal Gear Solid games, but he is doing it now.
For a long time plenty of Kojima-skeptics - or just smart asses, of whom there are plenty in the games world - looked askew at his apparent fascination with cinematic storytelling. That's clearly still there. We have a photorealistic Norman Reedus (and Lea Seydoux, and Guillermo del Toro, and now George Miller) for a reason. And who knows what the Death Stranding film will bring. But whereas in Metal Gear games the cutscenes, bravura speeches and setpieces felt like big swings, in Death Stranding these things felt more natural. In part because of the pace of the game and its reflective tone, and in part because the entire game felt like one big swing.
Kojima makes good games. That's the glue that holds this all together. Death Stranding 2 looks like it's bringing us more game, maybe less simulation. It also looks like it's bringing more story, too. Perhaps this game will be for true believers, enormous fans of the first game or video game people so ensconced in the culture that there is not much Kojima could do to turn them off. We'll find out in a few months. If that were to be the case however I feel the first game's claim to cultural relevance would if anything be enhanced. I am looking forward to finding out if Kojima is bringing his work to yet another level or if he's just putting the finishing touches on a game best enjoyed by sickos like me. Either way I think we win.