First of all, I wasn't really a big kojima gal? I had played the first and a bit of the fifth MGS until earlier this year, where i finally finished MGS V
i realized it is an extremely precient and political game, and I think i like kojima's brand of crazy.
So then I read about death stranding. I saw the promo footage years ago, and it followed that cutscene where Deadman finds himself on that combat beach, and I assumed it was more action heavy bs that I was growing out of (hormones change your tastes what can i say), so i completely ignored it until i grabbed it on a whim recently
and anyway, WOW! so I fucking love this game. Everything is so weird. Astrology and esoterica are canon, everything is a fucking insane metaphor for something else, the world has been utterly bent the fuck over by cataclysm, and you're just a dude out there with your artificial womb, making deliveries and linking up the remnants of humanity.
I love the vibe of these little communities and holdout preppers coming together, sharing what they have to move forward into a post-cataclysmic future. I love all the stupid shit with Lockne & Malingen, I love the bridge babies, i love that one of the most potent weapons in the game is made by running around until you're so tired you piss blood, and that bloody piss gets turned into a grenade. I love having weaponized body fluids. This shit owns.
I'm not even sure death stranding 2 can live up to this.
also the multiplayer features can be a bit much (I have it set up to log in offline and to not automatically share structures because people will just spam structures in the most annoying fucking places, but they're also awesome.
I love how much cooperation and community effort is the front and foremost thing, to the point it's literally one of the stats the game tracks.
Sorry, I needed to gush about how rad this game is, years after its heyday
edit: Also if anybody is currently playing and wants to form strand contracts, i'm on the Steam PC version. I'd rather see like, specific people's stuff in my game world than like, random people's.
Right now i use strand contracts with inactive friends to sort of make it less likely i get six bridges in a forest when i go online, but i'd actually enjoy building the world map out with some people. Not gonna put my steam id out in public though, pm me for all that
Something people don't bring up enough about the game is just how amazing the controls and animations and sound effects are. Everything just feels so perfect. There are so many games that mess up basic keyboard controls (although the director's cut doesn't let you bind vehicle controls to arrow keys 🤬). It's one of those games that's just nice to play because you don't have to constantly fight the controls or wait for tons of stupid animations to play (although there is some of that).
I was playing Elden Ring recently and both the keyboard and gamepad controls suck. Simultaneously overcomplicated and too simplistic. I don't know how you can mess up game controls so badly and still get so much praise for the end result. The game has two different overcomplicated "shortcut" systems for using secondary items and they both suck and are difficult to use. I feel like I spend half my time just fighting the controls. In Death Stranding, not only is the equipment system decent (ok it actually could be a lot better still, pretty clunky), but it also has some animations and nice sound effects and animated UI elements.
In DS they knew you would be spending a lot of time in menus and so they made an unparalleled menu system that is easy and efficient to navigate. Kojima always makes sure things like that are just right in his games.
I have to agree with some caveats. I wish screens pertaining to performance eval and stuff were a bit denser, and I feel like i really would've liked some interface options for manually managing cargo that wasn't just "drop and pick up in the order I want, auto-sort, or fuck myself"