Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week?
mohab@piefed.social 1 day ago
Unbelievable, but fucking Death Stranding 😂 The story has some cool concepts and moments—e.g. Mama's story—but it's too obtuse, has too much filler, and many senseless moments. Like, the [spoiler]Junk Dealer and his girl[/spoiler] living literal meters away from each other and for some reason trying and failing to find each other or establish contact for years, or an entire MULE camp peacefully coexisting next to a Timefall farm… best way I can describe the world and story so far is it's an inconsistent mess.
Funniest moments though has got to be The Craftsman going "Fuck you, not joining your UCA!" only to go back on that in the literal next sentence with "But maybe if you do X, we can talk!" 😂
Apart from the odd climbing bugs and the silly, barebones combat, the game is nice though. Rebuilding the world and cooperating with other players feels really nice. And barely making it through BT encounters on very hard is exhilarating.
Fucking bikes are awesome to ride too… I love how goofy they're meant to be.
I don't see myself coming back after I 100% it though… I'm halfway through and I don't see any value in replaying the game so far. It's not exactly a skill-based game, and after roads and ziplines, I'm hardly motivated to go back to walking, but I don't think it's meant to be replayable, and I'll probably get like ~70 or more hours out of it in total and I bought it for $7, so I suppose that's OK.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 day ago
So as a Kojima sceptic, is the story/writing better or worse than you expected? Or about what you thought?
I always felt like Kojima would be unstoppable if he hired an editor and a writer he trusted, and just let those two translate the “Kojima” into the scrips. He has always had lots of amazing ideas, but I’m not sure I would call him a great writer.
mohab@piefed.social 1 day ago
Based on my experience so far, I totally agree with you. I'm simultaneously impressed by the ideas and confused by the package they came in.
It's just that the fluff and errors are glaringly obvious… hard to fathom how the same mind who came up with these captivating ideas wrote, or at best OK'd, the fluff and errors.
I'd say I expected poor and somewhat pretentious writing and got that, but I'm impressed enough by the ideas that I haven't started skipping cutscenes yet, so I assume, overall, it's net positive… not by much, but it is.