A bit late to the party

higgs motivation was just hunger for power, wasnt it?

did higgs know about this? then he should have killed you sooner. ok so that's kinda a problem because you will be reborn after you die. so higgs is stronger but cant escape death. but you can.

anyway, thanks!
i mean the way it is complicated is similar to other japanese media.
it's kinda typical for a lot of japanese fiction.

>higgs motivation was just hunger for power, wasnt it?
He was an accelerationist.
And Higgs was unaware for the most part but knew a little more than Sam.

>it's kinda typical for a lot of japanese fiction.

There are ways to deal with complexity. But you always have to aim for people to understand or be intrigued by what you present to them. More of one, less of the other. Kojima fails to land on either. He creates a complex world, but he overexposes it and does it very poorly.

I respect his intention but the execution is terrible and it is because he does not listen to anyone, he thinks he is right when what he needed was an editor to cut the excess fabric. Kojima just drafted everything and put everything on the table.

Kojima NEEDS an editor.

i was very much intrigued from the beginning and i did enjoy a lot of the things he did or was trying to do. the game says a lot about (open world) videogames on a meta level while wrapping it in this romantic idea of someone who carries important packages. and then he goes further it's about rebuilding america, which in a way references trump's presidency, and then also the general idea of connecting people, by physically connectig them and the way he plays with the character's names and their meanings, which is also expressed in the gameplay itself, that takes a single dark souls mechanic and transforms it into this game's pillar.

i think this is done very well, and sometimes also in a funny (albeit intentional) way.
his main problem with my comes down to how he applies style to all of this. i enjoy the visuals very much and the crazy-ness of it as well, but it's at this point where it does not hold together as well, or at least it is not communicated well enough. he introduces new concepts right up until the end and then needs a lot of exposition to explain to you what happened. for someone who is contiously referecing movies, he fails at one of the most important rules of cinema: show, don't tell.
the way he communicates to you that cliff is your father is done well enough.
however a lot of parts concerning amelie are just scenes where talks to you, e.g. the credits where he continues to walk around you to explain the plot. and even after that, i found it a bit hard to follow.

but also to be fair, i played for 40 hours and then layed down the game for 6 months to do some other stuff. so naturally i wasnt gonna be able to follow everything.

for me basically death stranding comes down to the shock value of the gameplay.
you walk into a room, open the door and see someone playing this game on a TV screen. What do you feel? What do you think? There is nothing more valuable in Death Stranding than that first impression. That perception.

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i get what you mean with shock value but i dont see it as shocking.
more as a clever way of commenting on how most games are actually just this: walking around, walking from point A to point B, with the important things happening at those locations, which in exchange will grant you better abilities, in this case equipment to move faster and more efficiently between 2 points. he boils down the gameplay of most games to it essential quality. people who are shocked by this dont realize that this is how they've been spending their time in most games anyway.

also like how the difficulty in this game comes from walking. and how walking itself is really boring but that's also part of the point. it's the essential struggle, the most minimal thing that requires endurance. a very beautiful idea that at the same time. it reminds me a lot of dark souls in this way, where you successfully and slowly overcoming hardships will lead you to progress further.

and it does contrast very well with how insane the actual story of death stranding is.
you are one of the most important characters in the game and all you do is just walking.

>he boils down the gameplay of most games to it essential quality
But it is clearly the meta-comment of a person who watches others play video games instead of playing them. A person who plays video games would not make that comment because you never think about moving from point a to point b when you are playing, your mind is on the entertainment you get from the experience and the story. I do not share his vision.

For me Death Stranding is valuable for the "conceptual" or "ambient" shock value for me this holds the value. It's as if Kojima said "I'm going to take the concept of gameplay to its extremes" and went and did it. I think he has balls for that. Regardless of the quality of the end result.

>and how walking itself is really boring but that's also part of the point
Regardless of my feelings against Death Stranding, I have to concede that it's a great ergonomic experience on the PS4 controller, the problem is that Kojima didn't push the potential of the physics and control to the max, like the people behind RDR2 did.

>you successfully and slowly overcoming hardships will lead you to progress further
But the difference is that when you finish a game, you don't feel the sensation of victory, the game doesn't reward you with anything, just a hologram that talks to you and gives you something and that's it. Is very anticlimactic

>insane the actual story of death stranding is
Is insane, is extravagant, but the execution is just not competent.

>But it is clearly the meta-comment of a person who watches others play video games instead of playing them

i never watch playthrough videos. it's the comment of someone who used to play video games a lot when he was younger and now tries, but not always manages to, to reduce it to more interesting/experimental entries as far as gameplay and story goes. not to mention that the industry has been re-hashing the same shit over and over again for at least one or two decades now.
>It's as if Kojima said "I'm going to take the concept of gameplay to its extremes" and went and did it. I think he has balls for that. Regardless of the quality of the end result.

i agree with this. and especially in the AAA industry it's something not many people are allowed to do. he has put himself in a good position, where he can use the budget of AAA games and then also make something out of it that tries to be something more closer to art, while still being able to sell it to a lot of people. it goes to show that developers do not need to rely on safe bets to have a return of income.

>like the people behind RDR2 did.

no idea, have yet to play RDR2.
also really curious how the playstation 5 controller feels.
supposedly it has noticably more ways to give feedback directly to your hands compared to previous and other controllers on the market.

>Is very anticlimactic

finnishing the story, finding out what happens is a form of reward.
i dont need the sensation of victory when the journey itself has, despite all of its hardships, had its rewards in the form of being absorbed by what happens. i did very much enjoy the journey. i know what i was in for, walking around for almost 50 hours.

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>Amelie is Sam's sister/mother
She's not though. Sam's mom is the lady in the coma on the table in all the BB flashbacks.

oh, yeah, this.

amelie/the president just took care after him after his father cliff and his mother louise died.
it's then that he turns from a BB into a regular baby.
also interestingly enough he names BB-28 Lou, because that's the name he and his wife would have given their daughter, and which he does not know is his real mother's name.

>not to mention that the industry has been re-hashing the same shit over and over again for at least one or two decades now.
That's because that's how software development works. You take a domain logic, you implement it, you package it, you sell it and depending on the public reception you refine the edge cases. That's what makes software effective as a product. You have a formula, it works, you stick to it and perfect it.

>games as art
The history of video games is not even a hundred years old yet. It is yet to be determined how artistic expression and entertainment should interact with each other.

>no idea, have yet to play RDR2.
RDR2 is characterized by its EXTREME detail in relation to trivial tasks such as assembling or disassembling, picking up objects, cooking, etc. The main detail that can be extrapolated to Death Stranding is the fact that in RDR2 you can walk slower than Sam Porter. That I think is DS's biggest flaw, its absolute lack of commitment to detail in a game whose central focus is walking should be focused on physics and these are extremely clunky. Kojima takes the gameplay to the conceptual extreme but not the physics.

>finishing the story, finding out what happens is a form of reward.
If you manage to navigate Kojima's writing I can imagine that it's a kind of reward. But I couldn't connect with anything because the game's story unfolds as a collection of expository speeches.

>i did very much enjoy the journey
That's about it, because you basically Death Stranding: The Game is grinding a Death Stranding: The Movie and in the end, gameplay wise, the player is going nowhere.