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    Home Unlabelled Death Stranding POV: You are a MULE and you tried to steal some easy loot from a random porter.

    Death Stranding POV: You are a MULE and you tried to steal some easy loot from a random porter.

    December 28, 2020

    Death Stranding POV: You are a MULE and you tried to steal some easy loot from a random porter.

    POV: You are a MULE and you tried to steal some easy loot from a random porter.

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 12:20 PM PST

    Whoever placed this zipline right in front of this BT: Thanks, I had a good scare. ��

    Posted: 27 Dec 2020 11:02 PM PST

    Unoriginal meme, but I just had to do it

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 05:44 PM PST

    On my first play-through and feelin’ fabulous in my new hood.

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 12:56 PM PST

    This is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located on the island of Spitsbergen, close to Norway. It's amazing how much this looks like it's straight out of Death Stranding

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 09:41 AM PST

    Happy Holidays! Fragile Express will get your gifts delivered~

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 06:34 AM PST

    I'm working on a painting for the game. I'll post the finished product. What do you guys think so far?

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 02:39 PM PST

    I got my new Kojima Productions hoodie today

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 02:50 PM PST

    Future product placement opportunity?

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 06:32 PM PST

    Sam - The God of Destruction

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 10:45 AM PST

    Going on a road trip to the mountains!

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 08:48 PM PST

    Sam had busy day this christmas

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 01:59 PM PST

    [Spoilers] Kojima's message to all of us is important, and "boring" is intentional.

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 09:27 PM PST

    This'll be a bit rambling, but I hope you'll forgive me.

    ​

    I recently finished Death Stranding's story, I managed to avoid guides, spoilers, and anybody else's analysis of the game. I've seen just about every take or theory people have had on Kojima's intents, successes, failures, prophecies with the Metal Gear series, and after my first time trying Death Stranding after purchasing it, I knew I wanted to just let things unfold naturally without any more outside influence than I already had. To be completely frank, I think this is Kojima's best work and I absolutely adored the Metal Gear Solid series, and I think it demonstrates a significant evolution and step up from all his previous work. Kojima tends to leave meta-textual meanings behind in his work, lessons and messages we're intended to take in about gaming as an evolving art form, a hobby, an industry, outside of the moral and political implications of the plot and the characters' part in it. Outside of (maybe) Metal Gear Solid on the PS1, Kojima tends to deliver a finished game that not only exists outside of player expectations, but also outside player *desires*. For most Metal Gear Solid games there are arguments to be made that the man is either a genius or a man who's managed to burrow his way impossibly far up his own ass and managed to pull others along with faux-deep dialogue delivered by a spectacular cast. I fall somewhere in the middle, usually. I think he succeeds in giving players something they'll (at some point) love by deliberately not delivering what they've asked for.

    ​

    In Metal Gear Solid, I feel like Kojima was making a meta-commentary about feeling bound (reputation-wise) to previous successes/projects but believing he himself could exceed those expectations and create something greater (and by extension, you too, Player, can be more than what your GENES/past have bound you to).

    ​

    Metal Gear Solid 2 had, in a very over-simplified form, a meta-commentary of whispering "I don't like sequels, there's something better on the horizon, but we have to be careful in order to make that happen, and we can't get stuck in our old ways or bogged down by toxic ideology and misinformation, or we'll fail". There's a lot more to it than that, but MGS2 can be a bit exhausting to discuss due to the number of themes at play. I felt like he was saying, "I'd like to be done here, please do something good for the world and not get caught up in wanting to emulate this awesome action star I created and be your own person."

    ​

    Metal Gear Solid 3, Kojima feels doomed to slave away on a franchise he created but cannot escape from, the circumstances of his success (the SCENE, if you will) has trapped him.

    ​

    Metal Gear Solid 4, Kojima is screaming "I DON'T LIKE SEQUELS AND I DON'T WANT YOU TO EITHER, I'M GOING TO OVER-SEQUELIZE THIS INTO UTTER NONSENSE". His intent, or SENSE, of what he wanted the franchise and his career to be feel clouded, obscured, and he himself feels out of touch with the industry he's in. Snake literally can't use modern guns, the start and end points for just about every character arc will make you ask, "wtf happened, I must be missing something?", and Snake's aggressive aging feels like the reflection of a man who doesn't want to keep doing what he's doing, but does it anyway out of a sense of duty, even when he feels he's lost his touch and sight of his original intent.

    ​

    Metal Gear Solid 5, Kojima wanted you to stop wasting time on old conflicts/revenge/games and move forward to make something of yourself by your own standards, stop wishing you were a fictional action hero, and take your fate into your own hands. The final scenes in the game feel as though Kojima is handing off the fate of the franchise to someone else (Konami), but the legacy of the game ultimately belongs to you, the player (not too deep or hard to decipher).

    ​

    There are more apparent commentaries on war and politics in each, but I'm really not going to waste anyone's time spelling it out since the man himself did a fine enough job already.

    ​

    Kojima seemed to prefer, for the Metal Gear series, delivering both textual and meta-textual commentaries through dialectical questions and conversations (almost always over the codec). A slightly sloppy Socratic method with cheesy and often borderline non-sensical or stupid dialogue, but one nonetheless. This comes with problems, as Kojima's famously anti-violence moral code clashes (duh) with the gameplay at hand. You can kill people left and right, and other than that one scene in MGS3, the horn in MGSV, and not getting the not-so-meaningful-to-the-plot codename ranking at the end of the game/mission, there's really no consequence for going full Rambo on everyone you meet. Some lip service is paid to the fact that Snake kills here and there, but it never really becomes consequential to you, the player, unless you want it to be. I don't blame this contradiction squarely on Kojima, he had to push out games for Konami, after all, but the fact is that most of his characters were distinctly at odds with one another and the supposed anti-violence message of the game. This isn't news to anyone who's spent even a few minutes thinking critically about the heroes of most video games. The Phantom Pain is something missing, an itch that can't be scratched, a permanently tensed muscle, just raw turmoil from something that is not there. There are a lot of ways you could take that.

    ​

    In Death Stranding, I feel like Kojima is no longer at odds with himself, but wants to put you at odds with yourself in the same way Sam is. Death Stranding is often dismissed, not just because it's a "package delivery simulator" or it seems, initially, like it's suffocating due to having its head so far up its ass story-wise. I feel like both these points are both fair assessments to make at the outset, and incredibly intentional. I love every minute that I play Death Stranding, it's challenging, fun, satisfying, I get a nice zen-like feeling when I play it, I love to keep on keeping on. That doesn't stop it from being tedious at times, and again, I think that's incredibly intentional for the purposes of meta-commentary. The game also gets a lot less tedious and more meaningful as time goes on and you make your connections both with preppers and through infrastructure, again, duh, intentional. Making new friends and connections is hard work, reuniting a broken nation/world is even harder, especially in the face of enormous loss, fear, and lifetimes of broken promises and dashed hopes. Saving the world won't be accomplished by action heroes (I'm aware of the game's handful of big set-piece fights), but by small, intentional actions taken by individuals. The dialectic conversation has taken a back seat to a singular, broad path to redemption: helping others and doing nothing else. Violence against other humans in this game is never without significant consequence, for those who you who've intentionally or unintentionally killed off a MULE (and even those who haven't, but just paid attention to the world-building) know that a dead body, not attended (arguably, an act of violence not atoned for), can cause a void-out that can level a city. Lethal force against another human is not a viable option, even the MULES are pitied, doomed to seek short-term pleasure and security in stealing packages instead of actively working to make the world better.

    ​

    The online features play into this, and I feel they'll be lost on anyone who, for one reason or another, is stuck playing offline. Sure, you see the occasional Porter on your journey, but it's largely just you controlling Sam, going along and saving America one box of stuff at a time. Except it's not, other people have helped pave the way and will help you along your journey, whether they know it or meant to. Much like a few of the zip-lines that other players built for me in the game that made my playthrough a LOT easier and likely shaved hours and hours off my completion time, I've also gotten random pieces of advice on Reddit, or passed along from acquaintances that have improved my life immensely. A friend once gave me a brand new pair of shoes he couldn't return that he didn't care for that ended up making my work and financial life a lot easier. I once found $20 on the ground that helped me pay my rent on time when I was just starting out. Life and Death Stranding often feel empty and alone if you ignore the fact that so many people are doing the exact same thing you are every single day. I've had old students hit me up several years after I last saw them and tell me that something in particular (seemingly inconsequential) that I said or did one particular day sparked confidence to pursue a passion or saved them from a lot of pain, or helped them move on from past pain. Kojima's thesis with Death Stranding, even the boring parts, perhaps even especially the boring parts, is the immense world-changing power of small, intentional actions of kindness and selflessness. Cliff's forgiveness of Die-Hardman and Sam correcting Die-Hardman as he begins his path to redemption ("that gun won't help you here") speaks volumes to my earlier point that this is not a game about action heroes committing violence to save the world, or defeating some great evil to preserve the good.

    ​

    The good in the world will only be pursued by actively pursuing and committing good. Time is precious, human life is precious, and everything is fragile (but not that fragile). I was a few drinks in while writing this, and I'm pretty positive nobody's going to read this mess, but I loved this game. Heck, even my wife who thinks games are silly distractions (that she also enjoys) cried multiple times throughout the ending of the game (even after she read spoilers). I've never felt so emotionally connected to a video game ever, I have some doubts that I will again, but I'm excited for Kojima's next project. I didn't think it would take me 100+ hours to get here, but damn, it was worth the trip and I wouldn't have done it any other way.

    ​

    Feel free to tell me I'm wrong.

    submitted by /u/Whiskey-Leg
    [link] [comments]

    [Death Stranding] White hell

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 07:01 AM PST

    A Brilliant Game in Retrospect

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 09:44 AM PST

    Everyone quarantined and afraid to go outside from an invisible threat, relying on UPS and FedEx to receive goods, before covid this just seemed like a silly Kojima concept but now with everything going on, yet again he is a man ahead of his time.

    submitted by /u/ThisIsCultureShock
    [link] [comments]

    Well, you can tell by the way I use my PS I'm a Bridges man, no time to talk.

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 08:36 AM PST

    Its just better

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 04:51 PM PST

    PSA: when you recieve your first trike, do not drive it off a cliff for fun.

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 05:47 PM PST

    You won't recieve another one for awhile, atleast have a load ready to retrieve it again cause me wowoowow I Skyrim horse mine off a cliff.

    Do not do what I do

    Friendly PSA.

    submitted by /u/fitpetboo
    [link] [comments]

    Ride with Sam Porter Bridges

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 09:03 AM PST

    I just giggled like a child

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 07:50 AM PST

    I only wish there was a "Back to the future" Hoverboard skin for this thingy. Because oh god i love it so much.

    Posted: 28 Dec 2020 10:34 AM PST
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