Fractured America | Death Stranding, Part I (Ep. 148) - Pixel Project Radio: A Video Game Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Welcome back to Pixel Project Radio, the video game discussions
podcast where we do deep dives and analyze all of
our favorite games and some of yours too. My name
is Rick, and today we abandon all subtlety because we
are talking about Death Stranding, Kojima's epic games some might
say from twenty nineteen, just recently got a sequel put

(00:44):
out at the time of recording. Exciting times to be
talking Kojima, and I am looking forward to talking about
it today. Up top, I've got to thank the patrons
as always. The patrons are a wonderful group of folks
that believe in the show and help keep things moving
along here. If you love the world that we do
and want to support, you can check out patreon dot
com slash pixel Project Radio. You can see all of

(01:05):
the stuff we've got going on over there. This month's
episode is on Stellar Blade, which I'm actually I'm really
really looking forward to today to join me on Death
Stranding and talk about Connection and BB's and the Beach
and questionable Dialogue. I'm joined by two former guests that
haven't been on the show in a minute, the two

(01:26):
hosts of the Friday night game cast. We've got Will,
and we've got Nick. Nick and Will. Doesn't matter how
you slice it, they're still the same two. Fine fellas.
How you guys doing today?

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Well, doing well, Glad to be back on here. Like
I said, it's been a long time coming. But ooh,
if it's like a gloves like we're back home, we
appreciate it. Rick.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
Yeah, Rick, it's been a minute since we've been on.
I think I've been on a little more recently than
Will when I join you for Pentiment. But I am
incredibly excited to jump on the show with you. It's
been a long time coming, so thank you again for
having us back.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
Absolutely absolutely, we were going to hold off until Hades two,
but at this point I don't even know when that's
going to come out, and I don't really want to
jump in until it's like a full release. But I
will be playing that game, very excited for it. But
today we're talking Death Stranding. If you're a new listener,
which you might be considering how big of a game
Death Stranding is and the new release, First of all, welcome,

(02:19):
glad that you're here, and we hope that you love
the show today. How this show works is we begin
by talking about high level things. In the preamble discussion,
we're talking about development, mechanics, sound design, all of that stuff,
high level thought. Afterwards, we go into a narrative analysis,
break the story down beat by beat. We analyze the writing,

(02:41):
the narrative arc, all of that. No spoilers until we
get there. So if you haven't played Death Stranding, and
I know there are some of you out there, because
I am you, if you haven't played yet, we will
not spoil anything until we get into the spoiler discussion.
Episode five won't be spoiled in four, three, two or one,
the ending won't spoiled until we get there, et cetera.

(03:02):
So you plenty of opportunities to jump off. Speaking of
Death Stranding, let's talk a little bit about overall thoughts
and personal histories. So I'm going to kick it to
one of you. Either of you can go first. What's
your history with Death Stranding? Did you play it when
it first came out? History with Kojima? If you're a
passionate fan, how's it going? What are you thinking? What
are your thoughts on Death Stranding and Kojima?

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Well, I'll go ahead and take it here will so
for me, Death Stranding came at a very interesting time,
obviously interesting for everyone considering what four months from then
we would be going through a precedented worldwide pandemic that
kept us all shut inside our homes for multiple weeks,
if not more, relying on our different versions of porters

(03:48):
to get us door dish and pizzas and Amazon Prime, etc. Etc.
Into our man made bunkers. So that was a really
fun time for a lot of people. I'm sure if
you're listening, I'm sure you through that and it was
fantastic for you. For me personally, twenty nineteen brought a
lot of news. I was getting into my very first

(04:08):
house with my wife, so that was a really big
start for us, kind of beginning that build of a
family potentially. I had a job that I had recently
switched over into a new role, so I'd been working
in that role for the better part of six to
eight months and things were feeling pretty pretty good until

(04:29):
literally a week or so before the house got closed on,
I got a lovely notice to come into the office,
and then as I was in there, I was told
that my position was being deleted for lack of a
better leminated and yep, I no longer had a job,
so you can since the well, you can imagine rather

(04:51):
my fear, frightness, displeasure, all of that emotion kind of
balled in together right before getting into a house with
my wife, who we now had to pivot and figure
out all these different things from the lenders and the
realtor and the people we were working with. It all
worked out. I'm still in that house now, what six
years later, so things are running pretty smooth. That being said,

(05:13):
it was a really scary, horrible time for me and
for my family initially and while working through that, as
well as getting into unemployment for the first time, this
game came out and it was probably one of those
things that kept me going during that time. I got
to at night, after putting a couple of job applications
here and there, truck my way through Death Stranding, which

(05:35):
I had rented at the time from a red Box.
Oh wow, if you know what red box is, I'm
telling you right now you need to go ahead and
take some advil for your back pain because you have
to be at least thirty. But that's how I got it.
I played through in roughly a week to two weeks,
as far as renting it from there and not to
bury the lead, but it was a time that I

(05:56):
greatly enjoyed. It was something that brought me a lot
of not quite happiness, but it's like I understood what
was going on during the game and the sadder somber
moments as well as when the people were kind of
getting connected, since it was for me a complete disconnection
from Hey, I no longer have my coworkers, which I
thoroughly enjoyed working with. A lot of my friends come

(06:19):
from work as well, so while I could meet them
on the weekends, during the days, I was effectively alone
for a number of months. So I was something that
I connected to pun not intended with that connection premise
during Death Stranding. So all that to say, it's a
game that really touched me, and it really caught me
at a very emotionally vulnerable time in my life, and

(06:40):
I appreciate that it was there for that.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
How about you, Nick, hopefully more a little bit of
a more positive story. I'm sorry to hear about the job, man,
I'm glad that things turned out well.

Speaker 3 (06:50):
But yeah, I didn't quite know the full details around that.
So that was a first for me in terms of
the full picture on that story. But that's cool. Yeah,
the red box and everything involved with that such a
unique thing. Death Straanding came out, Yeah, in twenty twenty,
and during this time, I mean, as everybody, my experience
with COVID was honestly okay. As somebody who is very

(07:14):
introverted and spends a lot of time generally inside as
it is, especially with gaming being my primary hobby and
being an introvert and not necessarily needing a lot of
connection with other people, and that's going to come back
around later. I didn't really suffer as much as potentially
maybe my co host when he had to go through lockdown,
because he's such a gregarious and extroverted, wonderful person. But

(07:38):
I was also in a newly new relationship right when
everything happened, when everything locked up, and not only that,
but also really really like work was insane. I was
actually working with Will's wife at the time at the
company we were at together, and I was on the
front line of leaving absence and terminations, and not only
where was I handling people dying from COVID and coming out.
I know this is not to you know, too deep

(08:00):
in that, but I do think it's relevant. I just
the minuscule amount of time I did have to play
in twenty twenty, I was really focused on things like
I was focused on other games, and it was also
one of those things where in my mind, prior to
getting to this point in the podcast, Kojima's earlier properties
with Metal Gear had been a huge blind spot. There's

(08:21):
still a huge blind spot to this day. To set
the tone for everybody listening to this episode, I've never
played a Metal Gear game, so I am completely unaware
of Kojima in his history other than the fact that
he is an iconic name in the franchise, Like nobody
who is aware of games doesn't know who Kojima or
I don't know if that lines upright, But everybody knows
Kojima in his work, They're familiar with Metal Gear Solid

(08:43):
and the impact that that's had on the game industry.
It's just not something that's ever really called out to
me because it was really, honestly before my time, and
I wasn't aware of Slash playing it during the PS
two Xbox three sixty era, so I just didn't have
as much exposure to those titles. But yeah, so this
was my very first Hitdeo Kojima game. Honestly, I think

(09:05):
that in terms of the enjoyment levels, I don't know.
There's a very honest conversation that we should could have
potentially on the show about whether or not a game
should be fun or whether or not you should enjoy
your time playing it.

Speaker 4 (09:18):
I was.

Speaker 3 (09:18):
I will say this, I have not been more conflicted
about a video game experience I think the entire time
I've been doing content. Generally, for me, I am very lenient.
I'm not lenient, but like I enjoy so many different
types of games, I am willing to engage with and
enjoy experiences that I even may not necessarily like gravitate towards.

(09:42):
But also as soon as I lock into that, I
can see the vision and I enjoy it. This time,
I am so torn in between the things that I
really didn't like about Death Stranding combined with the things
that I really really did and those two, like the
components of that are on such opposite ends of the
spectrum that I am struggling to make it make sense

(10:02):
in my mind in terms of like where my head
spates at and how I feel about this game. But
I will say this that this is a wholly unique game,
and I think that it's really important that for anybody
who wants to enjoy kind of more engaging or difficult media,
this is a This is an interesting game for folks

(10:23):
to play out there, and I wouldn't say that it's
a must play for anyone. I feel like Death Stranding
is definitely something that you can leave on your back
catalog and not jump into if it's not something that
you're really willing to, you know, jump into both with
both feet. But yeah, I think that this is a
it's a really complex game. So to that end, I'm
really excited to see what you think, Rick and delve

(10:45):
into it a little bit more on the show.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
We'll come back to that idea. Nick, you said that
you haven't played any Kojima before, what about you will?
Are you also a first time Kojima player or are
you a fan of the Metal Gear series?

Speaker 2 (10:59):
Now? I am a fan of the Metal Gear series,
but I hadn't truly beaten any before this. So I
played a good amount of two. I played a little
bit of three. I wish I had gotten four, and
then five is too scary, Like it's just too big.
I look at the amount of time it would take
to beat that game, and I'm always like maybe in

(11:19):
three years. So it's a series that I've probably researched
to death, just like any other kind of entertainment that
I haven't necessarily gotten to. But I know I'll enjoy.
I spoil myself wholeheartedly and I do deep dives into it,
so I know quite a bit about the entire Metal
Gear series as a whole. But yeah, this is my
first a to Z beaten Kojima game.

Speaker 1 (11:43):
Okay, so you were going to have more history with
Kojima the Man and his vision, his creative esthetics than
either Nick or myself. I also have never played any
Kojima game. I started Metal Gear one a Metal Gear
Solid one just had too much going on at the time.
This is my first time playing Death Stranding for this

(12:06):
episode for the show, first Kojima game as well, and
to that, and I wanted to just set some expectations
up top, because it seems like the two of us,
me and Nick do not have a history and a
knowledge of Kojima the Man and will it sounds like
you do to some extent. I did want to sort

(12:26):
of preface by saying, you know, if you're looking for
somebody or some episode to discuss his evolution and how
this work sort of evolved and bloomed out of design
aesthetics and choices and decisions from the Metal Gear games.
This is maybe not the right episode for you. In

(12:47):
some ways, it feels very strange tackling a game by
somebody like Kojima that is such a well known force
in the industry, as somebody that is so fresh to
him and to his friendranchises it. You know, you could
go on to YouTube and find any number of long
essays or podcast episodes or whatever from folks that have

(13:08):
been playing this since the early early days PS. One
and even prior.

Speaker 3 (13:13):
So.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
In that way, it you know, I feel a little
bit reticent to even cover this game. But at the
same time, there is value in fresh opinions and having
fresh takes from left field or from folks that are otherwise,
you know, untainted by the shadow of Bob Dylan, as
I like to say, the specter of Bob Dylan, the
influence of the reputation that precedes him. So to that end,

(13:35):
you're going to get some fresh thoughts. If that's what
you were looking for, then this might be the show
for you will we might lean on you a little
bit for any previous co gam of knowledge. But you know,
I want to go back to what you were saying,
Nick about feeling conflicted with this game. I too feel
extremely conflicted, very very heavily mixed feelings on the subject

(13:59):
matter and especially well, no, my feelings on the writing
aren't mixed. Here's the thing. I'm hesitant to speak too
much on Kojima, obviously, but so far, to me, like,
I know his reputation, he's an auteur, he's a genius,
and we're going to talk more about that here in
a second. I was expecting a lot, and you know
that is not a fallacy, but that is a problem

(14:19):
with anything that has a reputation like this. You know
Undertail suffered a similar fate. Whenever you know young kids
are coming up and hearing about Metallica, you know, and
they first listened to it. That happens there too. Whenever
you have these expectations set, it can negatively impact your
experience playing through this game. From what I've seen so far,
and I am open to being wrong as we go

(14:41):
through the next two episodes, it feels to me like
this is directed by somebody that is an amateur film
lover that has somewhat higher than average sensibilities when it
comes to cinematism and cinematography, but is otherwise just just
an amateur film lover with endless resources, which is is

(15:02):
kind of what he is. You know, He's a self
described film lover with just a lot of money to
throw at this. I don't see the genius yet again,
open to being wrong. You know, I think the themes
of this game, the bones that make up the themes,
the themes that make up the bones, is a very
cool idea. I think exploring a world, the idea of connection,

(15:22):
the notion of connection in a world that so heavily
encourages seclusion like the one in which we live, is important.
But you know, at this time, I don't know that
I trust him and his team. Important to note that
to see through what's going on, especially with the writing,
it is extremely clumsy and ham fisted. It's so afraid

(15:44):
that you, as the viewer, are just not getting what
they're trying to put down. They so desperately want you
to see the clever little boys and girls that they are.
You know, it makes me think of that meme, like
I know writers that use subtext and they're all cowards.
That's what I think of half the time when I'm
playing this game. But again, there are positive aspects of
playing this that are genuinely at times like they catch

(16:06):
your breath a little, they give you that little hitch
in your throat, and it's like, you know, you're playing
something unique. Let's get into it. So just some high

(16:37):
level stats. This was released in November of twenty nineteen
for the PS four, right before COVID started, or I
should say right before Lockdown started. Came the PC in
July the following year. PS five came in twenty twenty
one in September, and it came to Xbox this past
November November twenty twenty four. You can find the full
credits on the IMDb, on the wiki, or you can

(16:57):
beat the game. But of note, developed Obvious by Kojima Productions,
published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, and five of five games
directed of course by Kojima, who also has a producer, designer,
and writer credit. Art credit to Yoji Shinkawa. Additional writing
credits alongside of Kojima, go to Kenji Yano and shu

(17:18):
Yo Murata composed by Ludwig Forceel for Cell. I was
completely unfamiliar with this name. It looks like, according to
his IMDb page, also composed for PT, the movie Bell,
and the movie Boy Kills World. Not super familiar with
any of that. I played through PT, but you know
that's only like what forty five minutes, Yeah, something like that.

Speaker 2 (17:40):
I've seen the poster for Bell I feel like many
a time scrolling through streaming services, but haven't actually watched
it myself.

Speaker 1 (17:46):
I want to touch on Kojima the auteur for a second,
and again I'm coming at this as somebody that's not
steeped in the Kojima lore, in the Kojima universe. It
seems to me that when folks talk about any of
his works, meadow Gear Solid one through five, you know,
meadow Gear Rising Police, Nots Death Stranding, obviously, they always

(18:07):
speak as if Kojima is working in a vacuum. You know,
Kojima's writing, Kojima's vision, Kojima, Kojima. I know this is
probably common knowledge, but I want to just say up front,
we know that he's working with a lot of other
talented folks, and that kind of rhetoric, you know, of claiming,
of giving all the credit to the quote unquote auteur

(18:29):
is a little harmful one, because you know, think about
au tours that genuinely do do the bulk of the work.
I'm thinking like Austin Jorgensen for Lisa the Painful. I'm
thinking of Toby Fox for Undertail in Delta Rune. You
know people that do the large, large, large bulk of
the work and maybe work with one or two other folks.
But you know, Toby Fox and Jorgensen, they composed, they wrote,

(18:49):
they did the programming, they did art, they did the writing.
Referring to Kojima as an auteur, and like Kojima's work
as his own, in a way does diminish their effort.
And I don't love that. It also obviously doesn't give
credit to the programmers and the writers, the composers and
the scene directors, the blocking directors that work with Kojima. Right,

(19:11):
my understanding, and my understanding is a shallow and amateur one,
is that directors, you know, direct they give notes, They
sort of are the creative oversight and they explain what
they want and then you know, the composer takes that
into account. The scenic director takes that into account, the
actors take that into account. Ultimately, Kojima, might you know,
give notes and say this needs to be a little

(19:33):
more like this, This zig needs to zag a little
bit more. But we've got to give credit to the
people that are actually doing the work too. That's just
a little bugbear of mine. It bugs me whenever people
talk about au tours in this way. Just wanted to
say it up front. I think it's important.

Speaker 2 (19:48):
Yeah, definitely, it needs to. But that's why I appreciate, like,
you know, podcasts like this, you know ours, other ones.
We definitely go out of our way to be like
this person did the art, this person did the music,
this person did that. Because it is a group, especially
for most video games, especially ones of this triple A magnitude,
it takes a lot of hands to kind of get
things moving. It doesn't bug me, but I do appreciate

(20:10):
when we get the chance to put that spotlight on
people that make these games click. Because you take out
the music and it's a completely different game. You replace
the artist, you take out the art. That way, it's
a completely different game. So it takes a lot of
different hands, and it takes a lot of things moving
in the right way for it to turn out the
way it does, which is probably why for something like

(20:30):
this or Metal Gear Solid, a lot of people look
at Kojima in his kind of body of work because,
as you mentioned, it's that direction. Kojima has over his
time been effectively given a blank check whenever he's making
a game nowadays, you know, you get that kind of
unrestricted oversight. When this game came out twenty nineteen and
Sony bought it to be an exclusive, they pretty much

(20:52):
gave him a bag of money, and then they let
him work with the developers of their other solo game,
Horizon Zero Down. They said, hey, can they use your
engine so they can make this game because they just
made a completely new Yip and then they went ahead
and made death S er ending. So I guess that's
what you get when you kind of have that time

(21:13):
and that tenure in and then your ability, your ability
to see your unfettered vision all the way through. So
I think that's why people kind of tap him as
saying he's gotten so big he can effectively do what
he wants, very much like a you know, I'm gonna
compare people, and I don't want it to say, because
this person is like that, but just in a different vein.

(21:33):
We all know Nolan with his movies. At this point,
Nolan's so big he can make whatever he wants to.
They did Inception, and now you get to make Tenant
and then no one's going to tell him no. You know,
you have the big enough star power to kind of
do what you want and make that your vision.

Speaker 3 (21:50):
Yeah, And I mean to piggyback off of that, Yeah.
And I think it's very prevalent when we talk about
au tourism in games and juxtaposed against auturism in film
as well. I mean, it's the same conversation that Rick
was having about like giving credit where credit is to
where it's like a Kojima game was not made only
by Kojima. And this is something that I feel like

(22:11):
we talked about very recently Will in terms of like
how many people are involved in the process of making
games and everything that goes into you know, what we
work on. It's like it's almost as if people are
going to look at the body of work of Denny Villeneuve,
like from the recent Dune Part one and Part two,
Entries or Enemy and say, oh my god, he's he
he's the one that makes all of these movies amazing

(22:33):
without talking about Greg Frazier as a cinematographer and Hans
Zimmer as composers, like without of course, someone at the
Helm to say, this is the vision that I have
for a piece of work, and then giving the direction
to extremely talented specialists who can make that happen, like
Yoji Shinkawa, you know, making the absolute just incredible, like

(22:57):
bar Nune, like one of the most beautiful art design
in a game that I've ever seen, one of the
most you know, interesting and specific and just I don't know,
esoteric art that I've seen on a show like These
are the things that we we notice when we watch
games like this, And I think where we get in
trouble with autourism is when we attribute it to something

(23:17):
that has frustrated me. With the air with a sentiment
around Kojima is that everybody you were saying earlier, Rick
is like when when people talk about Kojima, for me,
it's almost like people talk about him as if he's
in the room watching them talk about him. It's like
it's like people are scared to say anything negative whatsoever
about the Metal Gear series or I have only ever

(23:40):
heard like just glowing reverence for this man in the
in the games that he does. And I will say this,
something about Kojima that really strikes me is the fact
that he has such a strong personality. He has an
incredible media presence on the Internet. I followed him on
Twitter and Instagram for years, and it is genuinely a
delight to follow him and just see the silly, goofy

(24:01):
things that he posts, or what movies he's watching or
what music that he's listening to. Obviously, with a lot
of the lead up to Death Strainding two that as
Rick said, is out as of this recording, he was
posting a lot of really interesting things in his collaborations
with stars, and I think like when it comes down
to my assessment of what his involvement and his inclusion

(24:23):
in the work is is the fact that he has
a really strong, like heavy, heavy, and you'll see it
in the credits, heavy presence in the writing and as
heavy presence in the actual direction in the notes that
they're giving actors. I imagine that he's there in the
actual vo booth as well as when they were doing
the scans and they're actually like taking the live recordings

(24:45):
of the blocking whenever they're I don't know the terminology
that's involved with it, but when they're shooting scenes, he
is there in the room with them.

Speaker 1 (24:51):
There's a great interview with Norman Ritis where he's talking
about being directed by Kojima, who was, you know, working
with them, and he says that Cojmo will just say okay,
now pick up the baby and cry, and then just
stare at her and it will point up and be
like yep because of the whale, and Norman Ratis is like,
I don't know what the hell is going on. I
don't know what this means.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
And he's like, I trust you, but I have no
idea what the fuck we're talking about, right. And it's
something that I will say that I think I'm talking
about now, but we'll continue to come up later. Is
that I'd be really, really curious to see what playing
this game in Japanese, like English subtitles with the Japanese

(25:33):
translation would be like, because legitimately, some of the dialogue
in this game is so ridiculous and asinine that I'm.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
Like, there must be I want.

Speaker 3 (25:44):
I'm begging for the prospect that something has been lost
in translation. That he meant one thing and the writers
and the translators completely got it wrong and they said
something else. I don't I don't imagine that is because
of the not a budget. So I mean you're shaking
your head. Well, I imagine you think this is right.

Speaker 2 (26:04):
That's just that's just that's what he does. You know,
he'd be saying a wild shit sometimes, which is.

Speaker 3 (26:11):
Fair, which is fair. It's just that, like there is
so it's well, we'll get into it more. But I
just think that something about this game that is so
interesting and unique is the fact that there are legitimately
times where I'm watching these scenes play out and I'm
watching the direction of these actors, and it's something that
I really care about because I came into it really
really wanting to love this game, and some of these

(26:34):
scenes are just effervescent and beautiful and well performed and
well lit in the shots in the angles have that
making of a Hollywood director. And then something's I'm grabbing
my head and I'm just like, I'm I'm visibly angry.
I'm standing up on my couch and I'm throwing my
controller down, like what did I just watch? Why? Why

(26:56):
am I giving this so much time in my life
to experience.

Speaker 1 (26:59):
So yeah, the writing far and away is what makes
this feel the most amateurish, the most, you know, film again,
like film buff you know that you know from college
that just has endless money that can make this. Like
the dialogue is where that comes through the most. And
we'll talk about that once we get farther in to
move out of development a little bit. This was kojem
of Production's first game after transitioning to becoming an independent

(27:22):
developer in twenty fifteen, after that infamous situation with Konami
that to this day, I think we don't really know
exactly what happened, Like all that's confidential, right, Like I'm
understanding that correctly, right.

Speaker 2 (27:35):
Mostly like that he said, she's a type of situation
I don't even think to my knowledge, which I haven't
done a ton of background as far as like Kojima
talking about it himself, but I mean, I don't even
think he's really given the full details, if he ever
will at all. But yeah, it's just a sour relationship
after so many years. Yeah, it kind of not ruined
a franchise because you have Delta coming out pretty soon

(27:56):
this year, so we'll see how that goes, but definitely
altered the trajet of it.

Speaker 1 (28:01):
So they partnered. They partnered with Sony straight away because
of the reputation, and they announced ps exclusive title first
Strand type game. Death Stranding was revealed at E three
the following year in twenty sixteen. Tons of famous talent
voice actors, yes, but also movie stars in this. Kojima
is obsessed with working with film actors to the point

(28:23):
of snubbing folks like David Hayter to get bigger names.
I am familiar with that fiasco. But you know you're
gonna see Norman Ritas, Tommy ear Old Jenkins, Emily O'Brien,
Lea Seydo, Mad's Michelson. Of course, Troy Baker, Gearmel del
Toro is in this as a body scan. I guess

(28:44):
they got a voice actor, Jesse Cordy.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
To do his voice.

Speaker 1 (28:48):
I guess because he's not an actor. Maybe I don't know.
And then even I don't even know how I feel
about this. Conan O'Brien and Jeff Keeley are in the
game too, Yeah, they are. I think that part of
me thinks that's hilarious. Conan said that he was in
Tokyo filming, like for his show for Conan, and he
just went over and they were like, hey, you're here,

(29:09):
let's just scan you in which I think that kind
of rules. That's pretty funny, like you just happened to
be there, and he's like, yeah, fuck it, let's do it.
Who cares.

Speaker 3 (29:17):
Not only not only is it cool that they have
Conan O'Brien, but they have him shacked up with a cosplayer,
so we all know what kind of man he is. Yeah,
I don't I remember, Sorry to cut you off, Rick,
I don't remember coming across either of them, or maybe
they were and it was just the kind of the
weird scan when you go into one of the facilities

(29:38):
and they're up there. But yeah, I don't. I don't
remember coming across Sam Lake or Egg Right.

Speaker 1 (29:42):
Yeah, I missed Conan as well. I was told that
he's a random delivery in the early game, but I
think I missed it anyways, Speaking of all these actors,
though everybody speaks glowingly about working with Kojima, by all accounts,
he's I'm hesitant to say great to work with because
I haven't, you know, really really dug into it. But
everything that I've seen you know Del Toro, Norman ritis Conan.

(30:06):
Everybody speaks about him glowingly, so it seems like he's
a good one to work with. I want to move
into talking more about the game, though, Let's talk visuals.

(30:44):
I mean, look the credit where it's due. I'm going
to shit on a lot of this game as we
move forward, because there are things that I think are bad.
The visuals just ain't won. This game is absolutely gorgeous.
I started it on I've played the beginning of this
game like four times.

Speaker 3 (31:02):
Dude.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
I I don't know why, but I started this on
PC and then I went to PS five. I'm playing
the director's cut. It's just what I have. This game
is beautiful, like from the body scans to the facial
expressions and the motion capture, to the design of the
bts which are just incredible, to the landscape. The landscape

(31:26):
and the way that Kojima directs the camera is simply gorgeous.
This to me like something I keep looking at the
landscape and thinking Icelandic. But I'm not basing that off anything.
I just feel it in my in my gut. This
is a You both are shaking your head, yes, So
I'm not off base with this.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
It's very correct. It looks just like it.

Speaker 3 (31:45):
Yeah, it's it's it's definitely Iceland, and I believe that
that's what they said. The developer said in an interview
at one point is that they're designing it it for
me not to not a contradictory Rick, is that I
love the look and this is one of the from
what I underst as well, this is one of the
powers of the Decima engine, is that the environmental foliage
and the different tech that goes into creating the variability

(32:09):
and environmental design is one of the things that Decima
is like the best at and it really shows here.
And obviously if anybody has played the Horizon series, their
environments are great as well. I have a little bit
more qualms with Horizon Horizon's visual designed versus Death Strandings,
but yeah, I completely agree with you, Rick, this is
a gorgeous game. I'm a little pissed that America doesn't

(32:32):
look like this. I wish America actually looks the way
it does in this game. But yeah, it's really funny
how it seems that you can just go on like
a forty five minute hike and go from Wyoming down
to what is it like Kansas? It's great to me.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
I like that.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
Yeah, this, And because you're spending so much time in
this expansive landscape, it's really important that it sells the
feelings of one wilderness just untainted. You know that that's
sort of untainted wilderness that comes after a natural catastrophe,
which is what this game is is set in. It
is a dystopia of sorts. America is gone functionally, the

(33:12):
world is gone functionally. Nature perseveres as it will forever,
you know, until this planet is gone, nature will persevere
outside of us. And this sells that perfectly. The landscapes
are open. It gives this amazing sense of peace and
also isolation. It's very and this is just the landscape,

(33:34):
not talking about like the mechanics of helping other players.
This it gives a sense of deeply isolated and lonely.
But it's very zen and peaceful, which which feeds into
the sort of pace of play and the design ethos
of the game itself. But and I will say too,

(33:54):
I have not beat this game yet. I don't love
doing this. I don't love coming on to do an
episode without having beat the game. I'm only a couple
chapters in so I haven't got to like the snow
biome yet, for example, but everything I've seen so far
it's just really lush, isn't It's not lush and verdant.
It's mostly barren actually, but the streams and the ridges

(34:17):
and the plateaus. It's really relaxing. Having something like this,
this sort of meditative, languid pace of play, is just
such a breath of fresh air in many ways.

Speaker 2 (34:33):
And it's great too, just because the environments as you
mentioned there, like the different streams, the kind of jagged crags,
the mountains that jut off into the sky, is not
just there to look pretty, but they're very much parts
of the gameplay and how you interact with the world.
So it's the kind of situation to where if you
see a ravine that drops down, you scan and you

(34:55):
see a piece of a package down there for you
to pick up. It's not for you to just oh well,
hop over it and leave it alone. You can throw
something down, scale, down, scale, back up, really use the
environment to kind of not just navigate obviously, but it's
really working hand in hand with the look versus how
you're moving around the environment, which I found very nice.
As far as just kind of pathing, I felt like

(35:16):
the best part of the game obviously, aside from it
being coined or maybe just called the walking simulator, is
being able to figure out from where I'm standing there
are eight different paths that all makes sense. What is
my choice as far as like my maximum enjoyment or
maximum safety or maximum danger? I don't know. I found

(35:39):
myself doing that multiple times, even throughout this replay that
I've been doing, and it just kind of brought it
all back from twenty nineteen.

Speaker 1 (35:46):
Or maximum How much can I break the physics a
la Skyrim on this mountain?

Speaker 2 (35:50):
Correct?

Speaker 4 (35:51):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (35:52):
Well I get my truck stuck in a ravine and
jump and have it bounce thirty feet in the air.

Speaker 3 (35:57):
God, we'll talk about these fucking trucks.

Speaker 4 (36:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
I agree with everything that you said as well, Rick,
and with regards to just the feeling that the environmental
design imparts on you as you play. Also, I will
say this, I think that in terms of the visual
design of the enemies, Oh my god. When I first
started playing this game initially, I was so surprised at
how quickly it turned from this really really cool third

(36:23):
person you know, hiking simulator exploration of just like this
feeling of just absolute vibes that it was really really liking,
to the immense terror that the beats were imparting upon it,
and just the look of the hands that are splashing
down onto the ground as they come towards you frighteningly quickly.

(36:44):
And I think that it's one of those things where
I'm going through and I'm playing the game and it's
just as soon as I see those and as soon
as you're using you learn how to use the bet
and it goes in the area. Of course we'll get
more into that, but just that feeling, the look of
the vibe, especially when you actually confront a bat. I
will say again shout out to Yoji Shinkawa because this
is wholly unique, and it also makes me understand and

(37:07):
give the vibes of like I feel like he was
pulling things from PT and just injecting them directly into
this game in a way that makes sense for death stranding,
not to say that he's just kind of like Frankensteining
this game together. In parts, it all kind of worked
seamlessly together, but at the same time, I'm like, what
did we actually miss with PT, I've only ever seen

(37:28):
YouTube videos, so I'm really curious.

Speaker 1 (37:31):
Well, first of all, you can find playable PC versions
of PT. There is a hilarious one when we didn't
know when former co hosts Ben and I did it
on this show. I found one that had this really
bizarre opening, like you start out in a room and
you don't go back into it. But this opening room,
for some reason, just had a bunch of dedications to
this programmer's friends and most notably a big rapper. It

(37:52):
was like a shrine to this rapper, mumble rapper I'd
never heard of. It's just such a weird, weird thing.
But anyways, incredible, Yes one, this does kind of make
me pine for Silent Hills. And I know everybody says
that I know, but I mean, what can I say?
It looked so promising and fantastic. These bets are amazing
Yoji Shinkawa and Kojima both, I mean, these are downright terrifying.

(38:18):
These are and they're so simple in their design, humanoid
but with proportions that don't make sense and seemingly made
out of tar nether smoke goo. We're not sure, like
like it verges on that's what's the guy the it
defies description, it's too horrible for Lovecraft. It verges on

(38:40):
that kind of thing. And you know, speaking of like
Frank and signing it together, we see that tons with composers,
you know, which is like the one thing that I
can speak half acidly about. We composers do that all
the time. They take sketches of rejected pieces or stuff
that they didn't like and just put it together. So
Kojima doing that makes all the sense in the world,
you know, as much as I don't think he's a

(39:02):
very good writer, and you know, whether or not he
needs an editor, you know, that's kind of like a
plaid a trope at this point, whether or not that's true.
He knows what he wants and he has a distinctive style,
and I can't I can't appreciate that. Yeah, just looking
at this game is just gorgeous and unsettling, which I

(39:24):
think is the point. I'm not a fan of. How
often babies. Babies are in my face. Don't love it.
They look weird. I don't know, do you want?

Speaker 2 (39:35):
I love those little baby cut scenes, though, when you're
coming out of the private rooms, you get like the
little thumbs up, or sometimes I turn around and get
a little tishy in the face.

Speaker 3 (39:43):
Are you specifically referring to like the repatriation points when
you go down the throat of Sam when he's coming
back to life, or is it just like the involvement
of the of the BB in just general general gameplay context.

Speaker 1 (39:59):
I don't know what I was referring to. That's what
I was referring to, the throat scene.

Speaker 3 (40:04):
Yeah, you know, I mean that is very uncomfy. I
don't like esophagus esopha guy.

Speaker 1 (40:09):
I've made up my mind on the BB yet certainly
haven't seen anything else like it. I love that you
can relax it by rocking it, and uh, if you
jostle the controller too much, you just start shaking the thing.

Speaker 3 (40:23):
It's great.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
I don't I don't mean to like I I hope
that doesn't upset listeners, but like, oh my.

Speaker 3 (40:27):
God, that cracked me up.

Speaker 1 (40:29):
Speaking of shaking babies, let's talk mechanics. Yeah yeah, Patreon
dot com slash picks project rated so far. This is
where this game shines to me. And this ties into
that design ethos of a slow, meditative pace of play,
a world that well, it's a combination of a world
that is now empty of humanity. Empty is maybe not

(40:54):
the right word, but we're sort of starting over. Humanity
is being sort of rebuilt, and now nature is taking over,
and it is meditative in that way. It's zen in
that way. And there's also the notion of the delivery system.
You know, think back to Seinfeld, you know, a Newman's
classic monologue, the mail never stops. You know, something I

(41:17):
ran into very early in this game was trying to
do way too many lost deliveries, and I was just
sinking time, so much time backtracking to do these deliveries,
because it is pretty satisfying. There is something to be
said about the zen like satisfaction of having a goal,
a clearly defined and reachable goal that you can check

(41:38):
off and do, do it and done, do it again
and done. There is something very systematic, pattern based. You
get into a groove and it just works. And the
walking you know, will you mentioned this as a walking simulator.
That word gets sort of thrown around derogatorily, But I've

(41:59):
always loved the quote unquote walking simulators. Firewatch and Edith
Finch were two early early episodes on this show. I
love those games. Gone or No not gone home. What's
the one with the boat that everybody cried over because
you know it's not fun? Dude, I was late, dear esther,

(42:21):
that's what it builds, dear esther. Okay, dear, I don't
even you know what sucks is. I don't even remember
why I was looking for that now walking.

Speaker 3 (42:29):
Simulators because people because people were talking shit about rot
walking walking simulators.

Speaker 1 (42:33):
I think, you know this idea, does a game need
to be fun? At this point? Like that's another conversation
that's becoming almost wrote and uninteresting and just regurgitated, right I.
Anytime I hear an episode or a YouTube video about
it's just people making the same points that they've heard elsewhere. No, no,
and it's because this is kind of I don't want

(42:54):
to say exhausted, but I haven't heard an interesting take
on this in a long time. Games don't need to
be fun any more than music needs to be hummable,
any more than dance needs to be pretty. Rights, that's
just how art works, you know, any more than literature
needs to be florid. I mean, this is you know,

(43:17):
I'm remembering back in high school reading The Great Gatsby
in the Road in the same year. At the time,
I couldn't understand it, like I hated the road, because well,
he's not writing pretty Like if I wrote like this
would I would fail my AP exam. And that's not
the point, because mechanics is not the be all end
all of art. You can have the most perfectly crafted
sonata form with a great development and a recapitulation, but

(43:40):
if it's not saying something, if it doesn't tie into
the artist's voice, what worth does it have? At that
point You're just doing an exercise in a tude. And
that's what I think of when I think of games
like this, walking simulators, the walking of death straining feeds
so perfectly into the design ethos and the thesis of
the game connecting one another. And then these esthetic philosophies

(44:04):
of like meditative zen of feeling alone, of isolation, and
just that pace of play philosophy that is so anti
triple A for the most part until the combat will
talk about that, so anti triple A of just being
in the moment and plotting and slow lang zham or

(44:26):
language or whatever whatever pretentious language you want to use.
Glacial as another one that I wrote in here. Yeah,
I also wrote one must imagine Newman happy. We're off
of the Newman thing. I just wanted to say that
joke because I laughed at it, but I appreciate it.
It's so it's so sympatico and synchronous with that with

(44:47):
the identity of the game. And also, frankly, it's satisfying
to do. Like I found it extremely satisfying to be
walking across in balance, you know, holding myself steady, climbing ladders,
traversing the world. Especially again credit to where credits do
with Kojima, those perfectly placed tracks by low Roar. It
was really really viby and satisfying. I loved it.

Speaker 3 (45:11):
Yeah, And not to reiterate too much of what you've
already said, Rick, but I wholeheartedly agree with you. The
mechanics developed at the heart of what Death Stranding is,
of what Kojima wanted to convey with this experience in
this game is by far and away the best, the
best aspect. Like I legitimately enjoyed the core gameplay design

(45:34):
of delivering packages and going from one waypoint center to
another and figuring out like I wrote I wrote this
in my notes, is that there is an inherent loop,
a really enjoyable hook to that that gameplay loop of preparing,
strategizing what you're going to bring with you in order
to navigate the environment in the terrain, and then executing

(45:56):
those deliveries and it to your to your credit what
you had mentioned earlier, Rick as well, is that that contemplative,
zenful aspect of being out even if you are out
in the wilderness and you're starting to experience stress, if
your boots are breaking down, if the gear that you're wearing,
like if one of the sam has an ability to

(46:17):
equip multiple different skeletons exoskeletons to his lower body to
support him in you know, managing some of these deliveries,
these loads that he's carrying, which can be quite large
at times. And I think like it's one of those
things where you have to start really being very strategic
about what you choose to bring with you, what route

(46:39):
you choose to take. And it's even even further interesting
is that, like the onboarding to the process of actually
playing this game is really well done. In the first
part of this game where they tell you, okay, hey,
look like there are multiple strategies for you to get
from point A to point B. Here's a more dangerous
one that has a lot more treacherous terrain that you
can use some equipment to get over and it will
take you less time. And here's longer one that might

(47:01):
actually have you go around maybe to some BT or
meal territory, but you can manage that and you can
get there just a little bit slower in terms of
like what do you want to risk, well, how do
you want to tackle that? And that comes back over
and over and over again, and they really they evolve
it in a very slow and steady way. They give
you new equipment incrementally and a very purposeful times that

(47:25):
kind of like make a lot of sense with how
you want to you know, address and manage different you know,
deliveries and different shipment loads. And that I really really
enjoyed it, and I think that it's one of the
coolest things to do that I once I stopped using
vehicles to do these deliveries, I found a lot of

(47:45):
enjoyment in figuring out how to do it. The trike
is not good, the truck is awful, The truck is useful,
the truck is very handy. And I hope I'm not
spoiling this for you. In terms of where you're at
and what you can get later on. But I think
it's it's one of those things where whatever they were doing,
whatever they were thinking of having an it's just it

(48:08):
seems like very silly, the fact that they decided to
make a game about trekking across the wilderness and not
making like giving you a four wheeler, not giving you
like a road hog that you can go over a
few speed bumps, like uh, some of the some of
the mechanics for that are legitimately silly, but otherwise I
think that that the the core loop of managing that

(48:30):
load with Sam and going from point A to point
B is really powerful. Not to mention like again the
theme of connectivity. One of the things that listeners if
you if you're not aware of by this point when
you were tapped into the online infrastructure, you don't have
to be, but it's highly recommended in terms of how
you're managing death stranding, is that when you activate online

(48:51):
mode for death Stranding, you are actually connected to sometimes
your friends, but then oftentimes just random people serve in
their game, and then you have access to equipment that
they have built in the wilderness. So there have been
times that are truly like when we talk about emergent gameplay, like,
there have been times where I have been shit out

(49:14):
of luck. I'm out of hermetic grenades, my boots are
almost broken, my energy bar, my battery for my exoskeleton
is completely in the red, like it's not functioning anymore,
and all of a sudden, I see a generator from
a random person, or I see a time fall shelter
from a different person that will shield me from the
time fall rain or or give me the opportunity to

(49:36):
recharge my battery to get myself to that last leg
of the mission, and that those parts where it's like,
oh my gosh, with the amount of serotonin that I
feel when I have those moments, it's like, it's incredible.
It doesn't happen all the time. But I think that
that's smart. It's wisely done. I don't know if it's
curated or monitored for that specific ability, but the fact
that they chose to do it that way and have

(49:59):
those limiteds inherent that can be alleviated by the community,
I think it's really smart, and it's really complimentary to
the story he was trying to tell.

Speaker 2 (50:06):
That on top of it's also great too. When say,
for example, Nick, you mentioned coming across a random generator
or a time fall shelter. Then the game gives you
the option, and generally it makes you do it at
least once if you actually use set object. But to
send a like to the person that made that, just
like a little thumbs up. It's something that literally is
a number going up. It doesn't give you anything special.

(50:29):
It doesn't, like, you know, give you real life money
or even in game money or anything. But there's something
really neat about not playing for a couple of days
or a week logging back in and then one of
the first things that pops up is a player used
your ladder, a player used your bridge, a player did
this player, did a player use the road that you created,

(50:49):
which takes a ton of material to put the roads together.
And then your likes go up, you know, three hundred
four hundred points, which I feel like also taps into
that serotonin, completely draws to that, you know, being connected,
being online with the other players and everybody kind of
being in that same muck. So it just really helps
you band together, even if you're just playing by yourself

(51:10):
in your living room.

Speaker 1 (51:11):
This is I'm gonna forget to bring this up. Otherwise,
I promise we're gonna get right back on track. Speaking
of likes, the way people write emails to you in
this game is so unhinged and passive aggressive. They just
throw shitloads of thumbs up emojis at you and like
horny emojis at you. Sometimes it is what I noticed,

(51:31):
like like yeah the water, yes, yes, the water it
is Oh my god. Like I was reading some of
these like it couldn't help but laugh. It's so so silly. Anyways,
I knew i'd forget. So I want to say that
the trike is profoundly weightless. It feels so unsatisfying to drive.

(51:53):
That being said, it get me to point A to
point B faster and right now. I like that. So
I haven't got the truck yet. I've seen plenty of
truck footage from like Donkey and stuff.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
So yeah, you haven't. You haven't beat up a mule
and taken their truck and drove that around.

Speaker 1 (52:08):
I love some mules, which I think the mules are
kind of a dumb concept. But I've beat them up.
I haven't killed anybody yet. I have heard that if
you do that, you know there are consequences, but I
haven't done that yet. Speaking of combat with people, the
combat comes on kind of early. You know, you can
punch and shove and stuff. You also get this strand

(52:30):
of course, it's basically like a bungee cord that's woven
with your blood that you can kind of choke somebody
out from behind, which is cool because that doesn't kill them,
which does have in lower consequences, and that's really helpful
because these mules in game are very hostile toward you
think of them as like bandits. Functionally, that's what they are.

(52:52):
Combat stuff beyond that involved the bats, which I kind
of go back and forth as to whether it's serviceable
or really tedious to go through the combat stuff with
the vts. You can throw specialized grenades at them and
use the specialized gun at some point, I'm pretty sure,
and that's fine, that's okay. It's whenever the bts sort

(53:13):
of turn the ground into a puddle of ink goop
nether and you have to sort of trudge through it
and you're constantly pushing them off of you. Visually, it's
very cool, but it feels like it's it's so random
as to whether I'm going to get dragged down and
get into a big fight, or if I'm gonna be
able to shake them off of me. I can't find
a rhyme or reason. It's just really annoying. You don't

(53:36):
have to engage with a lot of the stuff though,
like if you can, especially with people, but with bts too,
you can stealth around and will this is a question
for you in particular, Like I know that's a big
thing in Metal Gear Solid games. You know, stealth, it's
very much a stealth game. You don't you're kind of
encouraged not to, you know, go in guns blazing, say
hello to my little friend on everybody? What is the

(53:58):
stealth value with combat like and death stranding compared to
what you've played of Metal Gear Solid? Is it like
a natural evolution? Is he taking like a complete rebalancing?
Is it kind of the same, Like, what's it like?

Speaker 2 (54:12):
It feels a lot more like a rebalancing. It was
funny because we were talking about the initial Kojema games
versus this one, and in the back of my head,
I was thinking, well, this is kind of a great
Kojima game to start off on because of how different
it is to like the Metal Gear Solid series, which
I still agree with, but there is a good amount
of overlap with some of these, not only the stealth

(54:32):
parts of the game, but also how in the other
Metal Gear Solid games it does not explicitly say too,
but a lot of the times it rewards you, or
maybe it doesn't hurt you to be non lethal with
your attacks. So sneaking up behind somebody a lot of
times you have the option to either break a neck
or to put them to sleep. Putting them asleep normally

(54:54):
lets them wake up a little bit later. So if
you're just trying to be done with it, you could
kill them potentially, but that generally would harm you, especially
in part three. If anyone's listening, they know there's a
you get a good part for not killing people versus
it makes it a lot more painful later on in
the game, and this game is no different. As we mentioned,
you don't want to kill enemies in this game due

(55:14):
to story reasons that we'll get into, so it's in
your best interest to either be stealthy or use non
lethal tactics, both of which Sam has no lack of,
especially when you get into later on like Act three,
Act four, when you get multiple ways to put down
a mule, you know, non lethally, versus having to shoot
them with something that's a lethal round. So I wouldn't

(55:38):
say natural progression just because especially Metal Gear Solid five
got really really wicked with the stealth, like it got
really nice. And this is very much not a stealth
game so much as it is. Sam can use stealth
in order to get in and out of situations, but
I would say in most cases it's in your best interest. However,
when things pop off, very easy to pull out a

(56:01):
bullet gun and kind of handle business.

Speaker 3 (56:03):
Yeah, I agree with that wholeheartedly, William, when you say
that like this is in a stealth game whatsoever, especially
somebody who truly does love stealth games like assassins can
not to say that Assassin's Creed is the best example
of stealth games. But like, you know, other other games
out there that deploy stealth, you know, really really well.
Think of your dis X or even splinter Cell. Of

(56:25):
course those are you know, the defining core characteristics of
those games. Even the last of a series does stealth
amazingly well. You can stealth your entire way through that
game if you wanted to. But you know, specifically with
with death Stranding, I will say this is something that
I think is really important for people to know at
this point, since we're getting into combat, we're getting into

(56:46):
how we manage these encounters. I think that as good
as an onboarding process that they do for managing the
core components of deliveries in this game, they do an
e poor job of giving the player incremental updates on
this is how you manage situations like for example, like

(57:07):
they give you opportunities that when you are in safe
houses to do different missions in order to learn how
to handle different weapons, but those are optional. I chose
to do the Hermetic Grenade one. Once I did the
Hermatic Grenade one, I did not go back to do
anything else because I was like, I can figure it out.
I can, you know, learn the hard way to do
certain things. But what I will say is that, like

(57:28):
specifically with a strand, I didn't I didn't realize until
it became vitally necessary at the tail end of this
game to know how to use the strand, that you
could actually go throughout different mule camps and manage stealth
options when you're you know, going through that and acquiring
different materials. There are several times when the game asks

(57:49):
you to go retrieve deliveries from a mual camp as well,
where it kind of becomes important to learn how to
or know how to use stealth options in this game.
This is also going to kind of give me a
secondary like tangent pivot from this point about like, I
think that one of the things that the game struggled
with is like giving you successive tutorialization as they introduce

(58:10):
new mechanics is the fact that we didn't talk about
it in the visuals. But the UI in this game, yes,
is fucking awful. It is one of the worst parts
about this game. It makes me want to scream and
throw my controllers.

Speaker 1 (58:22):
I have that.

Speaker 3 (58:23):
Not only is the UI bad, sorry sorry.

Speaker 1 (58:25):
Sorry, I have that note later on, it is maximalist
parentheses derogatory.

Speaker 3 (58:32):
Yeah, it's so bad and the UI is bad. The map,
I will say this, the map like is interesting in
its concept, it is wholly like, it's not usable. The
map is really really bad in terms of understanding what
the terrain looks like, how it goes into and interestingly enough,
from what I've seen of like gameplay and trailers, which
Kohima is notorious for giving away too much information in

(58:54):
his trailers and details. But like, from what I've seen
in the gameplay, it looks like that was a big
point of content that Kajima Productions wanted to work on
for the second game, and from cursory review, it looks
like they addressed a lot of that. So be interested
to see inevitably when I do get to the point
of playing the second game how that progresses. But like,
I never turned off the tip screen because at the

(59:16):
beginning of the game, I was like, oh, I want
to know the tips as I encounter the situations of
handling the mules or managing bets, and the tips can
be helpful, but they're given to you at really inopportune times.
And then on top of that, the tips screen is
like a block that covers up twenty five percent of
the bottom of the screen too, So it's like not

(59:38):
it's just the successive level of like the text isn't readable.
This is not an accessibility friendly game. The UI says,
too much maximalism going on. You have to like go
out of your way to refine the data points on
the map to know what you want to look at,
And I just think it's just too much work, and
there's just too much.

Speaker 1 (59:56):
It's overwhelming. They feel like they need to be badgering
you at every point, and that's kind of a theme
of this game, is they at every point want to
make sure that you know how clever they are, and
how well designed they are, and how well polished they
think they are. Like they really are afraid of players
not being aware of how creative they are, which is

(01:00:16):
the sign of a really insecure artist. It's sometimes in
those pop ups. Sometimes it's die Hardman just constantly, constantly
ringing in to tell you an update, and he talks,
He talks to you like no human being would ever
talk to somebody else. There is this amazing post that
I found that I tweeted on Blue Sky because I

(01:00:37):
was complaining about this very thing. Credit to Matthew Sagey
for coming up with his comedy gold. But it's just
like this, This is what it sounds like like, bed Sam.
It's me die Hardman. Wanted to let you know. There's
banana bread in the kitchen, so you can take a
portion of this sweet cake bread anytime. Use the knife
to cut off part of the loaf. You can take
a full piece or a small piece, depending on how

(01:00:59):
hungry you are?

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
This is that that was really good. That was actually
very good. I thought I was playing.

Speaker 3 (01:01:08):
He just like you said, he doesn't speak like a
human being, and he is almost in every single facet
of this game. It's like the dialogue they wrote for
this character was like a manual. It's like they wanted
to create a manual for this game, but they decided
to make it a character.

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
Yeah, that's not completely wrong. I mean a lot of
the times, especially since he's carrying you through the story,
he's kind of letting you know this is the next
point you need to go to, and you know they're
trying to do it without slapping a big go this
way thing on your face, and then they kind of
also do it anyways. So I guess it defeats the purpose.

Speaker 3 (01:01:42):
I'd rather take yellow paint any day. Sorry, well I
cut you off.

Speaker 2 (01:01:46):
That's that's really sad. But no, it's I don't know,
it's funny. I feel like, and we kind of talked
about at the top of this I'm gonna be like
the Kojima apologist for this episode, But I agree with
you all the UI is a lot, but I never
got too many points where I felt like it was
really bad. There are a lot of friction points, and
I feel like, ultimately, that's kind of the subtitle of

(01:02:09):
death stranding. It's like death stranding friction points, and I
think they did it on purpose. There's a lot of
times where you are interacting with something and it's not
neat packaged, well put together, but you have to press
multiple buttons. For example, hell if you put too many
packages on your back, and then you have to hold
packages in your hands, which is a pretty neat feature,
but it also requires you to hold both triggers at

(01:02:30):
the same time while now also walking and running. It's
like it makes you feel like you have your hands full,
because Sam literally has his hands full while playing the game.
So I don't know. I know the UI is a
ton and it's in your face, but I think I
feel like ultimately, and correct me if I'm wrong. I
think it fades away as long as you're not doing

(01:02:51):
something like actively, because I remember plenty of times walking
around up in the mountains, for example, and just seeing
like a beautiful vista and being able to take a
nice screen shot because there's not too much stuff on
the screen unless I'm sliding down a mountain, or I'm
getting attacked by mules, or I'm like seen by their
little pop ups that scan your packages and make you

(01:03:11):
get chased halfway around America. But it's one of those
things where it fades in, it fades out. You you know,
use the deep head to kind of open up your
multi use items like your pccs and your ladders and
things like that. I feel like it's fairly easy to
maneuver once you give it that, you know, two hours,
three hours of kind of onboarding, as Nick was talking.

Speaker 3 (01:03:31):
About, ten hours of remembering that you need to play
press X to close out of a menu once you're ready,
once everything is already auto sorted on your back. Like,
that's another thing that like really gets me. As you've
got a hold X again, it's yeah, you're right, Will,
There's there's a lot of friction to it. And what
I will say to kind of clarify is that like
to your point, Will those those gameplay mechanics of balancing

(01:03:53):
the R two L two of being like, that's fine.
I don't have any issue with that. It is relatively minimalist.
When you are out in the open environment, it's mainly
the menu system and the different ways that you have
to do it. Even when you're going in and selecting
your weapons and stuff like that, it's largely okay. It's
just really not to my tastes, and I think that

(01:04:13):
there are certain points where you have to figure out, oh,
you have to build that muscle memory that By the
point of course, sixty sixty five ish hours later into
this game, like I finally got the hang of it
and getting into it, but it's just getting to that
point where I was okay, where I was comfortable really
going in and out of it. It was just it was
a struggle for me.

Speaker 1 (01:04:32):
Makes you feel like Sam Bridgemam.

Speaker 4 (01:04:35):
Thank you, Sam.

Speaker 1 (01:04:59):
I would be miss not to mention this before we
move on to music and sound. But Kojima didn't invent
this idea of a porter. In fact, this is inspired
by an actual Japanese profession, albeit a very small one,
that of the Japanese Boka. They are porters that are
in Japan. They tend to work between the months of

(01:05:19):
April and like October, you know when the wezard's weather's
not hazardous, and these are so neat. I found a
fascinating article on the bokas of Ose Park on Japan's
National Parks of Japan website. Boka uses the kanji for
walk and luggage. Kind of self explanatory, but like straight up,

(01:05:40):
they stack packages just like Sam does. It looks identical
if you place you know Sam in the real world,
and they carry seventy five kilograms, one hundred kilograms, one
hundred and twenty five kilograms to these remote places that
are inaccessible to vehicles, and it is just a fascinating
rabbit hole to go down. Very very cool, very proud

(01:06:02):
of the work that they do too. And at the
heart of it, all the ones that they interviewed in
the couple of articles that I saw, which I'll put
in the show notes, by the way, you know, at
the heart of it, they're like, it brings people together,
like that's that's why they do that, that's why they
take pride in it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:17):
It is.

Speaker 1 (01:06:18):
It's a very humanistic idea of uniting everybody, which again
in today's day and age, is something that's difficult to
keep at the forefront of daily life. I think there
is some more combat stuff to talk about, like your
piss and shit grenades, which is a very funny concept
to me, and it's cool that you know, you can

(01:06:40):
just use the bath or many time you're in your
room and you get more of your piss and shit grenades.
Why I have to skip four cut scenes with Norman
Ritis's bare ass to make one of these, like they
really want you skip the cut I just I skip
the I skip the bare ass cut scenes. I've seen
it once. I don't need to see this every time, man,

(01:07:01):
But you have to skip like four of them.

Speaker 3 (01:07:03):
They really want you to gip the master cheeks.

Speaker 1 (01:07:05):
It's crazy, they really want you to see those cheeks.

Speaker 2 (01:07:08):
Let's see the ad for Norman Ritas's ride on AMC
that I'm sure is not on air anymore.

Speaker 4 (01:07:14):
What is that?

Speaker 1 (01:07:14):
Like? A, yeah, this is really fun, the Norman Riatas.
What are you talking about?

Speaker 2 (01:07:18):
So when you when you take a shit in the game,
it pops up an ad for Norman Rita's had a
TV show where it was him riding around like the
US on a motorcycle, just like talking to people, kind
of like a diner's drive in and dive type of situation.
And it was on AMC and it was actually active
around twenty nineteen when the game came out, so they
had the ad in there as since you've played the

(01:07:40):
director's cut. Well, I think both of you played the
director's cut, so you don't know. Initially the drinks that
are Bridge Energy inside your private room used to be
Monster astor Baby. They changed it for the director's cut.

Speaker 1 (01:07:51):
Why did they change that? Do you know?

Speaker 2 (01:07:53):
I'm sure licensing just the ad Yeah, the ad placement licensing.
They couldn't reap it for directors to cut. That's another
fun Coajima. He just likes to add drop You'll you'll
probably see that through. I'm sure des Stranding too as well,
is going to have some fun stuff like that.

Speaker 3 (01:08:07):
Yeah, I will say something to your point when since
we're talking about the room, the safe house is what
they call it in the game, I will say that
this is an example of Kojima design that I actually
really like and something that from what I understand about
the Metal Gear series is that he has a tendency
to have fourth wall breaking antics in a lot of

(01:08:28):
his different games. And I'm sure will you can probably
confirm this. But this is something, of course where several moments,
like you said, Rick, you know, you get to see
Norman ritis get in the shower, you know, piss and shit,
that sort of thing. And then of course he's sitting
on the bed and the camera does zoom around in
a very cool way. It is very on its nose,
It is very in your face. It is very much
a look at how smart we are and with the design.

Speaker 2 (01:08:49):
That we have.

Speaker 3 (01:08:49):
But I will say that I kind of it worked
for me in an interesting way. Seeing the baby on
the wall, seeing the armory of the different equipment that
you stack up over time. That is the kind of
stuff that I do like like drinking the energy drinks,
going into modifying. This is something that they change with
the director's cut. Is where you're able to, you know,
modify the color of your outfit, the color of your vehicles.
That sort of thing I think is very wholly unique

(01:09:13):
in its design itself. I liked it, and especially when
they played around with it. If I'm not mistaken. There's
also like a like a neu Automata cellar blade where
you feel like you're moving the camera while he's in
the shower. He'll like take the camera and like shove
you away or something like that.

Speaker 4 (01:09:27):
He does.

Speaker 1 (01:09:27):
Really you can't get a look at the taint.

Speaker 2 (01:09:30):
When he's sitting on the bed. You can't look at
his feet. If you look at his feet too much
and try to zoom in, he punches the camera in
the face.

Speaker 1 (01:09:36):
That's great, that's great, that made me laugh. And well
I shouldn't say that. I'll get canceled. That's pretty funny. No,
looking at the taint, I you know this is no meat.
This is purely yeah, no shmeet, that's you'd think, what
did I pay for the director's cut? For fucking bullshit? Coajima?

Speaker 4 (01:09:55):
Get you.

Speaker 2 (01:09:57):
Give me the Norman reads. No, No, I can't say
it like you said.

Speaker 1 (01:10:00):
I'm gonna that's.

Speaker 2 (01:10:02):
For the Patreons only. You gotta subscribe to hear.

Speaker 1 (01:10:04):
The fall I was gonna say, is it made me
laugh when to be kick the camera if you try
to look up for her skirt, I don't. Yeah, we're
getting this is a pixel project Radio after Dark. I
will say this is purely a taste thing. I'm not
saying this is good or bad. It pissed me off.
It pisses me off every time. Specifically when he does
the thing where he gets his face into the camera

(01:10:26):
and like taps it and then like points back, you know,
like the soyjack thing, like he's pointing. That pisses me off.
I don't know why you were with a hitten that
one specifically, like the other ones, Like there are other
times where he'll like kind of glance at the camera
and then like you know, tilt his head like hey,
check that out. But that one where he just gets
in and he points back, that makes me so mad.

(01:10:47):
I don't know why.

Speaker 3 (01:10:49):
We talk about menus in gameplay in grating. Okay, I'm
so glad you brought that up, Rick, because it was
I was on a treacherously close to not remembering this.
There when you're in facilities and you're preparing for trips
and you're going from way station to way station, there's
a function where you have to unload equipment that you
either don't use or don't need. And it's actually very

(01:11:11):
smart because there's a lot of this game where it's
like you really have to be picky about what you
bring along with you and the trips. To that end,
you have to recycle a lot of equipment. This is
good because this gives me materials. There is a jingle
in this game after you're done with cycling. There's like
a national anthem blaring, and I don't know if you
can splice this in Rick if you know the SoundBite

(01:11:32):
that I'm thinking of, but it's it has this stupid
fucking picture of a character named Brigitt Stran and she
says thank you for your service, and it's like a
it's like I'm in an army brigade or it's like
a I don't know how to describe it. It's so annoying.

Speaker 1 (01:11:46):
It's fun hated every time you can't skip it, you know,
it's funny that kind of There is a through line
of like aggressive capitalism that's a part of this. Like
I saw a tweet the other day, and listen, I'm
going to say this upfront. One don't ever take, you know,
politics from video game podcasters seriously. Two things you should
never take seriously from video game podcasters myself included philosophy

(01:12:08):
and politics. But there's like, and I'm not prepared to
talk on this obviously because I haven't beat the game yet,
but there's like this aggressive through line of capitalism taken
to its extreme, like somebody called this. I saw a
tweet about how this is like a very communist game,
and I read there like like the whys, and I
was like, Okay, that feels like a bit of a stretch,
like I feel like I'm being taken advantage of by

(01:12:29):
a corporation to do all their menial dirty work, boots
on the groundwork, so they can get the credit for
rebuilding America. But I guess that's just me, Like and again,
will you're you're doing the like the like oo hoo hands.
Maybe that goes somewhere, Maybe they want me to feel
that way I am, Like I said, I'm not. This
isn't a critique of the game. That's just how I
feel at this point in time. I'm barely into chapter three,

(01:12:51):
so like that could change. I could they could have me,
They could have me right where they want me, and
I wouldn't even know, but I'm looking for it. It
does feel that way though, Like you get that it
feels like adjacent to Fallout almost, you know, like it's
that like obnoxious a.

Speaker 3 (01:13:06):
Little bit, if I'm not mistaken, the Bridges, the Bridges Company,
it's almost like a it's almost to the sin of
like how China handles a lot of the corporations that
are state run organizations, like they're businesses that are independent,
but they're like it distinctly controlled by this day And
I think it's like one of those things that also

(01:13:27):
I hate that I'm making so many last of as comparisons,
But it's like feder where it's like a paramilitary organization,
but it's also like the only organization left in the
world that's run by some type of centralized governing force.
And I feel like that's what bridges HQ is, like
they're the only force that has direct connection to like
the governing bodies of the US anymore. That's how I

(01:13:50):
interpreted it.

Speaker 2 (01:13:51):
That is that is accurate.

Speaker 1 (01:13:53):
It just it feels more like I'm they're lackey, whereas
I never felt like FEDRA had lackeys. They just had
like everybody was part of the cause. I don't know.
I again, I haven't thought about this enough to you know,
really explain it or get into it.

Speaker 2 (01:14:05):
But it's the kind of thing that pops up to
not to cut you off there, but you know, as
you feel, I feel like you're feeling exactly how they
want you to feel in that moment, just because as
we later on get into the story, you know, obviously
not to boil anything up front or kind of tiptoe
too far into it. You have to go do all
these things and you kind of have to buy in, right.
You don't just come on board and say I'm a

(01:14:25):
good soldier. I'm gonna be with the UCA. You know,
they have to convince you. And during this time of
you playing through the game and making these connections, not
only do they try to convince you to be on board,
but while you're doing it, you're kind of like convincing
yourself that this is the proper thing to be doing.
And you see that throughout the game as it goes
once again, friction points, friction points. The video game. Sam

(01:14:48):
is not, you know, gung ho ready to do this.
There's always a reason that he's doing it, and each
step of the way carries a lot of friction for that.

Speaker 1 (01:14:57):
Yeah, I'm glad that I am glad that I I
am right where they want me.

Speaker 2 (01:15:01):
I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker 4 (01:15:02):
So Zoom pieces.

Speaker 2 (01:15:17):
Zoom pisus.

Speaker 1 (01:15:20):
H music and sound. I you know, I'm not gonna
say too much on this. I already said throughout I
think that the script of the cue music, you know,
where he blocks the scene and he pulls the camera
back and low Roar comes out to play. I think
that's really viby, and I think it is you know,
low low roar. I wasn't familiar with them before this.

(01:15:41):
It very much sounds like what the theater majors in
high school would listen to, you know, like when when
they were you know, going through the feelings or whatever.
It's it's really viby. I like it. I mean I don't.
I don't dislike it. It's kind of byorky ish, maybe.

Speaker 3 (01:15:56):
Byork really, yeah, sort of.

Speaker 1 (01:15:59):
I do like that. I like the cute music. It
worked for me every time. Hilarious because then they never
send you the reminders. The screen is totally like empty,
just showing the landscape, and your sound is cut out too,
So when you trip down a mountain, the soundtrack just
keeps playing. You don't actually hear it, you just see
you tumbling here. Funny. But in addition to that, and
we'll get to four Cell's score too, I appreciate how

(01:16:22):
often there's just no music, it's just silence. You just
hear the world. I like that a lot. That contributed
to the to the feeling of like loneliness and isolation,
the extreme vast emptiness of the world now that the
death stranding, you know, wiped everything out.

Speaker 2 (01:16:40):
Definitely agree there.

Speaker 3 (01:16:42):
Yeah, it's one of those things again, and for fear
of repeating myself, I won't go too long on it.
But yeah, to your point, Rick, it's the moments of
quietude of going over the mountaintops and hearing the wind
blow over like the peaks as you're trudging along through
the snow, and you're aware of what you're dealing with,
You're aware of the way that you're managing. You're aware

(01:17:03):
that you're in a situation you probably don't want to
be in because that point in the game is really hard,
or or you're missing something that you really should have.
But it's those moments where you're out there and you're
you kind of see where you have to go and
circling back to another thing you said, Rick about that
clearly defined objective, those pinpointings, those those easily manageable bite

(01:17:25):
side objectives, is a perfect compliment to this game, and
it's it's sound design, and it's one of those things
that I love. Yeah, it's just hearing those sounds of nature,
the running waters, the you know, the springs and the
grass and just like Sam's footfalls, it's great. It's it's
incredibly well done.

Speaker 2 (01:17:43):
It's funny and juxtaposing the nature and the quietness that
you both mentioned, which I also very much enjoy. I
also really like how it's kind of pierced occasionally by
the notes, you know, the flags what are they called, posts,
whatever people can drop in the world that you can
like run over, and then postbox y books boxes. Yeah,

(01:18:03):
well well not just the postbox, but like the little
like the smile face, the status signs, the signs yeah yeah,
the signs yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:18:10):
So I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:18:11):
I love being able to when you're running through an
area that's uploaded to the Chirro network and you, you know,
run through a little thumbs up posts and it gives
you a like, and it gives the personal like and
you hear keep on keeping on. It's that kind of
thing that reminds you how you're connected. And like I
mentioned how it just kind of cuts into you know,
that more quiet sound. But then you remember, although it's

(01:18:31):
quiet and you're alone in this time, you're still technically
around people. You're using things that others have built and
others have made in order to make your life and
your deliveries a little bit easier. So you always have
that bit of connectedness while you're in your solitude. So
it's interesting. It's very much a part of the games
as far as how they want to do it, and

(01:18:52):
I think it comes across very well. So that plays
a lot with the sounds.

Speaker 1 (01:18:56):
Yeah, yeah, I like I like those too. Those are nice,
and I mean not really to music, but those give
you a little boost of stamina to which kind of,
you know, contributes to helping other players. I think that's
really cool. Forcell's original compositions are nice too. I'm not
crazy about them, but I think they fit.

Speaker 4 (01:19:14):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:19:15):
Some of it is sort of that post rock kind
of like low Roar a little bit, but just with
a lot more electronic instrumentation. But other stuff like when
the bets come around, or like when you experience the
first void out in the very beginning. I think that
track is actually chiral carcass culling. It's just this sheets
of sound approach, this overwhelming force of sonic wall that

(01:19:41):
is meant to like force feelings of anxiousness and overwhelming
and just intensity. It's and then a lot of his
other tracks too, are just sort of in the background.
They don't try to step in front of the acting
that's going on or even the talking in the environment.

(01:20:01):
I think it's appropriate. I'd be interested to see, because
at this point in the game, you know, there's not
a ton at least where I am, a ton of
his tracks. They're there, but they don't stick out. I
wonder because I took a look through the ost and
I see a lot of named tracks named after people,
and I'd be curious to hear how much more of

(01:20:24):
those come in another I mean, speaking of music, nursery
rhymes are used prominently in this prominently two of them.
London Bridges is one, which, of course, of course they
chose them, of course it is, and then another one
that I think is made up for this game. If
it's not, then I'm not familiar with it, the like

(01:20:45):
see the sunset the day is ending. Yeah, I don't.
I don't think that's that's original.

Speaker 2 (01:20:51):
I think, right, I think it is, And if it's not,
please correct us. But I'm pretty sure it is because
a lot of the lyrics talk about being on the beach,
so I'd be a little surprised unless they just tweaked
it from something else.

Speaker 1 (01:21:04):
They do a lot of imagery to suggest not rebirth motifs,
but duality. In sam in particular, The most prominent is
Sam as a parental figure of sorts. It could also
be read as being one with a baby with one's
infant self, since there's a scene with both of them
nude and crying, which makes sense in context, I promise.

(01:21:26):
So that's that's suggestive of a duality between man and child,
man and father, man and infant. Both are represented, and
I'm very curious to see if that goes anywhere. If
they do, then the London Bridges thing makes you know,
it's just like of course, and then also because of
you know, their name is Bridges, so it's like, do

(01:21:47):
you get it. Yeah, it's one of that things. And
also like you know, nursery rhymes, they get creepy and
things like this. You know, that's something that maybe they
took from Silent Hills that we never got to see.
Who knows. I'm going to for this edit probably use
more of four Cell's tracks, just because one, I would
you know, like to highlight those more, and two because

(01:22:10):
this is a bigger game. I just don't want to
risk getting, you know, an email telling me to stop it.
I haven't got that before. But you know, it doesn't
mean that it's not coming, So I'll probably highlight four
cell stuff, except whenever we talk about low war, you know,
so it should be good. Okay, we really took a

(01:22:47):
Kojima approach on this one. I don't know that we've
ever gone an hour and a half before getting into
the story. And of course I'll edit it because we
you know, we took a break and we chatted a bit.
But we are going to go through a little bit
of the story today, not as far as I think
I had originally planned, which is fine. The next two
episodes we'll talk. It might be a more condensed approach

(01:23:07):
than we have in the past. That might be the
direction this show is going anyway, we'll see, But for today,
we're definitely, let's say, going to get through chapter one,
episode one, I should say prologue and episode one. Let's
go ahead and get started. Let's repatriate and see what
Sam Porter Bridges is up to in the story of

(01:23:28):
Death Stranding. It starts with a quote. I think it's

(01:23:55):
fairly straightforward, just trying to say the rope along with
the stick, are two of mankind's oldest tools. The stick
to keep the bad away, the rope to bring the
good toward us. They were our first friends, our own invention.
Wherever there were people, there were the rope and stick
that's cobo ave from Nahwa. Pretty self explanatory. We open gorgeous,
gorgeous landscape. This is where we get to see the cliffs,

(01:24:20):
the animals. There's some vegetation in some animals totally untainted
by civilization. But we do see these black wisps going
from sky to earth. Animals they scent something that we don't.
You know, that happens a lot. You know, animals will
sense danger way before humans do. They start to run.
If you're ever in the forest and the animals, you know,

(01:24:40):
are quiet where they start running, you do the same
they know. But birds begin dropping as rain begins to fall.
It's really striking. I really think the first hour and
a half or so two hours of this is extremely good,
really really good. Sam our main character, Sam Porter bridges.
He is fleeing too. He's on a motorcycle and he

(01:25:02):
just murks, crashes into this innocent bystander of a woman
and he loses his bike. Sam takes cover this rain
that's falling. This is called time fall. We can just
explain this now. I think timefall is kind of a
cool concept. It's when it touches the ground, it kind
of turns to normal rain. But whatever it touches, it

(01:25:23):
accelerates it in time because of the chiral matter that's
present within it. So if it rains on you, for example,
you age extremely rapidly. When it rains on the ground,
you can literally watch the grass growing, very cool concept
and then quickly dying. Oh yeah, yeah, so you want
to get the heck out of there, so you take cover.

(01:25:45):
But this is where we're introduced to the bets too,
This invisible demon guttural utterations. Just walking around, you can
see it. The way they walk is so cool because
you can't place well, first of all, you don't know
what they are, You don't know what for they take,
and you can't really place it because their handprints as

(01:26:05):
they walk look just like you or I placing her
hands on a desk one at a time. There's no
way that we can associate that with a living creature.
We don't know what form we're dealing with, and that
to me is particularly frightening.

Speaker 2 (01:26:20):
Yeah, there's the real raptors in the kitchen moment. Yeah,
in that cave. So I really enjoyed that opening remembering
that was a good time.

Speaker 1 (01:26:28):
That woman that we marked into is in here too,
and she keeps us quiet. The thing runs away. Sam.
Sam can sense these things. Sam's what's called. Sam has
something called dooms, which I don't fully understand, but you
know it lets him sense the bets. But now that
we're safe, this woman speaks. What I wrote here is

(01:26:50):
she says a string of incomprehensible syllables that form what
I believe our words and are going to make podcasting
about this game exceedingly difficult tears chi allergy.

Speaker 2 (01:27:02):
So you have dooms like me, I've got the extincsion factor.

Speaker 1 (01:27:06):
I think you got me be what's your level?

Speaker 2 (01:27:10):
You can see them right?

Speaker 4 (01:27:11):
No, but I can says them.

Speaker 1 (01:27:14):
Little too then, And at that that's at the time
where I was like, what the fuck is they are
they talking about?

Speaker 2 (01:27:19):
Did they drop in proper nouns? Baby, proper nouns all
over them?

Speaker 1 (01:27:23):
That's Kojima's trick, is he he froze everything at you,
like he expects you to understand his world, but he
doesn't want to explain it to you until he does,
Like he picks his times to info dump on you,
and other times he just does nothing and says, you
just got to figure it out. It's a very it's
a very Kojima way of world building. I guess this

(01:27:46):
woman is Fragile. That's her name, Fragile of the Fragile Express.

Speaker 2 (01:27:51):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:27:51):
And she knows who Sam is.

Speaker 4 (01:27:55):
Sam Porter preaches.

Speaker 2 (01:28:00):
The man who.

Speaker 1 (01:28:01):
Delavers somehow he's heard of her too, but she knows
him as the man who delivers. He's heard of her.
We're setting up this this sort of world. I still
don't know how Sam got that moniker the man who delivers,
and like how we're known from the start, I'm assuming
I'm just not far enough in this story. This is
where we get our first taste of gameplay and Nick.

(01:28:23):
This is where I call it the overwhelming maximalist barrage
of on screen information HUDs, colors, and indicators. It is
capital T two, Capital M much told you I got
your back here.

Speaker 3 (01:28:34):
You got it. Thank thank you, Rick. I'm glad that
she said that. I agree with you, though, in terms
of the assessment of like the very start of this game,
this is a really, I mean, visually at the very least,
is very strong introduction to this game, especially as we
go later on. As he starts meeting more people and
you kind of, you know, get introduced to the layout
of the mechanics of what's happening in the lore here.

Speaker 1 (01:28:57):
Yeah, so I think the way that we're going to
have to do this game is to be a bit
more liberal in our summation than maybe we would like
to be. So what's going on now? Sam gets commissioned
for a new job of corpse disposal from this company
called Bridges. We're gonna learn way more about Bridges soon.
It's notable that Sam has that last name, Sam Porter Bridges.

(01:29:20):
It's what he does, it's who he is. It's not subtle,
but it's there at all. So we're doing corpse disposal
because in this world when corpses, when people die and
they turn into corpses, they start to do something called necritizing.
It's again, it's very striking the way that they show
this here. You're kind of like positioned in the back

(01:29:42):
of this vehicle as you're driving with this corpse. You're
going along with this corpse disposal guy because you can
sense the bts, those invisible demons, because you have dooms,
you can sense them, and that's you know how these
guys are gonna keep safe and you see this corpse
that's like wrapped up in bandages or whatever, like oozing
black liquid into the sky. It's extremely cool.

Speaker 2 (01:30:05):
And the necro, the whole idea of going necro and
what happens there. As we continue this part, I feel
like it's one of the most interesting parts of the game.
And also, you know, the thing you want to happen
the least, right, I feel like you go out of
your way in most cases to avoid that happening. But
it's so cool. I love seeing it on YouTube, not
in my game.

Speaker 1 (01:30:24):
So as we're riding to dispose of this corpse, disaster
strikes very tense scene the BT's attack and we can
see how overwhelmingly destructive they are. They crash the jeep,
the jeep flips. Time fall is raining now causing like
vegetation to grow. One of the guys gets pinned under
the jeep and the time fall is hitting his face.

(01:30:46):
He's aging like and we're watching it. It is insane.
We're in the middle of a BT field and that
starts with B and that rhymes with P and that
stands for pool, which is trouble. Really really, it's It's
wild how much destruction these things are are raining down.
We really don't know what kind of shit these these

(01:31:08):
guys are in.

Speaker 3 (01:31:09):
I will say that this is one of the strongest
moments for me visually. This is when I start really
kind of understanding as you learned later on. You know,
it is as Sam kind of builds out as Kit.
You see this like really awesome expansion in like the concept,
the idea of like what Yojihin Kawa like wanted Sam
to look like, alongside of like the rest of the
character's design. But this is like when we talk about

(01:31:31):
enemy design, environmental design coming together in a true master
class alongside of kojimas notably albeit amateuristic directorial tendencies. The
the shooting here is like actually really great, Like the
imagery of the time fall coming down on these porters,
the sound design of them getting snatched away by BT's

(01:31:52):
If I'm not mistaken, a couple of them get wiped
out by BT's or grabbed. Whatever happens when BT grabs them, Well.

Speaker 1 (01:31:58):
That's the cool part. That's what happens here. Is our
guy that gets you know, pinned under the jeep. I
think he gets grabbed by a BET, which we can
assume is a fate worse than death because he's screaming,
and the other guy that's not takes out a gun
and shoots him, you know. And then that guy in
turn gets grabbed by a BT by the leg. He

(01:32:20):
try he reaches for his gun to shoot himself, but
he drops it so like he's and what seals the
deal is as he's being like lifted into the sky
by these invisible BT demons, he takes out a knife
and just starts stabbing himself, which is so anti instinct
for humans that we have to assume that whatever these
BT's do is worse than death. Otherwise this wouldn't even

(01:32:42):
be an option. Our brains instincts would not let us
stab ourselves like that. This has to be worse than death.
This is also where we see like from coming out
of the ground like an inky black tar, very cool,
so so like pt you know, very horror film. It's
extremely cool, and you know, debris is flying into the

(01:33:02):
sky humanoid figures, they're towering, colossal, and this is where
that this stranger sort of falls down slowly, floats down slowly,
does the shush sign with his lips, and this is
where a void out happens. One of you might have

(01:33:36):
to correct me on this. A void out is basically
a big explosion that happens from BT's right.

Speaker 2 (01:33:41):
Yep. So it's when BTS get a hold of biomatter,
essentially grabbing a human that's still alive, and yet that's
what causes the void.

Speaker 3 (01:33:49):
Out or or the human completing the process of necrotization
or becoming a BTS is what ultimately does cause a
void out as well, which listeners, that'll just I'm sorry,
is that right?

Speaker 1 (01:34:03):
Does it?

Speaker 2 (01:34:03):
To correct you there, that's just makes a BT is
a human neckwork. But it's actually the process of the
BT coming in contact I will go too far into it,
but no, it's the BT coming in contact with a
human that's what causes the true void out. Okay, human
a human dying and going full necro that makes the
BT Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:34:19):
I must have been confused there because it's not super
well explained. But for for my thing is that it's
just for reference in scale, a void out has the
size and the impact of like a nuclear explosion, a smaller,
smaller megaton nuclear explosion.

Speaker 1 (01:34:35):
Yeah, it's disastrous, and this particular void out that occurs here,
presumably because this mysterious man that's shushing us, it makes
me think of that it's always sunny thing he's shushing me,
but uh, he does it, and it's it wipes out
this whole city, Like we learned shortly, everybody here is
dead because of this, except for Sam, who is a repatriot.

(01:34:57):
What is a repatriot, well, a patriot it as somebody
that can come back from the dead. And the way
he does this is like through this weird, bizarre dream.
Sam's dreams are a huge part of this. They always
take place on an isolated, kind of decrepit gray beach.
In this one, a nude Sam finds a crying baby.

(01:35:18):
He picks it up, He's crying, the baby's crying. They hug.
This is what I was saying. The duality of Sam
as as an infant, the child Sam, and the adult
Sam that's me going through puberty just there, as well
as the paternal figure Sam. These are both really highlighted
a lot throughout this game, which is why I'm like
looking for like they're going to do something with this.

(01:35:39):
I know they are, I just don't know what yet.
These dreams happen a lot. This is a motif with Sam.
There's also a motif that comes up when Sam picks
up what's called a beach baby a BB. I think
it's beach baby a BB is how they're referred to
bridge baby, bridge baby. Yes, every time he does, he

(01:35:59):
kind of sees through the baby's eyes. Who is presumably
the dad talking to the baby. That also calls it
b B, which is weird that it wouldn't call it
by its name. But whatever, you see this a lot too.
Absolutely no desire to call out every time that comes up,
because it happens a lot. Sam comes back to life
for Patriot. He can return to life from a place

(01:36:20):
known as the Seam when he's killed in the seam,
follow the strand to guide Sam's soul to his body
to bring him back. God damn it. And that takes
us into episode one that was the prologue. I think
the prologue is really, really, really good. I really do.
I mean credit where he's due. Do I think he's
a good writer.

Speaker 2 (01:36:39):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:36:39):
Do I think he's a good Do I think he
has good instincts as far as cinematography and creating a world? Yes,
I do, at least in so far as death Strand
and can't speak to Metal Gear Solid, but this whole prologue,
when we don't know what's going on, it's really invigorating,
it's exciting.

Speaker 3 (01:36:56):
And it's because he's not going out of his way
to explain it right that mystery and we know what
happens later obviously for the folks who've played the game.
But I think that, yeah, I wholeheartedly agree with you.
The introduction to this game is just incredibly strong and exciting.
And this is the part of the game where they
do a lot of show, don't tell. And that's what

(01:37:17):
I constantly harp on about is what makes really good
world building and really good lord building is you show
what happens to these characters. You show the impacts in
the the consequences of the world, and that's what they
do a lot here.

Speaker 2 (01:37:30):
Yep. And I just feel like you're pulling too one, Rick.
I love the fact, honestly that you haven't beaten it yet,
because I think you're pulling a lot of strands intended.
And I feel like, hopefully I can't speak because I
know Nick not to bury the lead there, but he
you know, take it or leave it. A lot of

(01:37:51):
the times towards the end for the story. But I
feel like, yeah, I feel like you'll be rewarded for
your presumptions, but kind of your digging somebody who you know,
not critique. I don't want to go too crazy with it,
but you know you definitely inges media in a way
that is like, Okay, let me kind of look ahead
and pay attention and not just be on the ride
for the roller coaster. I feel like because you're doing that,

(01:38:11):
you're going to be rewarded in the end versus someone else,
not particularly not Nick, but it's just like somebody else
who'd maybe just been like I don't care what's going on,
and this is neat. Sure, sometimes you are looking for
stuff that's in there and you're not rewarded because you're like,
oh I expected better or more, et cetera. But I
think you're knocking on some of the right doors right
now and a lot of your questions will be answered.

Speaker 1 (01:38:32):
I do try. I will say I told you too
that I spoiled myself on like the ending. What I
spoiled myself on inadvertently, by the way, has nothing to
do with any of this, And I genuinely have no
idea like like that spoiler almost means nothing to me
because it's so out of context. Yeah, I spoilers aside.
I genuinely don't know what's going on. But episode one

(01:38:54):
is titled bridget We meet the coroner turned doctor and
like I think in actual Frankenstein based on the way
his head looks, Kojima's monster dead Man Guilma del Toro,
who is well acquainted with the dead this this begins,
Kojima is pissing me off. Here he explains what's Oh,
I know, buddy, I know. He explains what the void

(01:39:15):
out is. We're in Central not Central, not City was
wiped out. Wow, I wrote, Central, not City was wiped out.
We're in Central not City. No, we're not. We're in Capital,
not City, I think is where we are. Dead Man
gives us a new job. We're delivering morphine to the president, uh,
the President of America. She is dying of cancer. This

(01:39:35):
is like on the hush hush. We're kind of shunted
into this without any like say of it, and the
realization start to set in the President of America, a
country which, by the way, kind of doesn't exist as
we know it today. One is a woman and two
is not just any woman. It's the woman that raised you.
It's your mom, you know. And we don't know why,
Like Sam has a weird relationship with his mom, not

(01:39:58):
on good terms whatsoever. It seems to be mostly from
Sam's side. We don't know, and it is not explained
for a while. We just know that Sam really is
hesitant about seeing them, but he's kind of he's kind
of pushed into it by Bridges, by dead Man who
works at Bridges, and by another character we're going to meet,
Die Hartman who works at Bridges.

Speaker 3 (01:40:20):
Die Hardman, Hardman.

Speaker 2 (01:40:22):
I love Die hard Man.

Speaker 3 (01:40:24):
Not to be confused with Hartman.

Speaker 2 (01:40:26):
I know, dude.

Speaker 1 (01:40:27):
And at some point in here I wrote, Butch Hartman too,
like creator of the Fairly Odd Parents. I'm all over
the place. But yeah, you know you're set up with this.
I don't know at this point in the story, are
you are you? Are you? Are you thinking of anything?

Speaker 4 (01:40:43):
Do you know?

Speaker 1 (01:40:43):
Are you having any ideas of where this is going?
I certainly didn't.

Speaker 2 (01:40:47):
Yeah, you don't quite know where it's going yet. And
even like trying to think back to like twenty nineteen,
brain playing it because obviously now I'm like, oh, I
can kind of see the pieces of the puzzle falling
into place.

Speaker 1 (01:40:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:40:56):
No, it very much sets you up to be like, hey,
you're dropped into the middle of this. All of these
people have these relationships before you, and it's really kind
of dragging it out for you to like learn how
they're all connected. Who is really meeting for the first time,
who already knows each other, We already know Sam's reputation
precedes him as the man who delivers. So it's really

(01:41:16):
kind of getting caught up on your own as the
player into this world.

Speaker 3 (01:41:19):
Yeah, I for this part of the game. Again, it's
been a minute since I actually like was here, so
this is really refreshing my memory. But going back and
thinking of where we're at right now, I'm still like
really interested in the world building and the story and
that Koujima is laying out. I'm like truly very much
interested in kind of piecing all of the different esoteric

(01:41:42):
parts together, learning about who this strange man is that
came to us right before the void out learning, but like,
what is this weird relationship that I have with that
or that rather that Sam has with bridget Strand and
everything that's going on in this weird post apocalyptic America.
Why is a man with a Frankenstein scar talking to me?

(01:42:03):
It's interesting at the very least, and I'm curious at
this point what's gonna happen?

Speaker 1 (01:42:07):
Speaking of that strained relationship, we do take the morphine
to bridget strand Sam does not want to be there,
you know, she's and she's on her deathbed. Basically, she
is in chemotherapy, it looks like, and she's kind of
giving you these her last words. She Sam believes America
is finished. She doesn't. She wants to rebuild, and she

(01:42:30):
begs you to go west, and she says she wanted
you to go instead of Omily. Omily perks Sam's ears
up right away. Omily, you don't know that anything about
it yet, but in her final moment, she sort of
begs you to go, and she pulls herself off of
the hospital equipment and the two of you tumbled to
the floor. She says she loves you, and she dies
on the spot. What is so interesting about the way

(01:42:51):
this scene is shot? So fascinating? It is terrifying and
uncomfortable and weirdly sexual. First of all, it's very clear
that Sam is associating her with the BT's like she's
crawling toward him and leaving these black handprints that the
bets leave. But and he's terrified, and she like she
pushes you against the wall, or you push yourself against

(01:43:13):
the wall, and she drapes herself on you with her
hand on your chest. And it has this like Greek
sexuality to it, like sexualizing the mother, you know, thinking
of Oedipus, And it's so overt that I cannot believe
this is an accident. I just have no idea what
the hell could be going on with this and why

(01:43:36):
this is so sexual and uncomfortable the way that she
is positioning herself on her son. Presumably, I just don't know.
It is very it's dramatic, it's effective. I like it.
It's just there's got to be something to what's going
on here.

Speaker 2 (01:43:55):
Like it's clear there's a much stronger connection than you know,
what you would think of as a mother and a son. Yeah,
so that is of course something that as the game continues,
you kind of see more and it pulls itself out.
But yes, I agree with you there as far as
some of the overt nature, I didn't quite get sexual,

(01:44:16):
but I can definitely understand like sensual. Like I mentioned,
there's there's more of a connection there than just like
this is my son. And I want to not get
into too many spoilers, like yeah, it gets explained fairly
late into the game, but it all rolls out really
really quickly in those last couple of chapters.

Speaker 1 (01:44:35):
I didn't mean like HBO sexual. I meant like, you know,
like for sure, you know, you look at like like
the Greek god myths, you know, where everybody is fornicating
with everybody mother's brothers, sisters, cousins, you know, and that
kind of sexual like you know, hand on the chest,
like gazing up into the eyes, you know, that sort
of like classical sexual tension. I don't know, look at me.

(01:44:56):
Do you think I know anything about this?

Speaker 3 (01:44:59):
Yeah? I think it's definitely interesting imagery. Also, it's a
it's curious, uh, the imagery of dead Man wearing this
like red jacket as well. Leading up to this point,
he's almost traced up like a I mean, throughout the
game largely, he is dealing a lot with the medical practice,
being a medical practitioner both to Sam but at several

(01:45:19):
points in the game BB as well, and the fact
that he's there and kind of presidented administering like this
process with both of them. It is very interesting. I
can see what you're saying, though a little bit closer
with how the it's the fear of the bets is
being combined with this idea, the presence of like Bridge's

(01:45:41):
strand and the fact that he is, like strangely like
he is almost repulsed by her in a way, and
in this there's this like very weird physical contact. And
this is something that we're going to go back around
to later. It's not necessarily simply a repulsion to Bridget's herself.
Well specifically, it's a repulsion that Sam has with all people.

(01:46:05):
He can't be touched. He has an allergic reaction to
being touched by another human, which kind of combines in
with the themes of what this game is. This feeling
of isolation, this feeling of disconnectedness, and another thing that
the field feeds into Sam's presence at this point in
the game, of the fact that he does not believe
that America should be reconnected through the Kyle Network. He

(01:46:26):
thinks it's a bad idea. But yet it's like this
combination of all of these things coming in at once,
and of course we see die Hardman coming in later
at the end of the scene to manage British strand,
and you can tell that he is very imposing presence
overall as to what's happening.

Speaker 1 (01:46:44):
Yeah, Diehard Man, these names. He is a man that's
wearing a suit like he looks like a government official,
that is wearing a skull face plate with like a
hinged jaw.

Speaker 3 (01:46:58):
You know what's funny is that most listeners don't know this.
He's actually one of the two characters from Army of Two.
You just don't know that.

Speaker 1 (01:47:07):
If that's no, if that's a joke. It it went
over my head. I don't get it. It is terrible.

Speaker 2 (01:47:11):
It was terrible.

Speaker 3 (01:47:13):
It's they wear they wear like masks on their face
when they're going they're like two like fucking bro bird
dudes there. But it's it's not they're both white. It's
it's not even his Army of Two a movie. It's
a it's a game. It's the three sixty games. It's
like the first cover shooter after Gears of War. That's
like the most fucking bro dude ripping like shields off

(01:47:34):
of cars and like shooting rocket launchers. It's is incredible.
It's actually an amazing game.

Speaker 1 (01:47:39):
So sorry, it no worries. He but but he's got
that on and it's just never explained or pointed out.
I know at some point, you know, mild spoilers. I know,
at some point in the game it comes off. I
just don't know why it's there. I'm sure it'll you know,
I'm sure it'll be explained. But he he's no nonsense.
You know, he's kind of keeping you in line. He's like,

(01:47:59):
we're we're carrying on Bridget's legacy. You know, we're going
to rebuild America. Public doesn't need to know we need
to get her cremated because you know she's going to necrotize.
Public's not going to know. We're going to keep things
running because you know, America needs to be rebuilt. And
guess what, buddy, corpse disposal died in the void out.
Guess that leaves you you're already on the clock, which
is a quote. I love being chastised for capital when

(01:48:22):
my leisure. But now we take you know, this is
a very striking part of the game too, where we
carry our dead mother's corpse on our back as cargo
to the incinerator, and it is a long hike. It's

(01:49:05):
really striking imagery.

Speaker 3 (01:49:07):
Yeah, it's I mean, it's pretty cool. It's pretty pretty neat, and.

Speaker 1 (01:49:10):
Like, think about what it means, right, the death of
the mother, right, the death of fertility, the death of
that that which raised you.

Speaker 2 (01:49:19):
Having to carry that burden.

Speaker 3 (01:49:20):
Yeah, I will say that it pisses me off that
we know there are other Porters in this world, but
we don't literally have anybody else to do this job
except for Sam Porter fucking Bridges, the President's son, last
surviving assumed survived child.

Speaker 1 (01:49:37):
Hey, listen that this is like, we have Bridges here.
We're a family on this team. All right, you got
really we listen. We we didn't approve any pto.

Speaker 3 (01:49:47):
We're gonna need you to kind of put your feelings
to the side and come through for us.

Speaker 1 (01:49:51):
We'll give you a nice time.

Speaker 2 (01:49:52):
You just gotta remember Nick Sam Porter Bridges, he's the
man who delivers. That's like needing to put together a
three v three basketball team. You got one spot left,
and it's like, all right, do we put in Michael
Jordan or do we just pick up some guy off
the street, because oh no, this is Michael Jordan's dads
on the other teams like, no, you put in the
best you got and you take the President's body up
to the top of a damn mountain and you burn her.

Speaker 1 (01:50:16):
You burn her, you do, and credit where it's due again, Like,
I think the writing is quite bad in this game,
but this scene is shot very well. It's it's so
eerie that it becomes peaceful and it's clear like we
don't get a look into sam Psyche here, we can
only infer and I'm sure a replay of this would

(01:50:36):
give so many revelations, but he is clearly struggling with
this in some way, burning his mother, putting her in
the incinerator. But he has to otherwise you know she
will necro turn into a BT potentially because of woidout.
And speaking of BT's, this is our first Like BT Battlefield,
they do come down here. You got to get out

(01:50:56):
of there. This is where they start grabbing you from
the ground and again striking imagery just kind of tough
to play through. What I did? You know? They give
you three routes. They're like, you know, this one's dangerous,
this one's medium, this one just goes around, but it's
so long Hardman says, choose a route or don't just
get back here, because you're in serious danger. I straight

(01:51:17):
up sprint through the battlefield, shaking off demons. They try
to pull me to hell. I say no, no. I
get to an incline, I skyrim up the mountain and
just kind of jump down the mountain in a way
that I'm sure I'm not supposed to, in a way
that cheats physics, and I get away from the bets
and I just walk back. I don't know. It's very

(01:51:38):
funny to me. That's kind of my theme through this
game is I just go. I don't choose routes, man,
I go.

Speaker 2 (01:51:45):
You get to forge your own path, and that's the
important part. And the best part too is whenever you're
going through, like the back and forth and back and
forth and maybe hitting the same spot so you can
even see, like your footsteps, where's the last time you
went through a path? You're like, Okay, last time I
came through here, that sucked. Let me try a different way.
Or hey, look I got a well worn path, so
I can kind of continue to traverse that same go

(01:52:05):
and go and go. It all feeds in together.

Speaker 1 (01:52:07):
Well, I agree, I think that's really cool. Whenever I
noticed the foot footsteps, I think it's a really cool touch. Again,
I do kind of agree with Nick that the visual
language gets a little bit cluttered, especially you know when
you scan and you get to see the terrain marked
as like red, yellow, or blue depending on how dangerous

(01:52:27):
to safe it is, respectively. It is a lot to
be looking at. But I think the footprints are pretty cool.
We're going to finish up this chapter. There's literally one scene.
We'll come back to it, but I want to make
sure that when we do that scene, we talk about
the BB We're gonna pick up that next time in
episode two. As we get into episode two, So moving forward,

(01:52:53):
we might have to seriously compress how we talk about
this game, which is fine. Like I said, like that
might be how this show moves forward anyway. I don't know,
But there's just so much more to this story. My
understanding is there are like some teen chapters to this
We've we've got a lot to go, and I definitely

(01:53:14):
want to talk about the game. There's also a lot
of time spent delivering that really doesn't need to be
talked about because it's it's you know, the specialness the
The point of it is to be in it, and
it's tough to replicate that in an audio medium, but
we'll do our best. You know, listeners, you can trust us.
If you don't trust me, at least trust Nick, you know.

(01:53:36):
And if you can't trust Nick, I've already got Will.
How are you gonna not gonna trust Will?

Speaker 2 (01:53:40):
Easy?

Speaker 1 (01:53:41):
Willie? Uh, We're We're gonna do our best to get
through the rest of the story Episode two, Episode three
and talk through it. I'm looking forward to it. I
have no idea where this story is going. I have
some mild predictions of themes and routes and arcs, but
it's so up in the air right now that I

(01:54:02):
kind of am just going back to what you said, Will.
I just want to trust you know. I don't want
to think. I want to just be in the moment
and let Kojima take me on the ride that he
wants to take me on to that end. I want
to thank both of you for joining me. That this
has been great. I'm really happy that you two join
me for this. It's clear that you both have strong
feelings on this game, mostly positive, you know. Even though Nick,

(01:54:24):
I know a lot of this frustrates you, but it
does sound like you like this game overall, and it's
gonna be He's listeners. He's kind of shrugging, but I'm
looking forward to seeing where this goes. Now, speaking of listeners,
got to thank you for sticking around again. If this
is your first time here, I hope you love the
show today. Check out the back catalog as you wait
for more death Stranding or binge it if you're in

(01:54:46):
the future. For now, I would love for the two
of you to talk a little bit about Friday Night
Game Cast, a little bit about who you two are,
what you do on the show, and if you have
any suggestions for our first episode that folks can listen
to first timers, that'd be cool too. So tell us
a little bit about Friday Night Game Cast.

Speaker 3 (01:55:08):
Will I did this last time? Do you want to
run with this.

Speaker 2 (01:55:11):
Friday Night game Cast? So Friday Night Gamecast here you
got Nick and Will. We are two podcasters that talk
about games in their fullest, whether it be upcoming slash
new game reviews. We get a little frisky when we
talk about, you know, different game lists. We could have
the occasional news, so we're kind of the every man's
Game podcast, But we'd love to have you come and listen.

(01:55:33):
I think the big thing I would say for maybe
a first episode, especially if you're hopping in here listening
to Rick. We actually just did a recent episode with
mister Rick here himself talking about Expedition thirty three, which
was a blast of a time. It's a great game
and it's a great conversation. So that's where I would
tell you all to start.

Speaker 1 (01:55:53):
What about you, Nick, Do you have a suggestion for
a first episode?

Speaker 3 (01:55:56):
Honestly, I was gonna say the same thing that Will did.
If anybody wants to come in and talk about or
check out Expedition thirty three. It's the new hotness. It's
the new game of the year contender for twenty twenty five.
But we also have like a lot of other really
great reviews. We did an incredible review Will and I
specifically on Space Marine too, if you like more action
oriented games. We were joined by a mutual friend of

(01:56:19):
the show, Dave Jackson, as well as Sam Haney of
No Limits, and we talked about one of my favorite
JRPGs of all time, Metaphor Refuntasio, and it just really
really incredible games. A lot of our reviews can get
a little bit long in the long in the tooth,
But if you were here and you're at this point
in the Rick's episode, I will say that you clearly

(01:56:40):
love long form content, which means that you will love
Friday Night gamecast. So all of that being said, if
you want to find us, we are on all podcasting
podcasting platforms wherever you catch your podcasts, and if you
want to interact with us, we are primarily over on
Blue Sky and that's at FGC pod, at bsky something
something dot com loose guys.

Speaker 1 (01:57:01):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I never did update my profile like
some folks have, like you know, person A dot fun
or you know, like Willy dot Shaka Laka. I don't know, kid,
how'd you know?

Speaker 2 (01:57:13):
How'd you know?

Speaker 1 (01:57:16):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:57:16):
You can.

Speaker 1 (01:57:17):
You can find links to their stuff in the episode description.
I had no idea that Metaphor was one of your
favorite Jerifyg's. That's fascinating. The Expedition thirty three episode was
really really cool. We got into a lot of good conversations.
Nick took phenomenal notes for that one that really helped
guide the conversation forward. That's a great one to start
out with, but there's plenty in the catalog to check out.

(01:57:38):
You can find links to that in the episode description.
In the episode description as well, you can find links
to both the stuff that I mentioned as we went
through development, that Japanese National Parks article about the Boka,
which is pretty cool. You can also find links to
Pixel Project Radio's stuff the social media presence like Blue Sky, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok.

(01:58:00):
You can find a links to the Patreon. If you
like the show and want to show your support, you
can do that. Patreon gets you some special content as well,
Mortal Combat ninety five, Stellar Blade, Donkey Kong ninety four,
lots of stuff there. As always, ratings and reviews are
really appreciated on wherever you like to leave those, I
generally see them. If you're leaving comments on Spotify, which

(01:58:22):
I just realized as a thing, I don't check for
those very often. In fact, I just learned about them
not too long ago, so I've seen a couple know
that I am reading them. But if you comment on
something from like twenty twenty three, unless you tell me,
I probably won't see it. But I can tell you
for sure if you leave a review or a rating
on Apple podcasts or podcast addict. That's what I will see.

(01:58:44):
So if you want to do that, feel free. Once again,
thank you for listening. Once again, Thank you Nick and
Will for joining me. This has been great. Looking forward
to more discussions on death stranding. I am your host
as always, I'm Rick Podman and and we're signing off
for today. I'll catch you next time.

Speaker 2 (01:59:03):
Take care, HM

All Episodes

Fractured America | Death Stranding, Part I (Ep. 148)

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce

The Breakfast Club

Fudd Around And Find Out

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Fractured America | Death Stranding, Part I (Ep. 148)