As is true for a lot of his games, Kojima's writing is at its strongest when he doesn't explain anything. His narratives become a double-edged sword where he puts too much thought into everything, including the things that end up making the final product a lot less interesting at best and bloated at worst. In Death Stranding, he goes for quantity over quality, heaping new concepts and hard worldbuilding science into the niches between gorgeously slow, cinematic traversal segments. Mechanically, the game keeps itself afloat in this sea of science gibberish and Nothing plot with Nothing character development and Nothing narrative twists, but it's so wonderfully transgressively mechanical that I never found it ruining the experience, even when it got less fun listening to people explain things to me while I tried my darnedest not to fall off a cliff. And speaking of cliffs, Cliff's story was by far the most engaging part for me, Mads knocks it out of the park with his performance and is probably the most accessible character with the most relatable arc, being a guy who just loves his family -- unconstrained by the boundaries of life and death, and not needing any more explanation than that.
I'm hesitant to say that I'm excited for a sequel, I think making this into a full franchise will only elevate the fatigue of Kojima's quantity-over-quality hard worldbuilding revelry, but given how much effort he's putting into this concept, and how much he's playing with the boundaries of what the medium can do and what people will theoretically allow to be "a game," I think the world needs more of this.
My other problem is that it's built entirely on the "do small quests in a big sandbox open area" concept that MGSV did really well, but it never feels as satisfying as those side missions, maybe in part because there was more to do and more ways to approach tasks in MGSV versus DS' "just get from A -> B" mechanics. It's not bad for the main quests, but about 1/3 of the way in I found myself less interested in picking up side deliveries even if they were on my main route and started focusing on just the story. I anticipated this being something I'd pick up once in a while to do a few deliveries and feel satisfied with my work, but I don't have any urge to go back and be a completionist about it like with MGSV and Peace Walker.
I'm hesitant to say that I'm excited for a sequel, I think making this into a full franchise will only elevate the fatigue of Kojima's quantity-over-quality hard worldbuilding revelry, but given how much effort he's putting into this concept, and how much he's playing with the boundaries of what the medium can do and what people will theoretically allow to be "a game," I think the world needs more of this.
My other problem is that it's built entirely on the "do small quests in a big sandbox open area" concept that MGSV did really well, but it never feels as satisfying as those side missions, maybe in part because there was more to do and more ways to approach tasks in MGSV versus DS' "just get from A -> B" mechanics. It's not bad for the main quests, but about 1/3 of the way in I found myself less interested in picking up side deliveries even if they were on my main route and started focusing on just the story. I anticipated this being something I'd pick up once in a while to do a few deliveries and feel satisfied with my work, but I don't have any urge to go back and be a completionist about it like with MGSV and Peace Walker.