Hideo Kojima is my favorite video game director, this much was made evident to me before I even completed a single Metal Gear Solid game and all I had to go off was Death Stranding. I found myself in a bit of a slump when it came to games in my later high school and early college years, I simply do not remember playing or at the very least enjoying anything for about 4 or 5 years of my life so I never thought to upgrade my PS3 to the next generation. Even when Death Stranding came out in 2019, I wasn’t rushing to get a PS4 because of my pretty drab associations with games at the time. The covid lockdown happened a few months later and I found myself returning to several mediums that I had grown distant to because of school, and video games were one of them. After talking to several friends about what games they did or did not connect with, I was pretty dead set on playing the “boring walking simulator” game as soon as I could. I went out and bought a PS4 pro and a copy of Death Stranding as soon as I had the money to do so, and this combination of stellar hardware and a beautiful game almost single-handedly revitalized my interest in video gaming, especially ones that attempt to push the boundaries of what the medium can do artistically. No more were the days of lazy shooters, RPGs, or platformers as I ventured out to see what games truly had to offer.

I don’t think any game had spoken to me the same way that Death Stranding did, even before coming anywhere close to completing the game. I was immediately drawn into its incredibly unconventional control scheme and its ability to balance its earth-shatteringly large scale with such tender moments of genuine human emotion. Death Stranding was the first game I had ever played that felt truly important, and beyond that I just enjoyed playing it. Its slow-paced and very deliberate mission design as well as a multitude of menus and meters to constantly keep under wraps made the very simple act of walking in a video game feel significant, something I have never seen focus attributed to in even the best of platformers or Bennett Foddy games. Naturally, when my favorite video game director began hyping up an extended cut of my favorite game ever, I became excited to experience this truly unique work of art again on an even more powerful system.

Unfortunately, this game was not made with me in mind.

I will preface this by saying I did not actually complete the game again from a new save file, I got about a quarter of the way through the game before I understood it’s trajectory and ported my 100% completion save file to this updated version of the game. Something I noticed immediately is how much better the game looks and runs than its PS4 original. A higher stable framerate of 60fps made the game feel that much more fluid when exploring, the adaptive triggers gave resistance back to you when you were holding your straps and bearing a heavy load, and the intricately designed vibration allows you to feel which foot Sam is planting down and how sturdy of a place that is. These are all the biggest strengths of this Director’s Cut, the ability to raise the stakes of simply walking from A to B even further by stretching the console to its absolute limit. For the first 3 or 4 hours of the game, I was really enjoying being sent back to square one of this world that I had all but perfected, which made me have to consider my paths and my gear much more in-depth than I would if I was still in PS4 post-game. It was exciting to be vulnerable again, able to make mistakes due to a lack of gear, and able to forge my own paths again instead of following the one of least resistance. It really did feel like I was playing the game for the first time all over again, until I got one of the new missions. Die-Hardman handed me a gun and asked me to sneak into an enemy base and retrieve cargo. This did come after the first stealth section of the game where I needed to sneak into an enemy base and retrieve cargo, but the game treats these first few enemy encounters as microcosms of survival horror. You are woefully underprepared and must rely on pure stealth or melee if you get caught. No big deal right?

Along with this new mission where a non-lethal gun is put into your hands come an avalanche of things I really dislike a lot about this game. For starters, there is a new way of playing levels that rotate throughout the day. If you pick certain deliveries, there is an option to compete with other porters around the world and receive bonuses for things like perfect stealth or ammo conservation, and the winner gets a medal and bragging rights. I think this is a pretty terrible way of getting people in this game to all do the same thing as each other. The way structures, paths, and signs are laid out by other players are ALWAYS helpful and will point you in the right direction if you are feeling lost. Not only does this encourage Dark Souls-tier levels of trolling in a game about unity, but this tears away from the strand-type gameplay I have come to know and love. Beyond the fact that this makes absolutely no sense within the text of the game itself, its subtext urges players to complete deliveries and mission for the good of themselves and NOT the good of the delivery or the recipient, something I found to be powerful my first time through since your reward was almost always intangible “likes” that exist to make you feel good about what you have done. Perhaps a competitive medal could do the same for other players or would work better in other games, but it makes completing missions feel disingenuous to me.

I don’t have much to say on the reworked combat or stealth systems this game has to offer. I can count how many MULEs I knocked out with rubber bullets on one hand and after playing through the entire MGS series, I don’t have any problems with sneaking around to complete objectives. Kojima is obviously a master at directing this sort of action, so it really doesn’t make sense to harp on how it feels because it feels good, it functions as intended and there is a weight to how you knock out enemies. I do not like how this violence is encouraged and implemented so early on in the game. Like I mentioned before, these encounters with MULEs and terrorists have screeching scores and dangerous weapons attached to them which give off a very uneasy feeling that make you want to get through there as quick as you can. The base game does give you a lot of weapons to use at your disposal, but it severely punishes you for killing in the form of voidouts, so non-lethal is always the way to go...when you have to. Setting aside the powerful anti-violence subtext of this and all of Kojima’s games, sneaking is almost always more fun and rewarding because it greatly reduces the risk of damaging your BB or your cargo which is entirely how these few of many systems are meant to be micromanaged. The first two of the three missions could be completed entirely using stealth, but the very last mission has you neutralize all of the enemies in an area to advance. Putting such a high stakes, high violence mission so early on in the game not only sets players up for false expectations, but warps their perceptions of how Sam could and should act. I don’t think it's much of a stretch to say he would much prefer to deliver and be done with it, connecting people along the way, then he would to come into a camp blasting at everything that moves.

The reward for completing the VERY FIRST one of these very early extra missions rewards you with many things. The first and less notable one is the firing range located in any facility with a private room. These act as MGS VR missions and allow for Sam to show off his FoxHound skills against unsuspecting computers. I can understand the need to allow players to practice with weapons and stealth in this way, but I really do enjoy the way each mandatory boss or enemy encounter plays out. Even from the very first one with Higgs which comes in a strange place and time, it's clear that you need to think on your feet with your slow drip feed of anti-BT weapons. There is even a line poking fun at people who just wanted another epic big Kojima fight fest (as if MGS games were ever that to begin with...) when Higgs says “Aren’t you getting tired of the grind? Isn’t this what you’ve been waiting for this whole time? A game over?”, a multi-faceted line that challenges Sam and his purpose as much as it does the player’s. The very slow and deliberate structure of this game has come under a lot of criticism by impatient gamers, and it’s pretty clear that Kojima understands that and taunts players with a very one-sided boss encounter where you don’t quite understand the controls or weapons. I find this to be incredibly bold and challenging, but many may find this annoying so a firing range isn’t an inherently bad idea, it just robs the encounters of their true potential before the first one even happens.

Another reward for completing this early violent mission is a support skeleton. Now, these support skeletons do add another layer of strategy onto a game that is brimming with systems and mechanics, so I do love this addition...later in the game. You do not normally receive a skeleton until you meet the Engineer who builds them, and even then they are very limited in what they can do and often specialize in one stat like cargo capacity, speed, or climbing. The support skeleton has a decent sized battery that makes every single one of these stats better far too early on in the game. This completely robbed me of that feeling of progression and power that I was talking about earlier since the rest of the game (that I played up to) feels far too easy and uneventful now. Sure, you can still take tumbles and timefall is an always present danger, but giving players such a great piece of equipment out of sequence with the other equipment feels strange. These early sections of the game are a cakewalk, and once you get to the other skeletons (much faster than previously might I add), it feels as though you didn’t even earn them by befriending Junji Ito, it just feels like an unearned bonus to make the game feel even less like it already does.

Scattered in between missions and areas are also the three new structures that can be built with PCCs and a new support buddy. These are all unlocked much later in the story, but are still available in the story, and two of them change the game in ways that I dislike tremendously. The worst offender is easily the buddy bot. This thing can traverse nearly any terrain, carry mounds of equipment, and even carry you to your destination. Sure you might need to get off every once in a while for course correction, but the world is quite literally NOT in your hands anymore. An inhuman robot, one that is nearly infallible, can handle your deliveries for you, completely ruining any sense of importance and thematic relevance to Sam’s arc as a human being. Another terrible edition is the cargo cannon, wherein you can launch cargo to a predetermined spot far away on the map so you no longer need to carry it by hand. The entire point of this game is to bear the weight of deliveries and use every tool at your disposal to carry it throughout the map, whether is be a cart, car, or skeleton, but these two completely remove the human element and fun factor of each delivery. It is possible to complete deliveries WITHOUT using these elements of the game, but playing on Very Hard difficulty and going for the highest Premium Delivery orders all but requires the use of everything at your disposal. Attempting to perfect the several new deliveries and incredibly difficult new challenges Legend of Legends of Legends has to offer is possible without this equipment, but it also feels like it was made with it in mind, at least as a last resort. Unlocking such powerful abilities that allow gamers to bypass...the...game...seems to be a step too far for my taste, especially with how it clashes with the game’s own aesthetic and values. The bonus Half-Life and Cyberpunk missions are fine, nothing noteworthy at all but I thought I’d just throw them in here because I did spend time completing them for the new items that are almost entirely just for goofing around. The racing is also sub-par, if you can believe that.

None of what I just listed is necessarily a bad thing. Almost all of it is optional and, when it isn’t, it only serves to make the gameplay more conventional and satisfying for a wider audience of people. I have severe issues with how most of these reworked systems and new items are inherently compromising the game’s very core. Words like boring and drab get thrown around a lot when describing what you literally do in the game, but what makes Death Stranding a truly unique work of art is how it builds on top of that in such bold and beautiful ways. The asynchronous multiplayer aspect of this game makes you never truly feel alone on the journey and connect players together. This directly mirrors how Sam is laying down paths for both seen and unseen NPCs, ones that exist only to do the right thing. Adding in competitive time trials for missions turns the game into one about mechanics rather than one about meaning, and while the mechanics are still one of a kind and incredibly solid, it just doesn’t carry the same weight the game did before. Allowing players to circumvent difficult ways of travelling or even carrying cargo in the first place shouldn’t even need to be analyzed to determine how detrimental to the very core themes and gameplay loop of this work are. Giving in to player’s violent desires to see Kojima shine in directing stealth and action also negates a lot of what this game is trying to say about violence and people at large, something that comes to a head beautifully in every Higgs and BT boss fight in this game. Prompting players to destroy and hurt feels very contradictory to what this entire game is about, and is not a welcome change from me.

Which leads me to my ultimate verdict...this is not a bad game. Underneath all of these horrid modernized artless changes to such a tranquil and patient game is still a game that demands to be treated with care. Had this been an expansion on the post-game and not a fundamental reworking of the game at large then I would’ve been more on board with it, but this game is unfortunately not made to please me. Creating such a passionate, unchallenged, unique, and, for seemingly the first time in his career, streamlined and unaltered version of his vision only to have the most criticism piled onto him must’ve really bothered Kojima. Since he is such a passionate and caring man, it would make sense that he would want to please as many people as possible with his works, something he did seemingly effortlessly with MGS games. It is definitely not a bad thing that he wanted more people to play this game about the good humanity can achieve through unity, but it has to sting at least a little that this was by and large rejected and ridiculed for being something new and demanding in a completely foreign way than most games. The changes to make this game less strand-like and more conventional are felt far too often during the story mode, as these are inextricably woven into the very fabric of the game. This is not just a lazy port with DLC, this is a reworked game meant to bring more people together than before by appealing to their very short-sighted and impatient interests. However, Kojima himself put it best when he said that games are not artistic because they often try to appeal to everyone without any specific person in mind. I was that person for Death Stranding. I am not that person for Director’s Cut. This is the first and hopefully last time he disappoints me.