A year-end highlight for me was when Hideo Kojima and Kojima Productions, after months of teasing that eventually got a little tedious, gave us our first real glimpse of Death Stranding 2, officially called DS2 for now. We’ve known the sequel was coming ever since actor Norman Reedus, who plays the main character Sam in the first game, blurted out its existence in an interview, but it showed once again that Kojima and his team are up to the mark. a class of their own when it comes to the art of disclosure.
These four minutes establish a new world in the aftermath of the events of the first game and reflect one of the defining moments in Hideo Kojjima’s career as a major director. Kojima’s games had already enjoyed great success, and indeed he had already developed many of the ideas that he would later reuse, before the global success of Metal Gear Solid gave his team a new opportunity and a new problem: a huge follow-up budget. , a generational leap, and the expectations that came with it.
This isn’t the place to re-challenge Metal Gear Solid 2’s many successes, other than to note that a key principle behind it distorted audience expectations: most notoriously in the shift in protagonists, but also through things like making the US government the main antagonist. It echoed elements of the game it followed, and now, more than 20 years later, we arrive at DS2, another sequel to a big-budget hit, and find echoes of MGS2 throughout.
The reveal of DS2 shows us a world where seemingly impossible things have happened. It’s also a big shift towards the series having a real world context. Death Stranding was released just before the pandemic, and after the years that followed, the themes of loneliness and isolation now hit with tremendous force; it became a game defined as much by what unfolded around it as by what it was.
The sequel was made in this wake, and the trailer suggests it leans on some of the aspects that, perhaps accidentally, have become so defining. It starts with pictures of children’s toys, the kind of things a toddler plays with, and a look at a height measurement chart with little BT handprints that indicate growth. This is topped by guitar strumming and the vocals of Death Stranding antagonist Higgs Troy Baker.
Kojima’s first major twist is that Lou, your BB from the original game, seems to have grown up: which shouldn’t have happened, except something impossible happened to Lou at the end of the first game. Of course, there’s no ironclad way to tell if this toddler is the baby you carried with you across an American wasteland, but the details in the scene suggest it: We see the BB container, now repurposed as a toy aquarium of sorts, then that Fragile for her.
A scene that explicitly reflects in its composition this special edition box art, showing the characters Olga and Sunny, making explicit the game’s theme of what we want to pass on.
Here’s the Gackt cover for MGS2 that’s real. pic.twitter.com/gfuhwl9beEJanuary 7, 2015
Fragile was a key ally in Death Stranding, a companion throughout the journey who helps Sam prevent the “final stranding” at the game’s climax, and at the end joins Bridges (the organization that helped Sam with the reconstruction of America). Here, she’s raising the girl in apparent isolation when an armed group storms the grounds and forces her to flee on a remarkable-looking one-wheeled bicycle… and then comes the next twist.
In trailers like this, heroic things happen. There’s a jumpcut before there are fears or big revelations. As you expect Fragile and Lou to zoom into the distance, gunfire begins. Fragile is clipped, crashes and falls, protecting the child during the tumble. They land on the ground meters apart, at which someone, and it could very well be Higgs, aims his weapon. There is a shot and the suggestion is that he shoots either Fragile or the child.
This feels like a Kojima fakeout and may even sound familiar. During the first game, we learn why Fragile and Higgs are mortal enemies before, in a climactic scene, the game suggests she shoots him on the beach. We later learn that she left Higgs alive, with the choice of being permanently stranded or ending it herself. Gee, what a surprise that he’s back.
And as the DS2 trailer shows, both Fragile and Lou are alive and well. Next we see Fragile looking slightly older, with her skin apparently healed from the withering timefall effect, next to a white-haired Sam. This suggests a significant shift in the timeline, something the Metal Gear Solid series would do with any major entry, and more importantly, we see Lou’s BB pod with something manifesting in it: an angel baby, a captive BT or a tentacle horror, on several counts.
This is where we start to get some super-explicit echoes of MGS2, first with the giant tar-traversing mech emerging. Death Stranding had some Metal Gear elements in its world design and the Director’s Cut added significantly more, but this is explicitly a giant Yoji Hinkawa designed mech. Not only that, but it’s an amphibious mech, the big selling point of MGS2’s Metal Gear Ray, and at one point we see its name: OHV Magellan.
The achievements of 16th-century explorer Ferdinand Magellan include the Magellan Expedition, the first recorded circumnavigation of the globe. The Strait of Magellan, the main natural passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is named after him. All of this suggests that we’re looking at a seagoing vessel that somehow manages to navigate the beaches of this world in the context of Death Stranding.
The water is a big part of Death Stranding’s landscape, both in the real world and the beach world, but in the latter case the game is sparing about placing you in it outside of the cutscenes. This is a complete scuttlebutt but feels worth mentioning: one of the most persistent early rumors about DS2 was the code name Ocean.
Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything, though other footage from the trailer suggests some sort of drought (the cult followers in a desert) and a tar ocean. Much of Death Stranding’s story rests on the macguffin of how the strand, the haunted otherworld, bleeds into the “real” world and when and how that can be triggered intentionally or accidentally. The long and short is that there are rules, but as Death Stranding suggests, they are sometimes there to be broken.
And so we come to the trailer’s climax and arguably the biggest MGS2 kink yet. That game featured the relatively early and rather ridiculous revelation that the dead antagonist of the first game, Liquid Snake, had apparently merged with Revolver Ocelot and taken over thanks to an arm transplant. Don’t ask.
The trailer closes with what looks like something similar: a fusion of the beach-bound Amelie and the beach-stranded Higgs, with a bit of Guitar Hero thrown in for good measure. This character resembles Higgs, but has elements of Amelie’s design added to it, not least a hairstyle meant to draw comparison. Their robot followers, meanwhile, unmistakably flash a red ‘!’ symbol barely enough different from the iconic Metal Gear symbol to evade the lawyers.
Finally, the slogan: “Should we have connected?” Another cover. Death Stranding’s equivalent phrase was “Tomorrow is in your hands”, an encouraging phrase that also contains an element of hope, in keeping with the game’s theme of reconnecting America through the chiral network. The sequel’s first instinct is to question such a connection (perhaps another echo of MGS2’s grand themes), even though its core revolves around others: Is the Internet really a force for good in our societies?
But the biggest clue as to where we’re going is a Higgs voiceover that sounds towards the end: “It wasn’t UCA that made the final decision, it was APAC: a private company”. The United Cities of America was that grand attempt to reconnect: the wording here suggests that whatever we accomplished in the first game, it may have served several purposes in the end.
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Kojception
OK: Here’s some total headcanon. The whole Death Stranding disaster was precipitated when BB was shot and killed, but then Amelie used some magical voodoo to heal and repatriate her back from “the other side”: and a load of BTs poured into reality next to her. Now we have an older Lou, even though how old exactly remains to be seen (some are convinced this is Elle Fanning’s role, which would be quite a jump in age), who lives somewhere, be it reality or the beach, and is mistaken for the good guys by the bad guys.
In such a setup, it would fit to traverse the oceans to find the beach on which Lou is stranded. It also seems clear that the red Higgs-esque character has quite a cult following, with more of a sinister robot edge than anything seen in the original world.
Hideo Kojima has always been a self-referential creator. But this is quite different from the usual Easter eggs. DS2 resents being called Death Stranding 2, while at the same time bringing to mind Kojima Productions’ most famous sequel. It apparently gives fans what they want, particularly the return of Sam, while echoing a game whose pre-release hype was all misdirection.
This is a cyclical industry, especially beyond a certain scale. When you’ve made something successful, some just want you to make the exact same thing again. It’s a cycle where Kojima has managed to have his cake and eat it, making superficially similar games that are completely different experiences. The funny thing about cycles, though, is that here it comes again. If anything defines Hideo Kojima as a director of big-budget games, it’s that desire to go above and beyond and disrupt expectations. And if there’s one expectation DS2 will face after its prescient and unusual predecessor, it’s that it will be more of the same.