220 - Death Stranding 2 (feat. Workers’ Lit)

Hey folks, if you're listening to this message, I am dead. I have died. And the one thing that I want you to do in memory of me, this do, is...

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January 1st, 2026. It's not available anymore. And I'm still going to be dead. You can't bring me back, folks. Well, I can just say this. My middle name is Bridget. My name is Jacob Bridges Dallas. So it's right there. Oh, what? Yeah, I think I am a Kojima character.

well and considering the way that like ladders are also bridges and death stranding so it's like jacob's ladder jacob's bridges there's a lot that we can do with that you know that's there's something very station 11 about these names right these people are defined by like what they're whether into you know like in station 11 like they'll name themselves like whatever instrument they play in the

traveling orchestra. So I don't know. I play piano. I could be piano girl. I could be I'm drinking tea right now. I could be tea girl. Oh, I love the hot God is a Kojima name right there. Whatever latitude of the world is still growing tea. after the death stranding has happened it's gonna be like one place yeah t posing in the sky right you'd be really into like golfing there are so many different meanings we can pull speaking of people whose names are letters aj what would you be

I would be Diddy Man. Diddy Man? I would compose short songs for people. So you'd just be that guy from The Witcher? Toss a coin to your Diddy.

Welcome to the worst of all possible worlds, the first and only podcast where you can toss a coin to your ditty. I'm the worst of all possible AJs. And I'm the worst of all possible Brians. Josh cannot be with us. He's on a very important assignment to take over the Netherlands. He's not doing very well, but he'll be back pretty soon. Is he linking it up to the Chiral Network? No, he was just kind of like gonna sit in the Prime Minister's chair and be like, mine.

That's actually under constitutional law in the Netherlands that actually does make president. This is the worst of all possible worlds and we do weekly case studies in the pop culture of a dying empire or in this case an empire that was nuked to all hell by... otherworldly death forces and we are now forced to rebuild from the ashes by death itself and in order to help us cover this Death Stranding 2 the sequel to the hit 2019 Death Stranding

One, we have with us two very special guests. They are two of the four co-hosts of Workers Lit, newly renamed a podcast about books and the news where they encourage us all to read good books, tell bad jokes and fight. a better future and also jacob's new novel they called her rebel a fantasy novel about late stage capitalism people power and queer love is available now from any major bookstore but why not order from a local one support your local business or else a porter will have to try

your home and it is so cold outside. Please welcome Lenore. and jacob hi friends hello hey yo we are so back we've repatriated was there a void out first or you just you just uh set on fire and came back yeah yeah all of norcross is gone it's it's it's it's a whole thing oh no we were obliterated

we came back, we were a little different. We workers lit when we came back. But we're, we're back now and we are, we were literally lit on fire, but now we've sort of repurposed that to our own ends. And I recently went on workers lit to talk about. An Australian science fiction novel called On the Beach by Neville Shute.

and I'm really excited to talk about Neville shoots hit video game on the beach Death Stranding 2 it's worth noting has the subtitle on the beach and of course because of Kojima and his love for double and triple meanings of course Of course, you're thinking on the beach, just like the beach from Death Stranding, which is, you know, the pathway to the afterlife. However, it is also I guess in the early days, it was a clue to where the game was going to be set because.

This game did not reveal the setting of Australia until pretty late. They did a big premiere event in Sydney, but even then I certainly was like trying not to spoil it. for myself but of course Kojima retweets everything that anyone says about his game so I saw that it was Australia like the day after it came out and I was like well okay I know that now he had to invent this whole plate gate thing in order to get them to Australia

When Canada was right there. Yeah, but I mean, Australia is not get the chiral network. I think I think Australia is closer to Japan. Oh, that is true. Think about that. So maybe it's just like an easier trip to make.

And also, what are you going to do in Canada? Any number of things. It's got it's got planes. It's got mountains. It's got that variety of environments from the first game. I like the concept that the first game, actually, you didn't get to California. You just got to Lake Michigan. You thought it was California. And it's like, oh wait, actually that wasn't the whole United States.

You know, I would have accepted that, too. Yeah, I mean, well, because in the original, it was all Iceland. And then in this game, it's like, oh, wait, there are parts of America that look like America. Finally. Yeah. Yeah. You actually start the game in a part of America that looks like America and all the Australian bits.

are based on real Australian biomes instead of, yeah, just being Iceland and Norway, which Josh is not the prime minister of. Well, we can't. Regardless of what he promised me last week. What did he, what riches did he promise you from Norway? He was going to give me the, it doesn't matter. It was going to be Ibsen's bones. Oh yes, finally. He fucked it up.

I don't get to have Ibsen's bones. If you whisper to them, he tells you the secret of brand. Well, and now I'm like, why? Strindberg's bones are in my bedroom, and who are they supposed to be friends with? Let's talk about our experience with Death Stranding the original game because we of course have covered it

on this podcast. Twice. Once for its initial episode and then again in our Ladscast where we got really in deep. But what about you, Jacob and Lenore? What is your history with this franchise, with this acclaimed series about an Amazon deliveryman? I... I picked up Death Stranding after watching. Okay, I watched the Donkey video on it where he said it's terrible. Oh, yeah. I know this looks amazing.

Before he made his second video, yeah. Where he was like, this is amazing. His second video where he was like, okay, so I was clicking the buttons wrong. Which Josh identifies in that first episode. I just re-listened to y'all's first episode this morning and Josh was like, I think... he was clicking the video the buttons wrong oh yeah 100% well the buttons are fucking weird it's a weird system so I played Death Stranding 1

Back then, a few years ago, I was transfixed by it. I thought it was brilliant. I thought the bad parts ruled. I was like fighting Cliff Unger and I was like, this objectively sucks, but I'm having a really good time. Sam Porter Bridges as a character to me, I am just in love with him. I want to fix him so bad.

It's our big dumb boy. We have a running joke on our show where I say I could fix them and Lenore has women where she says she can make me worse. Sam is someone that I feel like authentically, I've said I could fix some people that I definitely can't fix, but... Sam, I think, you know, he is such a good, he's such a good guy. And I think he's very fixable. He is Job from the Bible. I think we're like Job didn't realize that he was being cursed by God, just kept clocking into his job.

He just keeps going and it's like, no, dude, you are like damned, I think. you can get him to cross continents for barely discernible reasons yeah absolutely he's also job if at the end god just went psych you know what i mean like all of his like biggest god kind of does do that aj he does his kids back well he gives him new kids you know he can't bring the kids back from the bible he can't bring the kids back from the dead but job gets a whole new set

of kids and the Bible's like, and see, he's fine. His wife also really hot after this point. Yeah. Beforehand, not so much, but God, oh, he made her hot. Yes. God's like giving her the first BBL. It's crazy. It's like one of my favorite. biblical passages because it's like he still had a bunch of his kids die they're still just like his dead kids yeah brian's got it their bones in his bedroom yeah they do not get along well with strindberg's bones

Sam Porter bridges is that he is a guy that is continuously suffering and everything that he gets like is like a kind of thing he can cling to temporarily between periods of just like prolonged horror. And the more you learn about his life, the more it's like. This guy's got screwed over at every turn. He is like the world's last proletarian. And I just love him for that. Absolutely. And what about you, Lenore? I know that you've...

come very recently to this very very recently yes and i had the idea to play them both in advance of this episode and as i was mentioning to y'all earlier i got to episode three of death stranding one where you get to like the larger United States. And I built all the roads in that first section. And then I zoomed out and I was like, I am not going to have time for this.

So it's a big map. Yeah. Yeah. So I skipped directly to two and 104 hours later. Here we are. One of the interesting things about Death Stranding 2 is that in one sense, it is a much shorter game than Death Stranding 1. And in another sense, it's much longer. You get to do what you want. If you just play the story, I did the story and a couple of extra things for my second playthrough for this episode. And I got through this game in about 30 hours.

That's pretty quick. Whereas Death Stranding 1 is like a... I feel like that took me like 60 the first time where I didn't do everything. And it's more mandatory for progression, right? To actually do a lot more of the optional prepper stuff. And so when I played... Death Stranding 2 the first time back in the summer for my own enjoyment. There are another 90 hours on that playthrough. I played for 120 hours before I beat it and then played a little bit more.

So this game has definitely taken a lot of the criticism of the first game and applied it. Also, in terms of there are a lot of new mechanics in here regarding combat. There are also a lot of old mechanics in here. that people just never knew existed in the first game because you weren't forced

to use them. And some of these things were in the director's cut that have been added to Dark Souls 2. Fuck yeah. That have been added to Death Stranding 2. I knew I was going to do it. Do you think Sam could beat Dark Souls 1?

Not playing the game, but like being the chosen undead. 100%. I mean, he is the chosen undead already by being a repatriate, right? True. I don't think Sam would notice that if he was in the Dark Souls world, he would be like another day at the job and he would just like be. He would be killing like just eldritch horrors to deliver a package. It really just, he can do anything. He'd be sliding down in that coffin to Gravelord Nito's lair and be like, this is just like on ride with Norman Reedus.

The man is unstoppable. Plus, he's already got the positioning to like sit in front of a bonfire he's got the perfect like relaxed thing which is how this game actually opens is with sam sitting on top of the mountain like he's sitting in front of a bonfire in dark souls yeah and we we start not too far from your your place of origin

Yes, my hometown. We're in Ansa Borrego State Park in Southern California. And I don't think you could walk to the border as easily as Sam does. There's far fewer people now. Let's pull back a little bit. Let's talk about the development of Death Stranding 2.

There was a lot of stuff in the development of Death Stranding 1 that let's just say was pretty fraught. These games are always designed. You write a certain thing, you get it up and running, you get your pieces put together and it's like, oh, we need to fill in this blank or this. scene doesn't work. We have to do reshoots. It was just a bad position in terms of time because then the big SAG-AFTRA video game strike of the 2010s happened and they couldn't.

They couldn't do any of their reshoots, which is why that game has so many like this feels like two different ideas at some point that never quite coalesce. It's because, yeah, some of those scenes were supposed to be replaced and they just couldn't. So they just had to Tim Gunn it and make it work. You know, Death Stranding came out in 2019. I feel like most people were like me and played it somewhere in the middle of 2020.

I feel like its sales went way up within the year of its release because, I mean, a lot of people also got unemployment checks that allowed them to buy PlayStations and a copy of Death Stranding. What was I mean, I think the thing that really struck people, though, is that it almost felt like it predicted the pandemic. Right. Absolutely. People are so many people are staying home and ordering things and feeling very depressed.

And so the really the protagonist of reality, even though they may not seem like it now in the present, were the people delivering everything, everyone having to do last miles and driving their truck across the. the interstate across America and whatever other countries, because so many places were shutting down. So many people couldn't go to stores or their their businesses or anything like that. I was a pizza delivery driver.

in this time so i can't claim i can't claim the full status i wasn't delivering medicine to people yeah but i can say it was awesome to see like i mean people would be like essential workers, protagonist reality, all that. And then everyone was like the meanest to me anyone has ever been when I was actually bringing them things. So there was also a relatability to Sam.

there were so many, I mean, just people screaming at me to take off my mask and there's, you know, everything, everything in the above. But it is interesting too, to see Sam like, He is really the savior of everything in this game, like carrying the world on his back. Yeah.

They're just still giving him more bullshit every turn. And it is so real. It's so relatable. Yeah. I mean, I think the only difference is that in these games, the preppers do eventually come around to your side if you are persistent enough and you bring them enough.

things in a way that I don't know necessarily a real life person would necessarily come around. Well, and none of them are ever really mean to you. They're just kind of suspicious and they're like, okay, great. And then they're always like, once you do enough deliveries, they're like, we love you, Sam. You're the best.

It's your deliveries that make life possible. And I'm sure that as a as someone who was doing deliveries during the pandemic, there's kind of a nice like wish fulfillment element to that of like. man wouldn't it be nice if people were actually like i want to know when i would deliver to the trailer park people were like that it was when i delivered to people who lived on the lake that they weren't you know

That makes complete sense. I also think about there is one prepper in Death Stranding 2 who is mean to you, and it's the pioneer. It's the guy who just basically wants to live by himself, be at a giant sand dune that Lenore, as you pointed out, I think in the outline.

You forget about him immediately because he's behind a giant sand dune and he's so hard to get to. You can find the tires that let you climb like slopes more easily, but that's long after you meet him. And by that time, I'm like, OK, I don't want to be here anymore. And he's so mean to you. He's just like, oh, is that all you brought? And I'm like, motherfucker, you are in the middle of nowhere. I tried to conduct airstrikes on his location. It wouldn't let me back.

That's what's missing from this game. We don't have drones. We don't have the autonomous delivery bots. And they are in the first game. And they suck in the first game. They always just do really shitty deliveries. I don't know why, but you do have kind of the monorail in this, although you still have to punch in the delivery once you still have to actually get to the location yourself, even when you've just delivered something by a monorail and it doesn't go everywhere.

Right. And every other Porter in this game is really terrible at their job. It really makes sense really quickly why they think Sam is the greatest there's ever been, because he carries more than one package at a time. And everyone else is just like, I don't know, the lightest thing. And it's like, come on, man. I just delivered two tons of ceramics to the asshole behind the sand dune. You can carry more than one box. They don't seem to be aware you can drive everywhere either.

No! No, I kind of wish that there were like other cars on the road. I mean, there are a lot of things that are like, this game has so many mechanics. It's not lacking for mechanics, but then so many of them just go underutilized. or under taught so that you don't know to utilize them. I tell you what, like during we were talking about combat earlier, there would be bits where.

what you're like hand fighting and the prompt comes up to like do a knee strike or do a body slam i never fucking did that i just throw my hands i did at the beginning i was like oh i'm getting into this i did some of the vr training stuff that are classic holdovers from metal

you're solid and i was like oh yeah you can dive which you really need to know how to dive during the boss fights but you're gonna forget because then you're gonna do 70 hours of deliveries and then you're gonna be in combat again you're like there are button combos Yeah. And then there's the stuff the pizza man teaches you that you will never use. I did exactly once and then I got shot to death. If you want to play this game and you want to do the combat against anybody except the bosses.

Load up on a couple of those grenade launchers that don't kill anyone.

somehow they just knock you out very specifically do not get the ones that kill people that was a huge mistake on my part and you could just walk into any base and just roll over anybody I got my first spirit blade from the mechs the ghost mechs and I was like cool this thing's awesome and I go to one of the miscreant bases and I hit a miscreant with my spirit blade and it's like he's dead now and you killed him like fuck you have to dispose but also body disposal works differently they don't

have these giant incinerator facilities either in mexico or australia in this game you just bring them to a distribution center but it still puts up the barriers so you have to like navigate around the body so what Also, if you leave the body, someone else will just take it. So they still have the mechanic, but they've just been like, ah, fuck it. But yeah, like this, this game came out and they were early in production for Death Stranding 2 when the pandemic actually hits. Yes.

He doesn't say whether he got COVID or not, but Kojima says that he got sick. Yes. He got very fucking sick and he couldn't even go to the hospital because of COVID. Yeah. And during the pandemic, he was going into. the office by himself to work on the game. He... So there's a huge sense of isolation, right? As I think all of us felt, but specifically, if he's just the only guy in this giant office complex by himself trying to pull this by the strength of him over the finish line.

you know I think there's a lot of that that permeates the game itself a lot of that isolation and loneliness in a way that is present in the first game for sure but I think is more desperately felt in Death Stranding too. Yeah. I would just like to read this little quote from Kojima at the very, it's going to be at the very end of here. I've highlighted it for us all.

By the end of 2022, we were allowed to travel to LA to do performance capture for the first time in about two years. That night, we went out to dinner with the actors and I thought, this is what we need. We need to be together, shoot together.

and celebrate together yeah if you dig into it i don't think that necessarily the main thrust of the game does it good job reinforcing this idea but like if you look into it what he's saying with the game a lot of the time is about the need for physical connection not just connecting but actually moving the movement of the body the movement of the body over borders

The movement, like the act of holding hands, that comes up too, right? There's that kind of odd moment with Tarman. He's like, ah, I see you're holding hands. He's like, uh-huh.

It's like, that's a great way to illustrate connectedness. Great. Cool. Okay. Thank you, George Miller. Everyone's so normal in this world. So completely normal. And also, Brian, to sort of reinforce that movement idea of just like. The idea of dance is so present in this game. Everybody dance. It sure is. He obviously saw the OA. Yes! And was a big fan of the OA. Huge fan of the OA!

But that's not all he references, right, Brian? I see you've written a lot of all the references you caught in this game. Yeah, so I mean, like the big ones are, of course, On the Beach, which is literally the subtitle of this game, and Mad Max Fury Road. He also has George Miller there in the game. And there is a whole section that's just like, by the way, the plot of Mad Max Fury Road happened to us just off screen. Don't worry about it. I'm Mad TV's Deborah Wilson and my hand is backwards.

So there's also you might not even notice this, but in Sam's room on the DHV Magellan, which you have to say the whole thing every time the DHV Magellan. Well, it's for the it's for the miraculous reveal later. He has three books. On a shelf that's under the crypto buyouts and the things that are not monster energy drink anymore that you drink. You can actually read the books. If you scroll the camera down and you press X, I think you pick up either Moby Dick.

What is it? The Voyage of the Beagle and Frankenstein. And it talks about the ways, especially that Moby Dick connects to everything. Moby Dick, of course, has a captain of a ship who is missing a limb. Yep. Who has a sort of. Phantom Pain? The Phantom Pain? Anyone? I think you've got something that's illustrative of the whole game and everything that's going on here with the books.

is you literally have Dahlman, you know, hanging there, and we'll talk about him more, but going, hey, that, he says at one point, Moby Dick is really similar to some stuff we're going through right now. Yeah. It's like, you can, Tyler, it down 10%. The Pequod's crew is also compared by Dollman to the team at Kojima Productions. He does, yes. Because Kojima Productions is a big international effort. They have people from all different kinds of countries coming together to make these games.

To make the world a better place. So true. Elle Fanning is here. Connecting this to on the beach is actually really important to understanding. I think some of the weirder story choices, the ones that still don't dramaturgically make the most sense. But. If you think of Sam as being like Captain Dwight Towers in On the Beach, Captain Towers has lost his wife and his children, but he refuses to acknowledge that reality.

The whole time he's in Australia waiting for everyone else to die of nuclear radiation poisoning. He's buying a fishing rod for his son and like always talking about how things are going to be when he gets back home. For people who want to know more about On the Beach by Neville Shute, I recorded an episode last week with Workers Lit about that book. Synergy, baby. It's a good episode. In this way, also, Fragile is like Moira in On the Beach.

in that also she and sam kiss once and that is the furthest extent of their romantic relationship yeah but that's huge for sam because you know he in the first game he couldn't touch anybody yeah ever it was really weird when sam said this kiss was from me and my therapist

That's an in-joke right there. Mojima would be very proud of our level of in-joking. So let's zoom out a bit, shall we? And let's get to the game itself. Let's talk about the game oh before we do i should say that the main question that was hanging over the first reveal trailer for death stranding 2 is one that i just wanted to kind of keep in the back of our heads as we talk about the plot of this which is should we have

connected yes which was also the theme of the first game but okay go off well no because on the first game it's like we have to connect and then this game is like

Should we have done that? Yeah, but also while you do it in the first game, it makes things worse in the same way that it makes things better. It's already the prevalent question of Death Stranding 1. Right. And now we're just going to dive in deeper because I think that Death Stranding 2 is just... the director director's cut of Death Stranding 1 in the same way that Death Stranding 1 was Kojima getting out all the stuff that he couldn't get out in Metal Gear Solid 5 and Silent Hills

Wait, I'm sorry. What was the subtitle of Metal Gear Solid 5? Ground Zeroes. Oh, okay.

and the phantom pain or modern prometheus yeah and in silent hills death stranding 2 is him getting out the stuff that he needed to get out in death stranding 1 which is still by extension things he needed to get out in metal gear solid five and silent hills so maybe maybe it's finally been expunged from his system but probably not no he'll be he'll be talking about this for the rest of his life probably so we begin

As we said, in Southern California, it's been 11 months since the end of Death Stranding, and Sam and Lou are... nowhere to be found right they've gone completely off the map because sam did not incinerate his bb lou at the end of the game and instead decided to raise her as his own as sort of like Not a replacement, but in the way that he lost his child in the events before Death Stranding 1, Lou has now become his child. Basically, if the UCA, which is the United Cities of America, find out.

That Lou is still alive. Sam is very concerned that they will take her for experimentation because bridge babies, which is what Lou is, are not supposed to ever leave the pod or grow older. Right. They are supposed to be too.

they are not people yeah but then it turns out that they are people oh god this whole time everyone is a is a people there was this big question in the first game of like who is a person does you know does a person whose circumstances of birth are different do they have a soul you know you have the character of dead man who has been stitched together from various corpses maybe some modern prometheus has done this to him as a result

He's like, I'm pretty sure I don't have a soul. He has a soul. They all have souls. Everyone's people. Sam was also a BB. We learn at the end of the first game. Yes. And it's unclear who knows that. in this second game because I think they wanted to keep it as a twist for people who played Death Stranding 2 before Death Stranding 1. The whole Clifford Unger subplot of the first game...

is the most underbaked aspect, I think, of pretty much all of Death Stranding 1. Ungerbaked. Ungerbaked. But that reveal is the best reveal in the game. Yes, absolutely. But it was the one that seemed like it suffered the most from lack of reach.

shoots right yeah and I think Kojima went into this game being like okay if we're gonna do that again if we're gonna do that same structure where we have this flashback thing that is slowly revealed over the course of it I'm going to nail it this time yeah and I think he kind of

fucking it's my favorite part it is so emotionally resonant in a way that so many other emotional beats in this kind of fall flat for me like I've not seen Kojima cook this hard in a very very long time first we do have to spend some time with those beats that fall flat, which are largely the ones at the beginning of the game.

yes because we um we get to see like the new systems and like the new toys that they're playing with right we get to see the rock physics of like avalanches we get to see how rivers rise and fall which you would think would affect your traversal but ultimately really doesn't at all because they're so quick it routes you through like rising rivers you know it's very much leading you through these environmental obstacles that yeah as it happens are

eminently navigable. You come away from the Mexico tutorial feeling that this is going to be much more of a problem than it actually is. You kind of want to get Kojima to sit down and play a bunch of Bennett Foddy games.

Especially considering he's Australian, you know, to just be like, oh, sure. You can make you don't have to go as far as Bennett Foddy, but you can make this more teetering and weird and and frictional than it is. So. yes sam and lou have been hiding out in this bunker he's wearing a why me hat yes uh first warning flag and lou is wearing little angel wings which i'm like oh no like immediately i saw that outfit i'm like oh lou's dead

Lou is a fucking another example of things having double meanings in this game, which is that angel wings also sort of represent butterfly wings. Oh, of course. Right. Oh, yes, yes. Wait until we get to the reveal about what a drawbridge is. Oh boy, so Fragile shows up. Lea Seydoux, again, reprising her role from the first game. And she's on a little unicycle, which is awesome. It's so cool. I wish we could ride one in the game. I think she gives, to me, a much better performance in this game.

game than in the first game yeah she's given more to work with i think i think her stuff is so much clearer than just having to say i'm fragile but i'm not that fragile it's just sort of like in this game she is she feels like a more realized character which with more clear intent And her relationship to you is more clear. And also she's allowed to feel a little more fleshed out. You see her happy. You see her sad. You see her guilty.

which I think is a really interesting. We actually get the romance between them too. Yeah. Well, because Sam's allowed to feel things in this game. Yeah. In the first game, he really was kind of trapped in the, I have no. social skills whatsoever and now because of lou he's able to like open up again and like we see a lot of his you can see how much he loves lou you can see how much fragile loves lou and there's like this potential

for a family to form there right the three of them you see it in the course of the main story quest of course There's also a lot of side stuff that I think I just missed because I barely talked to doll man. You didn't miss much. No. Yeah, I didn't always see the side stuff when you sleep in the Magellan because I spent very little time in the Magellan in the first place.

We were talking about this earlier. There's a bit of a disconnect between story and gameplay, right? Yeah. Where you can do whatever you want at whatever pace you want, pretty much. which is great for building up the roads, for building up the world, but there's a little bit of a disconnect that arises from just being away from these other people for so long, right? You stumble in on intimate moments, and some of it's really effective, you know, seeing tomorrow get...

a hold of her powers so she doesn't age everything she touches. But there's a lot of what's going on in the background that you feel very much of a voyeur in relation to. Well, and that's what makes part of this confusing is like Sam has escaped the UCA basically.

Right. There's a there's a legitimate danger to people knowing where he is. So he has to do it. He has cut himself off the same way that he did at the beginning of the first game. And now here, fragile shows up and she says, you have to start making deliveries again. And he's like. Okay. From where? From when? Didn't she offer him, though, that she'll be able to protect him in lieu permanently?

If he does this job. But how? That I don't know. The idea is that the UCA... is not a part of this like this is her this is fragile's new porter company which is called drawbridge and it's to extend the chiral network into mexico on behalf of apac which as it turns out is the new government of the uca because the uca doesn't really exist as a governing body anymore president die hard man has disappeared

And so APAC now runs the country. Not that APAC. I don't know how much of a coincidence all that is. But there's also APAC, which is a system that they use. Yes. That's the system that they use. And I feel like they came up with APAC so that. the actors weren't saying a pack as much because maybe someone at kojima productions learned what a pack was it's in service of like the reason that the uca qua the uca is not extending the chiral network into mexico and later Australia, is they tell you

OK, if the state actor does this, right, it'll be viewed as some form of like attempt at hegemony, conquest control. Because, of course, like no private company in history has ever done colonialism. Because, again, this whole thing is about the dichotomy. between sticks and ropes right and rope being something used to connect and stick being you know weapons things meant to repel and and and hurt and so he wants this to be almost the promise of the old internet

Yeah, where it's like, yeah, we're connecting people, but it's not necessarily imperial nature. It's everyone sort of coming to this as equals while also already acknowledging in the first game where that's flawed. And that's where we start to run into like the.

haven't we been here before aspect of the second game though not nearly to the degree that it could because like we were talking about books that inspire the story beats of this game earlier and one that i that i kept coming back to jacob i mentioned this to you earlier is blood meridian right because like because it's it's it is a game that could have captured

The experience of being somebody, an outcast, a third son, a convict, you know, somebody who's at the bottom of society who is hired to push the frontier this way. and there's no rules, you can do whatever you want, and as far as the frontier goes in this game, it's a very idealized one, right, without natives.

Right. And it's it's the sort of thing that, you know, that's that's the that's a promise. Right. You can play around in this area. Nobody has souls if there are even people there for the miscreants, except for the miscreants. Yes. And they don't even you know, they don't even talk. Right. The sounds.

they make are just unintelligible grunts you know yeah and like it's it's it's that hell divers thing right where everybody's given their own spaceship everybody's told what a special boy they are you know you and 20 million other people right i feel like neil vana's story comes closest. I'm sorry, did you say Nirvana? Let me tell you, when that reveal came, I literally screamed shut up at my screen.

because that's his name literally neil vana and like yeah his story flies closest to engaging with the with the brutality undergirding the reconstitution of the united states and of global infrastructure in general but it doesn't really dive into it as ambitiously as I might have hoped. Yeah. And that's because he's solid snake. So solid snake is the symbol of that from the earlier games, but we'll get to Neil Vana and a little bit more detail a little bit later.

First, we have to cross the border. Yeah, you got to go down there. You got to get over the wall, which I love. This is a great sequence because I didn't even think about it because at first you just you're going under a bridge and there's some miscreants guarding the place and you learn how to sneak past them and whatever.

And then as you keep going, it's like, oh, that is the border wall. That is the Trump Biden Trump border wall with the big fucking iron posts. And it's all falling apart. Yeah, there's no reason to have it. Which led to my decision for then in the rest of the game.

that the miscreants were all former ICE agents, which made shooting grenades of them much more fun. Oh, my God. That's got to be very cathartic, I'm sure. There's a bit in the second Neil Vanna fight where it kind of starts with the skelly men. who are kind of on his side but they always start off the level like they're holding him hostage and they're driving a truck with the big fucking gun mounted on the on the top of it they're doing it upside down in that hospital

And it's like, oh, those are just like militia guys who patrol the border. It's like not even ice. It's the fucking three birds and whatever going down there. And as you go. South of the border. They have a big sort of corpse disposal problem. Like they need to get connected to the Chiral Network or...

all of mexico will be voided out yeah because they've just been disposing of corpses in the tar which you can do in the first game instead of going to the incinerator but i guess if you do too much then they just start

bubbling back out of the tar, and then they still void out. I have a note here that we put our bodies in a tar pit, and then they turned into ghosts, and everybody started crashing out and killing themselves, so we just kept putting them in the tar pit and making more ghosts. It seems like you're just feeding ghosts through the tar pit, yeah. The BT. will continue until morale improves yeah in in mexico you also meet

the first of many, uh, NPCs who are seven months pregnant. Exactly. And who can't, for some reason, time has stopped in their uterus. You meet them, but you also, you know what else you, who you don't meet. Any Mexicans? No. Well, the guy who runs the first place, the Northern Knot City, is Mexican. But this also carries over to Australia, how few people actually speak with an Australian accent, which is fine. I just find it funny.

Yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah, because I think they got some Australian celebrities in there to voice some of them. I think the pioneer is somebody. I think he's a comedian of some description. Yeah, I mean, not really celebrities except for maybe George Miller's body. Mr. Impossible.

They are the two directors, I believe, of Talk to Me. There's also hit Australian celebrity Sam Neill. In that there is a Sam and there is a Neill and Sam Neill is actually from New Zealand and everyone's mad at me for saying he's Australian. Then why did he do the audiobook for On the Beach if he's not Australian? Brian, I've never gotten more emails about an episode. It's shocking. I don't know. People were like...

People are very aggrieved because New Zealand, like it doesn't show up on a lot of maps. What I have to say to all those aggrieved New Zealanders is subscribe to us on Patreon. I was going to say store.worstpossible.world, but we're actually not doing international shipping. It's just the US. So you can be aggrieved by yet another thing. Yeah. That you can't get our merch. But then you can comment and tell me how mad you are, or even get into our Discord and tell me how mad you are.

About the fact that Sam Neill is New Zealander. Y'all can only send stuff to places that are linked up on the Chiral Network. That is true. So connect to the Chiral Network and then we'll send it your way. You can print us. Just whole versions of us if you want. I do wonder if the Sam and Neill thing

is on purpose because of Sam Neill. I also think that probably the Neill thing is a little reference to Neil Armstrong. I'm trying to operate by Kojima logic. Absolutely. Sam being Uncle Sam, Neil Armstrong being our greatest pioneer, right? He went the further. Kneel for the flag, kneel for the cross. Oh, my God. Absolutely. There's wheels within wheels in this game. Kneels within heels. God damn it.

So you go into Mexico and you're just trying to get to dead man's lab because as it turns out, as you're linking up Mexico, dead man is also down there doing experiments on this thing called a plate gate. It's this big archway. That is a teleporter that could theoretically get you to another part of the globe because before this, nobody knew if anybody else on Earth had survived the Death Stranding. Yeah, because the oceans had gotten tarred up and you couldn't actually cross the ocean anymore.

So now they figured out a way to do that using the DHV Magellan. Yes. Because Tar Man, the captain of it, his hand is lost in the tar because he tried to reach in to grab his son who drowned in the tar and it separated him from his hand, but he can still feel. his hand so he's able to navigate the tar streams where they were just not able to and the dhv magellan is a sort of submarine whoa that is used to traverse the world and find signs of life elsewhere perhaps like the scorpion

In On the Beach. The name of the Magellan as well is, again, something that the game sets up that I think it... almost delivers on because of course you know everybody knows who magellan was he set out to circumnavigate the world and he died halfway through and like his first mate or whatever completed the voyage so right away you have this frame

for the whole story. That's okay. What we're doing is we are building a legacy on the bones of all that came before us. Yeah. Though it's relatively close to the northern tip of South America. The continent is entirely cut off from us by a tar belt, and so we have no idea what's going on down there. Nor do we know the state of any continent other than our own.

The researchers here were trying to establish contact with the rest of the world. The Earth you see is shrouded in a thick layer of chiralium that renders electronics inoperable at altitude. So they tried sending ships across the ocean. Oh, yes. Oh, but that failed too. The high concentration of chiralium and open water proved too corrosive, invariably causing them to sink.

But then the researchers found some rather rare birds on their doorsteps. Birds not native to the region. Nice birdie, nice birdie. And that, my friend... was just the beginning. The researchers would later dub the anomaly a placate. But further investigation revealed that it came into existence when you began to expand the chiral network across North America.

and that the gate grew larger in tandem with the network itself. This is a baffling scene to me because I've read so many interviews where, like, Kojima's like, okay, so here's the thing. I know I write over long cut scenes, and... I've been trying to work on that because the rhythm of games is so important to me.

And so his solution for this dead man scene is to give you half of the exposition first. An alarm goes off. You go to a boss fight. You come back and then dead man picks up exactly where he left off for the second half of the scene. Although he is talking about different things. The first half is.

him talking about this whole thing about the provenance of lose BB pod, which you're just going to have to hear the same thing about it probably five times over the course of this game. Right. Then the other thing is about the fact that he's dead. And like plate gates and stuff. And it's beautiful. It's actually like this really beautiful scene where he's like, I found out I have a soul. I'm going to be able to cross over just like everyone else. It's like.

Pinocchio meets the Wizard of Oz. I get to be a real boy, and it turned out I was a real boy the whole time. Right. And that's what that's Guillermo del Toro, too. Right. Who's who Deadman is based on his his his whole physical appearance. Like he loves Pinocchio. He loves Frankenstein. He's adapted both. And you get to watch.

Sam watch him walk off into his beach in a genuinely very moving moment. It was at this moment that I was like, whatever quibbles I'm going to have with this game, they definitely have figured out how to do the storytelling, which is.

Even if something doesn't really make sense, we're going to get through it fast and we're going to get through it colorfully rather than just have everything happen in the sleeping pod. Yeah. And I appreciate, you know, spoilers for a game that's been out for six months now, but.

The stuff that they do with Dead Man in this game is very much, you have the right of it, Brian. They kind of dash off a vague explanation and then they don't dwell on it any further. We do have the corpus, which is there to explain a lot of stuff for us. It's not as bad. as the version of it that's in Death Stranding 1. The Death Stranding 1 version is the only way that you know about Sam's wife and child who died.

His wife died presumably of a drug overdose in a suburb, according to that. Oh, really? Yes. And so that's. That's where we get all the information about like why Lou is important and all of that because they couldn't do reshoots here. The corpus is a bit pared down. You're still I can't imagine anyone who would want to read that whole thing. And instead of getting a bunch of. emails like you did in the first game there's like an instagram thing he got the the kingdom hearts idea

But it works. They never overload you. It really works. It's just like here at the beginning, you're just constantly getting messages from Fragile being like, I'm hanging out with Lou. We're having a beautiful time. And it's like, look how cute she is. I hope nothing terrible happens.

So you go up and a terrible thing happens. You go back, you return to your shelter. There's an alarm. You race back from Mexico to Southern California. You briefly get saved by a samurai in red. Yeah. That's important to know. He's like a samurai. Perhaps a ninja or maybe like a cyborg ninja of some kind. A cyborg ninja of some kind. Right. Also, it should be noted the president of APAC in this game is played by the same actor.

as the senator from Metal Gear Rising Revengeance. Really? It should be noted that the Cyborg Samurai is also donned in red armor, which is the same red armor that these new robots that are roaming around. are wearing and this is like going to be the new threat for the game yeah you make your way back to sam's shelter and fragile is beat to shit on the ground and she says i'm so sorry i couldn't protect her And we get a little bit of a flashback where Fragile tries to like teleport.

to the beach because fragile is able to teleport to these beaches which is as we said the the barrier between life and death like the purgatory for every single soul on earth that gets their own personalized beach and she was able to traverse them until she got a thing called jump shock yeah which is the thing they invented in this game so you can't just teleport immediately from the word even though you

can just teleport even though you can eventually they have three methods of teleportation in this game for some reason it just doesn't involve fragile anymore but yeah fragile could teleport places you'd you'd go to her umbrella and then you'd she'd be able to take you wherever you needed to go and now it's it's very clear like The next time she does it, she'll die. So that's just like a little like Chekhov's gun. And it is also, I will say, I think the reason that they...

they divorced it from her in this game. That ability to teleport is because if you were to teleport with her, you would find out her secret, which is a secret that does not matter and shouldn't happen because she's going to die anyway. Right, that's fair. That's fair. It introduces Chekhov's gun, and then it comes in with Chekhov's hatchet. Chekhov's dual wielding here. Chekhov's electric guitar. But this part is devastating, though, for me. Yeah.

I mean, like I haven't played the first game, having really loved Lou and having known, okay, some bad shit's going to happen to Lou. Like, come on. Even if I hadn't seen the trailer, like, why is he back at this? Yeah. But showing the body and seeing your home that you had built together, that little home wrecked to shit. He's so good at these devastating action sequences of like, you also never get a good sense of what the shelters look like.

In Death Stranding, you never get to go inside the real places, right? You always have your pod. No. Except for... Except for the pizza shelter in Death Stranding 1. Whereas here in this game, you actually get to see inside Sam's shelter, a couple other people's shelters, and you actually see how the delivery mechanism works.

that you put the packages in, it drops down. You actually get to see Fragile use that to escape the shelter. It's such a creative use of all of these things that already exist in the world and then using them in a new and different way. still the core of it is emotional. The core of it is just being this camera that's just tight right on fragile as she's running away. Yeah, the filmmaking in this is such a huge step up from the first game.

Right. It's unbelievable. We catch up with Sam. I think it's a month later. Yes, it's like a title card next chapter one month later because we see that Lou has become a BT. And is occupying the old pod that Sam used to carry her in in the first game.

I don't know if he's just dreaming this or if he's actually going out and doing this when he empties his gun. It's a bunch of empty shells. So I think he's actually doing this. Sam is just going out and killing himself over and over and over again because he can't actually die. And he is not. He has not fully accepted what's happened, as you said.

like the on the beachman he he just he cannot fully grasp that lou is gone forever yeah and so fragile shows up and it's like hey listen i'm your friend you can't keep doing this to yourself

So why not just come with me to Australia to link it up to the Chiral Network? Because at least it's not... here at least it's not in your basement and you would feel good doing your old job again that's where you all have always felt most you're making her case better than she is this is a scene that i just think really doesn't work

because they don't let us in on Sam's reasoning for doing any of this. And it's because they can't because they need certain things to be a twist later, unfortunately, which is one of the weaknesses of the game. I also think fragile is. to me being manipulative to a certain extent. Fragile needs Sam to get this thing done. She's thinking about it in a greater good sense.

So she is to herself and probably correctly justifying that he needs to get out of the thing, but she also needs Sam to pull off this project. And so she has decided that. Honestly, I think if they had leaned into that, that could have been interesting. But that's how I read it. I want to know too, Sam's hair is like... gray like he looks old and bad and he's still not dying but he looks old now

It's possible that his hair has been gray the whole time and he's been dyeing his beard. I don't know. When you get on board the Magellan and you actually go on your quest, it makes you dye your hair. Do you dye it? I know you cut it. You dye it and then you spray it. You spray it with this future magic dye. You're right. right yeah which is a little detail that makes me love sam it's like just a little thing about him that is not not his suffering is just like

He continues to dye his hair even though he doesn't ever see another human being. And that was kept from us in the first game, right? We've seen this man piss and shit and then throw that piss and shit at BT's. Not in this game. They got rid of the piss and shit grenades. There isn't that. same exploitation that we had in the first game where, you know, he has to, he's constantly having his urine and blood and feces collected.

Uh, because they've been able to synthesize his blood. You don't have like this wide variety of weapons that you'll never use because they're all tailored to different types of enemies. And. The old terminal that you use to access the computer used to be a handcuff with like a razor on it because that way it could take your blood. It would cut into you and they'd cuff himself to his bed every night. Now it's a ring. It's just a thing that you put on.

Everything in this world has gotten a little less vulgar. Which means that also his golden cuff that he used to kill BTs is now a blood boomerang. And it sucks. Which sucks shit. It does not suck. You're just not using it right.

Because it sucks as a boomerang. Yes, I'll agree with you. But it's the best way to dispatch a BT if you're a sneaky person like me. And if you get real up close to them, you cut the umbilical cord and they're gone. Oh, yes, yes. That's what the blood boomerang does. I meant throwing it.

is not anything throwing it is not fun yeah yeah you have to charge it you have to yeah and it takes blood to charge it and it doesn't do as much damage as just sneak it up behind them you can get a blood grenade launcher You kill them all. I only carried grenade launchers in this game. I had like a...

Half my cargo was always grenade launchers. Just scattered about the mountainside. They were everywhere. It's one of those things where you have so many tools to approach the scenarios however you want, right? If you lean too hard into the fact that that's weapons and blood bags are very, very easy to come by and very, very common, even just out and about the way that I approached any given like.

uh miscreant camp or really any any other combat challenge in the game i would just strap on six blood bags and just go in guns blazing and i would never lose grenades blazing it's not a very difficult game if you go on neoseeker.com which is

a website that does a lot of like walkthroughs and stuff because i was trying to remind myself like what happened in this yeah because you didn't replay it like i i did not replay it i put 120 hours into it and then i redownloaded it and started playing i'm like i'm still a little burnt out um because it took me about 80 hours

to like beat the main game and then it was another 40 hours to uh five star everything and i just i kind of and i didn't bother five starring everything or getting all the trophies i five starred everyone except the little anime girl Because because of you you five-star mr. Impossible. Oh, yeah Wow, just you just didn't like the VTuber. You're like fuck the VTuber. I also did not care for the VTuber. I don't want to be called I don't want to be called up

uh peko i don't i don't think sam would like that i put that hat on sam because it helps your agility and he just says peko over and over again i was like i have to take this hat off even though it's useful yeah lenore did you like the peko hat i love the peko hat it's very cute you know on the subject of

On the subject of little character moments that endear Sam to us more. He strikes me as the sort of person who would be like really, really into six, seven. But anyway, we get on the Magellan, right? We get on the Magellan proper. So the adventure can begin and we meet.

All of our little crewmen that we will be interacting with for the rest of the story. We meet Tar Man, whose physical model is George Miller and whose voice actor is Marty Rohn. Marty Rohn, who's like an actor and producer and like pop musician. Like he's got just this wide ranging career. I think it's a wonderful performance. And he has a little cat with wings that I found out does not have a name. Well, the cat might just be his son. Oh, yeah. It's left unclear. I think it's basic.

telling you it's his son by the end though it's got the little wings too like they put on Lou so like you know I think there's an Instagram post that's like I've thought that it might be my son but there's no way and then there's doll man who we've mentioned before I think this is beautiful okay yes correct But I also think it's a beautiful piece of animation work because they make him appear stop motion. I love that. Yeah, they give him a lower frame rate. I found it.

highly irritating. It hurts to watch. I'm in the same camp as Lenore with the animation style. I'm with AJ on this one, but on the visual. And Dolman has some great moments. Dolmen is also the most irritating parts of the game are all Dolmen. Like 10 out of 10 top most irritating moments of the game.

And he's like what? He's like a spirit medium who got trapped in a doll. Yeah, he's like an Alan Moore character that gets like two panels and then you forget about him. Like his body is Fatih Akin, the Turkish-German director of Auf der anderen Seite. And yes, his voice is the guy who plays Jesus on the chosen Jonathan. Yeah. Sam, did you know that I came back after three days to absolve the sins of humanity?

Some also say that for 40 days after I went around and I preached and eventually I ascended to heaven later. There's a little bit of dispute about where I acquire my divinity. But the important thing is I'm here for all of you. Wait, wait, wait, wait, tall man, tall man. Sorry, I have a follow up question.

When your mother died, did she just like yeet herself into the sky or did she die somewhere and we can find her bones? There's about six different denominations that have six different answers to that. I'm probably undercounting that. Okay, now do a little dance for us. Let's see his dance, doll man. I love, Adrian, that you're trying to use doll man to resolve an issue you have with me and my Protestant account of the Virgin Mary. Yes! We need a third party and why not have it be?

This wasn't even a podcast thing. We had this argument after seeing Waiting for Godot walking through Midtown Manhattan. Did you know, Sam, there hasn't been a legitimate poop since Alexander VI. Oh, no. Okay, that's enough. We're putting you away. We're putting you away.

you a short distance uh which is useful for that yo i'm gonna throw you into the sky so you can mark all the people i'm about to murder tall man also immediately is like there is no baby in that bb pod yeah and we have to just sit with that for 70 hours on the subject i was shocked there's a i don't know if it's a random event or whatnot but i got it where sam's having a dream

you have to go and look at the bb pod that's the only thing the game lets you do at that point yeah you hear like muffled like horizon dreamer that one song that plays sometimes and then fucking like doll man comes and he's like demonic like horizon dreamer Yeah, he's inside the pod and he pops because he has a scary face that shows up sometimes. He also has a different face where he sings EU Donna.

He just becomes the singer of that song in the bath. Yeah. What do the hot springs do? They give you different perks depending on who they do actually. Yeah, they teleport you. That's your third mode of teleportation. The one that you're actually going to use. Then there's the one that does the fragile style teleportation. And then there's the machine. And then there's the baths. So doll man gives up the ghost. Immediately. There's not even a BT of Lou. There's just straight up nothing.

just nothing because there are doom sufferers who are around you who can also see the pot and that was my first thought was like well wait maybe dolman doesn't suffer from dooms but then he's the one who helps you see all the bts yeah it turns out he is your bb for the rest of the game because you hang him on your

felt like a labubu. Yeah. Sam, I am labubu man. You still get all the usual BB stuff. They've turned it down a little bit. Like every time you get hit and stuff, it used to be that Lou would cry. Now it's a little bit less frequent. And I don't know about you guys. I never comforted fake dead Lou because it just, it felt so wrong to me now because there's less crying. Whenever you get hit, you have doll man being like, Oh no, that's not good. It's like, fuck off.

I know. I'm also here, doll man. It used to be that this was like stressful and very emotional because you wanted Lou to be okay and your controller is crying. And then now it's just like this little horrible doll is just like.

Things aren't going so well, are they, Sam? So basically, on your way to Australia, you also run into these pilgrims wearing red armor and worshiping some sort of goddess Higgs. The goddess Higgs, it's obviously Fulges Higgs. Troy Baker is back. He is a little gold boy. Sam is not sexualized in this game at all. Not at all. And he was in the first game, right? There is this whole exploration of Norman Reedus' body in the first game that...

contractually seems to have been written out in the second game. Well, he was the UCA, right? And now Australia is Troy Baker's body. So we're just looking at Troy Baker. I mean, he puts in a hell of a performance, especially towards the end. you reach the gate sequence where you encounter your mirror self and you go through the portal.

And you're in the world of whales. We're like, not the country. That would be way funnier though. You just step through and you're in Cardiff. The TARDIS is right over there. And it's like, oh my God. I love that your thought of whales is that's where Dr. After who happens. That's where they shoot it. That's where they shoot Dr. Who's in Cardiff. You run into Mary Poppins. Yeah, it's lovely. Predane is over in the corner there with the black cauldron. Frodo's here. It's the fucking, yeah.

No, Frodo is in Australia where they filmed the Lord of the Rings. No, Ryan! The modern Prometheus is trying to force you to make him a wife. Come on. Come on! You also see what I call like the... council of extinction entities that's kind of what I've just decided that they are there's these shadows that await in the distance who look like a tribunal of some time I was curious about this I didn't go back to like watch that scene over and over again and I should have because

one of them is holding a baby and puts it down and so i was wondering if they were the various people you have left behind uh fragile and like dead man again i'm not sure if they are and they appear as those floating things from the first game.

That's that's fascinating, too, because we see sort of a sequence like that at the end when fragile is carrying the baby. So, you know, that's that's so it's like that's a shadow of things to come. Oh, I love that. That's great. So you reach Australia. Right. And you link up the first Cupid. Right.

there the first sort of steps into it and that's when you meet the patron of the dhv magellan a mannequin named charlie like charlie's angels how about that like charlie's angels there you go and you are able to pick out a voice for charlie except you're not yeah they give you four options and the only one you can pick is diehard man totally spoils it if

You're not me because I agonized over this decision. I'm like, they're going to be talking at me for the rest of this game. And I was like, man, it would be kind of fun to have it be, you know, malignant. And I was like.

or hartman but i was like you know what i really like tommy earl jenkins so i'm going to choose tommy earl jenkins and i had no idea that that was actually the only option brian i did the exact same thing except i did not agonize over it it was it was like die hartman within less of a second

I want John McClane. I want him. I think it was, I think it was Lenore who, I think it was you who like broke to me, like how obvious that twist was. Yes. Yes. Cause I picked Margaret Qualley first because I want Margaret quality to give me orders. Yeah. Once.

and once the yes and once the game told me no i was like wait a minute and then i picked the other two that weren't diharban and then i was like okay this is word for word basically what happened with me and aj aj was like yeah oh yeah that guy who's definitely not die hard man i was like well you could choose another voice he's like no you can't

I like that your impression of me is so gravelly I'm very flattered I'm a regular Troy Baker so it is so obviously Die Hard Man and that's fine I don't mind that but the fact that they kind of play it as a twist is also just like I bet you didn't expect that. It was so obvious it's a twist. Die Hard Man is just on the ship with you the whole time. That I love. He's in like the rafters. He's skittling around up there. He's Chang from Community in the Vent.

Tim and Andy's boobs up there. And again, they're trying to do this so that you can maybe become suspicious of him and align yourself with the very Canadian actor playing the American president. As we mentioned, Higgs is back, right? And he cries gold this time, which is fun. And basically in the first game, he was just sort of that annoying other guy that was just like on the outskirts, right? Who was just bothering you a whole, whole lot.

In this game, he has such a clear plan and motivation that I find him so much more intriguing. He wants to make a world filled with violence and fear. And Sam's whole deal of what he calls your hippy-dippy chiral network... is really getting in the way of that plan. He's been thwarted by Sam before. He has a legitimate grievance against Sam. He has exactly the same motivations as the first game, except now there's actual history there.

As opposed to this guy just keeps showing up and hates me for some reason. I should note too that in between game one and two, it's been 11 months for you. Higgs was stranded on a beach for like 10,000 years or some shit. So he has spent this whole time basically just repeating the name Sam, like to himself, like muttering these few handful of people's names.

And getting really horny about it. Like he's he's so angry and so horny at the same time, which been there. So then add on the final two members of your team over the course of this. You meet Rainy. Basically, her whole deal is that whenever she walks outside.

She creates timefall, but it's not quite timefall, right? Well, it is corefall. Most of it is timefall, except within like two meters of her body, where she's actually able to reverse the effects of timefall. So she's able... to unrust this uh fire hydrant and yeah there's this recurring motif of bj thomas singing raindrops keep falling my head bj thomas of course the famous christian musician after that song and all around nice sky

real nice person especially at his concerts the other thing about rainy is that she is perpetually seven months pregnant like some of the other npcs that we met and she's delightful and so now whenever you connect a place to the chiral network what this means in game is that the place because becomes greener. She's able to bring this sort of verdant life everywhere that she goes. Also, the place right next to her shelter that you deliver stuff to gives you a huge shipment of unripe apples.

And you may not even notice it because you're skipping through that dialogue as fast as possible. But while you're in the rainbow value, you get a bunch of unripe apples that. you then see for the rest of the game. She also, uh, her shelter that you get her from, she has parakeet. She leaves there and you can deliver food to her parakeets and they give you ratings. Yeah. They learned how to use her Amazon button. And the more stars you get, the more parakeets there are really lovely.

I love that bit. I love when this game really lets its freak flag fly, which we'll get to much more in the second half. But before we do that, we just want to give one final shout out to the final member of your crew. Donkey Kong. No, sorry. Tomorrow, played by Elle Fanning. So, you know, she's going to be very important. You find her actually in one of the in that side parallel universe in Neil Vanna's.

whole track. You get your parallel version of the Unger fights from the first game and you fight Neil Vana in Mexico? Even though he's Italian. He literally says Mamma Mia sometimes if you hit him. I'm not kidding. That's not a bit. Here we go again. So you fight Neil. That's a beautiful segment. And then, yes, this girl emerges. She's being, she's in this.

It looks like a sarcophagus, but they call it a chrysalis, like a butterfly is in. And it's being gnawed on by wolverines once it comes back over to our side of things. And then you pick it up and... Yeah, you have this girl who has these weird like sort of tentacle suction things like an octopus has, but in a in a chiral tar kind of way and things that she touches.

will immediately age as though she's made out of time fall almost. Yes. And, and she will spend the rest of the game sort of trying to master that power. She's also got a bandage over her elbow. Hmm. Hmm. That's interesting. I wonder what's going on there. Maybe there's a birthmark on that elbow that another character in these games has. She also has an essential combat justification for being barefoot at all times. Yes, that is true. That is true.

We're going to take a little break and we come back. We're going to deal with the whole rest of the game, including all of our biomes and the preppers along the way. And also what leads to one of the greatest boss battles in video game history. Stay tuned.

Hi there, Sam. It's me, Toboggan Man, Prime Minister of the Canadian Autonomous Network of Undergrown Cities, or CANUC for short. As you know, most of Canada was forced underground after the beaver uprisings of the early 2000s, when the Canadian government fitted beavers with mechanical legs in an attempt to create the ultimate weapon, military op-

optimized units for navigating terrain in extreme snow, or Mounties for short. Did you know that Mounties are also the nickname for our Royal Canadian Mounted Police?

that can't be a coincidence sam i am reaching out because i have heard that you're down under might sorry about that linking up australia our sister in the great commonwealth of what was once great britain and is now mostly a nation of human fox monstrosities and firebonds we think it's just super that you're bringing the gift of chirality to the merry old land of oz

And we're just wondering, if you're not too busy that is, if you'd consider heading up to your friends in the great north and bringing us that life-saving internet so that our dead can stop exploding like nuclear bombs every three or four hours. Oh, there goes another one now. 13 o'clock already? We'll be patiently awaiting your response. No rush, though. Wouldn't want to be a bother. This is Toboggan Man. Over and out. Nice and easy. Sam, it's Toboggan Man again from before, remember?

I asked you if you would consider hooking up Canuck to the Chiral Network. I know you've probably been curious about the origins of my name. Well, you see, when I was a child, I loved sledding on my toboggan. If you have any more questions about toboggans or my name, feel free to ask. Or if you'd like to link up your neighbors to the north to the technological equivalent of magic, well, I certainly won't stop you.

Nor will the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who are currently being ripped apart by ghosts Okay, talk later Sam messing around why in the holy name of celine beyond did you not link us up to the chiral network first we are just meters away is it something we said was it Because you're still confused how I got my name? Is it because we were just too darn nice? Well, guess what, fucko? My grandma exploded in her-

So I am done being nice. But my murdered boyfriend was going to turn Australia evil. That hoser talks. Do not dare to have the audacity to shit in my mouth and call it poutine. We all have to throw old grandma into the great tar pit of Manitoba so you could go out for a rip through the Australian outback.

Probably a little harsh. So sorry about that. It's just... It's just been hard up here since the whole murder beaching, you know? There's just been whales falling out of the sky. And not just in Nova Scotia like normal. We're talking... sky whales in Toronto. Just yesterday Marv, that's my pal Marv, he went above grown to grab some supplies and he almost got eaten by a giant dog made out of goo.

The only entertainment we have down here are pirated DVDs of Ride with Norman Reedus. And I don't even know what it's supposed to be about. Norman Reedus? Motorized bikes? What was the audience for this? There's just a new tragedy every day and it all feels like it's too much And I don't know how any of us are supposed to keep living like this. I can't and I won't

So please, in the name of Keanu Reeves, another famous Canadian, won't you please consider hooking us up to the Chiral Network? Please, Sam. Please. Oh, also... Did you know the chiral network helps connect people across long distances? You could find out more about it in your codec. Oh, well, looks like Marv's necrotizing. I guess this is it for old Toboggan Man. This should be on an episode of Ride with Norman Reedus. Fuck yeah!

As we wander around Australia, we hit a number of interesting environs that are not just Iceland. They actually shaped the whole landmass kind of like Australia this time.

Mexico is not shaped like Mexico at all. It's just kind of a blob of land. And you can get through the whole thing in like, what? 40 minutes from tip to tail? This one, it takes a little bit... longer to to make your way around it and the first part we start off with is just a very basic tutorial level that is also has one of the hardest bt sections in the whole game or like the most populated between you and the lone commander

you to do stuff so that you can learn all the different ways you can handle a crisis. Where the first game is like the first BT section and the first miscreant section with the mules in the first game. You can walk pretty much around everything and you learn nothing as a result. Right. This one does force you to like in order to get to the lone commander, you have to fight through a whole army. And then there's there's like several or just be good at it and, you know, not get.

spotted there is a mission at west fort knots that sends you back to the original like plate gate where you emerge into australia and i was just like i'm never doing this no i don't want to go back i don't want to go back there and then the game makes you go back there at the end of the game yeah it's a really it's a really nasty bit of geology out there So whatever vehicle you take is going to.

fucking suck and then going on foot is also gonna fucking suck that's where zip lines come in i never once used zip lines lenore how this is fascinating to me i am confounded how did you get through the mountain i you know i just walked you know i just there there are places where you know you climbed a mountain and you turned around yeah yeah i climbed a mountain you saw your reflection of those snow-covered hills did a landslide bring you down

once yes that is one of the five times that i died two the other four were falling off of the same rock face on the mountain but i did conquer that fucking rock face that is pretty much the only way anyone ever dies in these games is by falling off of a rock face you put the ladder in place and it's like I went up the ladder and the game's like no fuck you you find something that works

And then you just kind of stick with it and everything else. Like I put down a safe house foundation at one point. I didn't bother finishing it just because it felt like a waste of time. I could be spending this time.

going somewhere else that is safe and completing an objective the main thing that you do in this game to make the game as easy as possible is build all the roads yes and it's so it's satisfying it's great you have a text from me jacob i believe from a couple weeks ago where just in all caps i'm like oh my god you can upgrade the roads yeah roads level two you were so excited i was like lenore have you beat the

story mode yet or well no they get little roofs now so they don't like degrade with time fall and those roofs make you go faster and then it becomes a thing like well i'm just gonna upgrade one of these right and then you get the speed boost and And then it stops on the next one is like, well, I got to upgrade the next one. And before you know it, that's 120 hours of your life. The fucking game changed the color on the map so you could see more clearly which ones.

you had upgraded without having to go to each terminal but either way yeah yeah you have to go to each terminal this is primarily a road building game if you choose to build the roads that will take more time than just about yeah of all the quality of life changes like in the game from one to two

Yeah, it's a little smoother dropping stuff off. It's a little smoother interacting with the world from vehicles like you can find the gloves that let you remotely pick up Carol crystals from the truck. You also get different kinds of crypto. biotes as well there's the old kind but then there's also ones that restore your battery ones that slow time down and and again you just might not be inclined to use them but they're actually quite useful

Except you don't need them because you have a rocket launcher and a grenade launcher. What if you could slow everything down before you aimed your rocket, though? Shit, I got to play another hundred dollars. Yes. That's what's so good about the mountain, though, because it pushes you to the uttermost limits of your resources, right?

that's where i really started munching on the crypto biotes yeah because like suddenly i needed a quick source of stamina suddenly i needed a quick source of um of restoring my consciousness because i'm you know so high up in the consciousness meter which is in the first game and it's just like what the fuck am i looking at right now and in this one it's actually used and you have to use your battery once you get the oxygen hood you burn through battery to be able to keep breathing

And if you take it off, your consciousness lowers, but your battery survives. Yeah, yeah. It's a lovely little trade off. And especially if you are not building zip lines through the mountains, like you are going to be hyper reliant on this. Or if you're building zip lines, but you don't know that they can curve.

AJ what like AJ because yeah, I skipped that part of the tutorial apparently so I was the geography of my zip lines is insane which is like the first game right where it's like everything has to fucking line up in a perfectly straight line yeah i spent so many hours lining up the perfect

Frankenstein's monster of ziplines and I'm like I've set up the ziplines why am I still not making the packages on time because they didn't curve you didn't notice when you were like writing a zipline that someone else put down that it had a curve sometimes no I never rode one that had a curve. The mountain is the last area. And if you're expecting the big mountain boss fight that you had in by the boss fight, I mean the mountain is the boss.

That you had in Death Stranding one that doesn't really happen here. And it gives you a couple moments where you're like, oh, fuck, this is the one. we're going to be doing it. And it's like, no, just take the bike. No, it is tough. The mountain does get, I mean, that is easily the hardest part of the game and all the kinds of stuff. I mean, it's got some fun guys up there. You've got a whole mission where you've got to find a motherfucker and that part's annoying, but the mountain.

uh you know to get to get like slightly personal for a second i hit the mountain in a very like a uh you know i played this game over however long a couple months and i hit the mountain at a very tough uh time personally i was playing super late into the night after my separation from my now ex-husband that happened while I was playing through this game, which was, you know, I was playing really late into the night, later that I was really like empty and I was...

traversing the mountain, the center of the map, and I didn't want to do the plot. I just wanted to be on the game and build ziplines. That's really all I wanted to do and all I felt like I could do. All the way up and down the fucking mountain, I decided I was going to do the perfect zip line that was going to go over the whole fucking thing. I had to upgrade the shit out of my bandwidth to be able to do that.

So I finished this like arbitrary goal. I'd done all these, like I was like half conscious basically. I get on the zip line and I take it all the way to the bottom. And there's a moment that's like almost emblematic of this game in a really amazing way. The best of it is. I burst through this dense cloud and I can see the whole continent. And the sun is coming up over the horizon. And Sam goes, woohoo! And Ghost of Lu goes. And the church's song hits the chorus. It's that you can take my heart.

hold it together as we fall apart. Maybe together we can make our mark and stars as we embark and keep together as the lights go dark. And I'm not kidding. I look out my window in real life and the sun is coming up in real life. And so, yeah, and I literally go outside and I like cry like I'm just, you know, like I'm about to fucking process.

stuff in a way that i don't really know how to explain i spelled it like fucking higgs throwing up golden shit um i breathe like i hadn't in weeks on my front porch i get inside i'm about to switch off the game and go to bed and dolman says you know

Ziplines are a great way to travel. And if that's not this game in a fucking nutshell, I don't know what is. That's Death Stranding 2. That is Death Stranding 2. It just lets you loose. And you don't have to do any of the story missions if you don't want to. You can just do standard orders forever. You have to do some because areas won't let you get packages to deliver until you unlock them.

so i i what i recommend to people is always go a little bit further beyond where you think and then you can go back and five star everything this is especially true of mexico where mexico doesn't really open up its deliveries until after you get through about three areas in Australia. And by three areas, I mean like three destinations. I had gone back to Mexico really early. You can't build roads in Mexico and stuff, so it's a little bit more rugged no matter what you do.

But like I was just delivering like spare luggage that was left on this on the dirt. And it's not as fun. It's just not as fun. The way that the game encourages exploration. Right. You can.

fix an auto paver or fix a track layer and you can just see over the next hill where the next one is and it's like okay i gotta go there yeah and continue the road or the monorail or whatever but sometimes you get to a place like uh the f5 distribution center like the metagenomicist and there's nothing to fucking do yeah right you can you can stick stuff in a locker there but like there's no fabrication option

There's a flag or two that you have to set before the metagenomics will come out of her house and say hi. You don't see those packages of hers or of other people's until the point in the game where they start appearing. And that always... that always irks me a little like you should be able to at least get them to like one star yeah i wanted to connect my last strand of road at the end of the game

And it basically doesn't let you do it because the final couple of survivalists don't have their packages appear. And these are ones that you have to find randomly. They're not story packages or anything. But they just don't appear until the very last chapter.

it is crazy i mean like lenore that is the the way we met as you built road up to my house and i wouldn't come out until you brought me back that was literally my my quarantine project was building a path yes let's talk a little bit more about the volumes we talked we talked about the mountain at this point um one of

the hardest ones to five star by the way is that fucking observatory jesus christ yeah i think i gave up on it there is a point where you get to the higher star levels that the lost cargo that you find stops being as consequential the stars are inconsistent like bigger places usually you need more to get to the next star but also the stars are gated by story things yeah that's the most frustrating so like some places you should just do the mission delivery

complete that and then immediately after deliver the other packages and then you'll get to them together. And sometimes that's not enough because it's gated by another. There's a lot of stuff like there's a lot of other biomes that we could talk about here, right? Rainbow Valley, which is a real place in Australia. It's beautiful. It's very. verdant um there are actually animals in this game and you can capture them using bola guns or stun guns and

put them in a big package and bring them up to the animal shelter. You can use bullet guns and animals. You can. Oh yeah. It doesn't tell you that, but you can. Yeah. I just wrestled them. Yeah. And you can absolutely wrestle them too. You can wrestle them to the ground because you also get the same skeleton.

Stuff that you got in the first game. So you can have speed skeletons that you can use to like chase after. To be clear, we're not talking about August Strindberg here. We're talking about exoskeletons that you put on your body. And they do have slightly different rules than they did in the previous game. And they're better for it.

It's so funny when you hit one of the animals with a bullet gun and it just... falls over and I'm sure did you ever see animals getting caught in the time fall no they die immediately and what you can do because that's what you're saving them from right right that's right you're saying you can go up to the body and if you press it's you square to capture right if you press square sam will will erect a little hologram tombstone

for that animal. He didn't do that for any of the ones I ran over with in my car? No. No, that happened. The first animal I saw was like some sort of bilby or whatever running across. And Dawman is like, there's an animal, Sam. Boom. Run it over. And he's like, you can catch that animal and bring it to an animal shelter. It's very, very funny. You get docked 100 likes for killing wild animals. It'll show up on the screen. Wild animal killed. 100 likes minus from drawbridge.

like you you make that back going to the bathroom while other people use the roads you build right there is rare like their currency you just hold on to them yeah exactly exactly and there's the the animal shelter people who are churches their likeness they pitch to you yeah this is like a preservation effort these things are endangered but like there's such a toothless banality to killing the endangered species in this game and it's funny

But it's not really echoed by other aspects of your relationship, and by extension, APAC's relationship to the world.

it should feel worse yeah it should feel worse if an animal dies there's less weight to the to the building of this uh frontier right then i feel like there ought to be yeah it's extra me because some people have set up like speed boosts right where animals very regularly yep that's what happened to me several times i straight up over the two playthroughs maybe hit three animals so i think it's a personal problem aj there should be there should be four shields on the upgraded roads that

prevent animals from going on the road. I think that's very smart. Did you notice that when you upgrade the roads and they have ceilings, the other porters will start walking down the road more? So then, yeah, you become a hazard to them as well. Yeah, I would feel way less bad about hitting the other quarter. And I have and I felt I actually did feel very bad about that because they worship you. They worship you as a god and you are running them down with your car. That is something.

The experience that I had with the porters in the first game was that I didn't know there were porters. I just thought there were mules carrying stuff. Yeah, they're so rare in the first game. I shot them on sight with my bulletin.

Oh no! And I stole their shit and I got Doc's likes, but whatever. I got their shit. Now I'm miles away on my little tri cruiser. Yeah. Lenore between, yeah, between the animals and that trying to do like an undertale genocide run. So rainbow Valley does this bit where they.

Usually you get a new item and then you get a chance to use it right in the next area, which was a problem that the first game had is that it didn't do that. This game is like, hmm, I just got a tar cannon. I should use this pretty soon because it talks about how it can stop enemies, especially BTs.

and stop fire so then you get this big scripted segment where a bunch of whales fall from the sky and set this entire forest on fire in the rainbow valley time to get the tar cannon yes nope nope nope this is scripted fire You can't do anything about it. You'll try to put flames out and Dollman will just be like, Sam, you can't put out the fires. You need to keep running. Okay, so we'll use it for the next fires that happen in this game, which don't. Yes.

one one does there's one when you're doing the ghost hunter thing yes yes yes sam is on and it never goes out you can try and put it out it does not go there's that there's also like when you're in like evil hell mexico or whatever yes there is a tar cannon on the ground you can

And it's less effective. Yeah. Well, yeah. And it's less for making it navigable than it is for making things visible because you cannot see a fucking thing with a fire in this game. You got to get the shit out of that. Yeah. Yeah. So don't ever use the tar cannon.

is what I will say to everyone who plays this game. You try to use it on enemies, and it's like, cool, it incapacitated them for about three seconds, which is not enough time for you to run up and punch them. You know what a better way of incapacitating enemies is? What is?

It's a grenade launcher. Oh, pretty good. Pretty good way to do that. Just letting you know. I've heard good things. I've heard they got five stars on the Porter reviews. So there's also there's a rainy bit in the north. Yeah, there are these sort of factories and mines that you can hook up, but they're.

also not as useful as you would expect them to be even after you've built out everything we get to this other bit um what i call just call arizona for lack of a better word it's just a bunch of canyons and crags it's not quite the desert but it's not not the desert and this is where the forest fire happens this is also i'm sorry wait a minute i'm seeing that there's a prepper here named hartman our boy he's back um he's still mapping the beaches

and things but something weird's going on with Hartman and Dollman's like I think he's gonna betray us and then it turns out that no it's just that Deadman has been occupying Hartman's body while Hartman is on the beaches his body is Nicholas Wendegreffen the Danish filmmaker. He has a heart attack every 21 minutes and then he spends the three minutes while he's unconscious to look for his family on the beach and chart the beach.

And so in that brief window of time, dead man is able to take over his body and send emails. That's all he does. This time Hartman is also. uh living with someone there's this woman who also has a 21 minute syndrome where she just has emesis she throws up every 21 minutes and she's part of a sisterhood a sisterhood she's the mother of two sisters oh i see also have a 21

minute syndrome. Well, so the thing is that this woman and the two girls who are her daughters, this is Nicholas Wendig reference wife and daughters. These are his real family. This whole thing about 21 minute syndromes just doesn't. really do it for me because what does this mean? What does this connect us to? What is this telling us? Why does 21 minutes matter? Does this bother you as much as it bothers me?

yeah it's it's it's it's you you get the you mentioned a sisterhood of these people right and there is indeed like a support group like a community of people who every so often something in their physiology cuts out um And it's cool. It's interesting. It is something that I wish there was, you know,

Final Fantasy seven has tons of like alternate media that, that explores like, you know, bits and pieces of the world. And this feels like something that should be explored in like a light novel and just like is not well. Yeah, it's a good point because there's going to be a Death Stranding show on Disney Plus in a couple of years. So maybe that's where it's going to pop up. Yeah. Yeah. It's weird. He made this announcement like.

two three weeks ago and i feel like it didn't get picked up by anything no one noticed disney plus disney plus doing a death stranding tv show i genuinely can't wrap my head around it and also they're doing two a24 movies yeah i mean i'll believe those when i see them but good god i was re-watching just the cut scenes to like refresh myself for this and the whole time i'm like

how are you going to do this? How are you going to do this guitar battle? Explain nothing. Just explain nothing. That's what you need because these ideas, aside from the 21 minute thing, these ideas are all really interesting. I think even while we're on subject to this the seven months pregnant thing pregnancy freezing at seven months not for everyone but for a lot of people

I think it's the idea. I think he's trying to take a little bit of the children of men thing here. Sure. Right. And just kind of explore birth work. in this universe right what would the death stranding since we know that there is a there is an afterlife right that also means that there must be a pre-life so this whole thing is mormon and this is saturday's warrior this is saturday's warrior the video game and and so just sort of exploring

The beginnings of life because we focus so much on the end of life. Right. I think that's what he's trying to go for. Also, that it's seven months pregnant and 21.

is divisible right there's a seven there might be something there i think honestly the 21 minutes thing is more just to give hartman somebody that he can be with and a family that he can actually be with on this side that he's not just constantly searching for but he never has that arc so nothing really ever comes from yeah i think with hartman it's like in the first game i didn't question at all why it was every 21 minutes i was like that's a thing this guy has but in this game

It makes you be like, wait, there's a lot of people with this kind of thing. And in that, I agree with you, Brian, that that makes you then ask questions that I wasn't asking.

Does it have to be every 21 minutes? Can it be somebody who's, I don't know, I thought that would be like, oh, here's what's causing the cycle. And I guess mystery is cool. It didn't bother me the same way with the seven-month pregnant thing because it fits thematically. In a way that you were just discussing. I don't know why they chose seven. Well, with seven months pregnant, I think it's because...

Lucy, Sam's wife, was seven months pregnant when she died. And considering that everything is going to be dealing with her child and Sam's child and that child's impact on the world, I think that works. It's not like time fall. It's not like the chiral network, which is like the exploitation of the afterlife.

You know, it's not about learning the history of the BB pods and how it was kind of this horrible thing. But now we're trying to make it better, but it still hangs up like all of that stuff has sort of an emotional resonance that works. Right.

Not not necessarily the concrete thing in the story, although that's also there, too. Whereas I don't know emotionally what we're supposed to be getting. And again, with like the seven months pregnant, I can kind of get like, OK, birth rates, things like that. Right. You're thinking about that a lot if you live in Japan. Sure.

And but like the 21 minute syndrome, people who have to. Who have some sort of health problem that occurs every 21 minutes, I don't know what we're like, I don't get anything from that. Right. Well.

Speaking of something that I do get something from, a profound thing from, let's talk about The Pizza Chef. One of the greatest NPC side quests I've ever played in a video game. Just... so surprising at every turn if you have not played Death Stranding 2 and you are still listening to this episode please stop what you're doing go get Death Stranding 2 and play it through

to the pizza chef moment because we're going to spoil the shadow shit out of it and there are a couple of pizza chef moments so not the first one but later on so in the same way that hartman's region in the first game is shaped like a heart The pizza chef's region in Death Stranding 2 is shaped like a pizza with a wedge taken out of it, or perhaps even our own Mr. Pac-Man himself. Yes. That might come up later. Yeah. Did either of you get the Pac-Man minigame? What?

i don't know that i did even knowing what to do it's hard to unlock because you have to do something with a very specific kind of timing otherwise it won't happen so you have to look you should look it up because it's very fun yeah but basically you just that the pizza chef is an imposter and is not the actual pizza chef everyone's been getting weapons right weapons are getting distributed to all the miscreants and these are often

deadly weapons and so it's like where the fuck are all these things coming that was a really good bit like when you deliver your first delivery from the pizza chef to the data scientist and then she's like thanks for the arms peco yeah she's like oh there was another box under my box and it's full of

Guns. Isn't that great? Because Higgs's whole deal here, right, is that he's trying to supply guns. We're talking about like emotional arguments and like things tether to emotion in this game. Right. And in the first game, it was just like Internet is like unequivocally good.

right it is a good thing that we are bringing to everyone i feel like there's a lot of equivocation i don't know i feel like it is because things get worse the chiral density gets worse and it opens the door to the extinction entity yeah but it's not but like everyone whose lives it touches it doesn't radicalize anybody in the same way that in this game Higgs spreads his message right he is the alternate side of it he is he is the alt-right rising up through the internet and that's what

kojima is really interested in it's just like yes the internet is great because it connected us all but also it allows bad actors like higgs to get in there and distribute guns through pizza chefs yeah there is not enough exploration of okay

Like all the, the, the Carol network connects the U S Mexico, Australia, all the other supernatural shit gets shunted elsewhere. And the rest of the world is not having such a great time of it, but we don't get to see the rest of the world. And we don't, this is, this is part and parcel. of how I think the theming of this game is not as ambitious as it might be because you have so much tied up in

The infrastructure of the United States being being supported by derived from the super exploited labor of not only you, the porter, but also the brain dead pregnant women that you get the BBs from. Right. Right. Right. You have that in the first game. And then in the second game.

What do you learn? You learn that a lot of those pregnant women were trafficked from Mexico. Right. And here's my hot take. If you're going to explore the theme of a of a. of a united states pursuing its manifest destiny on the backs of people um trafficked from from the global south right yes just stay in mexico

Right. Just explore that. Yeah. Explore. That was Brian's pitch as well. Yeah. Mexico's a big country. It's not like there's not attempts in the game to develop alternatives to a pass. Right. One of the end game preppers is like B pass. And they're like, OK. okay, well, if the network goes down, we're building our own network, right? I want to see somewhere in the world that didn't have to harvest brain-dead pregnant women.

You get the sense if you pursue this theme to its uttermost that the United States is doing this because of the nature of the United States. Right. You know, the same way that the birth control came from the mass sterilization of, you know, women in Puerto Rico, a colony of the US. Right.

Enormous public good that was that was undergirded by incredible, brutal white supremacy because of our peculiar history. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in the world of Death Stranding, and we'll see this with the big twists at the end of the game, there's just sort of a no, it's not.

We fixed it with reforms. Yeah. And it's the same thing with the first two. Yeah. Also did that. Yeah. Yeah. We're, we're, we're die. Hardman gives the whole Hillary Clinton speech at the end. Yeah. There's this whole like, well, delivery has gotten completely automated. It drove a bunch of delivery guys insane. and now the automation is going to come for australia but actually we fixed it but actually they get automated anyway but it's okay

Okay. All right. Either way, this pizza man. Yeah. Yeah. There's this pizza man and he teaches you karate. He teaches you a cheat code that makes your guns more lethal, which you should activate every time you're about to fight ghosts. because it makes the weapon stronger and then deactivate it when you fight people because then that makes it complicated there's just been a button on your gun the whole time that Sam is in curious enough not pushed

I think Sam is a very dumb, beautiful boy. And I think that a lot of, I forgive a lot of the dialogue in this game for being as didactic as it is because Sam needs some shit explained to him because he is so apocalyptically dumb. Yeah. One solid snake is the same.

It just has to repeat everything in the form of a question. We've been seeing basically a false pizza man. And the false pizza man has been the face of this weapon distribution front. This is the hub for weapon distribution where the factory is just a little ways over in the desert. Yeah. And once you get enough deliveries, the delivery stop for a while.

And you keep going and then you get some more deliveries and then the shelter opens up. You go in, you see the big chiral printers that are making weapons and you get a couple of, of robo miscreants that you have to beat up. And then you have a whole.

kung fu fight sequence with the pizza man and it's just incredibly silly and fun it's a delight it's fun in that way that the first game never was yeah there's bits like he'll he'll continuously like fight you off and then pause the fight to keep his kitchen straight and this is the this is the kojima that made metal gear this is like okay here we go we're back baby we're operating on all cylinders and then once you free the pizza man from his terrible fate uh you

He gets his old sign back, which is so beautiful and lovely. You then can unlock this very special minigame where you become a giant Pac-Man. Yes. that gobbles up ghosts. Pac-Man will basically move along the borders of each Chiral network region and you can eat BTs and they will actually disappear off of your map for like...

an in-game day. What? That's delightful. There's so much in this game that solves every kind of inconvenience you could imagine. It very much rewards you five-starring everybody. It very much rewards you doing that digging. Well, yeah, because it makes you go through the ringer first, right?

You have to go by foot to... various places on the mountaintop through horrible bt areas right but once you're on the other side the game's like well you've done that already yeah so you don't have to do that again here's all the toys to make it easier this time and death stranding one that was also

true but it is doubly so here in the sequel where they give you so many more toys fucking pokemon at a certain point in this game yes you can catch the giant bts for yourself and then use them as weapons in your boss fights that my little squid boy took out

like half the health of most of the bosses. And I just kind of stood back. I was like, I'm so proud of him. Look at him go. I was able to catch all of them except for the spider one. So a few other biomes to cover before we sprint here into the end game. There's the desert, which I think.

is big and red and they showed this early on in the previews for this game and there was this subtle implication that maybe you do leave earth for death stranding too and it's like all right just australia man it's just australia it's the closest thing we have to mars yeah you get you get her boobs you get like lightning and sand and you know low visibility and the weapons factory that you have to take out you get like a nice oasis there too but jacob tell me more about uh

the desert and what your love for. I love it because of the motherhood after getting through this environment that is, you know, a second, I think to the mountain in difficulty, but pretty, pretty tough. There's some dunes that like, if you don't have a.

Yeah, it's a pain. And I made it hard on myself because I wanted to see if I could pull certain things off. Like, can I rig something with ramps and speed that I can get all the way over this dune? The answer is yes, you can. In a way that the 21 minute thing does not work for me. This group of women, some of them who are like the seven month pregnancy and they built a society and they have fucking guns and they're like worried about Sam emotionally and you have to enter in your own birthday.

to get into the yes to get into the thing like what a weird moment that's one where the game is like oh you should look at the corpus wink wink and it's like oh yeah you have to enter it's like you go to the number pad and it's like

this game has stopped recording. You can't record this part. It's like, why? It's because it's your personal information. Yeah, yeah. It's also, I was very affected by Deborah Wilson's performance in this deborah wilson is just such a fucking fantastic actor and she has been in a god tier run in video games specifically for the last 10 years jedi fallen order jedi survivor she is

so fucking good in those games. Unbelievable in those games. And then she shows up here. When I saw that, I was excited because of her. I was just like, oh my god. And she does this thing where she's She's not evil, but she has this smile that's not quite a smile. It's like she doesn't quite know how to relate. At first I was like, is this like showing something sinister? No, it's not sinister. She's just like not sure how to relate to Sam. Almost like...

As a man, she's having trouble committing with a man for fair reasons. And like, and she's trying to help him with this like fatherhood thing. I'm trying to look at his, his, I don't quite understand everything that's going on with.

the tank and that she's figuring out and the serial number but she's trying to help you through this thing in a way that uh yeah let's say she's more gentle with things than doll minutes well if anything the tank issue just makes it more muddy because we find out that lou was actually bb zero and not the number that was initially assigned to her at the beginning of the first game which seems more like an elaborate retconning for a thing that

that Kojima like needed she was supposed to be like the grand BB to operate the entire chiral network which would have required not you know a whole bunch of different BBs this doesn't make a whole lot of sense considering that she's still not the first bb because you were right because sam was the first but sam was a bb you know like 30 years before she was so i don't entirely

understand like you were saying jacob what's happening here yeah but i think that it poses a question that all apocalyptic media has to cover at some point which is just like the human race has died out we got to get those birth numbers up Walk me through this. Apex trying to bring about a thing whereby humanity is turned into like semi ghosts and our evolution is halted. So we don't go extinct, but we're not doing anything. Higgs is trying to bring about the last stranding.

which will be our extinction. Yes. Okay. Okay. So they got two divergent things. Okay. Got it. Got it. Yes. He, he was using them. APEC generally just wants to, I think just, put everybody in San Junipero because they can control them entirely and there will never be another void and they're seeking a zero void out policy which seems to be a pointed reference to zero COVID this game is also extremely pro vaccine right

Vaccines are given a lot of weight at the beginning of the game. Also, when Tamara shows up, she's given an entire round of vaccines. Yeah, that's right. But it does seem to see any kind of policy that isolates people from other people as being... Even though it's a world that has already necessitated this in a way that it was before COVID. And so I don't know that it fully knows how to square the circle of all those things. It definitely doesn't land, whether or not they're trying to land.

You know, you might ask the creators and they might say, oh, we were not trying to fully give answers. And the motherhood is a... referencing something about the nature of war. We don't really have wars in Death Stranding, but again, he's still rehashing some stuff from Metal Gear Solid.

But that women and children are the first casualties of any conflict. I would argue that in Higgs's case specifically, all he does is crime. He spreads violence. He spreads unrest. And he specifically wants to wipe.

everyone out because he does not believe that they can coexist in peace which again that's metal gear solid from what i understand yeah i mean he is working hand in hand with a server system that has not necessarily even become sentient, but has its own goal in mind in order to bring war to every corner of the world, which is what Liquid Ocelot does in the Metal Gear Solid series with the Patriots.

It works better in a context of a story that is about war that has also had a couple of decades to cook here. It's like, well, right now it's just like brigands, you know, they're miscreants. They are not fronts. We kind of have an Australian government. But it's like the Australian government in on the beach, which is just like a guy somewhere who's like, I was in Parliament at one point. And so I can issue some things.

But that's about it. No real power. And for some reason still enforce fishing law. Yeah. Yeah. I honestly think that Higgs is less Christ, more Antichrist. Right. And I think. Yeah. self-described antichrist um yeah like i think he would self-describe in those terms he is giving himself the crown of thorns he's giving he has gone through the desert right he's gone through the beach through these tens of thousands

And when he was offered by Satan the kingdoms of the world, he took it. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, he sure did. He took these offers and was willing to sacrifice humanity. And I think... And it is interesting that you have your next big encounter with Higgs directly after the motherhood. You have one of the only actually difficult combat sections in the game for me. It was right here, this big fight you have with Higgs in the desert.

in the factory in the factory yeah yeah you can sneak your way through the factory and and get out okay but if you can't if you're using grenades no not if you're using grenades yeah but if and i was committed if the sneak gets blown then all of a sudden every robot in that area comes after you Yeah. And it becomes a just terribly violent fight. It's a really, really hard. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff. Yeah. But you don't actually fight Higgs. That's all. That's all just a cut scene.

You get to see his guitar, though, that shoots fire, which is really nice. Yeah, which is also from Mad Max Fury Road. There you go. That's exactly right. He looks like the crow. You put George Will in your game, it forgives everything. Yeah, exactly. He looks exactly like the crow.

and um i think this this is a good time to like let's just uh let's skip through a lot of the middle plot stuff that we need basically everyone's just obfuscating things for a long time like the next time cyborg ninja shows up or whatever mecha samurai

it makes baby noises. You're like, Oh, that's Lou. Except that can't be Lou because I fucking saw tomorrow in the DHV Magellan sucking her thumb. And that immediately was like, Oh, okay. She's Lou. Uh, yeah yeah i also thought the the samurai was blue for a long time which i think actually would have been a more satisfying reveal than the fact that it is just also just doing multiple things yeah yeah there's dead face in there was really funny though i won't lie there's also one more interesting

thing about the the pregnancy thing which is that rainy was wearing a bridget foundation hoodie when when uh fragile finds her which means that she was one of the pregnant women that president bridget strand was looking to experiment on right which may have something to do with her seven month thing. But you go out down to what I refer to as Iceland revisited. There's just a whole part of this map that just looks like that's stranding one to me. Yeah. And once you get there, don't be so serious.

Once you get there, you open up one. I think it's the observatory. It's the Southern Observatory that you open up. And Higgs just appears right behind you and shoots you with an everlasting fire. Yeah. Also, to be noted, the names of places are... somehow worse than they were in the first game not in the starting area where they actually kind of have different names but like

Here you'll have like the northern something or other that will be just east of the southern, whatever the other thing is. And it's just horrible. So I can't I can't keep any of the worst of the Fast and the Furious movies. So, yeah, Higgs is. setting you on fire and it's a system where basically every time you come back to life you have all this chiralium on you and that ignites the fire again and so you do the microwave crawl sequence from Metal Gear Solid 4

And you crawl out of the building because you can't put out your fire. But what can rain? And so your whole team comes out. And this whole time, Higgs is singing you the lullaby that you would sing to Lou. I'll stay with you by your side Close your tired eyes and I'll wait I'll see your smile in our dreams.

It turns out that he can be defeated, and it is by tomorrow. Tomorrow comes in and kicks the ever-living shit out of him. Yeah, tomorrow can fight like crazy. She's really strong. This is also not Higgs. fully right he's just using his spirit to possess one of the ghost mechs so this is a puppet operated him by him just in the same way that the car of doll man has inhabited a doll and is operating that and just in the same way

that a very living person, it's Die Hard Man, is operating Charlie. It turns out that Rainy comes out and is able to shower Sam with rain, and it puts out... the fire and the song plays and you hear the kids like shouting, everybody comes together. Fragile is there. You don't get, I wish tar man was out there too, but he's, he's just inside the ship that has shown up and is firing a support for you and everything.

This is a moment that they tried to get in the first game and couldn't quite nail. And they nail it here. I think they absolutely do. It shows that this Sam who was once so alone has this family that supports him and it's growing.

Right. It's even more friends now come into the fold, even though they've lost some of them. There will always be those who can replace them. And tomorrow had been cursed with this time fall thing where she rots apples the moment that she touches them or ages anything that she touches. But she can actually control it now. She can ripen the apple and then stop it and manage to eat it.

What else we get? We get a coffin surfboard. I just love writing this fucking shit. It's so sick. Again, inspired by Moby Dick, where at the end of the story, what is Ishmael saved by? A coffin surfboard. Yeah, that coffin surfboard.

I found the mechanics fairly opaque. I find the surfboard... it should be more useful than it is but it's blocked off to anything that's not on the chiral network so you can't ever take it to a new place yeah it's kind of fragile too it gets busted up pretty easily it's like they made a version of it that they thought was too overpowered and so then that's

It's all that you would use. And so they wanted you to still feel free to interchange. What it ends up doing is just makes me use the truck everywhere I go. Same, same. I ended up having one truck. that i try i preserved the entire game and i kept driving i kept finding it when i would lose it and driving it back oh i love that unfortunately in the post game it did end up finally uh meeting its maker but i managed to preserve it over

Many, many hours. The coffin board was fun to fuck around on. I like it in the mountains. The coffin board is fun on the mountain. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, you link up all of Australia. We did it. And then the plot comes back again. It's the same structure. It's the same cascading number of plot beats that we couldn't fit into the main game. But it just.

Works so much better than the first game. There was never a point in my first playthrough It's different on my second playthrough. There was never a point in my first playthrough I was like, oh my god, just fucking whatever. Okay, that's what we're doing now

But like, again, it's because it's so colorful. It's so vibrant. It allows a moment to just hit and move on. Sam finally discovers, yeah, Lou wasn't there the whole time. And then he discovers that tomorrow is actually his biological daughter. He doesn't discover that she's Lou yet. But Lou, it turns out, the child that he was able to raise and learn how to be human again after losing his biological child also is his biological child because...

Because she has to be in order for Higgs' plan to get to the extinction entity. They could just write the plan differently. All this is is just like whatever he says in dialogue, including a thing that I think is wrong. where he says she's an extinction entity. And I simply disagree in the way that the first game was incorrect in saying that Lucy died in the suburbs of a drug overdose. I think it's just like that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

For Sam's biological daughter, who is not biologically related to Bridget, who was the extinction entity or Amelie, who is Bridget, whatever. It just doesn't make sense to me. It does. more or less makes sense to me that she can open the door to Amelie's beach and, and

get Amelie to start the extinction. Is it possible that the reason that it fails is because Higgs is wrong about her being an extinction entity? Like, I mean, I'm trying to understand this. That's interesting. Once we get to the end, right, she proves Higgs wrong. on her own volition yes we also find out that the president of apac is not the president and is in fact a hive mind yes of 4 000 people and computer servers briefly turns yeah he's got these crabs crawling all over him

And then he turns into Armin Shimmerman in the first game. Yes. This is the weirdest NPC that they could have chosen from the first game because this NPC. can die in Death Stranding 1. He's the only one who can. That's right. You have to keep delivering stuff to him or he turns into a BT. He's the elder on top of the mountain. And in this timeline, he moved to, let's say, Denver. I don't know. He moved to a city.

Yes. And then the city had a void out. But the city also had this big data center and the data center ended up on the beach. And so now it is a data center that has merged with all of the dead souls. And is deciding that it's going to trap all of humanity within a beach computer. And all of this happens in what I call the remedy sequence.

Because it's like you're playing a remedy game all of a sudden. Yeah, you walk around the corner and he keeps walking around a corner and disappearing and then appearing in the distance. And then, like a remedy sequence, Die Hard Man appears from the goo and dances there. I found this incomprehensible.

I will defend the shit out of this. Okay, here comes Jacob. Let's go. Okay, so APAS 4000 wants permanent continuity of neither life nor death. I actually disagree that it's San Junipero. It could be. I think it's even less cool than that.

I think it is like real, like San Diego being on the internet, like huge state. Maybe. I don't know. Okay. San Diego is stretching on the bullshit, non-life and hyper consumption and isolation. Sam says we'll live forever as a bunch of dead people is what he asked.

The president says this is survival. And it's this idea to me, the way I took away from this could not tell you intent. But what I'm feeling here is it's like, see this world that we have that we're building. That's just this endless fucking consumption and everyone's being by themselves.

No one's having sex. No one's interacting with each other. No one's holding hands. Right. You're already living in this state. APAS wants to bring it out. You're already living in this bullshit. And he's like, this is what you want. He said to Sam, you want survival by all costs.

and die hardman shows up and is like or we could survive by getting really fucking weird with it and that's like how i take it is like die hardman is like actually what if we like break the shit we've been doing yeah we do it entirely different i wear necklaces now i'm cool and i'm just gonna like go fucking crazy and it's weird but i think it works because it's like this refutation of we can just continue this like yeah this insane way of like non-being for another

however many decades or centuries or millennia. And I think that it is a refutation of the idea that AIPAC and AIPAC have to expand and expand and expand and look different. I don't know that they're going to... continue that thematically forward but that's what i got out of this moment yeah he solves the moment through dance which is what movement and they talk so much about the power of movement the dhv magellan the plate gates they allow you to move freely between different nations.

People can combine from different cultures and perspectives and genders and races and everything. Whereas if you keep putting guns in everyone's hands, that separates them out further. If that person has guns, well, I'm going to need guns too.

And, you know, you're a middle gear. Right. If you're if you're the V tuber in the game, you're planting all those mines outside of your your place, which which attack anyone who comes by them unless they wear the special camo. And so, like, it's that expression of movement.

Movement through dance. Well, Brian, you mentioned DHV Magellan. Yes. What does DHV stand for? Oh. Well, Die Hardman's Vessel, of course. What?

there's a double meaning in something so it has the same thing where it's like we built the chiral network which creates the network that can destroy the world but also no no no we're not going to do that because we have the power of reforms yeah and so here it's like we had a programmer our company is called drawbridge why is that because a drawbridge can separate the the virus of this computer

from the good computers on the side of the living world. Also, what is a drawbridge? What is the symbol of a drawbridge? A bridge pulling up at two sides, but two thumbs going up.

Facing each other son of a bitch because he's he's done with just the word puns. He is doing fully visual puns as well let's go the drawbridge is the thumbs up and the thumbs up is of course the symbol from the beginning of the first game that connects everybody we all say we like each other they're two hands reaching for each other yeah

Oh my God, that's right. Brian, literally, and Lenore, both of you, this is like finding out that there's the arrow in the FedEx logo. This is blowing my fucking mind. But no, I love this moment is for me pure. adrenaline i do not completely understand all the mechanics of the cupid or whatever i don't really care or should you i do not care do not want to know don't tell me

But the way this makes you feel. He's going around, he's patting everyone on the shoulder and they're waking up and the president guy is freaking out and it's beautiful and Tommy Earl Jenkins is looking very handsome. And I'm just having a very good time. Oh, he looks beautiful in this. It's so great because you could tell in Death Stranding 1 he's given nothing to do.

um he gives you exposition for an entire game and then he cries for a while and we're just like why what's going on but he's so good and he has such charisma that you're like please give him something better And they did fucking do. It's a smaller role, but it's such a it's a better role as a result. And they call that chapter Die Hard.

Like they just call it Die Hard. That's it. That's it. Because it also applies to someone else because we get a galaxy quest moment where the big red samurai enters back in.

And you're like, oh, Dead Man's back. And Dead Man's like, I'm in Hartman right now. And you go, what? Yeah, Dead Hartman. And it turns out that Higgs has possessed this body and has come to kidnap tomorrow, which he... does yeah because he wants to cause the last stranding so you have to make it back to mexico in order to get yeah the dream catcher that is in your shelter in order to have a connection to Amelie's Beach.

In order to stop Higgs because that's where Higgs has gone because he also has a dream catcher that belonged to Amelie. You're actually not getting the dream catcher. This is another thing that the game does really weirdly is that it shows you Sam like flashes back to his house and you see the dream catcher hanging there. That's from the first.

game blah blah blah so that's what he went there to get that's what higgs went there to steal yeah higgs went to get the dream catcher and so you're not getting it and they clean this up with like a little bit of dialogue while you're on the bike or whatever and doll man's like oh actually you need to get something else meanwhile on instagram in game you're getting all of these messages

As though Sam is posting these messages six months ago, eight months ago, where he's talking about the development of Lou, but it's obviously it's just Higgs taunting you all the way back. It's so wrenching. The landscape, the sky is getting weird. Yeah. You're seeing whales in the sky. That portal realm that you've gone through is now becoming...

Mexico is just like an ocean floor at this point. Australia is in a perpetual sunset. And if you do a lot of delivery missions before you actually go back to Mexico, you realize, oh, the time cycle has stopped. Then you find a giant Japanese spider crab. It's huge.

this is a really fun big crab right by old northern not city except for the part where it rains like those like jellyfish bt is down on you and you you're you're stuck looking up on it and your perspective like you can't swivel around to see the fucking things yeah yeah and this is why they give you the weapon to fight this guy i tried to fight him with so many other different weapons but you're supposed to use the guitar here and

because it's supposed to be like it's faster than the rockets so you can aim it you got this new toy we're going to show you how to use it in this boss battle however if you've gotten the rocket launchers that auto lock and aim and can shoot their rockets. That's what you should use. I was stubborn on this section. Grenades. I used grenades. Kingship. Kingship.

Truly. All grenade run. Come on. I wish I could say it was a perfect all grenade run. I did actually have the rifle to shoot the jellies as they came down at me because grenades were useless for that. But the guitar is... it uses your chiral crystals which you'll have you'll probably have plenty of trillion at this point so you can shoot them and you can also use it as a swinging weapon so it's like a blade as well and after you defeat the giant crab you're able to make it

back to your shelter and once you do you are able to make it back to the beach to amelie's beach specifically fragile's final jump so fragile knows that she's gonna die i love emotionally what this jump and the jump back do because you get to see everybody that everyone left behind you see tarman's son you see i mean you see fragile you see doll man's body as well you see an entire fatia keen in there

Uh, all kind of gathered in this circle with Tom, your old Jenkins, just kind of hanging out in the middle. He's, and he's staring at the camera. He's giving a little smile. And you get mama and Lachna there too. It's reminding you like, no, these, these. These souls are still with you.

And even those that you have lost are part of your community. And so you fly into the beach and then the Magellan turns into a kaiju with Hartman and Deadman piloting it like in Pacific Rim. And it gives you likes. And it gives you likes. every time it destroys a big BT. I love this game so fucking much. Who directed Pacific Rim? Don't worry about it. Guillermo del Toro.

It's also sort of like a Metal Gear. You fight Higgs, you get into the same fisticuffs that you did in the first game. It turns into like a street fighter match, right? The fight with Higgs starts as a little guitar fight where you're in the remedy area again, like you're in control.

And there's a whole playable section where you run down a beach and basically don't do anything. You just wait for the next cut scene. If you're me, you're just watching the kaijus fight in the distance. Yeah. As you fight Higgs, it does.

the fight from death stranding one which was itself the fight from metal gear solid 4 it frustrates me because that moment was so specifically drawn to close out this incredibly long series and then it had a very pale imitation in this in the in death stranding one and here it has another pale imitation but it is a little bit more fun because now it's dark souls and you can roll

And then also then it becomes soul caliber and then it becomes street fighter. It was thematically weird. I was having a good time doing it. Yeah. Same. Um, but I, I will say that I've actually never played the metal gear games. Any of them. Lenore, have you played any Metal Gear games? I only played the third one. I played that three at the end. I haven't touched the others. Yeah, because I know AJ hasn't played that series. Josh hasn't played that series, so I am alone.

I am alone here, much like Sam Porter Bridges or Solid Snake, yes. Kojima seems to put everything that he doesn't like about himself into Higgs, I think, including his latent homosexuality. This is just him repeating himself. It's a thing he doesn't like about himself. And Higgs makes Sam do this. And as a matter of fact, he also makes you kill Solid Snake because Neil Vanna, every time you fight him in a boss fight,

He puts a little bandana around his head to look exactly like Snake. And then you kill him. You finally kill him. And then the next times that you see Neil Vanna all the way to the end of the game, he never wears it. It's like, it's something he kind of has to get out of his system now. And particularly because at the end of this Higgs boss fight, when tomorrow...

gets sucked into the last strandings extension entity, which I think is just, I think it's just Amelie again. Amelie's beach. Yeah. It's just Amelie's grand beach, which she had, I guess, sealed off. I don't fucking know, but like, yeah. Either way, she opens up the beach. And through this giant womb, which is what Kojima sort of imagines like

Heaven or the afterlife being a womb that we are birthed into the middle part of the world and then birth. So now we have this Evangelion 2001 A Space Odyssey paprika moment. where tomorrow reemerges as baby Lou once more giant baby Lou. Yes. Uh, who eats. fully eats Higgs alive and then stomps on his spirit. Yes. Kill it forever. And the moment that I saw this, I was like, he's not killed forever. This is totally the setup for the sequel is now Higgs is inside Lou.

And that's going to be the whole story of the next desk. Keanu Reeves and the entirety of cyberpunk. Yes. Yes. Or I would say Arkham Knight. This is this is the final of the of the of the Arkham trilogy.

because it's going to be the Joker taunting Batman from beyond the grave. Because they're like, yeah, I mean, the Joker died, and technically that's true. It's just a figment of Batman's imagination. But that being said... yes the third one i 100 thinks higgs is going to like be a ghost man yeah hanging out and it works this moment bizarre as it is it works as a moment of okay like i've been born into this like extinction entity uh destiny or you know

events have contrived to lead me in this direction but i can still make this decision i still have the autonomy to say no we're going to we're going to continue we're going to build this project of humanity however we can despite our previous sins which doesn't really engage with the legions of bodies that the uca and the new like resurgent world is built on but you know as a as a rage against the dying of the light it certainly does work

Well, I also think I also think it's because it taps so much into the grief narrative, right? This is about Sam finally letting go of the loss and guilt of losing Lou and what he gets. for that sacrifice is he gets Lou back, albeit a very different form of her. Right. He gets to be Angel or Miles O'Brien and get his child back as a grown up. That was another clever little thing. The tagline for this whole.

thing has been tomorrow's in your hands right because tomorrow starts the game in your hands because she's a baby this scene kind of wraps you are redoing basically a copy of the very beginning of the game You re-experience that moment from the beginning of the game with tomorrow in your hands.

Right. It's just snowy, but it's also a fantasy. He doesn't actually get to have that moment back. He doesn't get to have her back as a baby. He has to contend with. Which I appreciate. That would have been a little too clean. Getting tomorrow back. I think it earns that tomorrow is back. I do think it.

earns that i do not think that would have been um good to actually just be like oh and then there was nothing bad ever yeah no there has to be the horror involved and part of the horror is that in the next game as you play as tomorrow Higgs will tell you all the things he wants to do to your father. Yes, absolutely. So everyone gets back together. We end up being able to jump back.

We find out that fragile not only is dead because she did the final jump, but has been dead the whole time. She died on the beach. Don't worry. Time doesn't work the same. It does not matter. What is important here is that we get sort of the resolution of Neil Van. Vanna's whole arc because as we saw everyone we've left behind, we see the final person because now tomorrow is with us in that circle of people. We get to see the person she left behind, which is Neil Vanna.

So Neil Vanna, as we talked about, he was a smuggler bringing brain dead pregnant women into the United States from Mexico. This was illegal and it was also done on behalf of the American government. And so his status as this seemingly alien or immigrant person who is doing this activity, crossing borders illegally, borders that have been erected maliciously, capriciously, he has no leg to stand on.

Right. Which is the whole point of illegal immigration is you want to turn against a certain group of people so that they no longer have leverage against you. So, yeah. Oh, you a bunch of farm workers want to unionize. Yeah. Well, if they're all from Mexico, then.

They get the threat of deportation. They can't unionize. I wrote an article on child labor in the United States for Liberation News. It's been four years since I wrote this, something like that. And while researching the article, I called the Department of Labor.

And they admitted to me on the phone there are at least half a million migrant children who work in fields in the United States. And that's what the U.S. Department of Labor is willing to admit to a guy who calls them on the phone. So like the idea like, oh, a guy like who's like. smuggling pregnant women who are brained. I mean, it's comically evil, right? But it is not unrealistically evil. This type of shit is real.

Times a million, unfortunately. Oh, yeah. I mean, we're here in Georgia, you know, the case of Adriana Smith, right? There are there are women who are kept alive solely for the idea of perhaps. their kid you know and then of course the kid gets zero support from the state when it's unhealthy like it's not an abstraction how women's bodies are used in this way so what we see with Vanna is that he then goes to see this psychiatrist who's supposed to help

help him with his issues. She works with Porters. She worked with Sam and then fell in love with Sam and married Sam. And then she falls in love with him. She's got an ethics issue. Yes. Yeah, she's not very good at her job. There's also this weird thing where they're kind of linked from childhood that doesn't totally make sense, but it's okay.

And when their town fell to BT's. Yeah. And they both have the Pisces symbol burned into their hands from this like. Right. And people under certain star signs are more like. predilection towards having dooms. Yeah, because Pisces is one of them. Because the fault is in the stars. Yes. Thanks, John Green. That might have been the Stranding. The original Death Stranding? Yeah. It doesn't say it outright, but that might be what happened. That's what I interpret it as.

like the initial disaster. It's a little unclear as to when things happen. Cause then those two guys also say that they're a hundred years old anyway. Yeah. Mr. Impossible. So Lucy, Sam's wife, who is now dating Neil Vanna behind the scenes while, while Neil, while Sam is out. doing deliveries. She's played by Alyssa Jung, a German actress, and Neil Vanna is played by Luca Marinelli, an Italian actor who just played Mussolini in that miniseries M.

Oh, shit. Which is supposed to be really good. I haven't watched it. I heard he was really great in that. They are also married. They're an actual couple. And they have great chemistry. I mean, these scenes are really, really excellently done.

So they go through this whole thing. Sam at one point cast off saying that like his wife's child wasn't actually his biologically. She hides. It turns out she was lying about that because of dooms, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The repatriates daughter would absolutely be. targeted. So Neil comes up with a plan to get Lucy out of there. They're going to run away. He's going to take her to Mexico. They're going to be able to hide.

with this child all this information is in like a thumb drive that she's been carrying with her and that he's been carrying with him that he finally had the chance to pass on to sam after you kill him in the final boss battle in like mexico city's metro system this all gets thwarted by the government the bridges agents you know we get to see some of bridges from a little bit of a before time not before the stranding but before the events of the first game

in a highly militarized, fucked up place. Yeah. One of the guys just gets an itchy trigger finger and tries to shoot Neil, ends up shooting Lucy. uh which is going to kill her well and and that's that's how a drug overdose works you get shot with a gun drug overdose in a house and we are not in a house so i guess you could if you really wanted to be you know um you want to be gracious to the game, you could say that

That the government lied about how she died. Right. I think that's something you can do because it's just like a little text log. So the whole thing is just fabricated. So Neil gets absolutely blown away. They fucking just waste his ass after he promises he makes them promise to take care. of her and they don't they they harvest the baby from her body and he dies but he's like a vengeful spirit and necrotizes super quickly

And so you're you're in a first person sequence, which is reflecting the first person sequence at the end of the first game. But you are his BT roaming the halls of this facility and. As that BT, you see Sam pick up Lucy and take her away, presumably to his house where she should have died in the void out. And, you know, the baby has been.

completely harvested of course that baby is Lou because Lou also has to be his biological child for some reason and right you then merge with Sam and that is the void out and that is why you've been getting his flashbacks all this time

is because some part of his actually has actually been in you for the last 11 years. The whole backstory of Sam is, again, just in the. fucking menus of Death Stranding one as to like what happened 10 years ago and how people had suspicion of him being involved in his wife's death and how he then had to sort of strike it out alone. And that's why we see him where we see him.

So Neil Vanna started the whole thing, but he did so, you know, they cared for the same people. They cared for the same woman. They cared for the same child. And as a matter of fact, Neil Vanna also gets to father that child. in the other side in the beach it is his act of kindness that cascades and we see this very literally because we see blue on the beach

be picked up from the beginning of Death Stranding 2. Yeah. From the beginning of Death Stranding 2. And she walks into the giant thing in Mexico with the fireworks from earlier, the big Neil Vanna sequence. And then Neil comes to support her.

right with the other dead and then they all lift her up every single dead person lifts her up and puts her into a cocoon a chrysalis and she comes out the other side a butterfly she comes out as tomorrow and as an angel and as an angel and so we reach the end here where there's one last scene with everybody inside the Magellan it's the full reveal of her saying flat out

I remember our journey together across America. I remember it all. You are my father. And she says, I'm your Louise. And I cry every time. I cry every time because this man who has been hurting and has lost so fucking much.

finally finally get something back something he loves and you know what his response is yeah yeah that's all he can say my big dumb boy. And that is the end of Death Stranding 2. Or is it? We need to have the Beyond Two Souls ending. We need to cut way far ahead and we get way in the future. Real photographed footage of Australia in the same way that we had real photographed footage of America.

At the very beginning of the game. Yes. And so we're seeing Australia, but we're seeing these like CGI emus and the roads have deteriorated and we see all the robo deliveries that were not in this game. fully automate deliveries in Australia, just like they did in North America. And she is at the new plate gate that we knew we would be opening up by connecting Australia. But it turns out that takes a very long time to happen.

And you have the photos there as well. There's a bit in the game where you take a picture, you can take pictures like throughout on the, yeah, on the Magellan. And you're like, man, I know I've played a whole host of other games with this sort of mechanic. I can't wait to see where this gets used.

and it's like right at the end. Along with a photo of like, there's, it's implied that life does go on. It's implied that things do sort of normalize. You see Rainy with her kid. She's finally had the kid. So that clears out. Yeah. So the seven month frozen thing has kind of resolved, I think, largely just because tomorrow's situation has resolved. It's restored balance to the beaches as well. She's sitting there. She's smoking a cigarette. like Fragile or Solid Snake.

who still hasn't actually been killed in Kojima's mind and Solid Snake, who did not die. And she talks about all of the people in a way that makes it sound like everyone is actually dead. It sounds like everybody has passed away and she has outlived all of them. But she is a porter. She's the last. And she has her old tin that her vaccines came in.

And she carries that on the front of her suit and she's going to head her way towards that plate gate. So everyone, we have reached the end of our coverage of Death Stranding 2. And my question for you all is, should we have connected?

I mean, that's a question that doesn't have an answer, you know, because I mean, we live, you know, we live in the United States. It is a country with one of the bloodiest histories, you know, you could imagine, certainly the strongest imperialist country there is today. There is war, there is genocide, there are all sorts of atrocities undergirding our standard of life. It is something that can only be answered by what comes after it, you know, and that's what I feel, you know.

However obliquely the game treats its Manifest Destiny themes, what you come away with is, yeah, that question can only be answered by the fact of a future being built. You know, it can only be answered by what you create. with your community and with whoever else you connect to in your life and the existence that they carve out against the enormity of the depravity governing our country and our world, you know?

I think that the question should be answered with how do we connect? And if the answer is Di Hardman's answer, we got to get real weird with it. We got to wear some necklaces. We got to do our thing. We got to make something new. We got to. pursue new worlds, as he says, then that's great. If it's connection is a past four thousands answer.

of just eternal nothing, then we might as well not. And so I think Death Stranding is asking us not just can we connect, right? Not just can we hook this up, but then what do we do with it? What do we build with it? Once you've expanded the chiral network. What kind of crazy structures are you going to put together? And that's an answer that we decide every single day. I do think it's interesting that Kojima also conflates that idea of connection and movement.

with the abolition of borders you know that he does believe that a world can only function with that full communication of all people how do you get that done when there's colonialism behind it He doesn't really have an answer for that, but he does know that like good things happen when people can can sit together and make art and potentially that art can be part of our evolution. And you are two people who like to talk about art as part of our.

our evolution as people and as part of our, um, cultural growth. Where do you do that? What's it called? What should we do to listen to your show? Lenore and Jacob, we are workers list. We are. I don't know. We're well on our way to being like a podcast collective, aren't we? Because we've got two more hosts now, of course. Aisha of All My Maidens, Jen Bignasty of How the Red Was Won, respectively, holding it down on our socialist shelf like literature.

half and our unfit to print news half we're doing a news roundup uh in a couple of days about uh the war on lgbt rights here in the states largely yeah it'll be out by the time this episode is yeah that we yeah we're super excited of it if you've liked i mean if you like i show you far has been on this podcast twice two of the best episodes i think y'all made the silent hill two episode is like i don't know maybe y'all's best episode i really listen to that once a month

That's so sweet. That was such a nice one to do too because she came up here and we got ramen afterwards. It was a whole wonderful time. She described y'all as a quote unquote chill hang. So, uh, cause we are not chill. You know, we have a, we have a great crew. We're getting to do stuff with, we're getting to talk about art and then we're getting to talk about the things that are currently going on in the world.

and diving into different political issues, which we think are deeply interconnected for the reasons we stated there. I also have a book that is out now. There are some shipping delays because of tariffs, but it is what it is. You can order it. Now you can order it through a local bookstore, order it online. You can get the e-book directly through Collective Inc. or wherever you get your e-books.

And what's the title of that book again? And it is They Called Her Rebel, a fantasy novel about late stage capitalism, people power and queer love. So, you know, if you like lesbians with lasers, if you like progressive politics, if you like... alcoholic orcs who are actually really fun to hang out with. Any of those things, I think you'll enjoy the book. I had a really good time putting it together.

hopefully people enjoy it um so you've described the exact demographic that listens to our podcast you know i used to hang out with a bunch of alcoholic orcs back when i lived in orc city yeah i live in new york city new york city And of course, if you like us, if you if you've stumbled across us, maybe because you're coming from listening to Workers Lit, we are the worst of all possible worlds. We have a Patreon. It's.

Patreon.com slash worst of all. Every other week, of course, we put out these like three hour long episodes for free. And then every other week. We do a three hour long episode that you get like a half hour of for free. And then you got to pay for the rest of it because we do this as our job. And if you subscribe to us over at the worst of all possible worlds, Patreon, that's patreon.com slash worst of all, you get access.

at the $5 tier to not just the premium episodes, but also an extra monthly thing called fancy movie time, which is just me and AJ talking about interesting movies that have been made all over the years often foreign films and art films but sometimes the stuff AJ likes which is of course Hollywood trash yes that's like broadcast news which is actually really which is a really good movie yeah yeah

Ella McKay is it, though. Jesus Christ. And if you subscribe at the $10 tier, you also get access to something called Ladscast, which is our unedited, unfiltered, uncensored shoot the shit podcast that we do every single month. um these are also available as yearly subscriptions right now for the month of December only. You can subscribe for an entire year at 20% off. Also, for this month only, we have a store. I mentioned it at the beginning in the little preview thing, but it's store.

dot worst possible dot world we are selling merch like aj's horse corner t-shirts he what hats and various things containing our logo including a hoodie that i'm very proud of that has a picture that i took of josh using a prism lens uh where he is dressed as voltaire but uh aside from that that's that's our thing and uh i'm wearing a worst of all possible worlds shirt right now that's right a little hack you can actually cut the sleeves off that's allowed

Cool Voltaire remains on the shirt. He actually did not leave from me doing that. You can get those grenade launchers out. You can. You can. Let them loose. It works. If you if you like us and you're not able to spend the money right now, at least give us five stars over at whatever podcast app you like to use and maybe even write a little written review. It's nice. It's nice for us to see more than anything else. It's a nice little. Yeah, it's good.

it's good for both so we've talked a lot today about this question should we have connected which is the framing that Kojima I think wanted us to view this game through that was the lens But he couldn't really get out of the way of the personal lens that he crafted the game through, which was grief. And it was his fear of death. Sam Porter Bridges goes on a walkabout.

through Australia carrying an empty symbol of the loss of his surrogate child that we find out, of course, is his real child. And the thing that strikes me most about this game is how solitary it is. For so much of it, because that is ultimately how you have to endure grief. Yeah. Is by yourself. And that's scary and that's terrifying.

But the thing that ultimately gets him through it, the thing that ultimately gets him on the other side are the people that he loves that are around him. And even the single act of kindness by a man he didn't know that. Albeit was having sex with his wife. But a single act of kindness that cascades to the point that can eventually save Sam Porter Bridges from his grief. One selfless act.

And if we're talking about building a better world, I think it starts with doing one kind, selfless thing for somebody else, taking one single step. To climb that mountain. And not just surviving. But getting really fucking weird with it. I'm the worst of all possible AJ's. And I'm the worst of all possible Brian's. See you next week. So it's a lot like Ride with Norman Reedus.