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Mechafunkzilla
Sep 11, 2006

If you want a vision of the future...
Finally finished this dumb game. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but oh my god, it's so dumb.

Also kind of touching, but would probably be even more so if it wasn't all quite so dumb and if 90% of the story wasn't delivered after you're finished with the stupid thing.

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punishedkissinger
Sep 20, 2017
Probation
Can't post for 6 hours!
it is not dumb what are you talking about

Sono
Apr 9, 2008




punishedkissinger posted:

it is not dumb what are you talking about

Pretend I just posted a list of the characters' names.

Shalebridge Cradle
Apr 23, 2008


punishedkissinger posted:

it is not dumb what are you talking about

Kojima games straddle the line between genius and dumb as hell more perfectly than any other modern media

barbecue at the folks
Jul 20, 2007


It either draws you in or doesn't, if you don't find the way Kojima's brain works fascinating it might leave you cold. It's definitely not just dumb, though.

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
iirc Heartman is the only one whose name turns out to have been weirdly prophetic, which is something he comments on in one of his Interviews. Everyone else in the cast who's called something dumb or silly (besides Bridget I guess) chose that name.

edit: Besides Jake Wind the wind farm guy. That guy was born to be the wind farm guy.

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
gently caress I forgot about Cliff explaining in firm detail to Sam how he, Cliff, is similar to a cliff, while on his death bed. Never mind.

Party Boat
Nov 1, 2007

where did that other dog come from

who is he


CJacobs posted:

gently caress I forgot about Cliff explaining in firm detail to Sam how he, Cliff, is similar to a cliff, while on his death bed. Never mind.

I loved this bit. Peak Kojima nonsense.

Most of the distro centre / outpost heads have appropriate names, don't they? William Lake, Thomas Sutherland, Alex Weatherstone, Aaron Hill etc. I assumed that after the Stranding many people took new surnames from the places they operated

barbecue at the folks
Jul 20, 2007


I thought the names were an aspect of the Libertarianism/free-man-on-the-land ideological bent of the new social order, what with all the "you have entered into a contract with [persons job description as a name]" stuff they never get to explaining. Makes perfect (Kojima-) sense if everyone left alive are mostly preppers.

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
I think it's mostly meant to show that pretty much everyone in the cast is trying to escape something about their past, and as someone who has at one point changed his name, changing your name is an incredibly good way to distance yourself from who you used to be and start over. Sam outright says multiple times "I am not Sam Strand, my name is Sam Porter Bridges now." As if going by that name again would make him magically be the guy he was before he went off the grid. Die Hardman's, uh... name, was given TO him but he keeps it for symbolic reasons. And so on and so on. Even some of the delivery targets like the Cosplayer and Spiritualist are trying to escape each other at first and boy isn't it interesting how they aren't the only pair of twin sisters in the cast who have distanced themselves from one another.

edit: And honestly there's a huge element of wordplay that doesn't work in english straight-up, but Kojima historically has been really staunch about not changing that stuff for the translation even dating back to MGS. In that exchange between Sam and Mads I spoilered, the Japanese dialogue is a little less dumb sounding. Cliff doesn't just go "I am like a cliff and you are like a bridge and here's how", he says "listen Sam, you and I don't really know each other and now we won't ever know each other but it's okay because through our names we can extrapolate what we decided our purpose in life should be- my name was not hand-chosen but I lived up to it, and yours was, but both are meaningful." And then he... explains what he means by that. And it's still a bit silly and quite contrived but it's at least a little bit more emotional than in the English version.

CJacobs fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Feb 15, 2021

Dilettante.
Feb 18, 2011
Just tried the Speed Skeleton for the first time after ignoring it for 5 chapters, was not expecting the mega jump. Chiral boots are awesome too, I've been wearing a single pair for a few days now.

rabidsquid
Oct 11, 2004

LOVES THE KOG


plays a game for 58 hours voice: well i knew it, the game is dumb

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!

rabidsquid posted:

plays a game for 58 hours voice: well i knew it, the game is dumb

This is my favorite thing about Kojima games dude. Everybody is like "ugh this story is so dumb and fantastical and the characters act like they're reading information from a textbook" and it's like YEAH THEY DO IT'S REALLY STUPID BUT IT'S SO CAPTIVATING STILL I LOVE IT LOL

Dilettante.
Feb 18, 2011

rabidsquid posted:

plays a game for 58 hours voice: well i knew it, the game is dumb

Every time I have to navigate through BT territory.

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
Probably the moment I knew nobody would ever understand the goofy names thing is when Dan Ryckert of Giant Bomb said on iirc the podcast to Brad Shoemaker that the names in the game were dumb and Brad Shoemaker, whose last name is Shoemaker, agreed with him that it was silly

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

CJacobs posted:

This is my favorite thing about Kojima games dude. Everybody is like "ugh this story is so dumb and fantastical and the characters act like they're reading information from a textbook" and it's like YEAH THEY DO IT'S REALLY STUPID BUT IT'S SO CAPTIVATING STILL I LOVE IT LOL

Yeah I feel that way a lot too, like I spend a lot of the game going oh my god this game is so loving stupid aaaa and then I just want to see more of it.

I feel like there is some ancient theater tradition or something that tries to capture this sensation, like how we get the words catharsis and pathos and poo poo, there should be a word for a kind of art that makes you holler at the screen about how loving dumb it is and then going "ok welp gently caress me up some more dude"

Like it's dumb but it's not run of the mill dumb, it's a borehole of dumb that has breached some ancient forgotten dumb cavern full of prehistoric dumb life not of this dumb earth and I want to stick my dumb head in it and get it eaten off by dumb monsters.

OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Feb 16, 2021

barbecue at the folks
Jul 20, 2007


My SO and I sat down on the sofa every evening to play through Death Stranding, poring through the emails and notes, every time going "ughhhh this is a new kind of stupid - this poo poo is fascinating, please give me more, Hideo". Personally I think Kojima has an amazing ability to digest an idea and then give an operatic interpretation of it that makes just enough sense to ground some really weird drama in a way that shouldn't work but it still does! It tickles my brain in a way that nothing else does.

barbecue at the folks fucked around with this message at 09:50 on Jun 29, 2021

Party Boat
Nov 1, 2007

where did that other dog come from

who is he


CJacobs posted:

Kojima historically has been really staunch about not changing that stuff for the translation even dating back to MGS

MGS1 was the only game that didn't get a pass to make English script sound more natural, and according to the guy who did it Kojima was not best pleased when he found out:

The bizarre, true story of Metal Gear Solid’s English translation

quote:

Here’s what happened, as best I can piece it together. The voice-over work was done in Los Angeles, and, as script writer, I sat next to the director and had one of the three microphones that let us speak to the actors. The director and the sound tech had the other two.

I went home when the recording was finished, and the audio went to Japan, where Kojima heard it. It was my understanding that he loved it. He enjoyed it so much that he decided he wanted to create a release called Metal Gear Solid: Integral so players could play the Japanese audio with English subtitles, or vice versa.

That’s not a small job. Every single English line had to be “aligned” with the Japanese dialogue so everything flowed smoothly while it was being played. Whoever was assigned this job began to see the differences between the original Japanese writing and dialogue, and the work I had turned in.

I should mention how rare it is for the texts for two markets to ever be in the same game, especially at that time. Until then, North American releases were for North America, Japan’s voice acting and writing was for Japan, and so on. There was never a feeling that they needed to line up exactly, only that each had to offer a good experience for its particular market.

From what I heard at the time, Kojima began to hear that his work had been “tinkered” with. I’d argue there might have been a lack of appreciation for the needs of localization due to his not being bilingual, but he was not happy. As a result, all future Metal Gear games would be closely monitored for fidelity to the original Japanese script.

I feel it's kind of a shame that Kojima reacted that way. While some of the goofier lines in the later series have become part of its charm, Blaustein's localisation was a big part of setting the tone of MGS1 for western players. I'm curious, at the very least, about what we might have gotten if he'd continued to work on the rest of the series.

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!
It feels to me like Kojima has the opposite problem, as an author, of the Houser bros of GTA fame. The Houser bros are astoundingly good character writers, which is why all the best dialogue in GTA features either you getting yelled at by someone in an over the top funny way (follow the train!) or two ish characters interacting Big Lebowski guerilla style (get rid of that ol yee yee rear end haircut). They effortlessly pen even bit characters that you want to hear talk in that bitter, spiteful voice with which they write. But they are just completely miserable world builders, absolutely awful at setting a consistent tone that creates an engaging world you want to hear more about. You wanna watch Ken Rosenberg have a breakdown about Tommy's latest crime spree, not talk about the weather patterns in Vice City. And it's not just GTA, Max Payne 3 was the first time I noticed this and it pervades throughout their whole catalog, even Red Dead. You don't like Red Dead, you like John Marston. You like Arthur Morgan, and the way the characters navigate the world we find them in, and so on. The worlds themselves are intricately designed but otherwise visual and narrative tofu.

Kojima, meanwhile, is an incredibly bad character writer but an excellent world builder. Great at creating these weird alternate realities, awful at filling them with people who feel like they belong there. Really great ideas, really not so great at making a character come alive through those ideas. Snake is a fantastic video game protagonist on accident, almost, because most of his dialogue is done through responding to prompts from other people. They say a thing, Snake says how he feels about that thing, shot-reverse-shot and it continues. The first thing a character in a Kojima game does, time and time again, is say "hey I know you and here's how". "Hi Sam I'm Deadman, I monitored you while you recovered." "Hey Sam it's Die Hardman, we know each other from 10 years ago." "Sam I know you dislike me, Bridget, and I'm saying this aloud for no other reason than so the audience gets the gist of our relationship real fast". "Hi Snake this is Kazuhira McDonnell Benedict 'Master' Miller, remember me from 10 years ago? Ever try wearing your socks over your shoes?"

But he's meticulous, and I think that's where his strength lies as a writer. The methodical attention to detail, clinical or not, means that Kojima's games are thorough. Snake's dialogue may be done entirely through shot-reverse-shot in Metal Gear, but this desire to capture every aspect of a world and an idea means there's a LOT of Snake talking. And through that, it's ALMOST just as good as the much shorter and to the point alternative. You get a real sense of who Snake is not purely by his opinion on subjects, but also what he does and doesn't already know about what people do that shot-reverse-shot stuff with him about. For a more recent comparison, think Geralt. Hours and hours and hours of codec conversations make him feel like a real guy because he's got so many different opinions on so many things!

Well, Sam doesn't fuckin talk for like 85% of this game. Those little one-line vignettes where he talks to himself out in the field just doing deliveries are rare, and sometimes repetitive. In order for a Kojima character to feel full, they NEED to talk like Die Hardman does. Often, and about many different things. But there are only a few things to talk about in Death Stranding that are relevant to the plot, and Sam's an outsider so he ain't got much of an opinion on much of anything. Near the end of the game the story rockets up a mountain in terms of pacing and it's at least partially because once you reach Mountain Knot, Sam starts becoming an active participant in the cutscenes. You could call that some form of commentary on him growing used to the 'head west' stuff and becoming comfortable around people again, but I think it's just an open world game thing more than anything. The story has to drop the other shoe sometime, but for you and me it may be 40 hours away, and they didn't fill that 40 hours with enough characterization to make Sam feel like a Snake. One of my favorite lines in the game is right at the beginning, Die Hardman calls and says "Sam, if you come up on a cliff or slope, try using a ladder! As a seasoned pro, I'm sure you can think of some more creative ways to use them, though." That line says so much about how he trusts that Sam is smart, able to think outside the box, and hasn't lost a step since he went off the grid. And they never ever say anything like that ever again and it's a real bummer.

CJacobs fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Feb 16, 2021

Dilettante.
Feb 18, 2011
fuuuck I hit the bandwidth cap, my zipline empire has come to an end.

night slime
May 14, 2014
You can remove structures from the map screen

Dilettante.
Feb 18, 2011
I have 1 postbox, generator and the storyline safehouse outside of the weather station, literally everything else is ziplines lmao. I have to see what routes I use the least and trim them.

Party Boat
Nov 1, 2007

where did that other dog come from

who is he


Is that with everyone five starred as well? I'd considered doing a zipline empire (at least to connect the areas not well served by roads) but it sounds like you need to min-max it pretty hard.

Jezza of OZPOS
Mar 21, 2018

GET LOSE❌🗺️, YOUS CAN'T COMPARE😤 WITH ME 💪POWERS🇦🇺
You can connect every location up with ziplines in the central region if you have full bandwidth but I definately had to replace ziplines more than once to do so because of poor placement. Judging other players ziplines and trying to figure out how to use them efficiently helps as well but also you often waste bandwidth trying to use poorly placed ones rather than just ignoring them

Zonko_T.M.
Jul 1, 2007

I'm not here to fuck spiders!

CJacobs posted:


Well, Sam doesn't fuckin talk for like 85% of this game. Those little one-line vignettes where he talks to himself out in the field just doing deliveries are rare, and sometimes repetitive. In order for a Kojima character to feel full, they NEED to talk like Die Hardman does. Often, and about many different things. But there are only a few things to talk about in Death Stranding that are relevant to the plot, and Sam's an outsider so he ain't got much of an opinion on much of anything. Near the end of the game the story rockets up a mountain in terms of pacing and it's at least partially because once you reach Mountain Knot, Sam starts becoming an active participant in the cutscenes. You could call that some form of commentary on him growing used to the 'head west' stuff and becoming comfortable around people again, but I think it's just an open world game thing more than anything. The story has to drop the other shoe sometime, but for you and me it may be 40 hours away, and they didn't fill that 40 hours with enough characterization to make Sam feel like a Snake. One of my favorite lines in the game is right at the beginning, Die Hardman calls and says "Sam, if you come up on a cliff or slope, try using a ladder! As a seasoned pro, I'm sure you can think of some more creative ways to use them, though." That line says so much about how he trusts that Sam is smart, able to think outside the box, and hasn't lost a step since he went off the grid. And they never ever say anything like that ever again and it's a real bummer.
This would've been a really good thing to use the make-Sam-talk button for. Unique dialogue when approaching different preppers or facilities could've helped at more of a connection. This would help with the disconnect between the open world format and characterizing Sam through the plot.

Dilettante.
Feb 18, 2011

Party Boat posted:

Is that with everyone five starred as well? I'd considered doing a zipline empire (at least to connect the areas not well served by roads) but it sounds like you need to min-max it pretty hard.

Yeah I've been removing shittily placed zips and have been trying to figure out the most efficient ways to get to places, They're are all at 350m spacings if they can be. I'm at the part of the game where I need to get to Hartman's lab, and still have to unlock the Geologist, paleontologist, veteran porter, and evo-devo whatever. I'm a 3 stars with the First Prepper and Novelists son, so I have a bunch of bandwidth to unlock still. It's a pain in the rear end in the mountains, I think I've got the sweet spot then poo poo inevitably obscures it or it's actually in a really inefficient position, it's driving me nuts.

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!

Zonko_T.M. posted:

This would've been a really good thing to use the make-Sam-talk button for. Unique dialogue when approaching different preppers or facilities could've helped at more of a connection. This would help with the disconnect between the open world format and characterizing Sam through the plot.

Dude I thought that was what the button was gonna do and I was so disappointed when it didn't work like that. :smith:

night slime
May 14, 2014

Party Boat posted:

Is that with everyone five starred as well? I'd considered doing a zipline empire (at least to connect the areas not well served by roads) but it sounds like you need to min-max it pretty hard.

I have ziplines to all the places when I was trying to do all 500 missions but I stopped at 473 or so. Would post a video of me using all of them but I hesitated for a second and realized I'm afraid of being called the zipline emperor afterwards

Zazz Razzamatazz
Apr 19, 2016

by sebmojo

night slime posted:

I'm afraid of being called the zipline emperor afterwards

That would be a bad thing??

Sounds like a good gang tag right there...

Jezza of OZPOS
Mar 21, 2018

GET LOSE❌🗺️, YOUS CAN'T COMPARE😤 WITH ME 💪POWERS🇦🇺
Zipline Tsar is punchier imo

Ciaphas
Nov 20, 2005

> BEWARE, COWARD :ovr:


Zipline Lord?

Johnny Truant
Jul 22, 2008




Ziplord

Ciaphas
Nov 20, 2005

> BEWARE, COWARD :ovr:


gently caress it was right in front of me

The Shame Boy
Jan 27, 2014

Dead weight, just like this post.




Wanna know how the Housers would handle that awful Princess Beach line

CJacobs
Apr 17, 2011

Reach for the moon!

The Shame Boy posted:

Wanna know how the Housers would handle that awful Princess Beach line

They're big cowards about referencing real life brands so they definitely woulda said Blario and Princess Bleach and then shown a Homestar Runner style flash cartoon about Super Blario saving a bottle of Tide

Jack-Off Lantern
Mar 2, 2012

The Shame Boy posted:

Wanna know how the Housers would handle that awful Princess Beach line

There line is amazingly bad,it wraps around to being good.

ScootsMcSkirt
Oct 29, 2013

Party Boat posted:

Is that with everyone five starred as well? I'd considered doing a zipline empire (at least to connect the areas not well served by roads) but it sounds like you need to min-max it pretty hard.

eh, its not toooo bad. I managed to connect every location to a single zipline network. I did run out of bandwidth about 2/3 the way through so I deleted every non-zipline structure which got me close to completing the network. Near the end, I did need to have most of the preppers at 5 stars to have the bandwidth.

The distro centers and cities give the most bandwidth and it took me way too long to realize that. I probably could have gotten away with less stars overall if I prioritized those first. At the end of the game, I had a couple thousand spare bandwidth as well, so you don't need to delete everything else, but it does help at the time.

pretty fun tho, I recommend having a giant network if it seems appealing. Crazy feeling going from Lake Knot to South Knot to Mountain Knot and finishing at the Chiral Relay without touching the ground

Dilettante.
Feb 18, 2011
I can respect the hustle of players who put bridges on pieces of land that absolutely do not require bridges at all but still somehow have tens of thousands of likes.

rabidsquid
Oct 11, 2004

LOVES THE KOG


Dilettante. posted:

I can respect the hustle of players who put bridges on pieces of land that absolutely do not require bridges at all but still somehow have tens of thousands of likes.

i liked it a lot more when i thought people were just weird, but no, people put those bridges over the pathway that BTs drag you across when you're caught. they have a zillion likes because getting dragged across a bridge gives it an auto like, which populates them in more games, exacerbating the issue of you having wasted objects loading in your game

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OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

CJacobs posted:

It feels to me like Kojima has the opposite problem, as an author, of the Houser bros of GTA fame. The Houser bros are astoundingly good character writers, which is why all the best dialogue in GTA features either you getting yelled at by someone in an over the top funny way (follow the train!) or two ish characters interacting Big Lebowski guerilla style (get rid of that ol yee yee rear end haircut). They effortlessly pen even bit characters that you want to hear talk in that bitter, spiteful voice with which they write. But they are just completely miserable world builders, absolutely awful at setting a consistent tone that creates an engaging world you want to hear more about. You wanna watch Ken Rosenberg have a breakdown about Tommy's latest crime spree, not talk about the weather patterns in Vice City. And it's not just GTA, Max Payne 3 was the first time I noticed this and it pervades throughout their whole catalog, even Red Dead. You don't like Red Dead, you like John Marston. You like Arthur Morgan, and the way the characters navigate the world we find them in, and so on. The worlds themselves are intricately designed but otherwise visual and narrative tofu.

Kojima, meanwhile, is an incredibly bad character writer but an excellent world builder. Great at creating these weird alternate realities, awful at filling them with people who feel like they belong there. Really great ideas, really not so great at making a character come alive through those ideas. Snake is a fantastic video game protagonist on accident, almost, because most of his dialogue is done through responding to prompts from other people. They say a thing, Snake says how he feels about that thing, shot-reverse-shot and it continues. The first thing a character in a Kojima game does, time and time again, is say "hey I know you and here's how". "Hi Sam I'm Deadman, I monitored you while you recovered." "Hey Sam it's Die Hardman, we know each other from 10 years ago." "Sam I know you dislike me, Bridget, and I'm saying this aloud for no other reason than so the audience gets the gist of our relationship real fast". "Hi Snake this is Kazuhira McDonnell Benedict 'Master' Miller, remember me from 10 years ago? Ever try wearing your socks over your shoes?"

But he's meticulous, and I think that's where his strength lies as a writer. The methodical attention to detail, clinical or not, means that Kojima's games are thorough. Snake's dialogue may be done entirely through shot-reverse-shot in Metal Gear, but this desire to capture every aspect of a world and an idea means there's a LOT of Snake talking. And through that, it's ALMOST just as good as the much shorter and to the point alternative. You get a real sense of who Snake is not purely by his opinion on subjects, but also what he does and doesn't already know about what people do that shot-reverse-shot stuff with him about. For a more recent comparison, think Geralt. Hours and hours and hours of codec conversations make him feel like a real guy because he's got so many different opinions on so many things!

Well, Sam doesn't fuckin talk for like 85% of this game. Those little one-line vignettes where he talks to himself out in the field just doing deliveries are rare, and sometimes repetitive. In order for a Kojima character to feel full, they NEED to talk like Die Hardman does. Often, and about many different things. But there are only a few things to talk about in Death Stranding that are relevant to the plot, and Sam's an outsider so he ain't got much of an opinion on much of anything. Near the end of the game the story rockets up a mountain in terms of pacing and it's at least partially because once you reach Mountain Knot, Sam starts becoming an active participant in the cutscenes. You could call that some form of commentary on him growing used to the 'head west' stuff and becoming comfortable around people again, but I think it's just an open world game thing more than anything. The story has to drop the other shoe sometime, but for you and me it may be 40 hours away, and they didn't fill that 40 hours with enough characterization to make Sam feel like a Snake. One of my favorite lines in the game is right at the beginning, Die Hardman calls and says "Sam, if you come up on a cliff or slope, try using a ladder! As a seasoned pro, I'm sure you can think of some more creative ways to use them, though." That line says so much about how he trusts that Sam is smart, able to think outside the box, and hasn't lost a step since he went off the grid. And they never ever say anything like that ever again and it's a real bummer.

Interesting to compare this with MGSV where snake also doesn't talk and also undergoes a major character shift, but the lack of talking just makes him feel... like not a character? It's interesting how much the game falls apart narratively without that central pin to hold it together.

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