Transcript

[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the final episode of season one of the Gaming Backlog Book Club. As a reminder, we do go into spoilers, and especially with the end of the game here. If you want to avoid any major spoilers, start at one of our previous episodes, play along and come back to this one once you’re done.

Well, Alex, that escalated quickly, as we had seen at the end of last time.

There was a bit of a cut scene, obviously, going into the beginning of episode nine, where Higgs pulls you up off the beach from the tar belt and he mentions people wearing masks, your boss, and then that woman. We didn’t know who it was at the time. It turns out Amelie is the one who is wearing a mask.

She admits that she’s an extinction entity, that she’s on her beach, the one that she was born on. What the hell does that all mean? We end up finding all that out, of course, but that was a bit of a revelation as you get into your private room right there off the beach.

[00:00:58] Speaker B: Yeah, it was a huge revelation. Just everything you learned at that part and then just later on for the ending.

By the end of this, my mind was blown. By the end of this game, it.

[00:01:11] Speaker A: Goes in all sorts of directions and many that are just so out there that it’s hard to theorize them to begin with. You know, you can make certain connections after the fact. Hey, there’s some creativity going on here. Definitely a lot of creative.

[00:01:26] Speaker B: I could.

[00:01:28] Speaker A: Your first full Kojima game. Yes.

[00:01:30] Speaker B: So, yes, Kojima has an insane mind to create what he created here for the story. Wise of how this went there said there are. There are certain things we’ll get into them, obviously that like, happen at the end where it’s like one person could think it means one thing and then someone else can think it means another.

And it was.

It was crazy to say the least.

[00:01:52] Speaker A: And they throw you a lot of red herrings and all those kinds of things along the way. And. And even to their own characters in game, the story is in every direction. So. Right. So as we leave the distribution center, we need to go through basically a city to Ruin City to get over to Edge Knot City, and you end up encountering some new enemy types that aren’t just your typical bts.

So I mean, I guess my bit of story here as on the way to the city resting point to begin with. So I was going through the. Basically the BT jellyfish balloon and BT giant blob area. And of course I had my trusty floating carrier attached with extra tools and ammo you know, I just started popping them one at a time, single bullet, and they explode. That was nice. Eventually climbed up some scaffolding and for whatever reason, my carrier clipped into part of the ruined floor building and detached and fell to a level below.

And it had a bunch of my good stuff on it. So I didn’t.

I didn’t want to leave it behind. So I used up one of my climbing anchors that was still on my body to go down and collect it. But then I finally hit my first game bug and I couldn’t climb back up because every time I tried, Sam would basically try to climb through the ceiling and take a step up to get back up. But then it hit a snag and he would basically be forced back down to hanging on the rope again. So I just realized, okay, this is not a bug I can overcome, and went down and through the building instead and reattached the carrier after climbing back up. So it was a bit of an annoyance. But it shocked me that it took this long to find a single bug in this game. Which just goes to show you how on point all these developers are of AAA games these days. In most cases. I’ve heard things about other devs that maybe aren’t so clean.

[00:03:50] Speaker B: I haven’t found.

I got lucky in my playthrough, I guess I have not finding any bugs. But yeah, that’s good. I mean just finding of a game this magnitude, like just finding this one bug.

[00:04:02] Speaker A: Right.

Even at this level of visual fidelity as well.

Yeah, it’s. It’s crazy. I did also I had one other. I guess I wouldn’t call it a bug actually because it didn’t break anything. But there was one point where I had. And I had been sprinting into the distribution center or into the. Into. Into. Into a city and ran up to the terminal and used the terminal really quickly. And then I quit out of that menu. And Sam was basically at that point of exhaustion, you know, where. Where he kind of collapses over and like starts to catch his breath and all that. So he went on to all fours. But it was, you know how the. The terminal where you pull up the menu for deliveries and cargo and all that stuff.

So he collapsed on top of the terminal when it was inside the ground.

And then the game obviously realizes you’re in the vicinity of the terminal, so it starts popping back up and he’s on all force, but he gets raised up in the air because you know you’re where you usually would be when you open up that menu. So that Was kind of funny. I actually took a screenshot of it, so I’ll send that to you later. But I wouldn’t say that’s a bug. It’s just more of a funny moment.

[00:05:11] Speaker B: No, it’s just a funny moment in the game. That’s just. Yeah, a funny little fail that you found.

[00:05:16] Speaker A: Yep, yep, Good stuff.

And so, yeah, I guess through that section I was popping those jellyfish with the non lethal assault rifle, single hematic rounds, blowing up the blobs with hematic grenades. And then in the normal BT area, they were, you know, basically in reasonable enough areas that I just literally went on an umbilical cord cutting spree because I could just stealth cut the cord. Stealth cut the cord.

And notice that.

I don’t know if you had seen this before. The bts actually give you likes. After you cut the cord you get.

[00:05:51] Speaker B: A single like notice that.

[00:05:53] Speaker A: And I don’t know if it was just this section, but I. Or I just, you know, kind of space out and don’t. Don’t pay attention to the like system when I’m in heavy stealth. BT scare zone. But yeah, I guess I was. I basically. There was no real danger here because they were just one of the. After another and I just stealth between them. But yeah, it pops up. BT gives you one like. BT gives you one like. That was kind of funny. It’s like Casper the Friendly Ghost is around.

[00:06:16] Speaker B: But it’s only when you cut the umbilical cord.

[00:06:19] Speaker A: Right, right, right. Not when you shoot.

[00:06:21] Speaker B: I think it’s because. Because it’s basically like you’re setting them free.

[00:06:24] Speaker A: Yeah, right, exactly.

[00:06:25] Speaker B: Instead of what we’re doing is kind of killing them when we’re using like a hermatic grenade or hermatic rounds.

[00:06:33] Speaker A: It’s the. It’s a nice.

It’s the small details, you know.

[00:06:38] Speaker B: Yeah, it’s a nice small detail really set this apart.

[00:06:43] Speaker A: The other interesting realization I had. So Edgenaut city looks like an actual city. It has a city hall type building and everything, which is definitely out of place in this world. I think something that I had noticed along the whole way. I mean the, the death stranding, the in game death stranding seemed to have been not super far off in the past to the point where some people were still alive back then, but then all the cities are gone.

Everything looks like Iceland, which makes it seem like it was super far in the past. And there’s not a ton of ruins either.

Anyway, none of that’s really all that relevant at the end of the day. But it was cool to kind of be in a actual city, streets and all that.

[00:07:24] Speaker B: It’s. It’s a city in California.

And I was just trying to figure out because like obviously when you look down, you can see on the map. Yeah, yeah. And I’m curious on like if it was based off. I couldn’t tell obviously if it was how far up or down it was. If it was like San Francisco or maybe la.

[00:07:40] Speaker A: Yeah. Is what I was. And it might not even have been a major city, but it was definitely something west coast enough to be, you know, practically at the ocean. But yeah, I mean, it’s just. Why is this the one and only city that’s still standing? Maybe we’ll know. Maybe we’ll never know. Maybe it comes up in death Stranding too.

[00:07:56] Speaker B: It’s definitely really the only city that is more full, more whole. As you said, compared to everything else.

[00:08:02] Speaker A: Other. The only other sort of impressions of an actual city. I got where there was that one mission for the craftsman to go get his tool set from that mall type area that looked kind of like a bit like something that would be in a city. You actually. If you look off in the distance from farther away and you look at Capital Knot City at the beginning of the game, you can actually see the full city back there. You just never go into it.

So it’s.

So it exists. Like that exists, but it’s not.

They don’t make it in your face all the time. They’re trying to really kind of isolate you visually.

I also finally realized the connection to Cyberpunk 2077 that I’ve kept seeing here. I figured it was just one of those friendly cross game collaborations that happens so often now. But they made it more detailed with this one. And I don’t know if they had anything added to the cyberpunk end of this in that game because I haven’t played that. It’s still on my backlog. But I’ve had this thing in my menu in the. Basically the same menu, the accessories menu where the hat and the glasses and the otter hood and the shoes are for something called V’s face pattern. And it didn’t click with me. And it. The sort of icon for what it was didn’t make a ton of sense. It made a lot of sense once I tried it. But it’s been unlocked for a long, long time. And I always wonder what it was without trying it. So I finally did and it basically adds that sort of face plate division or lines that I know exist in the Cyberpunk game.

So it’s kind of just a fun cosmetic nod really. But I looked it up because I was curious and I guess I had completed whatever crossover side order that unlocks it. I think it was just for the director’s cut. But it turns out there are five more side orders to unlock other cyberpunk goodies in Death Stranding. Obviously we’ve both seen the samurai sign out there in the wild multiple times as well.

But until now I had only figured it was a simple thing like the horizon holograms, if there’s actually like side quests for it. So that’s kind of cool, I guess, if you’re a fan of both.

[00:10:09] Speaker B: Yeah, that’s cool. I, I, we did the. I have that V’s mask. I did the first mission.

[00:10:16] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah. But I haven’t done.

[00:10:17] Speaker B: I’ve seen on terminals though, like some other ones for it. I just. Oh, like order or. Yeah, I don’t know if it’s understand order, but I’ve never picked them. I’ve just never done them.

[00:10:26] Speaker A: So. Neither have I. I didn’t realize they were actually, what’s it called, actually to unlock things for that. And if I had, I might have, I might have done it. I, I did look it up because I was curious. And so you can get access to a motorcycle or basically a motorcycle skin for the auto Trike from cyberpunk. You can get.

[00:10:48] Speaker B: Okay, that makes sense. I’ve watched some. Okay, that makes sense. I’ve watched some YouTube videos of people with the trike or the spray paint. And I’m like, how do you get that spray paint?

That makes sense. It is definitely the cyberpunk.

[00:11:01] Speaker A: So there’s, yeah, there’s that. You can also get Johnny Silverhand, who is Keanu Reeves character. You can get his bionic arm as an a cosmetic attachment. And I think there’s maybe a set of sunglasses. There’s a couple more. But hey, I mean, cool crossover.

It’s cool that they did that. I did make the mistake though, of not removing that V face pattern for a long time. I kept forgetting every time I was in regular gameplay where there’s not that many moments, I guess when you’re only walking is when you can turn it on and off. So I kept forgetting and so it kept showing up in cutscenes and wishing I had turned it off.

Still fun though.

[00:11:42] Speaker B: So I just wear the hat or the otter Herd all the time.

That auto herd never came off after you told me about Otter Herd earlier and the water.

I just never. I always had the otter hood on and Then usually I just have him wear a hat and sunglasses.

[00:11:59] Speaker A: Wow.

Otterhood and sunglasses.

[00:12:03] Speaker B: Yep. That looked really cool.

[00:12:06] Speaker A: And so it’s right before going through all that. So leave it to an alarm blaring in your room with a flashing red light as a great time to receive a bunch of emails and interview files. But. So I took that moment to actually go through and read them just because. To check off the notification list. And so there’s an email from Deadman that talks about movies, and one of them is about his voice actor Guillermo del Toro’s own movie the Shape of Water, which won the best picture at the Oscars that year it released and all that. And I realized also, I guess I hadn’t. I knew that this Hartman’s voice actor was also some degree of celebrity, but didn’t realize he was a director and writer that had. Has done a bunch of movies too. He actually was the director of that movie Drive, about a stuntman with Ryan Gosling. I haven’t seen it actually, but might eventually.

[00:12:55] Speaker B: I haven’t seen that one, but there’s.

[00:12:57] Speaker A: There’s references to a bunch of obviously all of the main voice actors. Other works in here, which is one of those fourth wall things. It’s kind of funny. Obviously. We’ve seen multiple ones with Norman Reedus.

[00:13:08] Speaker B: Yeah, we have. I actually, I forgot to say back. I’ll tell my story here about my trip just to. There it is. Edge Knot. Is it Edge Knot City. Right?

[00:13:17] Speaker A: Edge, not City.

[00:13:18] Speaker B: Yeah, before that. I forgot I never mentioned this. Like, it was like a couple episodes ago. I grabbed a bike like somebody’s. Somebody had just left a reverse trike somewhere randomly.

And I grabbed it to go there and it had on it AMC stickers.

[00:13:38] Speaker A: Oh, yes.

[00:13:38] Speaker B: So while I was writing it, Sam would be like, don’t forget to turn. Tune in and watch Norman Reedus and his show.

[00:13:46] Speaker A: Yep, yep, yep. I. I’ve only. I’ve only written one of those recently.

Yeah, it’s.

I’ve only seen that recently, but I picked one up and he. As you’re writing, he says, I feel so effing cool. I feel like Norman Reedison Ride, which is obviously his show. That’s also advertised.

[00:14:02] Speaker B: That’s it. No. Yeah.

[00:14:05] Speaker A: Ride with.

[00:14:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I saw the shower. Shower one was like, towards. Yeah. Early on in the game. But then this bike one just completely caught me off guard.

[00:14:12] Speaker A: It was just for amc. They get extra advertisement out of this game too.

[00:14:17] Speaker B: Yeah, they do.

But so back. So my.

My trip to Edge Knot City through those jellyfish blobby bts.

So I. I got up to them.

I was using. You using, as you said, the non lethal ar. I think I had one. I don’t. Didn’t use it. I was using the anti BT handgun instead, which was also just a one shot on them.

[00:14:42] Speaker A: Oh, really?

[00:14:43] Speaker B: It’s kind of nice.

[00:14:44] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, the jellyfish ended up getting destroyed by a single AR round too.

[00:14:50] Speaker B: Yeah, there are a few of them where, if I could see them, that they were in like a pack, I’d throw a Hermatic grenade and take out like right. Four or five at a time. But that part where you got caught. So I was just carrying all my stuff and I climbed up the building and I went to jump and he jumped and he just jumped.

It’s like as if instead of just jumping, he just walked off the edge and I fell all the way down and died. So I had to. I had to come back and start back and go through again the first bit and all that. And I was like, okay, well, I’m not gonna go fully up that way because it has to be another way. So I like looked in like halfway up the building or so if you go to the left, you can go inside, like right on like a little ledge and then inside. And then what I did then was just drop down. It’s just drop down like a story or two. And luckily it doesn’t. Really didn’t do anything.

[00:15:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I think there was a ladder there for me, actually, from someone else, so that was helpful.

[00:15:48] Speaker B: Oh, I. I did not have that. I just dropped down.

But I was. But then I made my way through stealthed. But when you got to that BT section.

Yeah, as you said, you cut umbilical cords. Mine was a little bit tougher. I was trying to get through it. I cut a couple. I threw some grenades, and then I kind of just tried to stealth my way through. I almost got caught. One of them, actually, I did. One of them slightly touched me, but I was able to shake it off, like, instantly.

And at that point I could like see the end. And I was like, yeah, I hope. I’m like, hopefully there’s not many more. And I just sprinted and like a couple more popped up, luckily to the side I didn’t run into anymore. And I just sprinted out and then sprint. Sprinted down into the terminal.

But it was. Yeah, I did not.

I tried to stealth it. I. I don’t know, I just couldn’t.

I got. Yeah, as I said, I got touched and caught. And then luckily I knew it was happening like Instantly. And I was just able to instantly just shake them off without losing anything.

So that was lucky.

[00:16:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I noticed. I think I had scanned and it showed enough of them in the path because it’s a fairly. There’s a section we have to go around like a wall or whatever that had fallen. But there’s eventually toward. In that final stretch, you can see that they’re in more or less a zigzag pattern. So I was able to zigzag without getting too close to the other one following one. That’s why I decided to do the umbrella cord thing.

I did have, I think my gun available in case I needed to pull it out quickly. But.

[00:17:26] Speaker B: No. Well, yeah, yours was a little easier, but yeah, but then, yeah, we, as you said, we make it to edge knot, we get woken up by blaring alarm.

[00:17:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was like, well, that’s good. Time to read some emails, you know.

And that was a, a good old fashioned boss fight right there.

I don’t. They had just given you access to the four round rocket launcher. Did you, did you fabricate?

Yeah. Did you fabricate some of those or did you end up just going in with what you had on you?

[00:18:01] Speaker B: Oh, hell no. I fabricated like three of them.

[00:18:04] Speaker A: Wonderful.

[00:18:05] Speaker B: Because they had like a huge grenade launchers.

[00:18:09] Speaker A: It’s still. Yeah, it’s still. I did get killed once because he starts launching BTS at you on top of the blobs. But it respawned me actually with the same amount of damage done. So it did. That was good. It was more of a checkpoint than a full restart. The boss fight same.

[00:18:26] Speaker B: I died. I died as well once. I didn’t even realize, as you said, like he had spawned bts. And I just got. I was like running and then all of a sudden I just got instantly pulled down and through and I. And I was like, what just happened? Like I, like I had full health. Like, what just happened?

[00:18:42] Speaker A: And for such a tall enemy, it was a pretty enclosed space. And actually, I don’t know if you had experienced this too. I was wearing a speed skeleton the whole time because I saw I had one on me and I. So I switched to it and saw that there was the.

The blobs were all over if you don’t shoot them. And I didn’t want to stop shooting at him, so I didn’t stop to shoot them. I was basically just like weaving through all of them on the ground. But it created an invisible wall. Even though you have like that whole courtyard area.

It had invisible Walls. So it was really much more of an enclosed space. And there were some. Some moments where it popped up, some buildings you could climb up on.

But.

Yeah, but eventually, I mean, I was.

Because of the speed skeleton, I was sprinting the entire time. My battery ran out fairly quickly, so it was more of a slog to avoid. And you just keep popping rocket rockets at people.

Eventually, I ran out of rocket rounds and had to switch over to the grenade launcher. And finally some. Some of those.

Basically the help bts. The good. Yeah, the gray BTS started throwing me rocket launchers again, and I used that to finish them off.

[00:19:50] Speaker B: They were. They were helpful. Yeah, they were very, very helpful. We were. So we were fighting. Yeah, this.

This giant mega BT that Higgs is connected to, Anomaly are connected to.

And I don’t know where you. I was like, you. I guess you could shoot it sort of anywhere, because wherever you shot it, it sort of turned red. I was aiming mainly for where I knew Higgs was.

[00:20:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I was aiming at the gold sections, basically the gold sections, which Amelie was 1 2. But I figured they’re not going to kill her off like this, so I just kept shooting them at. There was one. There was one behind Higgs when he was originally on the chest, and then he switched over to the shoulder. But I just kept shooting at the goal, basically. And then at some point, you had to shoot the umbilical cord. Hang on.

[00:20:33] Speaker B: Umbilical. I was just about to mention that. Yeah, you have to shoot the umbilical cord because I don’t know if it’s.

Does it. Did it give it extra health? Is that what it was like a little bit of a.

[00:20:44] Speaker A: You know, if it did, I did not notice. I just. I just saw the thing pop up with the glowing center.

Shot it. And then I kept looking for it for a minute or so, thinking it was going to come back, like I didn’t do enough damage, but it didn’t. So I. I just went back.

[00:20:57] Speaker B: I only think. I think I got it. Yeah, I think I got it three times, maybe four times total. And I hit it.

[00:21:03] Speaker A: Okay.

[00:21:03] Speaker B: Three out of the four. One of them, I know I missed.

Like, I couldn’t get to it because I had to shoot off some of the BTs that were trying to pull me down on the ground.

So I missed it. But overall, it wasn’t too hard of a boss fight. It was very unique and very interesting. I mean, he shoot. He throws down, like wires that kind of trap you, that if you get caught in them, you can shake them off.

[00:21:27] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:21:28] Speaker B: And he’s got to shake him off.

[00:21:29] Speaker A: He’s got the. He’s got the blobs all around. He’s got some shoots. Bts. Gold bts. I think it was actually Gold bt.

[00:21:36] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:21:36] Speaker A: I mean, it was, it was. It was certainly a true boss fight. Right. Which we’ve had a couple times here. I guess I wouldn’t count the lion as a boss fight. It was more of a runaway section. But that first squid thing was a boss fight. There was maybe a bit more towards the end, but it was, you know, it was fun. It was like a bit. Bit of a change of pace.

[00:21:55] Speaker B: And yeah, there was one time where actually I got caught with like the. The tar tentacle, whatever the tar strands that came out. And he pulled me up.

Oh, but as he pulls you up, you can still shake it off. And I shook it off and I had a rocket launcher out. And then like as you’re kind of falling, I was able to just shoot the rocket launcher at the head over and over.

[00:22:17] Speaker A: Damn. Okay, maybe I should pretty cool play through there where that happens, because I didn’t get up in the air like that.

[00:22:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I only had it like once because after that I was just trying to get. Just trying to shake everything off. I was also very happy that the gray guys threw blood bags. Those were the main things I was trying to pick up, like every time.

Yeah, because the blood bags are just. They’re so useful.

[00:22:40] Speaker A: I mean, they’re like basically the source of all your ammo, really, at the end of the day.

[00:22:44] Speaker B: Yeah, it really is. I threw some hermatic grenades at the jellyfish on the ground because there are quite a few, like together. So just like take out a whole chunk at once. So then it clear off an area for me.

But yeah, it was entertaining. Cool, Fun.

Entertaining. Boss fight. Yes.

[00:23:02] Speaker A: So did this also happen to you? So after the boss fight with this giant Higgs mega bt, right after picking up the massive amount of chiral crystals that spawn right there, just as I knew they would disappear if I did anything else, I went to the private room to recharge.

And then I came out of the private room. No major story related anything happened. So I loaded up all my stuff. I was thinking, okay, I’m gonna have to walk back through the town to get to the distribution center near the tar belt. And I started walking back. I get like half the way there and then the thing pops up saying to go to your private room in edge not city, where I literally just was. So I had an immediate facepalm. And then obviously, they wanted to have him wandering around muttering to himself, think, Sam, think.

And then have, you know, the decision. Fragile can take you to the beach. I mean, okay, sure, but why not just tell me that while I’m sitting in my private room, ready to go?

[00:23:57] Speaker B: Ready to go. Yeah, I. I agree on that. I think.

I think I did this. I didn’t walk fully back or I almost walked a little bit. And then I think I just.

Because I forgot what it says when it. It’s just. I think it says, find a way to the beach.

[00:24:13] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. And so I was.

Start walking.

[00:24:16] Speaker B: I was like, yeah, is it. Is it mean the beach? Like back where we started this chapter? And I thought about. For a second, then I was like, I’m not gonna lie to you. I was like, I don’t think that’s right. And I just googled it, and I just saw something very quickly of someone saying, oh, go back to private room. I was like, oh, okay.

[00:24:31] Speaker A: All right. There it is. So I did think so. Yeah. When you.

[00:24:35] Speaker B: I didn’t, like. I did not want to walk back through all that, I guess.

[00:24:38] Speaker A: No. Hell no. I thought it was funny, though. So you get back to your private room, you call up Fragile, and finally Sam asks Fragile for something to eat. That was a nice full circle moment.

[00:24:49] Speaker B: Yeah, it was for the crypto buyer.

[00:24:50] Speaker A: And then he starts grabbing multiple of them both.

And then. Yeah, right. She takes you to the beach. You go into the. The on the beach boss fight with Higgs, and.

Right. I mean, I. I don’t know how you approached it. Basically, they. I think you didn’t have any of your weapons, but they give him a gun or they give him a knife, and then they give him a gun. I don’t know what. What the order was, but you have no weapons. They just have a bunch of cargo all over the place.

So I just started picking up cargo, sprinting at him, and then smashing him with the cargo, which then disappears immediately. And at some points, I was doing the whole. Because you know how if you hit. I think it was if you holding it with R2, and then you hit square, it swings his arm back and forth, and you let go. And I was so excited when I got the timing right and was able to just launch a chunk of cargo at him and hit him in the face.

[00:25:39] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, I. I figured it out.

Yeah. Pretty quick. With the cargo. I got it. And then I would just. Instead of, like, throwing it at him. Yeah. I just.

He’d shoot. And then you could see that he Would reload at some point.

So I just hide and then.

Then just run up to him and then just smash him in the face of the cargo, punch him a few times.

[00:26:00] Speaker A: Right, exactly.

[00:26:01] Speaker B: And then run off.

[00:26:03] Speaker A: You smack him in the face. You just punch and then, then he just.

[00:26:06] Speaker B: I will say, though, before we. I will say though, before we even started this fight, the speech that Troy Baker gives is Higgs being like, just a good old fashioned boss fight.

[00:26:17] Speaker A: Yeah. All of the no void out, no.

[00:26:20] Speaker B: Repatriating, no coming back. I was like, that is such a like sick ass monologue right there at the end.

[00:26:28] Speaker A: All of the meta boss fight references that he makes. At some point during the giant BT fight with him, he said, should I turn the difficulty down? And he says he made us some kind of funny reference to Mario and Peach during his monologue as well. So that was all good old fashioned fun. And also. Right. The last phase of that boss fight on the beach to me is just like. I don’t know if they still make them the Fight Night series, the boxing video game series where you have to kind of like weave and use the sticks to throw your punches and whatnot. That reminds me a ton of another moment in a different Kojima game, which I won’t go into for spoiler reasons, but clearly he’s referencing that here. But it was just so funny to see, you know, bob and weave, do the boxing thing, punch each other uppercuts and then head butting and, you know, block grabbing and pulling him closely. You can grab another crypto biote and heal up real quick.

It was, that was, that was a boss fight for sure.

[00:27:32] Speaker B: It was an old fashioned boss fight and it was fun. The second part of it though, when he has the knife. So before that fighting part. Yeah, that part took me forever.

[00:27:42] Speaker A: Oh really?

[00:27:42] Speaker B: To figure out what I had to do to Higgs. Like, I was just running around and I’m. I think at the end of it I got like actually like a, B or C on this boss fight because I took a lot of damage just from.

From the grenades and the knife. Like I try to like, then eat some biots. Crypto biots. And if he throw a grenade, like it was just a little too delayed of grabbing it and eating it before I could run and the grenade would explode. So it’s not like I took a ton of damage, like one big like hit. It was just a little, bunch of little damage over time because I was just like, I would run at him and like jump and kick, like do a flying kick at him and knock him down. And I kept punching and I’m like, I don’t know what to do. Do.

[00:28:26] Speaker A: And I was like, that was really, I think the. The end of the day, like what, what you’re supposed to do. I. I was just sprinting from out of COVID hit him and then go back to cover, wait till he pops up again, that kind of thing.

[00:28:37] Speaker B: Well, then I brought out my strand thing and it. Yeah, the. The strand. And when he’d like attack me, it gives you that.

The option, the parry. So I’d parry and then block him up.

And then you kick him on the ground. Did that like three or four times.

And then it finally.

Oh, yeah, it does that. And then it goes to like him. Then it goes to you guys, like fighting in the. He tries to run or whatever. You fight in the car.

[00:29:06] Speaker A: Right, Right. Yeah.

[00:29:07] Speaker B: The.

[00:29:08] Speaker A: I mean, so you find the old.

[00:29:09] Speaker B: Fashioned fighting game, as you said, fight night.

[00:29:12] Speaker A: Old fashioned fist fight.

[00:29:14] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:29:14] Speaker A: Which seems just like what Hicks wanted. So.

Yeah. And Right. You end up beating Higgs. He’s kind of on the ground, can’t do much. Fragile shows up and she takes over there. So that’s good. You can go have your chat. You learn a lot from Amelie and I thought. So she says, how are we gonna. Should we jump back to.

Back to the east? And she says, no, we’ll just run. And so you run the beach all the way back east. And I thought that was the funniest time for this weird romance montage of them running. And I was expecting some like, romantic song to pop on. Like, what is going on here? That did it just seems so out of place.

[00:29:53] Speaker B: Yeah. And before he was like. She was like, oh, you’re Mario and I’m Princess Beach. And I was like, what.

What is this?

I was like, yeah. From everything I just did in the game, from fighting a giant BT and then Higgs, this crazy evil dude.

And now it’s like this like.

Like just running down the beach to like a romantic song of like sunshine on my face and blah, blah.

[00:30:21] Speaker A: It was out of place. I don’t know where. Like that threw me off, I guess.

[00:30:26] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:30:28] Speaker A: A lot of cut scene and revelations happen and all that. One of them being.

Okay. So we spend the whole game connecting the Chiral network.

So connecting the whole full network makes the network too dangerous to use, really.

Obviously everything starts having fluctuations and weird problems and.

How do you like them apples?

[00:30:54] Speaker B: Yeah. That was interesting. That was a unique revelation.

[00:30:58] Speaker A: I mean, the nice thing is it pops you back out. You don’t have to cross the Tar Belt again. You pop back out at the relay station before all this.

So there was. That, that, that was a nice kind of. I guess the, the beach run did something good.

Yeah, because we created the safe. That’s where you pick up. Up for the, the next section.

[00:31:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Right. Is this a. Yeah.

[00:31:21] Speaker A: And so there, right there was a whole big.

You can, you can take any route you want. Basically, you can go back up to the snow. I ended up taking someone else’s long range trike and going real like on the. To the.

To the east along the beach as far as I could possibly go. Went through a small BT section a couple times, but didn’t even see any of them and basically just weaved my way back up towards. So, okay, so actually something we should jump into.

And I think you had a slightly different experience with this than I did, but Peter Englert, the pizza guy, was Higgs all along.

[00:31:58] Speaker B: As Higgs all along. Yep.

[00:32:00] Speaker A: So right when you wake up, right when you. That from there you get the email.

The guy, you don’t know this yet until you get to the end of the email, but he talks about being stuck on the beach. He was rendered powerless by you know who. He’s still definitely salty that you didn’t deliver his bomb to South Knot City and threw it in the tar pit there.

But he will forgive you if you bring a pizza from the first prepper and sign the email as Higgs. And I just thought, what.

Why are you so weird?

And. And I think we had different experiences. Right. Because I had done the champagne delivery and the other one after that from Mountain Knot City. And then now he wants one from the first prepper who’s at the top of the other mountain near that spiritualist.

And so, okay, he’s dead number one. But if he deliver a pizza, then he’ll be happy.

Yeah, I mean, it’s just all kinds of weird. How did you end up uncovering. Did you get the same email that I did or was it something else?

[00:32:59] Speaker B: So I got. I remember. If I remember.

[00:33:01] Speaker A: Did you do. I guess. Did you do the champagne delivery in the fourth one?

[00:33:07] Speaker B: I did. So this is. I. I found out that he was Higgs by doing the champagne delivery, the one from the Timefall Farm.

[00:33:16] Speaker A: You decided to come.

[00:33:16] Speaker B: So when I came.

Yeah, when I came back to 10, I had. Was it an email? Must be an email. Yeah, it was an email, but I might have skimmed it over. I don’t think it was the first prep one. It was basically something saying, like, come Visit me at my shelter and learn the truth and come see my secrets.

Yeah, something like that. Like, and I was like, oh, okay.

[00:33:43] Speaker A: Weird. Did he sign it or did he sign it Peter?

[00:33:46] Speaker B: No, it was signed Peter.

[00:33:47] Speaker A: Okay. Okay.

[00:33:48] Speaker B: It was still signed Peter. So I. At that point, like, I was. I was like, you know what? I’m over here.

Coming back.

No, coming back, I went like. I had basically a route that I.

Mountains all the way back that I basically established. And I got back pretty easily to Mount Knot City. When I got back to mountain Knot, I was able to basically, then I had, like, a road. The road through the mountain for me was about halfway, if not three quarters built.

So I just went through the mountain route, went down to the weather station, and then continued on to the Timefall Farm. Because I was like, you know what I’ll go do? I’ll go do this at the Timefall Farm.

I’ll just go get this pizza thing with the champagne. Because I, like, looked it up, and I was like, you know what? I have some more roads done.

I know a way to go around and get there.

[00:34:45] Speaker A: Mm.

[00:34:47] Speaker B: So I did it. I’m not gonna lie. I probably did this one at the worst time, because obviously coming back from 9, starting at 10, it is an immense downpour the whole time.

[00:35:02] Speaker A: Yep.

[00:35:02] Speaker B: And it gets like, there’s no. Yeah, there’s no let off at all.

So I was like, oh, my God. Everything is likely. I had some container repair sprays, but I took. I took a long way. So when I left Timefall Farm, instead of going obviously towards.

Towards the mule camp, I went to the right over this little mountain, and I kind of created a path that I could then go up a hill and just back until towards the waterfall. And then from there, I just had a little bit on the rocks, and then I had some road built. So I was like, if I can just get to this road, I’m golden.

[00:35:39] Speaker A: Like, that’s more or less the way that I went.

[00:35:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I had one. Obviously not a bug, but just a glitch, obviously. I think because time, fall, rain, rocks wet, everything just comes together. I was trying to jump up onto a road, and Sam just wouldn’t jump up. Even though it’s giving me the jump, like, thing to jump. He didn’t jump, like, fully. And it went from trying to jump to, like, he slipped and just went tumbling forward, like, straight into the rock. And I, like, dropped the champagne. And I think my champagne was at, like, 30% damaged or whatever.

[00:36:13] Speaker A: Now it’s, like, container or the champagne Itself.

[00:36:15] Speaker B: No, the champagne itself. And I was like, I was like, you know what? I was like, whatever, I don’t care. I’m not going back. I’m not like re. Reloading, loading a last save or whatever because I’m already like halfway there.

Yeah. I’m like, I’m at my road. Once I’m on this road, all I now have to do is just sprint all the way up the road until him. So I just did it. I got there.

When I got to Peter AKA Higgs’s place, the door was open.

[00:36:46] Speaker A: Yep. So his shelter door was open and you drop off. Okay, so you did with the champagne and the other pizzas? I did it with the final first prepper pizza.

[00:36:58] Speaker B: Yeah. So I dropped everything off and I was like, why is this open?

[00:37:01] Speaker A: Yeah. And you get soy kissu.

It unlocks custom Higgs versions of multiple guns, which is cool. Which have golden rounds, which are basically hematic rounds, but plus you get an automatic 5 stars for Higgs area. He gives you access to a normal chiral network connection for his area. And yeah, the door. I don’t know if I saw that the door was open when I arrived. I don’t know if it opened upon delivering.

But you finally get to enter a prepper shelter, which was cool.

It’s basically just a hallway and a room. Although I imagine other shelters are more detailed, have bathrooms.

[00:37:38] Speaker B: I assume there are others that are.

[00:37:40] Speaker A: Bigger and more spicy.

And Higgs has two laptops, a screen, a bunch of pizza boxes, obviously. And then the walls are covered with photos of Sam with post its all over it that say loser and done and.

[00:37:55] Speaker B: No, it’s just one of those typical serial killer walls that you see in murder movies and murder shows.

[00:38:02] Speaker A: Sheets of paper full of writing, scribbles, can’t read them, yarn pinned all over the place. Like a detective connecting the dots between people in a movie or a TV show. So. Yeah, exactly. Either detective or serial killer or both. There’s a pharaoh head, statue, skulls. I think there was a. Whatever Neanderthal skull and a human skull, hieroglyphics. Then like all that.

[00:38:24] Speaker B: Which the pharaoh thing is actually pretty cool because I didn’t realize that his cape and his hood and everything.

[00:38:32] Speaker A: The same pattern when he. When he kind of spreads his arms out. You can see the pattern there.

[00:38:36] Speaker B: Yeah, it’s like a pharaoh. Yeah, it’s very cool.

[00:38:40] Speaker A: There’s. Yeah. And the scribbles one as well. Say that the larger ones. There’s one that says game over. There’s another one that says bridges can’t make bridges, so who needs them?

And then another one that says what we need are void outs, not bridges.

But most importantly here you get a memory chip about Higgs’s life up till he went evil. So there’s a large, a long set of interview files that you can read through.

And another fun fact. So in real life, Peter Higgs and Francois Englert were worked together and jointly won the Nobel Prize in Phoenix in physics.

Thus, you know, Peter Englert, which is Higgs’s real name. There’s always a connection. That is cool.

[00:39:18] Speaker B: That is. Yeah, that is cool.

That’s such a, that’s such a cool connection that Kojima did.

[00:39:24] Speaker A: You always got to read between the lines and these ones.

Yeah, and, and then, Right. And so you get from here, okay, you finally get to back to late not city.

You can move along, basically, and you get into another supercell. Actually, I was thinking it was before you even get there, isn’t it?

[00:39:44] Speaker B: It’s before you even enter the city.

[00:39:46] Speaker A: Before you even enter the city, you get into a supercell, which, okay, gotta be Clifford. Clifford Unger.

It was interesting. You just see some conversation. So Die Hardman and Bridget are in BB’s room in one of those flashbacks. So they say a BB candidate, a sacrifice for a bridge. This BB is one of a kind.

And so I realized, okay, that’s why Die Hard man said sorry when Unger showed up on the beach, because you end up seeing some more details later too. But right, okay, we’ve seen World War I, we’ve seen World War II. This one’s in Vietnam. How did you go about approaching this fight?

[00:40:27] Speaker B: Stealthy. This to me, I mean, I.

[00:40:32] Speaker A: I.

[00:40:33] Speaker B: I haven’t played a Metal Gear game in forever. I think I played some of the, if not most of the first one a long time ago, but I just know like, of the, this felt like a, like a Metal Gear Solid type stealthy fight.

[00:40:46] Speaker A: Like the atmosphere, right. And just the environment itself with the jungle and the coverage and the tall grass to go through is. It really reminded me of Metal Gear Solid three, which is coming out as remade as Metal Gear Solid Delta, supposedly still this year. And it really gave me that vibe and sort of creativity and opportunities because it was a much larger space to play in.

So it was, yeah, it was another cool change of pace. And all three of the Clifford fights have been pretty entertaining and unique.

[00:41:21] Speaker B: Yeah, they have. As for this one, I definitely was more stealth. I just used the strand and just would just kind of sneak up behind people Take out like the, the gold soldiers and then would do it to Unger.

[00:41:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I, oh, you with the strand. That’s cool. I did it. I did it. I basically, I saw that there was so much space to roam around and looked at the map and all that. And so I, I did a ping and saw really, really far in the distance that there was a body armor piece and then saw another one kind of in another direction. And so I just flanked far, far left through the grass until I was way past them, picked up the two armor pieces and put them on my shoulders, and then I went up behind them on top of a hill. So I just had completely flanked them. And they were all in sort of the original area to that fighting space. Killed them all without any of them finding me by just using the rifle. Obviously there’s no scope on it, but I just kept shooting at them and they didn’t figure it out, so I just kept shooting at everyone. And then after the first respawn, they were kind of marching and I just checked a bunch of Matic grenades at them all as a group and got them all. And then the next respawn, they basically respond directly into my super secret high point with a nice overhead view. So I went down around a corner and took them out individually with the BT handgun and then the Higgs’s riot shotgun, which is super sweet.

Yeah, the riot shotgun finally finished them off from far away again. But yeah, I mean, it was, it wasn’t super tough, but it was a lot of fun and kind of creative gameplay moment. And in the scene after that fight, I totally thought Cliff shot Sam when they hugged. Like in basically any action movie where something with a bad guy gets nearby, the good guy happens. But no, it wasn’t that. That was nice.

[00:43:16] Speaker B: No, it was not yet. It was just to end the. It was really just to end the scene, huh?

[00:43:23] Speaker A: Right.

[00:43:23] Speaker B: It was sort of a gunshot noise, and then it just ends the episode.

[00:43:26] Speaker A: That was it. And was it here or farther down that you find out all about Clifford?

I don’t recall.

We can just jump to it anyway, I think at that point when you see in that scene, right, you see Clifford whistle to the bb and then Sam whistles back the same song.

And so the gears started turning. And I think that’s when I kind of started to realize. But right. Eventually you end up seeing a whole bunch of, well, long cutscenes.

Actually, maybe we can jump to that later.

[00:44:10] Speaker B: This one, though, I think actually, yeah, we’ll jump to that later. But this one, when you come back, I think.

Wasn’t there a cutscene here? Because we learned more about Amelie and Die Hard.

[00:44:24] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:44:26] Speaker B: When we come back, I think, basically, I think, yeah, because die Hartman is still gone.

He was on the beach with Bridget, Amelie.

He hasn’t come back, but he left us like a message for Bridges employees only or whatever. But it was Deadman found it and shows it to us.

And basically Die Hardman saying, hey, look, I’ve never met Amelie in person. Something about like, her Ha and Ka are split and that Bridget is a ha and Amelie is the car stuck on the beach. And that technically, Bridget could never ever have kids because she had uterine cancer.

[00:45:04] Speaker A: Yeah. So there. There you go.

This entire time they’re the same person and an extinction entity. And it’s all kinds of weird.

[00:45:15] Speaker B: Yeah, we did learn. I think earlier we didn’t say, yeah, Omli isn’t. Is the extinction entity right for this?

[00:45:24] Speaker A: So that’s fun. You’re best friends with the extinction entity. Maybe slash in love with them.

I don’t know. I don’t know.

It’s also unusual that the extinction entity. The whole purpose of existing is to cause an extinction. And yet she’s giving you a chance to not do that.

[00:45:41] Speaker B: To not do that. Yeah.

[00:45:43] Speaker A: Which I don’t understand the motivation there, but maybe it’s just, oh, she connected with humankind, humanity, and wants to give it a chance. I don’t know.

[00:45:50] Speaker B: Wants to give it a chance. But after this, though, after 11. So I think. And 11 ends with then like Die Hardman saying, like, hey, look, we’re all back at a capital, not city.

We need you to come back and bring these crypto buyouts because Fragile is in a coma.

[00:46:02] Speaker A: Like basically a coma in a coma.

[00:46:04] Speaker B: Yeah, she’s super weak.

[00:46:06] Speaker A: So I want to know all about your.

Your journey back to.

[00:46:10] Speaker B: About this.

[00:46:11] Speaker A: Okay, I’ll tell you about.

[00:46:13] Speaker B: No, I do. I will. But yeah, episode 12 is not what I thought it was going to be. I thought it was gonna be more.

[00:46:19] Speaker A: Like 10 a cakewalk right back to town.

[00:46:22] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it was. It was not. So, yeah, you go ahead, go first. Let’s see.

[00:46:28] Speaker A: Well, okay, so we. We have this journey set out where you get pulled instead of having to cross the lake, you actually from the supercell, get popped back into Port Knot City. So you just pick up the cryptobiots. Okay. So my dumb ass loaded them up on a long range truck, thinking, okay, I’ll just drive the whole way there and worm my way through whatever is in the way. Like I always do.

And then, of course, you get to kind of an archway, and there’s an endless sea of jellyfish BTS in the air.

Okay. So, all right, I’m not going to be able to take this truck all the way.

I get out, I start going through, popping BT balloons left and right from a distance, make my way through, got to the squid section, get past there using the awesome speed skeleton long jump in a really quick amount of time, landed on the ground, no battery. I tried to build a generator, but because of the weird chiral anomalies in the air, you can’t build anything with the pcc.

So I couldn’t recharge my battery. And I was like, okay, I can either.

I’ll just kind of run the rest of the way. And then I realized, shit. I didn’t take the crypto bias out of the truck.

No.

So my crypto batch, the one thing I need to have that I didn’t want to get wet and didn’t want to have, you know, in the rain or whatever, are in a truck at the top of the hill past all of that.

But I didn’t want to also go back all the way to Portnot City by reloading. So instead of reloading the save, and I knew I’d already cleared that whole path, a really easy path through the the hills there. I just ran back up the hill with no battery, picked the cryptobiots up from the truck, came back down, no issues, basically because there were no jellyfish balloons in the way.

Figured I was in the clear because in so many of the other BT areas in this game, once you get past them, they kind of disappear.

But no, the squid sequence came up yet again, and I had to do it without my long jump, so it took longer.

And then. And then they sure throw a lot of roadblocks in your way. And the BTS really don’t want Fragile to get her cryptobios. So during the Whale Boss, I got up on the tallest building and it basically, I got. It was in a corner enough right next to a hill, so I. It couldn’t hit me, basically, but I could barely hit it either.

And it rarely came at me from an angle with its mouth wide open, which I thought was the only way to damage it.

So I thought for a bit it was kind of like Shadow of the Colossus, and I was gonna have to jump on it and ride the thing and shoot it from on top of it, which obviously is not part of this. So eventually I ended up just kept shooting and Shooting and shooting and picking up ammo from the ground and blood bags from the ground and eventually was able to take care of it. By the end of it, though, my cryptobiotes Cargo was at 87% damage.

Obviously I didn’t want to repeat all that, so I just said F it and turned it in. I got a C. It did bring up to mind, though. It would have been funny if that caused an alternate ending where you can’t bring Fragile out of the coma and just ended the game right there with everyone exploding because there weren’t enough cryptobioids in the case left.

But no, no, fortunately it just worked just fine. You just need to turn it in. I think it made your grade better if you got above 50%.

[00:49:52] Speaker B: But.

[00:49:52] Speaker A: Oh, well. How about you?

[00:49:55] Speaker B: Yeah, so for this, I think so to start off, I didn’t go the. So through those jellyfish. I then went to the left. There’s like another opening to the left sort of. So I went that way, which had some BTs. I think I was on a long range trike.

Yeah, I was on a long range trike. So I had the buyouts on my back and I made it through, like, all that and I thought I was in the clear.

And then I just drove really quick and then all of a sudden it was like, I hit a wall and that’s when the squid, Squid pops up and I get like, pulled off. I’m like, what is going on? I was like, I didn’t hit a bt, but then realizing, like, oh, this is supposed to happen.

And so from that, yeah, I shot the squid thing a couple times in the face. Just kept running, ran until I could, ran and jumped until I could just get to the free, free area and then found someone else. Just like someone else’s just random trike.

So I jumped onto that because I was like, okay, cool, now I’ll just drive back.

Driving back on that and then again, like, just hit like a wall out of nowhere. And then the three lions pop up and I was like, oh, great. So I was like just shooting each lion. I was like, run. And then a couple of lines, like, would pop up next to you close. So I just like, run, pop up close to me. I turn, shoot it with some rounds. It would back away. I just keep going until I got to the clear. And at that point I was like, oh, yes, thank God, now I am in the clear. Right?

No, as you said, then we fight this giant whale. And this thing was such a.

For me, this was so much harder than the Giant BT fight.

Like, this fight pissed me off. Like, I, I. For a lot. It took me a little while to figure out, like, how do I know where he’s coming up and out of?

Because I could not see, like in the tar very easily. Like, it turns gold where he’s gonna come out of. In the tar where he’s gonna jump out of. And there are times where, like, I’m just running around trying to jump onto buildings, get out of the way, and he’d like jump up, like, right next to the building I was on. And it kind of like pushed me back a bit and it just, it took forever. There was a time where I thought I was safe in a part. Like he was coming up sort of close to me, but not fully. But he came up and knocked a bus, and the bus like flew into me and knocked me back and knocked all my stuff off.

[00:52:20] Speaker A: That’s no fun.

[00:52:21] Speaker B: Yeah. So I, I didn’t die, but it just took forever. Also, this, this is. This is one of the flaws I have with this game. And I’m wondering if it will be fixed in the second one. When you’re aiming in, you are so zoomed in. I didn’t see that the whale was shooting out BTs, like gold BTs in the ground.

Like, it zooms you so far in that I have no idea of like, what some of my surroundings are.

[00:52:52] Speaker A: So. I hear you. I have some issues with when you want to switch to a different weapon or you get hit and you want to pick your weapon back up. And for some reason, no matter how many times I hit right on the D pad, it just wouldn’t pull up the menu.

[00:53:05] Speaker B: It wouldn’t go or the weapon.

[00:53:06] Speaker A: So I’ll just be like spamming the thing and nothing would happen. And then I’d keep getting hit. Basically because you can’t pull your weapon up and shoot it back.

[00:53:15] Speaker B: Yeah. That only happened to me in this boss fight. I don’t know if that was like, that was.

[00:53:19] Speaker A: This was like this one, but I don’t think it’s just associated with that. Maybe it was just the way loaded or something. I don’t know.

[00:53:26] Speaker B: Yeah. But the BTS and the ground thing, like, it’s just like I’d zoom in with the rocket launcher or the grenade launcher. Also for the grenade launcher wise, I don’t know if you ever used it. The ones that are the homing. Like the. No, the remote detonation ones.

[00:53:39] Speaker A: Oh, I. I thought about thinking. What, what, what what. What’s it called? What Application of this Would make sense to me at this point in the game. I think it would have been really useful earlier when you’re closer, when you have a lot more just standing still. Bts But I didn’t re or people that were charting at you from really far away, like maybe in some of those unger fights. But I didn’t find any uses for it here. Although now that I think about it, maybe you could launch a grenade into the mouth of the whale and then explode it. No.

[00:54:08] Speaker B: Yeah, that’s what I.

I used it in the big BT fight and I used it in this. But basically, yeah, you just can just shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot. And then after you shoot them all, you can hit whatever triggered it or whatever else, then detonate them all at once.

[00:54:20] Speaker A: Would it swallow those grenades?

[00:54:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I hit one a couple times in the mouth. I just shoot it on any of it and then just like put like four or five on at a time and then just hit the dead.

[00:54:30] Speaker A: Or did it stick to him?

[00:54:32] Speaker B: Wherever it was, it sticks. The grenades stick.

[00:54:34] Speaker A: Okay, that’s cool.

[00:54:35] Speaker B: Yeah, they’re like sticky grenades.

[00:54:37] Speaker A: Oh, that’s nice.

[00:54:39] Speaker B: So those were kind of cool. But yeah, this. This whale fight, it took me.

It was just between. Yeah. Trying to get weapons to come out when like being sometimes way too zoomed in. I couldn’t see BTS like try to grab me and I’d have to shake them off. And I kept like dropping my stuff. I’m surprised that you got a C. I think at the end of this I got a B. And I was absolutely shocked because my cargo was at like 95% damaged.

Like, I honestly thought at one point I was about to redo it. It was just gonna give me a game over because it was gonna be fully destroyed.

[00:55:11] Speaker A: But I thought eventually once that probably does happen. Yeah.

[00:55:14] Speaker B: I don’t know. But yeah, it took me.

I was also playing this at like one or two something in the morning and I was kind of tired and I was not expecting this boss fight at this time.

I was getting like a little frustrated and. But it’s took. Yeah. And tired. It took a lot longer than I thought it was going to take. Knowing now though, like, how I know how it comes up and how it. It also. It shoots like lasers out of its mouth. And that was the problem too. If I’m so zoomed in trying to hit it and it’s past me, like I couldn’t see its mouth. And then all of a sudden, boom. I just get hit by something. I’m like, what has just Hit me. Like, where did it come from?

[00:55:51] Speaker A: Great experience. Overall, I do think this. This fight will make an amazing scene in the movie if it gets.

[00:55:58] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.

[00:55:59] Speaker A: Because it will visually be incredible and you don’t have to deal with the actual fight itself.

[00:56:04] Speaker B: No, it will be incredible. But, yeah, I did. I finished it. I got it done. We go there, we drop everything off, she comes out of a coma.

[00:56:14] Speaker A: Right.

[00:56:15] Speaker B: It was just. I think I did. I texted you. I think I texted you. Episode 12. Just finished episode 12.

Because I was so frustrated. I was like, I’m not even gonna talk about it.

[00:56:24] Speaker A: Okay. I. I thought, you know, I thought you were telling me in that moment about some giant revelation that happened, and I think we didn’t actually talk about it again after that. So that’s. Well, now I understand.

[00:56:36] Speaker B: No, yeah, that’s what it was for. It was a frustration text more than anything.

[00:56:39] Speaker A: Yeah. Good stuff. And, yeah. If. So if you. You find out here, if you kill Amelie, you’ll save the world, but you’ll be stranded outside of it forever. What the f. Also, at this point, I. Because of that. That specific statement when they were giving you kind of the briefing before you go into her beach, at this point, I had a prediction for what happens in Death Stranding 2, considering it’s called on the Beach. So my. My theory at this point in the game was, okay, you’re going to kill Amelie, you end up being stranded outside of the real world forever, and you’re stuck on her beach forever. And that’s where the entirety of Death Stranding 2 occurs, which would have been a very unusual experience. Overall. I think it turned out to be pleasantly wrong, obviously, by the rest of this game, but that. That was. I was a little concerned or curious about where it would go from there. And, you know, at this point also, Sam gives a farewell final act speech in case he never comes back. And it’s the most. Sam has talked the whole game.

[00:57:42] Speaker B: The whole game. It kind of was this chapter. I mean, this episode also, there was some big revelations.

[00:57:51] Speaker A: Right.

[00:57:51] Speaker B: I think also we find out that, yeah, as you said, Almelid is basically behind everything.

[00:57:55] Speaker A: Right.

Also that she gave Higgs his powers.

Yeah, she gave Higgs his powers at this point also.

And I. You know, it ends up showing you again later. So it all connected, but at this point, it said it had a bit of a flashback when you arrive on the beach, because she’s showing all these things happening.

And so was that a flashback to Amelie finding Sam as a baby on her beach and then drowning him and then he repatriates. And yes, that is exactly what it was.

But they don’t give you any context to it until later.

[00:58:28] Speaker B: Until later. Later we find that out.

[00:58:31] Speaker A: Which, right. I mean, at this point I’m also thinking, okay, damn it, never trust the people that give you a mysterious quest, main quest in a game, just never do it. Like freaking Bridget. She sends us along this whole quest basically so she has a chance to destroy the world. But then why does she give you a chance to keep it going?

I don’t know.

You know, and after that, so, right, you keep. You basically get re control and you have the first round of credits, which I think there were three separate rounds of credits in this game, which was cool too, but you had. It’s an active credit. So you’re walking around and I’m just going to call her Amma. Bridget from now on says she was the one who brought you and Clifford together again.

And so at this point I was thinking, okay, is Sam actually Lou, but much older.

So this. Some. Is this definitely a multiverse story.

Again, ends up being wrong. So they throw you for a loop there. But the, the right. So you have like the gun. You try to. You get a chance to shoot her. If you shoot her, you get a game over.

The extinction happens. It keeps respawning you. And if you. You go and get her.

[00:59:41] Speaker B: That’s actually not true. Did you try shooting her?

[00:59:43] Speaker A: Oh, no, I did.

[00:59:45] Speaker B: I shot at her.

[00:59:46] Speaker A: I did.

It shoots through her. But then if you, if you don’t, if you just wait around a little bit longer, it must be on a timer. Basically. It just. It says something about connection lost retry and it reloads you. So it’s a game over.

[01:00:00] Speaker B: That’s what. Yeah, that happened to me. I shot at her and it didn’t do anything. And I was like, huh? And then I just let her.

[01:00:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I did it actually to reload a couple times because I did it the first time. I just started running in the opposite direction, like up the cliff. And then it did that. And then the next time I started shooting at her.

Nothing happened. Waited. It happened again. And then eventually I started walking towards her and it gives you the option to hug her. And that’s where it continues on.

[01:00:23] Speaker B: But yeah, if you holster your gun.

[01:00:29] Speaker A: Yeah, you holster your gun. And then, and then if you holster.

[01:00:31] Speaker B: Your gun, it gives you the option to hug her.

[01:00:34] Speaker A: Yeah, you have to be like next to her too. So.

And then you just keep wandering and wandering and, and getting tired and sitting down and Then she walks around you in a circle and tells you more backstory and more backstory.

[01:00:46] Speaker B: And, yeah, there’s a lot of backstory that, like, comes through. This will let all you guys see all that there’s. Yeah, because this was a lot of. It was just, like, you just keep running. It just does a little backstory. Backstory. You sit and While you’re tired.

[01:01:00] Speaker A: Right.

[01:01:02] Speaker B: The one, actually, I will say I liked is that Amelie means soul. That is a lie. As in amma is soul and then lie. I did like that in one of the backstory parts. So for the name, I thought that was pretty good.

[01:01:17] Speaker A: Right?

Yeah. It’s all little intricate details that piece together and are revealed here. And, you know, finally your crew comes for you, and Deadman picks up BB and then pops through, and basically Hartman was looking for you in his beach and mama somewhere else. And you end up getting pulled back into real life and real. Yeah, I think so. You see the. The Die Hard man speech as a new president.

After that, you get some more backstory.

Dead man was so excited to give Sam a hug.

Just, like, pure joy to give Sam a hug. That was hilarious. And he still doesn’t trust Die Hard Man. And then you get some Die Hardman backstory. Cliff’s wife was Lisa Bridges.

And was it Lucy? Lisa or Lisa? I think it’s Lucy Lisa Bridges.

Oh, regardless.

[01:02:13] Speaker B: Oh, I wrote that down.

[01:02:14] Speaker A: She is a Bridges. Cliff’s wife is a Bridges. And it turns out another red herring. Right.

You are the BB from the flashbacks. When you flashbacks try to make you think that it’s your BBC when you plug in on the way up from the elevator from a private room. And no, it’s just your own flashbacks remembering what was happening.

So you are Cliff’s son.

That was a wild.

[01:02:43] Speaker B: That was a wild revelation.

That was not where I thought it was going.

[01:02:49] Speaker A: Very clearly did that on purpose.

And they did a really good job of it because I was not expecting it whatsoever until the end there. And. Yeah. Right. So Bridget obviously wants to keep you for various reasons, and so she brings you into her beach, and then that was her sending you back, basically, to repatriate. And.

And so Sam is the promised Man.

[01:03:13] Speaker B: Yeah.

[01:03:13] Speaker A: The one meant to reconnect everything.

[01:03:15] Speaker B: He’s meant to reconnect everything. They were going to. They were going to sacrifice him. Use him as a sacrifice to start. That was also a crazy revelation is that basically the BBs were used as sacrifices to start the Chiral Network.

[01:03:27] Speaker A: Right.

[01:03:27] Speaker B: Like, that’s.

I was like, wow, that. Yeah.

[01:03:30] Speaker A: That’s. There were some scummy people here.

[01:03:32] Speaker B: Yeah, there’s some scummy, scummy people. But yeah, as. Because Sam is. The BB is repatriated, he now is no longer viable as a baby.

[01:03:42] Speaker A: Exactly.

[01:03:43] Speaker B: And therefore present strand says, okay, you know, I’ll take him out of the pod and I will raise him as my own.

[01:03:47] Speaker A: Right, right. And then so, you know, you get through some more. More story here, mostly long cutscenes and your. Your final act is to go incinerate your BB that’s been on your journey the whole time and die no end. Deadman is also obviously has a good connection with the bb.

Deconnect, disconnects your cufflinks to from the network and says, hey, just take these off and don’t reconnect at the incinerator and you can do what you want. Basically, just hint you should not incinerate the vv. Which. Thank you for not doing that, Sam. So, yeah, I was a little afraid of that. Yeah. Because he sets it down on the. On the thing and then grabs it last second. I mean, I kind of figured that wouldn’t happen. Obviously, you know, we’ve seen some degree of promotion for Death Stranding 2, so we know that Lou survives at this point. But.

But I don’t know, maybe that was another BB that you pulled out later. But no, it was nice to see the removal from the pod and destroy the cufflinks and who knows what’s next, basically. But it gives you also. So following this, we both jumped into the Director’s Cut extra orders at the ruined factory in the East Zone. I knew these. Basically I finished the game or right before finishing the game, I was thinking, wait a minute, where are those quests? Because I. I had seen the Director’s Cut announcement trailer years ago and I know it got a lot of conversation because they had a kind of a gag joke about Metal Gear Solid and the cardboard box and all that in the trailer. I was thinking, where is that section? Because I haven’t seen it in here.

And so I looked it up and realized where it was and decided, okay, at least this is the one thing I’m going to actually do after finishing the game for sure.

Because I think the final mission of the three orders is actually after. Is a post game thing. And so that even had some additional revelations, which is kind of cool too, you know, in that it’s a series of three orders. The first one, I was all prepped with my gear to go in super stealthy and I was stoked to do it and I was just ready for another stealth mission and instead of hitting the Audra deck button, I hit the touchpad and Sam yelled. So I immediately blew my cover and then had to Sam wick it all the way through using the new brand new maser gun and stun bombs on the way in. There’s only like four or five guys. So it’s really. It’s a really quick set of orders actually. But I used the riot shotgun on the way back out and then the next one I was able to fully stealth in in the inside there which was with the strand the entire way. There was only five guys inside. That was really cool. And the final one, I get down, I get into that final section with a bunch of dudes and.

And I found a path. I found like this scaffolding that had collapsed and so I got up behind someone and stranded him, use a strand to tie him up.

And for whatever reason someone immediately saw me. So I just basically just had to run around. But I stealth. I used a smoke bomb and then went all the way around the guys and they get. Just kept shooting at where the smoke was. So I was able to strand a bunch more guys and then finish the thing off. And you.

Yeah. How was your experience with those handful of orders?

[01:06:56] Speaker B: Mine was pretty, pretty similar. I just want to go quickly back episode just 14 for us. Like the. When you walk to the incinerator with bb it plays like for both of us one of the best songs of the entire game called BBC.

And anyone’s listening to this, please go on like Spotify, go find the soundtrack, listen to it. If you haven’t played like it is a fun.

[01:07:19] Speaker A: Listen to it when you’re not playing it, I think is the key because. Right. I mean obviously you played this in our listening to this episode. You’ve. You’ve played through the moment. But it’s. It has its. Has an impact when you’re walking with BB and you know what you’re supposed to do or the order is that you’re supposed to do. If you listen to the whole thing without the game running. It’s a great song.

[01:07:40] Speaker B: It’s incredible. It’s a. It is a great song.

But for 15. Yeah. So the first one, as you said, the first part. Yeah. Because it was just orders, I think 77 through 79. I just didn’t. Yeah. Basically it was the last thing I did.

77. I just bullet gunned everybody. The first four of them just bullet and then kicked and knocked him out. Got what I had to go. Go Back second one I stealthed a couple and then I used the maser gun and I thought like if you shoot him it just instantly go down. But it doesn’t.

[01:08:11] Speaker A: No, you gotta like.

[01:08:12] Speaker B: So you kind of have to like punch them.

So I did that. I use that a couple times. I use a bowl of gun.

The third section, the third one, which I don’t know actually you didn’t talk about it. There is like a little, slight little Metal Gear reference.

[01:08:27] Speaker A: Yeah, right. There’s one cup scene that actually was in the trailer as well for it which is. Yeah. You go into a room right before going down into that lower level and you see a box and he dumps all the oranges out and then jumps inside the box, which is a snake way of stealthing around. And then he decides this isn’t going to work and he puts the back of his pocket back on the shelf. So it’s a funny kind of self referential thing.

[01:08:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I just found that. Yeah, that was funny little thing. I also noticed that the helmets that the dudes are wearing down there are very Predator esque.

[01:09:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. They had like. They were all hanging off.

[01:09:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Like they were from the Predator universe. It was actually pretty cool. But I had the same thing. I walked. I did the exact same as you. The scaffolding that was broken. I walked down, I stranded that guy and. And again someone random just instantly saw me and so I got into a firefight. So I had the riot shotgun and I just riot shotgunned everybody.

[01:09:20] Speaker A: Nice.

[01:09:21] Speaker B: And then I just made my way through. I didn’t. I wasn’t able to straighten anyone else.

[01:09:24] Speaker A: Damn it.

[01:09:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. But there. Then we go and yeah, you into the room and drop off the chip like to activate the terminal.

And there’s a bit of a. Some more backstory revelations which is run by.

[01:09:41] Speaker A: By Fragile’s mom who ended up.

Right.

[01:09:46] Speaker B: This is what I wanted to ask you. Do you. That’s my first thought was that’s Fragile’s mother. And then I think it is doing, doing this. I re watched, I rewatched it and she makes a comment of like she had a little girl. She had a girl out of one. She saved one and. But she didn’t last long and I didn’t know she was talking about Fragile or if you remember, there’s a photo of her with a little.

[01:10:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it was the girl from the photo.

[01:10:12] Speaker B: Yeah, the other girl from the photo. A different girl.

[01:10:14] Speaker A: Yeah.

[01:10:15] Speaker B: So I think that’s what it was. Yeah, I do. I. I do believe. Yeah. Fragile is her daughter.

[01:10:20] Speaker A: Is this woman’s daughter. Yes. And this woman had to basically abandon her family to go start up this organization. And she had also been working with Higgs, obviously, she mentions Higgs here too. So that’s. I think Higgs and Fragile have known each other a long time, probably since they were teenagers.

[01:10:37] Speaker B: This. This whole hologram was meant for Higgs, like, or for Peter.

[01:10:40] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. It was true.

[01:10:41] Speaker B: She believes that she’s. Yeah, yeah. And basically Peter is sort of like an adopted brother of Fragile. Like she says. Like, I think of you as one of my. Like my own son. So please take care of your sister Fragile.

[01:10:55] Speaker A: So that just makes whatever all that Higgs did to Fragile even worse.

What it do.

[01:10:59] Speaker B: It does. Yeah. It makes it even. Even.

[01:11:05] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, hellvoy, to end a story right, you end up. You end up getting. Right after the hologram place, you get a ladder, a door open, a ladder up to a hill with a bunch of gravestones for all the BBs that were sacrificed for bridges.

So, hey, you know, nice melancholic end. That was really the last kind of thing even.

[01:11:26] Speaker B: See, it shows you. It shows you a bt, like over a gravestone.

[01:11:30] Speaker A: Yes. But I didn’t know if that was.

[01:11:32] Speaker B: Someone specific or if that was just a random.

[01:11:36] Speaker A: I think it was supposed to be the woman, but I. It doesn’t really make it obvious, so I don’t know.

[01:11:43] Speaker B: The haircut was different, though. The haircut looked more like a strand, like Bridget slash Omli’s. I don’t know. I was just trying to figure. I don’t know. I didn’t Google it. I just was curious on if it was. But maybe I will look it up.

And then that also plays another phenomenal song, which I forgot what it’s called. I think it’s called Fragile.

[01:12:02] Speaker A: I think it’s called.

[01:12:02] Speaker B: Oh, is it called Fragile?

Yeah, but that’s another great song while you’re up there.

[01:12:07] Speaker A: And. And at this point, I think this is the first time I was at a really high point in this area. Again, after the end of the game, there’s no clouds anywhere, so you can actually see to the far corners, to the full edge or full capital dot city and in the other direction.

Pretty much everything really clearly, which was kind of cool thing to see for the first time.

Yeah. And so basically that. That is the end.

[01:12:33] Speaker B: That was. That was the end. That was the conclusion of death stranding.

[01:12:37] Speaker A: What are your parting thoughts here, Alex? I think the first thing that I’ll throw out there. So I didn’t this didn’t come about purely from random happenstance, so it’s not as genuine as I had hoped. But I finally looked closely at the bridge links menu in the main menu, and if you hit R1 a couple times, you get over to the friends menu and your name pops up. So I added you as a bridge link and then a little bit later, I ended up seeing one of your structures. So I think from the beginning, if we had realized this, we could have just added each other as friends and seen our structures the whole way. I still wanted to just find you randomly, but it is what it is.

[01:13:13] Speaker B: It is what it is. Yeah, I saw that. You sent me a screenshot that you found. I literally built that bridge, like probably however many hours before that. You found that.

[01:13:23] Speaker A: Yeah, not unexpected. I mean, it was probably.

[01:13:26] Speaker B: That was a trophy finishing. Just trophy grind task bridge.

[01:13:32] Speaker A: Yeah. And I mean, basically that was when I had looked in that bridge links menu for whatever reason.

I also want to revisit something that we talked about in our expectations episode in episode one of the podcast. So after putting some time into the game, you know, it’s this idea that was thrown around by all the detractors and poor reviewers of Death Stranding that the game is just a walking simulator.

Now, yes, obviously there is a ton of walking going on, but if you’re using it as a reason not to engage with the game or the slow burn story, you’re really missing out on one of the most unique, amazing experiences ever in games. Right?

Yeah, you really are to get into. I readily admit it’s hard to get into, but they just do so much well here that it’s worth powering through. Right. 10 hours of gameplay without enjoying it fully is tough to recommend, but it’s worth it.

[01:14:26] Speaker B: No, it’s worth it. And the more you grow and put people on the cowl network and the more the whole online thing I thought was going to be a little gimmicky for it is. I’m not going to lie. It’s an. It’s amazing. I actually like that you’re connected with other people and you can see their structures like it is. That was probably one of the most useful things in the game I’ve ever had in the game. Like, as I said, like for some of these final episodes, I just grabbed someone’s random trike bike. What a, like, truck, whatever it is that they’ve left about use their bridges, their. Their zip lines. I would build zip lines to hook up to their zip lines that they built that they hadn’t fit. Like there’s so much more. Yes, it is. There’s a lot of walking, but once you have stuff connected, there’s not technically as much walking, but it’s a fun way to figure. You have to figure out the right way to get to places.

Yeah.

[01:15:23] Speaker A: And I really enjoyed establishing a route or building up some road and then just reusing that same route. More pathway multiple times. Because that was retreading the ground that I knew and that made things more streamlined and more entertaining.

[01:15:36] Speaker B: I also like that too, that since it’s online, the path that everybody that most people use over the. Yeah, as you said, over time becomes more visible. So if you’re going through snow, if people take the same path over and over and over, the snow kind of goes away. It becomes like a dirt path. Like they’re under the snow.

[01:15:57] Speaker A: You can see it pass through here.

It’s just little details like that. Once again, a little details, little touches.

They put a lot of thought into all the mechanics because they’re unique mechanics. Really.

[01:16:10] Speaker B: Yeah, it was very unique. This was probably one of the craziest story games I’ve played.

Like there was a lot of twists, a lot of turns, but it was really enjoyable the whole way through.

Like really wanting to know, like, what’s next? Like, how does this turn out?

[01:16:26] Speaker A: Another sort of parting thought here. So something I actually haven’t mentioned throughout this first season of our podcast that I feel is worth a mention at this point. My wife and I actually had our first baby who is just two weeks away from turning one year old in the past year. And so I think it’s added something to the experience of playing death stranding, obviously with the focus on BBS and the stranding, the existential idea of life itself and the talk of a potential sixth coming mass extinction, the fact that maybe that is really on a slow path to that too, and just wanting to make the world a better place, you know, I. So while IGN did receive some mockery from some people when in their review of God of War 2018, they said that playing it made them a better father. I was not a father when I played that, obviously, but some similar type of thoughts come to mind. I can’t say I’ll make any claims that large about death straining like that. However, I do feel it has caused me to reflect in different ways and really appreciate parenthood in an extra different kind of light. Wanting to make the world a better place, be more outgoing to keep up and make new connections. Definitely don’t be like Sam, he’s kind of grumpy and doesn’t want any contact. But you know, the connections you feel to a baby or anyone that’s close to you really just by spending more time with them in the way that Sam does with Lou throughout the game is a nice touch.

And especially for someone that you spend so much time with in life and feel so connected to, when you spend time or extended amount of time away from that person, it’s even more difficult. Right? It seems to be subtly referenced during the Deadman episode when you have to survive and stealth entirely through that portion without your bb.

Now, it’s hard to find a lot of detail into his personal life since he keeps it pretty private, but it does appear confirmed that Kojima has some kids, so I can only imagine he reflected his own feelings of connection into this game.

Yeah, obviously this thing throws out a lot of scary moments like the nightmare Sam has with the BB bursting out of its pod and whatnot. Fortunately, I’m not the type of person to internalize things like that from fiction, so it doesn’t affect my own sleep, but it doesn’t make it any less scary.

But even so, you know, as Unger said, being a father didn’t make me scared, it made me brave.

So I think it’s, it was a good time for me to play this. Really.

[01:18:43] Speaker B: Good. I’m glad. No, it was, it was a great game. This was, as we kind of said this was like our top game on our backlog on both of our backlogs and with the second one coming out it was a great time to play it and I think it was a great first game for, for us here.

[01:18:59] Speaker A: For our podcast for this podcast. Yeah. Yeah. What would you rate a review? Death Stranding as alex on a 1 to 10 scale?

[01:19:07] Speaker B: I would probably give it a 9 out of 10.

I would say I would give it a 9 out of 10. I’m not gonna go 9 and a half or 10 perfect because there are definitely some flaws. As I said sometimes with the weapons, like changing over some of the boss fights, fighting over just little.

[01:19:26] Speaker A: Little little.

[01:19:26] Speaker B: Things of that I’m sure that they fixed in the second one.

Like I’m sure like with zip lines and like being able to hopefully carry stuff while you’re also ziplining. Just little things here and there. Like things that you would think that you’d be able to do but you couldn’t do.

But story wise, it was a great story. It flew me for all the loops, all the twists, all the turns. I was great gameplay overall was great the bts, I’ve still. Even though I’ve put down whatever I put into like 90 hours into the game, BT still encountering them make me nervous. I still get when your audio deck goes off that you’re in a BT area. I’m still like, oh man.

Like I’m still trying to avoid all the areas.

Oh, I was like later, like later on in the game, even though I have like all the equipment like that I should feel comfortable with.

But yeah, I would. I would say a solid nine. I think there are just a little. Some little tweaks to do which could be done for for two. But overall it was a. Yeah, it was a great game.

[01:20:31] Speaker A: I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Yeah, I’d probably give it somewhere between an 8 and a 9, I think.

Similar sentiment overall. I think the general vibe of it reminded me a lot of just kind of being out in the wilderness, which, you know, it’s always nice to get out there. And especially I enjoy being out in the forest or hills or whatever when it’s raining or heavily raining.

So it gave me kind of a simulated version of that. This game also felt a lot like hiking in real ways in many moments.

And I think, yeah, right. The story is just so out there. It’s so unique and good way to pass the first half of the summer here. So yeah, I’d probably. I’d put it eight and a half.

Really enjoyed it. Really looking forward to number two.

I think you and I both watched trailers and or reviews for Death Stranding 2 after we finished the game. It has been very highly praised, much more loved overall than Death Stranding 1, and is very strongly footed right now in the race for Game of the year 2025 as a front runner along with Clair Obscure, Expedition 33 and Donkey Kong Bonanzas, to the point where some people are saying nothing else even stands a chance. But obviously the year has another half to go.

I. You know, based on what I’ve seen, it is clearly going much more Kojima weird and wacky than Number one. And I for one can’t wait to experience it. Supposedly improves. It improves upon almost every detail that I loved in one. And so it’s likely something that I’ll play within the next year. 365 days rather than waiting for when the movie comes out, which is what I kind of did when I played the Last of Us 2, which was right as season one of the show was starting. I started Last of Us 2. I’ll probably play this before the movie comes out since there’s Time. Some time until then. But even like the little details, like supposedly you can take off your backpack and put it on the ground before you enter a fight that I read about, like, there’s. I think basically everyone just says it’s improved on everything.

Also takes this back and, you know, he was definitely the most exuberant, like, turn it up to 11 type personality character in the first one.

Based on these trailers, they just let Troy Baker do whatever the hell he wanted and have a wonderful time because.

[01:22:54] Speaker B: Just be as crazy as you want to be.

And it’s like, be as crazy as you want to be and then turn it up another like five to ten.

And that. That’s what we want for two.

[01:23:05] Speaker A: That. That’s right. So I’m. I’m excited. It won’t be next, but it’ll be soon.

[01:23:11] Speaker B: No, it will be soon. Yeah. Same for me after. After playing this and then watching through and hearing all, like, some of the. Since it’s out now, the great reviews that it’s been getting, the accolades appraise everything. It’s definitely sooner on my list than later. Um, as you said, you saw something where you can put your backpack down for a fight. I saw that there’s like a vehicle now that you can sit in front of and like, picks up stuff like the cargo for you automatically on the way. I was like, oh, my God. I was like, thank you for. I was like, God, I can’t wait to play this. Like, it’s just. It seems like he thought of. He did look at one and probably.

[01:23:47] Speaker A: Heard like, yeah, right.

[01:23:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And thought like, okay, what can we do to.

What can we do to just, like, make it bigger, better, 100 times crazier.

[01:23:59] Speaker A: It seems like the world is much larger because they’ve added a monorail that you can build out too.

[01:24:04] Speaker B: Yeah, that was nuts. Yeah, that was in one of the trailers.

[01:24:06] Speaker A: That’s kind of crazy. Like, all the different things that you can do now. There’s a full, like, weather system. Night, day, cycle. Yeah.

[01:24:12] Speaker B: BTS look bigger, crazier than ever.

[01:24:15] Speaker A: Weirder, creepy, weirder.

[01:24:18] Speaker B: Everything.

[01:24:18] Speaker A: There’s some weird robot armored samurai, which is like a bit of a callback to Metal Gear Solid one. There’s. Man, it looks great.

[01:24:26] Speaker B: There seems to be a cult. There seems to be some type of cult in two that.

Yeah, some red.

I won’t say coated, but red clothed culture samurai robots.

[01:24:40] Speaker A: Gameplay wise, it looks fantastic. It’s still very much a game about delivering things. And therefore, if you didn’t like that in this, you probably won’t like the second much or as much as, you know, if it just was a full switch. But it seems like there’s a lot more combat, a lot more options for combat. I think I heard about a silent sniper rifle. Cool. I think as far as gameplay goes, I’m gonna have an amazing time. As far as story goes, it’s just get ready for some wacky, weird stuff to go down.

[01:25:11] Speaker B: Get ready for some, yeah, wacky and.

[01:25:13] Speaker A: Some deep, melancholic, dark stuff to go down to. And I am, yeah, super excited.

[01:25:19] Speaker B: Oh, I’m sure. Yeah. For gameplay wise too. I remember there was one clip in one of the trailers I saw too where, yeah, you have these routes that obviously in the first one you look at your map, you can make your routes. You have other people online who have built bridges and blah, blah. But in the second one I saw like there’s a clip of like someone’s built a bridge or you’ve built a bridge and then all of a sudden like a flash flood comes and just destroys the bridge and just takes out the route that you’ve taken.

So it’s constantly changing, which is really cool.

[01:25:48] Speaker A: Floods and earthquakes and.

[01:25:49] Speaker B: Yeah, floods and earthquakes.

[01:25:51] Speaker A: Yeah. And supposedly one of now one of the best examples of how to take advantage of your PlayStation, which is always a good thing to hear when there’s a technical showcase that just so next level. I do also find it funny that the Kojima towards the end, after getting too much positive praise for.

For Death Stranding 2, decided to like make some tweaks to make it less.

Less of a crowd pleaser. But I don’t think he pulled that one off because it’s getting a lot of praise. Near masterpiece level.

So hey, good for us.

[01:26:26] Speaker B: Yeah, it’s gonna be for a lot of people. In their Game of the Year category, in their Game of the Year nominees.

[01:26:32] Speaker A: Which is a huge turnaround from Death’s running one being shrugged off by most by many.

[01:26:38] Speaker B: Yeah, when it first came out. Yeah, when it first came out, yeah. But I do think, I think also with two now coming out, I think one, obviously we’ve played it. I think a lot of people.

This is why I want to start this are going back and playing it and it’s getting it now. It’s respect that it didn’t get when.

[01:26:56] Speaker A: It first came out as it should. So.

Well, to wrap up, we’ve had a wonderful time playing through Death Stranding 1 have all the more interest than before in playing Death Stranding 2 on the beach, especially considering how well it has been reviewed. And while our backlog grows constantly, of course, and it won’t be next on our list, we might get to it this year, keep on keeping on, and listen in next week to find out which game Season two of the Gaming Backlog Book Club will be about.

Yep.

[01:27:24] Speaker B: Thank you everybody. Thank you for following along on this journey through test training one with us, and we’re excited to continue and as I said, get ready to hear what our next game will be for Season two. Thanks. If you want to follow along and discuss our playthrough of Death Stranding and any future games on the Gaming Backlog Book Club podcast, please give us a follow on your podcast platform of choice, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Amazon Music or Pocket Casts, as well as our Discord and Instagram under the same name. Thanks.