Death Stranding is one of the most creative video games ever made. Shame about the dialogue
My quest to understand the ghosts of Metal Gear Solid.
I owe Hideo Kojima an apology.
In my 2021 essay on Polygon recounting my two-year, 300-hour epic quest to beat FromSoftware’s Sekiro, I wrote some words about playing Death Stranding that now, having beaten the game, I rather regret:
Playing Death Stranding was like wading through mud for no good reason: It wasn’t exactly hard, just a rather annoying and pointless experience.
Looking back, I think this was more a reaction to my controller-throwing frustration at getting my ass handed to me repeatedly by Sekiro rather than any failure on the part of Death Stranding. The game was very different from any video game I had ever played—or have played since, for that matter. When I first played it, I lacked the context, understanding, and patience to give it the time, attention, and respect it so clearly deserves. It took me two years to beat Sekiro but it has taken me even longer to fully appreciate Death Stranding. It’s not perfect, and we’ll get to my biggest ongoing gripe soon, but first, we’ve got a bit of setup and exposition to go—just like a Kojima game.
Back in November 2019, when Death Stranding was first released, I was working with Polygon and putting myself through an intense crash course to learn everything I possibly could about playing video games. At that time, video games for me fell into two clear camps: Nintendo—fun, imaginative, beautifully made, and a delight to play games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Splatoon, and Mario Odyssey; and PlayStation—intense and more photorealistic games like Control, Jedi Fallen Order, God of War, and, of course, my obsession, Sekiro.
Death Stranding was like none of these. The game took me completely by surprise; I literally didn't know what I was playing or how I should play it. For those of you who have never played the game or watched it being played on YouTube, let me try to sum up the essential bits in one sentence. Spoilers ahead, you’ve been warned. Okay, here goes:
You play as Sam Porter Bridges, a freelance porter and delivery guy (no, really) as he walks around a barren, rocky landscape that looks suspiciously like a cross between Iceland and Scotland, deploying the occasional ladder to traverse a precipice, or climb a cliff with a rope—later in the game he gets to ride an electric trike, or drive a truck, or leap across mountains using a weird anti-gravity device thingy—with the aim of delivering packages of supplies and tools to various people in isolated outposts or cities with names that are all variations of Knot (Edge Knot City, Central Knot City, etc.) whilst wearing a baby in a bottle on his chest and trying to avoid floating invisible ghosts called BTs (“Beached Things”) who try to catch and drown him in a black treacle tar-like substance full of bodies and the only way to fight off the BTs—or the occasional boss BTs in the shape of a shiny black tar lion or flying whale with tentacles—is to throw projectiles at them powered by Sam’s own blood, piss and poo (and of course, you have to make him go to the toilet at a base camp to collect said ammunition), but Sam also has to avoid the Mules, human baddies who will beat him up and steal all his packages unless Sam goes into their camps and steals all their stuff first, but Sam can’t kill them because if he does, he then has to carry their bodies to an incinerator otherwise the bodies will explode and create a massive crater in the ground, and all the while Sam also has to interact with an extended cast of characters who give him missions or move the plot forward including Mads Mikkelsen who occasionally pops up playing a marauding combat veteran with dripping black eye liner in various theaters of war like World War 1 trenches infested with skeleton soldiers (and also appears in flashback sequences, sans black eyeliner, as viewed from the baby-in-the-bottle POV); Lindsay Wagner, the iconic Bionic Woman, who is the President of the United States of America and also Sam’s mother; Léa Seydoux who plays “Fragile,” a woman dressed from head to toe in black rubber that carries a bizarre cubist umbrella and has the ability to teleport Sam from place to place; “Higgs,” a maniac in a gold death mask who periodically appears out of nowhere and tries to murder Sam for some reason I didn’t quite work out but I think it’s something to Sam’s adoptive sister, Amelie; a number of important side characters who are modeled after famous directors like Guillermo Del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn but are played by someone else and also e names like "Deadman" and "Heartman" (because he dies every 21 minutes and has to resuscitate himself); and Conan O'Brien who makes an appearance as the “Wandering MC” but why, I don’t know.
Actually, there’s a lot about this game I don’t know or understand. But what I do know is that Death Stranding is absolutely grade A mind fuckingly bizarrely bonkers weird.
And I love it.
Five years after first playing it, I now consider Death Stranding to be one of the most visually stunning, imaginative, technically accomplished, and brilliant video games I have ever played. In fact, I’d consider Death Stranding as close to a true video game masterpiece as is possible to get were it not for one significant and consistent nagging flaw that runs throughout: The English language dialogue in the cutscenes is really bad, and I haven’t for the life of me been able to figure out why. Until now, that is.
Generally speaking, I am not a fan of extended cutscenes. I find they often combine the worst of all worlds: A boring video game that’s also a shitty movie—the recent Star Wars Outlaws being the perfect example. I think FromSoftware has the right approach: A few short cutscenes with a bit of exposition, most of which make little sense but still never get in the way of astonishing gameplay. The majority of lore, instead, is told through item descriptions and environmental set pieces—a smattering of esoteric clues that are so alluring and complicated as to create a whole cottage industry of YouTube lore essayists.
The cutscenes in Death Stranding have, like the rest of the game, a wholly unique quality all their own. They look astonishingly good. The animation, design, subtlety, and sheer fidelity are remarkable, especially on the PS5. Yet I think the English language dialogue is plainly terrible: a trite, nonsensical, repetitive, forced script that is so exposition-heavy that plot points are made with all the subtlety of a pickaxe smashing through concrete. I had wondered whether the dialogue would be better in Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, but if recent footage is anything to go by, it will be exactly the same kind of oratory drivel.
Skipping through the Kojima Productions livestream from the recent Tokyo Games show, I saw a few scenes from the Death Stranding 2 trailer in the original Japanese audio. And it made me wonder whether the writing is better, more nuanced and natural in Kojima’s native language. Though I thought it unlikely, given the budget and the number of skilled translators working in the video games industry, I’ve often pondered whether the reason that the dialogue in Death Stranding is bad is because something is (loath as I am to use this phrase here) “getting lost in translation.”
As much as I wish I could, I don’t speak Japanese. Nor am I an expert on Japanese video games and broader Japanese gaming culture, so any conjecture on my part would be wildly inappropriate. Luckily, I have Sam Byford, a friend and former colleague from The Verge turned writer of Multicore (and fellow Brit), who has been living and working in Tokyo for years to help. Byford not only reads and writes Japanese fluently, but he’s also a tech nerd and lover of video games.
Byford told me that to understand why the dialogue in Death Stranding is the way it is, you have to go back to the video game with which Kojima made his name: Metal Gear Solid.
In full disclosure, I have never played any of the Metal Gear Solid games myself and know little about them. Byford explained to me how the original MSG1 was a massive hit and made Hideo Kojima internationally famous. The game was not only hugely influential for its use of cinematic techniques, 3D environments, full voice acting, and extended cutscenes—all elements that would become Kojima staples even now—it was also praised for the quality of the dialogue translation from the original Japanese to English by Jeremy Blaustein, who worked for Konami at the time.
Byford says, “I’ve played it [MGS1] in Japanese, too, and the dialogue is extremely dry and filled with super-dense military jargon. I 100% prefer the English version.”
In an article for Polygon written in 2019, Blaustein explained how he focused more on translating the feel of Kojima’s dialogue than the literal words themselves. As he explains:
Translation is not a science; it is an art. One must take liberties with the text to capture the essence of the words, in an attempt to recreate the feeling of the original for a very different audience with a very different cultural background. That essence is found less in the words themselves than in the spaces between the words. It is a tone, an ever-present, unspoken attitude, and in this case it was a very confident tone. It is the mark of a single hand that often gives a work integrity and power, and I didn’t want to put my fingerprint on Metal Gear Solid. I wanted to imitate what I thought Kojima desired from the text.
Blaustein also makes it very clear that he believes Kojima wasn’t at all happy with his translation and how it changed and added to the original dialogue, which is why Blaustein assumes he has never worked on another MGS title.
Agness Kaku subsequently handled the Japanese-to-English translation of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, which was released on PS2 in 2001. In a long 2012 interview with John Szczepaniak (now only available to read on the Wayback Machine), Kaku makes it clear that her experience of working with Konami and Kojima was very different from Blaustein’s. Szczepaniak writes that, whereas Blaunstein was given access to Kojima directly along with ample reference material (“three huge, hard-cased ring binders from the R&D; department, one of which was filled with original drawings by Shinkawa, another was the script and another was biographies, with info about all sorts of places and weapons”), Kaku was given only word files to work from. Her translation was literal because she had no option to do anything different.
All of which leads me to the inexorable conclusion that Kojima and his team of writers have gone to great lengths to ensure that the English language translation of the dialogue in Death Stranding is as close to the original Japanese as possible. What I consider to be clunky or vaguely ridiculous is not an accident of translation but entirely by design; a feature, not a bug. And now I have this additional context of the contrasting approaches of Japanese-to-English translation of MGS1 compared to MGS2, I am starting to judge the dialogue in Death Stranding a little differently.
When I first played Death Stranding back in 2019, I was still relatively inexperienced at playing video games. I bought a Nintendo Switch in 2018, the first gaming console I had ever owned and my first real foray into gaming since owning a GameBoy in the 90s—or occasionally borrowing someone’s PlayStation every now and then. It is no surprise that I got blindsided by Death Stranding the following year.
But in the years since, I have played a lot more video games, mostly FromSoftware and Nintendo, admittedly. But I have also beaten the Director's Cut of Death Stranding on the PS5 and grew to love it in the process. As I progressed through the game, I became more and more impressed with the gameplay and the astonishing creative vision behind it. I adore the industrial design of the vehicles, the logo design, the design of the game’s graphic interface, and yes, I even found myself enjoying some of the dialogue in the cutscenes. Though most of the script is still bad, I now realize that it’s all part of the Kojima aesthetic and have learned to embrace it, wild-ass names and all.
Now, looking forward to the release of Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, hopefully sometime in 2025, I am grateful to now understand, at least a little, why Death Stranding is the way it is and why I like it as much as I do. I have developed a newly found respect for what Hideo Kojima and his team have accomplished with this first game, and it’s made me look forward to the promise of the sequel; clunky dialogue be damned.
So, Mr. Kojima, please accept this essay as my humble apology for once describing playing Death Stranding as “like wading through mud.” I take it all back. Mostly.
I missed the part where you explained why you changed your mind.
a game where the poetics outweigh the game loop