Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Death Stranding 2's Unanswered Questions - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

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What's up and welcome back to the Kind of Funny Games cast for Monday, May 12th. Of course, I am your host, Tim Getty's. I'm joined today by Blessing Adioia Jr. Good day, Tim. Good day to you as well. And joining us is owner of Giant Bomb, Dan Reichertz. That sounds crazy to hear. I'm still not used to hearing that.

It's wild stuff, man. Say it again. Say it again. The owner of Giant Bomb. Dan Reichertz. That's the good stuff. That's the good stuff. Oh, my God.

We got the fog machine. Got to do it. Hell yes. Got to do it. Dan, how are you feeling right now? In the last couple days, you and an amazing group of people, Jeff Backelar, Jeff Grubb, Janicechoa, Mike Minotti, have secured ownership of Giant Bomb and all of its assets. You get the back catalog.

You get the social accounts. You get the YouTube channels, the Twitch channels. You get to independently launch your version of Giant Bomb with all of the good parts of it. Like, how is that feel? It's insane because like I've done this for a long time, but I've never had this situation where I don't have a boss. I can't get fired. That's great. I wonder what's going to happen there. That sounds awesome. But yeah, I've worked for, you know, GameStop for eight years. You know, I was a game informer and the store level before that. I was at, you know, CBS, Red Ventures, fandom, you know, various different owners at Giant Bomb.

And I've loved it all, but I've never been fully independent like this. And it feels tremendous. I mean, it came together really. really, really hot. And once it looked like a possibility, it was like, oh my God, I can't wait to get this out in the world. And that pack, the timing was perfect. Literally, like my last day was the day before the PACs panel. And it all came together. Like paperwork was signed right before the PACs panel. It's like, well, I know exactly how we're going to announce this. Yep. Yep. And y'all crush it. Everyone should go check out the PACs to East panel of giant bombware. They announced this news, very emotional, very high. Oh my gosh. I got to, I watched it live because

I saw the teases from the different people from the team of like the formal message of like, Please tune in to the Pax panel at this time. And, you know, I came up out such a, I talked about this on KGB when we're talking about like Giant Bomb and all the Polygon stuff going down a few weeks ago. I came up a very big fan of Giant Bomb. Like I listened to as much Giant Bomb probably as I listened to kind of funny before I worked here. And, you know, seeing that news get revealed live was such a, jump scare is the wrong word,

but it was just such a surprise. Yeah. Such an unexpected, oh shit, like, I can't believe this is happening in this way. And it's funny. I was telling Tim earlier that I was listening to the next Lander dudes talk about like all the Giant Bomb Polygon stuff right and like one of the things that they had mentioned

in their episode was about how it seems like a lot of the problems that Giant Bomb came from it just not being independent right came from all the different owners that just didn't understand the brand it didn't understand like what Giant Bomb is and what Giant Bomb brings the table and so to see you guys go fully independent

it feels like it seems like such a oh this is how it should be and so I'm very happy for you guys Yeah, it's cool because, like, you know, the thing that has always made Giant Bomb very, very special is the community is very, very passionate about Giant Bomb. And so I always like to try to make stuff for the audience. And just by the nature of how corporations work, like you are serving like brands. You were trying to make this, you know, able to sellable to brands or you're serving an algorithm versus now that we're independent, we get to choose who we serve and we want to serve the audience. Like that doesn't mean we're not going to do ads and things like that.

We will. Thank you kind of funny for being our first bond. I appreciate that. Had to do it. Yeah, I just, I want to make cool stuff for an audience that gets it. I don't want to have to worry about like, oh, is, you know, this audience can understand all of our end jokes and stuff like that. Giant Palm's been filled with end jokes for, you know, since the beginning.

So like, if you're on board, you're on board and we are making that content for the audience. Yeah. I love it, man. And I feel like this is going to allow us to collaborate with you guys so much easier and just and better. It's always been great. But I do feel like y'all being independent, I think. gives a different energy to it all.

So I expect that there'll be a lot more crossover between us in the future. And I'm very, very excited about that. Again, congratulations to you, Dan, and to the entire crew. And honestly, the biggest congratulations to the community, because this is the ultimate win for them. Like, this could have been so much different, so bad. But, like, Giant Bomb's community now gets to thrive, hopefully in an era that is not just new,

but the best going forward for serving the community. So congratulations, everybody. But enough about that for now. Remember everyone, this is the kind of... Giantbomb.com slash join. I'm going to say that so much over the coming months or years. Giantbomb.com slash join if you want to help support us. Yes.

Make sure you do that. Thank you very much for getting that in there, Dan. Giantbomb.com slash join. Go do that. And then remember that this is the kind of funny games cast. Where each and every weekday, we get together to talk about video games and all the things that we love about them. You can watch us live on YouTube or Twitch. Or you can get us later.

on your podcast service of choice. If you love what we do, please support us with the kind of funny membership on Patreon, YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts to get all of our shows ad-free and a daily exclusive Gregway. For a chance to be part of this show, though,

please submit your thoughts and opinions or questions as YouTube super chats as we go. Today's topic is going to be your death-stranding two questions. Dan and Bless both played about 30 hours of the game in Japan. They can talk all about it. So if you have any questions

about the game. Please super chat them in now and we'll get to them. A little housekeeping for you. We're an 11 person business all about live talk shows. You just got a kind of funny games daily breaking down today's news with Greg Miller and Jeff Grubb. Another owner of Giant Bomb so you can check

that out after this is going to be our Last of Us screencast spoiler cast with me, Greg and Nick and bless perhaps. Oh yeah, I guess I wasn't on the calendar for that. Well, if you're free, I'd love to have you. Sure. Then after the

that. It's going to be a stream. It's going to be Nick playing Expedition 33 for the first time. He's going to play the opening of that game. You know what? I'm really excited. I think he'll fuck with it. Yeah, I think he might like it. Yeah, the combat will see, but the story... Oh, he's not going to like the combat. I'll tell you right now. He's not going to gel with the combat. But I think

he'll like the story in the world, in the French. And then, if you're a kind of funny member, of course, you get the Greg Way for the day. If you're kind of... Thank you to our Patreon producers. Carl Jacobs, Omega Buster, and Delaney Twining. Oh, he's walking in. Nick's here You don't tell me what kind of combat I like

You don't tell me that What's the last JRPG that you really enjoyed? Oh, that's a great question I don't know that there is well We're going to give us what a fair shot Just playing Pokemon now? Oh yeah, Pokemon Hey, that's a turn-based game

enjoys me playing Pokemon Less than me playing Pokemon But people like watching you be torture And hopefully it'll be fun today I think you're going to have a great time Yeah Today we're brought to by Shady Ray's R frames and Rocket Money

But we'll tell you about that later Let's start with the topic of the show. Tots, dots, dots, dots, dots, dots, dots. Death Stranding 2's unanswered questions. Like I said, super chat them in. I want to start with one super chat really fast. Isaac Danzler says, is there less story overall or is it paced better? Dan, what do you think?

I would say it is definitely paste better. And I think importantly, it gets into it so much quicker. I remember booting up the first one. And it's like, it is a lot of just kind of established. you know, you don't even understand the world or anything. Why are they crying? What is this chyrelium stuff? And like, since that's kind of all established that world building in the first game,

it just kind of gets into it in this one. And there's, there's a event very early on that sets off the events in motion. And, yeah, and the cutscenes out of there are better as well. So, yeah, I'm, the story's a big step up this time. Yeah, I was surprised to watch the beginning of Roger and Mike's Death Stranding One marathon and see how many cutscenes there were in Death Stranding one in the first couple of hours. It is like mostly cutscene in the most in the first couple of hours. Here that is not the case. Right. Like here it is paced way better. It gets you into the act of walking way

faster. Like there's some establishing cutscenes or whatever, but they're not that long. Really, they're tone setters. And then honestly, they do a really good job in the first gameplay sequence of the game of using that as a tone setter as well where I find myself like, you know, kind of, I don't know. It's funny because, and Dan, you played it as well, right? Like, the first, I guess, destination that you're going to, there's not really any emotional stakes set immediately in the game, but I still felt emotional about it for some reason. Like, I think it's just...

The music and the gate quail, you're just going home. There's not like a crazy, you know, stakes or anything like that. But just it's the music, it is the, uh, there was this earthquake thing and like folders going around you, like things like that are really cool. Um, but I said this in my preview for GameSpot that, um, it felt like the first game was kind of siloed off interactions where it's like, I'm at Hartman's Lab and now I'm talking to Hartman. And now I'm over here.

I'm in my room talking to Fragile. And so this one feels more like if you ever watched a Rest of Development, there are the first three seasons where like the whole ensemble castes together, you know, interacting all the time. And this one felt like that weird fourth season where like none of the actors could be in the room at the same time. So it was just like basically two people siloed off interactions. This feels more like an ensemble crew, like when you go back to the Magellan, which is like your ship. And it's just like, oh, a bunch of cool, fun characters interacting together.

lot better. I will say though that like to the question of is there less story overall, I would say no, like there's just as much story. I think it's just better paste and better done. And the stories serves like it serves like getting you into the gameplay better as far as like what you're doing, why you're doing it. I think there's less work to be done story and worldwide in this game because so much of it is just built in death straining one. And like one of the things I like that Dan mentioned in our first preview that we put up last week was the fact of like they're telling you about chiralium printers and I didn't I didn't have to think about it. I was like, oh, I know what that is. I get what that means. I understand what that means. Kyrillian printed diapers.

Yes. I was just like, yeah, yeah, that's normal. That's fine. That makes sense. If you are confused at any point, even during a cutscene, there's this corpus thing that's like, you know, it's like that. I haven't played Final Fantasy 16, but you're like an active lore. Active time war. You were like a vowed had that too, or it's any time there's like a proper noun or something, you can easily, easily be like,

oh, right, here's this like in-game glossary at all times. I got a question for Tim. Yes. So this is Destraining 2's unanswered questions. We're taking any questions to the audience. My question for you,

Tim, is, are you going to check out Destraining 2? I forget what your story was, the Destraining 1. Very quick story, because I have been saying this a lot recently because it was recently that I got back into it.

But I tried it when it first came out, and I'm a huge Metal Gear guy, but I like what, Metal Gear is in control. I like it when it's telling a story that I believe we're going to get an ending to. And Middle Gear Solid 5 is the pinnacle of gameplay, but also the pinnacle of my disappointment in Kojima's storytelling. And so getting into Death Stranding, I'm like, seemingly it's all the things I like least about Kojima's storytelling and characters. And so I didn't make it too far. I think I made it like three to five hours in the first time. And then years

later, like earlier this year, I gave it another shot on PS5. And I liked it. so much more. But I also stopped playing around three to five hours. So it didn't stick with me. Like I want to like Death Stranding so much more than I actually like Death Stranding. And I'm hoping I can push through that. Everything I'm seeing from Two seems to solve a lot of my issues that I have. My problem is everything you guys are saying now of like, oh, two just jumps into it.

It has the understanding of one. So it's a lot better if I don't have that understanding. I don't know that watching a YouTube video like recapping me is going to get me where I need to be. But to answer your question, yes, I'm going to give it to a shot and I'm very excited to. I will say to that last part, there is the recap in the game that is like a slide show essentially of here's what happened in Destraining 1. It goes through all the major characters. And I think it serves as a pretty good baseline for getting you into Descrating 2 because Descrating 2, even though it works off of all the rules of Destraining 1, I think the corpus thing

that Dan brought up, you know, does really well at keeping you in the know of, all right, what's this concept. All right, what's this thing? All right, what are the BTs? What are the BBs? What are like, you know, they define pretty much everything for you. And the story and death straining too is it, it's about new characters. Like, there are returning characters and stuff, right? But like, you go to a new location, you're in Australia for the bulk of this game, right? You go to a completely new location and you're meeting a, a lot of new ensemble. And the story here feels a bit more staying alone to like what's happening actively

in like the main narrative. Of course the world establishment and stuff is all Death Training one right? But I think you might be able to I think you'll be fine jumping into Death Rating 2 if you played some of Death Raining 1. Yeah, well I'm very interested in that

but I'm more interested in the two of you because you got to play 30 hours of this game. I listened to your Gamescast preview last week. It was phenomenal content. I was incredibly excited to see how glowing both of you were, especially Dan, knowing your history with Death Rinding and History of You

Kojima games being more in line with what I just said, but you did push through and find the love for death stranding one. Now that we're about a week removed from you playing it, you talking about it, have you been thinking about death stranding to nonstop? Or are you just kind of like, all right, cool, I preview the game and now I'm going to play it when it comes out and release, but like that's where I'm at. Dan? I've definitely been thinking about it, but in these specific last two weeks, I've had no shortage of things to think about that were very time specific. you know, with my job and everything. So most of my thoughts have gone towards that. But when I'm talking about this game,

I find myself getting very, very excited for it. And I remember thinking that like, oh, God, if we're playing 30 hours of this and our save won't come over, like, I don't know, am I going to even want to play it again? Or will I just kind of watch, you know, the cutscenes from the back half? And it's like, no, I will play this again 100%. Like, it is the moment to moment is very, very fun. In a way that I think the first one was not.

I mean, this is one that has actual combat that I want to engage with. In the first game, I wouldn't want to go to bandit camps or anything like that because it's like, oh, great, I'm just going to be running away, dropping stuff while people throw electric spears at me. Like, that's not fun. This one, the combat is fun. And it's like you're going to hear more people compare it to Metal Year Solid 5 because it does have more of that feeling. I'm not going to say it's full on Middle Year Solid 5, not that amount of, you know, action options and things like that. but it's a lot closer to Phantom Pain than it is the first Destraining, I think.

So I think people would be surprised by that. Yeah, I mean, I've been thinking about it a lot, right? You know, we talked a lot about how going into it, the idea of doing a 30-hour preview that we weren't going to be able to keep our saves for was a bit frustrating and a bit like, oh, man, I'm going to have to replay this thing during the, for the review. I'm actually excited to go back because I think so much of just the core gameplay has been uplifted from death training one.

And like I would stress that death training too in terms of gameplay, right? Like it is more death training one. They have such a belief in that gameplay system of, all right, you have your packages that you're carrying, you're walking to the next destination, you're laying down ladders, you're laying down structures to help yourself

and help other players, you're picking up packages on the way. You are trying to find ways to navigate around the obstacles, whether the obstacles are the enemy bases that are way better this time around as far as like the ways in which you can tackle them or whether it's rivers or whether it's steep mountains

which even those like you know looking back at watching Roger and Mike play Destraining One and seeing how steep some of the mountains are and how kind of unfriendly they are toward being able to get up I noticed in Destraining too that like a lot of the getting uphill remind me a bit more of like a Zelda

like Breath of the Wild in terms of like I felt like I could climb anything for the most part right like it's not exactly that in terms of stamina system and I'm literally climbing anything, but they want you. It's more inviting to explore as opposed to like trying to guide you through a chasm. Exactly, right? Like you kind of had those options as far as how do I want to get to the place that I'm going? And yeah, I think the overall just being in the Destrating 2 world is way more engaging and way

more fun and way more interesting than I found Destraining 1 to be. And I like I really, really like Destranding 1. But yeah, there was a moment during day three of playing where I'm just doing side quests and suborders and stuff for the standard orders. And like I found a kangaroo and I didn't gun this one now. Oh no, I did gun this one now. Oh, my God, bless. This was actually the kangaroo that gunned down with rubber bullets. I didn't kill the kangaroo.

I just knocked it the fuck out. What's your beef with kangaroos, dude? No, because here's the thing, right? The game has an animal shelter where you can save animals. And I saw the kangaroo out in the wild and I wanted to save it. I didn't realize that if I got close enough, I can just like, you know, take it, back it up or whatever. I... So you wanted to knock it out to then take it or whatever.

I'm saving it. The end product is the same. It's probably like... It was protected. Very peacefully, I took that kangaroo bag. Blessing out other planes. You know, it's easier to carry it if it's knocked out. So I use my rubber bowl to get it down.

But like, like, no joke. I did that. wrapped up the kangaroo. I'm carrying it to the next station. So another player could pick it up and give it to the animal shelter. And as I'm doing that, I'm like, it felt like another day on the job.

It felt nice. It felt relaxing. We're back. Yeah, it was like, we're back. And I don't know what it is about death training two versus death training one that just makes it more peaceful,

more serene, more of like a, ah, I can just do this all day kind of game. But it really does capture that. Something that I can't help but notice every time I see this game is how drop dead gorgeous. it is to a distracting degree at times.

What did you guys play on? They had us on base PS5s, and it looked incredible. I had it on performance mode, great frame rate, and the fidelity was amazing. And there was one area that we've all talked to. I think everyone that played the game, this really stood out to them. It's one kind of like boss fight

sequence, and it is one of the most striking things I've ever seen in a video game. I remember, because some people were getting ahead of me in the story, and I would like get up to go to the bathroom or something like that and walk past other people's screens. And I did a double take at one point. I was like, what am I looking at here?

And I was thinking about that until I got there. And then it was like even cooler than I expected. It's just to kind of tease it. If you've seen the trailer, there's that Neil character, the like the solid snake character. And he's got a skull soldier army. And if you remember the part where there's the fireworks going off behind him and they're like light and cigarettes and stuff, the sequence leading up to that. Yep, there you got it on screen.

It's just tremendous visually. And the boss fight itself is. essentially a shootout, you know, mechanically, it's not crazy. It's very fun, but it's just the vibes on this sequence are just pure Kajima, just unmatched. This game, when it comes to the boss fights, I think uplifts the vibes so much. I think mechanically, they're still somewhat simple. Like, they remind me of Meliger Salt 4 boss fights, which I think oftentimes would kind of boil down to a similar thing of chase after the boss, shoot it, shoot it, shoot it, but like the spectacle is there. Destrating 2, I think captures that exact spectacle.

and it's so fucking cool. Speaking to my soul, saying metal and solid four boss fights, I love that, yeah. The spectacle is so good. So yeah,

the Neil moment was dope. There's a moment even past that that I'll surprise because I thought that was going to be the moment of the preview. And then there's like

another moment even past that way further where I was like, ah shit dude, they got this stuff. So I'm glad to hear Dan. Base PS5 and it's looking that damn good. Another thing about PS5 is the controller. I always love the dual sense implementation.

For death stranding in particular, having that L2R2 kind of balance of as you're walking. Bless, did you notice it feeling like a step up from your experience of death-standing run that you played on. Oh, I played that on Steam deck.

So it's hard to tell because I don't know how directors cut felt on the PS5 Dual Sense. I don't, there wasn't anything that stood out to me in particular. I don't know about you, Dan, as far as like the dual sense stuff. Not the dual sense stuff, but in terms of just the like leaning back and forth and all that, I remember

that being part of what turned me off the first game so quickly is being like do I'm gonna have to spend so many hours oh don't fall over here don't fall over there and like I feel like I didn't have to micromanage it as much this time same with the baby you know the baby will cry like maybe two times in my 30 hours I kind of soothed it and stuff like that

but like it felt like there was way more pain in the ass mechanics and features in the first game and it just seems to like tone them down this time around I want to speak more to the PS5 stuff because the way this game looked on just the monitor I was playing at right the computer monitor on a base PS5 was kind of unbelievable um some of the establishing shots shots in the game are just of the environment and no joke at first i was like is this

live action and then it cuts to sam and i'm like oh no this is this is in game like this is rendered in game and you're doing like the first uh like mission where you know takes place in the uca but it is just like rock mountains in the background and seeing the amount of fidelity in detail on that stuff was incredible the lighting in this game is fucking Going back to the Neal sequence that Dan brought up, but even beyond that, you have the day-night cycle in the game this time around that wasn't in the first game. And seeing the, like, rays of the Adra deck in the nighttime because you have like a flashlight that's attached to it now that you can turn on in the night. Like, that stuff, the HDR looked pretty fantastic. Like the different, the amount of different types of environments and different types of weather effects as well, for me, I was like, oh, man, I can't believe technically what they're doing here because it could be.

a sandstorm. It could be rain. It could be the rivers. It could be the amount of like flora that's in this game that I think they're really putting to work as far as what the Decma engine is doing. It reminds you of horizon and how much like leaves and flowers and jungly environments and shit are in horizon. I wouldn't be surprised if they saw that and went, oh, we should have more of that in this game because you go into certain environments that are filled with leaves that are filled with all that stuff and it's like, wow, this looks incredible. And so I can't overstate enough how good this game looks on base PS5. Scott H writes in saying,

how does it improve on Metal Gear Solid 5's close to endless possibilities when taking on bases found throughout the open world in DS2? Dan? There are some cool things you can do like, you know, in the first game, you might remember having the PCCs.

They were the things that like would allow you to build any number of like, okay, I'm going to build a zip line. I'm going to build a watchtower. And some of that can play into this. So like if you're approaching an outposts, you can build a watch shower. You can, you know, tag all the enemies before you go in and try stealth.

Or you can do a thing that I prefer, which is Dollman, the puppet dude from the trailers. You can just throw him like a softball above the base and he hovers and you see through Dollman's eyes. And so you're like tagging dudes and stuff. And then you're pulling back. Oh, did I do a good job, Sam? Did I just like, yeah, buddy, you did great.

So like that's my way of tagging guys. And then yeah, you can go in. You can do all sorts of stealth stuff. You can do, you know, trank sniper rifles from a distance. You can go in and try to choke him out with the rope, things like that. There's decoy, like hollow, holographic decoy grenades. So like you can throw one of those and it might pop up and it's like an ostrich or something and it distracts a dude.

Or it could look like you or another soldier. So it's kind of contextually it'll have something pop up and distract guys. And then when shit hits the fan, you know, there's any number of like, there are weapons you will want to use versus like in the first one I would get weapons. And I'm like, I'm not going to use this. This is a lethal weapon. And then I'm going to like cause a void out or something. If I don't take a guy to incinerator, here you get to just use. use your weapons and have fun with them.

And by doing those side missions and the sub-orders and all that stuff, you will get some cool stuff to play around with. And another bonus is when you look in that corpus and you look at the different people you can deliver to, it will tell you like, oh, you'll get an automatic handgun if you get a close relationship with this person. You'll get a customized electric rod if you keep going here. So you can decide which sub-orders you want to pursue, you know? That's so cool.

I didn't realize that they told you that stuff. Yeah, it was super helpful. But because, like, for me, I was excited to do the suborders just to, like, figure out what items I was going to get. I was really excited when I did a suborder for a character and they gave me, like, a sniper rifle, a non-lethal sniper rifle. And I was like, oh, I'm going to use this for every encampment. It's also funny hearing you talk about doll man and using doll man to mark Dan because, like, I didn't even think to do that. Like, I knew what dollman had that functionality, but I was so locked in on the watchtowers, which is, like, another PCC structure that you can build. Usually because of the way the Cairo network works with people playing online, I would get close to an enemy structure that I knew or an enemy camp that I knew I wanted to go into.

And I would see that somebody had already built a watch tower. And I'm like, oh, perfect. And when you go up one, it automatically just tags everybody and puts the number of people tagged at the top of the screen. And so, like, as I'm going in and taking out people one by one, at first, I would start off with the sniper rifle outside of the camp until they noticed me. And then I'll then start to use, like, you know, more close up weapons. but I'll see that number ticked down. I'm like, all right, there's one more person left in this camp. Let's scan.

Okay, he's over there. Let's go get him. Take him out. And for me, that was always my routine. One of the things that they talked about during the interviews, because we did two interviews, right? We did the production team interview, which included Yogi Shinkawa and then two other of, like, the team leads over at Kojima Productions. And then we did another one with Kojima himself.

I believe it was during the production team interview where they talked a little bit about combat and mentioned that like yeah like we looked at the feedback for death training one and like you know a lot of people uh like it when we have like you know more defined combat in our games and we looked at our team and went oh we have people that know how to do combat so let's let's use our team and make a and like spruce up the combat system um and so like when i look at the death training two combat system versus something like mGS 5 it's an interesting in comparison because I think the inspiration is there as far as the direction taken with it, but I don't think I would, I would never say that it touches MGS's combat system in terms

of depth and quality, more so inspired by it. And so there are things like certain enemies will have on helmets in ways that remind me of like MGS5 where if you hit it, it will knock off the helmet and now like get another shot and they'll go down, right? Like it has a lot of those basic concepts from MGS5, but I definitely don't want to overstate how much this is still. death stranding compared to an MGS 5, even though like it has those MGS 5 flares there as far as what they're doing with the combat. Also, even like that's the bandit encounters that we've mostly been talking about. But you remember the first game that the BT encounters would be, I thought they were the

biggest pain of the ass because it's like, I'm at itself. So the BTs would spot me. The ground would turn into tar. I'm kind of trudging through it. It's like it was just a pain of the ass. Now a lot of your weapons will just take out BTs like their standard enemies. Or there's things like the blood boomerring, which is a, the boomerang that like you can siphon Sam's blood into the boomerang,

charge up a shot and you headshot of BT and they just totally dissipate and your blood grenades and everything. So like now it's just I don't worry about like I have to crouch walk and hold my breath and oh no, the baby's crying. It's just I will go in there. I'll try some stealth. And then when they spot me, I'm just going to kill them all. Yeah.

Hungry Four Dog says, is the doll man annoying? Oh no. He's the best. I love that dude. He's fucking awesome. private room. He hangs out on your shelf and he's just like your buddy. You just talk to him. Every time I go back there, there's a little exclamation

point next to him if he's got something to say. I will exhaust that until he's done talking. I've seen that man dance. I have learned how he stays young. Can I explain why he stays young? This is one of the things I learned by talking to him. Okay, so there's a character named Rainey. And she is

a woman. She's one of the still mothers who has like a seven month. Anyway, that's not relevant to the puppet. She's played by Shioly Kutsuna if you know who that is. Sure, yeah. And she, when Rainey goes outside, she causes timefall rain everywhere, which makes everything age. But in a 1.5 meter radius around her, it's Corfall rain, which makes things younger. So every once in a while, she will take Doll Man, the puppet, into the shower with her, and her abilities make the shower water turn into Corfall rain, which keeps the puppet maintaining a youthful appearance.

Of course. It's a good video game. It just makes sense. I mean, it's funny because I was like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Like, there are certain things. Like, that's a good idea. Yeah, and I won't spoil, like, his backstory, but, like, Dahlman explains, like, two sentences, like, what his backstory is. And I was like, oh, yeah.

Yeah, why not? That makes sense. Oh, yeah. That makes sense. The ha of a man got stuck in the car of a puppet. I get it. Yeah, exactly. And so, like, yeah, no, I don't think he's annoying.

Like, I think when we make them a mirror comparison, right, of, like, a dude who's on your face, he's always talking. He actually doesn't talk that much. Like, they tuned it perfectly, where sometimes I'll forget he's there until he says something. And I'm like, oh, yeah, Dahlman, you're here with us. And so I think they did well with him. Flay, Flaming Kid Flip says, how do the vehicles feel? In DS1, the vehicles were very rough.

You're good. You got the tri-cruisers, kind of the main one I used here, which is kind of like the three-wheeled bike you saw in the trailers. There's also, there are like clunky, big, just like delivery vehicles that are just for delivering large amounts of cargo. And I feel like they feel clunky and big in the way they should and something like the tri-cruiser feels fun. And it's cool. Like you can see in the trailer there. Like if it's going up a certain terrain, the wheels will turn into like kind of these gripping like blades and to help, you know, pull it up mountains and things like that. So yeah, all the ones I used were fantastic. You can also build things like monorails and you can use that to just ship stuff

from station to station or Sam can kind of like hang on to the monorail as well as the cargo. It's, it feels solid for sure. Did you guys get to play that little like Tron? No. No. That looks cool. It looks so fucking cool. Yeah. Very, very cool.

Stick it on the vehicles a little. I mean, blessed you have anything to say about how the vehicles feel. No, I echo everything that Dan mentioned. I will say that they added in like more mechanical stuff to the vehicles. And so like I don't think I unlocked this, but I, in the way that you can share items in the game, I rented somebody else's vehicle from the girl. from the garage and they had on there a turret. And so like I'm driving by enemy camps

and the turrets starting to lock on to people and there was another truck that I rented that had like a slingshot thing to or grappling hook on it where I would be driving by like packages that were just left by other players and it would grapple hook the package to the vehicle and so I wouldn't have to get out and pick things up it would just automatically detect things.

And so by the time I arrive at a structure sure. I'm like, oh, I have all these items now that I can turn in or store or do whatever with. And so, like, they have a lot of just incremental tweaks to like, oh, we should add this. Oh, we should add this. Oh, this makes sense for what this game is. Like, it's fun to see Kojima Productions like look at Destraining One and just keep on ask themselves, like, how do we uplift this from what the first game is? And then, yeah, like to what Dan was saying, right? Like, and the terrain stuff is cool as well. Oh, one more thing I'll say on the vehicle stuff as well is I found that I there was like a really good balance between me wanting to be in a vehicle versus me just hopping out and going on foot right because like that ends up being sometimes a way more viable thing to do as far as like all right I'm about to pass enemy enemy camp let me get out take care of the camp come or like store all my stuff in my vehicle take care of the camp come back to my vehicle and then continue the journey or oh I'm at this mountain or I'm crossing this river you know what let me just get out and just do this by foot like I I I

they do a good job of making you have to make those choices in real time. And to that, there's also, there's more like kind of hot key stuff going on with like the cargo management. So like, let's say you are making a delivery and you got a bunch of shit on your back. And you're like, oh,

I want to take out this camp and see what's in there. You can very quickly just like cargo management, drop all non-combat stuff. So it's like you basically just take off your rig, leave all the like big boxes and materials and stuff. And you can just go in with your guns and stuff like very simply without having to like manually remove a bunch of stuff. So stick it on vehicles a bit here.

CJ Splitson wants to know, can you manually navigate the ship in the game? Oh, manually? No, you cannot, but you can fast travel in it. Like that kind of works as a fast travel system where there will be certain, Dan, what are the big structures called where like people are living in them and stuff? Do you remember? I always forget the word. There's some of them were cities and some of them were just like outposts, like stations.

Yeah. Similar to the first game, but there'd be like, you know, whole full cities and things like that as well. Exactly. Basically, you can have the, it's called the DHV Magellan, your big ship. Once you get to certain ones that are, I believe, connected to the Cairo network, you can have that ship teleport between spots. And so if you get inside, and that happens like through the pause menu. So you go in and you're like, okay, I want the DHV Magellan to go here.

And you can do that if you're in it. You can do that if you're outside of it. If you do it while you're in it, then you fast travel alongside it. It is like, has kind of a cool fucking like animation within the menu itself where it disappears and reappears where you want it to. but there's not been anything yet where it's like drive the DHV Magellan I'm sure once you get further in the game

they have to have that like that seems like such a slam dunk of a thing to do so there is that part in the trailer where Hartman puts the hologram of the Magellan on his head and then it's like on top of a giant BT or something so I don't know what the hell is going on there that wasn't an hard time with it God there's so much in this game

I want to keep asking this is Barrett in the control yes he is he is everybody. Hey, get your superchats in. We're going to keep answering all of your questions when we get back after a word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Shady Race. Get ready for the season ahead with quality shades built to last. Our friends at Shady Race have you covered with premium, polarized, sunglasses that won't break the bank. Shady Race is an independent sunglasses company offering a world-class product rated five stars by over 300,000 people. Their shades have durable frames and crystal clear. optics, making them the perfect choice for all outdoor adventures. They have hundreds of options to choose from, so you're bound to find the perfect pair to match your style.

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The Mark Shark is asking, are you still delivering to metal bases with holograms. Yes. Is that the core of this game still? Yes. The holograms do look better though. Like the holograms are way more like, I guess just defined, right?

Like they're clear, like a bit more polygons to them. But yeah, that's still the core of the game is that you are in Australia. You're working with Drawbridge, which is Fradgall's new company. And like you have new characters and smart of drawbridge and all this stuff. And you are reconnecting the Cairo network within Australia. And so you're going through, you're going, yeah, big structure by big structure, which are these like either cities or outposts or whatever. And you are doing favors for these people.

You're delivering packages, right? And you're also, yeah, connecting the cow network and getting everybody to be a part of it. Yeah, Dan, would you say that's accurate? Yeah, totally. And yeah, sometimes it's cities, sometimes the outposts. And sometimes it is just like, oh, here's this hermit in the mountains or here's this artist. And suddenly you're friends of this artist. And she's sending you like different paintings and things like that that she'd

Meg. So you'll meet some fun characters that aren't major, but we'll pop up from time to time. And then another question comparing it to the first game. Calvin Perez wants to know the menus inventory management specifically were a huge barrier for me. Are they improved or streamlined at all? It takes getting used to for sure. If there's one tip I would give, which also applies to the first one, it's just be very liberal with your use of that auto-arranged cargo thing. It's just like when you're on the cargo management screen, pulled in triangle and it'll

just like, whoop, just kind of put everything. thing on Sam in a way that makes sense. And if you drop stuff or whatever, just keep doing that. But no, there are a lot of menus. It seems overwhelming at first, but you do really get used to it. And there are some good, like, hotkey situations and stuff you can use now to navigate that. Yeah, there are a lot of wheels now. And so, like, you'll go and you'll have, like, a weapon wheel. It's not even a weapon wheel. It's like an item wheel. So then if you go to the weapon portion of it, you can then scroll through weapons or if you go to, like, a different portion of it, you can scroll through different items and stuff. But even in there, they have like an auto-arranged thing,

where if I think it's like one of the buttons on the D-pad go to like the top right thing in this like auto-arrange, you can do it right there. And I think that helps tremendously as far as that. But when I look at the menus for actual like arranging the packages stuff, I think mostly it's the same. But there's just a lot more going on now too as well. Dr. Ryan says, Dan, in your article, you said it feels easier to engage in combat now that all the weapons are non-lethal. Does the shooting feel better? I love DS1, but the combat was a tad clunky. Yeah, it feels great. And you know, Bless talked about it feeling like Phantom Pain and, you know, you're talking about shooting off the helmets and things like that. There's even like the little details where it's like when the helmet flies off or you get that headshot, it's just like just kind of slows down. And, you know, when you get caught and stuff, there's like these lens flares on the screen that like feels straight out of metal gear solid vibe. So again, don't want to raise expectations too much. It is not phantom pain. But it's, it's definitely better than it was in the first one.

Dan, Dan, can I be from wrong? It does have like the when you're spotted, the time. slows down like millimeter solid five I couldn't tell if that's something else. When I was getting, when I was getting head shots and stuff, it would definitely do that as short like but I don't, I can't remember if it did it when you get caught. Yeah, that was one of those things where it would happen periodically and I'm like, okay, what's causing the slowdown?

Is it that somebody sees me? But I, I can never clearly tell. But even then like, it's very, it's in ways that I think MGS 5 in that way is pretty generous as far as how the combat went. This game also I think is fairly generous as far as like, all right, self is hard. So we're gonna give you the, options to like take somebody out pretty easily if you if you get caught or like if yeah if you

want to be able to have time slow down for a second so you can maybe get one or two headshots in a real real quick CJ also writes in saying is this game iterative in the same way that tears of the kingdom is compared to breath of the wild is that an apt comparison i mean here's the kingdom i'll say was surprisingly surprisingly not iterative when you get to the final game and you like see the depths and you see the sky and all that stuff like it turned out to be a way way big bigger experience. I will say that we've only played the first 40% of this game theoretically, right? Like they told us at the preview event that we'll get by the end of the week should be around 40% of the game. I'm not discounting some wild shit happening in that second half.

Like, in fact, I'm kind of expecting maybe not like a MGS2 situation, but like something along the lines of, oh shit, didn't see this coming, like that sort of thing, right? And I don't know what that is. I don't know if it's a different continent. I don't know if like, yeah, they showed of cap sand porter bridges or something like i have no idea what they could do but the amount of like the amount that they let us play and the amount of non-restrictions on how much we can talk about makes me go wow that's kind of weird the fact that we can talk about whatever we want here except for like a couple of things um but for the most part so far from what we have played it does feel very iterative in building upon destrating one in a way that i think is beyond

anything that Kojima has done before in terms of that, right? Like, this is a chronological direct sequel to Death Stranding One. Meliger typically hasn't really been that as far as MGS to MGS2, you have a new character, MGS3 is a prequel, MGS4 is like another jump as far as how it feels gameplay-wise and where it takes place in the story and all that stuff. MGS5, again, different type of game, open world, all this shit. DS2, or Death Rating 2 is like very much, hey, what is all the feedback that we can take in for Descrating 1 and how do we make that game?

And it could be a response to we want to make a game that objectively is going to have a really high metacritic and it's going to do really well or a lot better than Death Training 1 did on the critical level. It could be that or they could be saving something for the second half. I don't know. Yeah.

I do think there's like 50-50 odds of there being another continent because it was these gate plates. Plate gates. Is what the plate gates. Yes. That's how you go from Mexico, which the first like seven or eight hours are in Mexico and that's almost kind of like set in the stage of the story.

But I did look in the corpus and it said something about like, oh, go to the east coast of Australia, something about another plate gate. So, I mean, I got about halfway across Australia in my time with the game. And again, if that's 30 to 40%, wouldn't surprise me if maybe there's something

past that, but I don't know the scope of it. I was also thinking the same thing of like, yeah, you get you maybe finish Australia in another 20 hours and then they send you to an entirely different continent. That would make this game seem gigantic. though. Yes.

Which to be fair, like 30 hours, 40%, right? Then you're talking about a game that is 70 hours long. So I could see it. I'm not expecting it. I'm not trying to put it out in the universe of people being like, oh shit, there's another continent. But like, I could see it. I think that could make sense for if you're hiding that in the second half of the game.

Do you think that from what you've played, the game can support that system-wise? Like, do you think that you guys played a fair amount of this game? do you think that there's room for this to keep growing for another 30, 40 hours? I feel like I didn't really like at the time we were kind of wrapping up, we were still getting pretty big things. Like, you know, the monorail and some of the vehicle stuff was pretty, pretty late in our time with the game. So like, yeah, I don't feel like we hit a plateau really in our time there.

I felt it was still climbing and the stuff it was giving us. Yeah, I agree with that. Like mechanically, I, and like, just in terms of the system, that you can still layer on top, I wouldn't be surprised if there's still a lot more. And in terms of story, I think there's a lot more you can do a story as well. Like, we don't really know much so far about the Neal character.

Like, we've had, like, a cutscene with him. As far as where I end in my playthrough, I didn't actually get to, like, the final, final mission. I was, like, two missions away, so all is close. But, like, there's still a lot more to be learned about, about this dude. There's still, like, a lot more to be learned about, like, even the characters that you know,

I want to know more about El Fanning's character. I want to know more about Rainy, right? Like, I feel like there's still a lot more as far as the character stuff. So I want to ask, story-wise, is it like, oh, I'm into the story or Bless, are you like, dude, this story's awesome? For me, I might do the story's awesome. But it's awesome in a different way than a Metal Gear, though, where I think the plot is interesting. I'm engaged with it. but I'm more so, I think, just engaged with the characters and, like, what their individual

stories are. I think they're doing such a great job of, it honestly reminds you of peak Kojima stuff of, like, when you play, when you have the, oh, what's the crew in metal, your solid one, or any of the, like, the cobra unit or, like, Foxhound. Yeah, like, when you have those crews of characters, the beauty of the beast, maybe not the beauty of the beast, right? Maybe the beauty of the beast, like, when you have groups of characters that each have individual backstories that are developed really well. That is inherently Kojima thing. That's kind of a staple of how he goes about writing his stories.

And I'm getting that from Drawbridge, right? I got a cutscene with Tar Man where I was like, fuck, I didn't know. Like your backstory was this cool. Same with Rainey. I just got a cut scene in like my final day with tomorrow where I was like, fuck, dude, this is cool. Like I'm, I am in a, in the fuck yes side of things.

But it's still the weird death draining main story shit where I'm like, okay, this is very abstract. It's still very weird, but I'm really into what's happening. I'm right there with Bliss where it's like I feel like the stuff in the first game that I liked was more just like,

wow, this is real crazy. Oh, this guy dies every 21, 21 minutes, but like the overarching thing, like even understanding the basics of what the beach was and what the extinction events anomaly and all. Like I didn't quite have any kind of grasp what was going on with any of it the first time around. With this one, they do kind of like some main story beats early on. They plant the seeds for some mysteries that, like I am very curious about.

And that's on top of the individual character stories like Bless said. And yeah, there is that tomorrow cutscene that is just like, oh, oh, cool. Okay, I'm into this character. So it's, I mean, there's more to chew on here. They introduced a concept. And I won't, I don't, I'm not going to get super into like the definitions of what it is, but they introduced the thing called ghost mex, Dan. And like,

Ghost mex? Ghost mex? Or, yeah, I believe they're called ghost mex. I think I wrote them down as ghost mex. I'll talk to you off the thing about them. But like, they introduced a concept where I'm like, oh, that's the coolest Kojima shit ever.

And that was like hour 26 or something like that. Like, I want to see more of what the fuck this is. And so, yeah, I think there's so play. I think there's a lot more on the table as far as the story building and like, getting to, oh, yeah. And like, yeah, no, there's so much left. Now that I think about it. I got more questions about Higgs and what his deal is.

Oh, yeah. There's the Red Samurai. Don't know what's up with that. Yeah. NoCom says, is there new traversal options, climbing, etc.

Or is it more walking? It's walking. You know, we talked a little bit earlier about how like, it is a little less pain in the ass to climb up mountains and stuff. But it gives you just enough friction still to where, you know,

when you build a zip line and now you can just go right over that mountain instead of climbing it. It does feel like a, oh, sweet. okay, that's going to make it so much easier. But no, you're walking, you're driving, you know, you're fast traveling in the Magellan. Yeah, yeah, that's similar, I would say.

Yeah, like, I'll like what I mentioned way earlier, right? Of, like, the, it's more forgiving a bit in, like, the steep hills and mountains and stuff. Like, you still have those cliffs where it's, okay, I need the drop-down rope so I can climb down this thing. But if I'm pricing the Audra-Deck button to scan, I feel like there's less red as far as you cannot climb this thing. Like, it's a lot more yellow. And so, like, I think it's more generous in that stuff.

You can also get the floating carriers and use them like skateboards and kind of like just, you know, push off them with your foot. Like it's basically a hoverboard, yeah. Mental gear gaming says how accessible is two for newcomers that didn't be one. Can this be a starting point? Or do I be too lost in the complex context of the first? Bless you answered this a bit. But Dan, what do you think jumping into this one? I mean, jumping into this one, I played the first game.

I can't really say I understood any of it. And so I watched like a 20-minute video I found on YouTube, which is like, here's a recap of all the main things. And I did feel like I got kind of an understanding. You just need to kind of know what the beach is, what Kyrillium is, what the idea is of these like porters that are delivering stuff and the Kyril network. Like basic broad concepts. I think if you know that, I think you're good.

Like there aren't things like, I remember the last few hours of the first game, having so much about like who Lou is and who Madge Miggelson's character was and all that. I remember being very, very confused. and I'll say that none of that has really played into like that's not necessary understanding in the 30 hours I played of two. Yeah, I tend to agree with that. And like I would I would highly recommend playing one before two just to get like all the world set up and like the rules of the universe and stuff. But as far as the plot, as far as like following the characters the narrative, you might be able to get away with watching a recap. But I it's so funny how quaint a lot of like the new concepts.

star in this game because I experienced the first game. And so like, they say things and I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. I couldn't imagine then hopping into this game for the first time and having to hear them talk about certain things and like seeing fragile eat a cryobite and being like, why she just eat a beetle? Why is that happening? But I'm surprised sometimes because like my wife, her first middle year game was Middle Year solid four and she liked it.

And I was like, wow, if you can jump into MGS 4 if you do it. It's like, all right. And the glossary, I think, does a lot of heavy lifting as far. is okay, what is this thing? All right, I'll just read a quick paragraph about it and then you just go along with it. This is getting into the nitty gritty, so answer to the best of your ability here.

Smith Patel says, what about the five-star rating do we need to do them manually? How does timefall affect it? Does difficulty affect loot drops? Do roads and monorole connect all places? Are ziplines nerfed by how much is automated? So a lot there, but what's your response?

Let's go one of the time here. Let's start with the first one. What was that? What about the five-star rating? That's there. That's there. And as you, like, you don't have to get the full five to get, like, the item that that person gives you. I think once you get to, like, three or something like that, they'll give you a gift.

I'm not sure what the full five does. How does timefall affect everything? I mean, the same way as it did in the first game. Yeah. Yeah. And you can build shelters and things like that that'll, like, repair your cargo. That's very similar. Yeah.

Do you know if difficulty affects loot drops? I don't even remember there being a difficulty. I don't either. Yeah. I think there was one, but I probably just said default. Yeah. Do roads and monorail connect all places? Not all, not the whole map, but you could probably build between all the major spots.

I bet you could build at least roads, yeah. Yeah, I didn't really get a sense of how much you can do with the monorail. I got to imagine that you can do quite a lot with it because, like, one of the first things they teach you, or one of the missions they put you on when they first introduced the monorail is to connect the, a mine to one of the city structures. And like basically what the mama rail does is it's what it sounds like, right? Like it's a train that you can take back and forth. But you can also load it with resources.

And so if you go to a mine, you can create a bunch of metals and then transport the metals to the city and then like use that as a spot of, all right, cool, I want to make this at this location. Cool. I have to imagine that you'd be able to like maybe connect that then to another like city structure and then have it so where you can like take the monorail between all these things but I don't have that confirmed. That just sounds like a cool gameplay thing that I don't know why you wouldn't do it that way. Our zip lines nerfed. I didn't really use the zip line.

They introduced the kind of late. I got it near the end and I did one thing over a mountain and it worked exactly like I remember it in the first one. CJ splits on and says talk about the soundtrack. Does it hit? Oh more so. So we can't talk about specific licensed music. But I will say the one of the main additions that I love is the music player where if you're within the Cairo network, you can have like a playlist that like is based off of songs that you unlock as you're playing the game. Like they do the same thing where you'll walk to a certain point in the main story and then they'll have like the artist and song name at the bottom and they'll start playing a license track. You're essentially collecting those as you go now and yeah, you make a playlist and you can play those whenever. I had music constantly playing, especially because they didn't allow like phones or laptops

or anything at the desks that we're playing at. In the relaxation area, your fair game. Yes. If we went over to the relaxation area, then you can look at your phone. But the greatest vending machine of all time, by the way, in the relaxation area, especially when I had food poisoning for most of my time there. Oh, no. And I drank like 30 peccari sweats that were free and coffees and stuff.

It's like a death stranding branded vending machine with like 50 buttons. of every Japanese drink you would ever want on it. Oh my God. I used the hell out of that. Let me tell you. Pekari sweat. I didn't know about that before this trip. That shit goes hard.

I love the Picarry sweat. But yeah, because I couldn't have any electronics or whatever. Like by day four, I'm kind of like, man, it'd be nice to listen to music while I'm going on these walks. And I'm like, oh, I can. And so I start listening to music. And I'm like, yo, this soundtrack bangs. Again, can't talk about songs.

But I will say even like the OST, oh, there's some good tracks. I was noting down like, I got to look these guys up on Spotify here. There's, you know, one that they did announce like in the trailer and stuff Woodkid does stuff for the soundtrack. And I was like, ooh, let me tell you. Good fit for this. You're a good boy now? I'm a Wood kid boy now.

Hey, Wood kid, I didn't understand. I didn't know your game. I didn't know you were like that. I love that. I love that so much. We're going to call Super Chats for the day because I want to get to you and Dan spent a week together in Japan. You bonded.

You formed a friendship. I've never felt closer to Dan Riker. in my life. Yeah. It was incredible. When I heard Bless was going to be there, I was so excited. Oh, do you have to, you got the jacket on? Can you explain? The rubber jacket. Can you explain this jacket that you spent half the week trying to get? Yeah. So if anyone happens to watch wrestling, there might be some kind of funny fans that do. This is a very legendary steakhouse in Japan that dating back to like the 80s, it was like a right of passage for like American wrestlers that just wanted to eat big ass American style steaks

and get their protein and stuff. So they would all go to the reberer. Steakhouse and the owner was a wrestling fan so we'd always take pictures with them and they all gave out these jackets. If you look up Rivera jacket, you'll see old ass photos of Undertaker and Stan Hanson and Vader and stuff with their jackets. And it still goes on today. So it's like a badge of honor for wrestlers that like it shows that you got popular enough in the West to get booked in Japan. And so you go, you make the pilgrimage to the Rivera Steakhouse. You take the photo. You get the jacket. So, uh, yes, Marcus and I went, Marcus Stewart from Game Informer went one of those nights and we got a jacket and had a delicious steak at the Rivera Steakass.

I'm so sad I couldn't go because we tried to go like one of the nights before and I believe it was closed both locations were closed and so like the next day you and Marcus were like all right we're going to go back and I was like I really want to do some shopping in Shibuya and so I opted to go shopping and then like I got the text from you guys in the WhatsApp

of you guys wearing the jackets and I was like fuck I totally should have gone with you guys because these doctors are sick as hell but you guys got to do a whole bunch of adventures together there's a boat you've been teasing that you couldn't talk about. Oh, my gosh. And your original preview embargo.

So here we are now. Yes. So I can't stress enough how bizarre of a preview event this was. It was the coolest preview event I've ever been to in my life, right? It was one of my favorite trips I've probably been on in my life, right? As far as being in Kuduian Productions for an entire week in Tokyo and then hang out with Dan, Marcus, and everybody. And, like, there are so many bizarre things about it. But one of the very cool things they did to end the trip, we did our group interview with

And one of the things Kojima talked about was the reason why he wanted to do this preview event this way. And a big part of it was just that preview events don't function like this anymore. And one of the things of Destraining, too, is the idea of like, you know, should we have connected, should we have connected the Cairo network and all this stuff? And Kojima went on to talk about the internet and the metaverse and the pandemic and how during the pandemic that shaped a lot of his ideas of like how the internet has kind of taken away these

um, uh, uh, like these natural occurrences of being able to meet with people in real life and have those like, he called them in real life coincidences of meeting people and what that would lead to and like, you know, I, just what that does for us is human beings. And so the way he explained it was like, I wanted to bring everybody together from different places and like have it be a thing of getting to hang out with each other and doing all these things. And so as a surprise, they were like, okay, we're going to put you guys all on a boat. Um, And we're going to have you guys sail around in this boat around the port of Tokyo.

And like as we're leaving Kojin Productions that last day to go directly to the boat, like they gave us all. I forget the name of the gowns they gave us. Yeah. But like gave us all gowns. We got to keep them. Yeah. And we got to keep. Yeah.

And they were like Desraining 2 branded. And we all go onto this boat. We all have to like take off our shoes to go in. And they have like tables set up on the floor where we're all having like crazy meals. like Ella sushi, hell of steak, all the stuff. And like they had like basically like it was us as like the press, right, 30 press people. It was like some PlayStation people. So I got to sit next to a dope dude from a Kojima Productions whose name unfortunately escapes me.

But it was fun talking to him. He like formally worked at Spotify and then like I just chat about him or chat with him about like music and stuff. You asked me about Tyler the creator. I was like, okay, cool. I can have this conversation with you, even though there's a language barrier. but yeah we sailed around we like i don't know like dan is there anything that that that sticks out to you as far as that boat trip i mean the thing that i kept thinking of was it was the sequel to the notorious vita boat which uh some people might know that story it was also a sony thing

and it was the exact same experience but a bad version of it because the buses that were taking us there this is back in like 2011 or so before the vita came out could be 2012 and the buses got lost we got stuck in an alley for like, it felt like I think an hour or two that we were stuck on the bus. Then we went on there and the whole thing was like, you're going to get to play the Vita on this boat. And they had three Vitas and no headphones. And if I remember right, the game you could play was sound shapes, which is all about the sound. So no one could actually play it and those that did couldn't hear it. And we're just stuck on this boat and the buses got lost.

And so that was the thing like those who, that was like we're all in the trenches together, anyone who did that. So this one was like if it went well, you know, like we all got to hang out. There was some karaoke going on there. I distinctly remember looking down at the food and being like, I am still getting rocked by food poisoning right now.

I felt so bad for Dan. Yeah, it's a bless. And Andy Robinson from BGC helped me with some of the like, will you eat some of this? So I'm not rude, you know? So I just ate the steak and rice.

I kept it pretty simple there. My stomach was not having it. Yeah. And it's like one of those things where I, I like, listen to a podcast forever, like, games media podcast and like i hear people like gregg or you talk about like the um like the weird

preview events that would happen back of the day or like the over the top things that would happen happen back in the day this is one of the few instances of me getting to experience it because like most preview events are not like this usually all you know i'll fly to l.a and play a game for three hours and come back and talk about it right this is one of those ones we're out as i'm getting i'm like how much money did you spend on this i know like this is fucking insane like you did not have to do this. We could have played five hours. Like this is crazy kind of thing.

But like, you know, separate from like the preview and all in, let's talk about the game and all this stuff. I will say in a vacuum, very cool experience. Getting to take a boat on the port of Tokyo and take pictures in front of the rainbow bridge. So that was fucking awesome. Me and Dan got to go to a wrestling show. I believe we talked about that already on the kind of funny podcast, the DPW. But now we can officially talk about your switch to pre-order story.

Oh my God. That was such a dilemma because. Because, so the Switch 2 pre-orders happened in the middle of the day of us playing Death Stranding 2. 1 o'clock Japan time. 1 p.m. Japan time. And it happened to coincide very closely to the production team interview with like Yogi Shinkawa and people high up on the Kudjian Productions team.

And so like there was this weird thing of the Americans. And it was only three of us, right? It was like me, Dan and Marcus, us being like, all right, how do we not be rude? And how do we get our pre-orders going? Because, like, I need to get a switch too. Because I, like, I just need to, right? Like, this is the thing I need to do. And, like, I'm looking and I'm like, all right, like, 1 p.m.

It's also happened to coincide with lunchtime, which worked in our favor. Because, yeah, 1 p.m. happened. We, for an hour, are just in Kojean productions. Like, scarf down lunch, finish it. And then we're just on our phones for an hour straight on the different websites, trying to pre-order the switch two. and it was way more difficult than any of us had anticipated. And for that hour, I know I didn't get one in that hour.

I don't know if you or Marcus got one, Dan. At the end of it, I did get one through Target. Nice. Yeah. And so like I, as soon as the time hits for, all right, we got to do this interview, this group interview. We go. And like the whole time, like we're interviewing like these very high up, very cool ass people

from Kikujan productions. But at the same time, in my mind, I'm like, fuck man, man, I got to get a switch to you. I got to get a switch too. I remember now because, like, yeah, I didn't have one going into that interview. And as we're walking out, a friend of ours was just like,

hey, just heads up. They're staying on blue sky. The target might have opened them up again. And so we just got, that's when I got in real quick and snagged one. But it was like, yeah, two hours after they initially went on sale. Yeah. And yeah, thankfully after that,

Roger, I hit up Roger. I was like, yo, I see you got two. Like, let me get one of those. And so it all worked out itself. But it was like, oh, Like, just the weird thing of us being in Tokyo being like, oh, fuck, Switch 2 Prooters are at 1 p.m. Like, how do we navigate this? How do we figure this out? And also, how do we not insult anybody that we're trying to pre-order the Switch 2? Yeah. It lined up very nicely, thankfully.

Oh, man. I love it. Real quick, we got one super chat to end this saying, or actually, I guess there's two I want to read. Golden Spider says, don't forget to freak it today, KF Crew. I don't know what's going all with the freaking stuff. It's been happening. Roger and Mike have just been freaking it on the weekend. And we need to carry that energy into the week, okay? Well, speaking to them, Jeremy writes insane. Quick question, will Mike's Walkathon Vods be made available on YouTube? Love the content. Can't wait for DS2 and more games showdown.

Yes, they will. I don't know what the plan is. They're very, very big files. So it's probably going to take a couple days. But yes, they will end up on YouTube at some point. So stay tuned to that. No, they got close. I think they're like five hours away.

Yeah, they were close. I think they wrapped up sometime this morning and chat was telling them like, hey, this is a good stopping point. just because if they continued on, it would have gone way too early into this morning. So, yeah, they're very close. He was walking the whole time? There was walking.

There was ordering chilies. There was ordering Denny's. There was laying on the floor. There was a lot of stuff happening throughout the weekend. Yeah. That reminds me, you can help me solve a mystery. I remember two years ago or something at this point, Mike just decided that like, oh, I'm going to go run a marathon right now, despite not training at all and everything. and like, that's not really something you can just do.

And remember he tried to stream it and it cut out or something. How did that go? How many miles did he make it? Dan, you were tapping into one of the most controversial kind of funny lower moments of all time. Did he do it? Yes. Did he do it? Did he do a full marathon?

Definitely not. Did he do half a marathon? That's debatable. No. Depending on how you do that half of a half of a marathon, most likely. We're not so sure. Even a half takes a lot of training. Yeah.

But he freaked it everybody. That's all that really matters. Dan, thank you so much for joining us today. Again, congratulations on your acquisition of Giant Bomb. This is one of the rare acquisitions we're cheering for. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But where they're bad?

Yeah. Where could people find you and the boys? Well, we're going to be going to YouTube and Twitch primarily for our content. Also, we've got podcasts like the voicemail dump truck, the giant bomb cast. Those will be on your podcast. apps of choice. But yeah, I would say for just our daily stuff, follow us on YouTube, follow us on Twitch. You're going to see, you know, we're going to be streaming stuff every day. Jeff Grubbs doing the news show every morning, bomb cast on Tuesday, Blight Club on Wednesday,

which if you haven't seen that, or if you're just coming back to Giant Bomb after a while, blight club has been an absolute delight. It's me, Mike Vanadi, and Jeff Grub, beating the worst games of all time. It's fantastic. But yeah, and if you want to support us, go to giantbomb.com slash join. We do want the large majority of our stuff to be free. I've done the thing where I've made series and stuff behind paywalls and I hate that I can't just share it with people that aren't supporting monetarily. So we are just hoping that if you like our stuff, that folks can jump in there,

you know, subscribe annually, subscribe month to month, but that's giantbom.com slash join. And we are going to do right by the audience for sure. I love to hear that and I believe it as well. Stay tuned to kind of funny and Giant Bomb for all of your death Stranding 2 coverage. I am sure we're going to talk a whole bunch more about it because it comes out next month. Yeah. And that's crazy.

Stay tuned today. If you're watching live on Twitch, stay right where you are. If you're on YouTube, you're going to need to make the jump over to a different video. But we're about to review the last of us, latest episodes, full spoilers, all that good stuff. Until next time, though, love you all.

Goodbye.