Even-Paced Storytelling
Just like the Metal Gear Solid series, storytelling is a major aspect of Death Stranding, both in terms of character development and overall narrative. Kojima still has a tendency to use overly long dramatic cutscenes and on-the-nose metaphors, but the pacing feels seriously off.
Death Stranding basically front and back loads its content with story and cutscenes, meaning you’ll get a bunch at the beginning and a bunch at the end, but not much in the middle. It’s the same exact problem Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain suffered from.
Things are super interesting at the start, but then the delivery system almost entirely takes things over, except for when you connect a new system to the Chiral Network, which then basically gives you a dialogue exposition dump.
Then once you start reaching the end things really pick up to reach a crescendo, propped up by the absolutely fantastic acting performances.
Yes, Death Stranding’s story can be ham-fisted, but it’s still interesting at many many point. It would just have been better to see that storytelling more evenly spread out across the entire experience, rather than book-ended.
