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Death Stranding 2's Gameplay Is Too Good For Me To Waste My Time Watching Its Bad Cutscenes

I tried to play Death Stranding 2 the "right" way. For 12 hours, I had Sam hike all over Mexico and Australia delivering packages and battling brigands, and I watched every cutscene as I went. And despite being once again enamored with the moment-to-moment experience of being a porter in Death Stranding--it genuinely may be my favorite gameplay loop ever--I was having a bad time because I couldn't find any rhythm to the experience. The problem, as it was with the first game, is that Death Stranding 2 is full of cutscenes that are unnecessarily long, very poorly written, and don't fit together into any legitimate greater context.

And there are a lot of them. So many that I wasn't able to get into the flow of the gameplay experience. I'd have a great time walking around delivering stuff for an hour, then watch a 15-minute cutscene that sucked out all my energy, and then turn the game off because I needed a nap. Since I'd really been looking forward to playing Death Stranding 2, I was starting to find it disappointing, even though I was actually massively enjoying the "play" side of it.

My last straw was the introduction of the character called Rainy. Her first scene is a lengthy dance number in the rain that Sam watches. Her second scene is a tearful reunion with Sam's friends, who all apparently know Rainy very well even though none of them had ever mentioned her before. It isn't until her third scene that anyone tells Sam who Rainy is. But even then, her introduction doesn't matter--nothing about the gameplay experience changes at all as a result of meeting her, even though she's another magic person. These scenes look nice--very "cinematic," as it were--but they're completely devoid of substance or content. I was being forced to take breaks from the parts of the game I actually enjoyed so that I could watch some self-indulgent nonsense that I found incredibly grating.

So I tried something radical, something I have never done on my first playthroughs of any of the previous games designed by Hideo Kojima: I started skipping the cutscenes. I did it hesitantly at first, concerned that I might miss out on some important piece of lore or plot. I figured I'd use this power sparingly, only when a scene was overly long and not apparently going anywhere. But that cautious approach didn't last long. Within an hour of making that decision, I was skipping every cutscene as soon as it started.

Something funny happened after that: I played Death Stranding 2 for six straight hours. I was suddenly free to enjoy the parts I like without having to sit through the noise of the story. I no longer had to devote any brainpower toward trying to figure out how the latest nonsensical plot point makes sense next to the previous one. I could get back to the simple pleasures of walking around delivering packages and building infrastructure.

The goofy thing is that I knew it would go this way. I won't pretend that I expected Death Stranding 2's storytelling to be anything better than abysmal, but when I first booted it up, I did plan to watch all the cutscenes anyway. It was more for the sake of fairness than anything else--maybe this would be the one where Kojima's writing finally clicked for me. I had to give it a fair shot.

Up to now, I'd always been able to power through his games. I sat through every post-credits scene in MGS4, trudged all the way to the "we ran out of money" twist ending of MGSV, and I made it through the movie-length final cutscenes of the first Death Stranding in one sitting. I hated every second of it, but I did my due diligence. But I'm 38 years old now, and I no longer have the patience for all that.

And, to be completely honest, this is a lesson I should have already learned from the first Death Stranding. While I did watch all the cutscenes in the first game when I ran through it the first time, I later came back and played it through twice while skipping them all, saving 11 hours of my time in the process. I already had the blueprint to happiness, but I didn't want to take for granted that Death Stranding 2's story would be just as irritating and nonsensical as its predecessor's. I wanted to believe in Kojima the writer as much as I believe in Kojima the designer.

That hope is completely gone now, though, and that honestly makes me glad. Now that I'm free from any obligation to care about the cutscenes, I'm going to have the best possible time with the rest of Death Stranding 2.