Lith's Diary - January (Patreon)

Dear Diary,
I hope you've been staying warm! It's finally easing up a little here, but I know that in a lot of places, the winter is getting to its most bitter part around now. It's been a long time since summer, and the cold is setting in deep. You'd better be taking of yourself!

I probably could be taking a little bit better care of myself, actually. Things were a little hectic this month, and I ended up doing a lot of cleaning as well as working hard, and I had to remind myself to get some actual relaxation in again. I mentioned getting behind on things last month, and while I feel a little better about that, it's certainly still a lingering problem: always having more things that need to get done than I have time or energy for, making it hard to ever really relax when it feels like they're always looming over me. That can be a bummer, but it's especially frustrating because I still want to be doing more, and better!

...I guess that makes it sound like I have a work ethic? I think that's kinda misleading. It's more like... I'm still really lazy, but I'm always frustrated with myself for needing so much downtime and wishing I could do more. I think I might be getting better, but if so, it's pretty slow going.

With all this going on, I definitely needed a game that would let me relax more than something like God of War would. Thankfully, one game I picked up recently fit the bill well, and I've been playing it pretty much all month! I do enjoy it, but I have a lot of mixed feelings about it. Before I can really tell you about that, though, I think I need to give you a little background, in case you don't pay a lot of attention to the gaming community.

I'm a big fan of stealth games, and one of the biggest titles out there for that is Metal Gear Solid. The games are always incredibly well-polished to have solid, satisfying stealth gameplay and a lot of interesting innovations... and they're notorious for being really weird. The plot tends to be ridiculously convoluted, with layers of conspiracies, hidden identities, false premises, and ulterior motives. All of this is happening against a backdrop of high-powered technology that begins with giant mechs that launch nukes and only gets weirder, more ridiculously powerful, and closer to just being straight up magic. It's fascinating, sometimes awesome, sometimes goofy, and while cutscenes often dragged on way too long, seeing just what the heck was gonna happen next certainly felt rewarding once you snuck your way through the facility to your objective.

The whole series spanned something like ten games I think, if you count spinoffs and side stories, with the main story stretching across two generations of impossible technology and larger-than-life characters. It was bizarre, but it was great, and it was one of the few AAA releases out there that really felt like it was driven by a focused passion, because a guy called Kojima had complete control over it.

Well, apparently the company he was working under to make these games finally got sick of him, and of making money, and decided to kick him out. They kept the rights to Metal Gear Solid, too, so he couldn't make any more games in the series. And without Kojima, no new MGS game could ever possibly work, everyone's pretty well agreed on that. So now that company is making pachinko machines with the license, and Kojima has started over with a brand new IP, at his own company, where I guess he has even more control than he did before, presumably because he doesn't have any executives looking over his shoulder and reining him in. And for a long time, all we knew was that it's called Death Stranding.

And... well, in this particular case, I think maybe he needed someone reining him in a little, because this game is... I mean, it's good? And it's well-polished. But it's just so incredibly weird, it's hard to say how to really feel about it. It makes me miss the MGS days.

The basic idea of the game, gameplay-wise, is that America has been decimated by an apocalypse of ghosts with antimatter inside them, and now all the survivors are huddled up in shelters across the country. It's up to you to cross the country on foot delivering supplies and hooking them up to a new network that's basically "the internet but better" so they can finally start cooperating and sharing knowledge again. Along the way, you unlock vehicles to help cross open terrain, you get resources to build your own roads, and you build up to better tech all around for getting across a country full of hostile terrain, crazy raiders, and ghosts that want to eat you so they can set off an antimatter bomb with your body. This is literally the most normal, easy to understand part of the game.

And it's fun! For me, anyway. I like trading games, and I like building infrastructure and stuff like that, so while this is a little off my sweet spot, it's still really satisfying to build this big transportation network by hand, going out there on foot with the equipment and resources to build all this stuff so that it's a ton easier to deliver more stuff here later, and then do all that delivering myself, too. But instead of making a profit or building up colonies or something, you're rewarded for delivering stuff with... likes?

The game is all about getting likes, as if the whole world has been eaten by Facebok. If you deliver the cargo faster and in better condition, you get more likes, and also the people in the shelters will thank you profusely with telegrams. You almost never actually see another person face to face, but there's tons and tons of thanks and praise that gets thrown at you as you do the work, to the point that I'm just skipping through all of it because I don't need to listen to someone find a new way, for the fiftieth time, to say "you're really helping us out, delivering this stuff." You could say there's a strong theme of like... how you can feel connected to people through social media, but also feel incredibly lonely because you get so little actual contact in person. There are obviously a lot of strong messages in the game about people needing to connect, to come together and cooperate, instead of squabbling among ourselves or drifting apart. And I can appreciate that! But it tends to feel... really strangely executed. And they'll really waste your time with millions of little cutscenes and speeches if you let them, you have to skip a ton of stuff just to keep actually playing the game.

And... then there's the story. Like... When you play Metal Gear Solid, it feels like you're in a... slightly weird version of the real world. It feels like most people lead normal lives like we do, but we're peeking into the secret underbelly where ridiculous, secret technology is used to do incredible things, and all these bizarre, outlandish, and often insane characters duke it out for the fate of the world. It always struck this mesmerizing balance between taking itself super seriously and having hyper-realistic mechanics and military tactics and equipment... and just hilariously weird, nonsensical stuff mixed in, also trying to be taken seriously.

But in Death Stranding, it feels like... the very premise of the world is half-confusing, half-nonsense. And the basic people in the world are really weird. The main human enemies you fight are people that got "addicted to the rush of delivering packages" and went rogue, attacking other couriers and stealing their packages. And the technology level is really weird. And you basically have magic because you can put the word "chiral" in front of anything and it will do anything you want it to. And then every single character you see is just really, really weird. And creepy. And probably lying. That last part is standard for a Kojima game, it's kind of a tradition that basically everything you learn in the first hour will turn out to be a lie by the end, just because there are so many twists and shocking reveals. But in this game, it's just... there's no straight man.

MGS was fascinating because it was part serious and realistic, part completely bonkers. Now, this game is trying to take itself super seriously and have emotional depth, but... every single thing is complete bonkers nonsense. You can't tell what's an obvious cover and what's the truth, finally revealed, because none of it makes any kind of sense. It's a living fever dream, but also you're delivering packages. I don't know if this is what MGS would have been like if Kojima hadn't had anyone mediating his vision? I heard Star Wars only turned out so great because George Lucas was under a lot of restrictions and a lot of other talented people helped refine it, and that's why the prequels turned out so weird. I think that's basically what we got here. It was great with just a splash of genius, but too much and it just becomes... Well, it's certainly unique.

I do like the game! I've been basically wringing all the fun I can out of it getting kinda completionist, doing all the repeatable deliveries at least once, unlocking all the hidden places and building all the relationships to max. I'm about ready to finally finish the game, but I already know that even once you understand the full story, it doesn't get any less weird, or less crazy. I kinda watched a let's play first... But I've had a lot of fun with it anyway, so that shows you how good the gameplay is! I just... wish it was a little closer to MGS. There was a little stealth, but it was seriously stripped down from what MGS had, and while the plot was crazy, it was also fairly emotionally involving and fun, which was definitely missing here. A lot of this game felt like it was just aggressively trying to waste my time, and fell flat on what were supposed to be some of the best parts. I hope Kojima can work things out and bring us a new experience that strikes a better balance next time!

Phew! So yeah, kinda complicated. And I do still mean to finish God of War, I kept playing for a while and it kept surpassing my expectations, it really gives you a ton of options for handling combat while keeping things feeling simple, so it's kinda up to you to remember all the ways you can use all your tools. It was getting harder though, so I hope I don't have too much trouble getting back into it!

What else? I've watched a few anime, I might talk about Log Horizon next time, there's still more of it for me to catch up on. I did finish one called School-Live! that I definitely recommend. It looks very innocent and silly for most of the first episode, but it slowly unfolds into something intense, and sad, and it'll quietly draw you in to feel for the characters as they struggle to survive and to maintain a sense of joy in life. You can tell a lot of love and attention went into the show, and while I can't say it's one of the greats, it's absolutely worth a watch.

Alright, that's all the nerding out I've kept pent up this month. Thanks for listening! It still feels silly sometimes rambling about this stuff to you so much, but I hope it'll give you something new to enjoy now and then, and at least a few new ideas to think on here n there. I'm about to take a hearty break and get some real social time in, so hopefully I'll finally get to unwind properly after all the fuss this month. I'll just have to be careful not to let that get me too far behind on the work for next month, of course!

I hope you're taking care of yourself as well! It's important to take a proper break, or even a vacation, now and then, or you'll burn out without realizing! If we get too caught up in our work, we can lose perspective on why we're doing what we do, which will drain all the meaning and the joy even from what should be a good job. Make sure to get out of your own head now and then!

...I guess that's funny wording, coming from me, actually. Things are... reaching a peak, in the void. We've come a long way, you and me, you know? ...Thank you for standing by my side. Thank you for all your help, and your patience, and your support. I think it's finally paying off, so... I hope that you'll be happy with how things are turning out. That you don't feel like you've put all this effort in for nothing. It's meant the world to me that we've gotten this far.

From the bottom of my heart... thank you. And... Stay warm!
-Lith