I've played through Death Stranding and my opinion is mixed.
On the one hand, there are the game concept and the gameplay which I never thought would be so good. This is truly unique and unprecedented. The the boss fights were epic, the main gameplay was fluid, surprising and fun. I liked the interactions with other players. The presentation was great as well.
On the other hand there are the overloaded and freaky plot, bad script, many silly dialogues like "So I'am Mario and you're Princess Peach" and too many and long non-interactive cutscenes.
There is a well-known motto in movie making. Show, don't telll. Kojima spends too much time on explanations for the overloaded story instead of telling the actual story. Scenes are inserted in a conspicuous way just for that reason. Suddenly a cutscene starts and Del Toro comes in and explains and explains for minutes in an unbelievable way that the character in the story would never do so. It stands out as bad writing when a character speaks only to the audience. In addition, sometimes there was just a still image commlink from him where he spoke for minutes where the player just to sit in front of the TV, waiting for it to end so that he can play further. Why can't the gameplay go on and the commlink just appears in a corner of the screen? This leads me to my next point.
When I rated Cyberpunk 2077 I praised the interactive way of storytelling. Cutscenes are film language and video games should use their advantages and advance the plot interactively while in gameplay. Then it can become interactive art. Unfortunately, Death Stranding is the opposite here. Too many cutscenes and many go on for a very long time. At the beginning and end of the game it felt like I was watching two hours of cutscenes each. In these moments Death Stranding is more like a film than a video game.
Kojima is one of the most important game designers and he'd better focus on game design/mechanics and leave forementioned points like plot and dialogue to professional scriptwriters. One should recognise where his skills are. Denis Villeneuve also has good scriptwriters and doesn't write the script himself. Otherwise his films would certainly not be as good. Kojima doesn't have to show his unbridled creativity in every aspect of the game and should just put it into game design.
