Death Stranding 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.