#viz rambles

As a person who had grown to really love Death Stranding: Timefall and all of it's themes, I found myself extremely disappointed in it's sequel.

For one, even with the new ability to pick and choose conversation bits for Sam, he still felt very… how do I say this. Not there? He feels like he's floating arounf the game, no clear view on what he wanted or what he was doing. In the first game, we at least had a clear view of what we needed to do. Save Amelie. It felt like the game was building up to something. We got detailed glimpses into each side character's past and how they contributed to a story. We got to see Sam make connections and grow closer. We got many things.

We also got Higgs. Higgs, who is one of my favorite characters. He's a little shit, definitely. Weird, a freak, but oddly charismatic. I love him. I'm saying this to show that yes, I may be biased towards him. That will probably show in how I continue on.

Higgs, we are shown, is this huge big bad. This man who wants to end the world as we know it because it'll, what? Give us a more painless ending than the slow decline we would have had with the last extinction? It's bullshit.

We are shown that he'll do anything he can to get to it. Backstabbing one of his best friends, Fragile, is a huge one. Cutting off connections he already has to make a final, lasting connection with his dear, old "lady in red."

Despite all that, I'm sure most of us found him a fun villain, or at least interesting. And that's what I love about him. He's interesting, compelling.

Death Stranding 2 Higgs seems to lack a lot of that. He feels like three different people and also falls extremely flat in my eyes. He taunts you with this huge promise of something about Lou's past and doesn't come clean about killing her immediately (which makes no sense to me, as he's very blunt about having kidnapped Amelie from the start in DS1) and it just. None of it feels like him.

Do I doubt that it could be due to his prolongued time on the Beach? No, I'm positive that has some impact on how he's acting. But Higgs would have flaunted that he killed Lou with pride, dangled that over Sam's head instead of the promise of something in Lou's past that would have hurt Sam. This doesn't even feel like our Higgs.

Now. Onto the things that may just be my hurt little heart crying out for some sort of redemption of Higgs.

They absolutely loved talking about how sometimes, two opposing sides must come to an agreement about things. It's brought up quite a few times (the one I remember the most, at the moment, is with Samson Hook, one of the distro centre workers, telling Sam about how he opted to talk things out instead of fighting) and I was expecting it to be used with Higgs. Was hoping it would be. Because, otherwise, Higgs' whole villain arc would feel cartoony in comparison to his DS1 counterpart.

Well, I was, of course, sorely disappointed to find out that, no. He was, in fact, a puppet for APAC (even though he denies it, he never really feels like he's quite in control from my perspective) and just… a one-sided revenge plot.

Higgs felt boring. And I hated it.

I have other things I'd love to talk about, such as things in the second game feeling choppy and almost unfinished, but I don't have those thoughts nearly as sorted out.