If you’ve been playingDeath Stranding 2and noticed some obscure references to Kojima’s other work, there’s a good chance he put them there himself.
In a Japanese-language interview withGame*Spark, translated byAutomaton, Hideo Kojima discussed the more obscure references and Easter eggs present in Death Stranding 2.
It’s no secret that the game is littered with various things and people the creator and producer is a fan of, likeHololive VTuber Usada Pekora as a Prepper, along with other celebrities like legendary Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii and Train to Busan and Marvel’s Eternals actor Ma Dong-seok,among many others.
It’s appropriate that the game is filled with actors and directors, considering Death Stranding is getting bothlive-action and anime adaptations.
However, Kojima also snuck in a few subtler references to his own previous work, something that it seems like the rest of his team wasn’t so on board with, so he had to put them in the game himself.
‘All Of That Stuff Was Added By Me’
During the Game*Spark interview, Kojima was asked who was responsible for the self-referential humor in Death Stranding 2, and he took full responsibility, saying, “All of that stuff was added by me.”
What’s more, when he asked his team to add them, they would apparently pretend not to hear him.
Translated byIGN, he said, “Even if I said to the staff, ‘Please put them in!’ they would just say, ‘Huh?’ and pretend not to know.”
He’s likely exaggerating as a joke, but it seems like the self-references are mostly his responsibility.
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He also realizes that these Easter eggs might not be to everyone’s taste, which may be part of why his team wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about implementing them. He knows that they “might cause certain people to cringe hard.”
He even gave readers a hint about where they might find one of his additions.
If you look up at the sky at night in a hot spring, you can see a very beautiful sky. If you zoom in there, various things will appear, so please play around with it. – Hideo Kojima (translated by IGN)
I would assume that making certain people cringe is part of Kojima’s vision, since this is the same man who apparently rewrote parts of Death Stranding 2 afterthe reception by testers was too positivein order to avoid becoming too mainstream.
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