“Anything that lasts 10 years, 20 years, it has to be new. And most of those are not received well at the start.”

This interview is funny because yes, Death Stranding 1 received mixed reviews upon release, but has since been held in very high regard as a completely new experience (albeit spiritual success to Metal Gear).

It’s okay for its sequel to be anticipated and even praised ahead of time — continued success is a good thing for a videogame studio, but I get what Kojima is after: he wants his art to be off-kilter to provide something fresh, which is hard to do. We can only hope Death Stranding 2 can be both experimentally wild (what a true fanbase is hoping for anyway), while simultaneously yielding blockbuster revenues.