Take a photo of a barcode or cover
40 reviews for:
Death Stranding - Death Stranding: The Official Novelization - Volume 2
Hitori Nojima
3.59 AVERAGE
40 reviews for:
Death Stranding - Death Stranding: The Official Novelization - Volume 2
Hitori Nojima
3.59 AVERAGE
Legitimately the worst book I've ever read. There is exactly one good paragraph in this book wherein the author describes a landscape.
Gained one star for the climactic scene taking place while Sam and Die-Hardman are showering together, lost one star for never mentioning Monster Energy Drinks™️
I have not played the game
Gained one star for the climactic scene taking place while Sam and Die-Hardman are showering together, lost one star for never mentioning Monster Energy Drinks™️
I have not played the game
hopeful
mysterious
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
dark
mysterious
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
informative
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This simultaneously takes the weakest parts of Hideo Kojima's writing and ignores the best parts. As someone who completed and absolutely loved the game, I can't imagine anyone enjoying or even understanding this unless they've played the game.
While playing Death Stranding the game, I kept imagining what it would be like to have these mechanics in a Lord of the Rings game. While the LOTR movies focus mainly on the plot and action (a smart move for a film adaptation), The Lord of the Rings book is mainly about adventure in the classic sense. Traveling great distances and meeting strange new places and people. Tolkein describes nearly every path the Fellowship walks down, every tree they pass, every person they meet in great detail. A true videogame adaptation of that material would be primarily about walking, exactly the way Death Stranding as a game plays.
Thus a book of Death Stranding, like the book of Lord of the Rings, should be primarily about the walking, the journey, the traveling. It is the primary mechanic of the games: loading up on goods, plotting your course, balancing your load, navigating tricky terrain, changing your route to avoid dangers, trying not to stumble or fall, and methodically making your way to the destination. By having to walk every step of Sam's journey, we better understand his hardship, his bond with BB, and the trauma of the world. But the novel mostly eschews that in favor of exposition and plot, two of Kojima's obvious weak points as a writer.
Any traveling in the novel is mostly done in quick paragraphs that give passing mention to the long treks Sam takes and maybe a quick description of the terrain. Then we're jumped forward to Sam arriving at his destination so we can have the characters awkwardly explain how all of the confusing mechanics of this world operate and directly spell out the themes. We lose out on the more subtle and nuanced ways the game allows the player to feel and understand this world, its loss and melancholy. We lose the moments that make BB feel so important and personal to Sam. We lose the feeling of just how arduous it is for Sam to walk from one of the continent to the other because we're constantly skipping forward.
What could be an epic story that properly makes you feel the difficulty and triumph in Sam's long journey is instead mostly just a collection of cutscene summaries. Because it is constrained to mostly dialogue scenes of characters explaining what has happened or needs to happen, the prose itself is mostly mediocre, rarely giving enough description or mood building in individual scenes, but going to great lengths to explain and explain again how the Beach, the Seam, BBs, BTs, and all the odd sci-fi elements of the world work. Characters like Heartman and Mama, don't get hardly enough space on the page to make an impact or leave a memory on the reader. Either they're inserted randomly into a block of exposition or just pop up into the story out of nowhere to serve little purpose before they're gone again.
Cliff Unger, arguably the second most important character in the game, is sidelined the worst though. In the game, we see scenes of Cliff constantly. Nearly every time you sent out on a new job, we get a flashback of Cliff talking to the BB about something interesting or emotional that adds dimension to him. Sometimes he's drunk and sad, sometimes he's dressed up as Santa and bringing presents to BB, sometimes he's just reassuring BB that everything will be okay. He's such a constant presence that by the time Sam and Cliff meet in the warzone, the player understands what Cliff wants and feels the moral ambiguity in fending him off. In the book however, he's only mentioned in passing a few times, without any concrete details or scenes, before he shows up in the battle scene for a few mere pages. He leaves no impression at all.
While Death Stranding the game is about the long journey to a destination, Death Stranding the novel skips the journey in order to get right to the unsatisfying destination.
While playing Death Stranding the game, I kept imagining what it would be like to have these mechanics in a Lord of the Rings game. While the LOTR movies focus mainly on the plot and action (a smart move for a film adaptation), The Lord of the Rings book is mainly about adventure in the classic sense. Traveling great distances and meeting strange new places and people. Tolkein describes nearly every path the Fellowship walks down, every tree they pass, every person they meet in great detail. A true videogame adaptation of that material would be primarily about walking, exactly the way Death Stranding as a game plays.
Thus a book of Death Stranding, like the book of Lord of the Rings, should be primarily about the walking, the journey, the traveling. It is the primary mechanic of the games: loading up on goods, plotting your course, balancing your load, navigating tricky terrain, changing your route to avoid dangers, trying not to stumble or fall, and methodically making your way to the destination. By having to walk every step of Sam's journey, we better understand his hardship, his bond with BB, and the trauma of the world. But the novel mostly eschews that in favor of exposition and plot, two of Kojima's obvious weak points as a writer.
Any traveling in the novel is mostly done in quick paragraphs that give passing mention to the long treks Sam takes and maybe a quick description of the terrain. Then we're jumped forward to Sam arriving at his destination so we can have the characters awkwardly explain how all of the confusing mechanics of this world operate and directly spell out the themes. We lose out on the more subtle and nuanced ways the game allows the player to feel and understand this world, its loss and melancholy. We lose the moments that make BB feel so important and personal to Sam. We lose the feeling of just how arduous it is for Sam to walk from one of the continent to the other because we're constantly skipping forward.
What could be an epic story that properly makes you feel the difficulty and triumph in Sam's long journey is instead mostly just a collection of cutscene summaries. Because it is constrained to mostly dialogue scenes of characters explaining what has happened or needs to happen, the prose itself is mostly mediocre, rarely giving enough description or mood building in individual scenes, but going to great lengths to explain and explain again how the Beach, the Seam, BBs, BTs, and all the odd sci-fi elements of the world work. Characters like Heartman and Mama, don't get hardly enough space on the page to make an impact or leave a memory on the reader. Either they're inserted randomly into a block of exposition or just pop up into the story out of nowhere to serve little purpose before they're gone again.
Cliff Unger, arguably the second most important character in the game, is sidelined the worst though. In the game, we see scenes of Cliff constantly. Nearly every time you sent out on a new job, we get a flashback of Cliff talking to the BB about something interesting or emotional that adds dimension to him. Sometimes he's drunk and sad, sometimes he's dressed up as Santa and bringing presents to BB, sometimes he's just reassuring BB that everything will be okay. He's such a constant presence that by the time Sam and Cliff meet in the warzone, the player understands what Cliff wants and feels the moral ambiguity in fending him off. In the book however, he's only mentioned in passing a few times, without any concrete details or scenes, before he shows up in the battle scene for a few mere pages. He leaves no impression at all.
While Death Stranding the game is about the long journey to a destination, Death Stranding the novel skips the journey in order to get right to the unsatisfying destination.
adventurous
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
I have received this review copy for free. My opinions are my own.
Content warinings: Use of premature baby as equipment, loss of child, involuntarily taking of blood, use of blood and other bodily fluids in a weapon (on-page use of first, mention of second), graphic description of a nail hanging off and being removed from toe, graphic mentions of blood, bombings of cities (remembered), suicide (on page, brief, done in self-sacrifice), death (references and on-page), terrorism (mentioned and remembered)
This game novelization is the first novella in the two-part novelization of the popular game Death Stranding. If I have to be honest, it is my least favourite game novelization/companion novel so far quality wise. It was heavily carried by the already well written and well established story and worldbuilding created for the video game, as without that this book would simply not hold up.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book as the story and world are just so unique and even though it wasn’t perfect, or perhaps because of it, reading this novella made me even more excited to play the game some time as I just want to experience the story in full with visuals and gameplay. I consider this a huge plus, because even though this novelization was flawed, it didn’t ruin my experience with the story (which is really good), rather it has me wanting more if it.
An important thing I want to touch upon is the writing, which felt a bit dry and unengaging to me. It felt like the book was somewhere halfway between a script written in prose and a rather condensed summary of the game. Most of the book was a bit ”he did this, he said that, she did that, she said this.”; describing what is happening without actually making a story out of all of it. There were certain scenes that were written beautifully, where the emotions, thoughts and experiences of the characters were leading instead of just actions, which shows that the author is quite capable of writing something good, but it seems struggle appeared when the characters just did something without much else to it and having to translate that to prose.
One thing I kept in mind is that this novelization was originally written in Japanese by Hitori Nojima, also known as Kenji Yano, and then translated to English by Carley Radford. With translations there is always something that gets lost in the process from the original prose as not all languages flow the same way or have the same phrases and words to properly express everything when writing a translation. Japanese and English are completely different languages and it’s incredibly hard to properly phrase the beauty and poetry of certain Japanese words and phrases in English, which is a rather forward language. The roughness of the writing could have been caused by the translation finding a middle ground between proper translation and proper English flow.
The next I want to address is the characters and their development. The majority of the main cast aside from Sam Porter Bridges aren’t very well introduced and remain a little vague throughout the book. There was a glossary at the start with a short description of certain notable characters, but that description remained kind of vague and having to put it into context yourself when reading about the characters didn’t always work. It would have been nice to have some more introduction and background woven in the story itself together with more explanation as to who they are in the story and what they mean in it. In video games, you can leave characters rather vague as there are visual cues such as general design, body language and visual context that explain the characters and build them up, so I understand the word-for-word character introduction might not exist in the game. But with a book, the reader only knows what is written, so unless the author literally writes the context, there is none.
I kept finding myself scrolling back to the start of the book to read the character glossary another time, because I was just confused by the characters and often certain characters didn’t feel like different characters, just ones with different names, until much later into the story. It was really apparent the novelization is missing a lot of context to these characters that might otherwise have been presented visually or through gameplay that is simply not present in the translation to prose.
Regardless of the flaws I presented, I enjoyed reading this first volume of the Death Stranding novelization. It works and it isn’t a bad novelization by any means, just not the best and not my favourite. If you are by any means intrigued by the premise or interested in the game, but can’t play (yet), this is an excellent way of consuming the story and the way it’s told might very well be the perfect recap for those who have played the game and want to revisit the story without a full replay.
I look forward to reading the second volume and see where Sam’s journey is heading and after that, get myself a copy of the game to dive into this adventure another time in the original format.
Content warinings: Use of premature baby as equipment, loss of child, involuntarily taking of blood, use of blood and other bodily fluids in a weapon (on-page use of first, mention of second), graphic description of a nail hanging off and being removed from toe, graphic mentions of blood, bombings of cities (remembered), suicide (on page, brief, done in self-sacrifice), death (references and on-page), terrorism (mentioned and remembered)
This game novelization is the first novella in the two-part novelization of the popular game Death Stranding. If I have to be honest, it is my least favourite game novelization/companion novel so far quality wise. It was heavily carried by the already well written and well established story and worldbuilding created for the video game, as without that this book would simply not hold up.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book as the story and world are just so unique and even though it wasn’t perfect, or perhaps because of it, reading this novella made me even more excited to play the game some time as I just want to experience the story in full with visuals and gameplay. I consider this a huge plus, because even though this novelization was flawed, it didn’t ruin my experience with the story (which is really good), rather it has me wanting more if it.
An important thing I want to touch upon is the writing, which felt a bit dry and unengaging to me. It felt like the book was somewhere halfway between a script written in prose and a rather condensed summary of the game. Most of the book was a bit ”he did this, he said that, she did that, she said this.”; describing what is happening without actually making a story out of all of it. There were certain scenes that were written beautifully, where the emotions, thoughts and experiences of the characters were leading instead of just actions, which shows that the author is quite capable of writing something good, but it seems struggle appeared when the characters just did something without much else to it and having to translate that to prose.
One thing I kept in mind is that this novelization was originally written in Japanese by Hitori Nojima, also known as Kenji Yano, and then translated to English by Carley Radford. With translations there is always something that gets lost in the process from the original prose as not all languages flow the same way or have the same phrases and words to properly express everything when writing a translation. Japanese and English are completely different languages and it’s incredibly hard to properly phrase the beauty and poetry of certain Japanese words and phrases in English, which is a rather forward language. The roughness of the writing could have been caused by the translation finding a middle ground between proper translation and proper English flow.
The next I want to address is the characters and their development. The majority of the main cast aside from Sam Porter Bridges aren’t very well introduced and remain a little vague throughout the book. There was a glossary at the start with a short description of certain notable characters, but that description remained kind of vague and having to put it into context yourself when reading about the characters didn’t always work. It would have been nice to have some more introduction and background woven in the story itself together with more explanation as to who they are in the story and what they mean in it. In video games, you can leave characters rather vague as there are visual cues such as general design, body language and visual context that explain the characters and build them up, so I understand the word-for-word character introduction might not exist in the game. But with a book, the reader only knows what is written, so unless the author literally writes the context, there is none.
I kept finding myself scrolling back to the start of the book to read the character glossary another time, because I was just confused by the characters and often certain characters didn’t feel like different characters, just ones with different names, until much later into the story. It was really apparent the novelization is missing a lot of context to these characters that might otherwise have been presented visually or through gameplay that is simply not present in the translation to prose.
Regardless of the flaws I presented, I enjoyed reading this first volume of the Death Stranding novelization. It works and it isn’t a bad novelization by any means, just not the best and not my favourite. If you are by any means intrigued by the premise or interested in the game, but can’t play (yet), this is an excellent way of consuming the story and the way it’s told might very well be the perfect recap for those who have played the game and want to revisit the story without a full replay.
I look forward to reading the second volume and see where Sam’s journey is heading and after that, get myself a copy of the game to dive into this adventure another time in the original format.
Content Warnings
Use of premature baby as equipment, loss of child, involuntarily taking of blood, use of blood and other bodily fluids in a weapon (on-page use of first, mention of second), graphic description of a nail hanging off and being removed from toe, graphic mentions of blood, bombings of cities (remembered), suicide (on page, brief, done in self-sacrifice), death (references and on-page), terrorism (mentioned and remembered)