Masahiro Sakurai Praises Death Stranding And Hideo Kojima (Updated)

Iyane Agossah December 4, 2019 11:16 AM EST

Super Smash Bros Ultimate Director Masahiro Sakurai highly praised Death Stranding but also pointed out its faults like the small text.

This week’s usual leaks from Famitsu magazine included comments from Masahiro Sakurai on Death Stranding.

Masahiro Sakurai praised Hideo Kojima’s latest game, mentioning how there are very few games who manage to be this original and yet this interesting. Sakurai added that Death Stranding definitely isn’t for everyone, but that he loved it to the point of losing track of time when he was playing.

Sakurai also praised how well Death Stranding is built. He was initially anxious that the game could be too easy because of the help of other players online. This turned out to be needless fear because unless you reach an objective yourself and connect it to the Chiral network, you won’t get any help. Sakurai also noted how rare it is for a game to mix this well its new possibilities, its story, and its gameplay.

Sakurai mentioned that Death Stranding isn’t perfect though. He cited how he disliked the fact that the button symbols in the UI and the text are too small and hard to read. How the UI relies too much on button-hold commands. And the terrains with way too many small protruding rocks hindering you. An update will be correcting the text size soon.

Masahiro Sakurai ended by saying that playing Death Stranding reminded him of how talented Hideo Kojima is, seeing his team managed to make such a great game in such a short time. He added that he believes many game developers like himself are shocked and amazed about the game. Sakurai finished by mentioning Death Stranding goes over common sense and brings its players to a new world other games didn’t explore yet.

Personally speaking, I’m not surprised Sakurai praised Death Stranding this much, as the game is genuinely good and a nice experience overall. Sure it might be overrated, or rather over-discussed simply because it’s “A Hideo Kojima Game”, but it’s definitely a great game standing on its own. Many of my favorite seiyuu who worked on the game like Akio Otsuka were moved about it too.

Death Stranding is currently available on PS4. The game is coming to Steam and Epic Games Store in Summer 2020. We also recently translated comments from Sakurai regarding games awards and ranking games in general.

Famitsu Magazine is releasing in a few hours as I’m writing this. We’ll be updating the article if more interesting tidbits weren’t in the leaks.

Update: Here are additional details now that Famitsu is available:

Masahiro Sakurai mentioned that he avoids as much as possible watching trailers or reading about something before experiencing it. As such, he didn’t know much about Death Stranding before playing it. He was really into the game and frantically played it until clearing it.

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