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Hideo Kojima recently polled fans on their favorite Death Stranding 2 trailer, and obviously, the winner was Higgs. But while Troy Baker's villain came out on top, he didn't run away with the votes. Kojima himself is pretty happy about that, since he's been pouring his heart into character creation for years and can now rest assured that all his children have their fans.
If you've stumbled upon Tomorrow's Nightmare in Death Stranding 2, you've already been asked to choose between Higgs, Rainy, Fragile, and Tomorrow. The game doesn't really present any criteria for the choice, simply imploring you to "choose well." Are you meant to pick your favorite character? The one you'd like Sam to become romantically entangled with? (That would be weird for a lot of reasons.) The one you feel the deepest spiritual connection to? That's for you to decide.
Kojima put the question a lot more simply when he polled his followers on Twitter. "Which character is your favorite?" the poll asks (via machine translation), with the same four options represented. With 1,443 votes counted, Higgs took 33.8% of the responses, with Tomorrow coming in second at 30.3%. That left Fragile in third with 24%, and Rainy in fourth with a still respectable 11.9%.
"Higgs was the top favorite, but since all four had fans, that puts me at ease," Kojima said (again via machine translation) after the poll had run its course. "It's not just DS—up until now, I've always poured especially a lot of love into character creation."
Of course, Kojima's games have always toed a fine line between a loving gaze and an uncomfortable leer at their central characters, and that's especially true now that they're all modeled on real-world actors. Certainly, Death Stranding 2 was built to give us a whole lot of time with Norman Reedus' butt and Elle Fanning's feet.
But I think the fact that it's the campy, melodramatic Higgs leading the poll that suggests that Kojima's devotion to his characters does help fans build a real connection to them. After all, a cadre of impossibly attractive movie stars has nothing on an evil robot cowboy with clown makeup and a guitar gun.
