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With Death Stranding 2, Hideo Kojima is serving up no shortage of superficial references to Metal Gear Solid. But in the director's eyes, there's also a deeper connection between the two series, as they each offer a different perspective on the relationships between parents and children.
"The loss of my father was a major theme in the Metal Gear series," Kojima says in Edge magazine issue 411. "Those games explore the theme of how you surpass your parents. Death Stranding looks in the other direction: you assume the parent's perspective, looking toward the child."
Kojima was just 13 when his father died, and he's occasionally spoken about the effect that had on him both personally and as a creator. "It was hard and lonely but, in a way, it strengthened my resolve to become a filmmaker," he told us in a 2015 interview. "I’ve been stuck with something of a father complex ever since. All the Metal Gear games so far have been paternal stories. They’re all about killing your father (laughs)."
The number of parent and child themes in Metal Gear are too numerous to count, from the legacy that carries from Big Boss to Solid Snake to the downright oedipal Otacon backstory we were traumatized by in MGS2. Then, of course, Death Stranding puts us in the parental perspective of Sam Bridges, caring for the baby Lou throughout the course of the game.
"You think you know everything about your son, but there are some things that you don't," Kojima tells Edge. “In the first Death Stranding, Sam travels together with Lou, but he doesn’t interrogate who Lou is very much. In the sequel, that has changed. It's like how an adoptive parent might not know everything about their child. They might have questions. That's the emotion I wanted to elicit."
Kojima's certainly playing with a lot of ideas he previously explored in Metal Gear Solid. There's the Magellan ship that looks exactly like Metal Gear Rex, the doppelganger of Solid Snake, and even a reference to an extremely specific alternate cover for MGS2. That extends to gameplay, too, with the Magellan serving as a home base evoking MGS5. Clearly, Kojima's still thinking about the series he's best known for even after all these years.
Death Stranding 2 is one of the biggest upcoming PS5 games on the horizon.
