by At 90 minutes stage event on the final day of the Tokyo Game Show this weekend, Hideo Kojima revealed key details about several characters in the upcoming sequel Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, along with an engaging and revamped photo mode. The game’s release date, scheduled for 2025, is still unknown.
Audiences welcomed Kojima back to TGS for the first time in five years, with his last major appearance in 2019, leading up to the debut of the original Death Stranding. Today singer/songwriter Daichi Miura and voice actors Kenjiro Tsuda, Nana Mizuki, Tomokazu Sugita and Shion Wakayama joined him on stage. Danish film director Nicolas Winding Refn also made a brief personal appearance.
DEATH STRANDING 2』Special StageレSee also: TGS2024https://t.co/JfR3oMhe2A pic.twitter.com/EVewQRW5Q2
— ⚡Game*Spark⚡ (@gamespark) September 30, 2024
Most of the announcements concerned the Japanese voice cast for Death Stranding 2. Tsuda and Mizuki will reprise their roles as Sam and Fragile from the first game. Sugita, a performer known for his boisterous performance, will play the little Dollman, a living miniature creature. Footage showed Sam holding Dollman to his body, like you would attach a key chain or pendant to your backpack.
Wakayama, an emerging artist who won Best New Actor at the 2023 Seiyu Awards, will portray Tomorrow, a character modeled after actor Elle Fanning. A brief scene showed Tomorrow chatting with a visibly pregnant young woman named Rainy, played by Shioli Kutsuna.
Best known for her recurring role of Yukio in the recent Deadpool films, Kutsuna originally performed all her scenes in English with the rest of the star-studded Hollywood cast, but will provide her own voice for the Japanese dub. Addressing the audience via a pre-recorded video letter, she praised Kojima for his uniqueness, saying she had “never experienced a shoot like this before.”
Kojima showed off two flashy ways to enjoy watching the characters from Death Stranding 2. A new photo mode lets players virtually hang out with the Drawbridge crew in the game. As seen on a screen above the TGS stage, Fragile, Tomorrow and Sunny casually walked around, posed and danced for the camera. Clicking the shutter creates a Polaroid-like image, adding to the verisimilitude of the experience.
Another sequence had Dollman dancing on a table in front of Sam; the player can pitch and rotate the camera in real time. Initially alone, identical doppelgängers (perhaps Dollmen) joined him as part of a fully coordinated and choreographed routine. A virtual Daichi Miura also beamed in, taking the lead and singing. This new single, “Horizon Dreamer,” will be released on various music streaming services on Monday, September 30 at midnight (Japan time).
With the focus on Japan, Kojima revealed a number of upcoming merchandise opportunities for local fans to enjoy new Death Stranding gear. Designer Errolson Hugh took to the stage with new jackets that he said he designed with Kojima and artist Yoji Shinkawa for both the in-game characters and real fans. Kojima Productions already offers the jackets for sale online for 248,600 yen per piece ($1,749 at current exchange rates).
To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the launch of Death Standing, Kojima Productions will open a pop-up store at retailer PARCO Shibuya in Tokyo starting November 8. Subsequent events will take place in early 2025 at PARCO branches in Nagoya and Osaka.
Kojima kept the audience waiting for details about the upcoming release of Death Stranding 2. While he previously announced that principal photography of the artists was finished in May this year, Kojima said that there is still a lot of work to be done, including reshooting all dialogues in Japanese with the aforementioned actors.
He estimated that development is only “30 – 40%” complete at this point, but reiterated a 2025 launch target for the game. Internally, they have a date in mind, he said, but he declined to share that information with the gathered crowd.
Diamond Feit is a freelance writer for IGN Japan
