Death Stranding 2’s lavish, slightly eerie photo mode is what you get when Kojima gets a big budget with no oversight

Kojima Productions held a 90-minute panel at the Tokyo Game Show during which Hideo Kojima, assorted guest stars and around eight minutes of new Death Stranding 2 footage were shown. The photo mode was one of the most extravagant. It left me speechless at first, and then I realized that it was unmistakably Hideo.

The Death Stranding 2 video shows Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus), taking pictures of Fragile, Rainy, and Tomorrow on the Magellan ship, which appears to be your home. The full clip is available during the TGS panel, (timestamp), or below from Kojima Productions.

Kojima Productions motion capture technology is one of the best I've ever seen in a video game. Its animations create a real authenticity to the character movements. The studio's hyper-detailed visual style is stylised enough to sand off the photorealism, but not so much that it reaches the uncanny valley.

This positively luxurious-looking mode is a love letter to scanning tech, and Kojima's hopeless star-chasing as much as anything else. It's the kind of overwrought feature that you can tell one man made a priority because he loves using it.

There are some noticeable loops as the three characters move their arms and interact, but you have to look closely to find them. This mode also appears to have an element where the characters adopt specific expressions when you press the shutter. For example, Seydoux smiles, and the resulting Polaroid style snap brightens and defines the lighting considerably. If past experience is any guide, there will be a zillion filters for this stuff.

You can move around while the characters are acting (though it is unclear how much freedom you have). In a nice but expected touch, one of the environments has a mirror to admire Reedus' cheekbones.

This looks like the best photo mode in the industry, and it's consistent with Kojima history. Metal Gear Solid featured a camera that, over the series's history, became more fully featured. Usually for the better, but sometimes skewing toward some of the bad Kojima trends.

I could list a number of examples of bad photo opportunities throughout the series. But the one that I always found the most disgusting was the photo mode used for bosses in MGS4. The bosses of that game, the Beauty and Beast unit, were all female soldiers who had been traumatized by war. Also, under the mechsuits, they're smoking! After defeating each of the members, you can take pictures of them in various positions and cavorting while soft porno music plays. You can zoom in on their bodies, pan around them and zoom out. I find it a little gratuitous and dodgy.

The DS2 photo mode is not as bizarre, but I have played every Kojima-directed game and I can see a few alarms. The audio is a bit weird. The three women are constantly giggling as if they're having a slumber-party over low jazzy techno. All three women are wearing ship uniforms. But I know Kojima, and I'd bet that there are other crew outfits available through the game. You can tell that some players will try to move the camera in certain poses. Is Kojima Productions going to scan Elle Fanning's entire body and then let sweathogs fly a camera around the bottom of her?

Kojima is the man who brought us Quiet. I don't like how gratuitously naughty his games can be. I could be mistaken, and who knows? Maybe one day I'll be ashamed of what I said and did. This incredible-looking photo mode makes me hope that it's Kojima doing what he does best: being whimsical and creative.