Death Stranding - Death Stranding: The Official Novelization – Volume 1 (Death Stranding, 1) Paperback – February 23, 2021

I have always loved Hideo Kojima's games' cinematic feel and storytelling. Death Stranding went above and beyond in both of these. This two-part book telling the first game's storyline is fantastic, and I hope they do this again with DS2: On the Beach.

I read some reviews that said this wasn’t great, but I really enjoyed it, and I’ve already purchased the second book. I’d seen things about the video game, and I was really interested in learning the story, but I didn’t want to play the game. The book was exactly what I was looking for, and I really enjoyed it. The world building here is incredible. It’s clear that a lot of thought went into this, and I’m invested in finding out what’s going to happen.

My daughter started ready it right away and finished it in two days. She loved it.

Amazing book. I don’t really ready any books but I ordered this book to fully understand Death Stranding story. There is so much in this book that’s has not been used in video game. It’s a masterpiece and great story!

This book is honestly fantastic! While I would say it is easier to understand this book if you have played the game, it is NOT necessary in my opinion. The author lays this out with an easy to understand plot line that slowly builds in complexity and leaves you with mind blowing thoughts and ideas to delve upon. It outlines so many facets of the game itself and gives a greater look into the storyline of Death Stranding. There are many moments in the book where the writer captures a moment in time and then the next sentence you are thrown backwards in history, context, or events, and then just a quick, you are thrust forward again to the present events. Pay close attention in your reading or you will miss details and be confused on what has occurred. Also, the writing will make you feel a characters emotions, thoughts, and actions directly, and then as you read, pieces of the writing will stick out as to show the internal mental conversation that the character is having with themself, all while having outside interactions alike. I absolutely loved these details and I encourage any reader to pay close attention again,for it is easy to miss.Overall, I could not put this book down and it read beautifully on my new Kindle Basic ‘22. It is gripping, emotionally charged, and worth every cent.Onto number 2, enjoy!-Chris

Arrived early in perfect condition.

I wasnt expecting much from a video game novelization, but this one turned out pretty decent

This game novelization is the first novella in the two-part novelization of the popular Video game Death Stranding. In case you're unfamiliar with Death Stranding story or never made it past its exposition-heavy opening, here's a very quick synopsis. Death Stranding follows the footsteps of a courier named Sam Porter Bridges, who's tasked with rebuilding a kind of country-wide quasi-internet structure known as the Chiral Network, after a series of apocalyptic events have forced the remaining pockets of human civilization in the United States underground.If I have to be honest, it is my least favourite game novelization/companion novel so far quality wise. It was heavily carried by the already well written and well established story and worldbuilding created for the video game, as without that this book would simply not hold up.I thoroughly enjoyed this book as the story and world are just so unique and even though it wasn’t perfect, or perhaps because of it, reading this novella made me even more excited to play the game some time as I just want to experience the story in full with visuals and gameplay. I consider this a huge plus, because even though this novelization was flawed, it didn’t ruin my experience with the story (which is really good), rather it has me wanting more if it.An important thing I want to touch upon is the writing, which felt a bit dry and unengaging to me. It felt like the book was somewhere halfway between a script written in prose and a rather condensed summary of the game. Most of the book was a bit ”he did this, he said that, she did that, she said this.”; describing what is happening without actually making a story out of all of it. There were certain scenes that were written beautifully, where the emotions, thoughts and experiences of the characters were leading instead of just actions, which shows that the author is quite capable of writing something good, but it seems struggle appeared when the characters just did something without much else to it and having to translate that to prose.One thing I kept in mind is that this novelization was originally written in Japanese by Hitori Nojima, also known as Kenji Yano, and then translated to English by Carley Radford. With translations there is always something that gets lost in the process from the original prose as not all languages flow the same way or have the same phrases and words to properly express everything when writing a translation. Japanese and English are completely different languages and it’s incredibly hard to properly phrase the beauty and poetry of certain Japanese words and phrases in English, which is a rather forward language. The roughness of the writing could have been caused by the translation finding a middle ground between proper translation and proper English flow.The next I want to address is the characters and their development. The majority of the main cast aside from Sam Porter Bridges aren’t very well introduced and remain a little vague throughout the book. There was a glossary at the start with a short description of certain notable characters, but that description remained kind of vague and having to put it into context yourself when reading about the characters didn’t always work. It would have been nice to have some more introduction and background woven in the story itself together with more explanation as to who they are in the story and what they mean in it. In video games, you can leave characters rather vague as there are visual cues such as general design, body language and visual context that explain the characters and build them up, so I understand the word-for-word character introduction might not exist in the game. But with a book, the reader only knows what is written, so unless the author literally writes the context, there is none.I kept finding myself scrolling back to the start of the book to read the character glossary another time, because I was just confused by the characters and often certain characters didn’t feel like different characters, just ones with different names, until much later into the story. It was really apparent the novelization is missing a lot of context to these characters that might otherwise have been presented visually or through gameplay that is simply not present in the translation to prose.Regardless of the flaws I presented, I enjoyed reading this first volume of the Death Stranding novelization. It works and it isn’t a bad novelization by any means, just not the best and not my favourite. If you are by any means intrigued by the premise or interested in the game, but can’t play (yet), this is an excellent way of consuming the story and the way it’s told might very well be the perfect recap for those who have played the game and want to revisit the story without a full replay.Overall, I look forward to reading the second volume and see where Sam’s journey is heading and after that, get myself a copy of the game to dive into this adventure another time in the original format.