What makes this particular whale (or whale-like creature) spotting so fascinating, though, is Kojima’s recent history of using whales to tease new projects.
See, in 2012, a mysterious developer known as Moby Dick Studio confirmed that they were working on a new game called The Phantom Pain. Fans quickly figured out that the whole thing was a ruse and that Phantom Pain was the next Metal Gear game, but Kojima denied being associated with Moby Dick Studio or The Phantom Pain until 2013 when he finally confirmed that all of that was absolutely true.
Kojima then prominently featured beached whales in the first trailer for Death Stranding. That visual actually turned out to be a pretty significant tip of the hat towards Death Stranding‘s main themes, but for our purposes at this time, just know that it also continued Kojima’s admittedly recent streak of using whales to help reveal new games.
So is that what’s happening here? Well, there’s no clear answer to that question at the moment, but there are a few things that are certainly weird about the whale’s appearance in this trailer (even by Hideo Kojima’s standards).
First off, the whale’s appearance oddly occurs after the “end” of the actual trailer and after the game’s title screen has been prominently displayed. It’s certainly possible that the creature will simply appear in Death Stranding Director’s Cut (which I suppose you could call a new Kojima game), but there’s honestly nothing in the rest of the trailer that helps explain its sudden appearance or the mysterious water-filled room that Sam Porter Bridges suddenly finds himself in. At the very least, there’s nothing in the rest of the trailer that helps explain why this mysterious creature was essentially chosen to be the trailer’s final image.
For now, let’s just assume that the creature’s introductory scene does not occur in the game exactly as we see it here and was instead created for the purposes of this preview. That still brings us back to that eternal Hideo Kojima question “Why?”
