11-07-2025
Is Japanese skin really ‘too smooth' for Hideo Kojima's games?
They say beauty is only skin deep, but does that also apply to the world of video games?
Released on June 26, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is the latest action-adventure game from Japanese auteur Hideo Kojima and his studio, Kojima Productions. The follow-up to 2019's Death Stranding, the game sets players in a postapocalyptic Australia, where they must deliver supplies to and establish communications between remote colonies of survivors — all while unwrapping the mysteries of the cataclysm that brought humanity to the brink of extinction.
Kojima's games are more an acquired taste than mass-market hits, but even accounting for this niche appeal, the game currently sits at a 90 rating on Metacritic and is measuring up to be one of the best games the 61-year-old developer has ever made.
Aside from critical acclaim, Death Stranding 2 also includes a relative rarity for a Kojima game: a Japanese cast member. Japanese Australian actress Shioli Kutsuna's casting as curiously afflicted survivor Rainy prompted IGN Japan to question why this isn't a more common occurrence in Kojima's games.
'It's hard to make Asian people look accurate in (computer-generated imagery),' Kojima said. 'Especially young women or those with flawless skin, they end up looking too smooth. It's not just Japanese people, but many Asians have beautiful, fine skin that makes them look artificial in CG.'
Kojima added that language skills also influence casting decisions: Though Kojima Productions is based in Tokyo, it releases English-language games with performances recorded in Los Angeles. Still, the untranslatable quality of Asian complexions was taken by the internet to be perhaps the only blemish on Death Stranding 2's release, with multiple threads on Reddit criticizing both the technical and cultural merits of Kojima's claims.
Many of these criticisms take for granted an understanding of how digital faces are created, though. Some developers, like Kojima Productions, work with real-life actors, whose likenesses are digitally scanned and then blended with facial animations. Other studios create character models by digitally melding different facial features together, with or without inspiration from an actual person. The Assassin's Creed franchise, for example, has for years featured historical figures, but with no Leonardo da Vinci available to come into the studio for a face scan, the only alternative is to re-create a digital visage that evokes his personage instead of replicating it entirely.
That East Asian skin remains beyond the technical capabilities of modern game development is, on its face, a laughable proposition. The number of Japanese or ethnically Asian characters from major hits in the last few months and years alone — Lune in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 ; Naoe in Assassin's Creed Shadows ; Jin in Ghost of Tsushima ; and the 20 years of yakuza gangsters and Tokyo lowlifes in the Like a Dragon series — should tell you that even if the faces in these games failed to capture the spark of real-world likenesses, it did nothing to hamper their success.
The question, therefore, isn't whether East Asian skin looks good in games. Rather, it's whether it looks good to Kojima.
Kojima has long prized casting not just real-life actors but A-list celebrities in his games. In the Death Stranding series, Norman Reedus plays the main character, while Lea Seydoux, Elle Fanning, Margaret Qualley, Mads Mikkelsen and others also appear not merely as voice talent for other characters with different appearances but as you might expect them to for any role on the silver screen.
Norman Reedus leads a largely A-list cast of Hollywood celebrities in Death Stranding 2: On the Beach — a reflection how Hideo Kojima wants his games to look, play and feel. |
KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS
Sometimes, Kojima's Hollywood-first approach leads to consternation among fans. For decades, voice actor David Hayter played the iconic character of Solid Snake (and some of its derivatives, but no time to get into Kojima's labyrinthian plots now) of the Metal Gear Solid franchise.
As the series grew in popularity, Kojima would try to recast Snake's voice actor more than once, including an unsuccessful attempt to rope in Kurt Russell — whose character in the 1981 film 'Escape from New York' was its original inspiration. In 2015, Kojima would finally get his way, shunting Hayter aside in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain in favor of Keifer Sutherland.
Kojima is an admitted and unabashed movie buff, and he often casts his games like a film director. Look no further than Death Stranding's world-record, 71-minute-long cutscene (in addition to the game's 10-plus additional hours of nonplayable runtime) as proof of what informs his artistic approach. He envisions a character and finds a famous face that he feels fits.
When it comes to Kojima's visuals, art imitates life. And it's more often Hollywood's version of life — with all its inherent biases — that his games try to imitate.
