In July 2026, an original art piece inspired by the characters of DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH was showcased at the STRAND STORE, a pop-up store event by KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS.
We asked KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS concept artist Entei Ryu about what went into creating the sculpture “CONNECTION (Kizuna)”, displayed at the event for a limited time. The artwork is also on display at STRAND STORES at Shinsaibashi PARCO (from September 19) and at Nagoya PARCO (from October 17).
Please feel free to use this article as a companion piece as you appreciate the artwork.
Building imagination into something real.
――Can you please tell us what you do at KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS?
My name is Entei Ryu and I work at KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS primarily as a concept artist. Most of the time, I use sculpting and drawing to build the visuals of characters, creatures and the world itself. I’ve worked on concept art for DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH, OD, and more recently PHYSINT, as well as the upcoming DEATH STRANDING animation projects.
Sometimes I also would create poster visuals for those titles or pieces of art that are showcased at these sorts of events.
――How would you describe the work you do as a concept artist?
My job is to use drawings and sculptures, based on the information provided by Hideo Kojima, Yoji Shinkawa and the production team, to create a starting point for how things might look, their overall visuals and new ideas. For example, the Magellan Man is humongous, so a sculpture makes it much easier to visualize its scale than say as a 2D image. It’ll take more time to create, but it’s much more effective at communicating its presence and its information.
The Magellan Man prototype ended up being more than a meter tall and has Sam in one of its hands as a reference of scale. We’re thinking of having this on display at the 10th Anniversary Exhibition, so I would love to have everyone experience its size and all those details firsthand!
Building a connection between the game and its users through CONNECTION (Kizuna).
――Can you tell us more about your sculpture “CONNECTION (Kizuna)”?
It was created for the event at Shibuya PARCO (STRAND STORE). I chose three characters from the game to convey this idea of “connection,” because to me, these female characters were incredibly memorable. The game is of course full of interesting characters, but the personalities of these three are great in their own ways. Fragile is characterized by motherliness, leadership and trauma. Rainy by her power to save and bring growth. Tomorrow for symbolizing growth and the future. I linked these extraordinary traits through the past, the present and the future. It felt to me like these three were sacred, like the goddesses of fate. The piece is designed in a way that it can also look like a divine statue. Their clothes, hair and poses are all structured to support and complement one another, instead of lining them up side by side.
――At which point did you decide on the title for your piece?
It actually didn’t have a name when the sculpting was done. I brought the completed sculpture to Hideo Kojima to show him, and he gave it a name right then and there: “Kizuna” (interpersonal connection).
――What were some things that you especially cared about in your creative process?
When creating an artistically focused piece, I typically don’t focus on 100% parity with the original scanned data. We do have high-quality scan data and in-game models available, but this one I sculpted from scratch. It would’ve been easier to supervise the design if I had reused the data, but I wanted to create this from the ground-up.
It’s like a photograph versus a painted portrait. A photograph can capture every small detail of a character, but I think there’s value in something that was created through what the human eyes see. There’s divergence there, which might not be perfect, but it is making something that only I can create with my own hands that I care about most. Whenever I create something, I interpret the character in my own way and then let that interpretation flow into the work. I won’t entirely know what the final product might look like until it’s all done.
For this project, I think it landed somewhere in between Mr. Shinkawa’s character design, and the facial styles and aura of those three actors. This is something that happened thanks to Léa Seydoux playing Fragile in the world of DS2. I expanded on that for each one of the three characters in my own way.
――So you value the changes that can happen in the process?
Trying to reproduce a specific image is going to be a very mechanical process that takes away any opportunity of encountering something new.
Whenever there is something in your hands that you can physically touch as you create, that lets you have dialogue with what you’re making. An artwork is the resulting mass of all of that, including the time you spent and what you felt during memorable moments in the past. One thing I am particular about though, and this is something that is common across all of my works, is pouring my efforts into the artwork’s lifelikeness and the realism exuded by its presence, instead of just adding on details. The final product is something that doesn’t move, but that captured moment is going to contain all of the time and underlying emotion, still dynamic and moving about.
――Was this piece worked on by you alone?
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