Each Ultra-Limited Edition comes with a unique one-off sketch by Art Director Yoji Shinkawa. No one copy of the Ultra is the same. Each art piece is presented in a folder-frame. Heartman sees his condition as something of a blessing in disguise; his ability to regularly "visit" the other side and then return to the living is relatively unique, and it allows him to effectively (if slowly) research phenomena related to the Death Stranding in addition to searching for his family. This process has gradually deformed and weakened his heart, but after roughly a decade he has become America's leading expert on the Beach. Heartman generally keeps an alarm that warns him of his impending death, but can and does switch it off occasionally. Yoji Shinkawa was born in Hiroshima, December 25th 1971. In 1994 he graduated from Kyoto Seika University, a private art university renowned for its art, design, and manga faculties, where Shinkawa majored in "Western painting." Here, he specialized in oil painting, but did not restrict himself to learning one specific technique or skill: he was highly versatile in the arts of drawing and sculpting, honing skills at university that would prove very useful later on. Becoming a Beach expert, Heartman is hired by Bridges and chosen as a member of the first expedition, led by Amelie, to connect communities to the newly Chiral Network, and study the Beach and Death Stranding. Like all the other members, however, Heartman has never met Amelie in person, as she is part of the advanced team. Once installed in the area north of Mountain Knot City, the team of scientists began to reveal an anomaly in the tar belt around Edge Knot City, tar that surfaced to the surface, devouring Heartman's colleagues and a secondary station, essential for expand the Chiral Network to the west thus remaining disconnected.

The combined result of his artistic training and choice of tools, is that his pen flows intuitively, the paper capturing bold characters in strong poses that seem to come from nowhere—Shinkawa's doodles show his absolute mastery of weight distribution in a human body, keeping character art from "floating," as the workings of gravity are always evident. The user so far has shared two different collections of artwork. The first one shows new types of BTs that didn’t make it to the game. These can be seen in the gallery below. Kojima again: "We also grade each portfolio with a rating of S, A, B, C etc. (the S-rank is from a Japanese academic ranking system used to describe a level superlative to grades such as A, B, etc—AT) I’ve probably looked at 10,000 candidates myself at this point, and I’ve never seen anyone who I immediately wanted to give an S until Shinkawa. He’s the only one, and it was an instant “gold star”. He had 4 different styles on display then. When I first saw his work he had drawings in an American comic style, a French comic style… and these didn’t at all seem like they’d been drawn by the same person. One folder, four distinct styles."The first edition is limited to 300 units, and is presented with a signed art print featuring the work of Yoji Shinkawa, Art Director for the game. Central Region: Chiral Artist's Mother • Collector • Cosplayer • Craftsman • Doctor • Elder • Engineer • Film Director • First Prepper • Junk Dealer • Mountaineer • Mountain Guide • Novelist's Son • Peter Englert • Photographer • Photographer's Mother • Roboticist • Spiritualist • Timefall Farmers • Veteran Porter • Wandering MC

When it came to designing mechanical elements like robots and vehicles, how much did you consider how realistic or believable they might be in the world?Death Stranding is getting a brand new art book that reveals some of the unseen concepts from the game including new enemies and vehicles. As part of the interviews for our new video, How Death Stranding Foresaw Our Future, we asked Kojima about the image he tweeted (below), which appeared to show a new vehicle type branded with "BRIDGES", the name of Death Stranding's post-apocalyptic corporation-government: At the heart of Kojima's new game, that would take advantage of the 3D rendering capabilities of the new PlayStation console, was the Metal Gear REX, a walking tank. It fell to Shinkawa to design the 3D model. First, the creative parameters were discussed: in movement, the REX should have a dinosaur-like quality (the Tyrannosaurus Rex served as inspiration for its name and shape), and as a robot it should not follow the human form or be "too much from outer space"—basically excluding the whole canon of Japanese mecha designs as reference material. Heartman tends to make a heart "icon" pop up when he does a "thumb up" sign. He can also make a broken heart pop up, like when Sam messed with his phonograph while leaving his lab.