Death Stranding 2 Didn’t Need Neil Vana

One of the biggest reasons I’m not 100% gushing over Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is, as mentioned in my review, there are times when Kojima Productions unnecessarily repeated certain story beats. For the sake of avoiding spoilers, I didn’t spell out exactly why this bothered me so much. Now that everyone’s gotten a chance to play, it is time. I think the entire Neil Vana character and storyline is completely unnecessary in Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and the narrative would have been much stronger if Kojima Productions hadn’t wedged it in so the sequel would include a Cliff Unger character and gameplay segments.

Editor’s Note: There will be lots of major Death Stranding and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach spoilers regarding the story and Neil Vana below.

In the original Death Stranding, segments with former Army Special Forces Captain Cliff Unger come up and involve warzone boss fights against the soldier. They’re gritty. They’re dark. It’s steeped in mystery. It ties in greatly with Sam’s own past and offers incredibly insightful reveals into why he is a repatriate capable of returning from the Beach after death. It offers an insight into the Bridge Baby program Bridges created. It diversifies gameplay in a game that doesn’t really glorify or utilize combat in the way we expect from Hideo Kojima titles. Because of these moments, we realize Sam almost ended up being a BB. Cliff is his father who strived to save him and prevent that. Die-Hardman tried to help, but failed and was under Bridget Strand’s orders to get Sam. Sam ended up killed in the ensuing altercation, but Amelie brought him back to life and bestowed the repatriate abilities upon him. Bridget adopted him. 

As you can see, all valuable.

My first issue with this comes from a gameplay perspective. While those moments with Cliff Unger were intriguing and fantastic setpieces, there isn’t the same need for them with Neil Vana in Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. This is a far more combat-heavy game, one in which concerns about corpses and Voidouts won’t be a problem until the post-game. (That is, if you choose to enable the option that even makes them an issue.) Sam gets a wide array of weaponry. We’re encouraged to use them against armed survivalist humans, BTs, and ghost mechs of all sorts. There isn’t the same avoidance around altercations. The nature of the storyline also means we happen upon segments when elements of the Beach come up, such as when the DHV Magellan rides tar currents or Sam goes through Plate Gates, so tastes of otherworldly experiences already come up too. 

I’m also bothered by how similar the Neil Vana segments are to the Cliff Unger ones. They aren’t 1:1 with the original experiences, since they draw from moments in our new opponent’s life. However, they’re so similar that there isn’t the same punch. Deal with the ghostly soldiers accompanying the boss. Play shadow-games with him as you hit him with a few bullets or fists, then chase him down to attack again. Get some vague pieces of scenes that don’t always make sense or tell the full truth until you see the bigger picture. The tie between the two again seems to be the BB, in this case Lou’s pod. 

Given the other means by which Kojima Productions trickles out information about Lou, that makes Neil Vana segments in Death Stranding 2: On the Beach feel unnecessary too. Once Sam and the crew at Drawbridge start looking into it, we get just as much valuable insight from folks like Fragile, Heartman, Deadman, and The Motherhood’s Doctor. Instead of forcing this other character in for the sake of having another Cliff Unger antagonist around, why not instead push even more into the concepts of Sam connecting and relying on his friends and allies at Drawbridge to come to terms with what’s happened to Lou and get answers about her past? 

Especially since, frankly, the injection of Neil Vana and the Lucy Strand storyline in Death Stranding 2: On the Beach made me feel like Kojima Productions retcon events and established facts from the original game. Once one of these Neil nightmare segments involves a scene with Lucy telling him that the child she is carrying is his baby and we get Sam’s reaction, I actually needed to stop playing and double check my notes from a Death Stranding replay ahead of this release to confirm this ended up rewriting history. It’s more than just a photograph being changed from one game to the next to more closely match a character redesign. This is changing from Sam suddenly having a negative view of his wife, to the point of saying she was only his therapist and not his partner, after going through a game where it felt like the developer established he loved her and was heartbroken over her suicide and voidout that resulted after her body was undiscovered. And if there is this hostility over what happened and the betrayal introduced in this entry, why did he keep the photo of the two of them with his mother Bridget?

Because this Neil Vana storyline is forced into Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, we get this complete rewrite of history and events. I also feel like it doesn’t fit in with other bits of established lore from the previous game. Allegedly, Lucy told Bridget about her dreams of the Beach while pregnant. Except if she was talking to Neil at this time, she would know about Bridges’ BB plans, the sacrificial BB project, and his involvement in transporting Stillmothers over the border. This game even confirms she had been collecting evidence on the wrongdoings. So why would she have confided in Bridget about that and had that somehow chronicled in the original game? 

In turn, this completely rewrote history for the events that led to Sam becoming an outcast and isolating himself. The first game established Lucy’s death and voidout did it. But here, we see that it was Neil Vana’s getting to that state that caused the voidout at UCA-01-0C. It also establishes that Sam actually made it to Lucy’s side before this, again rewriting things.

I get that Hideo Kojima probably decided somewhere along the way that it would be cool and tie things up nicely to somehow tie Sam and Lou even closer together by making her his daughter with Lucy and trying to maker her situation as a BB similar to what Cliff Unger went through with him. I think the execution ended up being not great. Shoehorning Neil Vana into Death Stranding 2: On the Beach to set up similar gameplay and story beats ends up undoing character development and lore from the first game. It completely kept it from having any kind of impact on me in the way the Cliff and Sam reveals in Death Stranding did. It’s just disappointing, and I feel the story would have been stronger without the character in it.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is available on the PS5.