It took a while but I finally finished Last of Us 2. I don’t quite know how I feel about it. I loved the first game, but I think this game doesn’t really take the story in a logical next step. Most of all, the game is WAY too long. It seemed to have a bit of Lord of The Rings syndrome where every time you think it’s done, there’s another scene or gameplay option. I’m also not a fan of the ending. I won’t say what it is here, but while the first game had a controversial ending it at least made sense…this one…not so much. More detailed and spoilers in the next post.
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So, the aforementioned gimmick was a good idea. I liked seeing two sides of the story, but Abby wasn’t a redeemable character, and frankly neither was Ellie, so I ended up not rooting for either.
No one had any redeemable qualities and I don’t understand why Naughty Dog did that. Ellie turned into a monster with no care for anyone when she should have been the one who knew how important it is to keep friends close.
Abby randomly decided to care about the Scar kids because…they were kids? And she was a kid when her dad died? I guess? I understand why Naughty Dog wanted her to have a change of heart, but it didn’t go through very well. And her letting Ellie go was stupid and made no sense because I didn’t sense any actual change in her.
I was ready and OK for it to end when Ellie went to her farmhouse with Dina, but then she leaves just to keep the plot going. Then we’re introduced to ANOTHER terrible group of people (The Rattlers), it all comes to a head with a fight where Ellie finally gets to kill Abby but doesn’t because…reasons. Then Dina left and it’s done.
I don’t need a happy ending, the first one certainly didn’t have one, but this was no ending at all and there was no resolution. I felt like I just wasted my time. There is probably some kind of “man’s inhumanity to man” and “all people are terrible” kind of moral stand here, but I didn’t feel it. Has anyone else played? What’d ya’ll think?
I’ve been watching my favorite gamer play this on YT. I haven’t finished yet, but I have to say, the whole premise is stupid. Ellie is effectively making her life and those around her so much worse in the name of revenge.
Who is the gamer on YouTube? I’m always looking for good ones to watch
Be warned, when I say ‘fave’, I really mean the only one I watch.
Years ago, I needed help with an old Star Wars Bounty Hunter game. He was the first one to pop up when I did a search.
His earlier stuff, he’s an immature douche.
He’s better now, but I suspect that’s because he got himself a girlfriend, as well as more sponsors.
Anyway here’s his YT page.
I’m really late to the party on this series. I bought The Last of Us 1 about three months ago just to kill a little lockdown boredom. I didn’t really know anything about it other than that it had something to do with zombies, and since I’m not a huge fan of zombie games I wasn’t really expecting anything more a few hours of mildly diverting generic shoot-em-up action.
What I actually got was, without doubt, the best game I’ve ever played. I’m not really much of a gamer, so this endorsement may not carry much weight, but not only is The Last of Us the best game I’ve ever played, I find it difficult to imagine how much better any future games could be. The graphics, the action, the voice acting, and the game mechanics were all superb, but what really sets the game apart is the story. The Last of Us 1 has one of the best stories I’ve ever enjoyed in any medium. I’ve rarely felt so involved with a story’s characters as I did with Joel and Ellie. The character development was flawless, up there with some of the best books I’ve ever read, and the ending was absolutely gut-wrenching. I never, ever thought I’d be able to say that about a video game.
I became low-key obsessed with it and played it through on all levels of difficulty (except grounded. Try as I might, I can never get past the bit with Ellie and David in the cabin. Grrr!)
As you can imagine, I was hugely excited to but TLOU2. And while there’s lots to recommend it, I can’t help but feel it’s profoundly inferior to the original. While TLOU1 was a masterpiece, TLOU2 is a deeply flawed masterpiece, and, most disappointingly of all, all of these flaws concern the strongest element of the first game; the story.
spoilers ahead:
The first controversial decision the makers made was to have Joel killed off by the daughter of one of the people he killed in the first game. This was a shocking moment, but it’s one which I can understand from a storytelling point of view. Joel’s arc was basically over, and his death acts as a strong catalyst for everything that follows. There’s an old writer’s maxim about giving the audience what they need rather than what they want, and I think this decision is a fair example of that.
The first part of the game is actually fine. Ellie and her girlfriend Dina go on a mission to track down Joel’s killer (Abby). They end up in Seattle which is being torn apart by a war between two factions; the Wolves (a kind of provisional army of whom Abby is a member) and the Seraphites (a crazy religious cult, also known as ‘Scars’). When Abby killed Joel, she brought along some of her friends, and the first part of the game basically consists of Ellie and Dina killing Abby’s friends as they travel around Seattle looking for her. This section of the game ends when Abby gets the jump on them and holds them at gunpoint.
This is where things start to go very wrong. The game then takes you back in time a few days (to just before Ellie and Dina’s arrival in Seattle) and now you get to play as Abby. The makers’ intentions seem to have been to get players to hate Abby (because she killed Joel) and then have them empathize with her as they play through her redemption arc. Unfortunately, they’re not very successful in this, for several reasons.
Firstly, Abby is a deeply unsympathetic character. She’s insular, her face is set in a permanent scowl, and she seems to have no discernible sense of humor whatsoever. This is in stark contrast to Ellie, who has an endearingly outgoing and whimsical personality (when she’s not killing people, that is). The first job of a writer who wants his audience to empathize with a character is to make them likeable, and they utterly failed to do this.
Worse, at no point whatsoever does Abby show even a scintilla of remorse for killing Joel. Now, you might argue that there’s no reason for her to feel any remorse, given that Joel killed her father. But I think that, if the makers’ intentions were to have the audience empathize with Abby, this would’ve been a necessary compromise to make. It might have been different if Abby had shot Joel, but she didn’t. Instead, she took her sweet time, beating him to a pulp with a golf club. That matters. It’s hard to empathize with someone who isn’t conflicted about that, no matter how understandable her motivation might’ve been.
Abby’s redemption arc is supposed to be driven by her quest to save the lives of two Scar children. For reasons I won’t go into, both the Wolves and the Scars want these kids dead. However, Abby (who is, at one point described by another character as the “Number one Scar killer”) is, as Sir_T-Cups notes, never really given much reason to do this. Yes, she first meets the kids when they save her life, but she repays that debt almost immediately afterwards when she saves their lives in return. We’re never given any good reason why she might do more than that. It’d be different if we felt that she was, in some way, trying to atone for what she did to Joel, but the game never gives us any reason to believe that. It’s a far greater character inconsistency than having her feel remorse for killing Joel.
Anyway, skipping ahead, we find ourselves back at the point where Abby gets the drop on Ellie and Dina. But we’re still playing as Abby. We now have to use the character we don’t like to fight the character we do like. Abby wins but lets Ellie and Dina go. This is another massive character inconsistency because Ellie and Dina have killed nearly all Abby’s friends. It was the right decision to make in terms of getting the audience to empathize with Abby, but it’s another decision which we’re not really given a good reason for.
The game then skips forward about a year or so. One of the kids Abby was trying to save has died and Abby and the other kid (Lev) are traveling together in much the same way as Joel and Ellie did in the first game. They’re captured by a gang of slavers (the Rattlers).
We now go back to Ellie who is living with Dina and taking care of Dina’s son from a previous relationship. They seem happy, but then Ellie learns where Abby is and decides to leave the family she’s made to hunt her down. Cue another hour or so of carnage while Ellie fights her way through the slavers. And here’s where things really go off the rails.
It transpires that Abby and Lev have been punished by the slavers for trying to escape. They’ve been tied to these big wooden posts and left at the mercy of the elements. They’re both at death’s door, and all Ellie has to do to get her revenge is just walk away. Instead, she cuts Abby loose so she can kill Abby herself. They have another fight, which, this time, Ellie convincingly wins, but at the very last second - motivated by almost nothing - Ellie lets Abby go.
There’s so much wrong with this. First off, Ellie has killed about two hundred people over the course of the game to get to this point. All of that is now for nothing, because the makers decided to give Ellie a change of heart for no good reason. Not only does the game completely fail to get us to sympathize with Abby, it makes us actively dislike Ellie, not for letting Abby go per se but for throwing into stark relief just how easy it must’ve been for her to kill everyone else. It’s the exact opposite of what they were trying to achieve.
Second, Ellie’s decision to walk out on her family to seek revenge a second time does a huge disservice to both Ellie and Dina. It makes their relationship look hollow, and establishing the strength of their bond was one of the few things the writers did well, IMO.
Thirdly, after Ellie lets Abby go, we’re treated to a flashback in which we learn that Ellie had decided to try and forgive Joel for his actions in the first game. All through the game, I thought Ellie’s quest was motivated by the fact that Abby had killed Joel before they’d had a chance to reconcile. But it turns out that they had reconciled. In my view, this massively reduces the strength of Ellie’s motivation to seek revenge and, ultimately, it turns her into just another video game character that has to commit an obscene amount of violence to keep the story going.
There’s a lot that the game gets right. The graphics are superb, the music is excellent, the AI is a big improvement on the first game, the fight scenes are brilliant (Hillcrest, anyone?), the voice acting is, again, exceptional. But the story is terribly hollow. The recurring theme is “revenge is bad” and I didn’t think it was possible to beat an audience over the head with the same message as much as TLOU2 does.
I’ve gone on way too long, but I think that’s a testament to how much I loved the first game and how let down I felt by the story of this one. I’d still recommend it, because, despite my criticisms of the story, every other aspect of the game is excellent, but it’s a big step down from the first one. I just hope they don’t incorporate any elements of TLOU2 into the upcoming HBO adaptation.
What percent of this game do you play as Ellie and what percent as Abby? I only played the first game.
It’s about 60% Ellie, 40% Abby.
Just wanted to say thanks for the recap of the game. The distaste you have for the plot choices and the actions of the characters being forced by the writers is precisely why I loathed the ending of TLOU1 (an otherwise fascinating game). After that, I swore I would never play TLOU2, but I really appreciate having the plot explained. It sounds horrible.
I’m gonna be the contrary voice.
I really, really like TLoU1. The epilogue DLC, “Left Behind,” is one of the very best DLCs I’ve ever played.
And I absolutely adore TLoU2. For me, it surpasses and transcends the first game in nearly every way.
The thing is, though, it’s not trying to repeat the experience of the first game like a typical sequel. It’s not a rehash of the story and it’s not interested in replicating the emotional experience. It takes the established building blocks and it goes off in a very different direction.
Which is why I think it’s fine that some people don’t like it. I’m not going to argue that you’re “playing it wrong” or anything like that. If it doesn’t work for you, if what it’s doing doesn’t connect for you, if you wanted something else out of it, that’s okay.
In fact, it’s to be expected. The first game wants to put you through an emotional wringer, but it also wants to give you a satisfying story with a proper ending for a very flawed protagonist. If you can get on its wavelength, it works like gangbusters.
That’s not the second game. The second game is interested in something more complex, more challenging. It’s not straightforward. It’s consciously confrontational and it puts a heavy conceptual load on you as the player, asking that you fragment your emotional attachment and bifurcate your empathy. It’s a lot more demanding than the usual straightforward avatar-as-projected-self experience. It wants to push you away with one hand while simultaneously pulling you in with the other.
It’s difficult and it’s exhausting. But for me, I found it exhilarating and deeply rewarding. I’ve thought about it constantly since the initial play, and as luck would have it, I happen to be in the middle of a back-to-back replay of both games, so the whole thing is very fresh for me.
I personally regard the second game as a groundbreaking masterpiece. It’s not perfect, but what it does well, the core of what it asks of the player, is, in my opinion, a huge leap forward in realizing the true potential of narrative games.
It’s not for everybody. It’s extremely divisive, YMMV on steroids. If you didn’t like it, I won’t try to change your mind or tell you you’re wrong.
But for me, it’s the most emotionally thrilling game experience I’ve ever had.
Just wanted to put an alternative viewpoint into the mix.
Too big an ask for me; it just felt like I was playing against myself, and forcing me to help the (albeit damaged) sadist, Abby.