@Robby:
LoU2, on a purely technical level, is great.
Lol no, it's not great by any means.
Visually, the game looks great. But when you hold the controller and start interacting with it then you will see how shallow the game actually is. You can tell that ND wasted so much time on trying to be "realistic" that they ultimately failed to use that realism for anything other than it being….just there. The rope physics, for example, is cool....but it is just that; cool little side thing. Since ND controls the game so much, the rope in itself becomes a scripted thing that you just have to do in order to go along with ND's classic heavy-gunplay followed by slow and tedious puzzles.
And that type of limitation extends to many other stuff such as which object you can climb or not climb, which you can "punch" or not punch, or which thing you can "break" and not break. It's full of inconsistent logic all over the place where ND started heavily scripting and controlling shit ton of gameplay stuff that ultimately leave the game feeling empty and shallow.
Aside from that, the shooting, combat encounters as well as the level design in this game is worst than the first game by far. It's hard to explain if you haven't played the game but shooting, due to realism, can cause some really awkward moments in the gameplay. Due to the gun's slow and tedious nature, you are better off trying to use the hand-to-hand combat which is where the gameplay of TLOU2 ultimately shines.
TLOU2 had the budget, resources, and time to be something much better but it instead wasted it on trying to be pretty. It's worst then part 1 in many regards.
Try playing MGSV and TLOU2 back to back and you will see how utterly outdated TLOU2 actually is past the visuals.
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@Lord:
what's with this trend of calling anything slightly edgier than disney "torture porn"
Did you even play the game?
Because the game is not "slightly" ediger than Disney, unless you are visiting some kinky sites and referring to those as "disney", it is MUCH MUCH more edgier and is perfectly described as "torture porn".
As far as I know, the employees of ND had to watch/research actual human decapitation in order to create the "realistic" gore it wanted to portrayed.
I sure as hell haven't heard of Disney or its employees having to do the same for their movies.
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@starlalilymoon:
What made the story so horrible about The Last of Us 2 compared to the first one?
Because TLOU1 was very clearly meant to be a stand-alone father-daughter story that wasn't supposed to get a sequel. But due to the success of the first game, ND HAD to create a part 2 because ND aren't exactly creative and love to milk their current franchise. So naturally, when they were greenlit to create part 2, ND had to quickly think about what to do for part 2 since part 1 basically ended simple-story that they wanted to tell and that's where they decided that going in the direction that every generic zombie story goes into would be a very interesting idea while also covering the most basic and generic idea of a storyline which is "revenge".
And that's where the failure of part 2 comes in; it fundamentally tries to retcon a lot of stuff from the first game. Kills off the most/the only interesting character in order to gave way for the more boring paper-thin characters to start their CW-teen-emo-drama and spends close to 20 hours by trying to make a very simple point that they themselves haven't really thought about for more than 2 seconds.
It's full of fifth-grader level of stupid writing, downright moronic decisions, obvious emotional-blackmail techniques, uses the garbage newly introduced character Abby to replace Joel because it was 2020 and every Western writer was trying to pass garbage writing by masking it with more trendy stuff, introduces EVEN MORE shitty characters whose entire purpose is to get killed because that's somehow "realistic" and makes people think it's a very mature piece of work when it's just dumb, etc….
TLOU2 is a game where the more you think about it, the stupider the game becomes.