Okay so after about 30 hours of playing, I've finally beaten Last of Us 2. As such I'm going to give a full comprehensive review of the game. I'm not looking to start shit with anyone, these are just my thoughts and feelings about a game that I'm leaving here for posterity. Spoilers ahead.
Gameplay and Graphics Design:
So let's start with the positives. Naughty Dog is a groundbreaking studio in terms of visual fidelity. They outdid themselves in LoU2 giving us a visually breathtaking world that pushed the limit of environment interactivity. Granted it's a bit less impressive when you consider ND literally worked their employees half to death to accomplish this but the results speak for themselves. From elaborate set pieces to small visual touches, it cannot be denied that a lot of people worked really hard to make a really pretty game. Even the simple act of upgrading your weapons come with lavishly detailed animations of each unique upgrade for each weapon. Despite the massive amount of data the game uses, other than when you start the game, the loading times after death are quite short lasting only a few seconds. I had zero crashes in my run and no bugs that were serious enough for me to remember if any.
In terms of mechanics, there was no real evolution to the previous game, if anything they made it way easier. Clickers which were a major threat in the first game, are a joke now as Ellie can always kill them with a knife, Abby still requires shivs but she can make two at a time and has a multitude of deadly weapons that can deal with them. The AI required some fine tuning, I remember an encounter where I tried to set some zombies on some human enemies only to wait 5 minutes as they skirted around each other until I lost my patience and killed them all myself. There was a serious problem of ludonarrative dissonance where I encountered a human enemy type that can take two shotgun shells to an unprotected face.
The biggest issue I had with the gameplay is how repetitively tedious the scrounging can get. The first game had much tighter level design where you had to scrounge on the go as you constantly adapted to new situations giving the game more tension. In this game, you spend 90% of the time crawling through big empty worlds picking up shit. Despite the visual design being gorgeous, there is so much wasted space in this game. The first area after the tutorial game play is this massive sprawling city that you have to comb through, however I would say only 30-40% of the zone was used. Your motivation of going through this city is just to get some gas to power a generator which seems like a massive letdown given the time and effort to make this open world roaming system. It seems like the level was based on the Uncharted:Lost Legacy spinoff which also had a sprawling free roam area, however in that game you had to go to three points on a map and do elaborate action set pieces to get the items to unlock the final area, you didn't waste three hours just to get some gas.
Now don't get me wrong, I actually like the gameplay loop of finding items, I find it relaxing but I can see it get very dull for many people. Also while the gameplay has pretty much remained unchanged from the first game….it's still a fun gameplay mechanic allowing you for a lot of room in strategy and creativity in item use, my particular favorite being laying a bomb for an enemy and using a bottle to lure him to it.
Music:
Honestly nothing to write home about. There are a lot of sad guitar covers including a sad rendition of Take on me played in full which honestly destroys the point of that song.
Story:
It fucking sucks.
I've been reading a lot of defenses on how the game is a bold subversion of the genre that is being review bombed because a lot of incels are too mentally insecure to accept the mature emotional beats of the story driven by powerful female characters, similar to the Last Jedi. The only thing I would compare to TLJ to this game is how quickly the argument surrounding it has been polarised. While I have issues with TLJ, I respect that it legitimately took bold risks and tried to give a fresh take to a tired story. In terms of narrative, I would say LoU2 more closely resembles Rise of the Skywalker. A sequel that took all the interesting ideas from its predecessor, flushed them down a toilet and wrote itself into a sewer. The first game was this refreshing twist of the post apocalypse zombie genre, exploring the bond of two people trying to survive in a cruel world, as they go through various settings, meet different people with their own motivations and goals, and go through their own personal growth as they become more dependent on each other. It was a fascinating character study with the ultimate message being how human love and connection is just as important for a person's survival as their safety. Framing Joel's act of love to save an innocent girl from death as an act of selfishness was a genius subversion of the genre and ending it on such an ambiguous note was absolutely perfect.
In Last of Us: Part 2, you learn that revenge is bad…..
That's really all it is. And boy does the story feel as hollow as the world it inhabits. Whereas the first game was so tightly written and had so much going on...the second game is basically get from point A to point B to kill this bitch. In the time I took to find a can of gas in LoU2, I had gone through 3 locations and resolved two characters arcs in the first game. And let me make something clear, I loved Death Stranding, a literal walking simulator, but there was narrative and thematic purpose for that game being such a long slog of trekking across America. There is none of that in TLOU2, the only thing the drawn out slow burn in this game serves is to pad the runtime because the game director probably got it into his head that long stretches of nothing happening=art.
Structure:
The pacing of the game is absolutely abysmal, long slogs of nothing really happening (THREE FUCKING HOURS to get some gas for a generator) yet regarding what is there, so much of it is told in a random, haphazard fashion, flashbacks and flashforwards and flashbacks within flashbacks. I've seen this done many times before in films and games, faux auteur directors tell a story in a non-sequential order for no other reason but that they think it makes their work look artistic, everyone trying to be Quentin Tarantino without realizing that Pulp Fiction was a story best told out of order and that most stories would benefit being told in a chronological manner. In this case, this decision actively hurts the game.
The big gimmick of this game is that you play for half the game with Ellie before switching to the antagonist Abby, this is supposed to be a powerful moment which emphasizes the point on how every person has their own perspective to a situation. This moment is severely undercut by the fact that Abby was playable in the first 20 minutes of the game ruining the surprise, so even if you went in knowing about the change-up, it was telegraphed from the outset. The way the stories were interwoven felt somehow calculated for minimal emotional impact, after the first hour switching between Ellie and Abby, you spend the next 10 hours or so as Ellie before switching to Abby for another ten hours. The idea is to make the player feel guilty for all the violence Ellie caused in her run, this is a workable concept for a movie but a horrible idea for a game in which you spent such a long time killing as Ellie that you, the player, would long have become desensitized to the violence. For example, I love dogs but the game very quickly conditions you to hate game dogs. To you, they are nothing more than threats to be eliminated as quickly as possible because one sniff from that pupper is quickly going to blow your cover and they're so fucking fast, you can never reliably shoot them. After snuffing out 30 or so doggos, I'm not going to care much when I kill my 31st canine victim. However it's at the character change where it is revealed that that dog was called Alice and you could play fetch with it and how dare you, you monster! It's laughable, as laughable as the games attempts to guilt me for all the dead WLFs I laid at my feet by showing me that GASP they have faces and family and dreams! How dare I kill these people who actively tried to murder me and who I had no choice but to kill. Okay I'm sorry, i know I was talking about the story structure but fuck off with that shit, I'm not going to care about random NPCs just because they blurt out the random names of their dead comrades or make exaggerated gurgling sounds in their death throes, get out of here with those kindergarten level manipulation tactics, I'm not fucking four years old.
Ahem, so story structure, to make this idea workable I would have had two chapters switching between Ellie and Abby, something done in a far better game called Yakuza 0 which had a complex story that it needed to interweave between two characters. This would allow the player to get more emotionally invested in both characters, make it easier to understand the perspectives of both characters, understand how their stories are intertwined, make it easier to build a connection between the two characters and give their arcs more focus. However this game was written and directed by a chimpanzee flinging feces at a typewriter who actually thought people would cry about random interchangeable faces just because it told me to. So to cut ahead a little once we're done with Abby's side of the story which ended with her beating the shit out of Ellie and for some inexplicable reason sparing her again, we have an equally inexplicable timeskip where Ellie is living happily with her girlfriend and child at a farm just for her to have a random PTSD moment and resolving to try one more time in her murder revenge quest. This is such a baffling turn of events made all the more so when for no reason we jump back to Abby for 20 minutes when her character arc is by all means done yet the director felt we needed to spend one last segment with her to establish her getting captured in Santa Barbara, something that could have been established with dialogue in a cutscene. After which we jump back and stick with Ellie for the rest of the game. The game tries so hard to build this rivalry between Ellie and Abby, Abby kills Ellie's father figure, Ellie kills all of Abby's friends, they have two boss fights playable from both sides including a metal gear four style barefist fight in the ocean however because of the poor writing and story structure, you never really feel any sort of "bond" between the two. Part of it is the bad story structure but another part of it is that the two characters never really talk. They meet for a total of three times and share less than ten sentences between each other. A better story would have forced them together in a situation where they had to work together to survive where they're forced to talk and actually learn about each other. For crying out loud, Ellie never even learned that Abby was the daughter of the surgeon Joel killed!
The biggest offender of this nonsensical story telling was a flashback Ellie had before resolving to kill Abby for the last time. It was the trailer shown at E3 where Ellie was at a dance with Dinah. They only showed half the flashback for some reason which ended which was her kissing Dinah. The point being to show what Ellie was risking losing to go on her revenge quest. However, the second half of the flashback which was Joel defending Ellie from a bigot and Ellie telling Joel she'll work on forgiving him for lying to her about the ending of the first game was left for the very end of this game. And I do not understand why it was done this way other than to make us extra sad that Joel died I guess. It would have made way mroe sense to have this scene be placed before Ellie left for her murder quest to remind herself and us why she was doing this. It's such a weird, awkward way to split this flashback, it caught my attention more than any other scene in the game.
This incoherent structure hurt not just the narrative but the gameplay as well. I spent a lot of time upgrading Ellie's character abilities and weaponry and for the game to make me switch characters and start from scratch was very aggravating for me. In the middle of a game, I expect to be able to use all the skills I had learned and taking them away from me to work on a new character just seems antithetical to the purpose of a game which is forward progress. This is why Nier Automata didn't switch character perspectives until you beat the game at least once and when you did switch to the new character, it involved a completely new gameplay mechanic. This again could have been alleviated by switching between Ellie and Abby every two chapters or at least giving her the points I acquired as Ellie in her run (as was done in Yakuza 0). But again, I really don't think the director of this game cared about the player experience as much as he did about his overly pretentious film ideas.
Characters:
So now that I've delved into the story structure, next I'm going to focus on the characterization. In terms of established characters, Joel was barely in the game so there's not much to say there though what little there was they managed to get wrong which I'll get to later. And no one gives a fuck about Tommy. Ellie feels…so much more boring to her 14 year old self. None of the charm and personality of the previous game, I guess adulthood sucked all the personality out of her. And this was before Joel got killed by the way. I don't know what happened in between the games but it seems like the writer forgot to write actual characters with personality and emotional conflict and instead could only give walking blank slates who constantly throw badly written fluff banter with other characters. The one exception being one flashback when 14 year old Ellie and Joel visit a dinosaur museum. In terms of Ellie's character arc, I'll get to that when I discuss theming. As for new characters, other than Abby, who gives a fuck. They're a bunch of interchangeable faces that Ellie kills and we're supposed to feel bad for.
Okay there's Lev, the trans character escaping from an oppresive cult society. They could have worked a lot with this and there were some intriguing snippets here and there but ultimately this feels like a shoehorned story arc that the director didn't really care about since it's used for a device to force Abby into a dangerous zone to escape from and was quickly thrown by the wayside when that sequence was done. I don't like the term virtue signalling because it feels very dismissive of a minority group's desire to be represented in media but I feel it's applicable in this case especially when you have a trans character solely defined by being trans without any other distinguishing character traits or story motivations. If you think I'm being quick about this character, I;m sorry I have nothing personal against Lev, I just don't care about him. he's a character that was there and felt more like a plot device than an actual character.
Okay there was also Jesse, he was the best friend whose Asian who was actually kinda cool and fun. Abby shoots him in the face along with Asian representation. It was very quick and random too. I guess the point being that any character can die of anything at any time...woo how scary. Except every single character who dies has a death like that so it's not surprising as much as hacky and boy was I sick of that shit already because of The Walking Dead.
Okay so let's talk about Abby. In fact, let's make a whole section dedicated to her.
Abby:
Fuck Abby. Fuck this piece of shit character. Abby is a murdering psychopath. A total meathead who does not care about anything but her own personal satisfaction. This wouldn't be a bad thing if it was intentional. If there was a purpose to her character being this way or some sort of transformative change she experiences. Neither of these are the case. Abby is an awful human being but the game refuses to call her out on it. The game instead makes us judge Ellie as she does monstrous things for her quest to kill Abby, such as beat a spore infected woman to death with a pipe or stab a pregnant woman to death. Meanwhile Abby gets to do fun things like play with dogs, save children and beat transphobic cultists to death. It's a very cheap, manipulative way to get to empathize with a character opposed to actually writing insightful character development. The biggest red flag is how Ellie was forced to commit the heinous actions she did and is still visibly repulsed by her actions. Abby never questions or feels remorse for her deeds. In fact I would go so far to say that Abby lacks any character conflict. The writers think that showing Abby have positive character interactions with people she's on good terms on or giving her a fear of heights equates to actually giving her a character. Not giving her some actual emotional turmoil. Such as maybe some guilt into beating a defenseless man with a gold flub, a man who not ten minutes ago saved her life at major risk to his own. Not a single shred of remorse. Instead the writers invent two kids for her to save and for some unknowable reason, she gets attached enough to them to move heaven and earth for them. Yes, they saved her life by cutting the noose that was hanging her. Joel saved her from being torn apart by zombies, no fucks given about him, not even a painless, quick death. She even separated herself from the kids at one point, saying they were on their won, and only goes back to find them due to the very lazy writing trope of having a bad dream about them.
I'm guessing the idea is to show that there's more to Abby than a brainless killer. I never for a moment buy it. I do not understand why she saved those kids and stuck by them the way she did other than because the plot needed her to. In fact, when one of the kids tragically dies, she never shows the slightest bit of grief and mourning. yes, they were in a dangerous situation that needed them to keep moving but the game never bothered to show her grieving after they were out of danger either.She never questions or feels remorse about her violent lifestyle, her desire to move on from the WLFs and rejoin the Fireflies not being fueled by any sort of moral transformation but because she wants to protect Lev from the WLF because the story says she has to care about Lev. She doesn't even show any loyalty to her group. She was tasked to bring in a deserter who was her ex boyfriend yet when she finds him, not only does not not bring him in or execute him, she sleeps with him, making him cheat on his pregnant girlfriend in the process. Also when told she was about to kill a pregnant woman, she smirked and said "Good", quite the total opposite from Ellie who despaired after realizing she had accidentally killed a pregnant woman.
I went through over ten hours playing with Abby never believing for a second that she was learning a lesson or growing as a person. The thing that gets me the most is that by the end of the game, I felt her "character arc" was nothing more than a waste of time. She gets captured by a random new group in California and crucified on a beach and left to die of thirst. had Ellie not shown up and cut her down, she would have died there and then. it just struck me at how little agency the character had. Even when she was having her final showdown against Ellie, it felt very one-sided from Ellie's perspective, a far cry from the two equally large, clashing final battles with two equally prominent opponents better games have done such as A2 and 9S from Nier Automata, Kiryu and Ryuji from Yakuza 2 or Snake and Ocelot from MGS4. You could argue that this was to show Abby was a hollow husk at that point and Ellie getting revenge upon her was meaningless, that would have had more weight had Abby been put in this situation because of her violent actions and not because she was randomly attacked by a new group never introduced before in the game prior to the final chapter.
You know, reworked in a different way, the idea of a character trying and failing to prove to herself she's more than a lumbering, murdering psychopath but can actually be selfless and sympathetic could have been an interesting idea but that would require a level of self awareness and insight which I do not think the writers and director possessed.
Okay, let's get to the crux of the matter of why this game ultimately fails.
Theme:
Revenge is bad m'kay. It's a cycle of hatred where violence begets violence. It's been done with varying degrees of success. Series like Berserk, Vinland Saga, Star Wars, Xenoblade Chronicles, Nier Automata, A Song of Ice and Fire, Gargoyles, fucking Naruto. It's a very simple idea done to death in countless media. So how do you fuck it up?
So I mentioned this term before in passing, ludo-narrative dissonance. Basically, it means how a player can reconcile the narrative told through the story of a game versus what a player does during gameplayer. A go to example is the Uncharted series starring lovable, heart of gold protagonist Nathan Drake who is also a mass murdering psychopath who has killed hundreds of people and is never emotionally disturbed by it. So in the case of this game, the whole point is how violence and murder is bad yet the game is never more fun when you're finding creative ways to murder. Even upgrading weapons have these unique lavish animations to make guns look like the coolest fucking shit. Murder is bad but guns are good I guess which might be the smartest message the game had to offer and it was unfortunately an accident. I've already covered how hypocritical the game is in the way it treats Ellie compared to Abby. Ellie has to do horrible things while Abby gets off scott free even though she also killed a person for revenge, successfully, and suffered no consequences for it. Oh her friends died, like she gave a shit about Mel. Okay I'm being serious here, yes she had people she cared about killed by Ellie but in terms of seeing her actually grieve about it, we see very little. What's worse is we never actually see her blame herself for what happened, she never takes any personal responsibility that her lust for revenge got her friends killed. She one hundred percent pins it all on Ellie (which makes it all the more ludicrous that she spares Ellie again).
The icing on the cake is the final battle. Ellie finds Abby crucified on a beach and she cuts her down instead of leaving her to rot or shooting her on the cross. I have no idea why she did this and I don't think she knew either. It's not to have a fair fight because she didn't resolve herself to kill Abby until after she cut her down. So they're getting away on a boat when Ally has a random flash image of Joel lying dead in her brain and decides to kill Abby. They have their big fight, blood shed, wounds everywhere, Abby bites off two of Ellie's fingers but Ellie has her by the throat and is drowning her. And then Ellie has another thought bubble of Joel playing a guitar and she stops and lets her go. It is so nonsensical, it legitimately made me question Ellie's sanity. That thought bubble was from the flashback near the end of the game where Ellie told Joel she'd work n forgiving him so you'd think that memory would make her want to kill Abby more. You'd think the Adrenalin and the rage and the losing two fingers would make Ellie want to kill Abby more. But she randomly thinks of Joel and stops the fight even though the fight only started because she had another random thought of Joel.
And here's the thing, here's the giant cherry on the shit sundae that is this narrative. Ellie spared Abby to be the bigger person, to break the cycle of hatred, because she came to some big epiphany that killing her would be crossing a line she shouldn't cross. Uh huh. Sure. Except Ellie long crossed that line multiple fucking times. Remember that scene in the penultimate episode of season eight of Game of Thrones when the Hound told Arya not to cross the line and become a stone cold killer like him even though Arya had already murdered a whole family by that point? This is dumber than that. Ellie killed so many people to get here, she beat a woman to death with a pipe, she stabbed a pregnant woman and let's not get into all the non-canon WLFs and dogs she murdered on the way. Where are there cycles of hatred and revenge, when are their family members gonna show up and get their justice? What, did they all conveniently not have any families or friends who gave a shit? the most striking victim for me wasn't even any of them, you can make the excuse there that Ellie was in some way coerced into defending herself.
But not Fat Geralt.
Fat Geralt was a part of a group of slavers in California known as the Rattlers. Ellie got caught in one of their snares and seriously injured when she hit a protruding tree branch. Fat Geralt and one of his friends came to free her to have her join the slaves when Ellie managed to get free, push the friend into a hanging clicker and shoot Fat Geralt's leg with a machine gun. Fat Geralt pleads for his life and tells her in exchange, he'll tell her where Abby is. He completely complies, tells her everything she would possibly have needed to know and was completely unarmed, defenseless and immobile so he couldn't even warn the other Rattlers. Ellie shoots him in the throat after he tells her everything, a guy she never met before who she had no idea if he deserved it or not (Yes he was a slaver, Ellie didn't know that).
…
Cycle of revenge my fucking ass.
The game ends with Ellie finding the farm she shared with Dinah empty (I find it amusing that Dinah would spite Ellie so much to pack away everything and abandon a massive farm just for Ellie to find it empty). Ellie, alone in an abandoned building, starts trying and failing to play the guitar because she lost two fingers. She thinks of her final talk with Joel, gives up, puts down the guitar and the game ends. A more mature game would have her try practicing with her other hand to symbolize that no matter how dark things got, you should never give up. But fuck that, you get your misery porn instead.
That's the game in a nutshell. A hollow slog of misery porn, murder is bad I guess but when you don't murder, you still end up miserable so what was even the point?
To end this review, I'm going to comment on avrious plotholes and story contrivances and shit that just pissed me off that caught my eye and I think it would be a fun, humorous way to wrap up my ramblings because I actually care about giving a feeling of reward to the people who stuck by my creation at the end.
Stupid dumb writing decisions of bad game:
1. In an interview, it was revealed that in the first game, it was intended for Tess to track down Joel and Ellie across country for Joel betraying the deal but it was scrapped because the writers felt that a cross country revenge scheme was too unrealistic. This game has five, Abby to Joel, Tommy to Abby, Ellie to Abby, Abby to Ellie and Ellie to Abby again.
2. Abby tracks down the town Joel is living in. She and her friend Owen have no way of narrowing him down from a town of hundreds if not thousands. Abby suggests capturing a random patrol and squeezing them for information. Owen thinks that plan is stupid and tells her they should head back and rethink their strategies. Abby goes off on her own and almost gets killed until she is miraculously saved by Joel who practically wraps himself with a bow for her to take back to her hide out and murder. Even tells her his name. remember the first game when Joel didn't trust that random guy pretending to be a victim but was actually part of an ambush group?
3. Thousands of zombies are roaming the north in the freezing cold. Given the zombies depend on a fungal growth, I have no idea how a single zombie can survive let alone thousands. They are a big deal only up until they serve their purpose in the plot after which they are completely forgotten. You'd think an army of them outside the town would be a bigger deal but it is not.
4. Joel is beaten to death with a golf club because giving a respectful death to a beloved character would have been too boring. I'm not even mad at the idea of Joel dying but the story contrivances to get him into this position, how rushed it was and how undignified his death was was all shit that was badly conceived and delivered.
5. Dinah is pregnant. She got pregnant before she and Ellie left for the revenge quest. They had a fight about how if she had just told her they could have gone back but Dinah wasn't sure. Given it would take a month to travel to Seattle from Jackson by horse and Dinah last had sex with a man two weeks before leaving, I don't fucking think the writers understand how women menstruation cycles work.
6. Characters seem to teleport massive distances when the story requires them to, time thrown out the window when it suits the plot.
7. The WLFs are supposed to be a sympathetic group yet so many times, they try and trick you by talking things out and then try and rush and kill you when you have them at gun or knife point, they come off as idiots. They will also try and kill a defenseless child just because he's part of an opposing faction, never mind taking him in and reintegrating him. Also what the fuck was their deal? To liberate Washington? From fucking what? At least the Scars and rattlers had ideologies I could understand.
8. You spend the majority of the game with the WLF and Scars factions. Yet the final faction is a random group of slavers called the Rattlers introduced at the very end because the game decided the final battle had to be in California.
9. Abby sparing Ellie. Twice. The first time I can understand why, it made absolutely no sense the second time especially since she just killed Jesse and thinks she killed Tommy.
10. Tommy gets shot in the head in Seattle. He somehow survives and is treated by Ellie and Dinah enough that he can survive a long trip back to Jackson with no horse to carry him as he had previously been killed.
11. There exists a bank with robbers who got infected with the fungal spores who had been isolated for 30 years. Despite not having any form of nourishment, they did not reduce themselves to mushroom colonies which the fungus is supposed to do.
12. Ellie hated Joel for saving her from the Fireflies because they might have been able to make a cure from her death. According to her words, she took away her choice. Given she was sedated and it only took the fireflies a few hours to decide they needed to cut her brain open for a VACCINE for a FUNGAL infection and not do some blood tests for antibiotics or something, i don't much see what choice she had. But she had no problem forgiving her father's murderer though.
13. We're supposed to feel Abby is justified for her revenge plot against Joel because Joel killed her dad but convenienlty forget that her dad got herself killed because he was so adamant about cutting open a little girl's brain, he squared off against a man with a gun with a scalpel.
14. Aforementioned surgeon named Jerry because of fucking course he's called Jerry had an introduciton where he saved a Zebra from being caught in barbed wires. This is supposed to be our save the cat moment for this man. Idiot was too dumb to get some wire cutters. And next scene he's immediately talking about how there's no choice but to cut this little girl's head open.
15. Ellie sparing Abby. it needed to be said again. What a shitshow.
In conclusion, fuck this game. Gameplay was fine, story was atrocious. I'd give it Joel in One out of Five.