You have been warned. 

Stay away if you care about the game being spoiled for you.

So the first bit I didn’t like was OH MY GOD THEY KILLED JOEL!!! THOSE BASTERDS!

How could they kill off my main man?! But that set up the whole game I suppose and the tale of revenge and cycle of violence. I may not have liked Joel dying, but it seemed well done. That image of his bloody face, looking at Ellie just before the final blow to his head... haunting. And it clearly haunted Ellie of course. She sees his bloody face, lying on the floor, during the late game. His death still haunting her, she goes off to take care of unfinished business. Just so she can eat and sleep well again.

I had a lot more sympathy for Abby than Ellie after a while. I wanted Abby and Lev to find a way out. I didn't really care what happened to Ellie. The number of people she kills on her way to revenge is ridiculous, especially since the game tries to humanise the regular goons.

On humanising the enemy, it’s Owen and Mel that got me. Owen always came across as an ok guy. I’m glad the game didn’t force me to pull the trigger as the gamer when Ellie killed them. How do you choose to kill Mel knowing that she is pregnant?

The horror of that scene is just made worse and worse as you play more and more of Abby’s scenarios. I liked Owen. He/the voice actor even had a mellow and friendly kinda voice (or maybe that’s just the laidback attitude you refer to in your review?!). 

Ellie really does become the mass murderer doesn’t she? But maybe the feeling of watching Joel die was as strong in me as for Ellie and I still sided mostly with her until the end.

It's all overly laboured in the end though. No one's all good or all bad, everyone's just human and trying to survive in a fucked up situation. Yada yada. It could have got that across much more efficiently.

It's also undermined a little by the final section, which introduces some straight up bad guys who you're not supposed to give a shit about. Suddenly they're just regular game cannon fodder that you can enjoy offing with your full arsenal.

And the final final fight. I could've done without that at all TBH. It felt like the stupid drawn out punch up scene in They Live. I would've rather they'd both realised they were in no shape to fight and just parted ways. Perhaps Ellie needs to prove that she could have killed Abby, but that could easily have been done by pointing a gun at her.

Then again, my real issue with the last few hours is that the game is just too fucking long. I was ready for it to finish at the theatre after Abby's section and was disappointed to see so much more. Maybe if they'd cut the rest of the game by a few hours, I would've been OK going to a new location.

A shorter game would also have had fewer murders, which I think would actually reinforce the themes better. There's no impact killing regular enemies after a while, even if they do have names, and the violence feels like it's there for enjoyment rather than to make any kind of point in the end.

So it's a bit of a mess, but while I was playing I also found it to be a thrilling story for the most part, and was really surprised and intrigued by some of the turns it took. It takes itself too seriously and forces in a lot of 'big' themes without doing them justice, but the basic plot, script and characters all set new standards for cinematic style games.

So it’s over. Really don’t know what to think. I understand why they ended it like that, but I just didn’t enjoy said ending whatsoever. I have very mixed feelings about the entire game and at this moment in time I really don’t know what to think about it.

I don’t like a lot of the decisions they made about the story or characters and I really don’t think they needed to literally smash their points home over and over again.

Just a bit empty about it all.

With the direction they took, whilst I didn’t like it all, I appreciate it’s their (Naughty Dog’s) story to tell. And so I tried to judge on how it was told. There are issues there. As Jon says, and as you say, over egging it and hammering it over and over.

But I thought it was still expertly told, specially for a game.

Might be controversial but in my opinion they didn’t have to make so many characters LGBTQ or part of a minority, just felt very pressed by the end instead of natural. Only male character you spent a lot of time around was Owen who was happy to cheat on his pregnant Mrs. Again, people are shitty but fuck me.

I have no negative agenda against any minority by the way, just felt very heavily lead towards the end. Maybe I missing something.

Owen is an interesting one. I don’t think it’s too far removed from a realistic character dealing with emotional problems. 

Abby and he clearly have a past and love each other, it’s just that Abby is prioritising and obsessed with finding Joel and taking revenge. A man can’t wait forever so Owen finds someone else, Mel. There’s clearly connection still between him and Abby, maybe he should’ve tried to distance himself more but they stayed as friends. Except old emotions run wild and the Devil whispers in their ears, leading to Owen cheating on Mel - but not cheating his true feelings. 

I don’t think he loves Mel that much but is sticking for sake of the child?

I mean yeah a cheater is a cheater but human emotions are complex.

Even with years of weight training, there’s no way a female would look like that. Gotta be juice. Or an inaccurate representation of a female strength athlete type person

I think Abby's size is just a neat character detail revealed through her appearance. Clearly she's gone pretty crazy with weights and who knows what else and you can fill in the reasons for yourself. It certainly goes with her obsession for revenge. And why not just have a big muscly female character anyway?

As for non-straight relationships, there's only one in the game, between a lesbian and a bi character. There are a number of straight relationships.

I did feel that Lev's characterisation felt a little forced though. And, as some trans writers have been saying, in the end his identity is explained for him by non-trans characters. He doesn't really have much agency and seems a bit like a box-ticking exercise.

I agree with a lot of points offered by y'all. I think it could have been shorter but I'd probably take it out of the middle and not the end. I liked that she felt she needed to leave the perfect setup that she had even though it also upset me. It felt very "western" or at least the more modern western where the damage of a life of violence takes it's toll. I also thought that her deciding to try and forgive Joel and let him back into her life just before he died was a good way to make her choices make more sense. Something so unresolved eats away at the soul.

I actually felt more for Abbey than Ellie by the end really. Perhaps it was because LoU1 was so long ago and I haven't played it recently so I don't have the attachment I might have had if I'd played them back to back but I really felt that Ellie was the big bad in that Theatre fight and I thought that was well presented even if mechanically the fight was clunky and I died way too many times. I think they could have perhaps spent more time on Abbey's regret for killing Joel, I think it was eating at her too and she regretted her anger, but I suppose that falls into the slightly one-note aspect of the story. The cycle of violence, etc etc.

It played out well too in that the story made you feel for the characters (mainly Owen) after it was all too late. Much better than getting you to like them and then forcing you to kill them or do it in a cutscene.

I didn't see any issue with Abby's physique. Apparently that's not realistic? New to me. She just looked like a strong gymnast and one that got that big by channeling her anger into working out and figuring out where Joel was. Same with any representation of any minority. They're all as valid as "straight white male" so what difference does it make if characters aren't "straight white male"? I thought Lev's story was perhaps a bit obvious but I don't have any opinions on how it was presented as I don't have any personal experience with that experience and there will be those who do who will write anything better than I could.

When was the game originally supposed to come out? I actually had a few glitches which is very un-naughty dog and I feel like the latter portions were a bit less polished and possibly had some more work to go.

Overall, I loved it. I liked the story and it was stunning throughout. Naughty Dog could do with pushing themselves in terms of gameplay tropes but considering this was a sequel then I don't think they could have made that many changes to core gameplay and kept it a Last of Us game.
Perhaps the game could have done with some more downtime to relax. I wouldn't have minded another open type section like at the start. Or something more that formed the relationship with Dina after they got to the theatre. I suppose it is telling that the only relief you get is in the flashbacks, that a life of violence strips away the ability to live life or something.
Also more encounters where it was infected and humans. That red section was incredible.

Oh. That took me too long to get.



Oh oh. But one more thing about Part 2 is that it does something that I can't believe more games don't do. That is, taking something you do multiple times over and flipping it on you as a way to surprise further down the line. Jumping over another piece of barbed wire only for it to explode (big sad face), and relaxing because I stepped up to a work bench in that apartment block only to be attacked. Both were massive shocks and so well executed. I really don't know why more games don't do that. Especially horror games.

Oh oh oh. I also liked how they flipped what they had done with the original game whereby you were really keen to kill those scientists at the end of the game because of your connection to Ellie so (if you were like me) you dove right in and blasted away but this time I really didn't want to do those button presses they wanted me to do. That was clever.

Awards for

Writing.
World building.
Graphics.
Acting.
Music.
Genuinely amazing and touching versions of Ah-ha songs.
Skin pores, hair and just human modelling in general.
Brilliant jump scares.
Monster designs.
Zebra modelling.
Knowing how to grab at gamer dads heartstrings with brilliantly judged and wonderfully paced interludes.
Cutscenes segues to actual game.
Not having me play as AAA white man at any point and not making any kind of deal about it. At all.
The differing body shapes and sizes of everyone instead of gnarled dadman and pretty white daughter girl. Massive applause for having the guts to make one character definitely away from societal norms of what is pretty or beautiful.


Must do betters

Number of fucking sidekicks.
Number of fucking sidekicks getting knocked off.
Section Editing.
When to use cutscenes.
Working practices.
Willingness to listen to constructive criticism.

yourfavouriteuncle wrote:

Final point that I felt whilst playing is that the whole game world/universe or whatever it’s classed as almost feels as though it was developed entirely out of necessity of fitting in with NDs preferred game style. Mechanically and structurally it’s not that dissimilar to Uncharted and it kinda feels that at one point, way back when, this whole bleak world was the one way they could paint their way out being pretty much the only devs out there capable of delivering AAA productions with proper actual characterisation and writing. By making the world so horrible it negates that weird juxtaposition you get in Uncharted of lovely and affable Nate mowing down loads of people before settling back into homelife. In this world murder is simply required to get by and so you still side with the main characters and their actions. I wish I hadn’t thought of this whilst playing though as I think it impacted my immersion somewhat.

This was pretty much how I felt through both games. All the complex emotions and motivations these characters have are cover for the fact that in the end their actions are entirely driven by them being in a violent action video game. 

Joel never made a decision at the end of the first game. It had to end that way to have a final sequence of stealth and murder gameplay. Ellie has to kill everyone she meets because games like this don't have negotiation options. The game drives the plot, not the other way around.