The Last of Us Part II

Spoiler - click to showDo you hate Ellie yet?

No.

Spoiler - click to showI feel very, very sorry for her. I definitely don't agree with a lot of what she's doing/done, but I think the game does a decent job of showing her justification to herself, as well as the toll it's taking on her. It reminds me of Unforgiven, in a way, watching this person slide into viciousness in the name of a cause. She's tragic, not hateful.

Of course, I may change my mind later.

Spoiler - click to showI think I only really hated her once, for a reason I won't go into, as Ninchilla isn't there yet, and I wouldn't want to risk spoiling it, even in spoiler tags. I wouldn't say I like her exactly either, though, and I struggle to feel too sorry for her some of the time.

I completed it a couple of nights ago, and I've found myself appreciating it more the further I am from it. I thought (think?) it was too long, to the point where there were more than a few times I wished it'd just fucking end(ed), though I'm also not sure there's a lot you could take out - maybe a few combat instances? - and still have it work as intended. It's certainly a very good game, elevated further by the quality of its writing and performances, and just generally being a wonderfully presented, fantastically detailed, technological marvel.

(I was unaware of the crunch until after I'd started the game, weirdly. The rock I live under is a large one, it would seem. Nonetheless, learning of it does sour it somewhat, even as you notice some of the ridiculous detail, like spreading blood melting the snow around it.)

I think the story works, it's just not necessarily what people wanted. I can understand some of the criticisms, even if I don't agree with them, and then there are others that I do share. The writing and (especially) acting is on a whole other level to most other videogames, and some of the pacing that seemed off in the moment makes a bit more sense in hindsight. It still feels a bit bloated at times, and there are times when the game skips forward and you wonder why it couldn't have done that a couple more times earlier on, please and thank you. Thanks to its tone and nature, etc, TLOU was a bit of a slog at 15 hours or so, and this was twice that for me, which I think contributed to my wanting it over and done with on more than one occasion.

The length also means that some of it starts to feel a bit samey, and that the cracks/wires start to show. You become increasingly aware that TLOU (or ND) has it's own set of very specific tropes, and that they become more blatant as they're repeated over a lengthier game. More than once I correctly predicted that I would be "surprised" upon walking through a door, or that something I was jumping onto would collapse. I also stopped doing listen mode unless I already knew, through prompting, that there were enemies in an area, because it became apparent that the game only has (varying stages of) 'on' or 'off', and you can generally assume the game will tell you when it switches, which robs the game of some of its tension. (Your character and their companion instinctively knowing that the coast is now clear is a good example of what I mean, and is vaguely comical at times.)

Some of my other problems with the game, it's story and characters are sort of on me, as I traditionally play stealth games in an extremely pragmatic, often murderous fashion - if I consider that the best way to proceed is to incapacitate everybody, that is what I'll do. If there are ways to do that non-lethally, as in Dishonored, then I often go to great lengths to use them, but if there aren't my body count is often pretty damn high. What this means, of course, is that sometimes when an event is made to look traumatic for the character, if doesn't necessarily fit all that well with their previous actions as the avatar I've been using to do all of these terrible things. I also don't really go along with the explanation/justification I've seen some use, that 'it's kill or be killed' in the world of TLOU, as that isn't the case if you unnecessarily put yourself (and others) in a position where that's relevant.

Anyway, sorry if this is a jumbled mess of random, only slightly coherent thoughts; it's partially because I've been writing for ages in and around work-related happenings, but it also means it's a pretty fair representation of how I still feel about the game. It's certainly occupied my thoughts a lot more than I expected post-completion, and as I imagine that was one of their intentions, in that respect (and many others) it has to be considered a success..

You do rack up a monumental kill count.

For a game called The Last of Us, there sure are a lot of us.

Lot fewer at the end, though

Or there used to be, before our "heroes" arrived.

If the series does continue, the title might be literal by the time it's all over.

Edit - aniki beat me by literally 13 seconds.

I'm still thinking about it daily a couple of weeks after I finished it.
Have to agree with a lot of JDUBs points, particularly in relation to the game being "on" or "off".
As far as the kill or be killed thing, I don't have a problem with that. This is the world in which Ellie was born in to, and she is growing to understand it is wrong, going from guily to innocent rather than the other way round which is what happens in most games.
She still makes a fuck load of stupid decisions though.

I think a character making a bad decision is okay, as long as you can see their justification (even if you disagree with it).

Or there used to be, before our "heroes" arrived.

If the series does continue, the title might be literal by the time it's all over.

Edit - aniki beat me by literally 13 seconds.

maybe we are the walking dead the last of us

"We really are the Last of Us Part II™ Ellie"

Good writing my ass

Incredibly late to the party, but fuck that thing in the hospital basement. I take back what I said about the infected not getting under my skin.

Fuck.

Ah, you're past the part I was waiting for at last.

Spoiler - click to showSecond half of TLOU2 > First half of TLOU2. Easy.

I agree with what Al said.

Also, that bit Ninchilla has now done (and several other bits) felt very, very Resident Evil, which I absolutely loved.

I was initially concerned that Spoiler - click to show the rat king looked a bit goofy (especially when well-lit - like when it picks Abby up and you whack it with a fire axe), but the sound design is spectacular… once it drops you in the dark, and all you can hear is it barreling up behind you, howling, and the lizard brain kicks in…

Spoiler - click to showI still can't forgive Abby, but her will to live is fucking impressive. I was holding my breath the entire time she was trapped in the Ambulance. This with everything else makes her the best character in the game for me…though I guess there's not a lot of choice there.

Spoiler - click to showSo… I think I've said it before, but I fundamentally disagreed with Joel's actions at the end of the first game. I understand why he did what he did, but I don't think I've ever been quite so out of sync with what a game asked me to do, before or since. I certainly don't think Abby did anything worse than Joel (or Ellie), beyond the dragged-out cruelty of it, but again - I understand why she did it. I have immense amounts of sympathy for her.

Spoiler - click to showDo you hate Ellie yet?

Okay, now I kind of do.

Just did Spoiler - click to showthe farm.

Thought that was going to be the end.

Fuck's sake.

Final play time 28 hours, 8 minutes. Spoilers ahead.

Spoiler - click to showI'm very glad the California stuff didn't carry on as long as I was worried it would.

I don't know if my experience or reaction were markedly different to anyone else's, but overall it was effective, if a little heavy-handed in places.

Spoiler - click to showI know Druckman said somewhere that the idea was to gain "sympathy for the other", but given that I already disagreed with what Joel did at the end of The Last of Us, and immediately clicked why Abby et al were in Jackson, I can't say I couldn't see her point; I mean, sure, it was brutal, and a 7-iron is no replacement for some actual therapy, but I'd struggle to hear out any claim that she did anything worse than Joel ever had.

Spoiler - click to showSo I had empathy for "the other" already, and Ellie's descent into violent revenge seemed stubborn, pointless, and doomed to spiritual self-annihilation from the off. I understood why she was doing it, even as she slips further into darkness, but after a relatively early point in the game, it just felt like the cost was too going to be high. And the single-mindedness of her mission meant that I found little to connect with in her side of the story - all I wanted was for her to pack up and get Dina home. When Abby does finally show up at the theatre and gives her a chance to walk away, I honestly thought that was it for the game - a hollow ending for Ellie, perhaps, but I hoped she'd have come to realign her priorities in something like the same way that Abby had with Lev and Yara.

Almost none of that is meant as criticism of the game - it's just a strong gut reaction to some very solid character work.

As I said on Twitter, I don't think I've ever wanted to do anything in a videogame less than that final encounter.

Spoiler - click to showMy heart was thumping, I felt ill, and I was begging Ellie to walk away - aloud, on my own in the dark at 1 am - even as I was playing. I do think that fight went on a little long, though; it started to feel gratuitous, rather than emotional. But I'm glad Abby made it; and if there's ever a Part 3, I'd rather see her return than Ellie.

The performances are stellar, and even if the writing wobbles a bit here and there with unnatural phrasing, it avoids too much clumsy exposition. The environmental work is fantastic, and you get a great sense of the societies these various groups have built for themselves just from wandering around, overheard dialogue snippets, and reading a few notes.

Summary: It's a very well-made thing that did a very good job of making me uncomfortable with the things it asked me to do. I didn't enjoy it, and I don't know that I'd recommend it to many people, but it's staggeringly impressive at times.

As mentioned in PWB I'm into this at the moment and I'm coming at it with a good idea of where things are headed but without much of the fine detail as to how these things come about.
Currently tackling Seattle day 2, Ellie has just gone out again after that whole section where they fully introduce enemy dogs. I'm hesitant to say that I'm enjoying it but it's sort of dazzling and compulsive so I keep going forward. And, actually thinking about it, most of the momentum is to see how they position the back half of the game because I think that early switch in perspective was a real surprise despite knowing what was coming in the late game.

Any lack of enjoyment is based around the game world being grim and my susceptibility to jump scares. The boar… The guy with the bow… They all get me. And the violence: has no one in this world ever attempted a non-lethal take down?

There's a strange paradox I'm finding in, as JDub points out, the 'on' and 'off' portions of the game. This was probably most starkly presented when I was playing the aforementioned portion with the dogs – the shops and then the cul-de-sac housing section. Once cleared of enemies I was looting these areas looking at how they mapped, where the cracks were that Ellie could squeeze through to either stealth the section or allow more effective guerrilla tactics.

I find most of the enemy encounters stressful but I will say that the way you can play with the infected is really satisfying. I've been finding 'fun' in the human vs infected conflicts but I most like that you can draw the infected out of buildings so as to avoid having to deal with them in cramped indoor environments. The death animations still creep me out but I'm hopeful that I can push past this and not leave the game hanging for 6 months like I did with the first one.

Ellie tattoo done.

Looks great! How long did it take?

2.5 hours. Face down. Four feet off a concrete floor on a wobbly table. With a mask on.

2.5 hours. Face down. Four feet off a concrete floor on a wobbly table. With a mask on.

People pay for that kind of treatment, you know.

2.5 hours. Face down. Four feet off a concrete floor on a wobbly table. With a mask on.

People pay for that kind of treatment, you know.

Like Jimbob literally just did, you mean?

Hopefully it’s only his arm that’s sore.

I should add to that that I have hearing problems and wear a hearing aid. So I just laid there agreeing with everything the artist said.
So god knows what I could have agreed to.

2.5 hours. Face down. Four feet off a concrete floor on a wobbly table. With a mask on.

People pay for that kind of treatment, you know.

Like Jimbob literally just did, you mean?

Was he strapped to an upside down crucifix in a gimp suit? Asking for a friend.

Playing this again. Only on Easy+, because I'm mainly in it for revisiting the story - though it's still gosh darn tense at times, and Runners still need three body shots to take down - and trophies (if I can get them).

One of the things I'm very impressed by (still) is the level of detail. Not in a "so many polygons" kind of way, either, just all the mundane little objects and doodads that populate everything, without ever feeling recycled.

Minor spoilers, but I'll keep it brief: near the start of the game, you go to Joel's house in Jackson and poke around, and there's a stove in the bathroom:

This initially confused me, but of course there is, because Jackson doesn't have hot running water.

And the space book on the bedside table made me tear up with its major Dad Vibes:

I need to get back to God of War at some point. ALL THE DADS.

I haven't thought about this game since I beat it.

I imagine that might be partly because you sandblasted all memory of it out by immediately mainlining approximately 8,000 hours of JRPG…

I still think about it a lot.

It's still a good game! I think the debate around it might have just made me check out almost immediately.

Can't beat a happy ending.

Ah, we have a thread for this already. I see some of the points I wanted to make have been made already.

It's a strange game to discuss because all the usual ways you discuss games don't really apply. It seems wrong to be talking about how well it runs (it's a technical miracle, really, even on a PS4, and appears to be made out of actual vegetation and grime rather than pixels and polygons) or how well it plays (the best stealth gameplay I've ever encountered, I think, specifically the way in which you can drop in and out of stealth multiple times in a single encounter, and both the stealth and noisy side of things play equally well).

So you end up talking about the characters, and the pacing, and the plot, and all the things the writers want you to discuss. I love that some people (wrong people) absolutely hated this game, because that feels entirely deliberate:

Spoiler - click to showFrom the very beginning it simply refuses to give the players what they want. Ellie is no longer the cute wise-cracking kid from the first game, but a rangy tattooed teenager with a predilection for stabbing people in the neck. Joel is offed, brutally, within the first hour. The good guys aren't entirely (or even mostly) good, and the bad guys aren't entirely (or even mostly) bad. Anyone who took TLOU1 superficially as "cool guy with guns protects small girl" is going to have a very bad time with the sequel, and the inclusion of major gay and transgender characters feels like an additional "fuck you" to the kind of people who have the worst opinions about games like this.

I am very firmly

Spoiler - click to showTeam Abby

in this.

Spoiler - click to showI liked the way in which the two storylines worked in opposition to each other - while also hitting parallel plot beats. Ellie is jettisoning a relatively comfortable existence to pursue a demented revenge plot, while trying to kid herself that she's doing it to find Tommy. Along the way she gradually loses her perspective, her friends, and ultimately her partner and child. She thinks she is finding a way to make her life matter, but is going in the opposite direction. Abby starts at the point her personal revenge plot has concluded, and her story is one of finding a way back to her own humanity and discovering things to care about. Nothing Abby does is worse than anything Ellie does, or indeed that Joel did in the first game. Each story drags the player along and makes them complicit in the things the characters do.

I have no idea how they are going to film this for the TV show:

Spoiler - click to showThey've already said this story will take more than one season to tell. It'll be interesting to see whether they keep the same structure, or try and interleave the two stories somewhat. Ellie's story on its own would make for a better season 2 - you get a shocking opener, plenty of Joel in flashbacks, and an immense cliffhanger - but then that leaves season 3 with an entirely new cast of characters which might be too much for a prime-time TV drama. Interleaving the two stories would make that transition easier but you lose some of the drama of e.g. the Scars reveal and there's a danger it'll remain "the Ellie show" with Abby acting purely as an antagonist. I don't envy them their choice on this one.

Anyway, a marvellous, contentious, really fucking grim game that might be the best single-player narrative game I've played. I wonder if we will see a TLOU part 3 after this.

Spoiler - click to showIf they do, I hope it isn't a redemption arc for Ellie. Seriously, fuck Ellie. She's lost.

I am very firmly

Spoiler - click to showTeam Abby

in this.

YES. Absolutely.

I have no idea how they are going to film this for the TV show:

Spoiler - click to showThey've already said this story will take more than one season to tell. It'll be interesting to see whether they keep the same structure, or try and interleave the two stories somewhat. Ellie's story on its own would make for a better season 2 - you get a shocking opener, plenty of Joel in flashbacks, and an immense cliffhanger - but then that leaves season 3 with an entirely new cast of characters which might be too much for a prime-time TV drama. Interleaving the two stories would make that transition easier but you lose some of the drama of e.g. the Scars reveal and there's a danger it'll remain "the Ellie show" with Abby acting purely as an antagonist. I don't envy them their choice on this one.

I think the thing only works as well as it does because of that structure. Spoiler - click to showYou wouldn't learn to sympathise with Abby as much as you do if you weren't seeing her growth in isolation. Changing it seems like it would be a mistake. But I guess we'll see.

Anyway, a marvellous, contentious, really fucking grim game that might be the best single-player narrative game I've played. I wonder if we will see a TLOU part 3 after this.

Spoiler - click to showIf they do, I hope it isn't a redemption arc for Ellie. Seriously, fuck Ellie. She's lost.

Dunno if I agree entirely -
Spoiler - click to showEllie could be redeemed, it's just not a sorry I'm interested in playing through

• but I would like to see something a bit more removed from the existing story. Let us see more of the world!

(I'd really like to see some non-US stuff, but don't think there's any chance of that happening.)