I can't think of a game that has had a more contentious release than The Last of Us Part II. What's worse about it all is the contents of this contentiousness. The conflicts that permeate the discourse about this game are high caliber toxicity on the part of the gaming public, and a reductionist take on the part of some particular people in the critical sphere. This isn't to say The Last of Us Part II isn't incredibly flawed, because it is, but the discourse that has begun to bloom like the rafflesia arnoldii, the corpse lily of the amazon, has taken things into uncomfortable political waters that are only of some minor merit, a far cry from the types of conversations we are likely to have in the future about this game. Make no mistake, regardless of opinions currently tracking their muddy, bloody foot prints through the media currently (July 1st, 2020, as of this writing), this is an important game. In a word, The Last of Us Part II is unflinchingly ambitious, not just on what it tries to do (as some have pointed out there are elements that are far below original, nearing cliche) but in what it asks of its players, regardless of whether it is successful.
We will get into spoilers later, but let us start in an openly accessible way so you can see if maybe you want to try this game for yourself. The Last of Us Part II is essentially a stealth shooter, with a surprising amount of exploration. Like the first game, you will find yourself in post-apocalypse buildings looking through so many drawers scavenging supplies you'll be doing it in your sleep. There are well over a hundred collectibles in the game, from trading cards to coins to scraps of paper left by the dead, all hoping for either a better world or vengeance on those who took them to their bitter end. Also like the first game, you will need to balance resources and stealth with cover based combat, oscillating between human combatants with excellent (and I mean some of the best in any game ever) AI and the zombies that brought the world to its knees (with less than stellar AI).
The gameplay of The Last of Us Part II is essentially an expanded and tightened version of the first, and while the original game's gameplay was never my favorite aspect, in Part II it excelled past my expectations.
The first half of the game has some of the best stealth I've ever played, and that is largely due to the impeccable level design in this section of the game and the abilities given to Ellie in which you execute hastily formed plans. Ellie's weapon loadout is just about pitch perfect, allowing equal measure stealth and aggression, depending on what the situation needs. Likewise, your crafting will start out simple to the point of having excess in most supplies (especially on normal, although this gets more challenging on harder difficulties), but will begin to take shape as the resource management it needs to be, allowing for useful tools like noise makers, silencers, and arrows for your bow whose components overlap one another. Sneaking around is no small feat, either. You're given a myriad of paths you can take, from slipping between holes in the wall to try and circumvent people hunting for you, to going prone in long grass to try and crawl your way around a battlefield. You always have verbs to take advantage of, meaning the tried-and-true and, honestly, annoying mechanic in stealth games of "wait, wait, move, wait" is virtually done away with except in particularly tense circumstances. You feel as though you are coming up with stuff on the fly, and on the fly you will need to concoct plans because the AI is relentless at times. The AI doesn't make the same move twice, hardly, even when reloading a checkpoint. They will investigate sounds, see you lining up a shot (albeit with just a tad too much leniency in how long it actually takes them to notice you there), and will sometimes patrol with dogs that will track your scent, requiring both quick thinking and covert action if you don't want to be mauled and found out. It is almost unending tension throughout, which can begin to wear on you after awhile.
The Last of Us Part II is a grueling, violent, oppressive game. You will be in equal measure having fun and misery, and its absurdly long playtime only furthers how exhausting this game is. If you're quick, you can get through the game in about 20 hours. I took 35 hours to get through, and 35 hours here is not equivocal to an RPG of equal length, necessarily. An RPG will often let you explore, relax, and goof off in minigames to pad out that 20 hour game into a 100 hour game. There is no fluff in The Last of Us Part II (and yes, those of you getting mad, we will get to that). It is tight, tension filled misery through its entire run. I've never felt so tired playing a game in my life, and I'm over 60 hours into Persona 4 Golden as we speak, another busy-as-hell game with no reprieve. But I'd argue this is a good thing, and that has to do with the ending, which I won't spoil just yet. Know going in that if you begin to feel exhausted, then that emotion is going to service you in the end.
Graphically, The Last of Us Part II is one of the most astounding achievements I've ever seen in gaming. I live in Seattle, so seeing this city brought to life with such clarity (and quite a bit of geographical shifting, but it is a game after all) was a fun experience. As well, the lighting, particle effects, and all the details have a lush character to them that shows these guys are at the top of their craft here. No matter the response to this game, they should absolutely be proud of what they've done here, because it is astounding how good this game looks.
I strongly recommend The Last of Us Part II to those of you who find this interesting, even if you haven't played the first game (and if you have, stick with it regardless of what happens). I will not guarantee you will like all of it, or that you will come away thinking the game is great, but that it will be an experience you will absolutely not forget.
Spoilers below, and I strongly suggest not reading further if you haven't played the game, as going in blind makes the game that much better.
I want to get into the most contentious points of the game, but first let's run through what this game is from a spoiler filled point of view. The Last of Us Part II's plot follows Ellie for a majority of it, the girl immune to the fungal infection that took out most of the human race. She is rare in her condition, and the first game had Joel, the grizzled, violent man with more than a little trauma twisting up his worldview, taking her across the US as cargo to a faction called the Fireflies who believe they can make a vaccine if they research her, only for him to find a surrogate daughter in the charming teen. When Joel realizes that Ellie would need to die in order to research a vaccine, he kills the doctors that could do the procedure (and many, many more), takes her out of the facility, and lies to her saying that there were dozens who were immune, and that there was no cure. Ellie has doubts about his claim, and although we don't realize it until about the halfway point of the game, Ellie actually figured out the truth, confronted Joel, and told him she essentially wanted nothing to do with him ever again. When Joel is brutally murdered in front of here by vengeance seeking ex-fireflies, lead by a girl named Abby, Ellie sets out to kill them all, especially their leader. This brings her to Seattle for three days, where she and her girlfriend, Dina, look for clues and follow Joel's brother, who set out the day before them without telling anyone. Ellie descends into more and more violence as she gets closer, and the fact that her girlfriend is pregnant with her previous boyfriend's baby and needs medical attention doesn't stop her from carrying on. After killing just about everyone except Abby, Ellie meets up with Joel's brother Tommy, who tells them it's time to head home. They did what they could, for now, and they need to call it. That's when Abby breaks into where they are staying, and points a gun at them. Just before it looks like she is going to shoot, we are thrust into a flashback, starting on day 1 when Ellie got to Seattle, but from Abby's point of view.
The contentious dialogue over this game comes in many, many flavors, with only a few feeling as though they have merit, and fewer still that seems to talk about something in the game without ignoring many of the themes and consequences throughout. The game was swamped upon release over the death of Joel, which many people thought was overly callous and, more importantly, was an unfitting end to one of their favorite characters. The conversation here is almost not worth talking about, as anyone who thought Joel was a good person that didn't deserve what he got or at the least brought this upon himself wasn't paying much attention. The moral struggle of the first game was to get you to empathize with an awful man, to understand why he was awful, what twisted him that way, and to understand that it was something born of trauma, survival, and generational divide. We aren't asked to forgive or apologize for Joel, we are asked to understand, so that when we don't like him we get a full picture of who he is. It is like hate without catharsis, asking you to reckon with not just what you think is right, but also what you hate with what you think is wrong. That ending did not sit correctly with some of the players, who still thought Joel did the right thing. It never felt to me like this was a valid interpretation of the first game, as though that was an extremely cherry picked interpretation of the events that transpired. But nevertheless, people were mad when Joel was killed early in the second game, a plot point I think was one of the smartest (albeit most expected) the game pulls. A redemption arch for Joel does sort of exist in The Last of Us Part II, where we see how Joel spent his remaining days trying to be a better father to Ellie, and failing about as often as he succeeded. It doesn't forgive his past actions, but it shows he still had growth to be had, and that he had an important effect on other people.
Two of the other arguments against this game are rooted in bigotry, plain and simple. People hate that Ellie is openly gay, that there is a trans character in this game, and that they've apparently never been to a gym in their lives because they think Abby's physique is "unrealistic" for a woman to have. It's trite hate at this point from a group of people that stunted their growth at fourteen, and I can't say with enough emphasis fuck them and leave them behind. Their discourse isn't worth listening to. They can go on about virtue signalling or that this is mere politics and nothing to do with story, but that obviously ignores the fact that LGBTQ+ individuals exist. For their part to be normalized in media, it means they need to be put in media. If you don't like their inclusion in media because you think it's the developers or writers trying to hard to be inclusionary, then you obviously don't know what you are talking about. The only reason it seems strange is because it isn't normalized, and the only reason it isn't normalized is because people get mad when they are included. It is circular logic rooted in hate, worthy only of being buried as deep as it will go.
The last two points of contention have to do with the game's pacing and with the themes of violence and revenge. And here is where we start getting into an interesting discussion. On the first part, I have to wholeheartedly agree. This game's pacing is brutal. The first quarter or so is a slow, plotless walk around Seattle with a few skirmishes here and there, and Ellie and Dina sort of tastelessly one-upping each other on the brutalities they've faced in their youth. It isn't bad, but it isn't a very good start post-prologue. But that isn't really what people are talking about when they talk about the pacing of this game. What everyone refers to is Abby's story, which takes up half of the game's runtime.
Abby's story has several flaws with it, and they revolve around several plot flaws of the game entire. Abby is obviously not nearly as interesting as Ellie or Joel, despite the excellent work of her voice actress. She is a militaristic character, who was once a Firefly and now belongs to WLF, an army with a plan. Militarized factions are extremely common in games in this day and age, and they grow tired quick. Fighting them was enough for me to be over it already, so when I was forced to play as one for ten hours it worked against my getting to like Abby. Likewise, Abby is so strict with her beliefs, she doesn't come close to the complexity that Joel or Ellie had. Her motivation is sound, as we learn her father was the surgeon Joel unceremoniously kills at the end of the first game, and I had no difficulty empathizing with her. But the point was made relatively early on. The first day in Seattle as Abby is a drag, one that kills the pace immediately as the tension of Ellie's story had ratcheted up to an almost unbearable degree. I know of at least one person that quit once the narrative switched to Abby, feeling it wasn't worth feeling like starting over in order to earn his ending. I can't fault him too much for that, but after pushing through Abby's story I did end up liking it. The character of Lev that Abby meets along the way was more interesting than Abby herself, having been raised in the local cult derogatorily called Scars. Likewise, characters we meet in Ellie's section like Owen and Mel had their own emotional archs that were interesting, although I found myself liking Owen then disliking Owen by the end of it. Whether that was a plus is up for debate, but I lean towards yes. The issue here isn't just or mostly the story itself, so much as the fact that Abby's story feels like a second rate version of Ellie's story, even though structurally it should work. Ellie's arch is about enacting vengeance, and Abby's arch is about overcoming vengeance, learning to live with what you did in its name, and learning to be compassionate again. There is a running theme in both of The Last of Us games that people are more empathetic than groups, and that continues here as Abby is forced to go AWOL to help two Scars runaways, against here better, indoctrinated judgement. She risks life and limb (and not only her own) in order to selfishly save these two, and it is worth remarking that we agree more with Abby's selfish selflessness than Ellie's selfishness. Both run their friends and loved ones into trouble, but one side has a sliver of hope and redemption in it, a promise of something else other than this horror we have been subjected to thus far.
There has been talk among my friends that they should have just ping-ponged between Ellie and Abby throughout the story rather than running them through one at a time, and I partially agree with this. I think Ellie should have had a day one, then Abby a day one, then Ellie can go through part of day two, and then Abby can go all the way through part of day three, and we could have this imbalanced swinging affect going on so the plot doesn't start to feel too obvious in its parallels. But saying this is easy, and I can just about guarantee you that different plot organization was tried during development, and for whatever reason this seemed like the best choice. I think their ambitions, not just to tell a complete story in this odd sequencing, but also to follow a collective of people running over one another and show a condition rather than characters, is great. Although people want to root for characters, in real life finding characters to root for is becoming increasingly difficult due to social media and the darker side of some of these public figures being easier and easier to expose. Idol worship is flawed inherently, because it implies some idyllic example that cannot exist. People are messy, and they are messy in part because of the context they are thrust in. I think this is the right type of story to tell, just not told to its absolute best.
On the topic of vengeance and violence, I find the same thing repeated throughout conversations: this game beats you over the head with how bad violence is, this game is about revenge, but no one learns their lesson. The issue I have with this argument lies partially in interpretation, and partially in media literacy. The violence is obvious. It was stated in the last game, and to nix it here would be disingenuous. It is an axiom to the story, a thematic backbone not the theme itself. Vengeance, likewise, ignores Abby's story entirely, as well as the ending. Abby does not die. Abby fights Ellie, but gives up at the behest of Lev, and they go to Santa Barbara to try and find a reorganized Fireflies who are rumored to be stationed there. Ellie goes back with Dina, who has her baby, and they live on a farm for what seems like an epilogue, but is really a stop-gap. Ellie has PTSD flashbacks that debilitate her and won't let her rest. When Tommy, injured by Abby and now with a limp and only one eye, finds out where Abby might be, he tells Ellie to Dina's anger. But Ellie can't let go, and she leaves to exact her revenge. When she finally gets to Abby, she finds her crucified but alive on a beach, emaciated and her hair cut ragged. Still, in this weakened state, Ellie can't let it go. She won't kill Abby outright, either, though. They need to fight. Abby says she won't, that she's done with all that, but Ellie threatens Lev, who isn't even conscious. After an exhausting, brutal fight in which Ellie loses two fingers, Ellie pins her under the water and begins to drown her. But she can't go through with it. She breaks down into weeping, clutching her wounded side, and tells them to leave. When Ellie returns to the farm, Dina has moved out. Ellie picks up here guitar and tries to play, but the elegance of her playing is lost because of her fingers. The strings buzz or mute in an ugly, unrefined way. She has lost a lot, and she leaves the guitar behind as she leaves the farm.
One argument popularly repeated on the internet is that no one learns their lesson, and I cannot understand how anyone can make this argument at all. You can argue Ellie didn't learn her lesson, but so what? I did. I saw it, I experienced it through her eyes, and I felt the loss. If she didn't, then I get the burden of her actions, and that is one of the greatest, most unique aspects to art that isn't often talked about. In Shadow of the Colossus, Wander doesn't reflect on whether what he did was right. I do that. The contrast between player and playable character is a powerful tool games have to put us into a contentious place with someone, and there is a richness there that I love. And even saying that, I cannot believe Ellie felt nothing about what she did when she stops short while playing that guitar in her final moments. I cannot believe that when Abby tells Ellie she's done fighting, that she didn't reflect on vengeance. Vengeance is outright attacked throughout the game, being shown to be an empty, ego and grief led piece of selfishness that permeates the misery the world is already wrought with. Vengeance isn't the point either. It's cruelty and it's many forms, and how cruelty always feels justified by those who enact it. It was cruelty that made the Scars gut trespassers, cruelty that led the WLF to genocide the Scars, cruelty that led to Joel's death, that led to Joel's survival, that led Ellie into a lonely life without anyone with her. Joel learned the hard way that he can't be alone. Ellie missed that lesson, and only learned that cruelty is the language the whole world knows how to speak.
9.0
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