tlou has swagless nothing gun fighting / combat esp. considering it came out after re6 which is like so fucking fun as a zombie shoot game it’s embarassing in comparison. idk the rest seemed like pretty normie zombie shit too. couldnt really stand to play it long maybe i just want to talk abt re6. tlou pt. ii at least looks like a decent Shooting People With Guns game ig
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Terms like “FIDELITY MODE” are so fuckin funny
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I’ve only played half of it, but my impression is that it reaches for inclusion/representation/“woke points” or whatever you want to call in a contrived way that basically pissed off everyone on the political spectrum except for mealy-mouthed centrist liberals who love being pandered to.
that kind of thing can bug me but it didn’t particularly bug me here – though I’m not sure if I ever got to the part that’s supposedly so problematic. and I like it when characters in games happen to be queer or just outside the typical normative mold of videogame protagonists. even if it’s heavy-handed it’s generally better than no representation. but nothing in the tlou2 felt like outright pandering to me, at least in a way that detracts or even distracts from the experience. and I think the problem for a lot of people was not about pandering and more about how those characters were portrayed and used in the plot. it’s not really my lane to discuss that especially bc I never finished the game, but what I did play was dubious at best in that area.
but honestly what turned me off the most was that I just can’t buy into the baseline premise. I can’t buy into ellie’s motivation, I can’t buy into how the game expects us to sympathize with joel at all after the ending of the first game. it actually makes me like the first game less bc in a vacuum it seems to at least leave the ethics of joel’s decisions ambiguous and let’s you decide how you feel about it. the sequel more or less comes out of the gate telling you how to feel about it. and I get that the idea is that you’re role-playing as ellie, but I feel like ellie as portrayed in the original game would not behave the way she does in the sequel either. she’s not that dumb or credulous even as a child, even viewing joel as a surrogate father figure. the DLC chapter cements this further for me.
and because of this, the entire thing feels contrived, so the violent, dark, and cruel elements of the narrative seem completely gratuitous and I resent being asked to participate in any of it.
on the other hand on the level of game design, mechanics, etc., it’s a dramatic improvement over the original. I just wish they didn’t make it as a direct sequel. the anachronistic semantics of “part II” being the title (as opposed to just 2, or a subtitle, or whatever), feels less like a throwback to classic serial fiction and more a way to lampshade how terrible of an idea the entire premise is.
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also the original game still holds up imo. including it in the “are games art” debate is the biggest thing against it. it aims to be middlebrow HBO tv drama in game form and it nails it. it’s more impressive for the time it came out bc that era of AAA game design was so dismal and artless, and in that context it is apsirational only bc the bar is set so low. but the writing is exceptionally good for what it is. it actually has complex themes and explores them with considerable nuance. adilegian has a (sadly incomplete) series if video essays that get into that better than I can.
but it’s also a very well designed game. imo it’s bizarre to compate it to resident evil. especially 6?? like really? are there people who like that game beyond camp value and mercenaries mode? but I digress. the last of us barely shares the same mechanical format of RE games and that’s it. horror is a superficial gameplay theme here. it instead shines when viewed as a survival game with a focus on tactical resource management and strategic stealth/movement options. resident evil superficially is concerned with resource management but is very much invested in either being a tense horror experience or a campy action adventure. the last of us reaches for something much more sophisticated and difficult and mostly lands it imo.
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yeah I don’t think this part actually exists and is just a thing people who haven’t played it swear is in there somewhere.
I don’t get how. just because he’s brutally murdered? somebody did that cause they didn’t think his decision at the end of the first game was so great. and you play from their perspective in the second half you didn’t get to. also ellie begins the game hating joel because she knows what he did, and only goes on her revenge quest cause bad dad or not that wasn’t a nice way to go out, and he did give her the life she has now. it’s complicated. that’s why it’s interesting.
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I liked most of TLOU2 but one thing about it that super frustrated me was its condescending attitude toward the player’s capacity to learn its core themes. We learn about a quarter of the way into the game that Ellie is too mad and she’ll drive herself and her friends to ruin through being too mad and too violent; long after you’ve learned this lesson, the game is still hitting you over the head with bugs bunny mallets the size of a space station and shouting, “we’re gonna force you, the player, to do something too violent, and then chide you for being too violent, because being too violent is bad.” Like, come on, game, I learned this sixteen hours ago or whatever. Give me a fucking break. Take me through the other side of this lesson.
The game ends just closing on the lesson, though. Mega yawn from me, and a lot of frustration with the way the game continued to implicate the player in Ellie’s behavior long after they must have learned the lesson the game wanted you to “learn.”
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I can’t wait for the tv series to come out for one last hurrah of discourse and then hopefully never have to hear about it ever again
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the intro goes to lengths to humanize joel and make him sympathetic, tragic, complex figure. they make him an acoustic guitar bro just to remind us that he has feelings too. his home is full of all kinds of woodworking and other creative hobbies to flesh out his sensitive side even more. even when you’re playing as the girl from the other faction, they still have joel bail you out of a deadly sequence to show that hey, he’s still a decent guy who’s just trying to help people. and then there’s the extended nostalgic flashback sequence where he takes her to a museum for her birthday – look what a good father figure he’s become! they do this because they want us to feel sad when he is brutally murdered, and to be on board with ellie’s quixotic, suicidal revenge mission. but honestly I really only felt sympathy for the gang that kills him, and felt exhausted when I was expected to pursue them from revenge as ellie. and it makes even less sense that dina would leave the safety of her community for a mission that’s almost certainly going to kill them both, despite having no investment in the situation beyond having a girlcrush or whatever.
I don’t remember anything in the first half of the game that remotely suggests ellie is aware of what joel actually did in the ending of part 1. it’s possible I overlooked that, but if I did that just makes the entire situation even more contrived and hard to swallow.
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This is how I feel about basically 90% of all media in the post Breaking Bad era, and I can’t ever tell if it means I’m just some kind of marvel idiot/Disney adult or an actual grown ass human w enough of his own darkness and despair to be preoccupied by
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yeah no it’s a huge issue I have with so much “prestige TV” and also, incidentally, the vast majority of lars von trier’s output. you’re not alone, it’s weird and gross and I guess it sells well.
this is actually a reason I think that, judging the last of us part 1 on its own terms as a middlebrow HBO-style serial drama, it’s actually better written than most of the shows it draws inspiration from. and the hilarious thing about the actual middlebrow HBO produced TV show they’re making based off of it is that it’s almost certainly going to dumb down anything good the game had going for it.
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i guess there’s a type of person out there who saw Ichi the Killer and was like “this really needs quicktime events”
i guess my point is that it’s just sort of boring and gratuitous at this point but all anyone is allowed to do is retread
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oh well, that settles it then
it’s in the part you haven’t played, but it was already in the look on her face at the end of the first game
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I mean I can buy that she suspects that he isn’t telling her the truth but does she know that he basically murdered half of the firefly contingent that was trying to cure the outbreak once for all?
They’re some of the most strongly authored player characters and it can chafe against fundamental player temperament (mine for sure)
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i saw TLOU and from moment one, i was repulsed and disgusted
i did not play it until much later, after i had read way too much fawning praise about the game
i played through roughly 30-60 minutes on the PS4 version when that came out, as my friend had bought a PS4 and was letting me play around with it
i did not enjoy it at all. not a fan of pretty much anything the game indicated it would be attempting to do
i don’t think i am amicable to the types of stories and ideas and thoughts naughty dog think are worth telling, tbh
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resident evil 6 is holistically a sack of flaming dogshit but it is also amazing and mechanically brilliant, despite having incredibly idiotic design in a lot of places lol
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the ellie flashbacks are about that secret knowledge she intuits at the end of the first game growing more unavoidable as she grows older and her finally wanting to find out the complete truth.
I think people look to hard for the game to be lecturing them about something so they can then be annoyed with it. I’m not thinking about any of that, I’m just synced up with every character in the moment I’m playing them.
when I’m playing joe I’m 100% pro joe. if you symbolically break my watch at the exact time you murder my daughter, freezing me in time in that moment only to finally be woken up from man pain cryo sleep as I’m told my new surrogate daughter also needs to be murdered, I’m also mass shooting that hospital and the last surgeon in the world. not a problem.
when I’m ellie I’m avenging my bad dad because bad dad or not he shouldn’t of gone out like that, and I was able to have this life etc. great, couldn’t agree more.
abby’s turned herself into a weapon for her life’s revenge mission, and after doing so is directionless and just kind stuck with this militia she hooked up with for the action, and starts acting up and going off on her own doing shit like rescuing trans kids from cults to make up for her guilt. you’re just threatening me with a good time there.
what were they supposed to do make joel wake up twirl his mustache and contemplate what murders he was going to do next. everbody who ever lived was a person. I don’t think he’s playing guitar cause they’re trying to tell you what a great guy he is. all the guitar shit is just because he mentioned he’d teach her guitar at the end of the first game
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I recently got around to reading Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and one of the passages that I found the most memorable was this one, since it speaks directly to still-live debates we’re circling here:
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Besides a bunch of conversation and increased wpm rankings, watching a video about this remaster and hearing the narrator say TLOU was hugely influential and left a big impact, I wonder what influence this game really had? To me, it seems like a lot of what it does was already being done. What Broco said about the way it competently pulls of a dramatic, TV-esque story is about all I am willing to give it.
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it was very influential on prestige studios that ship one game every five years and get HBO to adapt it
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