The Last of Us (Spoilers)

what, this thing is 20+ hours long?

Almost 30 for me, but I took my time and didn’t use listen mode at all

I’m 19 hours in and still feel like I’m miles from the end. It is far too long and feels like two campaigns stapled together. I feel like it would have been better to frame it like a Nier A route and B route and NG+ Ellie’s Abilities to carry over on to Abbie rather than a continuous start-to-finish narrative.

Yeah it definitely feels like they at least chucked the dlc in as well .

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I’ll give the auto collect thing a try, sounds like it might help. I looked throught the accessibility options and didn’t find anything that helped make objects more noticeable, which surprised me.

But anyway, Ellie sure is looking for Tommy. Feel like there could be the sound of an ice cream van, or an elephant going PROOOO!!! in the distance and she’d stop in her tracks and go “that’s gotta be Tommy.”

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Isn’t the idea of a cure, as I think it’s been retconned from the first game where it was a vaccine, for a fungal infection kind of flawed? You go bad almost immediately if you come into contact with spores, and there’s definitely no way a Bloater is gonna be cured of its bloating.

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high contrast mode is what you want

I feel like this is the least of this game’s problems but it is weird they never explicitly discuss it. I guess they could develop anti-fungal medication but how they’re gonna produce and test complex pharmaceuticals in that environment is beyond me.

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Faithless talks about her favourite game TLOU 1 and it’s dlc at length in the latest how did this get played? episode if anyone’s interested.

it seems weird how this second game never even considers that the vaccine might not work. in the first game, the fireflies are presented as a messy organisation with flaws, but here they are just an objective good that would have solved everything if joel hadn’t done what he did.

Yeah, I mean the whole revenge thing seems to leave even the possibility of vaccine in the dust. I guess that’s sorta the point but it does paint the whole thing a bit black and white. Like even if a vaccine was created, how are you gonna distribute it? Clickers are still everywhere and transportation and manufacture are a huge issue. Not to mention trust when there are superstitious cults and societies that have already adapted to the situation. Once it’s all dealt with what would society look like? A vaccine isn’t a cure for the lack of government, resources or security, or the grudges everyone seems to love. I guess we can assume this has affected the whole world as well since no-one has come to America’s aid. What’s your moral imperative there?

specifically in this one Abby & co seeing the possibility of fireflies existing as this promised land that they will reach is so empty. the only conflict around it is whether it’s true or not, rather than what any of that means or how it would be any different than the WLF or Jackson or the Seraphites or the bonus last act slaver faction

In fact the Fireflies fomented their own failure by making a bush league mistake: they never bothered to ask Ellie for consent. If they had she would’ve said yes and then Ellie could’ve told Joel her decision herself, which may not have completely preempted his dadrage but probably would have robbed it of its force. By spiriting Ellie away, locking Joel up and saying “stay put we’re just gonna kill her real quick”, he has the perfect moral justification to act, by his own lights. He’s not even really wrong in a clearly definable way.

I think the game does a pretty good job at setting up the Fireflies as an organization that wouldn’t bother asking, making the whole thing a tragedy in the classical mode, rather than just a stupid inexplicable mistake.

If 2 just makes them Good Guys then that’s one more reason that 2 seems dumb.

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fireflies not just bringing everyone in ellie’s room waking her up and saying here’s what’s going on what’s your feelings on it is why also making the viability of vaccine an unknown thing seems overly complicating an already morally murky situation. why add that to the story, there’s already enough people who played the first game and it’s news to them that joel did anything wrong. and it wouldn’t really do anything but make joel more right. also I don’t remember everything in abby’s flashbacks but in the flashback with joel he’s still calling it a vaccine, not a cure. I don’t think they really make fireflies just good guys either. they disregard ellie as much as joel. all the flashback stuff with them is basically them saying “all the heinous stuff we’ve all done to survive in apocalypse land is now justified if we just do this one last bad thing.” for abbie and owen though the dream of the fireflies is still a step up from anything they’ve been involved in subsequently. ellie doesn’t care, when she finds the rattlers she’s still scribbling “fuck fireflies” next to her goth poetry in her journal.

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speaking of the rattlers, in the concept art their gear is all clearly marked police gear. obviously post-apocalypse the cops as kidnap and slaver gangs are going to have the most success in gun restricted states like california

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yeah i was gonna say just that the game doesn’t make the fireflies out to be straightforward Good Guys, it just makes abby out to be someone who thinks of them as Good Guys

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If anything I think the game’s trying to say Naughty Dog are the good guys.

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This game is very Phantom Pain, down to a random surgeon from the previous installment being imbued with plot-catalyzing significance and trailers plainly showing flashbacks from the end of the game that make you feel like you’re skipping over and misremembering things from the get-go.

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“If this was your daughter,” Naughty Dog whispers to the dads in the audience, “what would u do.”

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There’s a continuity error at the start of this, Bigot man says “I heard you and Dina are headed out today” then Jesse decides to put Ellie with Dina a minute later

Also Joel’s house would be the most camp thing in any other game

Still love this massive weird bad taste AAAA game though

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