Finally finished 2 (24 hours) and I can’t say it was great. However, I’d like to try and dump some positive, constructive thoughts to try and get something out of the experience. Having read some of the broader online criticism I feel like it’s very easy (and enjoyable) to mock the game but that a lot of this criticism doesn’t really lead to many steps on what to improve/keep about this kinda AAA blob of prestige drama.
Mostly Spoilers
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The game’s length is excessive as has been noted elsewhere and this could be solved by trimming certain parts. The game’s structure, let’s call it Act 1 (Ellie), Act 2 (Abby), Act 3 (Farm/California), seems to want the audience to identify with and empathise with two major characters who hate each other. However, it’s unclear if we really need to spend so much time with each one for this to happen or if this structure is the best way to achieve this. I felt like Act 2 was a dramatic step-up in interest for me since I was seeing characters and situations that the series hadn’t shown before and they were doing a much better job of developing characters and setting because of it. Seeing a major urban colony in the world and the implications of religious belief were pretty cool. They often hamfist it with the character writing but otherwise it’s good gristle for a story. Ellie’s sections in Act 1 felt underdeveloped and tiresome by comparison because the motivations are mostly hidden until the finale and new characters aren’t given much to work with.
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I often felt like the game was unintentionally bringing up the question: ‘is this the best way to tell this story?’ There are so many bossfights/setpieces and the sheer length of the game starts to reveal seams. The length is an issue in ‘narrative-heavy’ games like this because the seams on an abstract mechanisation of the world tend to become more apparent as time goes on. @Drem spoke to this issue earlier in the thread about being able to predict the game design and the length exacerbates it. This is less an issue in traditionally longform genres like RPGs since ‘film-realistic’ verisimilitude isn’t a goal.
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The point above can be exemplified by Abby’s trip to the hospital. In order to get Yara’s surgery tools Abby has to sacrifice a day trip to a hospital. The crane climbing setpiece was neat to embody a character with a fear of heights but once she gets to the hospital a ton of drama happens to needlessly delay Abby’s goal. Yes, it’s suspicious that she just shows up and has been out of contact and yes, the hospital was ground zero for the fungus but it just feels like the story has gotten so far from its focus for the sake of extending play time. The ‘rat king’ clicker boss fight felt completely needless. What does it do to help tell this story? How does it reflect the core themes? All this Resident Evil fight seems to do is show that Abby goes to absurd lengths for relative strangers, and that clickers have a bizarre life cycle. And this is just one boss, there are tons of encounters like this that extend game length for little payoff. Multiple ‘sledgehammer’ scars, the scar you fight at the end of the Haven section, stalker sections, bloater sections. You frequently wonder ‘why are we, the player, seeing all this?’. Could Abby have made it to the hospital, said ‘hi’ to Nora and returned to the aquarium? My focus was on resolving the tension of helping Yara and the game just used it as a carrot to drag me through the hospital (after having been dragged up one building and down another). There were many portions I feel could have been replaced by jumpcuts.
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The framing of Ellie and Abby’s stories could have been more interesting if we saw less of them. I’m tempted to suggest that everything after Ellie and Dina reaching Seattle could have been cut and we could just jump straight to Abby’s perspective and play on from there but interlaced with Ellie’s flashback sequences. It would make it more challenging to identify with Ellie in Act 3 (since we see the result of her actions from an exclusively third person perspective) and would keep the story snappy but contextualised by Ellie’s past with Joel since the first game.
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Music was a surprising highlight throughout since the game makes pretty interesting use of licensed and folk music. There was a lot of potential for world-building here since the original context and meaning of songs like Take on Me or Little Sadie provides implications for how older and younger generations mix culturally. Interactive guitar sections also provide interesting foreshadowing to Ellie’s later inability to play guitar and losing her connection to Joel in a meaningful way that has little to do with any moralistic questions about either’s behaviour. Losing the ability to play music is dehumanising and was set up pretty well. I dread to think of the labour involved in creating these sections though and it probably didn’t need to be interactive to make the same point.
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I liked the Sniper section in Act 2. It’s a great way to reveal Tommy but would have been more impactful without the foreshadowing of Act 1 before it. It’s also a genuinely nice bit of gameplay variety which the game is lacking across 20+ hours. It is very silly that Manny happens to be the only WLF there though.
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Learning about the Scars/Seraphites was neat but we get very little insight into their origins even when visiting their home. I would’ve liked more of this since it’s a concept we didn’t see much of in the original TLOU. Some of the writing for them felt very lazy though and plays into a lot of religious cult tropes. I’m not even sure the Scars can be called a cult given that they operate independently as a culture so I don’t see why they’re framed as backwards lunatics. Settling on an island away from clickers and where agriculture can be extended beyond the limits of a football field seems pretty smart.
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People, even major characters, are killed quickly and without ceremony which felt right. Only Abby and Ellie are able to escape ridiculous injuries without us fearing for them but this is an old problem. Yara, Isaac, Jesse, and Manny’s deaths weren’t drawn out and I appreciated the restraint. The context of the final flashback makes Joel’s death more interesting because you can’t really guarantee people will be around for a big emotional forgiveness later on when you can get killed pretty easily.
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Accessibility options in this game should be a gold standard and I anticipate a GDC talk on this.
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Reloading felt good. It never stopped being satisfying to take stock and inventory through interactive animations that click, chink, and shuck.
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I completely missed Lev being trans since a lot of the dialogue I was meant to hear got drowned out by combat or background noise in Haven. The issue of hearing it isn’t quite the game’s fault, it’s likely just bad luck on my part, but having read it back it does feel pretty slapdash. When the Scars yell Lev’s dead name (Lily?) I assumed it was another bit of clunky Scar slang insulting Lev rather than his dead name. I guess it’s on me for not picking it up but, again, it doesn’t really support the other themes in the game. I guess the Scars are transphobic and shouldn’t be? I’m not sure what they were going for here other than attempted brownie points. Druckmann seemed to want to frame it as religious interpretation mixed with personal identity but Lev doesn’t really get enough screen time to properly hash out this ‘fresh perspective’:
It’s not diversity for the sake of it - like, OK, let’s have a trans character just so we can like check that off the box - no, that actually became a really interesting thing to explore within a religion. Here’s someone that is hunted by people that are following this religion, and he’s still religious, spiritual, he just interprets the material differently. That’s what diversity gets us, a fresh perspective. It’s a new way to look at a story.
A spoiler-heavy interview with The Last of Us Part 2 director Neil Druckmann | Eurogamer.net
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I liked playing as a jacked woman, and as someone with altophobia. I suppose this is one area where the dueling campaigns helps really sell the idea of playing as different people. Ability felt very distinct in a subtle way.
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It was kind of uncanny to see Ellie as a CPU boss. Watching her put down traps genuinely weirded me out because no other NPC does this. She also seems to have the powers of a player character. ‘Don’t attack Ellie head on’