yeah that’s all totally right of course, i’m pretty sure one of the central throughlines here is just “uncharted but with AAA upgrade tree progression,” if either of the games actually wanted to be Art it should all be dropped
and actually it could be dropped anyway, the gun upgrades are all real minor fiddly shit other than, like, scopes, and it would be easy to just put a scope on a table somewhere
the pills stuff is even more absurd yeah
and yes it does get sort of hilarious when she’s already got knife in throat before she can start telling them to keep it down
I think the core issue here is a game director who thinks the weirdness of ludonarrative dissonance/repetitious mechanical action is not a drastically distracting issue in almost every game that attempts cinematic fidelity. Even those games that lean into it as a theme.
Like Druckmann doesn’t even want to entertain the idea that these games might seem bizarre or humorous when they are (very reasonably) interpreted as formally absurd with all their abstractions and repetitions.
It’d be easy to call this lack of insight or growth lazy but we know that’s not it with all the lives caught in the wheel of its development, it’s straight up they didn’t care to prioritise the game design at all. They don’t even know what to do with a zombie apocalypse setting any more and it comes across as bored. Not atypical with folks who fall for this genre.
Bold to make the secondary lead - introduced in the way she is, with her history and her character design to boot - a total bore of a person. Credibly dull and a personality void. I wish it was intentional.
This is absolutely the case and she’s only truly allowed depth by her later relationships once everyone else she ever knew, who are equally just as boring - but I mean, they’re all morally compromised genocidal soldiers so - turns up dead.
A lot of work too is done for you to feel increasing antipathy towards Ellie anyway as the story progresses, right down to the final memory reveal which I suspect is supposed to elicit a more sympathetic response but only sours her motives further. But what’s to be expected when seemingly the biggest figure in her life (we’re not shown any growth outside of that spectre even with her new social circle) is a broken monster himself?
Yeah, it does kind of amount to a ‘so what’ if you know that Joel is messed up from the beginning. It’s not super surprising that all these people who get traumatised on a daily basis and are literally fighting to survive have wonky morals and make questionable decisions when looked at from a pre-apocalyptic morality. Even with this lens in mind, people can be shitty but what’s so interesting about this particular flavour of shittiness?
that’s it I’m going back to school I’m going to write my big Gender/Queer Studies thesis on how this game treats/uses pregnancy as a lynchpin for the lesbian co-lead’s guilt re: emulating the behavior of her murderously masculine baddad plowing the furrow of death instead of life as represented by Phew Good Thing Not Long For This World Fertilized These Eggs Before We Broke Up Or I Never Would Have Made It To This Victorian Fainting Couch To Be A Literally Unconscious, Mute Woman As Symbol Homestead Fantasy Girlfriend During Your Time of Greatest Emotional Turmoil THAT’S RIGHT DAD YOU DON’T OWN ME
I was 100 percent in sync with ellie’s motivations. Joel’s a bad guy but I played as him for 100 hours in the first game so he’s got to be avenged. It was only conflicting cause I thought abby was cool
The three flashback sequences between Ellie and Joel were the sequel I was looking for. It felt like an organic extension of the first game’s mood and characters, and the rest of the story needs to retcon the first game’s moral ambiguity by narrating that the unethical world saviors were actually good guys after all. Nothing else works without that, but I still felt that Joel was right and the Fireflies became even more bumbling because their band-aid over the simplest solution (turn around and ask her, you dolts) was asking the nearest proxy when the real deal was very accessible.
They were touching and showed that Joel’s (and my) decision paid off. He got a daughter, and I was happy that he got to experience that. The non-playable scene at the end with Joel on the porch, post-revelation, leans into both the betrayal and the love of their relationship. It presents an actual vision of hope in that moral wasteland (you don’t know if love will succeed, but you have the freedom to try), and actually shoulders the burden of proving that all that misery can be worth it.
