How Does The Last of Us Part 2 Compare to the Last of Us Remastered? [Total Spoilers]

[Music] a recent article about the development of the Last of Us to buy the magazine GQ said that the first last of us was quote a totemic game often hailed as the greatest of all time which I found strange because I've been able to completely ignore its existence for years and haven't heard more than a few words to the contrary certainly nothing as glowing as greatest of all time in the game's heyday of 2013 and 2014 I wasn't playing console titles so that was part of it but it's got me feeling gas lit as in critic to read that line because I feel like I've had a thing you're on the pulse of what people's general opinions are of best and worst of all time since 2013 and I simply don't remember the last of us coming up much did I sleep then on a totemic game one of the greatest of all time I picked up a copy of the Last of Us remastered as a free game complimentary of my playstation subscription feed but it had been in my digital library for months because I hadn't felt any necessity or pressure to play it at all well totemic might be a poor choice of words I was glad to start the Last of Us without those sorts of expectations of greatness because it is a very unusual game with strengths and weaknesses outside and around what I typically think of when I think greatest game of all time what makes it uniquely remarkable is being a piece of crossover media a game that hangs in between the defined margins of the worlds of television film and games media in a way that's evocative of some of the best qualities of each however in games media specifically the Last of Us is quite frequently surpassed by contenders from a variety of subgenres who take something the Last of Us did well and does it in a way that's narrower but more obviously deft the Last of Us is not a bad game I'm not saying that at all but it feels to leverage much of anything that makes games special as a medium to instead add interactivity into what's at its heart an HBO limited series ironically of course here in 2020 the game is finally being reverse engineered into an actual honest-to-god HBO production but even at the time that was quite clearly what it wanted most to be over and over while playing The Last of Us I was reminded of a concept from Ernest Cline's nerd novel ready player one in the movie version the characters faced a challenge where they visit the Overlook Hotel from the shining but in the book that challenge is one with the main character suddenly he unexpectedly finds himself in the opening scene from the movie war games and Matthew Broderick's role losing points if he deviates from the script and gaining points if he imitates Broderick's mannerisms exactly if you are a superfan of something like zombie BBF for instance there is a desire to somehow participate after the fact in a way that's generally impossible with passive media the thing you loved was constructed without your input it doesn't require your input but you want to feel as if you have some ownership in the thing anyway sure you love Matthew Broderick and wargames but don't you sometimes wish you were Matthew Broderick not just experiencing the emotions but performing them as well the book called this speculative game genre flick sinks a kind of natural progression of what rock band and Guitar Hero did for music but applied to cinema The Last of Us one is a standalone original work you don't know all the words beforehand but the way it leans into genre conventions and tells its story so straightforwardly and on ironically means that if you're at all immersed in a wider world of zombie media or post-apocalyptic survival media in general the plot beats will all be familiar and comfortable all the way through The Last of Us doesn't have level design or mechanical systems that do anything besides serve the plot and serve the atmosphere meaning that your role in the last of us is not so much survivor as it is actor if you're a fan of prestige television The Last of Us is as close as I've ever seen to a genuine flick sync its satisfactions aren't based in any of its mechanical properties or interactive properties but in how robustly it allows a player to feel themselves inside of a more traditional media experience let's begin at the beginning with the games genuinely amazing opening sequence so here's a fact about post-apocalyptic games versus immediate apocalypse a present tense apocalypse is harder than a ship to animate the amount of chaos you'd have to present to do something as effective as say the world wars Eve movies opening sequence is just staggering to try to create a cinematic moment of present tense apocalypse on PlayStation 3 hardware is an act of colossal ambition for the developers an ambition that they completely nail you begin as a teenage girl Sara things seem extremely normal at first you explore your room you go downstairs but as oh the tension builds with the sure steadiness is sirens begin to wail and the empty house starts to feel oppressive then just in time dad appears things will be fine now surely putting the player in Sarah's perspective is a key choice because it not only better establishes a normalcy it establishes early on a sense of panic and vulnerability that Joel her dad will share as the game continues right away Joel seemed so impressive he's got a plan he's getting the family out of Austin and all the player can do is watch the chaos from the backseat window as the civilized world crumbles in minutes then a car crash which I imagine most of the audience was expecting and a character swapped which I wasn't immediately Sarah is hurt so Joel carries her you run you try to get out you almost make it but when a soldier guarding the quarantine zone confronts Joel that soldier shoots and Sarah is killed cut to 20 years later the scene effectively foreshadows all the major conflicts and characterizations you'll see in the game to come the long dead Sarah casting shadows through the entire plot and coloring the outcome of the final climax it also foreshadows how the game will be mechanically a level is not a level so much as it is a scene and the player will never have enough agency to go off-script in a meaningful way progression in the game isn't based on skills or ammunition so much as it is based on intuiting the blocking of the scene knowing when to hold them when to fold them and when to run based purely off of tonal cues I want to stress that I don't necessarily think this is bad design I'm focusing so much on the cinematic linearity of the game because the amount of directorial control the game wields versus the amount of player control you have available to you is unusually lopsided as far as games go The Last of Us and its commitment to this approach in style almost pushes it out of the stealth action shop your honor it's generally considered a part of and puts it as much in step with a title like outlast as something like Splinter Cell this refusal to yield round to the player so it can maintain its tone and intent allowed the last of us however to be the groundbreaking title it was at the time considered the ps3 era it was part of when it originally came out an era of stylistic access that culminated in God of War The Last of Us with its ability to so effectively mimic high budget premium cable storytelling handily surpasses other attempts from that hardware generation like Grand Theft Auto for the quality of its digital actors performances were industry-leading at the time and still stand up as being compelling and convincing throughout presentation Lee The Last of Us was something very special what makes it special also makes it divisive more than any turn of the plot the most shocking thing about the Last of Us is how able it is to get away with having the most minimalist gameplay of any triple-a action title I've ever played this is what to me gives it the feel of a flick sync getting the most out of the experience isn't about being surprised or being expressive through gameplay it's about anticipating what's coming up knowing your role knowing the props and hitting the cues The Last of Us part one has a kind of unique pacing when it comes to its narrative and gameplay the overwhelming focus is cinematic but rather than do what movies often do and jump from critical scene two critical scene the game intensely elaborates those scenes into sprawling hours-long multifaceted set pieces in which a great deal of the dialogue and character building is played out casually in desolate hallways and overgrown streets this is punctuated by significant time skips between major movements in the plot as the game goes on this gives the events of the plot await that short movie scenes can often lack on account of how direct they are these scenes The Last of Us are indirect you approach the scene on foot for blocks at a time before you arrive in that time you have three incidental conversations you kill a dozen zombies you rate an old pharmacy and then you've killed more zombies on the way out again as you redeploy to the next scene half a neighborhood away it's not usually that necessary to answer these questions of transit in a script when you're working within a movies time frame everything counts and has to be dramatically justified with movies this is where the post apocalypse comes into the storytelling for the Last of Us its world is so actively hostile and dangerous that you can't take these practical questions of transit for granted to the usual way and moving from one neighborhood to the next is drama it has all the dramatic qualities of a more formal scene motivation a progression of blocking dialogue the opportunity to raise and answer questions about the world and its people it's a structure in which you can hide quite a few major turnings of the plot inside some routine rummaging zuv the shelves so what makes this on game like if it's already on movie like in certain respects for the Last of Us one it's the structure to simplicity of its combat design just consider how crafting in inventory works there are a lot of useful zombie and people killing tools but he can only have a few of them at a time when you find the crafting materials they only yield small portions of the whole point you need to make a single item you have to build up over many rooms of scavenging to replace tools you've used in a single encounter hours back ammunition is similarly scarce what this means is that you'll generally have only just as much as you needed to advance sometimes relaxing margin in your favor sometimes a very stressful one away from it your opportunities as player for what actions you're able to take are managed by the mechanical pacing down to exactly how squeeze dry and boxed in the game wants you to feel if you kick too much ass you're gonna run out of items if you avoid all the enemies using stealth mechanics the game will eventually require you to engage in direct combat through some machination of the narrative director or level designer like putting a heavy object in front of a door which will attract the attention of all the enemies you neglected to murder the moment you try to advance to feel truly game-like game systems need to operate with an internal consistency they need to feel as if they're manipulated by the player towards the game here the systems are more manipulated by the game towards the player effing and flowing at the whim of the moods the game is trying to create using deliberate scarcities and scripted encounters so even if the pacing is utterly untenable for movies it still feels movie-like on account of the amount of directorial control withheld and reserved from the player it does take quite a while for this mixed a medium approach to feel justified and Last of Us it's a several hour walk just to the plots first significant event on the outskirts of the boston quarantine zone a lot of introduction is laid down at that time like the oppressiveness of the military that runs the city the danger of what lies beyond the walls the desperation and starvation of the people that live there it well establishes who Joel's become in the past 20 years bitter and withdrawn hanging with others who share his jagged disappointment with the Pearl and plot wise there's a cache of weapons that a smuggler is stolen from him and there will be blood to pay for it the smuggler of course doesn't have his weapons anymore he sold them at the Firefly is an underground group of radicals who are still trying to save the world joel has nothing but contempt for the fireflies in their optimism they've got him in a bind though leveraging the moment to get him to agree to smuggle a teenage girl named Ellie out of the quarantine zone later on it'll become clear that he won't just be escorting Ellie out of Boston he'll have to take her all the way to Denver this is where the games are added pacing stops being frustrating and starts becoming fascinating if it took you nearly six hours and dozens of near-death encounters just to get through ten miles of Boston cityscape found the absolute [ __ ] are you gonna live through thousands of miles of American wilderness completely given over to monsters and madmen the last of us one has much much more in common with Telltale's adventure game an adaptation of The Walking Dead in its first season than it even looks like on the surface the bedrock foundation of both games is a meditation on what fatherhood means in a world that's failed and broken whether the kinder thing to do is try and shield an adopted daughter figure from a world of overwhelming violence or to prepare her to swim deep in its blood tinted waters it's a question that's had more and more resonance for me as time goes on in the real world's norms and understandings erode both of these games pivot on the use of narrative and gameplay in a kind of critical symbiosis where the verbs of the game are generally violent and the father figure mechanically moves through it in a destructive way but is then accountable morally and intellectually to the child who watches them do these things in the scripted narrative here's the thing The Walking Dead's pairing of Clementine and Lee is still years later much more emotionally vivid and for me affecting than the last of us managed with Joel and Ellie The Walking Dead had even less gameplay than the last of us much less but it allowed the player to influence the way Lee responded to Clementine gave the player a chance to put themselves in his shoes more than the Last of Us is able to do with Joel its dialog in The Walking Dead is more in-depth and there's much more of it to fascinatingly Telltale's Walking Dead games could easily have tried to emulate Premium cable in the same way the last of us did but were prevented from doing so by budget and scope so they instead leaned into the comic books art style and decided to use the interactive advantages of games as a medium to emphasize moments of choice and consequence as opposed to a visual fidelity to television the player owns the choices and suffers the consequences with Liam Clementine ironically this makes it more game-like than the last of us because even though it's less gameplay focused it's more overall dependant on player input to achieve its outcomes despite being shallower in the writing Department The Last of Us feels more like a movie feels more like television because of the intense budget and the impressive technology behind it allows for facial expressions and nonverbal storytelling that is way beyond a telltale games capabilities as well as environments and backgrounds of astonishing fidelity and depth especially in comparison to the Walking Dead's drab and utilitarian environments it simply looks more like TV than the game actually connected to a zombie TV show does and by not even really pretending to be interested in traditional gameplay of The Walking Dead game gets started with its storytelling a hell of a lot II earlier the section in Boston leading up to the fireflies in LA doesn't actually do any more storytelling than a compressed three or four scenes of TV might despite taking hours longer it's only when Ellie shows up that the game begins in earnest because it's her dynamic with Joel that carries the momentum of the game's tonal ambitions through the twisting and turning of literal miles of corridors of the game sometimes sets in between you and the next major plot development if you're going to decompress your storytelling and decompress your environments you can't allow the current of the action to become stagnant there has to be something pushing you along besides curiosity and weapon upgrade points of dubious practical value that thing in The Last of Us is Joel and Ellie the long bereaved father and the prickly orphan while I think the relationship between Clementine and Lea is more dynamic and deeper the difference in perspective between Joel and Ellie is arguably more significant Clementine is much younger she forms her opinions based on Lee and the world she grew up in was previously a zombie free one le on the other hand has got a lot of life already under her belt all of it lived in a long zombified world of soldiers barbed wire and loss joel looks at Ellie and sees not only Sarah the daughter he lost but also the world that died that same night 20 years passed Ellie looks at Joel and sees what lies ahead of her a life that ain't living a heart that's all shriveled up inside a filthy plaid shirt they are compellingly opposed people barely alike at all and that's what's gonna make him such a good road trip companions the Last of Us uses his level progression to maximum effect when it comes to the world building choosing each of the extremely lengthy stops on its journey to best illustrate the world in a complementary cumulative way at first it seems like you'll legitimately never leave Boston so long does it take to creep through its outskirts and shattered downtown but by the time it's done there's no world concept or game concept that won't have already been made understood to the player the rest of the game stacks and amplifies those ideas level by level first Joel and Ellie need a car this being two decades past most cars scheduled maintenance that is a tall order there's too many questions for a big-time skip but a little break in the pacing after such a long moment for moment sequence in Boston allows her a soft reset of the entire mood and pacing when Joel and Ellie reached Western Massachusetts where someone might have a rig that they can use here the game starts giving the player a small amount of exploratory power by allowing you to pick up through and look around a whole couple blocks of the town to scavenge and have conversations as you stuff junk in your pockets it is distinctive but limited there are plenty other games from fallout 4 to dining light but do scavenging in a way that's both faster and more meaningful in a purely gamified context Last of Us ones exploratory moments are unusually simple they don't even have a soft desk puzzles to open up caches and content what lockbox puzzles there are only happen occasionally and can be easily solved by the solutions they put within arm's reach these solutions are within arm's reach because moving beyond the immediate area will advance the level in a way that locks content behind you if you want to be thorough you have to be thorough in a very specific way we you don't accidentally trigger a cutscene before you were ready to be done the reason the scavenging sections aren't more obviously gamified with puzzles seems to be a desire to preserve a sense of naturalism in miniature the naturalism does come through with the amount of care and detail time was spent thinking about the inhabitants of the explorable houses and businesses the way they lived how they fled if they died there what sort of people might could might have come through afterwards or was it all sealed up and untouched for 20 years the environmental storytelling is of a caliber much higher than something like Fallout 4 is skeleton tableaus it's just so unnatural in the very obvious way the explorable neighborhoods are sectioned off and the structural necessity of communicating the player all the ways they can't go and all the things they don't need to pay attention to that it kind of nullifies the realism gains made in the micro details of the set design because the props of the game are so limited and it takes so much of everything to reach an actionable amount of an item or items component that scavenging feels both critical and pointless in varying ways if you don't collect and collect and collect you'll never make progress but rarely does that progress help you right now this couldn't sometimes SAP the joy from the experience especially if the area is anonymously industrial or too ruined to have a lot of detail where you're just sort of running along flat surfaces to make triply sure there isn't some hidden cache of six or seven weapon upgrade parts out of these seventy you're trying to get for the next upgrade nearly all of the game's achievements are about 100% collecting one category of item or upgrade which holds no sway over the gameplay yet it does still suggest that meticulous surveys of all nooks crannies cabinets and shelves is the intended play style which adds frustration of course when you inevitably end up you know moving the story along by opening what you thought would be a closet but turned out to be a plot event the initial quest is to search the town for old smuggler friend and get the truck blossoms from the quiet of the early explorative moments into some extremely tense zombie action as he moved to the side of town that the smuggler doesn't go in search of a battery for the truck as you move away from exploration towards combat and scripted encounters the momentum really back up the last of us uses these non-combat interludes to tremendous atmospheric effect but they really drag mechanically because of the chore like routine of scavenging they are too linear to adequately get across the openness they're trying to suggests oh they're just bubbles stuffed with extra content as you're sucked further and further down the content tube once the game pivots back away from it the funneling effect clarifies the game's intentions and allows you to move quickly across larger distances while still feeling like you've seen all there was to see the more deliberate the game is and constructing specific scenes and specific moments amidst the sprawl of the world the better the last of us is this has seen nowhere better than the sequences hole climax where Joel and Ellie are going to have to push start the truck in the middle of a picket fence kind of neighborhood well the fungal hordes descend down on them in a movie it would be plenty exciting but as an interactive sequence it's incredible the scarcity of all your supplies makes each violent action costly and important there's monsters coming in from all over the trucks rolling the fungus monsters are screaming Ellie's yelling Joel shouting it's a glorious pandemonium that's been built up to over an hour of bigger and bigger encounters with the zombies a lot more happens in the town beforehand to an entire subplot with Joel's friend rises and falls and the early opportunities to go slow and unbothered allowed Ellie and Joel to size each other up some and come to a better understanding of their reliabilities and weaknesses the truck escaped climax is that two without each other they would have died right there in that town there's a sense now that Joel and Ellie Oh eat other something it's a positive feeling that the game will spend hours cultivating into something very cleverly dark it's able to be clever in the relationship between Joel and Ellie because the voice actors and their digital standings do have phenomenal stage chemistry and the amount of time they spend together of the course the game is quite large The Last of Us can sell this growing feeling of chosen family by extrapolating over the year of time the narrative takes place in how many unseen conversations they must have based simply on how much substantive stuff they talk about in the focus days you do spend with Joel and Ellie as the player Boston is only two days of time Bill's town is only a your time with the characters doesn't total more than a week of that year but those days end up being the truly pivotal eventful ones so the Last of Us is doing scene curation movie style but on a whole different scale where it's a tight 20 hours of game out of a potential thousands of hours of uncompressed interactive storytelling rather than a tight two hours of movie out of a potential dozens of hours of passive media storytelling the next section pittsburgh demonstrates the advantages of that by applying two days worth of violence and unyielding pressure to the main characters as they drive into the heart of a bandit stronghold it starts off really rough for the two of them with a beautifully animated and well paced ambush cutscene where Joel is forced off the freeway and into the occupied downtown area militarized Raiders are everywhere including an armored Humvee covered with barbed wire that fills a kind of Nemesis role during the sequence like that helicopter during the canal segments of half-life 2 the real narrative purpose of Pittsburgh though is to where the player down and exhaust them completely it's meant to take the optimistic thrill of setting out on a big American road trip in a big American pickup truck and then literally derail it then slowly crush the characters until stress fractures start to form and the people they are and the way they look at the world there isn't a single thing the Pittsburgh sequence does unique from other post apocalyptic media besides this directorial intention to create an unrelenting deepening bleakness it generally works by adding two new characters into the mix and older and younger brother traveling together and looking out for each other the same way that Ellie and Joel do double the characters means double the background dialogue and having other people around to make choices about where to go and how makes it feel more reasonable when the game refuses you three out of four directions at an intersection more than that it balances this chapter of the story out with a fragile familial compassion on one hand and a devouring violence on the other the combat in The Last of Us is unusually simple but effectively so because it supposes that the violence means what it says guns are deadly they tear people apart melee weapons hit with chunky thuds of varying degrees of effectiveness all the weapons have excellent sound effects and player feedback although all of them seem deliberately hard to aim there's a desperation and a consequence to combat that feels unique and rewarding however it also means that there is generally an ideal way to get through any encounter the ideal blocking of the scene you're expected to intuit a lot of deviation from that and you'll certainly die this isn't to say clever alternatives aren't possible you're meant to have to work within scarcity but it does mean that you can mess up badly enough quickly enough that it often takes several tries to figure out what's meant by an arrangement of rooms and enemies Boston's encounters were largely tutorial bills town focused overwhelmingly on the fungus on bees and so Pittsburgh is where the human on human violence really picks up the feeling is surprisingly intense is there better hunters than the zombies by a good margin they see your flashlight they coordinate search patterns they seem threatening in a way that goons usually don't in a game perhaps because they out match Joel unless the player is able to again gain the upper hand and thin them out a little bit beforehand there are so many of them flooding through the city that there is no sense that they'll just run out of dudes at some point they own this place you're trespassing the pressure is so intense and so constant that it feels like a relief when you're forced underground to contend with the fungus zombies in the forgotten places of the city where you might be able to slip by undetected Pittsburgh is the level where the last of us really refines and hones its use of violence to punctuate itself this is a miserable world where people tear each other apart for scraps and if you're lucky you get one or two other people to walk that path of misery with you if they're taken from you what's left henry and sam the brothers you travel with are pretty obviously doomed to die from the outset they're nice people so nice in fact that their presence jeopardizes the hidden misery is still lying in wait further down the script to maximise how awful their deaths will feel you got to get to know them and to root for them first the game does this in the most obvious way possible by establishing parallels of parenthood between Joel and Henry and then contriving to have circumstances swap their kids for a time Dolan San get to adventure together awhile while Henry and Ellie find their own way it's meant to get the player develop sympathy but that's not even really necessary there's a scene in a toy shop where Sam wants to keep something but Henry says no they only take what's needed that's the Sam is disappointed in a really sympathetically childlike way le then secretly tucks the toy away for him it's heartbreaking how little of a childhood this boy can have even Ellie got to have more than him growing up in the quarantine zone and she knows it Henry is doing his best but there is a fine line in this world between a happy kid and a dead kid and it's best not to walk the knife's edge it's the kind of touch that horror movies would more and more adopt in the coming years from the opening sequence of a quiet place to Byrd box it's part of why Last of Us part 1 hasn't aged all that much it was speaking a dialect of horror production that was only going to become more prevalent and common as the genre moved away from the eyeliner and hard rock mid-2000s horror aesthetic that does feel dated by now like much of today's media The Last of Us cares less about being original than it does about feeling genuine in some way a feeling led to the game by its excellent voice work and character animations structurally it is quite calculated and the sentimentality is calculated as well these sympathetic parallels couldn't be more on the nose if they used an Excel spreadsheet to balance them but if the sympathy the player feels is real then the subplot will land full stop maybe a few players will be taken out of the moment by the artifice of it but many more will take that moment at face value the emotional face value of the subplots climax is sad as [ __ ] no matter how far in advance you see it coming after escaping downtown Pittsburgh there are scenes in the Pennsylvania suburbs of long scavenging and no combat a lull in which Sam and Ellie become friends a small moment of them trying to imagine such a thing as an ice cream truck is especially charming but Sam is bit there's nothing for it and he hides it well well enough to go off to sleep loved by his brother and holding on to the toy Ellie gave him and then wake up as a ravenous monster is it possible for something you expect completely to be shocking it has another element of the flick sync sensation this moment of a child turning into a zombie is such a genre cliche for zombie media that you basically know it word for word before the speaking even begins but the specificity of the scene and the feeling of having known these people gave it a dramatic wait I didn't expect when Henry's had a moment to process what just happened he just shoots himself he barely thinks about it it was Sam or nothing so now it's nothing cut to black time passes the season changes and it's long to Wyoming to meet Joel's brother Tommy when Sarah died on the night of the great collapse Joel surely felt just as bereaved as Henry did but tommy was there that night that Joel lived another 20 years is testament to the fact that Joel didn't lose everything the same way that he just saw Henry lose everything still those two days in Pittsburgh deeply scar both the main characters inside Ellie the last of her childhood withers up and blows away inside Joel and deepening hardness calcifying around one obsessive idea that he won't fail Eliot the same way he failed Sarah the way Henry failed Sam people in this world are starving not just a food but of connection of purpose as God as his witness Joel will never go hungry again that full line from Gone with the Wind actually goes as God is my witness they're not gonna lick me I'm gonna live through this and when it's all over I'll never be hungry again no nor any of my folk if I have to lie steal cheat or kill as God is my witness I will never be hungry again in the movies context this line is said by a plantation owner whose estate was destroyed during Sherman's march to the sea it's the cry of a woman who had everything at the expense of others lives declaring before God himself that if she had to do it all over again she'd be an even bigger piece of [ __ ] that she'll commit any sin with a prideful smile in front of God's face if she can just get what she feels she deserves for her and hers it is a thunderous refusal to examine why her world turned to ashes and dust in the first place as the last of us goes on into its later acts Joel's obsessive aggrieved fatherhood begins to wear on Ellie it's interesting to me how in some corners of the internet there's a sentiment that Joel did everything correctly over the course of the game but I feel it's clear that the script itself is turning a critical eye to him as soon as he reaches the safety of his brothers settlement in Jackson Hole Wyoming seeing Tommy again seems to make Joel feel comfortable in confusing his memory of Sarah with his experience of Ellie he begins to see Ellie as dependent on him when they've always been interdependent at best and codependent at worse it drives a wedge between him and Ellie to the point where she has to run away to Denver herself because Joel is planning on leaving her there at the hydroelectric dam the last of us starts to kind of drag in this section even though the environment starts switching up a lot faster Joel and Ellie are experiencing a low point in their relationship and sublight estrangement which makes this whole section kind of hard to connect to Joel and Tommy's relationship is critical to the arc that'll connect both the games but it's more interesting in retrospect than feels at the time without knowing what'll come of it Joel is dragging his heels about getting where you're going right as you're nearly there it's time for saddling up not settling down Joel suddenly tossing anchor into the momentum of the plot is actually quite true to who he is who he's becoming being frustrated at him for it build sympathy for Ellie to whom the story is now gradually pivoting it is a pretty big gamble though to risk a deliberately causing friction for the player because you want to establish friction with the player character but I think that Naughty Dog pulled it off really well Joel is forced to confront la not as a child to be protected but as a young woman with self determination it is easier for Joel to reckon with that self determination when she's there to speak up for herself what's really problematic about this section is its interval of reconciliation afterwards the university sequence in Denver is positively the most frustrating level design in the entire game it has a huge open areas that are relatively barren of things to do except for occasional entrances and exits that are impossible to tell as for whether they lead to glittering optional prizes or advance the plot in a way that seals off those optional areas forever it is a large naturalistic University layout with giant lecture halls and warns of admin buildings which absolutely does not mesh with the often unintuitive sectioning off of certain parts of the map from another the significant moments of character development were accomplished back in Jackson the whole University expedition is a snipe hunt for the address your next destination and an unjustified slog towards the next truly pivotal moment the game doesn't take advantage of the moment to offer much character development or world building compared to the level design that came before the Denver University is a muddled and obtuse progression without a lot of memorable moments save the big finale the University chapters whole arc is all to set up a moment where Joel is ambushed and gravely wounded now the pivot tally seems clear not only is Joel fallible as a man he's mortal as a protector as fragile as any human right as the game had settled into a rhythm that felt rote and routine it took the creative leap to throw its whole status-quo out of the window all at once Ellie's winter is a chapter that would have been my favorite in the game if it wasn't for how its own cliches end up overwhelming and hamstrung the truly excellent character were put into Ellie and Joel's role reversal when I was in grade school one of the books that made the deepest impression on me was Gary Paulson's young adult survival novel hatchet the sense that book gave me of both the crushing isolation of deep wilderness and the Soaring adventure to be found and not letting it kill you left an indelible mark on eight-year-old Maine in 1996 Paulsen wrote an alternate ending sequel where his teenager had to survive a harsh winter Ryan and Ellie would have been about the same age in their respective stories and it was hard for me not to think of them in some kind of parallel one in a sanitized and more grounded setting and the other in a blood-soaked in the Asthma fantasy yet both of them forced by isolation and hardship to become a greater version of themselves to grow up in the face of nature's indifference the Last of Us violent as it is carves out a huge amount of time to allow Ellie a coming-of-age narrative that defines her vividly for the games to come as this sequence opens Ellie is hunting a deer in the deep winter weeks after we had last seen her and she's having a rough go of it she follows the wounded animal to an abandoned logging mill where she runs into the chapters big complication the threatening ly amiable strangers like with him Henry and Sam you understand their function in the narrative as soon as they appear and nothing they do deviates from your expectations of how that'll turn out save the skill of the line reading their bad cannibal men with bad intentions obviouly they barely have their [ __ ] together enough to sell a contrary story to a teenager who's never watched television let alone an audience of players who have probably seen over half the movies the story arc was cobbled together from my problem with this is that this chapter is ostensibly about Elly's drinks the sacrifices it took to look after Joel through weeks of seeping wounds and fever the way she has tucked her childhood into her backpack and the spot where her winter coat used to occupy yet the villains are all about emphasizing Ellie's fragility and weakness in a somewhat gendered way in the end Joel has to wake up out of his torpor like a big angry bear to save Ellie from a choice between Bing dinner or being a child bride you can argue that Ellie had mostly handled a good deal of the situation herself by the time Joel shows up there's a pole boss fight in a darkened Forest Service Lodge restaurant where Ellie has to creep up on the villain who would otherwise instantly overpower her but the fact that he that but the fact that Joel shows up to be mad sad dad at all feels unnecessary almost as if the game is afraid that if Ellie does it all herself then it diminishes Joel somehow the action set-pieces like early on in the middle when it's under assault and you help the strangers before they turn on you are really just fantastic and the swap from the vivid greens and golds of summer and autumn to a more pensive moody winter grayscale makes everything feel freshly strange this was the game's chance to really lean into Ellie's coming-of-age story with a wickedly violent twists like the way Jennifer Lawrence's character arc plays out in Winter's Bone but the choice to Menace LA with leering cannibals at this juncture runs counter to that by putting such a spotlight on her youth and gender instead of her individuality and capability as a survivor those complaints aside what's significant here is that this is the very back quarter of the game we're in now and instead of settling into a routine it's mixing everything up and keeping things novel now Joel doesn't see Ellie just as a surrogate for the daughter he lost now he owes her his life in a major way they are well reconciled the snow is melting and there's a distant hint of hope like campfires smokin the breeze the stage is now set for the tragedy that the games from building to the entire time not just quite yet though your rival in Salt Lake City heralds what's perhaps the game's most iconic scene the wandering giraffes these drafts majestically stroll through the old streets of Salt Lake City in brilliant daylight one reaches its head down and Ellie is able to share a moment of connection and tenderness with the strange creature it's a perfect distillation of what's compelling about the last of us and their specific approach to apocalypse one in which nature has completely triumphed having reclaimed the earth from humanity who may as well have come from outer space for how well their works fit in with the rest of it in 2009 and 2010 The History Channel did up what was at the time an extremely fascinating speculative series called life after people were Mechanical Engineers botanists and those who are qualified to guess gave opinions about how long our stuff would last if I were to if we were to simply vanish on Moss without a trace the show was hindered a lot by mandatory cable TV sensationalism and pacing but it animated a huge number of these educated guesses into memorable illustrations of overgrown skyscrapers crumbling in an old-growth forests and suburban housing tracts sliding back into the swamps they pumped out to make room for them I have personally grown up with an image of the post-apocalypse heavily influenced by Mad Max 1 where the world is made into a wasteland because if some [ __ ] up thing humans did lately pop culture has been looking beyond that and figuring that you know what the world will probably be fine and honestly probably better off without us and we're pretty much inevitably gonna find a war or disease that'll do the trick and kill us off anyway I'm honestly not sure if this is more or less pessimistic than a wasteland apocalypse it's likely a lot to do with the fact that in the 60s and 70s when the wasteland apocalypse really came into vogue there was a worry that industrialism would over foam the world and there's a sensation now that that very same infrastructure is largely just rotting around us cities built on 20th century promises like Detroit have taken on characteristics of ghost towns with neighborhoods left in completely to rot while life goes on around the ruin a nuclear wasteland felt right for the Cold War it just doesn't feel quite as present anymore as the growing global sense that our our rates of consumption just aren't sustainable in something is eventually going to give then it's to the weaves with it all the last of us with its nightmare fungus adds the twist that the weeds didn't wait quietly but took a more active role in shooing humanity off the stage the backdrop for all the misery and violence in the game world is often gorgeously scenic which is an interesting tonal flavor to everything the majesty of everything around you combined with the daily struggle just to witness it brings out the indifference of nature underlines how beauty will exist long after creatures with the bane rain wiring to appreciate it die it makes a person seem small worthless a speck of dust borne unnoticed in the wind it also makes all the great monuments and buildings and shopping malls more melancholy than a self-made Inferno would have because in this apocalypse there was still time there was good left in what we had all this left now is scraps and shadows nuclear war is basically suicide at the national level it's a choice the ruins are guilty in some way in this fungal setting it feels that humanity was murdered which gives it a more tragic impression it's a key difference between the last of us and horizon zero dawn in terms of verdant apocalypse because in the horizon lore there's still that kernel of guilt where it's indisputably humans that have destroyed the world they built robots that ate it all up and then apologetically seeded it try again next time for The Last of Us the world has utterly moved on from humans and humans just can't let go of their same old [ __ ] that's what's so moving about the giraffe scene it's a moment where Joel lets go of his world a little to meet Ellie in hers Ellie's world is empty of a lot of things but Beauty ironically is always nearby like a couple other moments in the game you're invited to linger here with a Vista you have to nudge Joel out up with a button press when you want to move on Salt Lake City won't be so kind to them as they move deeper into it despite being so movie like in so many ways this is one of the few ways that the Last of Us truly understands the emotional weight interactivity can add to a scene if it isn't overplayed choosing how long to linger is a small choice but leaving it to the player let's that interval of contemplation feel just right to each player whether that means slamming the button and skipping it entirely or letting the feeling of a wonder sit long enough to sour into a recognition of how intangible the moments we most remember really are from a purely mechanical perspective the climax of the last of us one is a boring and difficult slog through a weapons loud firefight sequence that basically rejects a lot of the rhythmic qualities of the game stealth combat to turn into a room clearing shooter for a while something for which the game was not designed from a narrative perspective though this is a moment of violent selfishness that quite literally every chapter of the game has been laying careful groundwork for on reaching the Firefly base in Saint Mary's Hospital Ellie is sedated and prepared for a surgery that will kill her to extract the fungal root that's grown into her brain without turning her in many ways Ellie's immunity has been immaterial to the relationship between her and Joel it's the why behind the journey but they were on the road for nearly a year together the what of the journey had long ago surpassed the why in importance and substance until now a cure or vaccine could be developed so that a bite isn't the death sentence it is now they are pretty sure of it these are some of the last qualified doctors with the last remaining equipment in the world even able to do the job of translating Ellie's immunity into something medically useful everyone is grateful to Joel and to LA for their sacrifice but this could be it the end of the end of the world there's a recorder you can find later on that some say equivocates on this but it doesn't seem like that to be the case to me it states that they have done previous experiments that failed but had never come across a case of genuine resistance and cohabitation with the fungus like Ellie has there just isn't an alternative reading of the climax even if the fireflies failed which was possible this is the last chance for all these things the equipment the expertise the one in ten million case of natural immunity to come together in a meaningful and actionable way Joel even has a part of him that seems to be willing to let Ellie go a small part a hateful and resentful part and the game takes the time to show that tug of understanding that demonstrates Joel appreciates the stakes at play here he is fully aware of what it would mean to try and stop the surgery now what happens next is precipitated not by high emotions so much as low emotions the soldiers escorting him out decide to be [ __ ] about if they had shown Jolin ounce of sympathy would he have begun to rampage maybe maybe not though on hot night in Austin Texas 21 years ago a soldier was an [ __ ] to Joel he told Joel to turn his family back Joel said no and that soldier took his daughter Sara from him that soldier is long dead by this point in the story but it is impossible not to figure that it's him who Joel was really lashing out at when he first begins the killing and once he started there was no point stopping Joel was thinking of LA sure but the real impact of the climax comes from how the game has meticulously built this moment around Joel's own private reasons his own regrets and fears - Joel this feels like Redemption a chance to do over what happened with Sarah to avoid what happened to Henry to shoot his way out of a potential future where the world could heal but he couldn't the narrative impact is so powerful that it basically overrides the fact that the encounter design of the climax is just kind of a Bismil dozens of enemies with barely any checkpointing having to fight with weapons that have built-in drawbacks to using them that previously prompted you to save these weapons for only emergencies to compensate you're given an assault rifle which is certainly helpful but the whole mood is little off because of just how tactical you have to be to kill your way to the next save checkpoint the tone is supposed to be dark and melancholy and all about Joel but it quickly devolves into alright alright next time I'm gonna try the left hallway and try not to waste so many pistol rounds this time kind of thinking still the intention is for the game to actually acknowledge the monstrousness of Joel's kill count here he doesn't just gun down the guards he kills the unarmed surgeon and then kills the fireflies leader so she doesn't send anyone else after Ellie what he does by human standards is [ __ ] up beyond belief and the Last of Us to its credit doesn't shy away from that but embraces it to color more darkly how the player views the entire story so far all the moments of connection all the moments of love and then that loved was weaponized in a way that crumbles any hope of a less violent world for anyone not Joel and Ellie and it wasn't on account of Ellie not really it was because of that scared infantryman two decades ago who taught Joel how casual it can be to take a life if it was for Ellie then why would Joel be so ashamed to tell her that he decides to give her a half-ass lie instead Ellie wakes up in a truck already moving away from Salt Lake City Dole is there what happened well I already had all the immune people they need it they didn't have room nothing to do now but go home too bad right kid sorry about your special destiny but maybe we'll find you some ice cream to get all the way back to Wyoming before Ellie tells him this story the story of her bite which the player hadn't heard before where she and her best friend Riley were both bit and only she got to walk away she's 15 but she's got survivor's guilt as much as bad as Joel she knows she's being lied to by him that's why she tells him this story to get him to see her and understand how important it is to her to have Riley's death mean something but Joel says he wasn't lying in this moment by insisting on the lie much of what they built over the past year together is broken not all at once not right away it takes some time after the bite for the infection to really seep in this was Joel's chance to see Ellie for who she is what she truly wanted to be a father to ellie by trying to understand her and respecting what he finds there instead joel see is only sarah even after all this time the credits roll on Ellie realizing this but choosing not to say anything the interplay between the extreme scope of the year-long cross-country journey they went on together and the incredibly narrow focus of the storytelling on how two people who mean well could go on to do great evil in the world lands the ending perfectly there are better zombie games better post-apocalyptic scavenging games games with more original plot lines and sharper dialogue but none of that is able to make a dent in the emotional impact the game has because of its commitment to being absolutely true to itself The Last of Us takes so much directorial control because it has such strong opinions on its own direction at first I didn't trust it finishing the last of us however shines such a light backwards on not only the plot events but why the game is structured the way that it is that I actively forgave it many of my initial frustrations I imagine that on replaying the game I'll enjoy its linearity a little more after all I'm starring in movies is easier when he go in knowing the words in between the last of us parts 1 & 2 is a dlc side story called left behind it's a fascinating bridge between the first and second game because it expands our understanding of LA backwards before she met Joel in the final days of her childhood and then forwards to the LA we see in the Last of Us part 2 by expanding on her winter chapter and showing more concretely the lengths that she would go to protecting Joel in return narrative Lee it's valuable mechanically structurally left behind is the worst elements of a design teased out from where they usually are nestled together and displayed alone with their works for all to see the two narrative threads run in parallel in several different ways which is something the writers very much liked to do in all of the Last of Us games it's a tale of two malls in one mall in Boston now he spends the day with her friend Riley she already told Joel and told the audience how that's gonna end in another mall out in snowy Colorado a year later Ellie searches through the rubble to find a trauma kit so she can close up Joel's wounds and treat it with antibiotics what's odd is that these stories are completely bisected into character moments and gameplay interludes fourteen-year-old Ellie is artificially prevented from doing anything she might have been supposed to learn to do with Joel by restrictively linear design even more linear and even more strict than the original game while fifteen-year-old Ellie doesn't have anything to do besides extremely simple puzzles and simplified combat encounters that restrict your inventory down to the absolute bare minimum running these stories in staggered parallel doesn't do either of them any favours besides teasing out the ending of each thread for the longest bearable amount of time what let the last of us one work better than the sum of its parts is that it never stuck with one particular presentational style for more than a 10 or 15 minute mark and then those styles would transition naturally from one to another left behind breaks itself into such artificially discrete chunks for such long periods of time that feels clumsy which is odd considering it's a much more focused story with a much more narrow intention the other problem is that the flashback sequence is just a more robust exploration of two things already covered in the main game one what Riley meant daily and two what Ellie's transition from girlhood to the murderous woman she is in part two looked like what we needed to know is the audience we already knew that what happened with Riley affected Ellie so much that it's literally her claim dick revelation we know how le changed because we were there at the key moments through the whole process however left behind fills in enough blanks - well justify its place in the story particularly how ellie received an education in the quarantine zone that taught her so much of the old world stuff that she already knows without having been born into it Rylee her friend returns after a long absence to reveal that she's joined the fireflies she has an assignment now a purpose her childhood is about to end and she's come back to see Ellie and trying to coax her out of hers Riley is talking so much tougher than she is though the focal point for that is a set of squirt guns they were Ellie and Riley's favorite and possibly only toy until the quarantine zone teachers took them away Riley stole them and snuck through miles of barbed wire to give them tally but she doesn't tell Ellie that until they've been hanging out for hours and tell she's certain that Ellie will get the depth of the gesture this is how the writing and left behind goes rounded concrete delivered naturally melancholy and the understanding of the context around it but also deliberately sentimental in a way that doesn't always work there's a very early moment with older Ellie in the frozen mall where she breaks into an off-brand American Girl doll shop and instead of fussing over any frilly thing she murders the [ __ ] out of a fungus zombie I was reminded of that Garth Marin DS Darkplace quote that goes I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards left behind is likable but it's categorically unwilling to be subtle some of this certainly has to do with perspective namely that a lot of the production team are kind of guessing at the experience of being a teenage girl and leaning on symbolism to fill in some of the gaps in a clumsy way the other thing is that we the players know how this story will end so that dozens of little moments of fun and friendship that Ellie and Riley share in such rapid-fire succession feels cynical a conscious accumulation of sentiment for the express purpose of just knocking it back down again the merry-go-round scene is my example for that after your turning the power back on for them all the girls go round and round the wheel and they have a deep heart-to-heart there is part of me that likes some of what's going on the merry-go-round especially as a symbol being a hokey anachronism even before the fall but it's especially alien to these two who never knew much besides barbed wire and ruin it is just too much though in this moment any one of these moments actually from their fabulous mask swapping bit in Halloween store to the extremely endearing photo booth scene where they're trying to figure out what the hell of Facebook is would have done the trick emotionally but it's one and then another and then another it's like they're trying to cram Ellie's entire early personhood into a single day and it just feels completely overloaded and contrary to the conversational naturalism the dialog with the main game tended towards none of the moments with younger Ellie have time to breathe even when given 20 minutes buffer of older Ellie restarting generators and sneaking up on zombies to give them the old word stab stab left behind only works as what it is supplemental material something for an audience that can contextualize it along a broader arc of story that isn't so overstuffed with feeling the story is most worthwhile and novel moment is cynically positioned as its pivot towards tragedy robbing it of some of the sense of significant it might have otherwise that moment has been Riley and Ellie end up kissing romantically a story bleed I was kind of surprised they went for they build up to it really well the voice work manages to sneak in a few moments of believably innocent flirtation and there's an option during the photobooth scene to have le suggest a romantic background as a 31 year old man I didn't feel I got to presume so I didn't choose it but the background and the groundwork is all throughout the way they navigate their friendship and tiptoe around the ways in which they need each other what's surprising isn't that Riley and Ellie have a romantic undertone to their friendship but that the game would attempt to animate a moment of intimacy like that which relies so so much on nonverbal expression to come across as emotionally convincing generally speaking video game characters have the sensuality of Barbie and Ken dolls being smacked into each other and here specifically because of their ages and how this is presented as part of Ellie's growing up it really can't be too sensual or gonna make the audience very uncomfortable yet it still has to be emphatic enough to convey the character work they're trying to do left behind should be given significant credit for understanding all of those dynamics trying it anyway and in taking that care actually landing the moment neither of these characters are allowed to reckon with what it means though before the zombies predictably inevitably show up to resolve the tension in their own ruinous way it's this part of the storytelling that paves the way so well for part two the climaxes of both threads of the story illuminate a different side of Elia that willing in a brutal tug-of-war with the other side and the turnings of the game to come one of those sides is who she is with Riley the part that hasn't learned to fear the Crave's connection and wants to ignore the world around her and right it's forgotten merry-go-rounds instead many years go by after Riley before Ellie feels open to that kind of connection again but how she felt about Riley cast shadows into a relationship with Dena later on it's a brutally sad scene when Riley and Ellie discovered their bites and realized that all this frivolous day and every good thing in it had come at the expense of ever seeing another day Riley says the line we know she's gonna say and then mercifully the story line ends we know what happens next Riley's connection at the fireflies Marlene will introduce her to Joel later in the week and a year after that Joel will shoot Marlene in the head in the Utah parking garage because Ellie's life means more to him at that point than any other the dark flipside of that of course is that Ellie would have happily given her life to prevent what happened to Riley from happening to anyone else the Last of Us came out close to concurrently with a novel by Mike Carey called the girl with all the gifts that bears tremendous similarities to this game both were produced in the same creative time window so it's hard to say who's riffing on who or if that's even the case but both works suppose a fungal apocalypse with a young girl who's mysteriously immune and whose immunity holds the cure if she only gives up her brain for it comparing Melanie from that book and LA from the Last of Us is deeply rewarding because there diagonally opposed on having agency in their plot lines and what they would do with that agency Melanie was raised like a thing a medical curiosity of the zombie fungus child and her understanding of what the fungus is and what humans are is rooted in antipathy and conflict she chooses then at the end of her plot to infect the world to close out humanity and give it all over to a new world of which she's apart for Ellie the guilt she feels over being the only one to come home from the mall that day colors her whole world she wants to atone she would gladly give her life to let the old world creep back in if it meant that going to the mall sharing a kiss and discovering the thrill of living didn't come with the ever-present certainty of dying rough going through that with Riley was like what Joel went through with Sarah to a degree and so left behind the story climax with all duralee functions as a kind of inverse of the hospital scene raiders stormed the ball after le finds the trauma care she's got Joel in the horse locked up behind a storefront but there's a good a couple dozen guys pouring in to pop the lock and finish him off so she does what Joel taught her to do she kills them all no sneaking around them no luring them away she's gonna put them down so hard that no one will even be left alive to follow which is incidentally the same logic Joel uses to justify killing Marlene it's left behind shining mechanical moment one where you genuinely do feel as small and fragile as a malnourished teenager in the face of all these hungry armed men and winter coats you've got a few arrows a few bullets and nasty a little blade and that is pretty much it it feels right that this part was included in the main campaign because Joel is out for the duration miss story is just Ellie's like the day at the mall with Riley is a memory quite personal and quite private for her character alone if their roles were reversed and Joel had to give up his brain to the scalpel would Ellie start shooting it's hard to say she never had to consider it being selfless comes easy when you feel you've got a moral debt to pay offering someone else up is a good bit harder so let's ask a simpler question would Ellie kill for Joel yes yes yes a thousand times yes the Last of Us part two has been extraordinarily controversial since it came out with the most common refrain being that it doesn't adequately respect or follow up Ellie and Jules relationship from the first game but I am telling you flat that this is not remotely true I wasn't even expecting to like part two from what I had heard from people I had heard it was very condescending about its violence and careless with how it chose to tackle its LGBT characters I had guessed that it was probably pretty damn linear and still very imitative of movies I had guessed wrong I had heard wrong The Last of Us part two is not only much more and much better of a game than the first it's story is considerably harder to predict and more compelling the trick of it is like for the way the climax of the first game colors how you see all that came before part two doesn't become complicated until you've already put 15 hours or more into the game and ticked it over into its back half professional reviewers had to sign non-disclosure agreements saying they wouldn't discuss the secret back half I might as well take this moment to warn of spoilers about it because it does completely change my understanding of the front half of the game all the best gaiden plays in the back half - so what do you overwhelmingly have in the discourse his people who got three hours into the game got incredibly angry to find out Joel won't be in it that much and then immediately began to complain before having made the hefty time investment necessary to discover what it is they replace the jewel with and why they pivot away from him the first act of the game is exactly the sequel I think most people wanted right up until that twist it's predictable it reintroduces the characters and explains the interval between games well it feels so of a piece with the previous game that you can see why they chose to call it part 2 instead of just to the entire visual style is preserved and then expanded on as well as the systems of upgrade and collection the games flow effortlessly into each other played back to back when it comes to style and player feedback everything that was totally and narrative ly important in the previous game is still important in this one in the first act the level design is even still very much in the same style of movie influence linearity the plot moves in all the ways you'd expect it to progressing in a kind of workman like amiability as we follow the characters through just another day of cold Patrol in the waning Wyoming winter a bit of the subtext is for cowards attitude remains as in a flashback Joel outs himself as an embarrassing guitar dad and strums freely a said a sappy tune that literally says if I should ever lose you how truly lose myself which really couldn't be any more obvious if it was put out by foreshadowing records incorporated the Last of Us part two takes just about God and forever to really get going but nothing of the truly remarkable script work in the back half would be possible if this was the course the game maintained from the beginning onwards Ellie and Joel are estranged for regions that you can probably guess but remain for now unspoken elías a friend named Deena who's trying real hard to become more than that she has other friends yes job she has stability she isn't happy exactly but she's safe the way Joel wanted her to be she is a teenager still in the ways that Joel was hoping to preserve for her coming back to Jackson living this way this is exactly what Joel did what he did to let Ellie it's a comfortable status quo think about the last games pacing though we skipped all the days of comfortable status quo we never spent time with Joel and Ellie on a day that did not change their lives what's new is that we'll be spending time with someone else who's live will a replica bleach Ange before the Sun comes back around I honestly don't understand how folks thought there could be a sequel to the Last of Us that didn't reckon in a serious way with what Joel did at the end of the first I don't mean just the tension in the disappointment that's crept into his relationship with Ellie I mean the fact that he took all hope of the Cure and snuffed it out completely leaving what's left of humanity to fend for itself in the fungal jungle to anyone besides his brother Tommy what Joel did was monstrous he's as much of a villain as any other who hasten the end of the world for one selfish reason or another and broader zombie media the difference here is that you played as him instead of fighting him as the final boss the Last of Us part two is all about expanding and exploring how powerful shifting perspective can be as a storytelling tool in an interactive medium in passive media sure books jump between different characters all the time and movies and TV it's utterly standard to follow lots of characters through lots of scenes it's the fixed perspective that are more uncommon in movies gangs are a little different because the creative leverage of a shifting perspective very much depends on the game around it like overwatch as he's switching perspective every time you venture beyond your main but there's no meaning to that beyond the mechanical The Last of Us one generally followed Joel's point of view with deviations from it used to underline and intensify the ways you identify with that primary perspective he's very much the main character and his evolution in the end into actual villain when you think about it it's so effective because the player characters actions create a wedge between him and the actual player he crosses a line so bold and so red that he were more or less forced to turn on him the interplay between perspectives is between you and him not him and the characters around him it's a neat trick but not one that's sustainable for a second time around by turning to a more straightforward shifting of perspective they're actually gaining a lot more useable significant tension than just the flourish of a cleverly presented twist and it begins right in the prologue we follow Ellie all the way up to a moment where she and Dena fall into bed together all is well in her world to a point she and Nina discussed the ages where they both killed her the first time like infected Deena scoffs nah actual human people for both of them its young but for Deena it's younger they've lived in a world of monsters all their lives and what happiness they find is always carved out in some pocket within that morass we search perspectives now to a muscle-bound young woman with a perpetual scowl named Abby her group seems likable enough but they're clearly some paramilitary outfit and they're scouting out Jackson Abbie's being set up for villains role but you're playing is her anyway this early in the game it's a novelty there's too many questions about Abby in the focus fields very much on Ellie still the hook here is the wavering question of if Abby's intentions are sinister and how she'll collide with the characters we know as she approaches a lookout for Jackson she alerts a zombie horde it's amazing how they did the sequence actually at first it seems like a regular little combat encounter just a couple wandering through the snow and then a couple more then a couple more and then you're running and they're suddenly everywhere the escalation is fluid more dependent on the interactive moment than any comparable scene in The Last of Us one while the prologue is deliberately quite linear even these scripted moments feel more game-like than they did before take much better advantage of the player as a player and not just an audience for the unfolding seem a bit catches up with Tommy and Joel as they're fending off the Horde themselves and everyone works together for a time the danger is immediate and the encounter design is very aggressive more combat heavy and research shy than any moment that the first last of us tossed at you before maybe bills town in this moment the game is toying with player perspective because we already know light can identify to some extent with Joel and Tommy and the act of keeping them alive bonds the player to a being gives them all the chance to trust her intentions she seems like she might not be so bad right up until the moment that she shoots Joel's like to shreds and beats him to death with a golf club this is the moment that's got everybody's dander up so badly the sudden unexplained the murder of a beloved character before he has a chance to reconcile with Elia or even see her again up until this awful final moment where Ellie barges in towards the bitter end I understand feeling shocked or sympathetic anger because those are the feelings the scene is squarely aiming for what I don't get is the massive outpouring of people making a tremendous racket about how this is somehow bad writing on the face of it there's an online petition demanding that Naughty Dog remake the entire story that's been signed by 18,000 people the complaint states quote the story was extremely bad they killed off our favorite character and forced us to use the character that killed off Joel and we were supposed to connect to a be throughout half the game and the main character isn't even Ellie we need a remake for this game because this was a massive disrespect for every fan that waited seven years for a sequel and we need to get what we deserved and it was not this game unquote there's a huge amount to unpack here but this preposterous nonsense does understand one very important thing you are in fact supposed to connect with Evie and she does make up half the game the super-secret second half the game lays out in meticulous detail but led Abby to this moment and more compellingly spends most of her plotline exploring what happens to her afterwards it's the reverse of the first last of us which began from a perspective of positivity and hope and then laid out how it could unravel into an act of tremendous selfishness and cruelty here instead we begin with an act of stunning violence and hatred and then unwrap the bandages from those wounds until something more hopeful appears amid the raw and bleeding chaos like the first game its storytelling is done in a strikingly uncompressed way but the overall intention of each scene and level is consistent and cumulative building towards a climax that recontextualizes the entire experience demanding they changed the game or saying the writing is bad because they kill Joel seems absurd to me seeing is the game that unfolds because Joel guys here in this moment in this way with so much left unspoken and unexplained is more creatively unique and genuinely surprising than anything the first game managed with its paint-by-numbers apocalypse well The Last of Us part one is emotionally affecting it is hardly surprising at any turn the Last of Us part two impressed me surprised me took chances in one directions I never expected it to and none of those directions would have been possible with Joel in the picture his story is the first game even left behind the series had pivoted away from him to the meaning of what it is he taught Ellie and who she is without him the overall arc of the plot uses Abby's perspective to explore Joel and Ellie's relationship in a critical parallel like what was done with Henry and Sam in the first game but in a much more comprehensive and dramatically satisfying way I was deeply entertained by the way the online petition phrased their complaint is we need to get what we deserved because if you asked Abby she'd tell you that Joel got exactly what he deserved and she'd do it again in a heartbeat she would know her own dad was the on arm surgeon Joel killed four years ago on the day the fireflies died so why don't they tell you right away and avoid this whole situation where people confuse the sympathetic anger on Joel's behalf with a critical anger at the developers for taking their own story and counterintuitive directions simple the game actually wants you to be as angry as all that I think the developer has just expected more people to be able to conceptualize that anger within the fiction itself they don't want you sympathizing with Abby yet they want you to feel what Ellie does which is that this terrible stranger showed up out of nowhere and killed the only person who ever loved her for no good [ __ ] reason and now she will pay we won't shift perspectives back to Abby after the prologue for well over a dozen hours we follow Ellie exclusively and single-mindedly because exclusively in single-mindedly is how she's pursuing her path to revenge well mostly Dena insists on coming along on the revenge trip and when they arrive in Seattle they find themselves barred from the city by old army quarantine zone gates to power them they need fuel to get fuel they have to scavenge through the downtown area together it is by far the closest the last of us ever comes to in terms of feeling like a limited open-world design there is even a little achievement for visiting all of the downtown sub locations it's the largest of these free roam zones in the game positioned as it is before conflict really begins in earnest so there's no sense of pressure anywhere in the game yet but it's not the only free roam area in the game by any means starting with this especially expansive in detail downtown area the Last of Us part 2 is willing to present areas much larger than before which creates mechanical pacing much more dependent on its game systems than it was before it no longer feels completely imitative of film now its narrative moments are much better blended into long gameplay encounters and those encounters no longer feel so limited and prescriptive no longer is there any sense of an ideal way to do anything even the difficulty settings themselves have been completely reconfigured into a set of sliders that adjusts enemy strength and aggression player durability item frequency stealth effectiveness flexibility and all these departments would be impossible if the level design and rhythm of play wasn't expansive enough to accommodate it it's a lot like the transition from the evil within one to two from pure linear with cinematic intentions to alternating small free explore areas with more traditionally linear sections connecting them using cinematic moments as a flourish and not a standard the amount of player agency you're able to exercise is tangibly expanded from what it was in the original last of us the section with downtown Seattle is an amazing way to reset the mechanical tone towards the new rhythms again the prologue back in Jackson isn't that much different from the first game in the level design department the developers waited until a moment of fresh curiosity to show how much farther they were willing to go to satisfy those curiosities this time around and it truly wouldn't work at any other point in the story with Ellie and Dena haven't been on the road together a few weeks now when the player rejoins them Joel's death is no longer quite so fresh and the two of them are able to bond and learn more about each other conversationally as they explore the more or less quiet ruins it's critical to note that they're both still like 19 still very young and this is their first revenge together neither of them really understand how badly it can spiral out of control from here cracking Abby down and killing her is the goal but it's a very abstract goal in the now is just Ellie and Nina together experiencing the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a working vacation as established neither are strangers to violence they know what it means to kill they're plenty adult by anyone's standards and they didn't come here with any naivety about what they're gonna do to Abby it's what doing all that violence to her might do to them but they just don't grasp yet where the first game was just interested in making its violins heavy and feel and heavy in tone part two is obsessively fixated on it it's not that the gore has been increased because in video games gore is not necessarily proportional to how brutal or impactful the violence is sometimes the goriest games are the ones where violence actually matters the least the Last of Us part 2 is coming at it from a very different angle it wants the violence to actually matter in a tangible humanistic way which is actually a big ask in a medium where the most traditional approach to murder is to rack it up on a scoreboard this isn't because games are inherently immature or anything like that it's that games are in apparently artificial and that artificiality colors the way we interact with them and the ways in which it's easy or difficult to take them seriously the key ingredient in giving the violence meaningful weight is empathy something the game understands well we feel for the people we know that's why horror movies are 90 minutes long and not 10 there's no emotion and no impact if you leave right into the disemboweling you want to know the WHO and the why of the violence as much as the with what and how the Last of Us part two wants you to identify not only with a be the narrative villain but all the poor bastards who serve the role of mechanical villains and hunt you through the misty overgrown City a lot was made of the fact that they all have names and react to each other's death with grief it's actually kind of fascinating the larger levels and bigger focus on combat mechanics as opposed to scripted encounters means that hidden run tactics are what you'll generally be using picking off a couple guards here running around the corner and picking off another guy there meaning that live enemies discovering dead ones happens a lot it feels very different from the usual chatter of stealth game guards much more emotional much more natural full of anger sometimes and fear other times in a kind of guttural rageful shriek on the occasion that you take someone's loved one from them this led to an extremely interesting debate about if the game is criticizing you the player for playing it it's a metatextual trick that some games like to pull and it would superficially go to follow that if the entire design of combat is to be depressing and thematically unpleasant then the game is calling you an [ __ ] for engaging with it by raising the stakes of empathy so that it's trying to portray its most basic non zombie enemies as human and worthy of compassion and then denying you the opportunity to show compassion to anyone it's fundamentally unfair and counterproductive to criticize the player for playing and doing that but is that actually what's going on the bisected narratives of a B and L a kind of illuminated in a slightly different light because the thing is on Elly's end there is a certain amount of justification early on she's captured and it comes in over the radio that the Washington Liberation Front the wolf's have adopted a kill all trespassers policy and there's no dead dead revenge exemption to the rule when he swapped Abby's perspective which takes place over the same three days you see all of the people that Ellie later kills living in the stadium an orderly society and no one's so different from Jackson except that when you dive into the notes in the lore the WLF is pretty awful it's all these people have got but they live in a culture of violence and perpetual war already the game goes out of its way to give credibility to both the argument that this violence was in some way inevitable and the argument that violence is tragically avoidable both are very valid positions to take and not mutually exclusive either the Seattle quarantine zone long ago overthrew the military and collapsed into a war between the wlf and the religious cult called the Seraphim and an Abbey's plot line that war ramps up into a frenzy of violence on a scale far beyond anything Elly inflicted during her three days in the city those who la didn't murder were bound for the frontlines anyway the kill all trespassers order is because of the war footing hell the war is the reason why the downtown area is so abandoned when le Andina first arrived while Ellie's revenge takes her to some very dark places and leads to completely unjustifiable instances of violence by and large the violence that Ellie inflicts is just keeping pace with a city around her this is why I don't think the game is making an attempt to criticize the player by making its combat uncomfortably human and the violence the level of brutality exists in the game because brutality is the way of its world its characters the player can't choose a compassionate option because the characters themselves can't envision one we know this violence to be theoretically and philosophically avoidable to be tragic in its callous disregard and flex it of selfishness the characters choose to do it anyway it's supposed to make his question Ellie to want her to stop to drive a wedge between her and the player the way they drove a wedge between Joel and the player and last game except Joel did his evil all at once Ellie does it a little at a time minute by a minute every moment she puts one foot in front of another to go deeper into a city that's trying to kill her just for revenge instead of going home to love her girlfriend and mourn her father a major flashpoint for the question of who's supposed to feel bad and how about the game's approach to violence is how they added dogs into the mix mechanically speaking dogs are a fascinating addition to the rhythm of combat specifically designed to take better advantage of the larger play areas they patrol with the guards and are able to pick up on Ellie's scent if they intersect with her path whatever route you took through the level is now a liability the dogs aren't especially lethal but if they catch you they'll start barking and they'll start biting at you and you'll have to start brawling with them and then everyone will know where to find the interloper it's better to kill them first but it is deliberately heartbreaking to do so say for example you at least lay one with an arrow from the hidden brush it'll let out a stunned and pain little Yelp and collapse and then the owner will turn around and express shock or maybe disbelief bruno bruno boy what's wrong followed by an angry scream supposing that is you haven't knocked another arrow to cut the owners heartbreak short already it is hard not to feel like the game is calling you a complete piece of [ __ ] for having done that because it was such a visibly repulsively cruel thing to have done and you did twos to do it didn't you well yes and no in a variety of ways you the player chose to do it by picking your moment and your weapon and hitting the button you've picked your moment inside the microcosm of the arena you're in at the moment but the macrocosm of why you're here and in this position to be killing people's dogs from the shadows is all Ellie's choice and not at all your responsibility it's hard for the last of us part two to successfully split the difference between play and to play acting play you take some responsibility for when you play a game of chess you play as yourself and you rely on your own skills it is in some way a reflection and expression of the self play acting is a creative projection where you're deliberately supposing thoughts and actions outside of the self to explore a role in the story it reflects nothing on you it's not like anyone is angry with Anthony Hopkins for being an evil cannibal man even though that is a huge component of why he's famous the violence here is not meant to be reflective backwards beyond the player character but the act of play feels like in some way an endorsement of the violence because of your control over it you wouldn't feel bad and passive maybe a version of the same story the blame would be simpler to place or perhaps displace in this case Ellie put the player in this position the game's beef is with her the repulsively empathetic quality of the violence is meant to try to get you on the same page where you're upset with la for all of this as well and not just cheerleading her and feeling like this revenge is justifiable in some way the problem I think is that all of this is a very nonverbal metatextual delicately abstracted direction to approach the character development from and while I personally very much enjoy how it was done it's not even 1/100 as explicit with its intentions as it is with its animations the storytelling is trying to accomplish runs counter to the expectations' of the medium and counter even to what people usually want out of game combat which is for it to be fun fun when it comes to violence and games always means making the impact of that violence evaporatively frivolous enough that it never really feels damning to participate in the Last of Us two throws that understanding out the window asking you to engage in play acting instead of flat play you're meant to feel sad about the violence so on those occasions when you end up feeling exuberantly victorious or tactically clever because this is still a game about underdogs self action it's vaguely embarrassing in some dramatic way if you said to somebody oh man this game is great the screams of the dying fill your ears with what sounds like real agony and real despair and you know what else you can bash in dog skulls with a hammer and stuff like that person you're talking to would back away slowly and try to surreptitiously text a picture of you to an emergency contact at that point except when you play the game and place these things in a dramatic context it actually is artistically meaningful it pushes the game in a tonal direction hardly any other developer has been willing to toy with going because it's simply creatively dangerous to do so the equilibrium that allows a game like doom eternal to have five that was in two percent the gore and violence that the Last of Us two has and still feel joyful is a balance that once upset can quickly destabilize the way a game communicates itself usually the intention behind the violence is play here the intention is exclusively dramatic and that's hard to parse when you can't avoid the inherent excitement of life-and-death situations where it's not your life and not your death online it's actually a little surprising that I don't feel more judged by the game personally considering that the one time I actually visited Joel's hometown of Austin Texas in real life I ended up punching a dog in the face I was on a road trip with my wife and our small dog a little Shih Tzu named Simon at a campground on the outskirts of the city giving them a walk before it went to bed for the night in the dark there's this pair of eyes flashing and deep barks but I don't really worry about it because we're at a campground seconds later with no further barks this dog tears out of its campsite seizes Simon by the throat and starts shaking him this stranger dogs like 40 pounds he's large and this all happened in one instant one moment things were fine next moment this weird dog is trying to kill Simon I yell at him and the dog doesn't stop and this is maybe three seconds that's gone by I yell at him again and I slap him and he doesn't let go he keeps shaking Simon by the throat maybe ten seconds have passed now Simon's screaming not howling but screaming and noise I never heard a make before I yell stop and I slap the strange dog again and he doesn't even let go at all he's not even making sounds he's just shaking Simon like a toy so I punched that dog as hard as I could between the eyes and sure enough he did let go i sat on the strange dog and I yelled and I yelled for help and now we're at maybe 40 seconds out from when everything was completely fine it's taken me at least three times as long to explain this incident than it did for this incident to occur Simon's collarbone was shattered and he had eight deep puncture wounds it took him weeks to recover he still doesn't really like to go hiking anymore so but the Last of Us part 2 was doing with the dogs was especially odd for me because the reaction they're going for is obviously what kind of [ __ ] monster would hurt a dog and Here I am having punched one and I don't even really feel that remorseful about it because Simon is sitting right next to me as I type this and if I had waited even 10 more seconds than I did I don't think he would be the memory is kind of seared into me but the most striking thing about that encounter will always be for me how fast it happened and how little thinking actually went into it the other dog was fine for what it's worth I don't think I did anything more than offend him and when he let go I grabbed his collar and just sat on him until the owner came out turned out the dog had broken its leash it's not even like the other guy didn't have his dog tied up in the first place that's just animals man sometimes they get it in their minds that something needs to die and then they act on it in that moment I wasn't much more than an animal either I spoke the language it was speaking and I met it there in violence I'm telling this anecdote because I was unable to play the last of his part too without thinking about it over and over again without letting it color how I judged le for what she does and how I judged myself as a player for helping her along with it I don't feel much remorse for what happened to me in Austin because I didn't do anything to provoke it I had Simon a leash I had a flashlight I was in a marked path in a public campground I did the best I could le however has many reasons and many opportunities to turn back but continues to put herself in these situations where violence is the almost certain outcome deliberately taunting death inviting it on others the player has agency and bears responsibility for the bloodshed but only in a reactive capacity it's Elly who bears complete moral responsibility there is a scene that I think illustrates this well and it's when la corners Abi's doctor friend in the hospital basement infects her with spores and then demands to know where Abby is the woman won't give up her friend so that's that right well jolted are a little differently jolted le that there is not a whole lot what can't be beat out of a person so le beats this woman senseless and you the player have to do the button-pushing to commit the violence the point being made is not that the player is bad for playing the game but rather that in taking this revenge each blow le rains down and each pain she inflicts is an individual choice it's not just that she could have stopped before now at so many intervals it's that she could stop each and every time she lifts her weapon but just brings it back down anyway this is Elly's first true murder a killing with no excuse the players hesitation is her hesitation - but the player can't stop because le won't stop and what were meant to feel here is sadness and disgust because this is still the same girl who reached out those same hands once to pet a wandering giraffe and it wasn't even that long ago she thinks that she's doing this for Joel but if Joel could see her in this moment it had kill him all over again it's not even remotely the nadir of how low down an awful le is willing to get in her revenge quest at the climax of her final day in Seattle she bursts into the aquarium where Abby's supposed to be holed up to the people who were there the night Joel died own and Mel are there Ellie thinks she has the upper hand but these people are extremely close to Abby and won't give her up the brutality that Naughty Dog animated into this fight is about the most extreme in the game the most actually shocking the most lingeringly tragic it just spirals out of control because Ellie only sees what she wants to see her anger her self justifications so when it's all over and done and she discovers that Mel is pregnant she's stunned to see it anyone else could have seen it coming anyone but Ellie blind to herself Dena's pregnant as well you know a child of boyfriend who also shows up on Hailey's second day and she's experiencing complications with that pregnancy if Ellie cares at all about Deena she needs to leave the city immediately so she does she never found a B all she found was the rock bottom of herself this last active revenge the murder of Owen and Mel is not interactive at all if the game truly wanted the players to feel responsible they would have assigned them responsibility at this the most intensely irredeemable act in the game instead the game leaves it all on Ellie's shoulders when Ellie's muscular nemesis tracks her down anyway before everyone can leave the city we rewind all three days to find out just who it was Ellie revenged herself on if it wasn't Abby the problem with the Last of Us part two is pacing is that Ellie's entire three-day run in Seattle isn't especially eventful this is half the game so that's very frustrating the only reason Ellie's in Seattle at all is revenge and revenge against a single person not the entirety of the WLF so her whole experience tends to split into brutally long transits from one side of town to another or equally brutal interrogations to discover that Abby isn't really around and no one's completely sure what her deal is the past few days the single-mindedness of Ellie's three days in Seattle is completely deliberate and we stick with her perspective instead of switching back and forth between her and Abby so that we understand her to have done the horrible things she did without seeking explanation and without seeking context Ellie thinks that her revenge is the most important thing in the world it's likely the most important thing to the player since Ellie's the players last real connection to the previous game and we know her so well here is the beautiful bitter irony of it Abby doesn't even know that Ellie is in town until after Ellie killzone and Mel until after your experience with revenge as the player is over and done with I expected Abby's flatline to weave in with Ellie is in some way but I would be following my own footsteps um and seeing the opposite side of events but that isn't how the game chooses to explore Abby at all everything that happens to her during her three days is unique and specific to her and does not intersect with Ellie's path at all in any way until the very end it's such a powerful thing to say about Ellie's revenge to take us right up to the threshold of it and then call it out as being so small and insignificant in the grain scheme of things that the subject of the revenge is utterly oblivious to almost every single thing that happens in the front half of the game I'm sure there is some who see this as bad writing but I don't think so at all it's a bold and very obviously deliberate choice that makes what Elly is choosing to do seem especially misguided this revenge is barely having any of its planned effects and the unplanned effects include Elly having to spend the rest of her life with own and Mel's lifeless aya sneering accusatory lay back at her the three days we spend in Abbey shoes and away from the monotonous misery quest that Ellison feels so much more expansive and even on occasion fun that it breathes a whole new life into the game in ways the last of us part two didn't really quite get going for me and tell the back half before I liked it with Abbey's plot and the way it's introduced and executed I grew to love the game instead I'll admit it was a big hump to get over when the perspective swap first kicks in though like when Joel arrives in Wyoming it feels like the plot is incredibly close to arriving at its destination and then it decides it's just gonna kick up its feet and simmer down now for a little bit it's not that I was offended at the idea of playing Joel's killer I was curious about that it's that the timing feels extremely unwelcome on account of how the single-mindedness of Ellie's half of the story means that you feel like you're spending all this time and effort kind of waiting for something to happen and take over and then the amount of time you might have to wait for that resolution seems to instantly double as you get into Abby's plotline and it starts to become clear how truly different the experience is going to be I found that irritation melted away quickly enough interactively you have to participate in Ellie's violence because that's her story in the world she lives in there is nothing saying you have to be equally complicit in her ignorant of the woman she's made up her mind to kill both main characters get extensive flashbacks with their absent father figures that fill in the background much better Frehley all the flashbacks are about Joel old I spent a whole range of Ages and situations in between where we left them at the end of part 1 and where we pick back up with part 2 the first one is pure nostalgia for character and player both Joel is taking Ellie somewhere special for her birthday likely her belated 15 through there abouts it's the apocalypse you can forgive not knowing exactly who she is here and who Joel is here represents the two of them at their best and most charming Joel is warm kind patient with le as much of a father as we've ever seen him be le is goofy inquisitive admiring of Joel in a way we had not seen her be in all of part two she feels his daughter in this scene it's a powerful contrast to all the hate and darkness particularly because that darkness is supposed to somehow be a tribute to Joel even though what he wanted for Ellie was for her to be better than he was instead of exactly the same his present Ellie is this museum a whole haul of lost dreams and forgotten knowledge and left behind if there was an interesting moment where Riley encouraged Ellie to picture in her mind what an arcade cabinet fighting game might have been like while narrating that fight tour the world around faded out in the sights and sounds of her mind's eye faded in the result was a little saccharine like left behind writing can tend to be but part two uses the museum scene to tinker with and refine this sort of imaginative vignette into something much more emotionally affecting it all invites her to choose a helmet from the displays and climb inside an old Apollo module that the museum has he gives Ellie a cassette recorder and tape with audio of an actual space launch there will never be another spaceship not in her world Joel's gift is the dream of what it would be like anyway to slip the bonds of Earth and grasp for the infinite it's a genuinely beautiful scene resident because it contains such a touching personal connection between the two of them for how deep of an inner life Ellie has to have to conjure up these images for herself but it's also so bleak in the understanding between all of them Ellie Joel and the audience that this dream will only ever be a dream the reality is left to moss and rust forever the next flashback is much more serious than Ellie sneaks off from Jackson to return to the st. Mary's Hospital in Salt Lake City surely she'll get better answers from them than she got from Joel but they're all gone and what's left is just enough evidence to convict Joel of the crime she'll was suspected him of they have it out and Ellie agrees to return to Jackson with him but it'll be years getting over it for her if at all this is amplified by Ellie's desire to try to have a movie night with Joel in the on the night he died before everything went wrong she wanted to reconcile but it never happened let's cut over for a second to Abbey's first flashback elsu in Salt Lake City remember the giraffes they're hardly the only zoo animal out here her father had been helping keep them alive and the two of them try to save a zebra from a barbed wire France in a moment that directly inverts the draft scene later she actually remembers her they're discussing Ellie weighing the morality of the sacrifice of one against the survival of millions and you know what Abby entered into that thinking for him that man that surgeon was protecting his daughter as well then the memory of her father with a sheet over his head in that empty surgical suite that we know so well Abby wasn't so muscly then her biceps are kind of Count of Monte Cristo thing the result of years of angry pull-ups with revenge burning in her heart the two main characters have felt the exact same pain and even if the parallels aren't even the least bit subtle they are effective in criticizing the endless back-and-forth of revenge an eye for an eye a dad for a dad a girlfriend for a boyfriend round and round and round the most impactful thing about the cumulative flashbacks for both characters is the revelation they add up to when the stories catch back up that Ellie knew exactly what Joel did and had already guessed why Abby did what she did in turn and then she came out here and she killed all these people anyway when asking myself why I came back to the failure to resolve what was between her and Joel how Joel died without having been forgiven for the fireflies in avenging Joel she can posthumously give him that honor she can pick up where he left off and skip forgiveness by rushing straight into misguided imitation in doing so of course she does damn herself how many children did Ellie orphan in just 72 hours it's a lot you even see some of the folks that I'm pretty sure Ellie kills dropped kids off at school in the early moments of Abby's plotline revenge does nothing but spread the misery around multiplied like a virus bursting a cell open with a million terrible copies of itself this is why Abby's three days are more than anything else about forgiveness a story does more than just provide context to the wrench plot it provides context of the whole civilization of the Seattle quarantine zone how the WLF have kept up their numbers in such a way for so long how they're waging a war where the mysterious religious zealots cult the scars Abbey is one of the WL F's most reliable soldiers in that war she's killed more scars than she can count her whole first day is interesting but workmen like as she moves to the front lines fights a small battle of the war then rests and regroups before having an audience with the W LFS leader himself Isaac I love these levels for the scale of them and how they thoroughly answer in a very natural spoken in direct way so many questions that the player has about the wls numbers cultures and organization the men and women that Ellie kills doesn't even scratch the surface of them they're a nation onto themselves let's dial it back a bit with another one of Abby's flashbacks an extremely long one that parallels Ellie's museum memory after her dad died and the fireflies disbanded a lot of former members of the fireflies ended up in the WLF Owen is one of them not too long ago a V&O and had kind of a serious thing going on one of Abby's happiest memories is the day that Reno and discovered the aquarium you know the one where oh and we'll be murdered two days from the present tense of the plot when you get the flashback Owen is incredibly likable in the scene especially when they first discovered and figures that it's a like a zoo I guess but for fish it's nearly 25 years after the end of the world now neither of these characters know what half the [ __ ] in this city was even supposed to be in the first place which means they get to discover it as they go along together Owens a very warm and very open person which is good for Abbey and a good foil for her reflexive irritation there's a sharp edge to it knowing what'll happen to Owen but it doesn't quite feel cynical like with how left behind played it with Riley like a lot of people I expected the aquarium to be a fortress of some sort to get a huge combat encounter on reaching it when I was playing Ellie's plotline I expected at minimum something sinister it was disconcerting to get there and have it be so empty so unthreatening that was a lingering question I had and the answer is so much better than I expected this was a special place for Owen and Abbey but more so for Owen and the present tense of the story they're kind of estranged Owens taken off from his unit and Isaac the WLF leader is hunting him rather than just abide by that Abbey decides in the middle of her first day to take off after Owen that's why no one Ellie interrogate snows where she is she's off trying to find her ex-boyfriend before something bad happens to him there's several other aquarium flashbacks of varying lengths and none of them are on welcome because Abbey really is a different person around Owen kinder more human Owen drawing that person out from underneath her pessimistic prickly exterior is a cleverly gradual way to establish that side of her to demonstrate that she has goodness in her but it takes some rooting around to find it it also shows why a Mel and Owen reacted intrusion into the aquarium the way they did they were acting out of love for Abbi oh and especially would rather die than give her up so that's what he did after the deep unyielding darkness of Ellie's flatline it's hard not to be pulled in by the camaraderie and affection between these characters it's like emotional and chair oscuro the way the plot lines are balanced and relate the more you look at it the darker the shadows the brighter the light I was so baffled by that complaint petition popping off about how the game is demanding that you sympathize with Abby it didn't demand anything of me at all the sympathy came naturally and once I started looking for things to like about Abby I began to find them in abundance what's especially cool about the whole back half is that it starts to ramp up mechanically and introduce some truly incredible set-piece action encounters Abby's entire second day every level of it after a brief moment of backtracking at the beginning is one masterful set piece after another Ellie's levels had begun to feel monotonous and all the effort made trying to reach the aquarium on Abby's first day felt like something I'd already been asked to do the second day starts off with a new status quo and on that footing evolves into an honest-to-god adventure with all the actual fun and actual excitement that that suggests towards the end of her first day Abby had met a brother and sister who are running away from the Seraphim cult they save Abby and in return she saves them but the Seraphim crushed the arm of Yara the sister she's in a bad way so her brother Levin Abby set out from the aquarium to reach the hospital you're already familiar with Yara doesn't have long however due to a complication from the bone fracture so Lev suggests that they take a shortcut that only the Seraphim know a series of sky bridges that go up and over downtown completely bypassing the front lines of the war they are a strange pair and not just because the fact that if they were acting the part of the societies that grow up and they'd be killing each other no love is soft-spoken compassionate without being cloying and completely naive of the old world Abby on the other hand is a veteran soldier and survivor withdrawn sour holding on to the uniform and symbols of a world she never really even knew like oh and leva draws a softer side out of a B he's completely immune to sarcasm which Abby finds very difficult to manage so after a while she just starts being direct and open with him and in doing so allows herself to be more human around live than just about any of her friends in the WLF plus she's in new territory herself she's just deserted the only life she's ever known to save a man who isn't even available anymore now she's traveling with the only Sara fight she's ever met that she didn't immediately try to kill to save another Sara fight for reasons not immediately clear to her it feels like the right thing to do but doing the right thing is a new experience for her so she's charmingly awkward about it this is so far the best character work in the game by leaps and bounds the whole mood is light full of possibility on the backdrop for it is the game's best level design Abbie's day two is largely linear but it takes advantage of that linearity by taking you through an absolute bonanza of action and world building the progression through environments and enemy types is layered perfectly first you have to wind your way from the aquarium to the first skyscraper in the bridge network you go up hill criss crossing a river that's flowing down what I think is second Street it's just a beautiful mashup of urban and natural environments then up and up and up the skyscraper all the while you're fighting the Seraphim who immediately attack as soon as they realize love is with you because of his apostate status fighting them feels more justifiable than the wlf because disembowelling people and leaving them hanging from lampposts is part of their religious practice it's easy to hold that against them and besides Lev is great so if they're being [ __ ] to live there is certainly some fun to be had being [ __ ] to them crossing the sky bridges is almost actually vertigo-inducing the game manages to convey their dizzying height in a viscerally effective way like they've been making you nervous about the sky bridge does collapse when it reaches the final building spitting Lev and Abby out on the top floor of a gigantic skyscraper filled to bursting with fungus zombies the descent through the skyscrapers harrowing and thrilling there's a ton of combat on the vibe of banter scavenging and puzzle solving is extremely reminiscent of the most iconic levels of the Last of Us one it is such a cool feeling being stranded in this labyrinthine monolith of a high-rise on reaching the hospital you don't just get to take supplies you have to scavenge them from the lower levels where no one goes no one's gotten to the basement for 25 years because it was ground zero for the original infection all the original victims were treated in the ER down there until they killed their doctors and burst out to slaughter the rest of the city not all of them though some of them are still sealed away down there rotting changing love doesn't and company Addie down there you're all alone for this sequence the atmosphere now is true and classic horror there's even a boss fight like a real boss fight with a multi-stage enemy of tremendous and terrifying strength I found it to be a very difficult fight but the fact that all throughout day two you're able to use the most visceral nasty weapons in the game without any moral questions about using them gives the whole thing an excitement that had been deliberately omitted until now each stage of Abby's day to the quiet and scenic introduction the fire fight up the skyscraper the death-defying crawl down the skyscraper and then the moody journey back into the lore of the infections Genesis flow into each other effortlessly juggling moods and moments with such a skill that I think it might be my favorite interactive sequence in all of Zombie media mechanically my favorite zombie game is dying light but the attention to tiny curated detail all throughout this day - and the artful progression of it makes such a strong impression and indelible memory that I drank it higher than any player directed or scripted sequence dying light had to offer The Last of Us part two is known for its character work and it's careful mood but this is the first time in the entire series I've been so impressed with the Last of Us as a game about zombie survival like for a bee that day - is just the second day of love living independently from the society that he had always known it was both a large thing and a small thing that drove him out of the cult the small thing is that he cut his hair that was the precipitating act that said everything emotion for him and his sister and for a B - the larger thing is that this was such a significant offense to the religion because they understood love to have been born as a woman and he must therefore conform to that or die so lévesque a risk on death instead and left in the fiction lives identity as a transgender individual is mostly immaterial to why he's such a great character his personality is concretely grounded in his world and in his individuality there's no sense here of tokenism at all of course that hasn't stopped him from being a tremendously controversial inclusion of the game what surprised me though was the criticism of love came from two major directions one being predictable [ __ ] from the kind of [ __ ] who always make a racket any time transgendered perspectives are included but the other side comes largely from the trans community itself who feel that Lev's gender is cynically used against him in the story for cheaply exploitative purposes my perspective is cisgendered sure but in terms of storytelling I never once felt lives gender was being manipulated in the lurid or dis compassionate way let's roll on the script isn't even anything so simple as being a B's sidekick in many ways Lev is the moral center of the entire game his quiet disarming courage to live his life on his own terms even if it means exile and death shames a bee in no small way it reinforces Abi's choice to leave the WLF and help Owen as well as underlining the inherent flaw in Abi's understanding of the Seraphim is culturally monolithic they are now exiles together more than that leva saves Elly and ABI both at the game's most pivotal moment after both day 3s are over having left Rocco and his killers down to the old boarded-up theater that we the audience know so well there's a strangely design that but interesting boss fight where you fight le and she uses her little inventory gadgets against you after that ABI sets about getting her own double revenge she shoots right away the father of Nina's baby she shoots Tommy somewhat less fatally and then is about to kill Dina when le says please no she's pregnant but what about Mel huh so Abby says good and moves to slit Dina's throat it is Lev who says no it is Lev who says stop it is Lev who's actually been able to keep his moral balance well enough to understand that this cycle is endless and worthless earlier his sister had said to Abby that she was a good person and Abby shrugged that off now she's not yara insists that in the time she's known her that is who she's been a good person yara didn't make it all the way to the scene but it is unthinkable that this conversation didn't influence Abby putting the knife down she has every reason to take her revenge except she's already been down that road to killing Joel she had her revenge and it didn't bring her any peace at all the only thing that ever brought her peace was oh em oh and who le killed Owen who is gone she has a choice now being who she was this past winter when she raised that fateful rub or be who she's learned to be in the past three days with love she likes her new self lev respects her and she respects lev if she kills athena all that gets thrown away so she doesn't if it was a be alone she would have done it in a heartbeat love is one of the most important characters in the game one of the best written and most vivid and if that isn't positive representation I generally don't know what is there's a secondary but very serious issue when it comes to live which is that the Sara fights dead named him which is to say they used the name he left behind and not the name he chose however Abby never does Abby doesn't even cry when Liv says he doesn't want to talk about it she takes him as he is at all times she respects his privacy she respects his autonomy the Volks who dead named live you do get to shotgun off the side of a skyscraper there's a question of whether Naughty Dog might have done better by including a warning about the dead naming because that is such a powerfully negative thing for trans people which is a compelling point on the issue though of whether Liv is exploited or supported by the script I felt he was treated with as much compassion as the world they have invented can muster it's only because of Liv that Ellie gets to live out the dream she discussed with Deana where they have a farm somewhere just the two of them after those mind-bogglingly long three days in Seattle the game time shifts too many months possibly close to a year into the future to meet the couple in this pastoral paradise the day is so beautiful that I'm actually shocked it isn't a dream sequence but I also lived in Gunnison Colorado for a summer once and I'll tell you that's pretty much just how the Rocky Mountains are the life that Ellie and Deana have made for themselves is preposterous ly cozy I mean they've got a giant electrified fence around everything but inside that they've carved out a space for themselves that feels pre-collapse in many striking ways of course the Last of Us has a very established track record of not letting a good thing keep for very long and that's on its way but I was expecting the destruction to come from without not from within this is another majorly divisive aspect of the game there's a good argument for why it should have ended when Abby let Ellie live in Seattle there's an OK argument that the game should have ended here and leave it with a happy ending there's an excellent argument that sliding back into more revenge from here is counterproductive ly ridiculous but in the end I appreciated how they chose to play it out the first day on the farm nothing it's just about the first time you've controlled a character in a non eventful moment but that's kind of the point this domesticity is eventful it's something le never had before this is everything le needs to have a happily ever after her for herself for as long as a happily ever after can last in this world then some days later we rejoin her for the turn estranged horses outside which is just such a classically Western image the whole scene now has a bit of a Western flavor to it not so much a John Ford is the Coen brothers but still Tommy's come back bearing news he found Abby someone fitting her description was drifting down California Way which we the audience know is something Owen was trying to do i audibly groaned that this was happening I couldn't believe that Tommy was being such a stubborn jackass about it but this revenge is all that he's got left getting shot by adding the theater gave him permanent damage his marriage failed all he's got is bitterness he has already thrown away what Ellie's got and when Ellie says that she won't throw it all away - he calls her a coward Tina rushes out when he storms off but that was it once planted this seed of self-hatred and self-doubt takes root and curls around her brainstem surely as the fungus did this is why I ended up respecting this story beat despite being absurd on the face of it this final revenge is no longer motivated by hatred but born out of a deep and inarticulate despair Ellie's got PTSD quite badly but the odd thing is that she still flashes back to Joel and not to what she did to own a mill which I would have figured would be far more traumatizing events at this point she has everything she needs to be happy except the ability to accept her place in it there's plenty of people who look at this pivot and say plot hole plot hole you don't leave the safety of the epilogue dumbass and Ellie is obviously being incredibly short-sighted stupid and selfish by letting what tommy said consumer her to the point that she would leave all of this behind that's the thing about depression though you know very well what you ought to do except that it seems impossible to do it you know so deep down in your heart of hearts that you're an irredeemably worthless piece of [ __ ] that it feels wrong to act in any way where you aren't punishing yourself or atoning for the crime of existing depression can come and go in waves but it is a disease of perception in the pit of it there's no clarity or peace about who you are and why you're alive Elly and Dina have a beautiful life together which already makes Elly uncomfortable when Tommy called her a coward I knew what she would do because I know that's what I'd do she promised Joel that she'd forgive him and she never did she promised Tommy she'd avenge Joel and she never did she promised herself that she'd make it right but nothing ever feels right Ellie's unfinished business is not that she came back without having killed Abby it's the shame she feels and having come back at all when I imagined the ways that this happy interlude at the farmhouse would implode I figured on gunfire and violence instead what I got was witnessing Ellie getting up in the middle of the night and having those middle-of-the-night thoughts that can sometimes be more lethal than any object you strapped to a pair of scissors it's not subtle but it is even keeled and completely justifiable storytelling the long epilogue Act may be a strange and divisive way to tie everything up but for me at least I found it to be one of the most truly believable choices that Ellie makes besides the epilogue chapter is where the game's obsession with parallels cemetry and inversions actually yields the most interesting fruit when we catch back up with Abby and Lev they're investigating a lead on a holdout of X fireflies they know an address that's supposed to be an old safehouse it feels pretty wild to even be playing more game at this point but the neighborhood is full of little light exploration opportunities and allows you to take your time and play it in a way that doesn't even hint at the end of the game is close by what's wonderful about it though is the dynamic between the two of them after they've been traveling together for so long it is just the same between Abby and Lev as it was between Joel and Ellie in the heyday of how they felt about each other Abby seems so much lighter of spirit and everything they do seems full of promise for some reason I was actually lolled by this sense of security I really should have seen it coming that they get ambushed beaten and captured as soon as they discovered the Firefly base was real and all they had to do was get a boat out to Catalina to find it I didn't though I figured Ellie would be the biggest problem but instead to this mean little twist adds complication to Ellie's continued revenge quest so we pivot to her arriving a month or two after her quarry on the outskirts of Santa Barbara it's a cool moment when he first switched back to her having found the boat that Owen restored washed up on the beach it is the most lovely California after that you could imagine Elly is finally fully completed her big American road trip after all she's made it coast-to-coast at last and all it took her was 300 murders across five years the landscape and climate clash wonderfully with the mood darkened so much from having live as little scavenging interlude more the prologue switching perspectives have been totally inverted when we first found ourselves in Abby's boots back in the prologue their resistance they should have nine worried about how this suspicious stranger would intersect with the characters we know when the characters we trust now those treasured characters are Abbie and LEM and that strange dangerous interloper is Ellie it's fair to say that I no longer know her as a player because she no longer very much knows herself there's a real feeling of dread as she gets closer and closer to finding Abby what's especially notable about the epilogue however is how much effort went into making it a mechanically engaging series of levels and not just a linear conclusion to the plot there's not really many free Explorer portions when she switched Ellie's perspective but the combat arena spaces are very large ranging through the whole town to a crumbling seaside resort where the Raiders have their Kingdom they're slavers [ __ ] of the highest order and in painting the villains that way the game cuts you a lot of slack in its game long mandate to take their personhood seriously this time perhaps you can feel okay about going a little crazy with the Stabbin and the shooting and the blown [ __ ] up like with the hospital at the end of the first game the game gives you a special weapon to compensate for how many enemies they're about to throw at you this time a silent submachine gun to better take advantage of the large open design of the resort all the violence feels for once justified enough to make you feel like Ellie's doing okay by all this killing she frees the imprison two people all except Abby and laughs who are staked out from punishment down on the shore that heroic flavor to what you're doing makes the moment a very pensive surely you're not still gonna try to have your revenge are you to her credit she almost doesn't at all she cuts down Abby who's been severely beaten for weeks on end Abby immediately goes to live to try to help him as a sidenote Lev is still wearing his own clothes there is never any attempt by the plot to sexualize the violence done to him or diminish his gender identity even in this moment where the developers certainly had an opportunity to be crass Lee graphic 11 Abby go to a boat Ellie to another and I feel like if they did end it here with them barely saying anything to each other at all and just sailing off separately in the fog it would have been perfectly fine I wish they had left it at that instead le forces the fight literally forces it by threatening live with a knife even though she clearly understands the nastiness and cruelty of what she's doing they don't just fight either it's this whole big production of a fight that I think is possibly the single worst tonal choice Naughty Dog made in the entire series I never played the Metal Gear games but I did once hang out with a friend while they finished off Metal Gear Solid 4 at that climax there's this fight that's influenced by movies like Universal Soldier and Escape from New York where these two dudes just beat the everliving [ __ ] out of each other for a round after round after round and then they inject each other with stimulants so that they don't pass out and can keep fighting I'm not entirely certain but I'd be curious to find out if these fights are really of comparable lengths because it's sure [ __ ] feels like it totally it doesn't feel like The Last of Us part two has so far it feels like a slightly more feminine sequel to hobo with a shotgun it is awful I understand that this is a climactic moment so they're trying to make it big but the only thing that's allowed the game to creatively succeed with what it's trimmin trying to do is its humanistic portrayals and it's sharp-edged attempts at conveying realism this moment is pure video games right here in a manner so blatant that Hideo Kojima even poked ironic fun at this kind of thing towards the end of death stranding with the Higgs finale at the end of this fight Ellie realizes something she should have realized a long time ago that this no longer has anything to do with Joel and runs counter to anything he would have wanted for her she stops she lets them go I hated the fight but I gotta admit I do love the image that follows it Ellie in the cold ocean water alone bereft empty of everything at the end of the earth fog surrounds her everything is gray obscure it's just a beautiful shot she's finally arrived at the place to revenge was taking her and that's no place at all after all that would it shock you to find out that a not insignificant amount of players hate the fact that Ellie abandons her of at the end and let's Abby go I have thought of this as being really the only choice for her if there was to be any kind of hope of me identifying where they were being curious about Elly again yet for some people there's this sense that if she doesn't kill Adi when she has the chance to it will all of them for nothing pointless how can you possibly get from one end of this game to another without having in some way internalized the obvious endlessly repeated point that it would all have been for nothing and completely pointless if Elly did to follow through to the absolute bitter end connection is the only thing that heals otherwise we're all just lost in the fog alone when you found your way through the credits and back to the menu screen that fog has lifted with a boat that Abby and Lev cook pulled up on the shore by the iconic Catalina casino for them there was some kind of happy ending still waiting I'm hesitant to give Ellie any kind of credit for that being possible but that is kind of how the moment ended up being constructed without both the decision to follow a be end the decision to let the revenge go this ending where they reach Catalina would not have been possible change one of those variables and its death it's ironic but it's not very thematically coherent it reduces the significance of how truly irredeemably awful Ellie chose to be in these final moments of the game by and muddling it with action heroics I was particularly appreciative that Abby's plotline ended so concretely at Catalina because Ellie's could go anywhere from here anywhere except home again although she tries when Ellie gets back to the farmhouse it seems empty even from far away the Sun is bright but hardly warm like it was in the day we first saw Ellie Andina here when he opened the door to go in that's confirmed but in a couple ways this emptiness is a relief one is that Dena left of her own volition no injury was done to her beyond Ellie's leaving in the first place two is that I don't think Ellie was prepared to explain herself if DNA was here how to pick up again now that the trust is gone in the corner of the empty dining room where their record player had been is a-blowing curtain that looks exactly like the one from the Start menu in the Last of Us one it is a powerfully Pavlovian touch to add when I noticed it I was immediately taken back to the moment when I first chose to even embark on this journey alongside Joel and later Ellie I began to think of the whole arc of Wolfgang how Ellie went from someone bursting with curiosity about the world someone who's dashed herself to pieces against it and all it took was one strategically placed blowing curtain to get me thinking about it if she goes upstairs we get another little inverse symmetry to the night so long ago now when Sarah crept down the stairs in her Austin house looking for her dad because things outside were beginning to seem a little scary way back at the beginning of the game there was a moment that I found it deeply moving and it wasn't any major conversation or twist but a tiny almost incidental touch after Joel died as Ellie goes to his house to collect some things his jackets are in the closet including the one he wore for so much of the first game she holds it feels the leather of it and then she takes a deep sniff it conveyed so much more of the loss of Joel than any part of the revenge ever did not only is Ellie mourning for Joel mourning the void that's left of him now she's also mourning the girl she was who could love him so uncritically the one who talked him into wearing a very silly hat at the Museum on a bygone day and when he showed her the star is the only way that was left to them at the farmhouse all her things are neatly packed in boxes in the room she used for her art Dena's been cordial about it it's all there including the guitar that Joel taught her to play but Abbey bit off some of her fingers in the fight now Ellie will never play again dole was taken from her this is true everything else Ellie gave up willingly as she abandons the farmhouse this final time she leaves Joel's guitar and the audience with it to watch her walk away through the window Ellie never got a chance to forgive Joel but she put herself in his shoes and did so much worse than he ever did to forgive Joel now to leave him behind to is easy in comparison to all she'd have to do to forgive herself it's a heartbreaking note to end the game on but one that truly resonates because Ellie sees clearly now who she's been in that clarity is a fragile kernel of a possibility that she can start now to choose differently like part 1 part 2 is complete in itself and needs no sequel but as well set up for one if they ever return into the franchise with both parts combined together I'm still not sure of what we're looking at are the greatest games of all time the first game doesn't take enough risks and the second game takes so many they're both such deliberate works of cross medium storytelling but just calling them games isn't quite right but neither are they movies or shows or anything traditional they are unique unto themselves with a narrative that weaves themes and characters and gameplay together into tight loops and symmetries that make each game interdependent on the other for the greatest impact I wrote earlier that said the Last of Us part 2 was trying too hard to be profound but I never felt like that was what was going on The Last of Us is too insular for that the dialogue level design and methods of engagement are all internally justified within the intricate thematic frame of each game it's not trying to tell us anything we don't already know as an audience it's trying to tell its own characters these things in a way so that they'll listen the Last of Us part 2 is such a creatively experimental gamble in so many aspects that it's kind of disqualified itself from being judged along the usual lines people use when they say greatest or worst regarding games so let's leave medium out of it it's a dramatic work in artistic work and art is about communication was it successful in that I'd certainly say so whether you loved them or whether you hate them The Last of Us parts 1 & 2 are such a divisive games because that creative perspective is so strong because the games override the player's storytelling wants to pursue their independent storytelling means they don't need to be the greatest of all time they are exactly the games they set out to be that clarity of purpose is a rare thing in any medium let alone a creative work that walks in the shadow lands between so many different mediums both games seem so truly of a piece to me that I can't imagine them turning out any differently and still being remotely so connected to one another fans like those who wrote the petition don't always understand that what's best for a character isn't always best for a story and that sense of ownership over the characters because we were the actors in the roles is fallacious Stephen King once wrote a book about that kind of suffocating fandom called misery and it was not flattering The Last of Us part 2 is as controversial as it is because it actually has strong artistic opinions I didn't expect it but I connected quite deeply with the Last of Us part 2 I trusted it to take me to the places it was going and I was glad to have gone I liked Delhi in the first game but in the second I felt like I actually understood her I'm no stranger to being lost in the fog myself thanks for watching I want to take this moment to thank by name some of the people who are currently contributing $10 month or more for the web site patreon who keep these videos going people like kale Tyrion Julian Renault company hat egg envy you Alex Henson Jared Meyer Leonie Oh Kenosha Ethan Cossack Stinson Steve John Paul Cuellar Newton Aaron Williams Adam Allah Andrew Hartnett I cr7 Zach Millington Thomas culligan Zoey she Oh Nora team Oh Eddie Bertie Brian Barrow Carol Henderson Cydonia Daniel Phillips massive wrong wrong Gervais Tyler Robinson Jeremy McQuaid James Condon koribo Phil grade ela Hobart mats Chris Pennington Dennis Clark Evan Eggers big maze / Rory cover Indonesia vodka blitz nobody Kirk battle World War two freak Johnny Mars bar Alexander oyster rusty 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Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 444,488

Keywords: Last of Us, The Last of Us Part 2, Analysis, Critique, Retrospective, Review, Left Behind

Id: Bat38vErWr4

Length: 132min 33sec (7953 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DSShinkirou]

After realizing an hour in that the essay is split explicitly into a review of the first game, and a review of the second, I tried to skim through the TLoU2 specific part of his essay to see if Noah covers something that's been bugging me. I don't think he does, so I'd like to throw my two cents in.

I wish more people discussed the recurring nature of trauma (and arguably PTSD), more specifically trauma in the form of the recurring hallway nightmares and instant-flashbacks that haunt Abby and eventually plague Ellie, as I think they're hugely important to the about-face decisions that Abby and Ellie make. (Skip to last two paragraphs to ignore plot summary)

Abby has the same dream over and over again where she walks through the hospital, goes to the surgery room, and finds her dead dad. It's very clear that this dream has plagued her for many years and is something that clearly contributes to her ceaseless hunt for Joel. Abby specifically says she hasn't slept well in a long time, and she gets the exact same recurring nightmare even weeks after killing Joel (Seattle Day 1 and 2), which proves that she didn't get the release she was looking for. After banging Owen, Lev and Yara appear instead of her dad, and now she inexplicably decides to save them the next day. That, to me, is proof of how much Abby puts importance to the outcomes of her dream: after she killed Joel, the nightmare was supposed to end. The second it changed at all was enough to completely alter her personality and life-focus. And what happens the next night after she saves them and gets Yara the surgery she needed? She gets the dream again, except when she enters the surgery room her dad is alive and smiling at her. To me, this is the point where she full blown believes that protecting Lev and Yara is her salvation, and that it's more important than anything else. That is why she kills the WLF when they turn on her (notwithstanding the fact that they shoot at her first in every encounter post-Isaac) without question: Lev is in danger. That is why she spares Dina and Ellie's life: because Lev says no. Abbie has fully bought in that if her traumatic nightmare says "hey, I'll show you better dreams when you look after Lev and Yara", she’ll listen to it. After all, what's wrong with protecting kids at all cost?

And then we see Ellie begin to embark along the same journey, only she doesn't have Abby's five years of experience living with it. We know she sees Joel's bloody face numerous times while she hunts Abby. Once Ellie goes back to the farm, she gets massive PTSD-triggered where even the sound of a freaking shovel falling puts her in an out-of-body experience where she fully believes she's in the cabin trying to save Joel from getting killed. For the rest of the story you see this textbook behavior of PTSD: Ellie encounters external trigger -> Ellie sees flashback of Joel's face or the basement -> Ellie acts impulsively to the recollected trauma. Ellie hears the shovel fall, believes she's back in the cabin, crawling on the floor crying and trying to struggle free from imaginary invaders. Ellie plays the guitar to calm herself down, thinks of Joel, sees Joel's bloody face, goes on hunt for Abby (in her journal she literally talks about walking down the coast for 5 days without pause). Ellie sees the blood on her hands, sees Joel's bloody face, forces the fight. Ellie sees Joel's smiling face, lets go of killing Abby.

This is why the final fight works plotwise, although I agree with Noel about how it played out not exactly hitting the right notes. The most important thing of that scene isn't that Ellie spares Abby, it's that she sits there afterwards crying pathetically, because I think to some degree, Ellie has realized that she is no longer her own person and is totally controlled by her trauma. Just like how Abby's hospital dream dictates Abby's life, Ellie is beginning to recognize that her flashback of Joel is going to forever dictate her actions: if she sees bloody Joel then she goes instant psychopath, and if she sees happy Joel then she recalls her humanity.

It's not that Abby spared Ellie the second time. It's not that Ellie spares Abby. It's that Abby's dream smiling dad spares Ellie in the form of Lev. It's that Ellie's memories of Joel spare Abby in the form of a remembered smile. How much do Abby and Ellie really have any personal agency and control in the story can and should be brought up for debate.

[u/JakalDX]

I really like that he brought up just how much dialogue and characterization is delivered by mid-mission banter. It's why I think people who absorbed either game via "cutscene compilations" are still only getting a piece of the puzzle. Those conversations that take place as you traverse can be just as, if not more, illustrative about the character as the ones that happen in "cutscenes proper". You won't really get any hint as to why Abby is so desperate to save Lev and Yara without the conversations that happen mid-mission. I think you also miss a lot of why she feels guilt over what happened with Joel, when you heard that basically every person who was at Jackson felt fucked up by it, with a sour taste in their mouth over what played out.

As an aside, the "traversal as a scene" was the inspiration for the movie Gerry by Gus van Sant. He was intrigued by how, as opposed to movies where you just "jumped" where you needed to go, in Tomb Raider, getting there was just as, if not more, important. He wanted to create a movie that captured that long, lonely feeling of finding your way, rather than just jumping from important scene to important scene.

[u/icecreamsandwich]

I hope Naughty Dog isn't dissuaded from taking risks by some of the responses to this game. After a few days of processing it, I think I can safely say it's on par with the first one for me. That feels strange to say because I did not enjoy this game at times. It is an unusual feeling for a game not to give you the exact feeling you want or expect at every moment, but I cannot deny it was a powerful experience. I don't often wince or have my jaw hanging open when playing video games.

[u/bg93]

I stopped watching Noah because... well two hour videos, but he understands this franchise, even as someone that picked it up very recently. His critique never becomes a list of complaints. Instead, it is a measured look at the choices made, and the advantages and disadvantages of them. For those who didn't enjoy the game, or even this type of game, I hope this is a decent path to understanding why some people (like myself) are very excited about it.

[u/WastelandHound]

"This is their first revenge together."

Such a great, cheeky line that also manages to completely sum up the tragedy of the entire game.

[u/fghgdfghhhfdffghuuk]

The one thing I have to disagree with in this video is his take on the final fight. I adored it, and I don’t think it was a tonal mess at all. It gave me the same feeling as the ending of the first game - I don’t hate the characters for what they’re doing, I just hate that things have come to such an awful place for both of them.

And the looks on Abbys face during it will probably haunt me for a long time. She does not want to do this anymore. She’s just trying to survive with Lev, while Ellie, the one you control from behind, has become fully dehumanised.

God, this game is fucking incredible. I’m so glad we can talk about it now without having to endure all the possessively childish reactions, or the hateful trolling and brigading.

[u/Zevy100]

his talk on the soldier at the end of 1 being a dick to joel,and how maybe, just maybe, that would have been lead to a different ending and wrapping that into the beginning with sarah was great. never thought of that.

also really drives home that the story for part 2 was easy to see from when we all finished part 1. think a lot of people just weren’t ready for it. full circle

[u/ChieftanAxe]

If nothing else, I love that this game can be interpreted in so many different ways. Everyone has their own takeaway from the story, whether good or bad. This game is such a phenomenon, from the leaks to the critical reception. I've never seen a game where opinions are a literal 50/50 split like this. I'm sure ND knew the narrative would be controversial, and I think it's great that they went for something that would generate discussion instead of a narrative that could be crowd pleasing, but pedestrian and uninteresting.

[u/Yophop123]

I actually really appreciate how they tried to be ambitious and ballsy with the second game's story.

They easily could've had Joel and Ellie go on another adventure across the US, run into some new factions, Ellie finds the truth about what he did, she breaks off and leaves for a bit then comes back and forgives him at the end

But Naughty dog has shown that Last of us aint Uncharted (love those games as well btw) and if they're only able to make a new game every few years then you gotta go big