Masterpiece? ABSOLUTELY NOT - The Last of Us 2 Review

[Music] before getting started I'd like to try something where I predict the outcome of your choice pick a number any number and hold it in your mind now I'd like you to multiply that number by three once that's done I want you to add six to that new multiplied number when that's complete I would like you to divide this current number by three again and lastly once that's done subtract the original number that you chose whatever it was from the current number that you have after completing those steps your answer is two and for the same reason that some viewers will think to themselves wow how did he do that some players will look to the last was two with reverence as if it's somehow conveys a profound emotional message because the truth is human beings can be manipulated with cheap and shallow tricks I've gone back and forth in my mind a few different ways on how to do this review at first I thought it would avoid spoilers then I decided against it then I realized the broader audience appeal of the video would be hampered by spoiler content until I ultimately landed on the reality that this game must be reviewed with spoilers because a twelve-hour segmented embargo by Sony is largely what landed us in this horrible situation to begin with where the game is intentionally attempting to blindside fans of the series with a brutally miserable narrative that focuses on deliberately tearing down almost everything you loved from the previous game I'm gonna break this down into three different parts first will be Sony and Naughty Dog's hypocrisy their legal abuse and pre-release lies second will be gameplay and physical mechanics and third will be the story I will also provide timestamps for these sections in the description down below because some of these topics may be of more or less interest to individual viewers and I feel like clearly separating these portions will be critical to giving a final truthful rating to begin we have the pre-release marketing cycle for this game which will be chronicled forever in the history of the industry as one of the most disingenuous manipulative campaigns to ever exist the reasons for this are many but looming among them are a specific few examples first is the flat out lies projected by mainstream publications such as polygons or IGN with regard to playable characters with complete fairness these lies are not theirs to own sin neil druckmann the game's creator explicitly stated on more than one occasion that Ellie was the only playable character and most major publications reported on it as a result this is a lie the definition of a lie is often abused so I'll clarify right here a lie is exposed when intent to deceive is proven Neil druckmann intended to deceive potential players because the truth is that Ellie is not the only playable character and the second playable character is one that many gamers will unequivocally despise this however was just a start when massive leaks were made available online Sony and a proxy company named Musso limited as sprang into action quite literally violating DMCA and copyright law to take down everything they could regarding the topic memes discussion videos live streams everything they could from tweets to videos God struck down accounts were suspended and the underlying objective was to suppress the escaping reality that the game deliberately tries to blindside you with misery and pain to further exacerbate their dishonesty here Soniya altered a trailer footage in a crucial way keep in mind I am about to discuss spoilers so you've been warned but I decided this video will holistically evaluate the Last of Us too without attempting to avoid them so you've been warned Sony altered trailers with a very specific character model for Joel in particular scenes the effect was that making him look older insinuated a much more serious involvement in the entire plot and led players to believe he existed in scenes and timelines that he categorically did not appear in to go even further the trailers made no mention whatsoever of the now infamous second playable character and led viewers to believe through an abundance of marketing material that the story they would get was akin to the first truly beloved game this was another lie and this was intentional the goal is to build a maximum strength railgun of shock value tragedy and used that to bludgeon the audience into feeling some sort of emotional rollercoaster however the leaked cutscenes thoroughly dampened that ability which is why their DMCA abuse became so aggressive these types of manipulations are innumerable another example is how publications and Naughty Dog's themselves while responding to criticism that the game was beginning to resemble Gorp horn defended the idea that you do not need to kill dogs one particular paragraph from GamesRadar reads as follows if you want more context on how the last of us to does not expect you to kill dogs and feel terrible about yourself all the time you can check out our original story from September 2019 down below however this again is flat-out deception owing to the fact that you must murder a dog in a very brutal way and this encounter is hard scripted into the game as in it cannot be avoided while this by itself might seem somewhat trivial the narrative then proceeds to mercilessly guilt you for this act which in turn had been forced upon you and the picture begins to solidify here that nearly everything you knew about this game except for the leaks was a lie all of this coalesced in the final days around a horrifying decision by Sony to place an embargo upon 12 key hours of the game 12 key hours that fundamentally changed the entire premise and contain almost every critical story point necessary to understand whether or not you wish to play these reviews were confined to an analysis that is based upon about half of the overall experience and that first half was intentionally constructed to contain the bulk of what the developers knew was the truly appealing content effectively pushing forward a tidal wave of positive reviews that could not possibly reflect the true overall experience lastly in this section I need to make note of the key hypocrisy in previous Sony published games nudity is highly moderated the slightest amount of cleavage or exposure will very often result in light beams to cover it up or some other form of general censorship this is not seen here and the Last of Us 2 makes a deliberate choice to show full frontal nudity with explicitly shown sexual acts on the very same character they attempted to hide from the audience with pre-release lies it is not an issue of this material simply existing it is an issue of they're slanted approach to what content is and is not aggressively shut down all in all the surrounding atmosphere for this game is polluted to an absolute extreme and that needs to be stated and considered by anyone evaluating a purchase now on to gameplay the physical gameplay here is very hit-or-miss subjectively I enjoyed the basic mechanics same as I did in the first game however that might not be true for others there are significant improvements to be seen such as for example how environment interactions take place there was one particular moment that stands out where I was fighting an enemy at the side of a flight of stairs and rather than being confined to the space in front of the edge Ellie actually kicked the enemy down and threw the class in a way that kind of sort of felt like a cutscene and it felt so much more organic than most other games out there in the industry it was actually astonishing visually the game is just stunning it's incredible what they are able to achieve from a graphical perspective here and for that reason alone the gameplay will become infinitely more enjoyable the environments the landscapes the detail at every single turn it's just baffling and it's easily one of the best parts about the game on top of this there is a massive suite of accessibility options which means a larger than ever subset of gamers will be able to experience the content if they choose to now accessibility can be done in a good and a bad way if the focus on increased availability enters territory that harms the base experience however that's not the case here and I find it impossible to say anything other than that's pretty fantastic when systems exist to allow more players to have a better experience now though we have to talk about repetition and pacing at first the stealth combat will feel clean and visceral then it becomes less engaging and finally towards the end at least in my personal experience it becomes unbearably repetitive the problem is that resource management in terms of stealth mechanics for the first two-thirds of the game is non-existent Ellie can infinitely knife enemies meaning the most effective and most encouraged tactic is to sneak around slowly eliminating everyone in nearly identical fashion for almost every single section this does not have to be the case if you choose to you can run through the level at a breakneck pace with enemies firing at you crafting on-the-fly swapping between weapons and creating some truly frantic encounters but the gravity of the game at least for the first half depending on your speed seems to revolve around stealth now this by itself might seem trivial but there's a catch the game also has a heavy heavy reliance on QTEs or QuickTime events but these QTEs exclusively operate around a single button every time an enemy grabs you which is super often by the way you spam square every time you grab enemy in some sort of scripted event spam square every time you interact with a major cutscene fight spamming square trapped under rubble spam some square and then to top it all off the melee combat loop is just dodge with l1 and spam square for punches this repetition can be fatiguing and by the midway point I found myself making jokes every time anything would happen such as I need some square in my life and sure enough almost every time a prompt would usually appear within seconds for whatever reason telling me to spam square since the format is so predictable that is to say pockets of enemies in between dialogue or cutscene exposition with barrier type doors to separate everything and so much of that experience can end up gravitating towards either cookie-cutter stealth takedowns or spamming square depending on resources the game can over the course of twenty five ish hours become somewhat boring as you progress from cutscene to cutscene again this can be somewhat remedied and I actually suggest turning down the resource scarcity to make things much more plentiful or just be more thorough than I was for the most part because having all of your gadgets and guns to choose from and every given encounter can help break up this pattern like I said the possibility of parkouring your way through a level while 18 enemies shoot at you taking down one mob at a time and another using a bomb on them and attacking with melee and a third with the bow and a fourth with a quick switch to your pistol all of it can be extremely fun but it will take some fairly calculated effort to break up the baseline gameplay loop the world is extremely well crafted from a layout perspective as well no matter how you choose to progress there will be intuitive cues to guide you sometimes it can take a minute or two to figure out where to go yes but more often there will be a sort of guidance that ensures you end up where you need to be with ease to help even further if you take too long a prompt will appear for a hint which I admittedly did need a couple of times and this feature definitely helps avoid the minority of instances where you might actually get frustrated by level construction interspersed in the gameplay are various puzzles but honestly puzzles might be too generous at first they seemed cool but eventually you sort of figure out that it's either putting a dumpster somewhere or throwing a rope over something that's usually it and maybe there's a ladder or an electric plug to mix it up but the Xul's become a novelty very fast there is also a very clear difference between the first section and the rest of the game for some reason they decided to have a larger pseudo open world map in the very early stages which you can explore at your own convenience and then the entire rest of the game is a linear track now I don't reject the idea of a linear story with compressed levels to support it but I enjoyed the first open area much more and I can't help but wonder why they didn't continue with that format I feel it would have been better overall if they had speaking of linear the AI is extremely linear the pathing is more often than not a simple patrol track that walks enemies back and forth in perfectly predictable ways they don't really react well to surrounding events either and your companion if you yourself are hidden or crouched it's just flat-out invisible to them I understand the reason why it would be frustrating really it would be to have your companion alerting the enemies constantly but when your ally is just sitting directly in front of someone and they're just looking around as if they aren't there it pretty much shatters the immersion upgrades were interesting sort of but never felt as meaningful as they did in the original game this gets remedy to a certain extent later when you play as the second character instead of le but the skill tree progression is quite clearly a low priority and your choices in that regard will not really matter they can matter for small gameplay variations or utility but my point is that what you choose won't impact your ability to effectively clear areas or progress through the game I'm not arguing that it should but I wish there had been a bit more emphasis on how your character evolves for another positive there are some gorgeous set pieces some new enemy archetypes and a boss encounter that is a whole lot of running away honestly but still fun and overall I would say that the gameplay and mechanical systems are rather good they have some flaws definitely but they won't actively subtract from the game's value there is a huge emphasis on gore and violence it's absolutely gratuitous and over-the-top a lot of the time but that part will just come down to your personal preferences this game is about revenge and violence it pulls no punches and probably everyone already knows that going in so I won't harp on it too much but now now we have to talk about story and this is where the whole thing goes off the rail it honestly feels like they let a monkey with an exacto knife loose on their storyboard it truly legitimately seems schizophrenic in terms of pacing and if I had to sum the entire thing up with one single sentence I would say The Last of Us 2 is an incredibly successful endeavor to make the player miserable differentiating here between success and fun is rather important Naughty Dog themselves came forward with a position that fun is not a word they like to use and it shows it definitely shows they prefer the word engagement but with the game play cycle predicated so heavily on repetition and a story so oppressively brutal and nihilistic it causes emotional fatigue how engaging can that really be the entire story pivots around the death of Joel in the most brutal way possible this is also a shock tactic that Sony attempted to hide through unbelievably aggressive strategies and deception this death is facilitated quite literally by mere coincidence ABI the daughter of a surgeon that Joel kills in the original game to save Ellie though we do not learn this until much later on is hunting him however she is effectively at a standstill in that process for a variety of different reasons so how do they accelerate all this Joel randomly shows up with his brother Tommy saves her life and runs from a horde of infected to her hideout now the complexity of Joel having lowered his defenses through the connection he feels to Ellie is a valid explanation for his confusing lack of skepticism most likely a few years ago he would have simply let Abby die on purpose but his compassion has been building up over time and the result is that he lands after a chance meeting in a situation where he can be brutally murdered I'm not sure if the message is that compassion is weakness or that selfishness is safety in a post-apocalyptic world but the fact is Joel randomly saves ABI within the first couple hours only to be beaten to death right in front of Ellie as she begs Abby to stop this is the ignition point for what will become one of the most confusing ly drawn-out revenge plots I have ever seen in my life which totally and completely destroys all of the elements that made the first game incredible and does so with deliberation and aggression what follows is a segmented campaign where the player hunts down Abby's friends as Ellie and then hunts down Ellie as Abby culminating in a final section Elly abandons her happy fulfilling life to hunt down a B again and loses everything while making a final last-minute decision to spare her life the basic framework is not really an issue the issue is the tactics employed to achieve the goal of humanizing a B while incriminating Joel and Ellie the death of Joel is effectively a gunshot metaphorically the bullet fired is our hatred of a B for this horrible act and it's moving at Mach 15 the player is immediately filled with anger and allowed to play out that anger as Ellie as she hunts down Abby's friends in attempt to fight her along the way there are endearing and emotional flashback scenes which perfectly demonstrate what made the first game so powerful but these are little more than a taunting flash-in-the-pan as the main story unfolds where Ellie is seeking retribution the first 15 hours or so are somewhat enjoyable there are graphic scenes of your horse dying and overabundance of brutality and gore but narrative Lee speaking it seems understandable brushing aside the night and day difference in dialog quality between the flashbacks in the main game because it's honestly painful at times how cheesy and awkward the interactions can be we are eventually forced to confront ABI as she kills what is probably the most interesting and well crafted new character in the game thus far and then it happens the game makes a once denied deliberately suppressed switch and you now play as a B that's what I'm referring to the action of it switching over to her is it happening after she is brutally killed the character you perhaps loved the most this is where it all falls apart because anyone who actually pays attention to the tricks that they use will begin to feel emotionally manipulated in the cheapest ways possible remember how I said Ellie is forced to kill a dog it is scripted right in and then there is no other option despite counterclaims in the pre-release marketing yeah it's Abby's dog and they not once but two separate times force you to play catch with the dog throwing a tennis ball or a squeaky toy while patting it to make you feel guilt and shame another example would be the scene where Abby helps free a trapped zebra who is stuck in barbed wire which then runs off to its child the subtext here is extremely obvious Ellie bad Ellie kills animals thing further pushed by the fact that dogs will be rather difficult to avoid killing in the actual combat levels though I will say I was successful in doing so for the most part on my personal run but le bad she killed the dog a be good she saves animals and look how cute her puppy is look how much they love each other they practically bludgeon you over the head with it remember the metaphor of our anger being a bullet that was fired when she killed Joel and is now in full motion these types of scenes are like holding up cardboard in front of that bullet trying to slow it down or make it stop it has some effect if you don't realize just how cheap and tacky it is but in reality you are going to need a lot of cardboard because it's really not gonna do anything this ties back into the idea of a knife wielding monkey being let loose on their storyboards had these events and gameplay sections occurred in a different order it would have been possible even likely that the player would relate to connect with or otherwise feel some sort of investment in a be story but when you lead with a comically muscular girl beating your favorite character to death while Ellie screams and begs her to stop it kind of wrecks the idea of the player ever actually carrying what happens to her after that point I will say that some of the best combat scenes take place during the 10 or so hours that you play as a be without a doubt but this particular section drags on and on and on while simultaneously not being long enough to undo the character damage caused by her initial actions this is the part where I add that maybe some people love Abby and they hate Joel maybe they believe Joel's previous actions in the first game earned him that death or they think that these contrived scenes of relatability are emotional and artistic that's entirely possible but it does not change the fact that they spliced together a series of events which then placed an incredibly heavy burden on their own ability to manipulate your emotions while resorting to really unpleasant and shallow parlor tricks to achieve that end this makes no mention of the differences in character emotional state Ellie is quite clearly unraveling as she executes Abby's friends it also bears mentioning that these executions are actually self-defense in a lot of cases or caused by a fit of rage when they say something like Joel deserved everything he got and more but the point is it is taking an obvious emotional toll on her one critical situation involves a woman that kills who was pregnant and upon finding this out Ellie collapses onto the ground there is a well executed scene where it becomes clear she is feeling a rush of emotion and guilt that overwhelms her ability to even function and all this because she killed someone who was trying to kill her actively and they turned out to be pregnant inversely after the game forces you to attack Ellie as the Hulk esque bodybuilder Abbey then holds a knife to Dina's throat Deana being Ellie's partner and Ellie exclaims please don't please don't she's pregnant Abbey then clearly relishes the idea of slitting her throat he's literally about to do it says good and winds up only to be stopped by her newfound friend and companion someone who is quite obviously supposed to operate in the same way that Ellie does to Joel as a parent slash Guardian to child relationship Abbey despite murdering just as much as Ellie is never once displayed as having endured emotional trauma from it she certainly reacts when she discovers her friends have been killed she reacts strongly when she discovers her dog the one they forced you to kill and then beat you over the head with afterward but she does not second-guess reflect on or suffer from the brutality she inflicts on others in any comparable way to Ellie Abby takes visceral pleasure in the revenge cycle while Ellie does not she is traumatized by it and yet once all this has happened the game manipulates you even further with what honestly feels like a false ending time passes and it shows a somewhat happy tranquil life where Ellie and Dena have their child Ellie has clear PTSD and when Tommy shows up despite having now rotated three distinct times between let's get revenge and it's over we should be done with this now back to you better come with me on this revenge quest again by the way she abandons the tranquil life to go after Abby again another youtuber named skill up made an astute comparison between Game of Thrones season 8 where Daenerys Targaryen just snaps because of Belle's maybe and ignores the city surrendering to burn them all alive this is an accurate parallel to draw because the motivation behind Ellie's new rebooted quest is nearly impossible to understand or reconcile regardless you once again go after Abby who by the way still has absolutely no second thoughts about any of her past actions is clearly existing in a perfectly normal emotional state and is off wandering around with her knockoff le sidekick named Lev Abby gets captured you as le fight through a gauntlet of enemies to free her and then it seems like you were about to get in the boat and abandon the quest for revenge to sail off into the sunset when yet again le does some kind of emotional 180 attacks Abby they fight in just a gut-wrenchingly violent way and Abby bites off Ellie's fingers lastly Ellie is drowning her actively and now after all of that decides okay I'll let her live Abby sails off with her companion and Ellie goes home to find that she is lost Dena she lost the baby her fingers they're gone too and thus her ability to play the guitar which was her sort of final connection to Joel and she walks off alone as the credits roll the last of us to narrative Lee speaking is an absolute mess one might interpret a meaning of cyclical revenge and violence but that thread is cut when you realize that one party loses everything while deliberately ending that cycle and the other lives on with relatively little emotional damage on top of it you could interpret the message to be one of selfishness owing to the fact that Joel truly only dies also because of a coincidence but because of a Keystone decision to save Abby in a random coincidental meeting or maybe it's just nihilism everyone is dying and murdering and fighting from entire factions all the way down to individual characters but no matter how you examine the story it is a basic shock reveal and forced humanization afterward that fails to live up to nearly anything and everything that the first game did so well in the beginning of this video I gave a series of math questions which forced the user to arrive at the number two despite an illusion of choice the Last of Us 2 tries to force the player to feel some sort of emotional connection to a character that is every bit as bad if not worse and probably worse than the characters that they tear down and while doing so they use equally transparent parlor tricks to manipulate your emotions even going so far as forcing you to beat a character that you love as a confounding Lee and stupidly skilar villain while you mash square hating yourself for even playing this title is being heralded as a milestone in all of gaming by critics and major journalists because the same way some of you still don't know how I force you to end up with the number to some players never look at deep enough to see what exactly this narrative really says or rather what it doesn't say the critical acclaim for this title can be summed up as a problem of intention these reviewers who give the game a 10 out of 10 or a hundred out of 100 they're not writing their review for actual players they write it for their mana collide peers who perceive themselves as the artistic date keepers to the proletariat because only they are intellectually competent enough to interpret such a profound message they deflect and ignore contrary opinions and condemn them as bigots or homophobes and they generalize the undeniably massive number of players who have legitimate issues with this game or its narrative as prejudicial for their acknowledgement of flaws they see a game that subverted expectations a fancy way of saying intentionally disappointed you and they scream to high heaven that it is artistic brilliance when in reality it is sometimes exactly what it seems to be which is an unpleasant game with an unpleasant story that is riddled with holes characters that make horribly confusing decisions which make hardly any sense retcons sections of the first game because I have no idea why and deliberately seeks to tear apart everything you loved from the franchise the smartass young girl and cynical old man survivor playing off of each other in witty or endearing ways it's all gone beaten to death on purpose in its place is a miserable emotional swamp that hardly even takes the time to allow you to breathe as it lays out a one-sided story a very one-sided story of revenge and violence will ruin your life which really only ends up applying to the characters you truly loved while the ones that you do not know and hardly care for or worse yet actively hate morally develop together in a struggle against evil bigoted religious fanatics this game can never be a ten out of ten it can never be a 100 out of 100 and it cannot be held up as a pinnacle of progress in any other category than visuals likewise the game is not a zero definitely not it is not void of redeeming and should not be generalized in a dismissive way as worthless over the course of my playthrough I went up and down a great deal at the lowest I considered a four at the highest for a split second I considered an eight but realizing that the modern review scale has normalized a seven as average I guess if you really want to call it that I would call this game on that scale a six so much of the experience is just cutscenes so much of it is repeated and so much of it involves mashing a single button or excessive use of violence and gore that the audience who finds it worthwhile will be smaller by far than the number of people who actually purchase and play it Naughty Dog and Neil druckmann set out to make a game that was divisive and controversial they succeeded The Last of Us too is an incredibly successful endeavor to make the player miserable and it absolutely does if you want to be miserable definitely definitely buy this game if you enjoyed the first one I really don't know what to tell you because that's an entirely different creature the criticism that you must play to understand don't fall for it you can understand what misery is without experiencing this particular form of it but that's it I do not like this game but if you evaluate from a perspective of success on the most basic level imaginable I have to respect their ability to accomplish their goal and rip to shreds everything I loved about the series if you want to support their links down below merch patreon Twitter other social media another gaming youtuber to support as well but I'll cut it there and stop rambling as always thank you all for watching and have a nice night [Music]

Channel: Upper Echelon Gamers

Views: 1,128,453

Rating: 4.3212833 out of 5

Keywords: Last of us 2, last of us 2 review, last of us 2 reviews, last of us, last of us 2 gameplay, last of us 2 score, last of us 2 lies, naughty dog, sony lies, last of us 2 story, last of us 2 characters, last of us 2 controversy, last of us 2 revenge, gaming media, last of us 2 articles, last of us 2 metacritic, last of us 2 reviewed, upper echelon gamers, upper echelon gaming, ellie, abby, joel, new characters, last of us 2 missions, last of us 2 enemies

Id: A5bw4CmLZcY

Length: 28min 32sec (1712 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Deathcrow]

This is a really good analysis. It hits upon every major issue of the game that I would've wanted to be explored.