The Last of Us 2 - Why It's Great

the reactions to The Last of Us Part Two was really surprising not just because I honestly thought the game was pretty good although we'll get to that whether you want me to or not but also because of how much faith we had in it it was a sequel to one of the most well-received games ever made from a studio that made Banger after Banger after Banger for decades but I guess that winning streak had to run out eventually having said that though it's still a game made by a ton of talented people arguably some of the best in the industry which sure doesn't guarantee success but I think it still shows now if I'm gonna defend this game it's probably best I start with the least controversial thing I can say and work my way up a lot of people hated the game because of the story which is perfectly reasonable considering it's the main selling point of the franchise but regardless of how you feel about the plot can we at least agree the gameplay is good it's basically what you'd expect from a sequel to The Last of Us the thing is though the original game was seven years old when the sequel released and it is showing early signs of age the movement is a little stiff and limited and the melee combat can often just amount to giving the square button a beating until the enemy goes down there is a Dodge block button but it gets used very rarely I first play in part two right after replaying the first and I was amazed by how much more refined it feels the melee combat has you dodging a hell of a lot more and the game will punish you if you get greedy with the amount of punches you try to string together without it there are also a few additions made to the move set like jumping and crawling and they're not just for show because the enemy Arenas are way more elaborate now the jump button allows the level design a lot more verticality which gives you a lot more options to outmaneuver enemies but that also means you have to mind your surroundings a lot more because they could get the drop on you crawling takes the basic idea of crouching where you can fit behind cover much easier but you're slower and looser mobility and takes it to much more of an extreme now you can take cover in really tight spaces but you have all the mobility of a baby which is not ideal when someone's pointing a gun at you and speaking of crouching and crawling you can now hide in the grass a mechanic that Naughty Dog brought over from Uncharted 4. it's another good way of navigating environments because you can be a bit more in the open without getting spotted but the trade-off is that if you do get caught you won't have any actual cover so you can end up trapping your yourself if you're not careful over here not to mention the Arenas are a lot more open and non-linear this time around which adds an extra layer of challenge you'll often have to explore a bit to find the way out while also trying to keep cover and not leaving yourself exposed to enemies but the game doesn't just force you to wander aimlessly because the exit is usually on the opposite end from where you start so you know the general direction of where you're going you just need to figure out the exact spot which I think is a good balance all of that adds up to a really tense really varied and really challenging combat system that I think does a great job of building on the combat from the original game there are other aspects of the gameplay that aren't perfect though for one I understand that including breaks in between enemy encounters is important for reasons like variety atmosphere and story but the game gets a little carried away with them it's mainly because like the enemy Arenas the in-between areas are much more explorative than the first game to an extent I like that the game encourages Scavenging for materials but if you're as adamant about finding everything as the game seems to hope you are it can really hurt the pacing you can potentially go long stretches a time without much plot development or enemy encounters it diffuses a lot of the tension when I'm in a big open area and I can see that I'm not in any kind of danger occasionally something will catch you off guard but it's pretty rare after a while I had the idea that these areas could benefit from Random Encounters like maybe you're safe one minute but there's a percentage chance a group of infected might wander in or a patrol of humans might pass through that way these areas could feel relatively safe but still keep the player a little on edge and since these areas are larger than before it seems like there are also more materials dotted around they're apparently more scarce depending on the difficulty but I played on hard mode and I rarely felt like I was under prepared for a fight it doesn't make the game easy but you don't really have to worry about running out of resources unless you're very Reckless with them speaking of Scavenging for items though there's one little tiny itty bitty probably not that big a deal but I'm gonna mention it anyway point I want to make if you've seen naked jakey's video on the game he brings up that very deep in the game settings there's an option to have the item pickups be automatic instead of press in the Triangle button now you're going to want to go ahead and flick that some [ __ ] on because I don't understand why it isn't on by default there's never a situation where you don't want to pick something up it's a pretty reasonable complaint and a really well argued video but I personally disagree with them the way I see it is that Scavenging for items is a big part of the game and because of that you want finding them to feel rewarding I'd argue that manually picking up items as a little more satisfaction to the found it moment because it feels just that little bit more deliberate on the player's part god it just occurred to me that this the second time in the span of a few videos where I've publicly argued with a YouTuber who's more successful and quite frankly better than me oh but like I said I think you can make a valid argument in either direction and ultimately it's not that big a deal I just wanted to give a bit of a different perspective no offense naked Jacob getting back to the level design though there is one section where the exploration gets particularly ambitious no long into the game Ellie arrives in downtown Seattle and we actually get this decently sized non-linear map to explore there's a ton of optional challenges and hidden items to find and how the game encourages you to look for them is very clever the premise involves Ellie needing gasoline for a generator and finding a potential lead to some mention that there's gas in the courthouse garage and the Dome so what's the plan for finding these places we ride around and see what we see it's honestly a really Natural Way of nudging the player to look around for the optional challenges because it builds off the searching that the player is already doing come to think of it between this and the times Uncharted 4 and the Lost Legacy had segments like this I have to wonder if Naughty Dog are practicing for an open world game if they are I'd say they're off to a good start and I'd like to see them develop the concept even further I wish there was a mini map so I didn't have to keep pausing but otherwise I like it but while naughty dog have been experimenting with different types of gameplay they've also included a lot more set pieces that they've become so well known for these have always been a highlight of their games they're insanely tense and varied and a lot of them have better action and spectacle than a lot of big budget movies and the last was part two is no exception for example we got a car chase to finish off a long Gauntlet of enemies and it's pretty climactic Ellie's in the passenger seat so the game turns into a rail shooter for a couple of minutes it's not particularly complicated it's basically just point and shoot but it's one of the few times where you don't have to worry about your ammo count you can just go in guns blazing so it's more intended is just a short change of pace it also feels really immersive trying to shoot while having to deal with the cars slightly shaking on the roads swerving and bumping into each other and the sudden halts from crashing what's not great for immersion is the fact that a game which 99 of the time treats ammo conservations very seriously is now all of a sudden with no explanation telling you have all the bullets you want go nuts just have Ellie find a big box of ammo in the car it belongs to a faction that's heavily militarized it's believable that they'd be stocked up that's all you had to do later on though there's an action scene where the players pinned down by a sniper it's not his frantic as a lot of the other action scenes it's much slower and minimalistic so it's less a sense of panic and more sense of dread throughout the scene you have to cross a mile of road to confront the sniper while he pelts you with bullets the tension here comes from trying to find different ways of staying behind cover and it's very easy to accidentally step out into the open if you're not careful especially when infected start attacking you so you have to fight them off while trying to stay behind cover but when it comes to spectacle and horror there's one moment in particular that really stands out that being the Rat King this is arguably the best idea for an infected that we've ever seen in the last of us what we have here is a group of infected that have been enclosed in a tight space for the entire 25 years since the initial cordyceps outbreak and because of that the fungus has grown around them into one giant hulking clump of mushroom and faces and this fight is one of the most intense and violent in the entire game if the Rat King gets anywhere near you it will tear you apart so you need to constantly make sure you have room to run away and if you want to survive you need to unload as much of your ammo as possible I do have to wonder though if the Rat King has been trapped in a basement for decades how have they not starved to death same goes for the other infected in that basement or even the infected the Ellie finds stuck behind this barricaded door either way though the set pieces in general are really engaging and they have a ton of creative ideas they easily beat out the set pieces present in the original game and that is a hill I will die on but okay I've put this off long enough I'm gonna have to talk about the game's story and how despite how many of you are likely to disagree with me I think it's pretty good and a really solid continuation from the original game no the story basically revolves around the idea that hatred can corrupt a person and that Revenge ultimately does more harm than good I think the decision to make Ellie the main character trying to avenge Joel's death does wonders for making the theme more compelling keep in mind that in the original game she was one of the most innocent characters she was willing to kill but only in self-defense plus she had a much different attitude to it than most almost every character in The Last of Us was more or less completely numb to violence but Ellie was still young enough with very little survival experience that she was still somewhat uneasy about taking a life I feel sick with that in mind seeing Ellie becomes bloodthirsty as she gets in part two I think is great for conveying the theme and the transition that she goes through to where she's willing to do truly Terrible Things feels very natural unlike the original game it actually takes a good while before any encounters with human enemies show up for the first few hours it's all infected and I think killing them is pretty morally Justified but then and Ellie finds out that the only way she's getting to Abby is by going through the militia group that she's a part of called wolf and throughout all this violence and death you start to realize Ellie is kind of the instigator here oh sure she's getting unfairly attacked by an army that's shooting her on site but it's not like the first game where she and Joel were trying to save the world she could justifiably cut her losses and head home anytime she liked but instead she continues to hunt down Jules killers and murder countless other people who had nothing to do with it but at the same time her dislike of violence from the first game doesn't just disappear Without a Trace there are plenty of moments where she shows signs of regret for the things she's done and even fear and shock at what she's turning into but she still convinces herself to keep going either she'll decide that she's come too far to stomp or she'll even briefly come to her senses and give up but she gets to live foreign [Music] it has to be only for something extreme to happen which will push her over the edge again she's also given her own set of brand new supporting characters the most notable one being her new girlfriend Dina initially she seems to be on board with Ellie's Revenge Mission out of a desire to keep her safe but she also has enough emotional distance from Joel that she's able to realize that the hell Ellie is putting herself through isn't worth it there's also a subplot where it's revealed that Dina is pregnant and unable to tag along with Ellie for a good chunk of the adventure and from then on Ellie being distanced from the only one who can act as a voice of reason is a large part of why she goes to the extremes that she does there's also Jesse a friend of Ellie's from Jackson and he's okay there's nothing necessarily bad about him he just isn't really all that fleshed out his personality is fairly Bland and he doesn't have much of a personal stake in Ali's Revenge Mission beyond the fact that he's friends with her they try to give him somewhat of a stake by making him the father Dina's baby but that's not really expanded on in any meaningful way he didn't know that Dina was pregnant when he joined them so he wasn't doing it out of Parental responsibility and there aren't any moments where he's torn between the mission and the safety of the baby or anything like that but my biggest problem with LA's storyline would be her goals throughout most of it I mean the main goal of tracking down Abby is fine because she's the one who killed Joel and had a vendetta against him but I'm not really as invested in her revenge against the other characters responsible for Joel's death it's engaging enough mainly due to seeing the lengths that Ellie is willing to go to but I wish that Abby's accomplices had a more prominent part in killing Joel instead they kind of only tagged along and then were just in the room while they let Abby do her thing don't get me wrong they're still guilty but they're not really a focus in Joel's death scene and so a lot of Ellie's story just meanders around while you wait for the confrontation that you actually care about honestly a lot of the most interesting parts of Ali's storyline actually come from the flashback subplot with Joel which is a genuinely strong progression of her relationship from the first game it's clear that in the years since the original story they've become a lot more comfortable around each other they're a lot more playful with each other and talk about their interests in person no lives a lot more frequently hey you remember those uh Savage Starlight comic books that you're into did you like them oh you know what it's not really my cup of tea but Dr Daniela Starr means Rich West how they escaped them there's even some really good attention to detail with minor lines of dialogue from the first game becoming more significant in the second you know once we're done with this whole thing I'm gonna teach you how to play guitar [Music] you got it remember now don't just flail about you got the water with your whole arm blah blah blah I really miss coughing are you drinking coffee a little embarrassed as to what I had to trade to get it but it's not bad and my personal favorite when I was a kid I used to wanted the uh singer shut up it was serious think something oh no come on wow I don't think so and then at the beginning of the second game now that he's a little more comfortable around Ellie oh my stolen missing parts I have no need for anymore but their relationship isn't without conflict Joel did some pretty reprehensible things to protect Ellie as much as he tries to hide it from her and even during her best times with Joel she always had that little bit of doubt about him over time she became more emotionally distant because she didn't know how much she could trust him honestly it's pretty believable that this would happen considering that as Ellie points out the story that Joel told her about the fireflies being unable to find a cure doesn't make sense you said there were dozens of people like me I've never met another immune person before why did you pull me out of there while I was still unconscious because I let them run their tests and when I saw that they were useless I got us out of them how do you know they were useless maybe if you you just would have given them more time they could have figured something out eventually it becomes obvious that he isn't being entirely honest with her and she demands to know what really happened making a vaccine would have killed you so I stopped them I'll go back but we're done this falling out of the Ellie and Joel have his handled brilliantly it happens really naturally over time while still showing how much they care about each other so the time they spent bonding over the first game meant something and seeing how much that Bond developed even further after the first game makes it all the more heartbreaking when it eventually breaks I'll talk about Joel and Ellie's reconciliation later but since I'm on a roll defending this game Let's Venture deeper into the controversy rabbit hole and talk about Abby's story it's fair to say that the decision to have Abby torture the main character the first game to death and then have you play as her for half the game turned a fair number of people off but personally I think it works out pretty well to start out as divisive as it was chill's death scene is handled really well it's made really unsettling just how slowly and quietly it plays out Abby not being content to just get it over with quickly and instead shooting a huge hole in his leg so he can't run away stomping the bleeding so it's not over too quickly and bludgeoning him with a golf club you don't get to rush this foreign it makes you initially sympathize with Ellie's Revenge Mission but also serves as good foreshadowing the level of Cruelty and selfishness that Ellie eventually sings to is hinted at early on by showing how evil and sadistic Abby has become in her own Revenge Quest and when Abby's half the story gets going we see that her everyday life is also pretty dark she and the rest of wolf are engaged in a turf war with the Sarah fights but the cycle of violence that Abby is a part of gets disrupted when her life is saved by a couple of serified kids named Yara and Lev this along with her ex-boyfriend Owen who's become disillusioned with the tarf war ends up sending Abby on a road of self-reflection and Redemption I'll admit that much like LA's story The Supporting characters that Abby has to work off of aren't the most consistent in terms of quality I wouldn't call any of them bad but some are better than others Owen and Mel have a couple of decent scenes where they talk to Abby about how she has a destructive and negative impact on everyone around her and have her realize that she really isn't a good person I haven't always done the right you're a piece of [ __ ] Abby but other than that they're not the most interesting on their own own the same goes for the rest of the walls including the leader Isaac who apparently encouraged Abby's aggression and is a big part of why she is the way she is but he's barely given anything to do here honestly along with the game's pacing The Supporting Cast is the main reason why I ultimately prefer the story from the first game I can't think of a single major character from that game that I don't find interesting but with that said Yara and Lev are actually pretty good ambi's relationship with Lev serves as a parallel to Joel and Ellie from the first game a violent and bitter person meets an innocent young kid who needs protection and It ultimately puts them back in touch with our Humanity but unlike Joel and Ellie Abby and lav's relationship is less parent and daughter and more older sister and younger brother Abby looks out for Lev but they both come from slightly similar backgrounds living as survivors so Lev ends up being just as supportive to Abby as Abby is to him Abby is able to keep him safe but Lev also helps her work through her fear of heights and is also still capable in a fight and Abby's Redemption Arc is handled in a way that I think is really clever after finding out that Ellie has been killing her friends she confronts her and we get the big climactic Showdown that we've been waiting for but it doesn't play out exactly how you'd expect despite it being Ellie's Revenge Story the fight is actually played from Abby's perspective yeah Ellie is the boss but when you get down to it it makes sense Abby has spent the game learning to become a better person while Ellie has steadily become more and more vicious I think that having Ellie serve as a boss fight hunting down an unarmed Abby is a smart way for the game to make its Point Abby eventually wins the fight but decides to let Ellie and Dino live after spending the whole game realizing that Revenge has only ever brought about more pain honestly since ampy's story is so heavily based around her relationship with Lev and her Redemption as a result I actually find it more interesting than the bulk of Ellie's story since it doesn't drag nearly as much but to give Ellie's Story the credit deserves when she finally does confront Abby again at the end of the game it ties the story together really well by this point Ellie Abby and Lev have all lost pretty much everything in the senseless violence that they've all played a part in from Abby killing Joel to Ellie killing Abby's friends to the war between the wolves and Sarah flights to Ellie continuing to hunt Abby long after Dina would go along with it and so throughout the entire fight instead of it being cathartic for either of them they're exhausted they're miserable they're barely even still alive and they both just wanted to be over with and so even after Ellie gets the upper hand and is about to kill Abby they both ultimately agree that it isn't worth it and it never was now it's not exactly uncommon for revenge stories to end with the main character changing their mind like this but in this case it handles it in a fairly unique way the message is more than just revenge is bad because it's morally wrong although they do touch on that ultimately the story is about how revenge is bad because it only causes more problems really if Abby and Ellie had just accepted their situations they'd be way better off for and neither of them would have lost everything but all they can do now is take what's left of their lives and try to start over but the story isn't finished yet we get one final flashback to Joel the night before his death a couple years after their relationship broke Ellie realizes that she misses having Joel in her life after he stood up for her earlier that night it's genuinely quite touching that even though Ellie wanted nothing to do with Joel he was still willing to look out for her she admits that she's still angry with Joel and probably always will be but she'd like to try and forgive him and for them to be a part of each other's lives again I'd like that I don't know if I can say this for definite but this might be my favorite moment in either of The Last of Us games not only is it a good parallel to Ellie and Abby's stories about how forgiveness is often the more constructive choice but it's also a really poignant end to Joel and Ali's relationship it's tragic that Joel and Ellie never did get a chance to properly make amends but after what he did it's kind of thematically appropriate that it's as Bittersweet as it is but it's nice to know that their relationship ended on somewhat good terms and the scene is made infinitely more powerful the detail that for someone as stoic and accustomed to pain as Joel the thought of having Ellie back in his life is enough to make him cry I like The Last of Us Part too it's not perfect it's definitely got some story and pacing problems and I agree that the first game is more consistently great but when part 2 is at its best it's some of the most compelling I've ever experienced from a video game I respect the risks they were willing to take how ambitious the game is and overall I think for the most part it's really good thanks for watching make sure to subscribe and click that Bell for more videos also do you want to know how La La Land tells its story visually without dialogue or how it balances optimism and realism click the video on screen now to find out

Channel: Stuart Barron

Views: 122,199

Keywords: the last of us, the last of us 2, the last of us part 2, the last of us part ii, sony, playstation, playstation 4, ps4, naughty dog, review, video essay

Id: rPI8zAlu0eA

Length: 22min 16sec (1336 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 06 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Sorry-Ad7074]

That was a really well made video. I also really enjoyed the second game.

[u/wizard_on_beans]

Ha