@LN78 interesting stuff. I loved the sequel… quite a bit more than the original as it goes. I found the story beautiful yet quite simple in The Last of Us. While I found the sequels narrative ugly and emotionally complex (in a good way). I do love how we all get such varying reactions from the same product though.
As with most of my reactions, I honestly think that my expectations going in had a big bearing on my feelings at the end. I played The Last of Us Part 2 around 18 months after it’s releases and as a result, I went in very weary having heard all the hate. Conversely, I went in to the original back in 2013 having heard it was the greatest game ever made. Neither were true imho yet both examples of public perception probably had an impact on my eventual experience.
I went into the sequel very tepid… never having really been a fan of linear, heavily narrative-focused games, yet I finished it in awe. Straight into my top 5 games ever (though it was just nudged out by Elden Ring, which went straight in as my ggoat).
I'm another person that enjoyed Part 2 more than Part 1. The game play was great and even though it was long I found myself wanting more. Most of all though it was how well the story was told and the story in general, it felt very personal like those decisions might be ones I'd make myself in those situations. Ultimately the ending played on my mind for a long time after finishing it.
I liked the moral ambiguity of a lot of the game and the fact that it doesn’t ever sell anyone as the “winner”.
Same.
And yeah, if you strip it down to "violence begets violence" the general premise is indeed very simple - but IMO the game excels in how the individual characters are "executed". Characters (the main one ones anyway) are complex enough to make them feel human and the performances are fantastic. And it's a pretty great action game with good shooting mechanics, level design, enemy AI, etc. on top of that
@render Yeah, the ending worked for me too. I won’t say too much seeing as people are still going with the game!
@Voltan I admire ND for going something quite different from the mainstream with the story and characters. It was always going to be divisive but I’d rather companies take that risk than play it safe every time. Even better when it’s a big company that will get more people playing too!
@LN78@Thrillho@Voltan I watched some of the Game Developer Conference vids that ND did regarding the tech in TLoU2 and it's incredible the level they go to eek out every little bit of performance from the hardware. I can't wait to find out what they can do when they've just got the PS5 to target 🤯
@JohnnyShoulder Wow, you weren’t kidding. 😂. I thought the game was going to end about 3 times before it actually did. Very much like Red Dead Redemption 2 in that department, although I’d argue that TLoU2 did the “dragged out epilogue” much better. Yeah it did go on a bit too long, but the ending was worth the extra time. But just. Not sure I could have taken another “so-and-so is at that place way over there in the distance and I need to trek through these infested encampment set-pieces to get there”
But I did probably play this last stretch all at once rather than breaking it up into smaller play sessions, so I probably hurt myself a little by rushing the ending. But I really wanted to finish the game by the end of the weekend, so it was a bit of a marathon at the end.
——————
But all in all, I did complete the game and it was quite fantastic, all things considered. I agree with a lot of what’s been said. I’m still letting it all sink in, but I do think I’ll drop a more formal organized review, so as to solidify things in my mind. So hopefully I’ll have something written in the next few days which is more thought out.
However, for some quick first impressions after completing it — I am quite awestruck with the game. It’s a masterclass in development, as many have noted. I think with the PS5 patch at 60 fps it runs and looks as good or better than any native PS5 game I’ve played to date. Character models and acting are phenomenal. Extremely few glitches — over a 40 hour playthrough I can count on one hand the number of time I had even minor visual issues like weird lighting, clipping, or stuttering. I think it’s a testament that the game actually got me using the photo mode repeatedly, which is something I don’t normally do. Every time I arrived at at new area I was like “Wow, look at this! I need to take a snapshot.”
Although from a technical standpoint there is simply no debate at the excellence on display, the narrative is where the real divisiveness lies. I’m going to process my thoughts but I can’t deny the emotional gut punches I took over and over during the game. Few games have made me feel this way. I do appreciate the themes and lessons the game is relaying, and I did like the ending, like I said. Did I like it better than the first? I think my initial thoughts are that although this game is better by a wide margin in gameplay, technical achievement, and overall quality, the first game resonated better in the end. I think I’m more apt to play this one again, rather than the first, but the final story beats and the tale told in the first game are more ingrained in my memory as truly classic.
I don’t know. Like many have said, I’m wavering on it. I’m not sure there’s been another game which was so broad and diverse in its impact.
@Th3solution I agree with a lot of your thoughts, especially where it's obvious that it's a better overall game in most areas. I'll always prefer the first game's story, but this was a better game otherwise. Like others have said, I felt like I was playing a PS5 game even on the PS4 Pro with how good it was technically.
Unfortunately the game lost me as the Abbie portion of the game dragged on and on for me. I was officially mailing in the rest of my playthrough when they force you to play as Abbie vs. Ellie in whatever indoor section. Sorry, I know neither one is technically good, but I was still playing the game to play as Ellie and experience her story. I was fine with getting some of Abbie's backstory and all, but I was still playing it for Ellie. To have to fight her was ridiculous imo, and I kept saying "I don't want to be doing this", but I obviously was forced to so I could progress. Honestly, it's like being forced to play a Nathan Drake Uncharted game or Horizon as a villain. That's not why you're playing those games.
I'd still like to replay it someday though with the 60 FPS patch just to see how great it is still from a technical perspective and if I can let up even a little on the story issues. It's a real shame that there had to be those major story issues given how good I thought the actual game itself was. I'd go as far as to call it one of the very best games of the whole PS4 generation on every level but the story for me, but unfortunately the story is a huge part of the game obviously.
@KilloWertz Those are some good thoughts, and I can’t disagree, only to say, I think that’s all part of the statement that Naughty Dog was trying to make — the discomfort you feel when playing as the “villain”, or rather that there really was no true hero or villain here. Both main protagonists were villains in the other’s story. It’s all a matter of perspective. However, I felt the same twinge of pain when I was smacking Ellie around and nearly killed her and Dina (and did kill Jesse and maimed Tommy). But I think they knew that most people came to focus on Ellie and so the whole epilogue and final confrontation did give me a little satisfaction being able to play as Ellie one last time. And to confront Abby, who suffered plenty during her ordeal, and then to (hopefully) come to peace with Ellie’s inner demons and learn to forgive her (maybe? It’s hard to tell but I think the flashbacks of Joel tell the story that she was at peace with letting it all go). There’s some wonderful narrative elements there, like the final sequence of having lost her fingers and therefore lost her ability to play guitar, which was the major thread throughout that linked her to Joel. Symbolically, Ellie lost her ability to remember and honor Joel through her unbridled anger and revenge. So the leaving the guitar behind was symbolic of leaving Joel to rest finally.
Anyways, I kind of went on and on there, but I think you’re emotional response was common and part of just what the whole package of discomfort the game intended. But I respect that people didn’t like that. Some people come into the game just wanting to have fun and be fed a story that makes them feel good, and ND subverted all expectations in that regard.
As for the PS5 patch, it’s funny because I played their first 10-15 hours of the game before realizing that I had to go into the menu and enable the 60fps settings, and it was like, “Wow! I thought this looked good before, but now it looks amazing!” So it definitely makes a difference in an already beautiful game.
@Th3solution If treating this as reality, I definitely agree that neither Ellie or Abby are the hero or the villain really as neither are truly good because of what both did throughout the game. Still, while I appreciate the attempt to add more depth to a story that really didn't need it imo, I couldn't help but feel the urge to punch Neil Druckmann in the face while Abby's part of the story dragged on and on. It's a video game. If I wanted to be shoved heavy handed BS in my face for hours, I'd just watch The CW every night.
Whether intended or not, I obviously didn't appreciate it by the time I felt it went on and on. I went into the game knowing there was a real chance I wasn't going to like the second half as I already read about some of it from all of the spoilers. That was intended to give me the opportunity to make a decision if I was going to give the game a shot or not despite it being one of my most anticipated games at that time, and obviously I caved and figured I'd at least give it a shot and see if it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.
As I said before, I thought everything but the actual story was so good that it could have been the game of the generation, but at the end of the day it's a video game and one where I'm being forced to try to consider the whole reason why I'm playing the game might be a bad person and I should look at it from the other person's perspective even though that's not why I paid $60. I give it credit for going places that most game's wouldn't have the balls to go, and you might be right that my reaction is one possibility they were going for, but the Abby stuff should have been DLC. I wouldn't have minded it then as giving you a chance to play from another person's perspective in a game with a story like that is genius.
PSN ID/Xbox Live Gamertag: KilloWertz
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I still don't get why people get so emotional about it. It's just a video game in the end.
It's clear ND wanted to make a different kind of experience, and instead of positive emotions, they wanted you to feel negative ones. And that's incredibly difficult in any kind of medium. But it's an interesting question nevertheless. Can a piece of medium be good when it's main intention is to make you feel anger or disgust?
Reminds of Firewatch and how people didn't like the ending because it didn't turn out to be a wacky super natural plot twist, but a very mundane ending. I think that ending resonated more with me than if it had gone in that direction.
Anyway, when playing as Abby I had absolutely no issue beating the whack out of Ellie, as that would be completely in-character for her to do at that moment in time.
I guess that's the ''roleplaying'' in video games, but roleplaying these days seems to mean projecting your own feelings and thoughts onto characters. That's what people like apparently, they like to play as a character that's like them. That's why most video game characters are boring blank-slate characters, because the medium wants to appeal to as many people as possible.
Doing a 15 hour emotional campfire check in, I am going to bang this whole post into spoiler tags as that way I can just write freely. I would prefer no one replies and spoils anything beyond the point I am at in the game, but if you give me fair warning I can dance around your tags.
Okay the spoiler tags broke and I had to tag each individual paragraph with tags for some reason, sorry if anyone saw anything before I could rush to get all the spoiler tags around each paragraph.
Maybe it is a result of hearing for three years about how bad The Last of Us Part II is/was, I was dreading this to be honest, but maybe because of those lowered expectations, I've actually really enjoyed this so far outside of those opening three or so hours. I do, however, think the game is a total mess, a hot mess, but a mess all the same.
Firstly, I can see why Part 1 lovers dislike this, as it throws away basically everything that made Part 1 special or unique. I don't necessarily hate the idea of doing this inherently if your replacements are worthwhile but it is hard to really judge how worthwhile they are because of how muddled this game feels tonally, and how unfocused it feels narratively.
Whereas Part 1 was a richly nuanced exploration of the grey, Part II will tell you every second of the way exactly how to feel. The intention behind this change though, is very hard to place. Like, they add in a lot of smoke and mirrors to really force the player to face the consequences of every button press. Whereas this was a realisation you had to come to organically yourself as a human in Part 1, Part 2 shouts in your face 'OH MY GOD DID YOU JUST KILL JOEY THE WLF, HE HAS A FAMILY DON'T YOU KNOW YOU MONSTER?!' literally every three seconds.
The first game - sans David and his crew - made it so the humans you faced weren't ever presented as inherently evil, just survivors who do a lot of the same things Joel has done/does do to survive, but they also didn't need to tell us about how we murdered their girlfriend in the petrol station down the road. Whereas both of those extremes are flipped here, we are being called a monster by the game for killing Terry the Scar a minute ago, while at the same time the game is constantly telling us about all the terrible things the WLF or Scars have done.
Even later game attempts to humanise both groups just feel so muddled, even when presented through biased lenses, are often full of muddled caveats. Maybe, for example, not everyone in the WLF are the monsters you read about in those notes in the early parts of Seattle, but they still seem like ***** people all the same. Maybe that means brutally killing them isn't justified, but it isn't like I am suddenly looking back and having some deep crisis about all the people I killed. ***** the WLF.
Same with the Scars, featuring just a couple of Scars who have decided to turn against the group as a whole, doesn't make me feel somehow worse for all the other ones I killed along the way, as you present them as truly evil, truly brutal, religious nutters the whole rest of the time. Do you want me to feel bad for killing them AND think they are truly evil monsters? Because that doesn't work.
It is also weird when the game shifts focus for you to play as the antagonist you have been chasing all this time, they start introducing her backstory and expand on some of the characters who have already died as antagonists in the story by this point. I was kinda dreading I was about to be gaslit by the game here, but honestly, even through a biased lens, a lot of these characters don't really come across much better than the evil way they are painted by Ellie and company in the first ten or so hours. If this part of the game is meant to endear me to any of these people, it failed massively.
But then the game also flies off on this weird redemption arc with Abby and those two Scars which has absolutely nothing to do with anything really beyond like I guess thematics? This is exactly the kind of unnecessary, unfocused, bloat Part 1 avoided indulging in and I don't really understand why this portion of the game exists at all.
Likewise, the gameplay while mechanically hasn't necessarily evolved in some grand way, it has been tweaked enough to create an ultimately pretty massive shift in focus, all the same. Had the systems been included where NPCs scream out the name of their friend you just murdered or whatever in Part 1, it might have mattered more, because Part 1 wasn't really an action game. There you were expected to try and sneak by as much as you could, and avoid open combat for as long as you could, whereas Part 2 has really shifted things through new mechanics, or various system tweaks/new enemy types, to disincentivise stealth for a more direction, actiony, approach.
Human enemies now have dogs which can track you if you try to stay in one place and bait enemies to you, forcing you to constantly move around and likely end up getting spotted. Infected encounters are now often mixed with human enemies, and so it is now far more preferable to just pit the Infected and the Humans against one another and then just come out of hiding and blast away at whoever is left. The introduction of silencers means you now no longer need to take the risk of getting right behind someone or sneaking by them, when you can silently just drop three of them in rapid succession from a safe distance. Likewise, your AI companion can now blow stealth for you, too. So you can waste a lot of time trying to stealthily clear an encounter, for your companion to just stand there right in the open like a *****, get spotted and it turns into a shootout anyway.
All of this means it feels like the game is actively encouraging you to disregard stealth and just kill your way through everyone you come across. Again, this would be fine, but then why couple this with a game that recoils in disgust every time you do kill someone, like I did some forbidden thing, rather than the easiest solution you encouraged me to take? Is the idea that I make the game way harder for myself and try to sneak by everything so I don’t have to deal with the game looking down its nose at me? ***** that.
And I don't even hate this shift inherently. Part 1 was a game I tolerated as a game, to get to the next story development. I actually genuinely find Part 2 fun to play, I think it is almost a flip of Part 1 again where Part 2 is a fun game to play, and I am more interested in the next set piece than necessarily the next story development. Even if I hate killing dogs and how emotionally drained I feel after every gameplay session. But I hate how you have increased my enjoyment of it as a game with the cost of now having to have the game preach out me incessantly throughout.
Combat in Part II feels faster, more immediate, but also more tactical, too. Ellie has more options, and more tools, than Joel did and the expanded semi-open world like environments also further widens your options with engagements. It isn’t a true sandbox, but it does encourage some creativity from the player, which I appreciated. Especially as encounters work just fine if you want to keep it simple.
The differences between how Abby plays and how Ellie plays are subtle, but still convey enough to make their differences as characters apparent through their gameplay. Abby is a hammer, Ellie is a scalpel (ironic given who Abby's Dad turns out to be). This also keeps the game fresh when you effectively repeat the first ten hours again as a different character. I will say Abby probably gets the more interesting weapons/upgrades from what I have experienced so far, but trade offs like needing shivs to kill Clickers stealthily sorta balance it I guess? I also really missed Ellie's perk that means she can no longer be one hit killed by Bloaters/Clickers a lot during my time as Abby.
Facing the Infected is generally still more miserable and frustrating than facing human enemies, but there are new Infected types who aren’t just a pain in the arse to take down thank God, and like I say the game mixes in more Humans with the Infected and also has more set piece like moments with the Infected, so generally they are more enjoyable than the frustrating, stealth focused, Infected engagements that made up the bulk of the Infected encounters in Part 1.
I will also say, going back to a point I mentioned above, while your companions blowing stealth sections for you is kind of annoying, I think they actually did a lot of great work with the AI companions in this game. In the first game, the AI companions you had were often kinda useless outside of scripted moments that required them to do something. Even with the accessibility options turned all the way up, they’d often just stand there and watch you clear whole rooms on your own and if things went South, your companions would just watch you die? There is still some of that here in Part II, but even with the accessibility options left alone, it feels like companions are taking a far more active role in combat, helping finish off any enemies I might have left after a stealth sweep, or immediately pulling out their weapon and blasting when they got caught in the open etc. They are still no Elizabeth or Atreus, but I appreciated the changes all the same.
Also going back to that point about semi open environments, Naughty Dog's art direction and environmental storytelling remain some of the best in the business. Some of these locations that you could potentially miss entirely, are packed with more detail than many main campaign locations in other games.
@Pizzamorg Per your request I won’t comment much yet about specifics, but just wanted to say that I’m reading your thoughts with much interest and vicariously enjoying the roller coaster of experiencing the game again for the first time.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
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Topic: The Last Of Us Part II - OT (No Spoilers)
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