What do you get when you cross an angry sheep and a mad cow?
So, I obtained the plantinum trophy for The Last of Us 2. It’s a fairly rare achievement for me, irrespective of coming fairly close with a fair few games (God of War, Zero Dawn, FF7 remake, Spider-Man) but just never bothered to find all of Odin’s ravens or whatever. It is probably a testament to the Last of Us Part 2 that the final trophies, which are collectible related, never felt like too much of a chore because exploring the game is so compelling. I’ve also now played the game through twice and I’m ready to talk about it.
I’m going to go ahead and use spoiler tags liberally. I’ll be spoilering things that happen throughout the game to the end and I’m going to spoiler tag things that are even vaguely spoilery or talk around things that may be deemed spoilery, so it’s going to be your own bloody fault if you read something you wish you had not.
To begin, I need to talk about the first game, and given how far out we are from release I will not be spoilering this part.
Last of Us Part 1.
So, the reputation of the first game is well known at this point. Like many people, it has a special place in my heart. I played it after coming home from a 4 year stint overseas, after many of my friends had changed jobs and cities and generally moved on with their lives. At the time, I had discovered what might have been a cancerous polyp in my throat and was waiting to undergo surgery to have it removed and diagnosed. You could say it was a time of pretty strong emotions and the ending hit me like a gut punch.
The game really is a masterpiece. At the time it was a tremendous graphical achievement which made it’s core virtue, the storytelling, all the more precious. The game is peppered with truly cinematic achievements and moments of brilliant acting that can be appreciated whether you like video games or not. It is because of this that the game makes you truly feel for Joel and Ellie, and truly understand when Joel, at the end, decides to kill the fireflies and save Ellie, thus dooming the world to a future without a cure of the cordyceps virus. It is that moment which many point to as the achievement of the game as the mediums first truly universally recognised “work of art” on the same level as the best cinema. If the player wants to finish the narrative, they have no choice to continue with an action many did not agree with. It subverted the idea of player agency and would have fallen apart if it was not told in the brilliant way that it was.
Ultimately, the game was about love, hope, protection, the paternal bond and the lengths you might go to do what you think is “right”. The second game is not about these things. And some of the bad reactions I have read about the second game really can be seen to be a testament to how brilliant the storytelling of the first game was, and the emotions it made you feel.
The Last of Us Part 2.
Is it a masterpiece? Yes, it is. Like the first game, this is a graphical watershed moment for the medium, and this must be beyond dispute. The level of detail in each area is meticulously crafted and all consuming. Some games have come close – Red Dead Redemption 2 and Final Fantasy 7 Remake perhaps – but neither of those have gone to the extent the art department has here. As you trawl through the apocalyptic wasteland of the post-cordyceps world you see the remnants of a dead civilisation everywhere – photos of family, notes to each other on whiteboards, half-played games of warhammer, spilled record-collections, motor-cycles in the middle of repair, – all of this stuff is inconsequential to the story, and yet it’s there. And there is A LOT of it. There is no environment you traverse that hasn’t been lovingly and meticulously detailed down to the nth degree. Every environment seems fully realised – and importantly – seems to have it’s own backstory which is played out in the detail. No two apartments the same, no dishevelled house identical. If nothing else, you must appreciate the level of attention that has gone into crafting the world. It is an absolute, absolute testament to the creativity possible in the medium and frankly far surpasses any of the post-apocalyptic world-building you might see on film. No game has achieved what the developers have here. No game. It is also, frankly, very difficult to convey just how amazingly detailed this is unless you are talking to someone who has played it and you can say Holy shit! The Aquarium? The Farm? The stadium? The Museum! . It’s also, perhaps, the strongest reason to replay the game. There is plenty to appreciate here, and even if you were meticulous enough to appreciate it all on the first playthrough, then there’s a good chance you’ll still want to see it again (in the same way you might a movie which blew your mind).
But, to the crux of it, the story.
This game is not about hope, and it is about love, but in a much different form.
This is about anger , grief, vengeance , compulsion , and ultimately, it’s about letting go.
The story clearly doesn’t work very well for some people and there’s a couple of clear reasons for that. There isn’t really the same equivalent of the moment from the ending of the first one in this game. Instead, the emotions are teased out to the player across two characters – Abby and Ellie – who each have roughly the equivalent playtime. Roughly, but not exactly. Maybe 4/7ths of the game is Ellie and the rest is Abby. The story begins with Joel’s death at the hands of Abby, who has been hunting him because she is the daughter of the doctor Joel kills at the end of the first game to save Ellie, and then follows Ellie as she embarks on a journey of revenge across Seattle. What we get of Ellie here is pretty well realised, but she’s a much darker character than the Ellie many fell in love with in the first game. We do get to play that little more joyous Ellie in some flashbacks, which makes the player miss both her and Joel. Ultimately, how much grief you feel and understanding of Ellie’s compulsion is going to depend on the emotional connection you had with the characters in the first game. Maybe you feel too much grief for Joel and are angry that the game takes him off the board so quickly. Maybe you miss the old Ellie too much and don’t like the jaded, bitter, angry, borderline-psychotic older iteration. Maybe
The thing is, it really took me two playthroughs to appreciate the emotional logic here. That’s partly due to the subtlety the game employs with the many ways in which emotion is conveyed. Ellie’s actions are driven by compulsion and this is going to frustrate some players. There is one moment, near the end, at the Farm, where Ellie has been beaten by Abby and has retired to a life of happiness with her girlfriend Dina, and their child JJ, and you the player are forced to attend to those domestic blissful tasks. But, obviously, you feel like the game is incomplete and the story is not told. And then Ellie picks up and leaves again to chase her vengeance. She gets an impossible rare chance at a reprieve and throws it away. Many players are going to hate that she does this. Who would do that? But the flipside of the coin is it would be a deeply unsatisfying game if it ended there. Instead, in the final 3 hours, you begrudgingly follow Ellie as she abandons a happy life, an absolute gift in this post-apocalyptic world, to satisfy her revenge. It is a moment which some players will be frustrated by, and not in the same way as when you are forced to make Joel save Ellie in the first game, because Ellie’s actions are motivated by negative emotions and not positive ones.
There is a similar moment, sure to frustrate many players, in Abby’s story. I’ll come to that later, but to do that I need to talk about the general storytelling. The Director has said, while the first game has a traditional three act structure, this one is told in more of a novel format. That means there are points where it feels more natural to stop and reflect on what has transpired. The structure of the game, for the most part, takes place over two halves. The first is Ellie’s first three days in seattle which culminate in a confrontation with Abby. And the second is Abby’s corresponding days which then culminate in a confrontation, which she then wins, and leaves Ellie bloodied on the floor and telling her not to follow her (which then cuts to the farm sequence and Ellie clearly not following her advice which makes up the final 3 or so hours and the “End” of the game). Abby’s story doesn’t really have much to do with Ellie’s at all until that moment where they confront each other in the theatre. I’ve seen Abby’s story described as a “10 hour side quest” and I don’t really agree with that. Some of the best moments in the game are in Abby’s half – not just in gameplay but also in the little character moments between her and Lev. Ultimately, Abby takes on the mentor figure to Lev, similar to the role that Joel had in the first game. It’s a difficult path to walk because by the time you play as her, you hate her. You’ve been entrenched in this quest for vengeance to kill her, and then, all of a sudden, you are playing as her. Playing as her as she plays fetch with her pet dog and agonises over her ex boyfriend getting someone else pregnant. The game is going to fall apart for a lot of people here. If they don’t end up liking Abby, then the rest of the narrative falls a part, and clearly that is what has happened for some players. Laura Bailey, the actress who played Abby, has received death threats on twitter for “killing Joel” and that is the absolute peak of gamer entitlement isn’t it? Those people are clearly people that should be learning the lessons the game has to teach – which are empathy, forgiveness and moving on
Abby’s story does have a moment where you question her emotional logic, like Ellie’s, and I can see why some people consider it a plothole. At a point, she abandons the group that has become her family, the Wolves, to save a runaway child of her “enemy faction”, the Seraphites. I get some people are not clear on why she does this, but Abby’s story is coming from the end of where Ellie’s starts. She has got her vengeance and feels deeply guilty about it. She looks at her life and wonders what she has become. She sees that people hate her and wonders what the point of that hatred is, and so, in Lev and Yara she sees the possibility of redemption, and chooses to abandon, her “family”, the group that has perpetuated her hate and grief. It is the same journey of redemption and protection that Joel has in the first game with Ellie. It should be obvious to all that play the game that this is a terribly brutal world that forces you to do terribly brutal things to survive. We should be able to understand Abby the same way we understood Ellie, and Joel, and I think the writing really does achieve this. It did for me on the first playthrough, and that was only strengthened on the second playthrough, but I understand that it may not work for all .
Look, do I think there are things that could have been done differently? I do. I’m not sure if the ultimate tale of the two girls and their journey to understand themselves is told the best way by dividing it up into two corresponding blocks. I saw an interview with Neil Druckmann (director) and Halley Gross (the writer) about how they played around with the structure and had it intercutting at one point. I think that could have worked better, but I’ve also read criticism that players hate how the game sometimes takes away the tools you just learned to use and intercutting like that would maybe exacerbate that. It was also clearly informed by marketing. Abby’s experience in the game has clearly been left out of the marketing, and there are good reasons for that, but I do wonder if the game would have played better if we cut to Abby right after Ellie’s first day in seattle (which would have been hard to leave out of the marketing). I do think that the final three hours in Santa Barbra, which culminate in Abby and Ellies second fight on the beach, is superbly told, and resolved in the best way. There are lots of little red herrings that lead you wondering as to how the story will end. I definitely thought Ellie would kill Abby and the final scene would be Lev arriving at the farm to kill Ellie, the cycle of vengeance never resolved, but it did not end that way. The way it ends, I think, is very well done. It is not the same gut punch as the first one but it is very moving. There’s a strong sense of melancholy and reflection that you leave the game with. Was it all worth it? Maybe yes. Maybe no. It’s certainly a testament to the game that you do think like this – Like the best movies, you carry the story with you long after it’s gone. But I do wonder if the game could have been “cut” differently and wonder about the parts that Druckmann has mentioned that were left out. .
So, also, probably important to talk about the gameplay. There has been some criticism from some circles about how the game plays a bit samey in some parts and isn’t too deeply evolved from the first one. There are aspects of that I agree with but I generally found this pretty fun to play. Fun might seem a loaded term because the gameplay is clearly quite brutal, but I have to say I did enjoy getting through some encounters by the skin of my teeth very much. Some, I think, could have leaned into the “playground” aspect a bit more. On my second playthrough, on hard, I found that the enemy AI was so good that they came out of the “playground” to find me and I was forced to just shoot them. Also, the listening mode size is reduced which makes it less useful because almost always enemies will see you before they pop up on listening mode. This has the effect of making the stealth aspect less prolific then intended at some intervals. So I think this could have been fine tuned a bit. The game is very tense and great to play, and some of the best encounters are amazing, but there were a couple of aspects where I wished the AI had behaved a bit differently. Generally, I didn’t find myself wanting any more tools to use and found the game gave me everything I needed to make each encounter unique. But this is mostly done through the level design, and enemy placement, than through your weapons and crafting. So, I think the gameplay could be fine-tuned for sure, but I found it enjoyable and hugely compelling for the most part. There are certain bits that stand out for me mostly in Abby’s second day which is truly a tense few hours culminating in this resident evil-esque boss battle underneath a hospital and I would happily play the game again a third time.
There is a lot more I could say. The game truly is a masterpiece. It’s a monument to motion cap and level design, the music choices are great, and it’s fantastic to see characters outside the normal scope of gaming too. Like the first one, this really is a work of art that I think will be appreciated more in time. It does feel like it has a little bit in common with The Last Jedi in that it does a lot of work towards subverting and playing with your expectations and also because of the general conflicting audience reactions, so if you are the type of person that loved the first game and hated The Last Jedi, then there’s a chance you might not love this. But, ultimately, I think this is an amazing piece of design and should be celebrated. It is an unparalleled technical achievement with a story that will stay with you long after the credits roll.
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This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by
Dave.
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Nothing’s going to fall on my head is it?
