A lot of characters die. Not a single character is fridged, because it’s not possible to fridge a well-constructed, three-dimensional character with their own agency in the story.
I really can’t get over how shallow the “violence=bad” reviews seem after I finished. They definitely don’t want you to feel good about what you’re doing, and the violence is part of it. But it isn’t both-sides-ism in the Bioshock Infinite sense. And I think the level of violence has been exaggerated, too. In Tim’s TLoU review posted above, he calculates that it’s about 1/3 violence and 2/3 conversation/exploration (about the same ratio as FF7R). I imagine this is around the same, if not even more heavily weighted to the walk-and-talk. Overall, I’d say it’s on the same violence level as the Tomb Raider reboot series (which, admittedly, is pretty damn violent). Yeah, the enemies have names. All those people you kill in other games don’t?
If I could summarize the game’s thesis statement in one extremely reductive sentence, it would be: “Hey, maybe think twice before dragging other people into your personal bullshit.” There are healthy ways to ask friends for support and unhealthy ways. The characters here do not choose the healthy way very often.
Can I just talk about how maybe problematic the Scars are as enemies? There’s something “tribal” about them, and I find it very uncomfortable how that makes them so easy to dehumanize. They hang up sticks, they ritualistically scar themselves, they mutter some mumbo jumbo religion.
Not to mention how much this game turns Seattle into SE Asia already. Rob compared this game to Vietnam in the podcast. The Scars’ tactics remind me of stories of night jungle warfare against the Japanese or Viet Cong. Those were wars with notoriously grisly atrocities on both sides, where US soldiers dehumanized the enemy to a horrifying extent.
Then you have this game which is like theoretically about cycles of revenge and how violence is bad. Except violence against this one psycho cult of “primitives” is perfectly okay.
Completed TLOU Part 2 yesterday. I’ve tried to remain free of all the discourse once the story got leaked. On the whole, I really enjoyed it (apart from all the dog killing) and the story did keep me engrossed right up to the end, even though it did feel a little too predictable in places.
As soon as the story sets in and declares itself a revenge tale, you pretty much feel the developer shouting out to you that revenge is going to be treated as bad in this game. Not like in your Call of Duty games! You will be left a hollow person by the end of it. And sure enough… I think after about two hours through the game, I was like, okay Naughty Dog, I get it. But it just kind of persists hitting you over the head with it whilst going to great lengths to show how Ellie wants to kill Abby. By the final confrontation, I liked Abby more than Ellie and I was kind of standing there thinking I could just not fight Abby, but if you do nothing she obviously kills you and you go back to checkpoint until Ellie lets her off in cinematic fashion.
Wasn’t expecting to play as Abby, at one point I thought the game was going to switch characters again and show what life is like on the other other side. Last of us 3 will probably be a free for all, in which your character gets killed by your next playable character, you learn everything about them until they get iced. In the end, I think I preferred Abby to Ellie. And her magnificent arms. Though her arc was a little too ‘I’m the saviour now’. though I was genuinely sad for her when Owen gets killed. (though I was more sad about Alice).
I had been trying to play the game as stealthy as I could, mainly because I didn’t want to kill any dogs. But then, I actually started getting good at the game and I started to feel like the Terminator which kind of jarred with the violence being bad (but by all means fill your boots) message the game is going for. That said, though the game definitely is violent, I think it’s more tastefully done than other video games, and I think there is more emphasis on the feeling rather than being gratuitous.
Highlight was definitely the dinosaur museum, and Joel showing all his knowledge of dinosaurs as coming from Jurassic Park. But also fuck Joel for dissing The Lost World. As well as I guess ruining humanity’s one chance to find a cure for the fungus zombies.
The game is long, and I think like the first game it should have been played episodically. I started to notice it getting formulaic, when characters walk out to a vista see something in the difference and you realise there will be about three combat encounters, two nice walking tours in which characters bond and maybe a set piece. Each one of those was like an episode. Also are Naughty Dog just contractually obliged to just have one specific area in which you free roam about?
I really liked the location of Seattle, the game looks incredible and it makes me want to go to unapocalyptic Seattle, where it is cold and rainy. I used the photo mode a lot in this game.
Fuck Shamblers. No easy means of disposing of them. You always have to go loud. Though to be honest, getting good at the combat of the game does mean that you sort of have to come out of your sneaky approach.
Jeffrey Wright was in the game. And I definitely heard Nolan North as a Scar.
Was expecting Ellie to go off with Abby and give herself over to the Fireflies and do the good thing, but I guess they’ve got a Last of Us 3 for the end of the PS5 cycle. When it really will be the last of us. Unless it won’t be.
Perhaps I’ll dip my toe into the discourse now. I’ll certainly watch that Tim Rogers video on the first game.
What else have we got?
Oh look, apparently some people had a problem with Abby, and there’s a ‘fan’ petition for the game to be remade…
I’m sure Naughty Dog pulled from a lot of references, but between their in-game name (Seraphites), monk-like robes and what we eventually learn about their “morality,” for lack of a better word, I definitely think they’re supposed to evoke a Christian fundamentalist cult.
(Also, don’t know if you’re playing or how far you’ve gotten, but your last line is not as cut-and-dried by the end.)
Major late-game spoiler
Towards the end, you are thrust into a battle between the Seraphites and the WLF. The only time I actually felt good about killing people in the entire game was murdering those bloodthirsty fucking Wolves. As much as possible, which wasn’t very much, I would kill the Wolves and sneak past the Scars.
Weird twist of fortune, won a code in a company raffle, so I’ve played it a bit over the past couple days.
For people who have finished it: the ending of the first game and first act of this one imply a strained/awkward relationship between Ellie and Joel after the events of the finale, is there ever a moment where the story reckons with this and has Ellie question why she’s going on a vengeance quest for someone she’s not sure how to feel about? If not, that would be pretty disappointing, like the writer was too enamored with Joel as a character and assumed all the other characters would be too.
It does come up right before Joel die for MAXIMUM AWARD BAIT SAD POINTS. She finds out what he did and has very mixed feelings but has made a close relationship with him over the offscreen years. Basically, pissed but wants to find a way past this thing nobody can really change anymore to keep living and then the revenge start and the director wags his finger at you whenever you have to do a quick time murder to continue the game.
I…don’t think that happens in the game. I was surprised because the implication had been that it was a mid-to-late game surprise, whereas it’s actually the inciting event of the first act. Nothing really changes about those two characters relationships before that event, so unless Joel comes back from the dead later on, I’m not sure how it would play out that way.
e: I’m guessing we eventually find out the events of The Night Before and that’s when it happens? The game starts right after that.
The Night Before must eventually happen in a flashback sequence because I remember everyone (rightfully) getting pissed about Ellie being called a slur and yet it’s only referred to in the game’s opening.
I’m going off a spoilery review I listened to where they couldn’t use footage of later game events due to Sony and Naughty Dog making takedowns of spoilers in general so take my understanding of plot details with a grain of salt (said review was unscripted, a getting off his thoughts after a fresh finish of the game thing). Here’s that video if anyone’s interested (he does show footage of the scene where you have to press the murder button)
I know you’re basing this on things other people have said, but it is just not true. There is absolutely nothing “meta” about The Last of Us.
It wants you feel bad while playing it, it isn’t trying to shame you for playing it any more than, like, The Godfather is trying to shame you for watching it.
Wanting me to feel bad for playing the game is very different to making me feel bad for playing it. Killing people is so easy and intuitive in TLoU2, even on hard. If Neil wants me to feel bad, he shouldn’t have made throwing a bottle in someone’s face and then taking their jaw off with a lead pipe so simple and effective.
I can’t be shamed Neil, I like the fake game murder. The more you make NPCs scream “CHAD” when I kill one of them, the funnier it gets.
Ah okay, it probably goes like this: when it switches over to Abby halfway through, you eventually get to see the night before flashback where Joel comes clean, then you play out the execution scene as Abby.
I didn’t say that. I’m saying when a game makes you complete a button input to continue the game, that paints a scene in a completely different context than if you just showed it as a cutscene, which forces the player to be involved. For a game like TLoU2, there’s only one reason for that - to make the player feel worse by creating a more personal connection to the act. Same as the dog stuff the game pulls.
You don’t have to have meta commentary to pull these basic tricks, it’s interactive narrative design 101.
If the developers make me press a button to do a mandatory thing in the game and then berate me for being an awful person afterwards I mostly feel annoyed at them, not sad at the bad thing I did. Because I didn’t do the bad thing, i’m playing a video game and it was part of a mandatory story sequence that I needed to do in order to see the rest of the content.
Exactly. It can only really work in a meta context or with an additional layer to it.
I specifically love how MadWorld ends with a QTE. It’s all about the dehumanizing nature of violence and it becomes clear by the end that stopping the bad guy at this point, when an entire city is dead and the people who run the world are already angry with them and probably planning their own retaliation for using the Deathwatch games for profit. And yet, the only way to finish the game is complete a QTE that makes Jack chainsaw the instigator in half. The guy deserves it so badly, being a spoiled brat who caused a mass genocide solely for the fun of it, but doing so also damns Jack back into the violent world of Deathwatch he escaped from before agreeing to take down this game’s organizers. Having broken his radio and connection with his government contact, the ending is basically trying to genuinely unnerve you on a second level beyond just making you feel bad and instead forcing you to consider the nihilistic, defeated mindset Jack seems to be in and try to untangle that.
I’ve always liked how Manhunt tried to gameify extreme violence. If you want to get a five star rating from Starkweather, you gotta be fast and brutal, but there’s nothing stopping the player from just brawling it out. There’s no incentive to be monstrous unless you want meaningless bonus points.
Manhunt is so zany with its seedy, outlandish splatter-gore aesthetic and tone that I always find it funny when it’s brought up in conversations about violence in games. That shit is wacky and Brian Cox just chews up his lines with a kind of depraved glee as Starkweather. It’s so deliberately shlocky, so consciously referential to exploitation cinema that I’m amazed some people still take it seriously as a “violent videogame that comments on but also glorifies extremely cruelty, Discuss” type game.
I haven’t visited the Waypoint forums in quite a long time, but in my vociferous need to take in all kinds of conversation about this game in the week since I finished it I’m a little disappointed that you guys managed to hit nearly 200 comments on the review of this game and yet nearly all of it is speculative based on leaks that have been proven to be untrue and second-hand information rather than first-hand accounts (other than Rob and Maddy’s reviews, which are well written and well meaning but are weary for this thing in a way I’m just not and I think they get a little lost in that weariness without recognizing how novel it is for a video game to express a weariness for itself).
I respect anyone who wouldn’t want to play this game because of the things it depicts, but I have to say it felt entirely mindful and respectful of the topics it was addressing at every turn. This game has a lot of issues with pacing and structure that I think are fucking impossible to find the absolute right answer to, and if you’re already decided that something about the Naughty Dog expression is not your jam this wouldn’t be the game to change that.
But if you liked Metal Gear Solid V, this was a pretty fun, less video game-y interpretation of those systems, and if you liked The Last of Us, all that stuff that people liked from that game is done again here, just as expertly and attentively. It does end on a bit more of an “this was all a bit of a waste of time” bummer than the first game and that’s saying something, but I think the fact that you’re the primary director in that scenario rather than just passively absorbing it through a TV show or movie really effectively tweaks the feeling of this story in a novel way.
Naughty Dog games can always and probably always will be capable of being dismissed as derivative, but I find their character work intoxicating and with this series in particular they have twice now put you in the role of a guardian angel for a lovable monster, emphasized the fidelity of their violence…and then asks you to spend most of their games talking about ice cream, Jurassic Park, the hopeful ambition of space programs and hoping for an unexpired vial of pills in a nameless employee’s office desk drawer rather than commit that violence.
I was happy to see Tim Rogers’ review of the first game mentioned early in here, because he happens to line up with a lot of how I’ve received this series, the second game actually in particular. The Last of Us is remarkably interested in being the thing it doesn’t have a reputation for being almost more frequently than it pursues its stereotypical description, and it has an ethos of “game as cutscene” to such a degree that it’s one of the few games where I say “I can’t believe Ellie did that” rather than “I can’t believe I made / they made me make Leon do that.”
I will readily admit that I haven’t played TLOU2 and don’t plan to for a while, and I think your general commentary on it sounds fair. Having played the first game about a year ago, I was surprised by how little it resembled the thing I had heard people discuss at length for half a decade. I’m sure this game does similar things.
But if you’re going to make this statement, you need to qualify it by saying AAA game, or blockbuster game, or something like that, because otherwise it feels like tunnel vision. There are absolutely games not made by Sony’s first-party studios that express a weariness for their stories. Silent Hill 2 is old enough to vote at this point. Detention and Devotion are more recent versions of that formula. I will still argue that Spec Ops was that for military shooters, even if it was going for something more meta as we talked about at length further up. And I mean, I’d argue that that’s Bloodborne’s ultimate goal too, and that’s about as close to Sony first-party as you can get without a Sony-owned studio.
Who knows, maybe I will play this game next year or the year after and find that it’s incredibly unique and novel (from a non-technical standpoint — I’ve seen the rope physics and it’s clearly an incredible technical achievement), but nothing has really convinced me of that thus far. At least not enough for me to shell out 60 bucks for it.
