The Last of Us Part II Review
The Last of Us Part I is widely regarded as one of the best storytelling experiences in gaming. It’s a tight fifteen hour experience (short, for a modern AAA title) that focuses on the relationships between its character in a dark and seemingly hopeless post-apocalyptic future where a fungal born infection has turned most of the human population into murderous zombies. This review is going to spoil the first game so fair warning on that. I’ll save my spoilers for Part II to a postscript section for those that haven’t played yet. You have been warned.
Part II deals with the fallout of Joel’s decision to save Ellie in the finale and doom all humanity to never finding a cure for the cordyceps virus. This begins a vicious cycle of revenge that destroys almost everyone and everything involved. I’ll talk more specifically about this stuff in the postscript, but the game largely wrestled with themes of hatred, revenge, bigotry, and mental illness. If that sounds unpleasant it largely is and that is definitely the point. There are obvious references to Moby Dick throughout.
In terms of presentation, this is one of the best-looking games on current generation hardware full stop. The environments are incredibly detailed and the character animations both in and out of the cut scenes are some of the best I’ve seen in gaming, very little of the wonkiness so common in video games is here, the character’s control feels organic from picking things up and putting them in your backpack to pulling the mags out of fallen weapons instead of absorbing the entire gun like most games. The level of detail plays a big role in the violence as well, cutting a throat or shooting someone in the head is a visceral experience, blood pours out as you slice a throat with your switchblade or make a hole in someone’s head with your pistol. The expressions on characters faces during some of these executions add a level of humanity to the NPC’s that is fairly unheard of in video games. You’ll probably grow to loathe the killing, and again, this is clearly intentional. It is not meant to make you feel good, or powerful, or justified, this is not the game for that.
The presentation is nearly as excellent in the cut scenes, motion capture technology has come a long way and the level of expressiveness the actors are able to convey through their character models is astounding. Allow me to put my movie reviewer cap on for a second as that is clearly what these scenes are going for. The shot composition isn’t bad but it’s fairly uninspired, though there are some exceptions like the final shot. The performances as I already noted are excellent and luckily the focus of most of the scenes. The narrative itself is quite ambitious and I’d even go so far as to call it a brave sequel to such a beloved game as it was inevitably going to piss off a lot of people, even if they'd done it perfectly which they didn't. I did find the writing somewhat uneven; the game is about 25 hours long and still a lot of character choices feel forced as the game doesn’t set them up well. The structure feels intentionally long but somehow still rushed. But this part is hard to talk about without spoilers. Suffice it to say I appreciated what the team at Naughty Dog tried to do with the story and while I don’t think it was nearly as tightly written or effective as the first game I still think there’s a lot to appreciate about it and I came away from the game moved nonetheless.
Now, let us talk about the gameplay for a bit. This is notably one of the weaker aspects of the first game, it’s a third person action survival game with limited resources (namely ammo and health) to stay alive as the infected and hostile human factions all try to kill one another. This hasn’t drastically changed in the sequel, all the elements are still here, you still have laughably low ammunition caps for your weapons and gear, you still die quickly if caught out in the open and some enemies can even one hit kill you. The game revolves around two main actions, exploration (stocking up on your constantly depleting supplies) and combat (constantly trying to use as few of your supplies as necessary to survive an encounter). This usually involves being stealthy initially and whittling down the enemy numbers until you inevitably get spotted and face the remainder head on trying not to use too many of your precious bullets. I personally enjoy the exploration side of things heavily over the combat and found it rewarding as you occasionally find new weapons & upgrades alongside the constant replenishment of basic supplies. The best part of exploring though is engaging with these detailed environments that feel lived in and finding notes that add to your sense of the world around you. Not all of these notes are well written however. Some aren’t very subtle about the exposition they’re delivering and a lot of them can break immersion by being a little unsubtle in their delivery. Some of these are more believable than others, as there are a lot of them. The exploration is woven into the core of the game alongside the combat so you get a fair amount of both but the linearity of the later areas really tamps down how good exploring could have been, as it's definitely not the focus despite being incredibly similar to Uncharted 4 where it most certainly is.
The first major area you get to explore is quite large and fully explorable and that felt so much better than the later section where exploring really amounts to dipping into the one or two open buildings along the corridor you have to walk through. I do think this is an intentional move by Naughty Dog, the deeper you get into the game the less choice you have and the more you are simply forced to press forward as the character’s self-destructive action keep them on a singular path forward ignoring all other options available to them. The combat side of things is ok. The stealth mechanics are decently challenging due to the sheer density of enemies most of the time as it’s hard to isolate people enough to take down more than a few without getting spotted. There is an exploit for these sections (which are easily two thirds of all the combat encounters) simply running or stealing your way to the exit door you need to go through skips the entire section provided you have enough time to complete the door animation without getting hit. As the game wore on, the combat began to feel more tedious and I found myself opting to skip these sections more and more often. Part of this is that it’s just an unpleasant experience to kill in this game because of the visceral nature and because you'll probably start to find yourself at odds with the characters motivations even if you can sympathize with them. The game goes out of its way to force you into situations where you have to kill and I found myself increasingly choosing to avoid doing so whenever possible. I’m not a particularly squeamish person nor do I balk at even the most violent displays in film and video games, but the game did wear me down by framing the violence in such an unappealing way and forcing you to do it so often. This has little to do with how the controls feel mind you, I wasn't bored I was just tired or aiding the protagonist in their self destruction. While I didn’t have as visceral a negative reaction to it as so many others I saw on social media, I didn’t certainly didn't enjoy it either.
At the end of the day, I think Naughty Dog made the game that they wanted to make, it’s a violent, depressing, saga of humanities self-destructive tendencies and the cycles of violence that threaten to tear everything down when everyone gives in to their basest urges.
8/10
P.S.
Spoilers beyond this point. We’re gonna talk about the story now in detail.
This games story is simultaneously its crowning achievement and its biggest disappointment. As I said earlier, I think Naughty Dog largely accomplished what they set out to do with the story, but there are a few things that I thought held it back from being truly great.
For one, the character motivations are a mess. We see bits and pieces of the intervening four years that are meant to inform us about Ellie and Abby’s change in attitude, Ellie learning about Joel’s betrayal of the Firefly’s to save her and Abby going from hopeful teenager to vengeance obsessed furie after her father is murdered. Neither of these transformations are wholly unbelievable to me, but we get so little of these intervening periods that we’re asked to buy in earlier than a lot of people are going to be willing to, particularly those that have a strong attachment to the more hopeful and lighthearted Ellie from the first game.
This pattern of poorly set up character behavior continues throughout, from Ellie randomly deciding to abandon Jesse and leave Tommy to his fate, to Mel going off on Abby with virtually no prompting right after she’s helped save a girl’s life. These moments speak to a script that is trying to move too quickly and do too many things at once. I personally didn’t find the majority of the rest of the plot twists to be too objectionable, I think people objections to the majority of the plot points is likely going to be a result of their refusal to accept the character's as they are presented. If you don't accept this new Ellie, then nothing she does is going to make sense to you. I personally thought Ellie’s decision to abandon Dina and her son was inevitable as her PTSD was basically haunting her with Joel's dead tortured body for what looked like at least a few years, as was her inability to follow through and actually kill Abby due to that same trauma resurfacing and showing her how similar her own actions are to what happened to Joel and how murdering Abby will just compound that trauma.
I would’ve been completely crushed if she had gone through with it, to me Ellie would've been hopelessly lost in her own pain at that point, a more heartbreaking and painful loss than any of the myriad others throughout the series. This finale was quite an effective moment for me because despite some reservations I had accepted this new version of Ellie and found empathy for both her and Abby. I was practically begging her not to doom herself with another murder even as I pushed the inputs to get her there, Naughty Dog's choices here were very cruel.
I think there's more than enough narrative problems for someone not to be able to get there. But I'm glad I was able to, the experience would ring extremely hollow otherwise. I found the ending genuinely uplifting as well, taking us all the way back to the beginning with Ellie’s last moments with Joel and her resolve to find a way to forgive him despite the monstrously selfish decision he made. I felt like, that combined with the final imagery of the Firefly on the guitar neck (a symbol of hope throughout both games) a gift from Joel as he tried to mend their strained relationship did a great job of indicating she was finally moving on from Joel as well as potentially going to do the work Joel did and earn the forgiveness of Dina for abandoning her.
I think it’s interesting that people are complaining about the length of the game as my issues with it are that it’s script feels more rushed than anything, almost like they could made two games out of it, though I understand why they didn’t do that, the momentum of the story would be lost in between. Certainly the game isn’t for everyone, particularly those that get angry when stories don’t go the way they want them to go (looking at you Star Wars fans) or those that simply don’t have the stomach or the desire to put themselves through this much violence and loss which is perfectly understandable. But I found it to be a genuinely moving experience despite it’s flaws, Naughty Dog continues to push the envelope when it comes to strong narratives in video games. This game indicates a level of risk we rarely see in AAA titles and I applaud them for that even if I won't call it a masterpiece.