The Last Of Us Part II

Note: This was going to be longer and more in-depth, but unfortunately migraines

The Last Of Us Part II (it’s called “Part II” instead of “2” because this is a Serious game) arrived with a lot of baggage. The first game was a beloved classic that many people--myself included--were deeply skeptical about the idea of a direct sequel to. The game’s developer, Naughty Dog, had its abusive working environment laid bare earlier this year in a devastating expose by Kotaku, leading many to question not just whether the game is good but whether it’s worth the human toll of its development. And finally, some of the game’s cut-scenes leaked in April, and while some of the story conclusions people jumped to on the basis of that turned out to be incorrect, the content revealed in the leaks turned a lot of potential players off.

I think the final product would have been divisive either way, but maybe these circumstances contributed to the polarized response it’s received since release. Some people truly hate this game, while others are proclaiming it as a masterpiece. Personally, I’m floating somewhere between those two extremes. TLOU2 is astonishingly, masterfully good at most of the things it tries to do; I’m just not always sure if the things it tries to do were worth doing to begin with.

Spoiler warning: This game was released under a ridiculous veil of secrecy, wherein reviewers were forbidden under pain of being fed to clickers from talking about core elements of the story, like the inciting incident of the plot or the game’s basic structure. I’m going to “spoil” those things because it’s impossible to talk about the game meaningfully otherwise, so if you want to experience the story like the developers intended then don’t read any further. 

Part II picks up five years after the end of the first game. Ellie and Joel are living in a safe, prosperous settlement with Joel's brother Tommy, but their relationship has been strained to the breaking point due to Joel’s actions at the end of The Last Of Us. Luckily, Ellie has found something positive to make up for it in the form of Dina, whose friendship has recently turned romantic following a kiss at a town dance.

Given that starting premise, you could write the next step yourself: someone comes after Ellie and Joel due to Joel’s rampage from the first game, forcing them to leave the safety of Jackson in a bid to stay ahead of their pursuers. That’s sort of what happens, but not quite.

Joel’s past does come back to haunt him, but he doesn’t survive the encounter: a woman named Abby beats him to death in revenge for an initially-unknown grievance, her companions kick the shit out of Ellie and Tom, and then they go traipsing back to Seattle. But they don’t count on Tommy taking off after them in revenge, and Ellie and Dina quickly follow. Seattle turns out to be locked in a never-ending civil war between the militaristic Washington Liberation Front and the religious Seraphites, complicating a mission that already seems ill-advised to begin with. 

And that’s the half of the game’s plot that Naughty Dog want you to know about, even though it ignores one of the game’s strongest features: that you get to play both sides of the unfolding cycle of revenge between Ellie and Abby, switching between the two characters to get both of their perspectives on the story. Abby, a soldier with the WLF, deals with the aftermath of her revenge against Joel--which most of her friends weren’t as enthusiastic about and clearly aren’t entirely comfortable with--while going off on her own adventure involving two young Seraphites and a WLF attempt to end the war for Seattle once and for all.

Before I get into the criticisms that will comprise the bulk of this review, I want to start with the things I’m 100% positive on. Mostly this pertains to the gameplay, which takes everything good about the first game and iterates on it in interesting ways.

The first Last Of Us (The Not Last Of Us?) was arranged in a very linear, predictable fashion: you’d do a section where you have to deal with infected enemies either via stealth or combat or some combination of the two, then a section where you have to deal with human enemies, then infected again, then there’d be a walk-around-and-explore bit with no enemies where you could scavenge supplies and maybe upgrade your weapons at a workbench, and that basically repeated with some variation for the whole game.

TLOU2 is made of the same basic ingredients, but it shakes the formula up in interesting ways: combat against humans and infected blends into each other and the game is overall less rigidly divided into discrete enemy encounters and safe zones. You might find a workbench right in the middle of a heavily-patrolled area and have to choose whether to clear out all the enemies, try to use the bench stealthily without being spotted, or just skip past it rather than take the risks. You will also sometimes get attacked suddenly in areas that seem to be enemy-free, a trick the game pulls just often enough that I was constantly on edge about it but not enough that it became predictable.

The game is still completely linear overall, but in parts it embraces the “wide linear” approach that’s becoming a popular middle ground between open world games and traditional stage-based design, sometimes giving you multiple locations off the main path that you can explore or skip past as you desire. Early in the game there’s an even more open section comprising several city blocks and a collapsed highway that you can explore on horseback; this is the only such location in the game, and a common complaint is that people wish there were more parts like it. Personally, I actually felt this mini-open world killed the game’s pacing and was glad that it wasn’t used elsewhere. The game’s movement and controls were built around a tightly-designed linear experience and not an open world, and even with the horse it really shows.

One drastic change from the first game that I really appreciated is a shift towards horror. Despite being a zombie game at heart, The Last Of Us was only trying to be scary in one or two specific set pieces; by contrast, fairly large chunks of Part II were clearly designed with horror in mind. The infected are far more frightening in terms of their appearance, animations and vocalizations than they were before, and the game leans into this by frequently forcing the player to navigate alone through dark, creepy locations that wouldn’t look out of place in a Silent Hill game. Given that big-budget horror is still relatively scarce these days despite promising signs of a resurgence, I appreciated this a lot.

Apart from these changes, most of the gameplay is pretty much identical to the first game, but tightened and refined. Movement, animations and weapon handling just feel smoother and more tightly polished this time around, which makes a big difference if this franchise’s action/stealth blend appeals to you. It certainly appeals to me; I’m a big stealth fan, and I think The Last Of Us is up there with the very best stealth games. The way these games give you just as many options for direct combat as they do stealth and let you move in and out of stealth quickly and easily is really satisfying, and it encourages you to just roll with it and find exciting ways to get out of a sticky situation if you’re spotted rather than restarting the encounter.

And before we move off the positives, the game looks amazing. In particular, environments where you have a lot of dense foliage and strong lighting interacting might be the most impressive looking things I’ve ever seen in a game. Naughty Dog paired their usual technical expertise with strong art direction: Seattle fundamentally isn’t that different from the overgrown urban environments in the first game, but here the concept of nature reclaiming human construction is given a slightly more fantastical bent, such as a memorable early bit where you’re walking through what seems like dense old-growth forest and then you suddenly come upon a highway littered with rusted cars.

(I said this was the last unabashed positive, but given the recent revelations about the developers’ labour practices, I couldn’t help but look at the gigantic array of unique art assets in the game and wonder how much burnout and unpaid overtime went into all of that post-apocalyptic splendor).

So it looks great and it plays fun, but what about the story? That’s where things get a lot more complicated. I could sit here and heap praise on a lot of elements of TLOU2’s plot, but I’d have to follow every compliment with an equally strong condemnation. 

The most immediately noteworthy element of the game’s story is how much of it there is. Most play-throughs will be at least twice as long as the first game at between 25 to 30-something hours; that’s not very long compared to huge open world games or online service games that are meant to be played for thousands of hours, but it’s hefty by the standards of linear single-player action games.

But the story feels like it lasts about 90 hours. The sheer scope and breadth of the game’s plot, the ways that it takes different thematic ideas and spins them out into strands with enough content to fill an entire game on their own, is undeniably impressive. But it’s also a problem. This is the game equivalent of an 800 page fantasy novel. It’s seasons three through five of a TV series that should have ended after season two. It’s a three hour long superhero movie. It is wildly, flagrantly self-indulgent to a degree that video game developers rarely get the resources to achieve.

It feels as though Naughty Dog had five different ideas for a Last Of Us sequel, and instead of picking one they just decided to do all of them. The story is made of different components that often feel tenuously connected thematically, narratively, and tonally, to the point that it sometimes seems as though the characters are moving between parallel universes instead of inhabiting the same world and story. And none of it meshes particularly well with the first game, which goes some way to answering one of the core questions I had going into TLOU2: did this need to be a direct sequel?

Ultimately, I don’t think it did. Like many fans of the first game, I always felt that preserving the ambiguity of its cliff-hanger ending was more important than making a sequel just for the sake of having a sequel, and I still feel that way. What the developers decided to do with that ending wasn’t interesting enough to justify the effort, and the best parts of TLOU2’s plot have nothing to do with the first game at all and could have stood alone perfectly well.

Specifically, the long middle section following Abby as she questions her loyalty to the WLF and befriends two young Seraphites is by far the strongest part of the narrative, to the point that I kind of wish it had been the sole focus of the game. Yes, it’s a bit of a retread of the first game’s story, but it’s also the only part of this game that recaptures the original’s warmth or humanity.

It’s not perfect, mind you. The Seraphites are the only faction in the game who aren’t extensively humanized by the story, and a lot of their dialogue is very video gamey “generic sinister cult” stuff that feels noticeably inferior to everything else in the franchise. I suspect that the Seraphites’ motivation for antagonizing one of the main characters might have caused Naughty Dog to shy away from wanting to portray them more sympathetically (although the game does seem like it’s turning into Dances With Seraphites until it abruptly veers away from that direction), but if that plot element was causing such a headache then maybe it shouldn’t have been included in the first place. 

And speaking of humanizing awful people, that brings us to the game’s themes.

Much of the critical reaction to TLUO2 has focused on this issue, and on one hand I think it’s genuinely reductive to say that the game’s primary point is something like “revenge is bad”. The game does focus on a lot of other ideas like sectarianism and the ways that secrets can undermine relationships. But on the other hand, I can’t blame people for summing up the game as “revenge is bad” because for 90% of its playtime the game is, on the level of narrative mechanics, doing “revenge is bad”. Those other themes fall by the wayside until by the game’s final act all we’re left with is a revenge quest that’s increasingly hard to connect with on an emotional or logical level.

Last Of Us heads like to debate the morality of Joel’s actions at the end of the game, and most people will conclude that what he did was morally wrong, but that they would have done the same thing in his situation. I can’t imagine anyone saying that about most of the things the protagonists do in TLOU2, and that’s not just because a lot of them are violent or reprehensible. It’s because the game is at critical moments too busy being clever to let the player connect properly with its characters.

For most of the game, I felt that there was something missing from Ellie’s all-consuming quest for revenge, something I just getting in terms of why she kept going with it even when it was obviously a bad idea. It turns out that wasn’t because I’m bad at analysing fiction; it’s because the game is deliberately hiding information. Ellie’s actual core motivation is only revealed to the player at--literally--the very end of the game, in a flashback to events that the player isn’t initially shown.

This is clearly trying to repeat the end of the first game, wherein Ellie reveals the circumstances of how she got bitten and the fact that her friend (and first girlfriend, although that wasn’t apparent until the Left Behind DLC) Riley was also bitten and died shortly afterwards. This cleverly reframed the events of the entire game around the theme of survivor’s guilt, making the player reevaluate everything that’s happened up to this point. And while this could be said to come out of nowhere--outside of a prequel comic, Riley’s existence was only briefly hinted at in the game itself--a key aspect of the scene is that this information is being revealed to Joel, the protagonist and point of view character, at the same time as the player.

That isn’t the case in Part II’s ending. The flashback happens when it does purely for the sake of narrative impact and contains information that Ellie has known all along and had no reason not to reveal to Dina at some point in their quest. And what does the game get out of ham-stringing its central character’s motivation? The mind-blowing twist that this game that you--the fool--thought was about revenge, is really...about forgiveness! Do you see how deep this is?

I’m being flippant, but only to an extent. The game’s ending didn't exactly disappoint me, but it left me feeling completely indifferent. “Oh,” I said, “that’s what this was about.” Then I turned my PS4 off and started thinking about what I was going to have for dinner. 

But there are thematic issues with TLOU2 long before the end. The game seems to want the player to recoil from its extremely realistic and gory violence. The fact that all of the enemies have names and their comrades will be like “Wilberforth, noooo!” if you kill them is just as gimmicky and asinine as it sounds, but the game does actually humanize its NPCs quite effectively simply by making the enemies look and sound like normal people instead of scowling post-apocalyptic raiders.

Coupled with the fact that it’s often viable to just sneak past enemies instead of killing them, this did actually make me reluctant to murder people...for like an hour. Then I realized that a) it’s much easier to scour environments for upgrade materials if all the guards are dead and b) killing people in this game is fun as hell. 

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” I chuckled to myself, planting a trip-mine along my scent path so the cute German Shepherd following me would be blown into chunks of dripping crimson flesh. “Only the dead have seen the end of war,” I chortled, aiming an arrow at its distraught owner’s throat as she surveyed the bloody aftermath. “Hey look, a skill-tree manual.”

(I’m beginning to think that video games--or at least mainstream games intended primarily as entertainment--just aren’t suited to criticising violence, simply because the violence still has to be fun for the player to carry out.)

I don’t want to make it sound like I disliked the story, because overall I didn’t. It’s compelling and propulsive in the way that the best thrillers are and the narrative tricks it employs in immersing the player into both sides of a conflict are at times impressive. But taken as a whole, it ends up being this shaggy dog story that could have easily been half the length and doesn’t really feel like it needed to be told in the first place.

I think the most damning and most succinct thing I can say about The Last Of Us Pat II’s plot is that it’s missing that subjective quality that the first game had that made it feel like such a revelation. Where The Last Of Us stood head and shoulders above most big-budget games, the sequel is just another convoluted video game storyline, indistinguishable from the many, many tales of revenge and violence that have come before.