Topic: The Last Of Us Part II - OT (No Spoilers)

@Voltan Ha really? I wonder if these same people have ever watched Memento.

😉

@colonelkilgore It sounds like it impressed you as much it did me. I think it almost elevates gaming narrative to a different level, the equal of most premium TV shows on Netflix or BBC or HBO. It's probably too bleak for some people and other choices were too much for them but I loved it

It does what a great sequel should do,bit expands upon the world and lore and story of the first and takes established characters in new directions, as well as introducing new ones.

I think it's a masterpiece.

Yep, a stone-cold masterpiece! Although totally different subject-matter and themes etc. it just reminds me of how The Godfather part 2 improved and expanded on (imho anyway) The Godfather. It was a much darker movie… and one that played a lot with out-of-chronology story-telling for extended periods of time. It also annoyed some of the fan base (although fan bases were a very different ‘thing’ back then) to see Michael (the original’s protagonist and beating heart) descend into absolute darkness.

@colonelkilgore I felt the same. It was a perfect story for the bleak world they’ve created. Even though I went in without any expectations I still found the end result unexpected. It was a brutal story from start to finish and I’ll admit that it moved me way more than I thought it would. I found my mind wondering back to the place where the game ends and thinking through how it led to that point. The decisions the characters make are decisions that we all might make given that set of circumstances and that for me makes it more poignant as it almost seems unavoidable.

For such a brutal story it is also beautiful in how it’s told, how it does what it does to invoke these emotions in you. How it makes you actually feel anger, sadness, loss, hope even is a tribute to how well the characters and world have been built. The only downside to the game is that you only get that first play through once.

@velio84 I honestly hope I never have to find out

@Voltan If you ended up in that world I can imagine Take On Me might have a bit more edge to it 😂

@render regarding the end… I’m so glad that Ellie didn’t actually kill Abby… I know to some it may seem like such a waste after she left her home and happy-family-unit but I think it took that last journey and what eventually happened for her to psychologically ‘put-the-ordeal-to-bed’. And as with many works of great narrative and character-development, it mirrored the fact that Abby had indeed let her go on two separate occasions.

@velio84 yeah I actually really liked Abby… and totally empathised with her motivations. And that is coming from someone who has a proper man-crush on Joel!

@colonelkilgore Yeah I agree with ya, defo one of the best stories I've experienced in a video game. Sure there have been good ones like in BioShock, Mass Effect, the first Wolfenstein game last gen, but tlou2 is on a whole other level.

Some of the story decisions ND made were risky as they knew it would upset a part of the fan base. But i thought the game was all the better because of it. They could have played it safe but I'm just as many people would have moaned about that too.

@JohnnyShoulder hear, hear 🍻

@colonelkilgore Glad to hear you enjoyed it! Like most things gaming related, the ones who didn’t have similar feelings as you tend to be in the very vocal minority.

There are just so many decisions Naughty Dog went with regards to the story that you just don’t expect a games developer to do and no one comes out as a winner in the end.

The second run for collectibles is pretty easy especially for Ellie if you use the infinite ammo modifier now you have the silenced automatic rifle!

I’m just glad that in the second half of the game I didn’t need to fight the Rat King again!

@Thrillho ahh that’s cool, I didn’t use any of the modifiers… I did have a quick squint prior to my ng+ run (as I think you mentioned something about them previously) but I couldn’t find them… and I just wanted to plough on etc.

I actually didn’t mind that fight tbh… just went all-out flamethrower and Molotov on him and he fell ‘relatively’ quickly. Good thing I didn’t have to fight him on the second go though as I used all my flamethrower ammo in Abby’s opening section though.

@colonelkilgore before I post my reply, would you mind reminding me how to do spoiler tags? I can’t for the life of me remember even though I’ve been taught before 🤦

@Jimmer-jammer yeah no problem just start the spoiler with then insert your spoilerific take… before ending with. You’ll have to press quote on my post to see the actual commands though 😉

@Jimmer-jammer Quote me to find out how to do spoiler tags. jimmer jammer in his jim jams

@colonelkilgore @JohnnyShoulder Thank you kindly!!

Glad to hear the game had such an impact on you! A lot of the controversy around it doesn’t make much sense to me, however the game is not completely free from criticism for my part. There are several key plot beats that, in the moment, didn’t work for me at all. I wrote extensively about this in a thread I started a while back (before I understood what threads are, how they work or the general function of the forums all together), but I strongly feel that the games narrative does suffer somewhat from its structure.

This isn’t about pacing or what have you. What I’m trying to get at is that certain emotional moments were wasted on me because of a lack of understanding up to that point. For example, what happens when Ellie runs into Mel and Owen actually made me burst out laughing at the time as it came across to me as cheesy and just didn’t ring true.

We know almost nothing about Mel up to that point. In Owen’s dying breath, he tells Ellie that she’s pregnant. This is a revelation to Ellie. All of the killing up to that point hits her like a ton of bricks as she pulls the jacket away to confirm that she’s pregnant, like none of the other 200 people she brutally murdered up to that point could have been. It establishes a weird common ground amongst strangers, where killing is one thing but God forbid they might be pregnant! When I take the story as a whole, it works, but the moment itself was wasted, and it’s a big moment. I think it would have worked better for me had Ellie organically discovered the pregnancy, not be informed by Owen in the way that she was.

I also feel that Lev’s entire arc is criminally underdeveloped. There’s no nuance to his story at all. When you lay out the arc on paper, it’s: boy goes against the rules of his religious cult, boy leaves cult but longs for resolution. How is this conundrum solved in the world of The Last of Us? Be liberalized by your true saviour, a “woman of the world”, return home and kill your mom. This story deserves so much more than that, especially with the modern, real world socio-political climate this so obviously wants to bring light to.

I’m in the camp of wishing the ending played out differently as well. I firmly believe Ellie should have killed Abby (don’t hate me). Not because I hate Abby (I think Abby is a fantastic character) but because I think it would have been a more effective resolution for the audience, and a more believable resolution for Ellie. I appreciate where they took it, but for Ellie to finally go through with killing Abby, in front of a horrified and distraught Lev, would have been the true, undeniable revelation for Ellie as she would see herself in Lev. She would have put Lev through exactly what Joel put Abby through, and what Abby put Ellie through. Then it would hit her. It’s admittedly more devastating than what we got, but it’s more believable.

Anyways, I don’t mean to sound like I’m tearing the game down, I absolutely love it. It’s a masterpiece, though a somewhat flawed masterpiece for me. I could write a much longer reply on all of the things the game does brilliantly, but I think it’s unfair to point out any criticism of it as unfair. There is a lot of that out there - read: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2020/11/15/the-last-of-... - but I do feel that this game crumbles slightly under its own ambition. Glad you enjoyed it, man.

Edit: just a word of warning if you read that review. It’s a painful read!

@Jimmer-jammer
Not sure if you missed the fact that Lev is a transgender person or you just think it doesn’t affect his story.

@Voltan no that wasn’t lost on me. I frankly don’t have a deep understanding or much experience with this topic or transgender people so I’m not going to pretend that I can speak about this in any meaningful way but I guess for me, if someone identifies as the opposite gender, it just begins and ends right there. I accept that and think singling them out as anything else or something in between seems counter productive. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong but that’s how I feel. Really, that’s exactly how Abby approaches Lev…So I guess it’s more the latter for me. It’d be nice to read some impressions of how this was handled from folks who identify with Lev. A piece that goes beyond the surface appreciation of representation and digs into the meat of the story.

@Jimmer-jammer Ok, so thing is - he was not a boy who rebelled against the ways of his people.
He was actually very much into the ways of his people and he wanted to have a role in their society that was in line with his identity but they wouldn’t let him. Instead he would be executed for being the way he was. His sister was the only one supporting him, which is why they ran away together.
There’s a scene where Abby and Lev are noticed while trying to sneak through Seraphite territory and the Seraphites refer to him as Lily. Yara says they’re hunting Lev because he shaved his head but the reason he shaved his head was because that’s what the men in their society do and girls are not allowed to.
I’m not saying the story couldn’t be more fleshed out but it’s very different to what you described IMO

@Jimmer-jammer I can definitely understand your take on all three of the points you raised… and for you, from the balanced and informed way you have explained your read I would never say your wrong. As when you’re (we’re) digging around in such deep and dark emotions, any particular person’s interpretation is always going to be at least somewhat subjective… I know my take is.

I’ll briefly touch on each of the points you raised just to explain my take but I won’t go in too deep as I don’t want it to come over like I’m trying to convince you that I am right and you’re wrong, just that my personality and my past has informed this particular take. So ultimately… and this could well seem flat-out insane to many… but I actually think Joel, Ellie and Abby are all ‘good’ people. Obviously, they have all done some terrible things… but I honestly think we are all capable of committing terrible acts if our personal perception adjudicates them as ‘just’ in the greater scheme of things. I’m not saying any of their actions are actually ‘just’… only that when seeing the events through their eyes, taking into account the events that have sculpted their personalities, they seemed ‘just’ in the heat of the prolonged-moment. Don’t get me wrong for one second though, underneath the veil of the various emotion-fuelled perceptions these are terrible acts.

This brings me to Ellie running into Owen and Mel… and how that panned-out. I genuinely read it as these psychological ‘veils-of-perception-we-wear’ when allowing our baser-instincts to dictate our actions are (at least in the case of ‘good’ people) quite fragile. And Owen disclosing the fact that Mel was pregnant (which obviously Ellie instantly connected to Dina) caused this fragile-veil of her perception to momentarily slip. In doing so, the past three days of allowing her id to run rampant crashes down around her.

I do agree with you on Lev’s story somewhat though. first off, I’m glad Naughty Dog ‘went there’… and it certainly wasn’t handled horribly but yes, I do think it was underdeveloped. It’s a tough one as I honestly don’t think the game should be any longer… and I think that only more time and context would provide more solidity to how his events played out. I get the impression that Druckman et al placed a far greater importance on what they ultimately feel about religious-fundamentalism than what they feel about trans-gender metamorphosis. Still, even though I do agree with you here, I’m still really glad they included it… and I genuinely loved Lev, he had some beautiful takes on ‘the old world’.

As to the ending, so as I mentioned in a previous post I was so glad Ellie ‘saw sense’ and didn’t actually kill Abby. This is definitely rooted in my personal take that Ellie (as well as Joel and Abby) is fundamentally a ‘good’ person. I was actually talking to my screen as the final events played out, pleading with Ellie (even though it was I controlling her) not to do it! As I pointed out in my previous post, Abby had actually let Ellie go on two occasions during the game (the first time through coaxing from her friends in fairness), so Ellie now ‘repaying-the-favour’ just lends balance to the overall narrative. I get that to some, it must seem a total waste of everyone’s time for her to leave the farm and then not actually carry through with her objective but… for me her journey wasn’t a wasted one. I feel that it took that second journey-into-the-heart-of-darkness for her to finally relinquish the ‘weight’ she has carried since Joel was killed. She was struggling with the memories and the guilt etc. prior to her second odyssey (see the nightmare in the barn) but I see it that she will no longer struggle with that (she may well struggle with other things in future but not that) as she had allowed herself to forgive through empathy. It’s why the scene flashes back to her last interaction with Joel, where she finally allowed herself to start forgiving him too… though she was never able to see that ‘journey’ through as Abby killed Joel the next day.

Just my two-cents but they worked for me… well the first and last anyway. I’m inclined to see it like you on Lev’s story.

@Jimmer-jammer so having just read your reply to @Voltan, I think maybe your getting caught up on how the Seraphites react to Lev’s situation. As you have identified, Abby reacts (or doesn’t react at all) how any ‘modern’ and or ‘decent’ person would react. In a narrative, it’s more than fine… even informative to show negative sides of society. It doesn’t mean the overall product ‘agrees’ with the horrible take some of its characters have. If anything, it serves to underline and highlight just what a bad take it is.

@Voltan hmm…I’d say you’ve laid out the nuances of the arc much better than I gave credit for. I’m gonna chew on that for a bit. I suppose the real underlying theme of what the game is touching on, in more than just Lev’s story, is the effects of trauma on a person and the people around them.