All things symbolic, I've landed on the day of the launch of the new TV show for the final write-up in my series. But first, here are the other entries:
10. Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams
9. Perfect Tides
8. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
7. Chop Suey
6. Knights and Bikes
5. Super Metroid
4. Gone Home
3. Butterfly Soup
2. The Last of Us Part I
1. THE LAST OF US PART II
Time to BeReal.
Should video games give us what we want...or what we need? Does a game need to be generally enjoyable to impact you more than anything else ever has before? Most of The Last of Us Part II is a miserable slog, on purpose. It's not miserable because the developers didn't care what they were making, it's miserable for a reason: because it's an honest game about hate, and hate, and its consequences, are not fun.
I highlight this because both gamers themselves and also those who argue that video games should not be considered a valid art form on par with other mediums in merit alike frequently cite the idea that the defining purpose of a game is to be fun, and therefore any game that isn't has failed. It's worthless. In contrast to meritorious artistic mediums whose entries might be valued for evoking any number of different sentiments and ideas, with games only joy defines success. Right? Why would anyone play a game that isn't fun? What other value could possibly be derived from it?
Perhaps this sentiment underlies why The Last of Us Part II has proven to be, by many metrics, the most controversial video game of all time. (Consider, for example, the more than 160,000 user reviews of this specific game posted on Metacritic, and the polar division of those responses. No other video game in existence has even come close to generating that much response on the platform.) Or perhaps it's largely down to pettier, uglier motivations people rarely like admitting, like bias against certain kinds of people who take the central roles of this particular title (e.g. this being the only AAA video game ever to primarily center on a lesbian character). Whatever the case there may be, one thing is for sure: this game has definitely made an impact.
Before I get to that, I guess first I should touch on Part II's structure. I don't really want to spend a lot of time discussing the design of this game because it's generally similar to that of the original and I discussed that at length in my entry on that game (see the link above), but I do want to take a moment to point out that Part II was originally going to be an open world game mostly taking place in Jackson, but ultimately had to be streamlined to establish the best possible pacing of events. That's the exact opposite of the decision-making process we typically see in this medium today. So many open world games today are clearly only designed that way so that they'll sell better, not because they work better as a result. In short, Naughty Dog did not sell out. Where so many games today start you out on a linear training ground before opening up access to most everything, this one almost reverses that template, reserving an open world area as a kind of breather section toward the start of the game before tightening things back up to escalate tension, and adrenaline. In this way, it flows like a good book, launching with a strong attention-getting opening chapter before pressing on to a main body that creates waxing and waning degrees of conflict, seeming to breathe at an variety of different paces but in general escalating over time, before finally advancing to a thought-provoking conclusion that leaves you wanting to go through the whole experience again because so much has been put in a new perspective along the way. The addition of flashbacks to the main game here are the best new design addition. By adding in more context steadily and at the right points in time, Part II continually changes the player's perspective on events and deepens their connection to the characters that define it. This is a huge part of what separates it from Part I in emotional resonance for me and establishes it as the overall superior entry.
But now let's get to what you're really here for: the story discussion. I'll just spoiler tag that.
You know what, if you're reading this part of the post, you've almost certainly played the game before and know the basics of the story already, so this time around I won't waste your time excessively describing the story. Instead, I'm going to devote this section to describing how I read some of its themes and what I've found most compelling about it:
Ellie is this game's main character, at least as gauged by the amount of time we spend involved in her story, and the overarching challenge she struggles with is a real mental illness called survivor guilt. She never really got over surviving the loss of Riley through her immunity in the first game and, while not suicidal (per se), has ever since felt that she has no right to live anymore. She says at the end of the first game that she's "waiting for [her] turn" to sacrifice her life for someone else like Riley did for her...and so when she forces Joel to reveal the truth about the events at the hospital years later, it drastically exacerbates her sense of guilt for living. I mean quite literally it is the case here that the whole world is cursed because she exists. And yet ending her life now wouldn't make a difference. How would that knowledge make you feel? For some time thereafter, she hates Joel because, at the root, she hates herself. And so when she decides later on that she wants to try to forgive Joel for taking her choice away from her, in many ways it's also her starting down a path toward forgiving herself. She's decided that she wants to try and see the value in herself that Joel does. Then the very next day Joel is murdered...because she survived the hospital. And no one else can know that she's the reason. That development catastrophically disrupts her personal recovery process. She has no guide back to a sense of worth anymore. She needs some kind of closure very, very badly and burying Joel ain't gonna cut it. Ellie makes selfish decisions, but she is not a selfish person. She's someone who is at the end of herself, trying to find herself. What lessons will she learn from Joel? His love? Or his bitterness, distrust, and hate?
I've played through this game quite a few times now and it's the ending that I've rethought the most. Early on, I used to imagine a happy ending for Ellie being hinted at because that's what I wanted to imagine. The more times I see and experience those final moments of the game though, the more I recognize that as baseless, wishful thinking and that Ellie is, in reality, just arriving back from Santa Barbara and is walking off in the game's final seconds into an uncertain future, alone. As open as I like to posit myself as being, back in 2020, I couldn't really handle that being the case because...ya know, there's a lot of Ellie in me and her worst fear, like mine, is winding up alone in the world. And yet exactly that situation is the note on which her journey concludes, her ultimate fate undecided. Her favorite band's set list hints at her narrative progression over the course of the game. The possibilities for her future though are also hinted at...in Abby's story. Unlike Ellie, Abby manages to get her desired revenge, but, discovering that it doesn't offer her the closure she seeks, winds up feeling compelled to go down a new path driven by empathy that her father, she genuinely believes, would be proud of.
It's interesting to me that, given Ellie's sense of guilt over surviving things others didn't, that she'd wind up paired with someone who "like[s] coming from a long line of survivors". Dina is someone who also offers Ellie the drive to go on. She's my favorite character in the game, along with her approximate analogy in Abby's storyline, Owen. "What kind of psycho picks Joel's corpse over [Dina, Jesse Jr. and the farmhouse]" in the end, one critic has opined. Someone clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder is the answer. Much like how Abby spends years choosing vengeance over the love Owen wants to give her, Ellie too loses the ability to believe that her new life at the farmhouse can offer her closure, as we see in her journal entries. Ellie's loss of her relationship with Dina hits very close to home for me, as someone who has often struggled to find someone willing to deal with all my own mental-emotional baggage.
Maybe I empathize more with Ellie's pathos than I should. Most people like Abby a lot better in this game because she emerges, by some metrics, as the better person by the game's conclusion. I'm often sympathetic to villainous characters in games and other media though because you kinda know they're going to lose in the end and everybody's rooting for them to. Losers love villains I guess because, in that way, you might say we relate to them, or at least to their fate. (Try not to cut yourself on this EDGE!) Rarely though do games dare to present the world from their perspective and insist that we experience it for ourselves, and when they bother it's typically only within a narrative set-up that presents them as clearly the lesser of two evils that are in conflict. Ellie is not the lesser evil here. But perhaps she deserves sympathy anyway.
As I neared the end of my first playthrough, I kept anticipating a resolution between Ellie and Abby. Perhaps even Ellie would be persuaded to join the Fireflies. I kind of appreciate that the game opts against that kind of a simple, comforting conclusion and instead chooses a more plausible one. It may not be as consoling, but one thing is for sure: the creators of this game are not bullshitting you about the consequences of your actions. And that lack of bullshit only makes things like the visit to the museum of natural history, the date at the aquarium, and the farmhouse (my favorite scenes in the game) feel even more impactful than they otherwise might.
Many games, and lots of other media as well, offer us lectures against hate. This game offers a story about the reasons people choose hate over love, about the complex journey out of the illusion that it brings healing and toward a different path. It forces us to experience the suffering of Ellie and Abby and others and to do many things we don't want to do in order that we might feel conflicted, torn between our compassion for these characters and our compassion for others until finally it all begins blurring together and we ourselves see that we all need to forgive. Forgive both others and ourselves. Is that fun? No, its hard and it's painful! But it's worth it. And for conveying that with more power and earnestness than any other video game in existence, I regard The Last of Us Part II as the best video game ever made.
EDIT: You know what, I could go on talking about this game forever, but this post is long enough as is. Don't wanna fatigue you. This was the best wrap-up to the commentary, so will leave it at that. Further discussion can be had upon request.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 15 January 2023
