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Forums - Sony Discussion - The Last of Us Part II - Review Thread (MC: 93 / OC: 93)

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KratosLives said:
Azuren said:

I would say Ghost of Tsushima is a shoe-in if Cyberpunk 2077 gets delayed again. Regardless of anyone's personal opinion on TLOU2, it was a divisive game. Ghost of Tsushima has had glowing praise from gamers and reviewers alike, and Cyberpunk is poised to take the crown if it can deliver Witcher-3-tier content again.

Ghost has a shonky camera, terrible AI, glitches and a combat system that needs reworking. Tlou2 kills it in every department. There is soo much detail in that game it's insane also the tiny details, never been done before,  that to many have gone unnoticed  that even kojima would be proud of. Tlou2 was decisive because of peoples expectations and emotional attachment to a certain character. Those who understood what "thelastofus" theme and nature of the world represents, went on to love the game. 

Not even getting into a debate of comparing the two games. Our subjective tastes are going to be different, so I'm instead referring to general reception; TLOU2 was a divisive game for fans, and GoT was almost universally praised. Those are both facts.



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BraLoD said:
@Jaicee can you please add a spoiler tag into your post?
Let's please not ruin the game for other people, it's still only 2 months old.

@COKTOE can you do it too? Like I did into my reply to you?

Yep.



- "If you have the heart of a true winner, you can always get more pissed off than some other asshole."

I'm still taking issues with some of the writing in TLoU2:

Spoiler!

the portion of Abby's father rescuing a zebra.

He's a doctor! The writers don't need to contrive such a scenario to make us like the guy, just show him doing doctor things. Doctors are generally very well-respected and admired, all you needed now was to show him caring for patients. Hell, you could even show him teaching Abby with Abby once wanting to become a doctor like her father. Would have been great! Instead, we have this zebra scene which was just excessive and it makes me like the characters less.

The doctor is helping me see right through the writing: NEVER let a reader see through the writing. You can do this with natural scenarios like a doctor caring for a number of patients and Abby wanting to be a doctor like her father as opposed to artificial scenarios like the rescue of a zebra.

If ND's writers wanted us to like Abby and her story, I'm afraid they've failed at it considering how some take great pleasure in watching Abby get killed.

Also, the ending. Ellie doesn't kill Abby... WHY!? After risking so much and sacrificing so much, Ellie doesn't kill Abby? WHY!?

It seems so dishonest. I don't believe for a second killing-machine Ellie would let Joel's killer go. There's even the fact that Ellie is armed when she confronts Abby at the end but never uses her gun for whatever reason but is perfectly willing to use a knife against Abby.

Then there's Ellie getting her fingers bitten off. As a result, she can't play guitar at the end. This too feels contrived.

I think Ellie keeping her fingers would have been a better ending: that way, when she leaves the guitar behind, we could assign deeper meaning to the gesture like "she wants to leave tragic events behind her and move on and the guitar just reminds her of said tragic events". Instead, we might have to consider she left the guitar behind simply because she's missing fingers thus cannot play it. It's a little more shallow of a reason.

One great thing about TLoU1 is the ending: at the end, we were left to grapple with a very compelling question: "how far are you willing to go for a loved one?" In Joel's case, he'd rather see the world stay in hell than lose his daughter a second time. It's a tough but understandable answer.

In TLoU2, the question I'm left with is "was revenge worth it?" Ellie doesn't kill Abby so the clear answer seems to be "no, revenge or attempt thereof wasn't worth it". Had Ellie killed Abby and returned home to an empty house, the question "was revenge worth it?" seems more compelling and harder to answer. You got your revenge but at what cost?

Then there's also Ellie being so angry at Joel for lying to her. Sure, it sucks Joel lied to Ellie but he also saved her life: surely his saving her life would help to soften the blow. Why is she so angry at Joel!? It makes Ellie a more miserable character in TLoU2 when Ellie in TLoU1 was a more upbeat and snarky character which contrasted with Joel's rougher and more cynical character.

I think ND lost considerable talent when Amy Hennig left.



KLAMarine said:

I'm still taking issues with some of the writing in TLoU2:

Spoiler!

the portion of Abby's father rescuing a zebra.

He's a doctor! The writers don't need to contrive such a scenario to make us like the guy, just show him doing doctor things. Doctors are generally very well-respected and admired, all you needed now was to show him caring for patients. Hell, you could even show him teaching Abby with Abby once wanting to become a doctor like her father. Would have been great! Instead, we have this zebra scene which was just excessive and it makes me like the characters less.

The doctor is helping me see right through the writing: NEVER let a reader see through the writing. You can do this with natural scenarios like a doctor caring for a number of patients and Abby wanting to be a doctor like her father as opposed to artificial scenarios like the rescue of a zebra.

If ND's writers wanted us to like Abby and her story, I'm afraid they've failed at it considering how some take great pleasure in watching Abby get killed.

Also, the ending. Ellie doesn't kill Abby... WHY!? After risking so much and sacrificing so much, Ellie doesn't kill Abby? WHY!?

It seems so dishonest. I don't believe for a second killing-machine Ellie would let Joel's killer go. There's even the fact that Ellie is armed when she confronts Abby at the end but never uses her gun for whatever reason but is perfectly willing to use a knife against Abby.

Then there's Ellie getting her fingers bitten off. As a result, she can't play guitar at the end. This too feels contrived.

I think Ellie keeping her fingers would have been a better ending: that way, when she leaves the guitar behind, we could assign deeper meaning to the gesture like "she wants to leave tragic events behind her and move on and the guitar just reminds her of said tragic events". Instead, we might have to consider she left the guitar behind simply because she's missing fingers thus cannot play it. It's a little more shallow of a reason.

One great thing about TLoU1 is the ending: at the end, we were left to grapple with a very compelling question: "how far are you willing to go for a loved one?" In Joel's case, he'd rather see the world stay in hell than lose his daughter a second time. It's a tough but understandable answer.

In TLoU2, the question I'm left with is "was revenge worth it?" Ellie doesn't kill Abby so the clear answer seems to be "no, revenge or attempt thereof wasn't worth it". Had Ellie killed Abby and returned home to an empty house, the question "was revenge worth it?" seems more compelling and harder to answer. You got your revenge but at what cost?

Then there's also Ellie being so angry at Joel for lying to her. Sure, it sucks Joel lied to Ellie but he also saved her life: surely his saving her life would help to soften the blow. Why is she so angry at Joel!? It makes Ellie a more miserable character in TLoU2 when Ellie in TLoU1 was a more upbeat and snarky character which contrasted with Joel's rougher and more cynical character.

I think ND lost considerable talent when Amy Hennig left.

First of all, honestly, to read your post, it seems more like you're actually criticizing the direction of the game rather than the writing; the direction being the core idea and the writing being part of the execution. What you're criticizing here are the core ideas of the game more than their execution, it seems to me. Just as a minor correction.

As to the writing though, I find The Last of Us Part II to be among the very very best-written video games I've ever played, and I've played a lot! If you really do think it's poorly-written, I'd be interested in seeing what you consider examples of solid writing in games for the sake of comparison.

Anyway, to some specifics...

Spoiler!

You ask why Ellie is so mad at Joel for saving her life at the hospital. What she's experiencing is a phenomenon called survivor guilt, which is a real thing that really happens! It's currently treated as a possible, significant symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, which Ellie clearly has. It's a situation where a person believes they've done something wrong by surviving a traumatic event when others didn't. In other words, her anger isn't strictly rational. She hates herself for being alive under these conditions, which is in turn why she's angry with Joel. It's really more her self-hatred than it is about her hating Joel. She has no self-esteem. Like everything she's got to say about herself in the game is self-denigrating. She'd only just begun to try and see the value that Joel saw in her. But that's another reason why the loss of Joel is all the more harmful to Ellie. As we learn near the end of the game, she had just begun the work of trying to forgive Joel for saving her...and in that respect, of trying to finally forgive herself for being alive. Joel's untimely murder halts that process of forgiveness (both of others and herself) and healing, rendering her unable to proceed with her life. It exacerbates her survivor guilt, in other words, to the point where she can't feel anything else and feels like she has to address the source of that problem. (There are those who have theorized that perhaps Ellie doesn't even intend to survive her mission to kill Abby, which is why she takes so many risks and relents at the end when it appears she might emerge victorious, though I don't really see any clear contextual evidence to support that particular conclusion.)

The real trouble for Ellie...and others...is that these experiences transform her from the Ellie we knew from the first game into a more Joel-like person in some of the worst ways. (She was also substantially raised by Joel, after all.) The game is in essence about her process of acceptance; of learning to let go. She can't let go of Joel until she learns to forgive him and she can't forgive him until she finally forgives herself. The memory of that last talk with Joel comes up during her second fight with Abby for a narrative reason. It's to show that, ironically, though she's become a lot like Joel was, in so doing she's abandoned what Joel wanted for her. Joel didn't want Ellie to become like him; unable to really trust or forgive people. THAT's why she relents at that particular moment.

When Ellie symbolically finds herself forced to leave Joel's guitar behind at the very end of the game and the screen closes in on the Firefly symbol thereon, it's to signify that she's finally let Joel...and her own survival at the hospital...go. She's wearing the bracelet Dina gave her in that last scene...unlike when she left the farmhouse to confront Abby...which one has to suspect is meant to indicate where she's walking off to after she leaves the farmhouse at the very end. It's actually a brilliantly subtle happy ending, I've concluded!

Detractors tend to lean heavily on the idea that "the message of this game is: don't murder people! Well DUUUUH!!" NO! No, that's NOT it!! The revenge story is a genre trope of Westerns (in film Westerns, game Westerns, all that sorta thing), which this is. That narrative set-up is more the means than the ends of what the developers are trying to convey here. I mean you can read this as simply a commentary on vengeance (like if you think about the game's meta-analysis of the world), but the deeper-going essence of it is the importance of forgiveness and acceptance, both of others and of one's self. And it's about how precious the simple, mundane things in life that many people so often take for granted are. Physical violence doesn't have to be a part of one's life in order for one to connect to these essential themes. To that end, I wish people online wouldn't be so strictly literal and just surface level in how they analyze this game. The Last of Us Part II, even more so than the original, leans heavily on nonlinear and subjective storytelling that you're meant to piece together and discover more of on repeat playthroughs. People should think about its themes in the same way, in that same spirit, I think.

That's how I read it anyway.

Different people connect to different characters more in this game. The overall plurality of players seem to connect to Abby the most and like her the best as a character. I connect to Ellie the most because I have PTSD, I kind of hate myself, I'm a very flawed person who struggles to let go of people, places, and things, also I'm a lesbian myself so there's that too, lots and lots and lots of things. I mean Dina is my actual favorite character -- the one I like the most -- but Ellie is the one I'm the most like, I think. Abby winds up as among the most genuinely good-natured characters in the game, at least in the end, and as such I see her as the natural favorite of judgmental moralists who can't understand that Ellie is a broken person, not a bad person. And then there are others (overwhelmingly men) who just can't bring themselves to relate to anyone but Joel or accept that Ellie might grow up and not always be a kid (prolly what they'd like out of their own kids) and, as a result, hate this game and have completely and utterly missed its point(s).

Last edited by Jaicee - on 23 August 2020

Jaicee said:
KLAMarine said:

I'm still taking issues with some of the writing in TLoU2:

Spoiler!

the portion of Abby's father rescuing a zebra.

He's a doctor! The writers don't need to contrive such a scenario to make us like the guy, just show him doing doctor things. Doctors are generally very well-respected and admired, all you needed now was to show him caring for patients. Hell, you could even show him teaching Abby with Abby once wanting to become a doctor like her father. Would have been great! Instead, we have this zebra scene which was just excessive and it makes me like the characters less.

The doctor is helping me see right through the writing: NEVER let a reader see through the writing. You can do this with natural scenarios like a doctor caring for a number of patients and Abby wanting to be a doctor like her father as opposed to artificial scenarios like the rescue of a zebra.

If ND's writers wanted us to like Abby and her story, I'm afraid they've failed at it considering how some take great pleasure in watching Abby get killed.

Also, the ending. Ellie doesn't kill Abby... WHY!? After risking so much and sacrificing so much, Ellie doesn't kill Abby? WHY!?

It seems so dishonest. I don't believe for a second killing-machine Ellie would let Joel's killer go. There's even the fact that Ellie is armed when she confronts Abby at the end but never uses her gun for whatever reason but is perfectly willing to use a knife against Abby.

Then there's Ellie getting her fingers bitten off. As a result, she can't play guitar at the end. This too feels contrived.

I think Ellie keeping her fingers would have been a better ending: that way, when she leaves the guitar behind, we could assign deeper meaning to the gesture like "she wants to leave tragic events behind her and move on and the guitar just reminds her of said tragic events". Instead, we might have to consider she left the guitar behind simply because she's missing fingers thus cannot play it. It's a little more shallow of a reason.

One great thing about TLoU1 is the ending: at the end, we were left to grapple with a very compelling question: "how far are you willing to go for a loved one?" In Joel's case, he'd rather see the world stay in hell than lose his daughter a second time. It's a tough but understandable answer.

In TLoU2, the question I'm left with is "was revenge worth it?" Ellie doesn't kill Abby so the clear answer seems to be "no, revenge or attempt thereof wasn't worth it". Had Ellie killed Abby and returned home to an empty house, the question "was revenge worth it?" seems more compelling and harder to answer. You got your revenge but at what cost?

Then there's also Ellie being so angry at Joel for lying to her. Sure, it sucks Joel lied to Ellie but he also saved her life: surely his saving her life would help to soften the blow. Why is she so angry at Joel!? It makes Ellie a more miserable character in TLoU2 when Ellie in TLoU1 was a more upbeat and snarky character which contrasted with Joel's rougher and more cynical character.

I think ND lost considerable talent when Amy Hennig left.

First of all, honestly, to read your post, it seems more like you're actually criticizing the direction of the game rather than the writing; the direction being the core idea and the writing being part of the execution. What you're criticizing here are the core ideas of the game more than their execution, it seems to me. Just as a minor correction.

As to the writing though, I find The Last of Us Part II to be among the very very best-written video games I've ever played, and I've played a lot! If you really do think it's poorly-written, I'd be interested in seeing what you consider examples of solid writing in games for the sake of comparison.

Anyway, to some specifics...

Spoiler!

You ask why Ellie is so mad at Joel for saving her life at the hospital. What she's experiencing is a phenomenon called survivor guilt, which is a real thing that really happens! It's currently treated as a possible, significant symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, which Ellie clearly has. It's a situation where a person believes they've done something wrong by surviving a traumatic event when others didn't. In other words, her anger isn't strictly rational. She hates herself for being alive under these conditions, which is in turn why she's angry with Joel. It's really more her self-hatred than it is about her hating Joel. She has no self-esteem. Like everything she's got to say about herself in the game is self-denigrating. She'd only just begun to try and see the value that Joel saw in her. But that's another reason why the loss of Joel is all the more harmful to Ellie. As we learn near the end of the game, she had just begun the work of trying to forgive Joel for saving her...and in that respect, of trying to finally forgive herself for being alive. Joel's untimely murder halts that process of forgiveness (both of others and herself) and healing, rendering her unable to proceed with her life. It exacerbates her survivor guilt, in other words, to the point where she can't feel anything else and feels like she has to address the source of that problem. (There are those who have theorized that perhaps Ellie doesn't even intend to survive her mission to kill Abby, which is why she takes so many risks and relents at the end when it appears she might emerge victorious, though I don't really see any clear contextual evidence to support that particular conclusion.)

The real trouble for Ellie...and others...is that these experiences transform her from the Ellie we knew from the first game into a more Joel-like person in some of the worst ways. (She was also substantially raised by Joel, after all.) The game is in essence about her process of acceptance; of learning to let go. She can't let go of Joel until she learns to forgive him and she can't forgive him until she finally forgives herself. The memory of that last talk with Joel comes up during her second fight with Abby for a narrative reason. It's to show that, ironically, though she's become a lot like Joel was, in so doing she's abandoned what Joel wanted for her. Joel didn't want Ellie to become like him; unable to really trust or forgive people. THAT's why she relents at that particular moment.

When Ellie symbolically finds herself forced to leave Joel's guitar behind at the very end of the game and the screen closes in on the Firefly symbol thereon, it's to signify that she's finally let Joel...and her own survival at the hospital...go. She's wearing the bracelet Dina gave her in that last scene...unlike when she left the farmhouse to confront Abby...which one has to suspect is meant to indicate where she's walking off to after she leaves the farmhouse at the very end. It's actually a brilliantly subtle happy ending, I've concluded!

Detractors tend to lean heavily on the idea that "the message of this game is: don't murder people! Well DUUUUH!!" NO! No, that's NOT it!! The revenge story is a genre trope of Westerns (in film Westerns, game Westerns, all that sorta thing), which this is. That narrative set-up is more the means than the ends of what the developers are trying to convey here. I mean you can read this as simply a commentary on vengeance (like if you think about the game's meta-analysis of the world), but the deeper-going essence of it is the importance of forgiveness and acceptance, both of others and of one's self. And it's about how precious the simple, mundane things in life that many people so often take for granted are. Physical violence doesn't have to be a part of one's life in order for one to connect to these essential themes. To that end, I wish people online wouldn't be so strictly literal and just surface level in how they analyze this game. The Last of Us Part II, even more so than the original, leans heavily on nonlinear and subjective storytelling that you're meant to piece together and discover more of on repeat playthroughs. People should think about its themes in the same way, in that same spirit, I think.

That's how I read it anyway.

Different people connect to different characters more in this game. The overall plurality of players seem to connect to Abby the most and like her the best as a character. I connect to Ellie the most because I have PTSD, I kind of hate myself, I'm a very flawed person who struggles to let go of people, places, and things, also I'm a lesbian myself so there's that too, lots and lots and lots of things. I mean Dina is my actual favorite character -- the one I like the most -- but Ellie is the one I'm the most like, I think. Abby winds up as among the most genuinely good-natured characters in the game, at least in the end, and as such I see her as the natural favorite of judgmental moralists who can't understand that Ellie is a broken person, not a bad person. And then there are others (overwhelmingly men) who just can't bring themselves to relate to anyone but Joel or accept that Ellie might grow up and not always be a kid (prolly what they'd like out of their own kids) and, as a result, hate this game and have completely and utterly missed its point(s).

Spoiler!
I hear you on the survivor guilt but I'm still confused by Ellie getting mad at Joel after he sticks up for her in the bar against "bigot sandwiches". What the hell was that?..

These characters were great in TLoU1 but now these characters have been ruined in the sequel.



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Seems like this thread will crawl over 1000 posts.



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363

Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994

Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."

KLAMarine said:
Spoiler!
Spoiler!
I hear you on the survivor guilt but I'm still confused by Ellie getting mad at Joel after he sticks up for her in the bar against "bigot sandwiches". What the hell was that?..

These characters were great in TLoU1 but now these characters have been ruined in the sequel.

Well you have to say that or else your red pill credentials would be revoked.

Spoiler!

I hate to use a maternal-sounding cliche, but "that's a teenager for you!" I mean as you can gather from the dialogue at various points, Ellie doesn't really understand why that was her instinctive response to Joel defending her and Dina from Seth either, but personally I think there are two factors here:

1) Ellie's a teenager. An older teenager. She wants to establish her independence, including from Joel, like teens her age are often positively desperate to. I can remember in my senior year in high school there was a time I was sitting in church with some kids and young adults in my general age range where we sat and they were making me pretty uncomfortable. My mommy noticed and approached the pew and "rescued" me from the situation, evacuating me to sit with the family. Ooooooh my god, I was SO embarrassed! I mean I wanted out of that situation, but not like that! My mom was totally oblivious to the social cost to me of her publicly "rescuing" me like that. I think when you're that age, you kinda just want your parents (or parental figure in this case) to butt out and let you solve your own problems. I imagine this kind of thought process being part of Ellie's mindset here. I don't think she realized how sympathetic her peers actually were until after.

AND

2) Also, and really more importantly, she and Joel have formally parted ways, remember? She doesn't want to be associated with Joel anymore at this point. This goes into the survivor guilt issue on some level. Although they've begun to reconnect recently, there remains a certain considerable emotional distance between them.

BUT, these things said, this incident, as we learn toward the end of the game, actually served as a catalyst for a breakthrough between Ellie and Joel. Ellie does seem to actually appreciate Joel's intervention on some level even if she's not willing to formally admit it. What she seems to appreciate about it in particular is the implication that Joel is okay with Ellie's sexuality. You'll recall that that was a matter of real question in Ellie's mind for years. She suspected Joel wouldn't understand. Many parents don't. Mine didn't. Much of Ellie's issue with Joel in general since learning the truth about what happened back at the hospital especially has been trust. This incident with Seth, and Ellie's subsequent conversation with Joel, has the side effect of restoring some of Ellie's trust in Joel indirectly. She can be more open with him than she previously thought she could.

So it's a complicated thing, in other words. All of these things seem to be part of the mixture of Ellie's feelings here.

Last edited by Jaicee - on 23 August 2020

BraLoD said:
Azuren said:

Not even getting into a debate of comparing the two games. Our subjective tastes are going to be different, so I'm instead referring to general reception; TLOU2 was a divisive game for fans, and GoT was almost universally praised. Those are both facts.

But the critics are the ones picking the GOTYs.

Well, it wouldn't be the first time the critics have been out of touch with what gamers actually want, but I would hope they wouldn't be so out of touch that they would vote what is currently the most divisive game of 2020 in as GOTY.



Watch me stream games and hunt trophies on my Twitch channel!

Check out my Twitch Channel!:

www.twitch.tv/AzurenGames

Azuren said:
BraLoD said:

But the critics are the ones picking the GOTYs.

Well, it wouldn't be the first time the critics have been out of touch with what gamers actually want, but I would hope they wouldn't be so out of touch that they would vote what is currently the most divisive game of 2020 in as GOTY.

Well they were out of touch when death stranding didn't win game of year. That's because they were scared of the backlash due to people crying " walking simulator".  If they don't care about some backlash, tlou2 would easily win it, and almost every category it fits into to. 



Azuren said:
BraLoD said:

But the critics are the ones picking the GOTYs.

Well, it wouldn't be the first time the critics have been out of touch with what gamers actually want, but I would hope they wouldn't be so out of touch that they would vote what is currently the most divisive game of 2020 in as GOTY.

And all the divisiviness is about one silly aspect. So certainly on the whole pack haven't launch a better game this year, and I say that having enjoyed and thinking it was much prettier and funnier Ghost of Tsushima.



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363

Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994

Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."