I've already said this as well that Joel risking his life was out of character if he was still behaving like his TLOU1 self. If this were TLOU1 Joel, it would be believable for him to leave Abby.

I'll just reiterate my point again with another example. In TLOU1, Joel didn't want to associate himself with Ellie. Yet by the end of the game he is willing to risk his life for her. Imagine if we only had a few tidbits as to why Joel changed. We're basically forced to accept his abrupt change. This is exactly what we got here. It will have less impact and meaning. It also makes it harder to sell the idea of the character's behavior and personality.

At its core I find TLOU2 really inferior when it comes to building characters when compared to TLOU1. In TLOU1, we only had a short amount of time with its characters and yet they were able to make them compelling in order to deliver the message that they wanted for those acts.

In TLOU2, we lose characters that I'd argue some were extremely underdeveloped. They show us what they lost and what we took from them. To me it just felt like a really cheap way of making players feel guilty of the action.

IMO TLOU1 also delivered loss in a more meaningful way than TLOU2. TLOU2's approach in depicting loss just felt monotonous to me and at times just nihilistic. But whatever.

Ok pal. :)

You win by default. It is no longer within my interest to discuss this game. I also do not wish to further trigger you with any of my my posts pertaining to this game. In almost every thread I post about this game, you seem to take some sort of offense to it.

Yeah, I think the first game was a bit more of a personal story. In this you have a lot of characters to keep track of. I personally think they did a good job with the majority of them, but I guess its all in what you need a character to have in order to consider them fleshed out. 

That is exactly how I felt during the Ellie-Nora scene. Any connection I had with Ellie was severed at that moment; which is also what happened with me and Joel at the end of the last game. That is why in the end I felt a much stronger connection with Abby.

I still loved both games though.

These are the kinds of things that I wish people had stopped and taken a minute more to resonate with.

Personally, I didn't want to press the button. But eventually, I had to. Just like Ellie is thinking the same thing. I know some people are going to be like, "shit that's stupid I don't want that"....But it's not about what YOU want. The whole point of the scene is get you to feel how Ellie feels. It's such a shame that this is so brilliantly done, and so many people are just going to be like, "that's dumb". For real though, this is the first time where I've ever been forced to push a button that I didn't want to, and just suddenly understood everything. Everything I felt, when I was thinking, "no, not like this", "this is wrong"...is exactly what you see in the very next scene when she's crying to Dina.

It's not even like I can be mad about it, it's just like- I don't know, a shame. It's disappointing- that some people are so hard headed they can't even realize they made an emotional connection with a piece of art. A physical manifestation of an impossibly expressional state. 

EDIT:
There are a kind of people who look at a painting of a lighthouse and decide whether or not they accept it as a representation of a lighthouse.
There are others who look at a painting of a lighthouse, and feel the last time they felt when they just looked at a lighthouse.
A game is like a themed art exhibit. People will either come out and remark whether the paintings were good or not, or how they felt looking at them.

You aren't supposed to feel what Joel is feeling at the end of TLOU1. You are supposed to feel betrayed. You are supposed to feel heartbroken. If you feel a disconnect, that's how you know it was done right.

mispost

Yeah it's like she jumps personalities on certain time,in mere seconds she goes from compassion to hate.

Really shizophrenic behaviour but would suit the trauma she had beforehand.

Question: Should I keep my earlier pledge to create a thread discussing my thoughts on The Last of Us Part II after I finished it and had time to absorb it all, or would such a post be merged into this thread?

I think it would be better to make your own thread,in here your discussion might be overshadowed rapidly.

And your take as a rare female gamer on this forum that is also part of the LGBT community and has a history of making interesting post does make it more worthy of having a seperate place.

Dunno if this is the right place to talk about the AI, I'm not that far in yet and don't want to read any spoilers. However not sure if this is spoiler free enough for the other thread.

Seriously, my partner is useless, so useless enemies still ignore them completely... (And still stomp around to change position in full view)

I'm loving the game though, hence I've only recently begun exploring Seattle. I keep stopping to admire the work put into the game and the awesome lighting. I didn't expect to see a game already this gen where your flash light changes color based on what it bounces off. I spend far too much time bouncing it off things to watch the ambient light color change and shadows interact lol. Yet there's this niggling feeling that the same effort was not put into the AI :/