I finally finished The Last of Us Part 2 over the weekend. At best, it was a serviceable action adventure title typical from Naughty Dog, even if they peaked with Uncharted 4. At its worst, it’s a run of the mill revenge story trying so hard to tug on your heartstrings with narrative cheats and twists that it ends up having a totally unsatisfying conclusion.
Gameplay wise, it’s what you’d expect from a Naughty Dog game. It controls fine once you get used to it (it took me a while). Successfully stealth killing an area full of enemies is quite satisfying. The scripted set pieces, while not as grand as in the Uncharted games or even Part 1, are fun enough to break the monotony of puzzle solving or clearing an area of enemies. As for its visuals, it’s a triple-A production; it’s expected to have impressive visuals. The same goes with the voice acting: you get talent like Troy Baker, Ashley Johnson, Laura Bailey, and Ashly Burch as your performers, it’s bound to be impressive. Praising this game for its gameplay and production values alone, however, would do this game an injustice. Naughty Dog prides itself in giving importance to videogame storytelling in its previous titles which is why overall, The Last of Us Part 2 is a tremendous disappointment.
The Last of Us Part 2 is a revenge story. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some say revenge stories are done to death, but any story well told deserves to be told. In this aspect, Part 2 suffers tremendously. The game begins with Joel recounting the climax of Part 1, when he rescued Ellie from an operation which would develop a cure for the cordyceps infection but kill her in the process. The game then moves forward in time where you play as an older Ellie doing patrol runs for their community. I won’t go in detail but then the game introduces you to a then unknown character, Abby, who seems to be looking for someone in Joel and Ellie’s community. Abby gets separated from her group and is nearly killed by the infected if not for the timely intervention of Joel. Abby then brings Joel back to her group’s hiding place where it turns out that Abby and her group belonged to that group of Fireflies whom Joel massacred in Part 1. Ellie reaches the cabin but is too late as she witnesses Abby bashing Joel’s head in with a golf club. Ellie vows vengeance before being knocked out by a Firefly. The rest of the game resumes and seemingly takes the form of a revenge story. Things seem straightforward enough until we reach the game’s midpoint and continue the game from Abby’s perspective, depicting events parallel to Ellie’s half until Abby’s portion catches up with Ellie’s story.
If the developers thought that making us play as Abby would make us like her as a character, they’re only half correct. There are moments in Abby’s storyline which show her humanity, but it is a tall order to force players to “like” her when her introduction in act 1 is killing the previous game’s protagonist. Sorry but it’s pretty impossible for an inherently immersive medium like videogames. At best players would, for a laugh, force Abby in hilarious situations resulting in her death. But is it totally impossible for Abby to be “likeable”? Not necessarily. This is where good storytelling could help this game tremendously.
If the game were told in chronological order, Abby might have been a more sympathetic character. If we opened with those Abby sequences leading up to Joel slaughtering the Fireflies to rescue Ellie, we probably would not feel as appalled when we’re forced to play as Abby in the latter half of the game. Whether we liked him or not, we all played Joel in Part 1. Whether or not we agreed with his actions in that game’s climax, we spent a substantial amount of time as him. To have to play as the person who killed Joel within the game’s 1st act would obviously enrage those invested in Joel and Ellie’s storyline in the previous game.
But suppose that this story is the story the developers wanted to tell and no amount of backlash would change their mind, please allow me this simple what-if for the final act: Ellie, fully consumed by her desire for vengeance, kills Abby instead of letting her go. Game director Neil Druckmann repeatedly mentioned how this game supposedly examines the cycle of hatred. You can see it clearly in the characters. Because of Joel’s selfishness, Abby bashes his brains out. Abby’s cycle of vengeance involved her alienating her community and having her friends killed by Ellie. Even if Abby initially defeated Ellie, she gets captured by an even more sadistic group of survivors which weakens her tremendously. Ellie killing Abby by the 3rd act fits in with this cycle: in pursuing Abby despite her lover’s pleas not to, Ellie loses her fingers (effectively preventing her playing the guitar) and she is left alone by the end of the game as her lover leaves her. It would even give that last flashback of Ellie telling Joel that she would try to forgive him for his actions in the previous game more narrative weight instead of the mere narrative cheat as seen in the game. Sure this would make the game even more depressing than it already is, but it will reinforce Druckmann’s vision of the unending cycle of violence. I would actually defend this game, despite its bleak nihilism, if it ended this way.
Some ardent defenders of the game would say that Ellie letting Abby go shows how Ellie still has enough humanity left in her to break the cycle of violence. I agree with that point, but it still highlights how lazy the narrative is when they would have to resort to a flashback of Ellie trying to forgive Joel at the end of the game. And therein lies my main issue; lazy story-telling. I don’t mind a revenge plot, but if you’re going to tell that story by relying on inconsequential flashbacks, shock value for the sake of “subverting expectations”, and narrative cheats, you’re better off playing a run of the mill Call of Duty game.
To summarize, The Last of Us 2 would have been a better game if the narrative were told in a linear fashion instead of its current form as it would soften the player’s perception of Abby. If the developers were indeed keen on keeping the current narrative, then it would have been better off for Abby to have been killed as it would strengthen the game’s theme of violence. Instead, we have a game trying so hard to be taken seriously with its narrative twists and turns that it ends up wallowing in its own filth of self-pity. Play SpecOps: The Line instead with its far superior narrative and subversion of its own genre tropes.
As for me, thank goodness that I can finally resume my playthrough of Persona 5.
Commentary by a Jaded Idealist 