2020 will not only go down in history as that one year where the United States spectacularly failed to properly address the dangers of a raging pandemic, largely due to an elected president with the mental capacity of a toaster and an ego so fragile that you need to wrap it in tape, but it will also be remembered as the year we all finally got to witness the second coming of Jesus Christ, that is the release of Cyberpunk 2077. The only way CD Projekt might screw that up is if we have to witness V bashing Geralt’s head in with a flashy futuristic baseball bat. Anyway, here are my afterthoughts…...
Warning!
I’m about to spoil the ending of Last of Us 1 and 2. My afterthought series are plain opinion pieces, which means they’re highly subjective. As it is with subjective things: Your mileage may vary. You can agree or disagree with what you’re about to read and that’s okay. It’s perfectly fine to like things that I don’t like or vice versa. If you enjoyed playing this game, then in no way shape or form do I want to ruin your experience.
Last but not least, as Super Bunnyhop used to so lovingly put it: I love you.
Recap
To say that TLOU2’s release was surrounded by controversies is a bit of an understatement. You probably heard of it a shit ton of times before, so the last thing you need is me writing about this stuff acting like I’m finding the egg of Columbus here. I’m not doing this for a living and since it’s more or less of a hobby I’d rather spend my time writing about the actual game itself than participating in a TMZ-level discourse about how some idiots said some idiotic things on twitter.
Instead of talking about our sad reality, let’s move on to even sadder fiction. TLOU2 takes place a few years after the end of TLOU1. Human civilization is still deeply screwed by a fungus that was able to infect humans and turn them into mindless flesh-eating cannib, they’re zombies. Let’s face it: TLOU2’s infected are, once again, zombies with a different name. Yes, it’s based on a real-life fungus that essentially does the same thing to small insects, but it’s still a zombie outbreak scenario. Anyway, at the end of the first game our main protagonist, Joel finally manages after a long and perilous journey to successfully deliver the immune-to-death-by-fungus (and briefly unconscious) fourteen-year-old Ellie to an organization called the Fireflies, who were trying to develop a vaccine by any means necessary. Staying true to their company slogan “literally any means” the Fireflies decide that, if necessary, this also includes the non-voluntary euthanization of a child (Ellie). Joel, struggling to accept Ellie’s supposed fate, decides to instead kill any Firefly who’s between him and her in order to forcefully extract the (still unconscious) Ellie. He does this because, over the course of their travels together, it is thanks to her that he is once again able to emotionally connect to someone. Now, TLOU2’s plot is set in motion by a daughter of one of those Firefly members as she is looking for Joel to get her revenge. If that last part sounds like fanfiction-quality level of writing to you then I can’t blame you, it certainly does to me.
Roots
Before I talk about TLOU2 and why its plot doesn’t work, or at least not as much as it could, let me say a few more things about why the plot of TLOU1 worked so well. You start by controlling Sarah, Joel’s daughter, inside their house. While waiting for Joel to come home the game uses environmental storytelling to give you a good impression of who they are, by showing you how they live. You also witness second-hand how the initial outbreak of the Coronavirus cordyceps infection leads to an increasingly deteriorating situation. As you try to escape with Joel and Tommy (Joel’s brother) the tension rises until you finally witness the effects first-hand. Constantly you see people dying or frantically trying to escape. Also a Hollywood-level of explosions. Seriously, watch it again on YouTube. I forgot how much of them there actually are. As you slowly get the feeling they could almost make it out alive, the game gives you a sense of security, only to have Sarah shot and die in Joel’s arms. As he cries his heart out the screen cuts to black, followed by a dramatic montage of outbreak-related news reports. Bam! That’s how you start off with a bang. It’s a concept that on paper may seem a bit cheesy, but it’s so well presented, not only in visuals but especially in voice acting that it does feel truly authentic. TLOU1 then carefully spends hour after hour of what essentially boils down to a “Joel and Ellie road movie experience”, to fuse those two characters together by having them face hardship after hardship. It is through this that Joel faces an even harder moral dilemma at the end of the game. He can either let Ellie, a proxy for his deceased daughter, die for the chance of humanity overcoming a terrible disaster, or he can try to forcibly take her with him, having to kill those who oppose him… He ends up doing the latter, in addition to lying to her about what transpired.
There are two things that make TLOU1’s story stand out. First, there are legitimate reasons for the player to both agree or disagree with Joel’s decision. Yes, a vaccine might help the general population but who guarantees that it will reach everyone who needs it, or that it will not be used as a tool of power by the Fireflies? In theory, this is also a basic “do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?” dilemma. So, is it justified to kill a girl for a small chance of making things better? Even if Ellie is relatively young since it’s her life, shouldn’t she have a say in this matter too? Is it even right to ask this of someone? Joel might claim he did what he did out of (selfless) love for Ellie but isn’t his entire motivation and even the love he feels for her selfish? Does Ellie eventually figure out what really happened? How is she going to react to that? There is a wide range of issues to discuss here, from the practicality, the morality and ethics of this situation. But the most important thing is this: No matter where you stand on that matter, it’s entirely understandable why he did what he did. The plot is both cohesive and coherent. Two things, that TLOU2 could absolutely use more of.
Shock & Awe
At the beginning there’s a bit of gameplay here and there, but the game really starts off with Joel’s death, which isn’t inherently surprising but its presentation definitely is. It’s a shock that hits the player as much as it hits Ellie. It should be noted that, in a way, it serves to not only set the tone for the rest of the game but it also leads the player to have certain expectations because of how high the stakes are. It is up to the game whether to subvert, avert or fulfil those expectations. Still, it’s important to acknowledge that those expectations are there in the first place.
With those high expectations in mind, the more I played of TLOU2, the more I noticed the seams at the costumes, the coffee cup in the back and the sun being a badly-placed stage light. The story never unfolded naturally to me for a multitude of reasons. The first one is that quite a few of the plot events felt heavily constructed in order to provide a certain narrative. This not only comes at the cost of believability but it also shows the player that it cares more about the message than it does about the characters. This shows itself significantly at the beginning of the game where the point of view way changes way too frequently. The second reason is that the majority of new characters, especially from Abby’s crew, are either unlikeable or uninteresting. In some cases both, which also meant that even retroactively I didn’t feel a single thing about their deaths. Mel, one of Abby’s “friends”, is a pregnant woman, who, despite warnings of recent attacks, takes part in a mission which in all likeliness will lead to combat. Owen, Abby’s ex, cheats on his pregnant girlfriend with Abby, because why not. That’s not to say that characters aren’t allowed to have flaws, but if their flaws are the only remarkable character traits they have, then that’s a good reason for the player to simply not care about them. However, my biggest issue with the story is that, for a game that tries so very hard to show deep it is, it never accomplishes to be just that.
A major reason for that is inconsistency. TLOU2’s story is based on the idea that a minor, insignificant NPC from TLOU1 that you killed might have a relative who, in turn, could be seeking revenge. TLOU2 once again completely disregards that aspect by giving the player often no option but to kill those who are in their way, both as Abby and Ellie. After all, the killing is heavily interwoven into the core gameplay itself. While it’s definitely an interesting idea to attach names to those randoms characters that you murder, I heavily doubt that anyone really cared about that. Why would they? We have no emotional connection to those characters and giving them names isn’t going to change that. The only thing it does is to confront us with the fact that in this video game we just took someone’s life. But there is no other consequence to it. So, yes, we just killed Frank, but if there is no consequence to that he might as well just be the nameless grunt, that he would have been in the first game. To continue on that, the game’s entire progression system is based on the idea of how to more effectively and efficiently kill people like Frank. For a game that is so heavily focused on having the main characters learn a lesson, it just fails to believably have them disregard that until the very end of the game. Another reason is that TLOU2 constantly tries to recontextualize everything, especially in regards to Abby. Her father is presented like he’s straight out of a Disney movie (I’m leaving the intended child-killing here aside, of course). Abby’s entire game portion is purely dedicated to showing the player her perspective, which in itself isn’t much of an issue, it’s the context that is.
Here’s what happens: After a good chunk of game time, Ellie and her friends made it to Seattle and killed pretty much all of Abby’s crew, so Abby decides to take matters into her own hands by miraculously finding a map that Ellie dropped next to Abby’s dead friends in which someone conveniently marked their hideout. Abby surprises Ellie, kills Jessie (one of Ellie’s friends) and holds Tommy as a hostage. The tension rises and as Abby’s god complex jumps through the roof (“We let you live and you wasted it!”) we get a hard cut to black. What happens next? We get to see the character background plot for Abby, her father and her friends. Not just for a short time, but for roughly ten hours. Once again, the pacing is all over the place. I frequently noticed that, even when TLOU2 had something interesting to say, it always seemed to bring that up in the worst possible moments.
Meaning
Another major issue I have with TLOU2 is that I never had the impression that it would go anywhere with its two main characters. Ellie doesn’t get any character development until the last five minutes or so. Showing the final conversation on the porch with Ellie and Joel at the end of the game also fell flat because it shows that at the time Joel was killed, they were both already on their way to mend their relationship. Whatever they had to say to each other in regard to what happened with the Fireflies, they both got it out of their system. Joel’s death would have been much worse if he died before they had that conversation. Still, the game presents that cutscene with the obvious intent of trying to surprise the player and to retroactively explain, why Ellie was so bent on revenge. But at that point, it’s neither relevant nor necessary. It’s purely there to, once again, elicit a feeling from the player by using recontextualization. Getting back to Abby, her character development is pretty much non-existent unless you willfully ignore the fact that she only acts as she does out of pure self-interest to keep Lev around. If it weren’t for Lev, Abby would have happily killed pregnant Dina. In that way, she’s an egoist the same way Joel was. You may be able to chalk all that, and more, up to the game wanting to present deep, flawed characters, but in combination with all the other issues, I just couldn’t. Also, it would have been nice if the game spent just a fraction of the effort it does to rationalize Abby’s behaviour for Ellie.
About that final part in Santa Monica… You can argue how Ellie letting Abby live is about her finally being in control, having the actual power of killing her nemesis so she can turn around in the last moment. Or how she suddenly has a realization that killing Abby is ultimately pointless. But not one of these answers is satisfying. Ellie abandoned a perfectly happy life to go on another idiotic mission to kill Abby. This entire section didn’t feel like it existed because that’s what Ellie would do, it felt like it existed because the writers and directors wanted it to happen. To what end? Ellie finds Abby and Lev utterly broken, at a point where she herself is broken as well, only to force Abby to fight her by holding Lev at knifepoint. What follows is about as corny and unnecessary as the final fistfight from Metal Gear Solid 4. Notably, we are talking about the end of the game here. I paused during that sequence multiple times because I just couldn’t get how anyone would think that this is the epitome of storytelling.
A Brutal Miss
I wanted to like The Last of Us 2. I really did. But the more I tried to let that experience sink in, to ponder about what messages it might try to convey, the more I just found it to be not that interesting. It’s a decent game with a hyper-inflated production budget that fell apart for me the more and more I looked at each aspect of its story without the context of its top tier presentation. TLOU2’s main theme is blatant. It’s about the contrast between revenge and empathy. About how destruction is no substitute for construction. About how revenge is a downward spiral that will eventually get the better of you and how empathy will lead to salvation and meaning. The problem with that theme is that its execution is inconsistent. It regularly pushes the believability of the game’s story to a breaking point, as plot points happen not because they naturally would, but because they have to, to keep the drama going. I know that this text is full of complaints but I do want to note that I appreciate the fact that Naughty Dog tried to do something different. They knew what kind of public reception they would get and still decided to go with their vision. By doing so, they set the bar very, very high. Let me put it this way: If game development had a difficulty slider they put it all the way to the top. The only issue is that, for a significant amount of players, which sadly includes me, they just didn’t quite make it.
Oh, and to all of those arguing that anyone who disagrees with you just “didn’t get the deep and complex plot”, here’s a video carefully explaining why you’re wrong.