Board 8 > The Last of Us Part II Review Zone

(+) Yeah! (+)

Lightning Strikes posted...

If you are truly engaged, you dont notice that it isnt fun. It fills the same mental space. No other medium demands fun, so I dont see why its essential for games.

Agree. I certainly don't see why it can't evolve as a medium to be something different then what it was in the beginning

Like I didn't find Celeste "fun" die to its difficulty but that was kind of the point of the game in an overarching way

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I think the game could absolutely be excellent even if it's not fun. My favorite two games are VNs.

The issue is that it sounds like the game will not be fun and also it will be bad to experience, at least for me.

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This engagement vs fun debate is just giving me flashbacks to the Death Stranding discourse. Because wew boy is that the poster child for that dichotomy. And a lot of people do love that game, and a lot of people hate it.

I would err saying that video games don't have to have fun or even GOOD gameplay but the element of interaction is what you are looking for in the medium. And I cant speak for others but sometimes just being able to move around in the world does the trick for me.

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My main issue with all the backlash of it is that it's basically all situated around "not going in the direction that fans want" which does not make it a bad story or game

Just means they did something you weren't wanting them to do. Doesn't mean it's bad. Bad writing and "not what I was expecting" are very different things

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I wanted anime titties in this game and am now upset that Naughty Dog did not give them to me.

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HeroDelTiempo17 posted...

This engagement vs fun debate is just giving me flashbacks to the Death Stranding discourse. Because wew boy is that the poster child for that dichotomy. And a lot of people do love that game, and a lot of people hate it.

I would err saying that video games don't have to have fun or even GOOD gameplay but the element of interaction is what you are looking for in the medium. And I cant speak for others but sometimes just being able to move around in the world does the trick for me.

Death Stranding has fun gameplay though, and the story is hot garbage.

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Lightning Strikes posted...

Death Stranding has fun gameplay though, and the story is hot garbage.

Ah, but it's fun garbage!

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The story of Death Stranding is not fun garbage.

Some of it sure, but a lot of that ending nightmare was making me visibly angry. My roomate asked me if I was gonna be alright, lol.

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

The storynof Death Stranding is not fun garbage.

Some of it sure, but a lot of that ending nightmare was making me visibly angry. My roomate asked me if I was gonna be alright, lol.

The ending being a nightmare is part of the spectacle! It opened my eyes to what it was actually possible to put in a AAA title when you give Kojima complete control over it. What a spectacle.

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

The story of Death Stranding is not fun garbage.

Some of it sure, but a lot of that ending nightmare was making me visibly angry. My roomate asked me if I was gonna be alright, lol.

Which part actually made you angry?


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Everything from the start of the big beach monologue to the end of the first credits.

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Death Stranding great game

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Death Stranding flawed but interesting game.

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This seems like a solid review that articulated explains a lot. He seems to think the story is a giant mess and that it's about 10 hours too long and that the gameplay is barely improved at all.

https://youtu.be/GB20A8CitRU

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I enjoyed hearing Jeff Bakalar's thoughts on it on the Beastcast today. He also mentioned that it did feel like it was going to be over multiple times and then it just kept going, but he was very satisfied with it and he didn't feel like it was too much.

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Like if you want to argue that the message is not well protrayed because the player has agency over the game but is forced to commit violence so message of "violence is bad" isn't gonna land

Then ya that's a valid criticism

Does that mean the story is bad or it's a bad game? Not necessarily

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davidponte posted...

I haven't read them but apparently the Polygon and Kotaku reviews dock points from the game because the issues discussed in a game that has been in development for multiple years don't exactly align with the issues that the world has experienced in the last few months, which seems both outrageous and hilarious.

maybe you should read those reviews before commenting because 1) that didn't happen and 2) they aren't scored so what points are docked???

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iiicon posted...

maybe you should read those reviews before commenting because 1) that didn't happen and 2) they aren't scored so what points are docked???

From Polygon's review:

Playing The Last of Us Part 2, a game that supposes that humans will enact violence upon one another to their dying breaths, is a very strange thing in 2020. Naughty Dog created a world in which people across America react to a massive structural crisis by dividing and disconnecting from others, rather than uniting together to demand something better not just for themselves, but for the most marginalized people in their communities.
I see a widespread level of selflessness and an intense care for the preservation of human life in the real 2020, in fact, and an increasingly loud demand for a society that meets that need. Our systems have failed, in large part, but individual people remain strong and kind. Things have rarely been worse, but there is hope to be found in the actions of average folks fighting to do the right thing. We dont need a video game to rub our noses in hatred and violence to know that other people who are just trying to survive arent the real enemy.

Points in here directly parallel what is happening in the real world to what happens in the game. To be clear, I have no issue with this, and I believe games criticism should absolutely take this into consideration. If games want to send specific message then we should view them through a real world lens.

My initial comment speaks more to the idea that the tone of the paragraph I pasted here makes it seem as if though Naughty Dog is in the wrong for not paralleling our own 2020 world, when they couldn't possibly have foreseen it (although you could say that what is happening now is something that could have definitely been foreseen). You get what I'm trying to say. I personally read it as "in a world where X is happening, ND decided to do Y, when they could have done X", and ultimately I get the sense that that is a negative point on the part of the reviewer.

We can make the argument that the game should have done something closer to what the real world is doing, and that's an interesting conversation to have, but again, it just feels like the reviewer is angry that that didn't happen. Are games not allowed to tell their own compelling stories?

In terms of my "dock points" comment, I was of course not speaking literally, and I figured that was apparent because, as you said, they aren't scored reviews. Points were docked in the sense that I read this as a negative point about the game.

Would be interested to see your response, @iiicon , because I actually do enjoy Polygon and Kotaku, and feel as if though I agree with most of your takes. I think we're on the same side here in terms of worldview, and in this specific case I found it 'outrageous' and 'hilarious' that the perceived negative point is something that is kind of unfair to the writers of the game.

Also you came off kinda hostile there, not sure why.

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It's not really saying "This game isn't reflecting 2020 and that's bad."

It's saying "At this age in 2020, I'm kinda over needless hatred and violence," which TLoU2 has in absolute droves. It'd be like the reaction to when every game was trying to be Mortal Kombat at a time when people were kinda getting sick of Mortal Kombat.

One of the things ND have basically admitted they don't think people will like is that the game is kinda over the top brutal/violent.

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A lot of post-apocalyptic stories suffer when they choose "humans are the real monsters" storylines IMO. Particularly zombie stories.
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HashtagSEP posted...

"At this age in 2020, I'm kinda over needless hatred and violence,"

This is a take that I can absolutely agree with.

Maybe attempting to read tone through words is not the way to go here, but I feel like in this specific instance what I'm getting from the author is less, "Hey this thing is cool but not for me at this point in time", and more a condemning of the choices made because of what is happening in 2020. That itself is not a wrong opinion to have if, let's say, I'm creating a new piece of media in 2020. In that sense I absolutely agree. It's tone deaf.

But how many years ago was this story set into place? Doesn't it seem unfair to kind of go "hey read the room", when the room was a different thing when this idea was being established? Should Naughty Dog have scrapped the entirety of their game a few months ago because it now clashes with the real world, more than ever? Maybe the author has all of these answers, who knows.

Again, I might just be reading the tone wrong, but that's what I'm getting out of it.

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Mac Arrowny posted...

A lot of post-apocalyptic stories suffer when they choose "humans are the real monsters" storylines IMO. Particularly zombie stories.

which is how it feels like most zombie stories turn out, which is why zombies tend not to be all that interesting to me

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I think its fair to judge games that are inadvertently outdated once they release if they are trying to say something. It might be unavoidable, but its no less an issue.

I wasnt mad about Horizon, but one of the things I liked about it was that it presents a post-apocalypse that is a fully functioning cooperative society.

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Yeah, I'd agree with that. A game being outdated isn't an issue. But when it's taking the "artistic" approach and trying to say something with the message it's giving, then yeah, if that message is outdated than it falls flat in a negative way.

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Mac Arrowny posted...

A lot of post-apocalyptic stories suffer when they choose "humans are the real monsters" storylines IMO. Particularly zombie stories.

This is the default, not a choice. Literally the first zombie story was about 'humans are the real monsters'. It's inherently baked into the setting.

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I'm seeing so many people bring up the point of the game trying to make you feel awful about stuff you're straight up forced to do with no direct control over the character and all I can think is where were these people when it was time to stan Spec Ops

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Spec Ops loses basically all of its punch for me because of how obvious it's biggest moment is. The fact that it's basically impossible to not see it coming, yet you can't do anything about it even though it's menu based and you can sit on it indefinitely, is just a major failure of what it was trying to do.

That game gets way more credit than it deserves just because it came out at a time of extreme genre saturation.

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KamikazePotato posted...

This is the default, not a choice. Literally the first zombie story was about 'humans are the real monsters'. It's inherently baked into the setting.

Having the first zombie story be about that doesn't mean all of them have to be.
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HashtagSEP posted...

"At this age in 2020, I'm kinda over needless hatred and violence"

I was just thinking about this the other day. It's weird because some of my favorite stories have a lot of awful shit happen to the characters, and being able to emotionally resonate with the story can make it a really great experience. but at the same time I am just so tired of watching bad things happen to people, fictional or otherwise. usually it takes a lot to convince me to add a story with such negative slant to my plant to read/watch/play list at this point. I'd rather watch something that is going to make me happy.

I will say I don't think it has anything to do with it being the year 2020. bad shit has happened, nonstop, throughout human history. people who think that 2020 is uniquely terrible are just suffering from a bad case of recency bias and lack of perspective.

my change in taste when it comes to media I think just has to do with me being older and feeling more weary, and less with the state of the world (which has always been shit, and will always be shit... so damn, at least let me play a game that is going to make me feel good for 30 hours instead of feeling miserable)

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This is a game that tells you "Hey killing people is bad" but then gives you no option to not kill people so they can continue to tell you "Wow, you killed a guy. You fucking suck for killing a guy. Isn't that awful?"

Hell, they apparently have scene where you kill dogs in gruesome ways and have flashbacks to a time you loved your doggo to make you feel bad about killing a dog you can't avoid killing.

I think the issue isn't "They didn't expect this to be so received poorly when people are tired of wanton violence" so much as they made a game that is so nihilistic with the express purpose to make you feel bad while playing it and rubbing your face in it, and it's so egregious that people are finally saying "You know what? This fucking sucks."

TLOU1 did this right by still making you seem like you were just trying to do the right thing to survive, so that even if you understand it was awful, you felt like you had to or that it was for a good reason. This game throws dogs at you, you kill them, you get punished by them making you feel bad for killing them, and they keep forcing you to kill them. It's senselessly cruel without any real meaning. The statement they're trying to make is just mean because it forces you into that situation. But it tries to dress it up as a lot more deep than it is.

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Xiahou Shake posted...

I'm seeing so many people bring up the point of the game trying to make you feel awful about stuff you're straight up forced to do with no direct control over the character and all I can think is where were these people when it was time to stan Spec Ops

We need more Undertales where you're a bad person for even wanting to find out what happens if you do the bad thing without even doing it yourself!

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@'ing me doesn't work because I have all notifications turned off.

I think that's a reductive and inaccurate description of Maddy Myers' review. Her entire thesis is laid out at the beginning of her piece, and it's a pretty common leftist cultural critique that rejects nihilism as a worldview and favours community-building as a means of progress. She's not using this singular flashpoint of widespread resistance to police riots amidst a pandemic to say the mirror Naughty Dog hold up to society is an inaccurate, insufficient depiction of the modern world, she's using it as one point of a larger argument, alongside TLOU1's 'cycle of violence' contemporaries already feeling tired by 2013 and Part 2's own depiction of life flourishing in pockets ("The Last of Us Part 2 luxuriates in depicting the best parts of being alive in a way thats somewhat rare, even in games with this kind of budget and scope. The game depicts characters falling in love, discovering a well-hidden post-apocalyptic weed stash, and trying to come up with the worst possible puns."), to show that this game could have been more. The passage just above what you quoted cuts to the heart of her criticism, and I find it strange you jumped over it to quote the part with a literal date:

The writing in The Last of Us Part 2 emphasizes that even the most justified of grievances can grow like a cancer and destroy us, if we let it. Thats the story that the gamewants to tell a story of someone infected by something they dont have the tools to stop. It makes poetic sense, given that the game is about a brain-eating fungus, as it turns out that Ellie doesnt need to be infected to turn into an absolutely monstrous killing machine.

But when the game gave me more and more information about Ellies opponents, painting them as fully realized humans who also deserved to live, the effort felt wasted. I was already convinced that Ellie was handling things the wrong way, and that Joel had made a terrible mistake in the first game. The Last of Us Part 2 didnt need to force me to kill a dog in order to get me to see that its bad to kill dogs. But, of course, it still made me do that. Just to be sure I really got it. I felt annoyed, not reflective. Like, come on, you think I need this much convincing? Does Naughty Dog think were all out here killing dogs, unaware that doing so is a horrific cruelty?

This story seems to think I need to experience ridiculous levels of virtual violence in order to believe that maybe, just maybe, Ellie should have learned a little more about her enemies personal situations and motivations before slamming a baseball bat into their skulls.

This is a story ND have already told. This is a story other games this game is referencing have already told. Why does it need to be reinforced? What point does this serve? That's what she's asking.

As an aside, even if how you described her review was her main argument, that's fine too! Art doesn't exist in a vacuum. If the story Naughty Dog spent years developing is out of touch with the world its releasing in, that should be commented on! The people reviewing or playing the game are the ones out there actually living in the world this game is ostensibly commenting on, and if the came away thinking 'wow, this game doesn't get it at all', ND shouldn't be absolved for a lack of foresight.

davidponte posted...

In terms of my "dock points" comment, I was of course not speaking literally, and I figured that was apparent because, as you said, they aren't scored reviews. Points were docked in the sense that I read this as a negative point about the game.

I don't know this! You said upfront you didn't read the reviews, it follows that I think you're referring to counting stats when you use that language to describe the tone and summary of their reviews.

as for the hostility, it was more incredulity - there's a lot of protective console warring surrounding any criticism of Sony games, so if someone says "I didn't read the review (red flag), but it docked the game for x, y and z (red flag), and here is why I think that's silly (red flag)."

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Xiahou Shake posted...

I'm seeing so many people bring up the point of the game trying to make you feel awful about stuff you're straight up forced to do with no direct control over the character and all I can think is where were these people when it was time to stan Spec Ops

I think, like, all of the reviews with that reading of TLOU2 directly reference Spec Ops

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Isnt the difference for Spec Ops that it was unique at the time? Like it gets a pass on forcing you to do the things its critiquing you for because its the first time a game is asking you to reflect like that, and to that point you never had any reason to not play a shooter like that.
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Curious how the user reviews will end up playing out.

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Fair point, Icon. I'll read further into it.

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Pirateking2000 posted...

Curious how the user reviews will end up playing out.

It's going to get review bombed 100% just for the direction this game goes. I exect it to settle in the mid-high 7s range in the user scores.

davidponte posted...

Fair point, Icon. I'll read further into it.

If you're looking for more perspectives from people with a similar worldview to Myers, here's a couple other worth reading:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxqnxy/last-of-us-part-2-review
https://www.pastemagazine.com/games/the-last-of-us-part-ii/the-last-of-us-part-2-review/

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Raka_Putra posted...

Numerically speaking, most people who play video games (battle royales, casual/Facebook games, certain MOBAs) probably care little for the writing.

What I said is mostly true but that's a fair point.

pezzicle posted...

Ya maybe. Go hang out on the PS4 board tho first

Again, I'm not saying people like that don't exist. Thing is though, most of the time that is not the case but people are just reading into it that way. It's the same as whenever someone says the game must be pandering because it has LGBT in it. Games aren't pandering just for having LGBT representation, and most fans who dislike certain games don't dislike it because it has a female lead or LGBT or whatever. The people doing these things are a very small subset of fans, and both sides need to stop just assuming.

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PrivateBiscuit1 posted...

This is a game that tells you "Hey killing people is bad" but then gives you no option to not kill people so they can continue to tell you "Wow, you killed a guy. You fucking suck for killing a guy. Isn't that awful?"

Hell, they apparently have scene where you kill dogs in gruesome ways and have flashbacks to a time you loved your doggo to make you feel bad about killing a dog you can't avoid killing.

I think the issue isn't "They didn't expect this to be so received poorly when people are tired of wanton violence" so much as they made a game that is so nihilistic with the express purpose to make you feel bad while playing it and rubbing your face in it, and it's so egregious that people are finally saying "You know what? This fucking sucks."

TLOU1 did this right by still making you seem like you were just trying to do the right thing to survive, so that even if you understand it was awful, you felt like you had to or that it was for a good reason. This game throws dogs at you, you kill them, you get punished by them making you feel bad for killing them, and they keep forcing you to kill them. It's senselessly cruel without any real meaning. The statement they're trying to make is just mean because it forces you into that situation. But it tries to dress it up as a lot more deep than it is.

Is it tho? You aren't "the player" you are Ellie

Like, it's a story

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pezzicle posted...

Is it tho? You aren't "the player" you are Ellie

Like, it's a story

No aren't the character. But you play as the character, control the character, and you're forcing the things they do.

Because it's interactive. If you watch a movie and someone kills a dog, you watch them kill a dog. A character in this game doesn't gruesomely murder a dog until you make her murder the dog because the game made you murder a dog and beat you in the head with a brick about how bad you should feel for making the decision to kill the dog because killing dogs are bad and look at how upset you made Ellie because you forced her to kill that dog.

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BadTopicIsBad posted...

What I said is mostly true but that's a fair point.

Again, I'm not saying people like that don't exist. Thing is though, most of the time that is not the case but people are just reading into it that way. It's the same as whenever someone says the game must be pandering because it has LGBT in it. Games aren't pandering just for having LGBT representation, and most fans who dislike certain games don't dislike it because it has a female lead or LGBT or whatever. The people doing these things are a very small subset of fans, and both sides need to stop just assuming.

I dunno I've read a lot of moaning about pandering

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PrivateBiscuit1 posted...

No aren't the character. But you play as the character, control the character, and you're forcing the things they do.

Because it's interactive. If you watch a movie and someone kills a dog, you watch them kill a dog. A character in this game doesn't gruesomely murder a dog until you make her murder the dog because the game made you murder a dog and beat you in the head with a brick about how bad you should feel for making the decision to kill the dog because killing dogs are bad and look at how upset you made Ellie because you forced her to kill that dog.

Sounds to me like you are personalizing the message as opposed to just hearing it

Ellie feeling guilt because of actions she has taken doesn't mean you're a bad person

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pezzicle posted...

Sounds to me like you are personalizing the message as opposed to just hearing it

Ellie feeling guilt because of actions she has taken doesn't mean you're a bad person

I mean the devs have outright stated that it is their intent to make the player feel bad about actions they take in the game.


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Yeah the devs directly saying (and advertising, weirdly enough!) that they want you to feel miserable for your actions kind of defeats that argument.

But also I don't think the approach the devs have said they're taking here generally works unless you're actually responsible for your actions. You can't have a mandatory QTE of killing a dog and then say "look at the awful thing you did" when really I had very little part in it beyond wanting to continue the game. It does work if the entire point of the game is that you shouldn't be playing the game, as with Spec Ops, but I very much doubt ND has the chops to even attempt something like that.

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redrocket posted...

I mean the devs have outright stated that it is their intent to make the player feel bad about actions they take in the game.

Can I get a quote

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redrocket posted...

I mean the devs have outright stated that it is their intent to make the player feel bad about actions they take in the game.

I feel bad about every action taken in that game

because it's bad to play get it

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I think there's something to be said about stories about how people are addicted to stories about suffering but it's not unique to video games. It hits harder because you're forced to be a participant by interaction but other media do that all the time. It isn't really about player agency over the narrative itself although game writers seem to try to make it that way sometimes.

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Plus I don't think it defeats the argument anyway

Again

You feeling bad what has happened in the game, and you feel the weight of the violence that has transpired in front of you and that you have had a part in is not the same as them saying "you're an awful human being for playing this game"

ND seems like they are ambitiously attempting to take a story that is typically seen in a movie and translate it into a game. It might not work especially well for the medium, but that doesn't mean that the message of "violence bad" is a really "you are bad"

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If player interaction isn't at all a part of the heaviest hitting part of your project then it sounds like you should be making something besides a video game to me.

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