Current Events > Just finished Last of Us 2. *expect spoilers*

(+) Yeah! (+)

I get that this is a controversial game, but rather than dismissing everything I have to say based on the basic score I give it, I'd appreciate you looking through some of my pros and cons and addressing them with your own views on them.

With that being said - rough ballpark score, I'd give it a solid 7/10.

I played through it with a friend over the course of a few weeks. I liked it pretty consistently up until the Abby switch - everything from Shimmer dying to Ellie getting to the aquarium was okay, but it felt like it was building to a conclusion and then it pulled the rug out from under me to start all over again.

I think it would have been better with Ellie and Abby's stories being intertwined. Breaking them up the way they did really hurt the game.

Ellie and Abby's stories were decent, though. I actually got really into Abby's story. I did think that they were too separated, and stuff like the seraphites felt kind of paddy. Revenge stories seem to work better when both parties are invested in each other, but Abby had no idea about Ellie being in Seattle and Ellie had no idea about Abby killing Joel, and then the ending dragged so fucking long... I think narrowing the scope of Abby's storyline, and maybe cutting out the seraphite stuff out - have Yara and Lev just be trespassers or something - would have been better.

I liked the gameplay - it felt pretty well balanced. I was better at sneaking and my friend was better at action, so we had a nice give and take sort of playthrough. I liked the crafting more than I thought I would, and I really enjoyed sneak-killing. I also liked the dynamic that came with finding new materials and needing to craft new stuff to fill the inventory up, like it felt really well balanced gameplay wise. I always managed to scrounge up exactly what I need.

I liked Dina a lot, I didn't mind Abby so much as I played more of her, Yara and Lev were cool even if their stories kind of sunk. But Jesse was pretty flat, and I didn't like Tommy - especially in the end game. I understood why he was like how he was, but I still didn't like it.

A few things about the controversy I want to address - I don't get why people are so vitriolic about Joel dying. Ellie's the playable character, and I really did think it was a natural progression to take in a grim setting like this one. It genuinely wasn't that surprising. Ellie was depicted as non-straight in the last game, so the consternation that came from the reveal trailer really felt stupid and forced. I thought Ellie and Dina had a very sweet relationship - I liked it a lot. Abby did weaken the game a little bit, but I hardly see why she's a villain sue or why she's hated to the degree that she is. She killed Joel, sure, but I don't think the outright hatred for her - mocking her for looking mannish, saying Neil Druckmann self-inserted himself into the game to fuck her - is justified to the degree that it's been perpetuated. And the sex scene wasn't that cringe - I don't think it was meant to be titillating, and Owen looks nothing like Neil Druckmann. I seriously don't get that angle of attack - it's fucking stupid.

I have some specific pros and cons I want to go over:

Pros

+ Good gameplay. Really loved sneaking around.
+ The open world part of Seattle, as short as it was, was really nice. There was some very solid character building, and I got really attached to Shimmer - the scene where she dies was super fucked up.
+ The music store in particular. It ran a bit long, but it was a great little moment of downtime with Ellie and Dina, and I really appreciated the Take on Me scene. That was the moment the game hooked me.
+ I feel like the game had good conveyance. We were never stuck for very long. The hints were annoying, like just let me bumble around for a bit, but the game was pretty decently paced gameplay wise.
+ I really liked Dina. Scenes like her in the synagogue, talking about her family and faith, or where she's taking care of Ellie, were really nice. I feel like she grounded the game. The pregnancy stuff was a bit... ehh, but it paid off at the end of the game and she was still very sweet with Ellie.
+ The final conflict in the game. I have more to say about the ending as a whole in my "Cons" list, but the fight with Ellie and Abby was very weighty, desperate and draining in the best way possible. The fight itself was the emotional climax the game needed, even if the build-up was kinda flawed.
+ Lev's role as Abby's morality chain was done pretty well. I thought he was one of the better characters in the game, even if his sister died like a dog in the worst way possible.
+ The game felt very polished. Everything looked good, especially the gore. I thought the game was pretty well acted, even if characters like Jesse and Owen felt kinda off - for the most part, where it counted, I thought it was a well-acted game. AAA production values - the game had a lot of polish.
+ I'm 100% sure that Haven and Old Town on the Seraphite island were nods to Jak and Daxter.

At the end of the day, I spent more time enjoying TLoU2 than I did disliking it.

Cons

- Ending fatigue. Seriously. A majority of the game takes place in Seattle, and when it cuts to Ellie and Dina on the farm, that felt like the natural ending point of the game. Stretching it into Santa Barbara really soured my goodwill towards the game. Honestly, it was like The Last Jedi in this regard - the stuff in Santa Barbara/on Crait needed to happen to wrap everything up, but it felt like it artificially extended the product and the end result suffers for it. It sets up the Rattlers, you take down the Rattlers - you were fighting the WLF and Seraphites for the rest of the game, and these chuds don't have the same presence. It breaks up a happy ending, seemingly for the sole purpose of making everything futile and suck to hammer home the whole "violence begets more violence" point. I don't disagree with that being the point of the story, but they didn't have to set up a nice ending point, ruin that ending point for drama, and then tack an hour long ending where everything turns to shit. Santa Barbara felt like DLC - for the game to really hit it home, they needed to end the conflict in Seattle and end with Ellie and Dina on the farm. The Abby fight was cathartic, and I think the game needed that conflict at the end, but Santa Barbara as a larger entity is flawed.
- The way they split up the Ellie/Abby campaigns felt really jarring. I don't think it's dishonest that you play as Abby for a big part of the game, but I think the stakes had to be more intimate. You do your thing as Ellie, trying to get to Abby, and then when you play as Abby, she was out gallivanting around as the hero of her own plot, totally unaware of Ellie's actions. This would have been fine if they swapped out their stories chapter by chapter, or just cut back and forth to advance their stories in tandem, but putting them back to back like they did was a massive cocktease and it irritated me to then have to play Abby's campaign before resolving the scene at the theatre.
- The Seraphites were too much. They took up most of Abby's campaign, which contributes to the disconnect between her plot and Ellie's plot, and I don't know how I feel about their martyred god figure. I think there should have been a figurehead if they were that big of a deal to the plot. I liked Yara and Lev, but I feel like they could have been trespassers. At the end of the day, I just think the Seraphites bloated the story too much.
- Honestly, while the graphics looked pretty good for the most part, I do think it's gonna age kind of poorly. That's the draw with the pursuit of realistic graphics - they never age well. But they did the job most of the time, and the gore was fucking fantastic.

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At the end of the day, it wasn't the big, cohesive cherry on the top of the PS4's lifespan like I think most people wanted. It was very well made, though, and I enjoyed myself well enough. It's a shame that the backlash to this game is so overblown and shitty, because I think this game would benefit from some civil discourse - it doesn't deserve 100,000 fake ratings to drive its user score down, and it's higher than a 4/10. Seriously - if you're that ass-blasted about the game, like honestly dedicated to burying this game as the biggest pile of shit to come out of this generation, I think you're out of your mind. Chill the fuck out.

But yeah, stuff like the ending stretching out as long as it did didn't do the game any favours. But at the end of the day, it's not too bad - not as good as the usual Naughty Dog fare, but it's a pretty solid game. On a good day, I'd lean towards an 8/10, but overall I think it's a solid 7/10. It's not above criticism, but I sincerely enjoyed most of my time with it and it isn't deserving of the sheer scope of its backlash. Gamergaters ruin everything.

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I wanted to do a big writeup but I find myself agreeing with most of your points.

I really do feel a sense of loss now, this was the true good bye to Ellie and Joel and it's very bittersweet, with a small hope for the future.

Pacing issues really hurt this game most of all, after the backlash from the leaks. This would have had to have been near perfect in its execution to surpass the first game. TLOU was a generic setting with familiar beats that was executed in a very good way, while this did try something new with its story formula and beats but didn't achieve everything it set out to do.
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